Psalm 1:1-2 “Blessed is the man…..his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”  What does it mean to meditate on God’s Word?  The word “meditation” has the synonym of “rumination.”  Rumination is what cattle do when they chew their cud. I live on a few acres in the country and recently allowed a neighbor to pasture three bulls for a few months.  I would often see them resting and chewing their cuds.  Cattle eat grass, chew it up and swallow it into their four stomachs for a while.  Later, they burp it up, chew on it more and then swallow it again to be absorbed into usable life-giving nutrition.  This rumination allows the animal to get every calorie of nutrition from the grass eaten. 

Meditation on God’s Word is our spiritual digestion and should be followed by rumination where we get quiet and bring up God’s Word into our minds to keep chewing on it.  Spiritual meditation does not mean that we put our mind in neutral or park and think about nothing or go blank.  It means that we rethink and chew on what we have read.  We take the Scripture, bring it back to our consciousness, think about what it means and apply it to our lives.  Just like cattle add some digestive juices to gain more nutrition, we ask the Holy Spirit to help us get more spiritual nutrition from the Word we have ingested.  If we don’t ingest the food of God’s Word, we cannot meditate or ruminate on it day and night.  We may often need to ingest less verses and meditate longer on what we do ingest.  One of the most instructive verses in all of Scripture about meditating on God’s Word is Joshua 1:8 “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it.  For then you will make your way prosperous, and the you will have good success.”  Just as I observed those three bulls ruminating at all hours of the day on what they had earlier eaten, we should meditate on His Word both day and night.  It will provide us the nutrition to live successfully.