This post is not for everyone but if you are interested in memorizing large portions of scripture this may help you. During the last 4 years of my 27 year Ministry at the Jerome Free Will Baptist Church I started memorizing the passages that I was preaching from during the 11:00 service. I wanted to do it for all of the services that I preached on Sunday but it was too overwhelming as I would preach three times on each Sunday with a different sermon in each service. I love expository preaching so I would memorize the book or chapter as I preached from it one passage at a time.
I usually memorized about 10 verses a week some more some less. I would quote the passage then preach through it.
I have memorized and quoted in Church the sermon on the mount, which is Matthew chapters 5-7, Romans chapters 6 through 8, the book of the Epheseans, the book of Philippians the book of first Peter the book of James I've memorized individual chapters like Mark chapters 1-6, Matthew chapter 14 most of Matthew chapter 28 Matthew 2 and Luke 2 and other individual passages and verses in the New Testament. I am currently working on the books of 1 Thesselonians and the book of Colossians.
I used a couple of powerful tools to accomplish this.
The first tool is time itself.
Here is an explanation of the use of time I wrote for my blog.
"Answer the "When" question.
So what stops us from "just doing it"? probably the number one reason people give for not memorizing the word of God is they don't have enough time. There is a subtle misunderstanding in that phrase, it's the idea that somebody else has more time than I have. the reality is that everyone is given exactly the same number of minutes and seconds, and hours each day we just choose how we used those seconds, minutes and hours.
Say your goal is to memorizes verse a week for this next year. that's 52 verses that you could have tucked into your spirit you can carry them with you everywhere you go.
The great news about that goal is this easily achievable in just minutes a day.
You can achieve this goal with five minutes in the morning five minutes at noon in five minutes before you go to sleep. spending just 15 minutes a day you can easily memorize a verse a week... perhaps several verses a week if you really apply yourself. We will get into the nuts and bolts of this simple plan a little bit later but know that you have enough time right now to memorize God's world.
I have seven children and a full time job as well as ministry obligations. The most precious commodity in my life right now is time. what I had to do is assassinate some time wasters in my life.
A lot of people watch between four and six hours of television every night of their life. I have to say that much of modern TV is a wasteland. most of it is not worth watching. when I assessed my time i found that I would watch a show that I wanted to watch then often I would be hypnotized by the one eyed monster and sit there through shows I cared nothing about until was time for bed...that was a waste. I haven't cut out tv completely I still watch some shows with my family but I have cut out 100% of mindless TV watching.
The computer can be another huge time waster you get on to simply check your email and the next thing you know 6 hours have gone by, you find that it's 1 o'clock in the morning and time to go to bed so you can get up in time for work in the morning.
If anybody were to ask you what you did on the computer for six hours you wouldn't be able to tell them beyond I got on Facebook and I check my email.
Again I wasn't able to get rid of my computer I needed my computer. I need it for communication and I need it for study. so how do you manage that time waster without "throwing out the baby with the bath water".
I do "drive by" Facebooking what I mean by that is that I get on for a few minutes and post something to each of the pages that I admin and then and I have my iPod and my android phone set up to receive notifications when somebody posts or comments on it. Then I can respond quickly and get back to what I need to get done. I can be responsive and productive at the same time.
I do Email first thing in the morning then again later in the afternoon. Get on delete delete delete and get off.
Once I made those two changes I freed up a ton of time I didn't even know I had. Because of all the review I have to do. it takes me between an hour and an hour and a half a day.
I worked up to that incrementally. I spread it out over a couple of sessions a day.
Finding little segments of time throughout your day is actually much easier than you might think. say you're taking a family member to a doctors visit those 15 to 20 minutes waiting in the waiting room and another 15 or 20 minutes waiting in the examination room can be productively spent reviewing your memory verses for the day. You are truly redeeming this time that otherwise would've been wasted looking at some Hollywood fluff magazine is now spent internalizing the eternal Word of God.
Later as we get into the details of developing a memorization plan that fits you, you'll find that by carrying either 3 x 5 index cards or memo book or memory verses on your cell phone or Ipod. that your frustration level goes down whenever you're stuck waiting somewhere you can now easily make that time count for something instead of just getting frustrated and upset."
Here is an android app I have used for memorizing verses and shorter passages.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.bible.remember_me
A second tool was creating a skeleton of the verses I was memorizing that consisted of the first letters of the words in the verse.
For example John 3:16 reads, "16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
The skeleton is...F__ G__ s_ l____ t__ w____, t___ h_ g___ h__ o___ b_______ S__, t___ w________ b________ i_ h__ s_____ n__ p_____, b__ h___ e__________ l___.
J___ 3:__
This web site let's you turn any text in to a fisrt letter skeleton. Book mark it
When doing long form memoriztion read the passge out loud 100 times (I do it once a day for 100 days right now. Around day 60 spend some time going over individual verses till you can "read the skeleton" of the passage then do the remaining daily readings from the skeleton you have made
Another tool I use for this is.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WEABPK/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_YM6XFBK3J7N4G1KXSN6P
This is. Kindle ebook that allows you to shift back and forth from the skeleton of a passage to the verses writen out in full.
After the 100 days then use the
Skele
The struggle for me has been retaining the passages they leak out of my mind but what I m doing right now for review nd refreshing the passages is I hve created a playlist in my music app on android phone and right now I listen to about 30 chapters each morning the repetition will help me recapture these chapters in about 6 months. Then I will create another playlist with the rest of the chapters and books and listen to them till I have recovered them. Then I will break them up and focus on individual books cycling through them every few weeks
https://firefighters.org/bible-kjv/
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