When I was in college, I worked part-time as a dental assistant. One afternoon, a friend from church was in the office for a procedure, and when I stopped by her exam room to say hello, I noticed she was perusing a large binder with lots of plastic page protectors, sticky notes, and handwritten pages. I leaned closer and asked what she was working on.
She held up her binder and said, “This is my Scripture memorization work.” She walked me through the process she used to memorize Scripture with a friend, but even as she explained, I was surreptitiously backing out of the room. If I asked her any follow-up questions, I knew she would invite me into her process, and that was just not something I felt I had time or margin for.
Several months after that encounter, I ended up in a discipleship relationship with this woman, and you’d be impressed by how neatly (and how often) I skirted any conversation about memorization. I truly believed I didn’t have what it took to memorize Scripture as she did, and I avoided the subject at all costs.
What I learned later is that though I didn’t adopt her method, I, too was able to hide God’s Word in my heart during idle moments of my day. Looking back, I so admire my friend’s dedication to memorizing Scripture in the cracks of her day! She was one of those women you knew was fully devoted to Christ by watching her life. She didn’t memorize His Word because she was a legalist or a perfectionist. She loved the Lord and treasured His words enough to meditate on them in the dental chair. This was before smartphones or apps, but rather than bring a book with her, she dedicated her downtime to memorization. She had found a system that worked for her, and she used it often.
That is the principle I want you to take away: find a system that works for you and use it often.
No matter what method you use for memorization—notecards, apps, the first letter method, writing or listening to the Word, or reciting it in the shower—repetition will be a necessary ingredient. Reciting, rewriting, remembering—what do all of these have in common? Repetition. Repetition turns the thoughts we’re thinking into information we can retrieve again and again. Your brain was designed to remember things through repetition.
Lisa Genova refers to the process of holding whatever is in our minds right now as our “working memory” and that you use it “to keep a phone number or passcode in your consciousness just long enough to enter the numbers into your phone or computer before they vanish from your mind” (Lisa Genova, Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, 38, 39). But our working memory wasn’t designed to hold information for very long—only about fifteen to thirty seconds. With repetition, though, you keep information in your working memory long enough for the hippocampus to consolidate the information into your longer-lasting memory. Anything we want to remember, we must remember or rethink. Repetition aids us in moving a phrase or sentence from Scripture from the unknown to the well-known. Whatever method or combination of methods suit you best, they won’t work without repetition.
So how do we harness the power of repetition for Scripture memorization? You’ll use repetition to begin, practice, and finish memorizing a verse, passage, or book (yes, I said book. More on that in a moment). When you’re standing in the shower in front of your ziplock bags of text, begin by reading and repeating the very first phrase aloud ten times. Then try to recite it without looking. Tomorrow, read the first phrase again and recite it ten times. When you’ve got it (and it may take a couple of days or a week), read and repeat the next phrase aloud ten times. Then recite it without looking. Then, circle back to the phrase you learned yesterday or last week and combine it with what you’ve just added. Read, recite, repeat.
While this part of memorization may feel rote, the purpose is to get the words down into the grooves of your mind and the corners of your heart. As you repeat and recite, you’ll meditate on and think about the words.
For example, when reciting Psalm 23:1 multiple times, put your emphasis on the italicized words:
Mostly Cloudy, 62°