God's Word

As a child, I remember memorizing a lot of Bible verses. One of the first verses I remember is Psalm 119:105, "Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." I memorized verses for Sunday School, for AWANA, and for school. Adults were making me, and other children, learn verses because God's Word is important. As an adult, I have encouraged kids to memorize scripture because it is good for them to know God's Word.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped memorizing scripture, and I suspect that most adults do not memorize scripture either. What a shame! If I needed to memorize scripture as a child, why not memorize now? If I thought, as an adult, that children should memorize scripture, then why not me? Psalm 119, which is neglected by most people because it is so long, emphasizes the importance of God's law. Verse 97 says, "Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day." This is very convicting. Do I really love God's law? If so, wouldn't I spend more time with it and memorize it? Do I really meditate on God's law? Generally, no. But, when I am memorizing scripture, I end up meditating on it. I am constantly reviewing the verses and this causes me to meditate on His law.

Because of the importance of God's Word, I have committed myself to memorizing scripture. For this year, my goal is to learn 2 verses per week. Two verses a week does not feel like very much. It seems to be a very reasonable goal. If I accomplish this goal, then I will learn over 100 verses this year. Two verses does not seem like much of an accomplishment, but 100 verses will be.

As the husband of my wife and father of my children, God has called me to be a spiritual leader in my family. As the spiritual leader, I need to memorize scripture. I cannot expect my children to memorize scripture if I am not setting an example. In addition, I should lead my family in memorizing scripture. So, on a weekly basis, I am giving my children 3x5 cards with verses to memorize for this week. It will be a great opportunity for me to lead my children and for us to memorize verses as a family.

So, where do I start. I decided to begin by building a strong foundation. Navigators has a Topical Memory System with some basic verses that every Christian should know. They have 30 subjects with two selections for each subject. Each week, I will have my family learn both selections for one subject. The first subject is "Christ is the Center" and the selections are 2 Cor. 5:17 and Gal. 2:20. While we may already have some of these verses memorized, there will be some new ones and it will be good to memorize the familiar ones. It is amazing how easy it is to forget even the familiar verses.

While I am looking forward to memorizing scripture, my children are very excited about it. This is going to be a great year.