scripture Memory

How well do you know the scriptures? There's various ways we can answer that question. For some people, they are very good at remembering the narrative of scripture. Many people are very good at simply understanding the main point of scripture. There's a lot of people who can discern things well while reading scripture. But what I want to focus on in this episode is the importance and urgency of memorizing scripture.

I understand that not everybody is naturally inclined to memorization. I understand that sometimes you may remember the point of a passage very well without remembering the details of it. But I believe that it is an important spiritual discipline in the life of every Christian, to memorize scripture. One of the reasons I think it's important is that when I look at people in Christianity who say they can't or don't memorize scripture, I inevitably find that they have a number of things memorized from their job, they memorize when their favorite TV show is going to be on, the actors' names, things of that sort.

The excuse that scripture memory is difficult is just not an excuse that holds any water with me whatsoever. Now, having said that, I think that we can also memorize scripture for the wrong reasons. I still think people should, but if you're memorizing scripture to try to win a contest or out of a form of pride because you want to be able to win a debate that can be problematic as well having said that god can use that in your life and he can do good things with it now by memorized scripture i want to be a little bit specific one i don't think that there's a lot of value in memorizing dozens of random verses throughout the Bible only.

Let me clarify. I think that there's probably some important verses for us to know, some verses that strike truth very quickly and very strictly without needing a lot of context. But I think that we can fall victim to using too many scriptures out of context if we just memorize a verse here or there without understanding the the pericope around that verse and so what we what I would advocate for is that people memorize what I'll call chunks of scripture frankly I think we you should memorize entire chapters and entire books of scripture and what I have found in my experience is that the effort to do that is such a payoff back to me that I'm so glad that somebody got me started in an endeavor that I never thought I would do, memorizing books of the Bible or entire chapters.

So let me start by giving you my acronym for why we should memorize scripture. and the acronym is because God's word is pivotal that that is pivotal so what that stands for in my in the acronym I created is it's powerful it's important it's vital for our lives it's our source of comfort it's to be meditated upon it's able to be understood and it's living and abiding Let me flesh those out with just a little bit of scripture reference here. God's word is powerful. Hebrews 4.12, for the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

God's word is powerful. It has the ability to do things that no other book can do. the greatest writings of the greatest theologians to the extent that they're not just quoting scripture they don't have the same power that just reading the Bible or committing the Bible to your own memory can have God's word is important that's the I in pivotal, God's word is important Psalm 138 too tells us, I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness. For you have exalted above all things your name and your word.

God's word is important because of who has dispensed God's word to us. It is God, the authority of the universe, the supreme one, the sovereign king of all, has spoken, and his words carry the weight of his authority. So God's word is important. And so that is another reason to memorize it. It's powerful. It can be used to help each of us in our time of need.

And it's important as well because it's from God. It's vital for our lives. Jesus said, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God in Matthew 4.4. Jesus proclaims here that God's word is vital for our lives. Just like we would not go long periods of time without food, except in the case that Jesus is dealing with there, he's quoting scripture after fasting.

But we don't normally just go long periods of time without food. And if we went too long, we would simply die. the same is true of the Christian in relation to the word of God we have no nourishment that can possibly fuel us for what we need to do as laborers for our Lord but the word of God it is only God Word that can provide the nutrition the nourishment all that we need that we might please Him and serve Him. And so God's Word is powerful, it's important, it's vital for our lives.

It's also our source of comfort. According to Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4.18, he said, Therefore encourage one another with these words. Sorry about that. I had a little timer going off. Paul said, encourage one another with these words. Paul had just written to the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 4.

Let me go to that chapter. He had just written to them about how to be comforted in difficult times. He talks about the coming of the Lord. and he's writing God's word and he tells people encourage one another with these words and so God's word is our source of comfort our source of encouragement and so you should memorize God's word again because it's powerful it's important it's vital for your life it's our source of comfort but in addition God's word should be memorized because God's word is to be meditated upon.

In Psalm 1-2, David says, but his delight is in the law of Yahweh, talking about the blessed man. He says, but his delight is in the law of Yahweh, and on his law, or on his word, he meditates day and night. Meditation has to do with musing about something. It has to do with thinking about something. So the idea is that no matter where you are, you're meditating on God's word.

