bondChristian

For the last few months, I’ve been particularly interested in memorizing Scripture because…

I don’t do it.

photo credit: nicolee_pikita

“That’s not a reason,” you say. Ah, but it is if I’m wanting to be a bondChristian. Here’s the famous verse from the chapter devoted to speaking of God’s Word…

“Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against You!” – Psalm 119:11

Yes, I want that.

And that’s only one verse from one chapter of the Bible. There are many other verses calling us to know the Word of God.

As a result, to help motivate me to memorize, I’ve started a challenge. You can join too!

Interested? If so, read on.

“66 Verses Before 2010” Memorization Challenge

The goal: to be able quote 66 verses, one from each book of the Bible, before 2010.

The plan: memorize one new verse per week until 2010.

I attempted a similar challenge toward the beginning of this year. When I started, I scheduled to learn a new verse each day. In the beginning, that wasn’t too hard. As the verse count grew though, I began to fall apart.

Retaining a new verse after only meditating on it for one day didn’t work for me. After a while, the old verses were simply replaced by new verses in my memory. While this might be acceptable in some situations, for my purposes I want to learn and retain the verses as I go along. In other words, I’m looking for a long-term approach, rather than a “memorize it, meditate on it, and forget it” approach.

Thus, the new challenge was born.

This new memory challenge is spread out over a much longer time. As far as I recall, this is the longest schedule I’ve ever had for one of my challenges or experiments. In general, I put a one-month cap on them, with some being much shorter, like in a one-week or three-day time period.

Back to this challenge though.

I’m sure I’ll benefit more from this than I can imagine at the moment. For now, I’m assuming three particular reasons to try this.

3 Reasons for the Challenge

One: It will be a challenge just to memorize 66 verses. While that’s not an ignoramus amount to memorize, it’s still somewhat substantial. In particular though, I’m hoping this challenge will develop into a habit. Until now, I’ve had spurts where I’ve memorized a number of verses, but these spurts tend to wear off, and I end up taking a break from memorizing. I’m hoping to learn to stay with it slowly but constantly rather than fluctuating between periods of memorizing in mass to memorizing nothing.

Two: This will challenge me to focus on an actionable, long-term goal. Most of my long term goals are much more general. For example, one goal I have is to visit the Marshall Islands before die. I plan on accomplishing this goal, but I haven’t yet planned how I’m going to accomplish it. With this memorization goal though, I have planned how to do it. I know the exact actions I’m going to take each week, each day even, to achieve it.

Three: This challenge will give me a broad survey of the Bible that I can quote. With this challenge, I hope to choose verses that convey the general meaning of the entire Bible. By the end, if I’m able to complete it, I’ll be able to tell at least a little about every book in the Bible. In short, it’ll give me a rounded perspective, or that’s what I’m hoping anyway.

That’s why I’m doing it, but…

Why am I telling YOU about this challenge?

I’m telling you about it because I want you to participate with me. Doing this together will help motivate us to finish.

Over the rest of this year and the one to come, I’ll post new verses to memorize probably on a monthly basis. So try it with me. The worst that could happen is we could give up, having wasted countless hours memorizing Scripture.

One other feature I have neglected to mention – we’re starting in Revelation.

Why the oddity?

When I tried this earlier in the year, I started in Genesis and progressed forward. That experience didn’t turn out so well. Going backward allows me to focus on different parts of the Bible, instead of starting over with what I’ve already done.

Plus, it wouldn’t be a Marshall Challenge if it didn’t have something whacked about it.

I started this challenge last Sunday. As of now, you’re already behind if you’d like to join. I apologize for this. If you try to jump, it shouldn’t be too difficult though.

The first verse I memorized for this challenge was Revelation 21:4.

The second verse, which I started memorizing on Sunday (November 16), is Jude 1:21.

If you’d like to follow along, or if you just want to know what I’ll be memorizing, here’s the tentative schedule for the next three weeks.

“66 Verses Before 2010″ Schedule

- 3 John 1:2     (November 23 - November 29)
- 2 John 1:11   (November 30 - December 6)
- 1 John 5:11   (December 7 - December 13)

That’s it. I hope some of you will join the challenge and learn something from it. If you don’t join, reading without trying to memorize the verses is a good idea also (nudge, nudge).

As a final note, Chris Esty from The Bible Post recently started a Bible Verse Memory Program. If along this journey into verse memorization you find yourself wanting more to memorize, check out his posts on Fridays.

Chris also gives a brief outline of what to consider when memorizing with comments on the verses. Even if you’re not interested in memorizing any extra verses, I’d still suggest reading some of his comments.

Oh, and of course you could just pick some of your own verses to memorize. Between the three of us (you, Chris, and Marshall), we should have a healthy dose of verses to memorize and meditate upon.

Enough yappin’. Let’s get to it.

Serving Suggestions:

(1) Join the challenge. Try memorizing 66 verses from the Bible before 2010 with me. It’s only one new verse to learn each week.

(2) Quote one of the verses for someone else. The Bible is one of the best ways to encourage others. If you can quote it, you’re well on your way to being used by God to spread His Gospel.