Memorizing Scripture

You may not be ready to listen to what I'm about to say
I'll be honest with you, until a couple of months ago, i wouldn't believe what I'm about to say.
I'm about to say something you might think you're supposed to believe, or you might already believe it...sort of....in your head.....some days.
I pray that your ears will be opened to this, and that you will trust, not me, but God's word and what He says about this topic.

so here it goes:
memorizing scripture has a TON of value!
I know you've been told this before.

I used to hear this and cringe a little, I'd feel a bit convicted, think about memorizing scripture for approximately 7.8 seconds, and then think to myself, "why bother memorizing something that i can read at any moment?"

A couple of years back the group that I'm home schooled through put out a challenge, if you memorize all of James than you will get a sweet prize.I decided to take the challenge because i thought that it might be useful to be able to pull out a perfect verse from my head at just the right moment!
not true.
I did it because my mom told me that I would (and thank God she did - not a swear! I am literally thanking God! :-)

so i memorized James it was fun the first week (verses 1 & 2).....

i survived the second week....

and by the third week I decided that I hated memorizing anything and would never be good at it.

Well, i continued through the year and memorized all of James. I was pretty stocked when I found out the prize was 30 bucks to spend at Focus on the Family.
so for a while after that I thought "Hey, maybe there IS value to memorizing scripture, God wants me to be rich and have lots of books and cool stuff like that!"

The following year the same challenge came out but instead I had to memorize 1 John. So I chose to do it because I knew how much I had appreciated memorizing James and how it had helped me in tight spots.
also not true.
I did it because my mom said i should and i wanted another book!

so i memorized 1 John.
and by the second month I was sick of it, and I was getting ready to tell my mom that I didn't want to do it the next year, and i was wishing that i could give up.
All day I had one line of Relient K's Up&Up song stuck in my head and the line was "And I'm not givin' up, givin' up on what I know I'm capable of!"
I hadn't even listened to that song for a couple of days, so it was definitely God that put it in my head.

so then last year the contest was memorizing Colossians (i'm almost gettin' to the end of my story!)
this time I didn't take it because my Mom told me to, or because i wanted money and books, but for a much better reason.
my much better reason, well, it wasn't really a better reason.
I enjoyed bragging about it, people were impressed when i told them that i had memorized 2 entire books of the bible.

This time, I didn't mind it as much, it was just a habit and so I didn't really think about it much.

In the second half of the year I ran into a bit of a "coincidence"
my pastor was preaching on Ephesians which, if you didn't know (I didn't until then) is written by the same person as Colossians is, the apostle Paul. Because they were written to two different groups of people but written by the same person, they are quite similar.
so one week i would memorize a couple of verses, and then the next week my pastor would preach on the same topic.

SO NOW YOU KNOW: I haven't always been a fan of memorizing scripture

Anyways, long story short, God told me this summer to spend some time in His word and work on growing in my knowledge of the scripture as well as my walk with Him.

This week I had to write a speech on pride, and I'm supposed to have examples and diagrams and that sort of stuff
so I thought "what better to use in my speech, than scripture!?"
But then I thought, right, so uhmm, what verses?
and the Lord just started popping up a BUNCH of verses that worked PERFECTLY for what I needed!!

If I didn't have those verses memorized, I'm sure God still would've been able to help me with my speech, but He wouldn't have been able to speak to me in the same way.

So now I'm SO excited about memorizing and reading scripture that I think I'm driving my friends crazy by how often I mention how glad I am that I've memorized so much scripture.

It has been such a blessing!

Home work:

- CHECK IT OUT:
1 Peter 1:13, preparing your minds would include memorizing scripture!
1 Peter 4: 11, gee, I wonder how we do this?
check out Relient K's Up and Up, it's a GREAT song!

- PRAY ABOUT IT:
ask God to give you the strength and desire to memorize His word, and that He would open your ears and heart so that you may truly believe what you are learning.

- DO IT:
As Greg Speck mentions in one of his books, memorizing a verse of the bible every week can GREATLY change the way you live! give it a try!