The Briefing, a publication from Mathias Media that I used to read regularly (cause it’s really good) has done a series on memorizing Scripture. This is an area of huge challenge to me and yet we encourage our youth ministers to engage students in… not in a competitive sense like some sort of Bible drill team, but for the sake of knowing the Bible.
It’s said that human beings have forgotten how to remember.
I’m sure there’s some truth in that, but I won’t accept it. The human brain is infinitely adaptable, and we can re-learn skills we’ve long forgotten. As we exercise our brains, we lay down new neural pathways, and what was once difficult becomes easy and even enjoyable.2 We might be a little rusty at first, but memorization will come easier with time.
Every Bible memorization method has one or more of the three Rs at its heart: Repeat, Recall, Review. Repeat a passage over and over until you’re familiar with it; practise recalling it until it’s worn a path in your memory; then review it so you don’t lose it. But there are different ways to do these three things,3 and not all of them will suit you.
So what I want to do today is give you a smorgasbord of ways to memorize the Bible: twenty suggestions that cover everything from preparing a passage for memorization to reviewing the passages you’ve already learned. You might like to sample a few of these ideas, separately and in combination, until you develop a method that suits you.
Take a look at the article titled A smorgasbord of Bible memorization methods (and one way to learn whole books) and the other articles which are linked from it.
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