Meditating on Scripture is vital to a healthy Christian life. Dawson Trotman, founder of the Navigators, frequently lectured his men about the importance of going to sleep while meditating on a verse of Scripture. He knew that our slumbering and subconscious minds tend to mull over whatever we’ve last inserted into them. When we go to sleep meditating on a Bible verse, it stays with us all night long, and we inevitably awaken the next morning in a better frame of mind.
Once as a young pastor I was struggling with a passage of Scripture, trying to find a sermon outline. I had an out-of-town engagement, so I studied in my motel room until the wee hours of the night. That night, I dreamed I was preaching a sermon from that very text, and the outline was clear and easy to follow. Upon waking the next morning, I jotted down the outline I had dreamed up, and I preached that very sermon the next Sunday.
The great British preacher Charles Spurgeon once reportedly preached an entire sermon aloud in his sleep. His wife jotted it down, and he used it in the pulpit the following week. And, in October 1920, Dr. Frederick Banting was working on his lecture for the following day. His medical practice was too new to be lucrative, so he supplemented his income by teaching. He worked far into the night on the problem of diabetes, but medical science provided scant data on the dreaded disease, and no cure had yet been discovered.
He fell asleep. At two in the morning, he awoke with a start. Grabbing a notebook, he penned three short sentences, then collapsed again in sleep. But those three sentences led to the discovery of insulin.
Still a century earlier, Elias Howe’s fertile mind had imagined the sewing machine. He worked and worked on his invention, but its stitches were jagged and uneven, and he grew so frustrated he considered giving up. One night, Howe dreamed that a tribe of savages had kidnapped him. They threatened to kill him if he didn’t invent a sewing machine in twenty-four hours. In his dream, he worked frantically, but in the end he failed. He was tied for his execution, and the natives raised their spears and flung them in his direction. But as the spears flew at him, Howe noticed they had holes near their tips. He awoke with an idea: put the eye of the needle near the tip.
He patented his sewing machine in 1846.
The words mull, mill, and meal all come from an Old English word meaning the pulverizing of corn in a grinder. To mull over a subject is to ponder it, to pulverize it in the millstones of the mind. When that subject is Scripture, our souls are fed with manna from heaven.