If you want an anecdotal look back at my memorization history (such as it is) check out Part 1.

So, I have been blessed by a number of situations where I have heard lots of very good ideas to help memorize Scripture.   First, I would like to say that one size does not fit all.  Everyone’s mind works differently, so I can’t guarantee results with what I have done.  You need to find your own way along this path, but researching what others have done does give you good ideas to try and see which will be best for you.

A couple of years ago, I sat in on a nice little seminar taught by my church’s worship pastor, Jason Strain.  He taught a session on Scripture memorization, and highlighted a number of ideas, including mnemonic devices, acronyms, and song.  I like song: it does work.  He even got into producing entire songs for our church to help memorize Scripture.  You can download them for free on the church website if you like.   The only downside I found with them was while I learned the verse very quickly, I didn’t learn the reference point or the verse number – so while it was now in my head, I couldn’t reference it for others.  Saying to someone, “It says somewhere in the Bible, ‘Salvation is found in no one else, and there is no other name under heaven, given to man by which we must be saved,” doesn’t have nearly the same impact as saying, “It says in Acts 4:12, ‘Salvation is found in no one else…” See what I mean?  Still, it’s better than no memorizing!

More recently, I was at our church’s “Discover Hope Lunch” where we introduce new attenders to our church and help them take the next step towards membership.  At the end of the lunch, I was sitting around talking to a couple of nice ladies and one of them took out a little business card wallet.  It was filled with Scripture verses printed onto business card paper.  She said she carried it everywhere she went and used it all the time.  What a neat little idea!  The next day I scoured three different Dollar Stores for such a wallet, and then went and bought some business card paper to print on.  I put together a dozen verses on “Scripture” and “God” and put them into the wallet.  What I have been doing is taking that wallet to work, flipping open a verse and sitting it on my desk right in front of my monitor.  This keeps the verse in my vision all day long, and it’s been working very well so far.  This week I have memorized 2 Tim 3:16, Psalm 119:105,  and Psalm 19:1.  Today my goal is to do two: Romans 1:19 and John 20:28.

I wanted to write a little about memorization.  Interesting trivia fact: the first piece of Scripture I memorized was NOT John 3:16!  Growing up in a home that didn’t put a high priority on God, it simply didn’t come up much.  In fact, my first memorized section of the Bible is also the longest I have ever memorized – and it came courtesy of Charles M. Schulz.

Yes, that’s right.  The creator of Peanuts.

He was actually a devout Christian, I have heard.  Whether or not that’s true, in his Christmas special, “It’s a Charlie Brown Christmas”, the question of the true meaning of Christmas comes up, and Linus, Lucy’s little brother recites Luke 2:8-14.  From the King James.  I watched that show so many times, that passage sank into my heart, and remains at the tip of my tongue.  It is a very poetic passage, recounting the angels announcing to the shepherds the arrival of the Messiah as an infant, and where he could be found.  Oh, to be a shepherd that night!  That would have been amazing!  Here it is, from memory:

And there were in the same country, shepherds – abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night, and lo – the angel of the Lord came upon them.  And the glory of the Lord shone ’round about them. And they were sore afraid, but the angel said unto them, “Fear not!  For behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the City of David, a saviour: which is Christ the Lord.  And this shall be a sign unto you: ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger.”

And suddenly there was with the angel a heavenly host praising God, and saying: “Glory to God in the Highest!  And on earth, peace, good will towards men!”

I wonder how many other children have this passage riding in their hearts as a result of Mr. Schulz’s little animated special which has become a Christmas institution for so many North Americans.  The takeaway idea here is that when you are engaged emotionally and you are experiencing something on a number of levels, there is much more of your brain working on committing something to memory.  When I experienced Scripture in the context of a story, presented by a character of interest, and I heard it repeatedly voluntarily, all these things allowed me to commit to memory a big chunk of text effortlessly.

Next up: what’s working for me to memorize!

Two things from the article and where it intersects with myself.

