I chuckle to myself when I hear men’s ministry leaders – and any spiritual leader for that matter – tell men that if they’re going to grow in their walk with the Lord then they need to read their Bibles every day. The reason I find that amusing is because printed books have only been around for the last five hundred years. If daily Bible reading is critical to to our spiritual growth, that means no Christian in the first fifteen hundred years of the church would have been able to grow to full maturity.
But obviously that is not the case. Scripture makes it clear that it’s not Bible reading that is critical to spiritual growth, but Bible memory. “I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you,” the Psalmist writes in Psalm 119:11. The prime example of this verse? Jesus, who quoted Scripture each time he was tempted by the Devil.
Actually, it’s not even just Bible memory that is essential to our spiritual development, but Bible meditation, of which Bible memory is a prerequisite. “On his law he meditates day and night,” the Psalmist writes again in Psalm 1:2. One of my Greek professors at UCLA knew the entire New Testament by memory in Greek. But he didn’t believe a word of it. It was just Greek to him, so to speak. He was living proof that one can memorize the Word of God without thinking it worthy of your meditation. But on the other hand, you can’t meditate on the Word of God if you haven’t memorized it.
Unlike my Greek professor, the Bible is not just Greek to any believer…or Hebrew for that matter. It’s our lifeblood. Our very souls and our eternal destiny depends on our understanding of it. It is, in fact, a true depiction of reality. The degree to which we depart from it is the degree to which we lose contact with what is real, and then stub our spiritual feet in our self-imposed darkness. So our goal is to live in the Bible and then to live out the Bible. The only way to do that is to meditate on it…all the time.
And the only way to do that is to memorize the Bible.
Which brings me to the room with the red ribbons. It was a room in my childhood church, Church of the Open Door in Los Angeles. It was dedicated to Scripture memory and had no furniture in it. Instead, all four walls were completely covered with dozens and dozens of long thin red ribbons that dangled down to the floor. At the top of each ribbon were names of students in the children’s ministry. One of those ribbons had my name on it, “Herbie Reese.” (Yes, that’s what everyone called me when I was a kid. You can call me what my friends call me now, “Sir”:)
On those red ribbons were various colored paper emblems with Scripture references on them. The emblems corresponded to the Scripture references. For example, the emblem for Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd…,” was a sheep, for Ephesians 6:10-18, “Put on the whole armor of God…,” a shield, and so forth. Every time you memorized a passage, you got to put the corresponding emblem on your red ribbon. Obviously, you also got to compare your own progress with the progress of the other kids at church. Some only had one or two emblems on their red ribbon while others had emblems down to the floor and even onto the floor.
The cool thing about this was that the passages were not just one or two verses, but often entire chapters, like Isaiah 53, Psalm 1, Psalm 2, Psalm 110, Ephesians 1, the Ten Commandments, the Beattitudes, and on and on.
I wasn’t the best in the class, by far. But I did pretty well. I think I almost got down to the floor on my ribbon. As I matriculated through the Christian education program at church, I continued to memorize Scripture including most of the Book of Romans and all of 1 John.
Now here’s the interesting thing. Later, when God called me into ministry, I went on to do the four year master’s program at Dallas Seminary and then I entered the pastorate, where I prepared and preached sermons every week. As I did my preparation for those sermons, I noticed something. What first came to my mind as I studied for those messages wasn’t what I learned in four years of seminary, but the Scripture passages I learned as a kid.
And that still happens. It’s been fifty-five years since a learned many of those passages, but I still remember them as if it were yesterday.
And that means I’ve had fifty-five years to meditate on them.
And that means I’ve had fifty-five years to live them.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
How about you? Have you taken the opportunity to memorize scripture? Do you have any plans to start?
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