Vida at Thankful Place has written an inspiring post on memorizing scripture. She gives a very good argument as to why this is vitally important to every Christian. I highly recommend that you visit her blog and read it!
Read the post here.
Her post has prompted me to get back to doing this more regularly. I had quite a few verses memorized for awhile, but then I fell out of my memorization habit due to some circumstances. Over time, I’ve forgotten many of the verses that I had committed to memory. Sigh. It is a discipline, that’s for sure – but an important one to keep working on.
There are many ways to memorize scripture and Vida covers lots of different ways to do it. I have what some call a photographic memory, so I memorize by how the scripture looks on paper. I usually write down the passage I want to memorize and put it somewhere where I’ll see it many times a day (such as above my sink). I read through it every time I pass that way, and soon I have it committed to memory.
I’ve found that one thing that really helps me is to study and understand what the general theme/topic of each book of the Bible is. I then have a framework within which I can place the scripture that I’m memorizing. If I don’t remember the book, chapter and verse number of the passage, I can usually at least guess the general area or book of the Bible from which it was taken.
How about you? Do you try and commit scripture to memory? How do you go about it?
Related post: Scripture Memorization for Young Children
I am finding out quite to my surprise that listening to the audio books of the Bible while I’m working around the house, one book at a time over and over and over again is actually helping me remember key verses and which book it is in. But I haven’t memorized the right chapter yet. I guess it is like seeing the commercial on TV over and over and over again, eventually you start singing the jingle, conversely you start saying the scripture! Also, there are also the DVD versions of the books such as the one I just watched called “ACTS ‘A Dramatic Presentation of the Birth of Christianity’ – Part I and II” which actually goes through a dramatization of both books of Acts, verse by verse and nothing else through the eyes of Luke. It is the same as listening, but more dramatic. We remember things so much better when we SEE and HEAR. Hope this helps!