You're chewing on it. You're digesting it in a sense. You're taking it in and you're allowing it to nourish your soul and to feed you and to energize you for the work that you have been foreordained to do as a born again Christian. And so in order to meditate upon God's word, you have to have it memorized. Or you have to always have a Bible with you, and you have to have a light, and you have to have some way to be able to look at it.

But when I'm driving, I can meditate upon God's Word if I've memorized it. I can think about what God has said while I'm laying in my bed in the morning before I've turned on any light, or before I would want to even look at my phone to look at a Bible lap. So that's where memorization really starts to help you to become the man or woman God wants you to be because you meditate on God's word.

You think about it throughout the course of the day. And so God's word is pivotal because you need to, it's to be meditated on. That's the T. I know it's kind of cheap. It's not a real word. It's to be.

But to be meditated upon is God's word. And if you read through the Psalms, if you just think about Psalm 119, so many verses about meditating upon God's word. The psalmist says he rises before dawn that he might meditate on God's word. There is just so much scripture about our need to meditate on God's word, and you also need to meditate on it. When you memorize scripture, you cannot do anything but meditate on God's word.

It's how you memorize. We'll get into the how of memorization more later, but we want to know that we're thinking about God's word, and that's how we meditate on it when we're memorizing. when you're practicing saying a verse to someone who's testing you or typing it into a an app like biblememoryapp.com which i can get you 20 off of if if you want to download this at biblememory.com send me a message at michael at things above.us but when you're when you're thinking about memorizing scripture you're meditating on it as well so it's it's one pitfall of memorization that I would warn you to be careful of is don't just memorize the words. A part of how you memorize the scripture is by really meditating on it and getting the thoughts.

Next, God's word is able to be understood. That's the A in pivotal. I think it's key that we know this. I think that there is a problem in our culture now where it's really almost a post-modern thought that that nothing has any meaning and then since nothing has any meaning we really can't understand god's word is the logical conclusion but god's word is able to be understood god said in second peter 120 knowing this first of all that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation.

The prophecy of scripture is interpreted by scripture itself. God is the one who dictates how his scripture will be interpreted, and it is able to be understood. Therefore, you should memorize it. Because God has spoken, and because his word is comprehensible, because of the perspicuity of scripture, the clarity of scripture, we can understand what God has said.

This is not some magic book that only clergy can translate for us. This is not something that we need a priest or a high priest other than Christ himself to make us be able to understand it. This is something that men indwelt by the Holy Spirit can understand because it was the Holy Spirit that moved men to write prophecy. Luke 1629. But Abraham said they have Moses and the prophets Let them hear them And Luke 1629 When we talking about Abraham and the prophets let them hear them in luke 16 29 when we talking about abraham and the prophets and let them hear them we're in the context of the rich man and lazarus where the idea is that the man who goes to hell the rich man he says well let's just read it he says um i beg you father send him to my father's house for i have five brothers so that he may warn them lest they also come to this place of torment.

So his idea is, hey, if I send Lazarus to my father's house, my five brothers, they will be warned of this hell that I'm experiencing and then they'll avoid it. And Abraham's response is, they have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them. There is clarity even in Moses and the prophets unto salvation is the point here, that we can understand God's scripture.

This is not something that God does not expect us to understand. Finally, God's word is pivotal. It's powerful. It's important. It's vital for our lives. It's our source of comfort.

It's to be meditated upon. It's able to be understood. And finally, it's living and abiding. 1 Peter 1.23, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable through the living and abiding word of God. This also takes us back to the very beginning. It's powerful.

It's living and active, we said in Hebrews 4.12, but it's living and abiding. We should memorize God's scripture because it's alive, because it's God's word that actually brings us new life. It's the hearing of the gospel that enables us to believe. And so when we talk about memorization, I want to motivate you, first of all. I want you, if you already do some memory or if you don't do any, I want you to be motivated now that you need to add that as a spiritual discipline.

If your concern is where you will find time, I suggest you think about how much time you're spending on activities that are not as fruitful as memorizing scripture. I'll name a few in my life, things that I've had to cut out of my life that were in and of themselves not bad. I've had to reduce the time I spend on social media. I've had to put an app on my phone that does the Bible memory for me.

