Knowing God’s Word by Heart

Do you want to hide God’s Word in your heart?  Do you wish you could know verses, passages, chapters, and even books of the Bible by heart?  Does the spiritual discipline of memorization seem like an intimidating and impossible task?  This little booklet is an attempt to give you some new tools in your quest to internalize God’s Word.

Before I talk about the tools and techniques that will aid you in the process of internalizing the Bible, I need to mention two very important things:

The first is that all the tools, techniques, and abilities in the world will not do you any good if you don’t truly desire to learn the Word and make it a priority.  In the first twenty eight years of my life, I memorized about eight chapters of the Bible, but in the last year I’ve taken to heart ten books of the Bible.  I didn’t figure out a new technique; I didn’t all of a sudden gain a ton of brain power, but God worked in my heart to give me the desire to learn His Word and strengthened my will to be able to complete the task.  If you don’t really want to do this, then you will fail, no matter how talented or equipped you are.  There is only one way you will have success: if God creates in you the desire to know His Word, and if you make it a priority in your daily life.  Ask yourself the question, “Why do I want to know God’s Word?”   Find the right motivation, and seek the Lord in prayer to equip you with the desire to do this, and you will find the key to success as you seek to know God’s Word by heart.

The second thing that needs to be said is that it is not the one who hears or even memorizes the Word who is blessed, but the one who does what it says.  In 2 Kings 22 we see that all it took for King Josiah to change was an encounter with God’s Word, but it was his obedient response to what God said that found favor with Him.  If you do not obey what is revealed to you and if you are not drawn to Jesus through the Word of God, then of what value to you is knowing the Bible?

I hope that you decide to pursue the spiritual discipline of storing God’s Word in your heart, and I pray that you will truly desire and prioritize it.  I also hope that you will have a heart that accepts the truth, believes the promises and obeys the commands of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Now let me give you some practical advice to guide your way forward.

The Sledgehammer Method

Most people’s experience with memorization is what I like to describe as the sledgehammer method: taking a square peg, setting it on the round hole and bashing it into oblivion until it finally succumbs and sets in the hole…repeating words over and over until you can recite them back.  Unpleasant, painful, laborious, and, perhaps worst of all, it often doesn’t have any lasting effect.  This experience is probably the biggest reason why most people tell me “I can’t memorize.”

Besides the difficulty of rote memorization and its lack of longevity, one of the other big detractors of this method is that it doesn’t need to take into account comprehension of the content.

Conceptualization

Simply trying to be able to reproduce the words of the Bible should not be our goal.  Instead, we ought to try to understand what God’s Word has to say and be able to articulate those concepts, as close to the original text as we can.

The first thing that I do when I approach a text is to break it down into its concepts so I can better understand the flow of thought and what the author was trying to communicate in that passage.  The easiest way that I have found to do this is to rewrite the verse(s) on a sheet of lined paper so that I can see the different concepts found in the passage (see picture of Hebrews 1:1 below).

Regardless of what method you use to remember the text, understanding the concepts of the verses should be at the heart of what you are doing.  Far too often we only focus on being able to reproduce the words without understanding the concepts that are found within.

Visualization

Many years ago I worked with a company as a “brain trainer,” basically a personal fitness trainer for the mind.  In the first week of training, we required new students to remember every single president of the United States and recite that list forward…and backwards.  And this we did with an incredibly high rate of success.  You see, we didn’t give them a list of names to repeat over and over until they got it right and then expect them to regurgitate that information.  We gave them a picture that created a story.  If they could picture the story in their mind, they could remember the list.  The next step that we took our students through was to give them information that they needed to remember without giving them an image.  We then had them create their own mental picture so that they could remember it.  Once they learned this skill, they were able to recall much more information for a much longer period of time.

What I found during this time is what many people have known for a long time: the brain is much better equipped to be able to recall a picture or a story than text or raw information.  This method of using pictures and stories to remember information is often called Visualization and Association, or simply Visualization.  Though there are other methods and techniques that can help in remembering, this is the best place to start for anyone who wants an alternative to rote memorization.

