Wednesday, January 31, 2007

I Will Hide Your Word in My Heart

My brain has a whole lot of useless information rolling around in it, that's for sure. But by the grace of God, there's some great stuff in there, too. Over the past few months, He's been powerfully writing His Word on my mind and heart--it's one of the few goals/growth strategies that have actually stuck.

For years, I've kind of pooh-poohed the idea of deliberate, methodical Scripture memorization. It's not that I didn't believe it was important to know God's Word. I just never got on board with sticking index cards everywhere, or repeating a verse every day so you could recite it at Sunday school. I did have a lot of God's Word in my heart, but it was from years of regular reading and studying, not from using flash cards. I maybe couldn't tell you the exact chapter and verse, but I could tell you that the end of Ephesians talked about the armor of God--and I could find it pretty quickly if I had my Bible. Or I may not get every word precisely right, but I could tell you the gist of it and again, verify it with my Bible. And, along the way, I did absorb lots of verses word for word.

I don't know what changed my heart, but sometime last fall I decided I to try being more intentional about memorizing God's Word. I could see the benefit of knowing large chunks of Scripture, rather than a verse here and a verse there, and I remembered a method John Piper had outlined in one of his books that he claimed was incredibly effective. So I decided to give it a shot.

I was astounded at how God used it in my life. But I'll leave the details for another post--as I've said before, I'm afraid you don't always plod through the long ones :) More to come...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

God bless you and your family! If you know of that link to John Piper's method thing... could you email it to me? I was doing a web search and came across your blog. I'm working on a web site that may address this, Lord willing.

Amy said...

Phil,

This post gets found by Google often, so I'm glad for the heads-up that the method link is broken. A little searching found it as a pdf file available for download here. The step-by-step method I use is included in this helpful resource by Dr. Andrew Davis. I'll update the links in the original post. Thanks!

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