We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

I do not question this in the slightest.  The failure I see here has come from the home, though.  It has come through disengaged parents who bought into the concept that children need to be given the freedom to choose their own path, with regards to their faith.  There is a difference between giving your child the freedom to inquire and question, and refusing to teach your child the truth.  If you let your own faith in Jesus just be “an option” to your child, you are doing not just a disservice, but you are blindfolding that child and pushing him into a furnace.  He may find his way back out the door before he burns to a cinder, but the odds aren’t good.  If Jesus isn’t the way, the truth and the life for your child, then how can you claim he is yours?

After thinking about what I wrote, maybe I can blame the church after all.  The church failed to teach parents to disciple their kids.  That is a failure of the church.  They failed to communicate to parents the essentiality of passing on their faith to their children – to “Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” (Deut 11:18-19).  How could we miss teaching this to parents?  How did we allow parents to abdicate their roles as their family’s spiritual leaders?

I myself am a product of that.  I am 34 years old and only recently have I really begun to be equipped to really share with someone that faith that I have.  Only recently have I begun to understand why church isn’t just an option for a Sunday morning.  Only recently have I really begun to realize that the Bible isn’t just something to read, but it is LIFE.  What have all these realizations done?  They have spurred me to live my faith in a way that others might call vocationally, but dang it, we ALL need to be living this way!  Our church isn’t can’t be just a few leaders actually following God and the rest just following the leaders.  We need to grasp hold of the treasure we have been given!

A third point – the phrase “…a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.”  Take out the young part.  It is the young and old who have fallen into this trap of relying on their emotions as their guide instead of their will.  Through many many books, lessons, and sermons, I have been convinced that love and marriage is not about “falling for someone” and then living in that passion for the rest of your days.  Deciding to marry on that basis is folly and the reason why marriages are failing left, right and centre.  Ever since culture accepted the premise of emotion as the basis for marriage, marriages have been falling apart.  The truth is that love is a choice.  Entering into marriage with a decision and not an emotion lends stability to the marriage, and insulates it against the ebb and flow of emotion, which is fickle and we all know it.

We’ve taught this and I think that most people in the church get that.  But what many, especially the young, but also those who perhaps have experienced major spiritual and emotional highs with their faith, have fallen into this exact same trap with regards to their faith.  Faith is a decision that is not based on emotion, not based on an act of God.  It is based upon your deciding to believe in the cross, in Jesus’ atonement, death and resurrection, and all that comes from that.  If you base your faith in even small part upon the experience of God, or of emotion related to God, then when that goes, you conclude your faith is gone, or diminished somehow.  That means when you do something “spiritual” like praying or singing a worship song and don’t feel anything, you question whether it is all fake because the emotion isn’t there.  How fragile is that?  Where is the bedrock of your faith?  If it is an emotion, then it is here and gone like a breath.  That is not the faith that the Bible describes.  When the Bible speaks of faith, it speaks of a volitional decision.  “…As for me and my house, we WILL serve the Lord.” (Josh 24:15b) Our Lord gave us all a choice – that was why he made us – so that we could choose to love and serve him.  If our choice is based on how we feel then there is nothing to keep it from blowing away.

I’ve gone on pretty long here.  I’ll save the other piece of the article for later.

On the subject of Bible reading.  First, I noted she referred to Bible reading plans.  I am always up for new ideas in that area.  Last time I did it 3 years ago, I was all up on a system that allowed you to receive automatic emails of the daily reading to keep you on track.  I found that when I read my emails I would invariably skip them though so I printed out a plan and stuck it in my Bible.  I managed to finish that one year plan in a year and a half.

But lately, I have been very high on Google Reader.  I had always like the idea of an RSS collector for digesting the contents of a number of sources from news to sports to bloggers to webcomics.  It’s like my own customer newspaper that updates all day long.  I never got around to setting it up until a few months ago, but now I cannot imagine my life with out it.  What do I discover in her links but a list of Bible Reading Plans in the ESV (my new favorite translation), set up as RSS feeds!  SWEET!

