"Wait, what was I supposed to do again?" I am pretty much famous for making this comment. I'm one of the most easily distracted people you will probably ever meet (squirrel...just kidding), and if someone tells me to do something while I am in the middle of something else I will say, "Yes, I heard you," but five minutes later I'll repeat the above question. Because hearing and understanding are two completely different things. It's easy for me to hear a command and confirm that I heard it. It's not so easy for me to hear that command and understand it so that I remember it an hour later and it becomes useful information to me. Because it's easy to collect information in our heads and not comprehend it in our hearts. And sometimes I think that we make this mistake in our Scripture memorization. This is our missing link to effectively hiding God's Word in our hearts. You can memorize more Scripture than you ever thought possible but memorizing words and knowing what they mean are two totally different things. When I was doing Bible Bee, I had the challenge of memorizing hundreds of verses in a very short amount of time. If I was not careful, I missed this most important step of memorization: Meditating on what I was learning and understanding it. For if you are only going to stuff words into your mind and not comprehend what they mean to you, then there is no point in doing it. The point of memorizing Scripture is to understand, comprehend, and allow the words to transform your life. Here are just a few of my suggestions for comprehending the passages of God's Word that you memorize: 1. Study context. This is something else that we can miss in memorization. When I was in Bible Bee, I made a point to study as much of the context of the passages that I was memorizing as possible. If you're memorizing one verse, read the chapter (s) surrounding that verse until you have a better understanding of what that verse means. I love studying historical context as well, because this gives you an idea of why the words were written and what life was like when they were written. Totally helps bring the verse or verses to a whole new level of understanding. 2. Apply the passage to your life. A fun way that I would do this is by writing a two-three paragraph article on how the passage I've memorized can change my life. For example, if I'm memorizing Ephesians 4:32, I may write a few paragraphs on forgiveness and someone in my life that I could forgive. Whatever works best for you, whether it's writing it down or maybe discussing it with a friend, apply the words you are studying to your own life. 3. Have an accountability partner. The story of how God blessed me with one of my greatest blessings: He gave her to me as my accountability partner for the 2015 National Bible Bee. Every day we would ask each other the same things: "How many verses did you memorize today?" and "What did you learn today?" Having someone to discuss God's Word with is invaluable. Gather your squad. Find a friend to dive into God's Word with you. Memorize together and always remind each other to live out what you're studying. 4. Think about the passage throughout the day. Allow that passage you've memorized to affect your entire day. For example: You've memorized Ephesians 4:32. Later on in the day, a friend makes some hurtful comments. After confronting them, they apologize (or maybe they don't) and you have the choice to forgive them or not. Think again about Ephesians 4:32 and remember to apply it to your life by forgiving your friend. Keep the verses you are memorizing at the front of your mind. Don't let your memory verses stay in your heart. Let them change your life. Live them out.
4 Comments
I'm so glad you did this post, Bella. All four of your points are very helpful to gaining a depth of understanding when studying and memorizing God's Word. The one I've struggled with a lot has been gaining historical context. In Bible quiz, we memorize Bible books in chunks, rarely splitting up chapters, so getting context in that way isn't much of an issue. The issue with me is that so often I don't take the time and energy to go search up extra information, whether through cross references or listening to a sermon or searching up key words online or whatever. That is something I have steadily learned to do more, and sitting in Sunday School with the adults has really helped. Choosing the tougher classes (like Leviticus instead of something simpler like Philippians) has proved to be very insightful.
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Bella Morganthal
4/13/2018 11:09:42 am
That's awesome Grace! Thanks for sharing those thoughts! Something that helped me a lot with historical context (and made it easy too!) was Blue Letter Bible, but I know I've talked about them before xD
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4/10/2018 04:31:48 pm
How true, memorizing is absolutely pointless if all we are doing is stuffing words into our heads that we never meditate on and let transform our lives! Thank you for reminding us of this oh so important fact of memorizing!
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Bella Morganthal
4/13/2018 11:11:24 am
Thank you Livy for reading and commenting! <3 Ah, so true! That is such a good passage! I've been working through the Psalms actually, I have a goal to memorize the whole book of Psalms someday :) (I should put an age limit on it, but I don't know what would be a good time frame to get it all done by so xD)
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