One, because using a phone is actually just something natural to me. Some people don't like using phones for their Bible memory. But the phone app, actually, for me, it's helpful because I can tell my, I have a warning on my phone. You have to review your memory verses. and I can type all my verses into the app that I know and then it reminds me to review them once in a while and so a verse that I don't think about often that I shouldn't have to review daily I'm reminded to review it monthly or every few weeks and so you can reduce the amount of TV you watch you can look at the time you spend with people especially people of the faith and you can ask yourself could I ask this friend of mine to work on scripture memory with me and if that friend loves you and is a Christian as well they may in fact enjoy that process and enjoy helping you learn it setting goals for yourself is good I want to memorize Psalm 1 by two weeks from now That would be six verses in 14 days.

That means every other day. So for two days, you would practice Psalm 1-1. For two more days, you would practice Psalm 1-2 and on and on and on. And at the end of two weeks, you would have Psalm 1, a wonderful introduction to the Psalms memorized in your heart forever. And then you practice it on a regular basis. You deal with different modes of memory.

You work on reciting it. You work on writing it. You work on typing it on a phone. You work on testing whether you know Psalm 1-2 or Psalm 1-3 or Psalm 1-5. or you just practice doing the whole thing all at once, whatever you prefer there. But the key is that you want to get your scripture memory written to your long-term memory. And I didn't understand this when I first started doing scripture memory, but it's my understanding that if I practice it every day, it will never go to my long-term memory because it's always in my short-term memory.

So you actually have to reach a point where when you're practicing memorizing something that you stop working on it for a few days and then try again. And it's that effort when you try again that writes it to your long term memory. And so it's why I use the Bible memory app. It used to be called Scripture Typer. I really like this app. and again you can save 20% on the paid version if you let me know.

I'll tell you how to do that but it'll let you you can download it for free and you can actually store 50 verses for memory for free. It's once you get over 50 that you need to buy it but in this app I can go to my verses and I can add any verses I want and it looks them up for me and you can pick your bible version that you like to use. And you can even make modifications.

So when I memorize the Old Testament, when the Tetragrammaton, I think I said that right, I pronounce it Yahweh instead of the Lord. And so I actually modify my verses to read that way. But once I add a verse to here, it actually allows me to practice memorizing the verse And there a few different methods you can use to memorize It allows you to record your own voice saying it and you can read it back to yourself But the feature that I really like about this app is that when I correctly type in a verse, the app tells me, hey, great job.

Sadly, it tells me great job even if I get the verse wrong. So it probably could use a little room for improvement, but it's a little over encouraging. But when I type a verse into the app, and let's say I'm memorizing John 3.16, and I type it correctly, it says, congratulations, you've got it right. We have increased your review time from one day to two days.

So then the next day, I won't be reminded to review John 3.16. I still can if I choose to, but it won't pop up as a red notification, hey, you need to do this. But then two days from now, it'll pop up and say, hey, you need to review John 3.16. And then when I review it, if I'm successful, because it's starting to be written to my memory, then it'll change it to three days.

And so then I will not see John 3.16 in my regular course of study for three days. And it'll keep increasing that. I think the max it goes is a year. I actually have mine set to a max of one month. So every verse I've memorized, my phone forces me to practice it once a month at least. Some verses in my phone are still in very low, much lower numbers of frequency of review.

And so when you're memorizing scripture, there is one question is what do you pick, right? what should you memorize because as soon as as soon as i start memorizing something i start wondering am i going to um forget something else now right that i wanted to keep my eye on and what i have found is that uh scripture is so full like every part of scripture is so full of lots of different doctrines that you just pick one and you just memorize it. So when I first did this, I was basically told, hey, we're going to memorize 1 Peter. And I just thought, why would I memorize 1 Peter?

I don't know. At the time, it was just like I didn't get it. But it was like there was a group of people doing it, and somehow it was very public. And I said, fine, I'm going to sign up. Why not? And I started memorizing 1 Peter.

And it was six verses a week, and 1 Peter is about 105 verses. So you've got about 17, 18 weeks that we split that up into. And what I started to notice is as I was meditating verse after verse, day after day, a few things happened. One, I started to notice how much I could cross-reference things within the book itself. So I started to notice how the flow and the logic of the book made more and more sense to me, just like I was studying it constantly.

I started to notice how many different doctrines were really at least touched upon in the book. They may not have been the main point of any verse, but there were a lot of doctrines that a cursory reading of 1 Peter you wouldn't realize was there. So as you're memorizing scripture, verse by verse like that, you're verse by verse preaching it to yourself.