My own devotional times, which rarely slip now (thank God!  It’s only taken me 18 years of walking with Him to get that one consistent!) consist of reading a chapter, then reading the day’s devotional from “My Utmost for His Highest”, then taking the dog for a walk and praying.  It’s about 20 minutes and I do it every weekday morning, and most weekend mornings.  But with this RSS thing, I think I will add that in, as I can pick away at it all day.

On that same page I ran across a link to another site with a blog.  On that blog was a good article that makes an awesome point about Bible reading.  Mainly, that the reason so many people struggle with developing a consistent devotional time or Bible reading time in their busy lives is because they see Bible reading as optional.  God doesn’t see it that way.

See Psalm 1.  See Psalm 119 (the whole thing).  See Romans 12:2.  See 2 Timothy 3:16-17.  See Hebrews 4:12.

It’s not my idea.  It’s God’s.  If you aren’t reading your Bible every day, then I’d suggest trying to explain yourself in prayer.  See if God buys your excuses.

The section I am working on right now deals with contextualization. There have been some very good things I have been reading about it. One of which I even got off one of the links I have on the sidebar – Jonathan Dodson – the Church Planting Novice, wrote something interesting that spurred me to think.

Some have actually said that contextualization of the Gospel is a bad thing.    It’s funny that anyone could say that because the lack of contextualization is exactly the reason why churches are declining so badly in North America and Europe.   For perhaps hundreds of years, we have assumed that church culture was the Gospel and attempted to export it, calling it “church growth”.   It has ceased to work, as people have less and less connection with their roots and history, they simply don’t care.   I read one dissertation on the weekend looking at attempts of Southern Baptists to plant churches in the Pacific Northwest, and lack of contextualization was written all over it – they admitted that the only success they had was amongst those who were already a part of “Southern Baptist” culture but moved there.

For a long time it seems new church planting groups had been talking about stripping “the Gospel” down to its essentials – of removing all culture from it, so that culture no longer got in the way. Now, however, thinking has come to the point where it seems like most have given up on stripping the culture from the Gospel, and now are focused on placing the Gospel in the culture they are trying to reach. It’s a messy business, and no mistake, but yet there are still naysayers who think this “contextualization” is a bad idea.

What really struck home with me about what Jonathan wrote, was his comments about Jesus and the Bible.  Jesus himself is God – entering into our context. Then there is the Bible.  It never occurred to me before, but it is so self-evident – contextualization was always God’s plan from the beginning!  He took men who lived in their cultures, spoke languages and used idioms particular to their culture, to communicate His plan and his works and reveal himself to us all.

The Bible is in context.  Perhaps the reason God did this was because not only would it force us, the readers, to sort through and deal with the difference between culture and the Gospel (decode), but in learning to do that, we then gain the tools to place the Gospel into another culture correctly so that the people we teach read and understand how it applies to their context (encode).

In that light, I read with interest and appreciation the efforts of George Halitzka‘s effort to contextualize the coming of Christ by imagining it occurring to a Jewish couple in America in the 80′s (through the prism of Joseph’s death-bed conversations, while Jesus is 15.).  Read both parts – they are fascinating, emotional reading.

And before some of you get all feisty, I know we don’t know when Joseph died, and I know that some of the analogies aren’t perfect, and I know Mary wasn’t as opposed in the Bible as Mary in the story is… look past it and enjoy the fresh insight it offers, and how much more real it feels.  I’m not saying it replaces Scripture, but it gives you a new view on what may be a story you’ve maybe let get too familiar unappreciated.

Amen.

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping God may wake someday and  take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

It is attributed to Annie Dillard, but not referenced.  The imagery is a trifle overwrought, but after thinking about it, I think I agree.  We don’t respect the Bible nearly enough.  We say it is the Word of God so casually and blithely that we don’t even think about what that really means.

After reading this, I got to thinking, if and when we really do plant a church, I think my first sermon will be on the Bible – what it is and how it came to us, and what that means to have such a treasure collecting dust on the mantlepiece, or tossed into some forgotten box from the time we moved out of our parents’ house and into our own place.