Let’s Get down to Business

The best way to show how the techniques of Conceptualization and Visualization work is to give an example.  Here’s how I would approach Hebrews 1:1.

“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.”

The first thing that I would do is break the section down into manageable concepts and physically rearrange them on a piece of paper so I can see how it looks.

Though it often doesn’t work out this nicely, this is a great example of why arranging a section spatially can be helpful.  The different parts that are contrasted stand physically above each other: “long ago” with “these last days,” “to our fathers” with “to us,” and “by the prophets” with “by his son.”  This verse basically repeats itself, but with a contrast in the place of the first idea.  Also, instead of having to deal with about thirty pieces of information (every word), you now only have to remember eight concepts.

The next thing to do is to take the above concepts and create a mental picture of each of them.  My picture would look like this:

Since you probably don’t have your decoder ring on, I’ll walk you through my picture and hopefully it will make sense. The bolded words are the concepts from the verse.  Starting from the left, the timeline along the top reminds us that this is taking place a long time ago.  There were many different types of times (the watches) standing at an intersection with many ways (the signpost).  At the intersection we see that God (the shiny cloud) is speaking (the speech bubble) to our fathers (guy in canoe…cause my wife’s dad likes to canoe) by the prophets (bearded guy).  Moving to the right to the other end of the timeline, these last days, we see that He (the shiny cloud) is now speaking to us (stick figures of my family) by his Son (the cross, of course).

Notice that I didn’t have a picture for every word in the verse but rather for every concept.  In my experience, your brain knows how to get from point A to point B and will bridge the gaps between the concepts rather easily.  Some people will find it more comfortable making a picture for every word, but I’ve found that it takes a lot more work to be that detailed when I make pictures with my mind.

The picture that I’ve shared is what I would think up, but your picture might be something completely different and that’s perfectly fine.  The important thing is that you create a mental picture that’s memorable for you, and that the picture creates a story.  Once you’ve broken down the section you’re working on into manageable concepts and then created pictures and a story you simply start at the beginning of the story and work your way through it, letting each picture take you on to the next.

This process will take some time at first as you get used to making the pictures in your mind and connecting them to the words, but it will come more quickly as your brain gets used to the process.  Also, as time goes by, the picture will become less and less prominent and your brain will simply shortcut to the verses themselves rather than going from picture to story to words.  As this happens, you will be left with a portion of Scripture—God’s very Words—in your heart for years, perhaps for the rest of your life.

A Consistent and Structured Review

The last thing I want to share with you is the system of review and repetition that I use to make sure that the work I put into remembering verses isn’t wasted.  This process will help take your short term memory gains and turn them into something that will hopefully last a lifetime.

Whenever I learn a new verse, I always recite it with the previous verses that I have been working on.  So if I just learned Ephesians 1:4, I would not move on to learning 1:5 until I could consistently recite 1:1-4 together (shooting for 95% accuracy.)  Then, when I add on 1:5, I would not move on till I could recite 1:1-5 together.  I would continue to add verses together like this until I got to a natural break in the text.

Here’s what that process looks like:

• Work on the first verse (1:1) until you can recite it.
• Work on the second verse (1:2) until you can recite it.
  • Recite the first two verses (1:1-2) together.
• Work on the third verse (1:3) until you can recite it.
  • Recite the first three verses (1:1-3) together.
• Continue doing this until you have about a ten verse section (1:1-10) that you can recite.

If you are going to work on a longer passage, or even an entire book, you then set the first ten-verse section aside, learn an additional section by the above verse by verse process and then recite that new section together with the previous section.  Continue stringing sections together when you become proficient in each new section.

Science has shown that the brain remembers things best when it reviews in a cycle: learning something, returning to it soon, then returning to it later, then again even later.  This process of review is where repetition is the most valuable and gives the most return for your investment of time.  Instead of repeating over and over to try and learn something new, you are repeating and reviewing what you already know so that it becomes solidified in your long term memory.