And you may not be as good a teacher as your pastor or some guys you listen to on sermon audio or Bible thumping wingnut or wherever you pick up teaching. But you and the Holy Spirit working together to memorize scripture, he will illumine your mind to things that you would not have seen without that effort put in. So I memorized 1 Peter, and it was a great joy to me.

And when I finished, I couldn't wait to just pick something else. And so I've done small projects. you know I did I did Psalm 117 that was two verses I memorized the book of Jude 25 verses and I've also done much larger projects that take a lot longer a lot more effort a lot more time and so it's really a personal choice what you want to memorize I have found that in in my case doing things that are small enough that I sort of get rewarded with a completion is very helpful to me, but it's really up to you. Is there a book?

Maybe you already know a book pretty well because you love it, and it would be natural for you to just start memorizing, and a lot of the verses would already come to you. That would be fine too. Maybe you just want a list of verses that will help you with evangelism or prayer or dealing with fear or dealing with anger or fighting pornography. there could be verses about handling your finances marriage loving a spouse how a husband should love a wife and how a wife should love a husband parenting there's that you can you can go to you can get topical lists of verses that you can even build yourself you could memorize books of the bible chapters of the bible key portions of the bible i memorized the sermon on the mount So that wasn't a whole book of the Bible, but I memorized Matthew 5, 6, and 7.

And for me, I didn't want to memorize all of Matthew, and frankly, I knew that would take me a long, long time. So I just worked on a portion of it that I thought was instructive and helpful to me. So one of the things I do want to bring up is, I've known a lot of people that said they memorized scripture. And certainly you can memorize scripture for a moment, we'll say.

But I think that if you want to take memorizing scripture seriously, you need to be able to recall it at any time. so if I memorized 1st Peter and I just just told you I memorized 1st Peter and you saw me tomorrow and asked me to quote 1st Peter or asked me to quote a part of 1st Peter and I couldn't I couldn't rightly say that I memorized 1st Peter I might be able to say I had memorized I don't even know how to phrase it my opinion is that you should be continuously working at practicing these things so that you will be able to do it on almost no notice. The whole purpose of it is for it to be available to you in the case that you need it. If you're in prison, if you are persecuted, if you're in a situation where you need to recall God's word to aid you to help you to get you through a difficult moment it doesn matter then that you used to have memorized something if you have forgotten it So you must stick with the spiritual discipline of practicing And as hard as that can sound it is rewarding.

The effort that you put in is just adoration to God, and He's worthy of it, even if the end result is you don't end up needing those things for emergencies. but I will tell you that I have found that when I pray, sometimes I pray more like Jesus or Paul because I'm praying their words. When I preach, oftentimes I preach and it's just full of scripture. My mind is filled with God's word.

So when I'm preaching, I'm actually preaching God's inerrant word to people rather than my own best thinking. I'm synthesizing different portions of the Bible together sometimes even by accident because they sound the same in my mind and I'm and my memory is crisscrossing different things that really aren't together in the Bible but because the thoughts are the same it actually teaches me even at that time if you counsel someone you going to be a better counselor because you know how to answer people from the scripture And you know things like evangelism are easier When people ask questions about the Bible it's nice to know the answer. If people bring up their gotcha verse where they're going to prove Christianity wrong, sometimes it's nice to just know in your mind that context and to be able to quote the surrounding verses.

I found that other Christians are generally very encouraged when you've memorized scripture. They'll often praise you, and you can always just deflect that praise to God and say, we praise God for what he's done. And at the same time, though, you do set an example for others that they might also memorize scripture and have it available to them in their life.

And so I want to remind you, scripture memory is pivotal. Scripture memory is urgent, and scripture memory is something that you need to start doing And I suggest that you start small enough that you don paralyze yourself with with the difficulty of it but at the same time start start with enough that it challenges you and that is that is something you have to decide for yourself it is more fun with a friend it is easier with a friend or a family member. There's groups on Facebook and different people that have websites about this.

There's a Scripture Memory Encouragement and Help group on Facebook that's just a wonderful group of people that share this joy together. And so I can recommend that to you. So in summary, memorize the scripture God is worth it his word is worth it and you need to put in the effort to memorize it and that will help you understand it and it will help you to be able to employ the truth that God has revealed to us through his word in your own life Thank you.