Spiritual Disciplines: Reading and Memorizing Scripture

Spiritual Disciplines: Reading and Memorizing Scripture

For some of us, reading Scripture may seem like a boring chore, and memorizing it may trigger flashbacks to Sunday school competitions. Are those things we truly need to do? Do they benefit us in our Christian walk? If so, how?

The importance, or even the necessity, of reading Scripture is both simple and profound. The Bible is referred to as God’s Word, and when we read His Word, we get to experience Him speaking to us. That is not to say the Bible functions as a holy Magic 8 Ball, where we can hold it, ask a question, flip open to a random page, and get the exact answer to anything our hearts could imagine. However, it will give us the answers we need when we need them. The Bible is God’s way of telling us what He is like, what He has done, and how we should respond. How can we know where to turn, though? This question brings us to our next discipline: memorizing Scripture.

When we memorize Scripture, we learn how God wants us to act. God’s Word becomes a part of us, which is what God has intended. Psalm 119:11 says, “I have treasured Your Word in my heart so that I may not sin against You.” In Deuteronomy 11:18, God Himself commands, “Imprint these words of mine on your hearts and minds, bind them as a sign on your hands, and let them be a symbol on your foreheads.” To show this is not just an Old Testament concept, the author of Hebrews writes in 8:10, “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be My people.” The Bible makes it clear that God has called us to “write His word on our hearts,” or memorize Scripture, all throughout.

But why is this important? First, consider the first story of someone being tempted, in Genesis 3. In this famous story of the serpent tempting Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, what does the serpent do? He starts by making Eve question what God has said. Creating that small amount of doubt was all it took for Eve to end up falling prey to her own prideful desires. That being said, we cannot know for sure that if Eve had remembered what God had actually said (memorized His Word) things would have turned out differently. But it definitely would not have led to the ambiguity that resulted in her sin.

The Bible is God’s way of telling us what He is like, what He has done, and how we should respond

Now, we can look at an example where having Scripture memorized definitely led to a positive outcome. In Matthew 4, just before Jesus begins His ministry, Satan tempts Him in the wilderness. Satan makes three attempts to get Jesus to sin, and in two of the three times, he does this by either twisting Scripture or taking it out of context. How did Jesus overcome this? In all three instances, it was by combatting these lies with other Scripture. But in order for Jesus to be able to do that, He had to know it—and not only did He need to know the Scriptures He used to defeat Satan, He had to be familiar enough with Scripture to recognize when Satan was misquoting or taking it out of context. It is no wonder, then, that Paul calls the Bible the “Sword of the Spirit” in Ephesians 6 when discussing the full armor of God. (It is also worth noting that we cannot memorize something we have not read, and that meditating on Scripture, the discipline we discussed last week, requires both reading and memorizing Scripture.)

If you would like to know a good way to memorize Scripture, there are lots of apps that are designed specifically for that. If you would like help understanding Scripture as you read it, make sure to check out our podcast and accompanying workbook, Understanding the Bible. For an in-depth look at the Old Testament in particular, you can go back and check out our recent series here on Experience Commentary, titled Why the Old Testament Matters. You can find it at experiencecc.com or on your favorite podcast platform.