People often ask me how it is that I have memorized so much Scripture. When I tell them that I never try to memorize Scripture, they tend to conclude that I have some sort of a photographic memory. I wish this were the case, but it is far from the truth. I would argue that my memory is no better than anyone else’s. Perhaps, as I am discovering, the key to my ability to memorize Scripture is to found precisely in the fact that I never try to memorize it.
Trying to memorize Scripture is like cramming for a test; it requires a tremendous amount of mental energy, and it only stores the information in the short-term memory. At the end of it you’re worn out (because brain activity can be just as exhausting as physical activity) and you’ll soon find yourself frustrated by the fact that you can’t seem to remember what you memorized even two weeks later!
Jesus said that if a man seeks to save his life he’ll lose it, but if he loses his life for Christ’s sake, he’ll find it. The same is true of Scripture; if you try to hold the Scriptures in your mind, you’ll lose them. But if you allow them to pass through your mind, you’ll inadvertently drop them into the depths of your heart. This is what it means to hide God’s word in your heart.
Meditation > Memorization
My approach to Scripture is simple:
- I allow the Spirit of God to draw me to a text
- I sit with that text until it comes alive
- I write down whatever God gives me from it
While I have much to say about the first and third bullet points, in this post I’m focusing in on the second. When I say that I sit with the text, I mean that I simply read it . . . and read it . . . and read it . . . over and over again. I read the text without trying to make sense of it, without trying to get a revelation out of it, without trying to understand what it means, without trying . . .
And I read it out loud if I can. I want to hear it both with my mind and with my ears. I want to give it my undivided attention without imposing an agenda on it. This is the definition of Scripture meditation.
Meditation utilizes the power of the basil ganglia, the part of the brain that identifies and enforces our mental preferences. The basil ganglia identifies and enforces our mental preferences, carefully analyzing our most prominent patterns of conscious thought and then setting those patterns as our default settings. In other words, the basil ganglia is where all of our habits are formed and stored.
“Habits emerge,” says Charles Duhigg in his best selling book, The Power of Habit, “because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. The brain tries to make any routine a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often.”
Developing the habit of Scripture meditation is at first an energy-intensive exercise because while it does not require any of the first four of the five major functions of conscious thought (understanding, deciding, recalling, or memorizing), it does engage the fifth function: inhibiting. Meditation is difficult at first because in order to do so we must actively inhibit the habitual patterns of mental wandering that we have learned over the years.
But inhibiting these patterns is only required until meditation itself becomes a primary pattern of thinking. Once this occurs, the basil ganglia will regulate it . . . we will naturally find ourselves meditating on Scripture even when we don’t intend to.
Instead of struggling to remember a scripture – a process that requires an extra-ordinary amount of biological fuel – simply repeat the text over and over without trying to memorize it. Just think it, speak it, and let it pass through your mind effortlessly. After just a few repetitions, the basal ganglia will begin to take over. Once the activity has been firmly established in the basal ganglia, it becomes a habit, and habits are extremely energy-efficient for the brain.
Meditation makes Scripture a daily habit, rather than a sporadic activity. Do it for one month and you’ll find yourself meditating on verses that you didn’t even know that you had memorized!
If you need some help, I’ve written a little book about meditation. The testimonies of how this little book has impacted people’s lives are still coming in, and it never ceases to amaze me.
I’d love to give you this book for free. You can download it by clicking here.