Summary and Final Notes

Putting everything together here’s the process that can help you hide God’s Word in your heart:

• Break the verses down into their concepts
• Create a mental picture for each concept and connect those pictures together to make a story in your mind.
• Always recite the new verses you add with the previous verses you already know.

As you work through this process please keep these important principles in mind.

1. Do not move ahead to additional verses until the verse and section you are currently working on is at least at 90% proficiency.

In the long run, not doing this will simply mean a lot more work for you and produce discouragement rather than a sense of achievement.  If you are unsure, review again before moving forward.

2. You need to have a daily review of the material you are currently working on.

If you are going to be serious about hiding God’s Word in your heart it will take a time commitment from you.  At least once a day you should review all the material you are currently working on memorizing.  This should be a separate time from when you are working on adding new verses.  The best times for this review are right before you go to bed, and not too long after you wake up.  I find that doing a morning and evening review gives me the best return on my investment for the time I put in.  Though this may sound like a huge time commitment, keep in mind that it only takes two to three minutes to recite an entire chapter of the Bible, so even if you were reviewing an entire book, it would only take fifteen minutes of your day to do this review.

3. Work on a portion of Scripture, rather than isolated verses.

In my experience, it is easier to learn a passage of twenty verses than to try to remember five or six isolated verses.  Also, we often take verses out of their context when we simply memorize them by themselves.  You will be surprised at what you will learn by not skipping over the “unexciting verses.”  Pick something you care about, you want to learn, or pertains to your current life situation.

4. It is not necessary to remember the chapter and verse numbers

Practically speaking, there is little to no benefit to remembering verse numbers and chapters.  In fact, it often makes the process of trying to remember the words that much harder as we try to remember artificial breaks in the flow of thought.  If you are working with a longer passage, you won’t forget where it comes from; the individual verse numbers are not important. Besides this, most of us now have access to online bibles with search functions that make finding verses easy if you know the content of the verse you are looking for.  Some people like to include references in the process, but I give you permission to no longer do this, especially if you have struggled with memorization in the past.

That brings to conclusion what I have found to be a couple of helpful tools, and techniques about how to memorize the Word of God.  I cannot stress enough the fact that your desire to do this will be your greatest asset and the greatest factor in whether or not you are successful in hiding God’s Word in your heart.   But I want to ask you this: what will you do when God’s Word is hidden inside of you?  Will you share it with others?  And if you do, what will it sound like when you share it?

Bringing the Bible to Life

Can you remember the last time you heard someone read the Word?  What did they sound like?

Hopefully your experience has been different than mine, but far too often I cringe at how poorly we present God’s Word.  When God spoke through His prophets, He did not speak with quiet reservation, but with the passion of a jealous lover, with the thunderings of a judge, with the tears of a sorrowful father, with the joy of a youth. He would never speak with apathy because every word mattered to Him. So why do we?

One of my professors once said to me: “If you are going to read the Bible, read it well.”  Far too often the message of the Bible is undercut by the presentation of its messenger.  The reason that the prophets, John the Baptist, Jesus and his disciples presented the Word of God in a powerful way is because they believed the message that they were giving and they let it show.  The only way you can read or recite the Word of God well is if you believe it is true.

As you learn more and more of God’s Word, you have the opportunity to become the messenger, you have the opportunity to speak for God.  Is God going to be pleased with how He sounds?    Are you going to share the Bible as if it’s true?

The church around you is drowning in the mire of the world, in large part due to her ignorance of what God has to say.  There is a great need for people to simply hear what God has to say and to hear it in the way that God would have said it.

Josiah’s Gift

“Then Shaphan the secretary told the king, ‘Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.’  And Shaphan read it before the king.” 2 Kings 22:10

Such an unassuming verse, but from that encounter came one of the greatest revivals the world has ever known.  A willing heart encountered God’s Word and repented and then took that same Word to the rest of his people and led an entire nation, for a generation, back to God.  This is Josiah’s Gift: The gift of the Word of God that was given to Josiah and the gift that he then gave to the world.  All it takes for a life to be changed is for a willing heart to encounter the Word of God.  Receive the Gift into your own life and then give it to whoever will hear.