Sunday, January 13, 2008

Memorize in Minutes

Back in August '07, I read an article by Ruth Beechick called "Family Scripture Memorizing". The content peeked our interest.

These last four months, as a family we've been doing an experiment, memorizing Romans chapter six. We started by reading the whole chapter out loud together at the beginning of our daily family worship - every day. Just reading through the chapter once each day. It just takes a few minutes.

It didn't take long and the young guys were saying verses from memory. Now we can all recite the chapter in a mere three minutes ... well, us older folks are still stumbling occasionally, but the young folk are ready with a prompt - even the three year old twins can fill the blanks right to the end of the chapter.

Amazing or what?

God's Word will not return void, it will accomplish His purposes:

Isaiah 55:11 "So shall My Word be that goeth forth out of My mouth: it shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."

Having planted these seeds in our hearts, we look forward confidently to repeated harvests.

We've memorized before, but rarely such a long passage at once and not with such relative ease. Passages committed to memory will accumulate over time if we remain faithful. A chapter every 3-4 months, even factoring in the time spent reviewing previous passages(3 minutes or so), really is not a huge chunk of the day, but the temporal & eternal benefits are ... oh so worth it!

Time to plant more seeds, new seeds. Next?

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