It’s been a full month now since I launched the Indwell Podcast on January 1st. My desire, as always, was to create a set of resources that actually empower people to draw closer to Christ, and it goes without saying that developing an ever-deepening intimacy with Scripture is absolutely essential for growth in Christ. This is why the focus of Indwell is empowering people to memorize Scripture one verse at a time.

For most Christians the idea of memorizing whole chapters of Scripture seems either impossible, impractical, or unnecessary. What I hope to demonstrate is that it is not only possible, but simple . . . so simple that even a child can do it. And, in fact, my 6-year-old daughter just finished memorizing the entire chapter of Psalms 27 last night, and she can quote it word for word (in fact, she corrects me when I get a word wrong here and there).

My dream is to participate in the creation of a new normal in the body of Christ in which the average Christian commits large portions of Scripture to memory as a matter of course. This was the normal for the Judaism of the first century, and I believe it can become the normal for the Christianity of the 21st century! But in order for this dream to become a reality, we must understand both the why and the how.

The why is simple: Scripture memory is foundational for Scripture meditation, and meditating on Scripture is the means by which we actively and intentionally love God with all of our mind, heart and soul. Paul exhorts us to set our minds on things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God (Colossians 3). Apart from Scripture, we can only obey this command by imagining what heaven might be like and visualizing Jesus sitting on the throne. While this might be a fantastic experience, it is not very spiritually fruitful. The imagination is a powerfully creative realm that we must cultivate in order to maximize our prophetic potential, but it is not the realm of spiritual formation.

Spiritual formation transpires as we give our undivided attention to the word of God. The word of God articulates the thoughts of God; when we meditate on God’s word, we think his thoughts with him. This is what it means to set our minds on things above.

However, the problem with memorizing Scripture is that it is not immediately experienced as a spiritually enriching activity. Reciting a phrase over and over and over again . . . and then adding another phrase to it . . . this is the work of memorization. There are no immediate results. The heavens don’t open, the wind doesn’t blow, and the fire doesn’t fall. It just seems so . . . banal, so boring . . . so unnecessary.

The power of memorization is not in the act of memorization, but in the fruit of it. The fruit of memorization is meditation . . . in order to meditate on Scripture, you must first be willing to endure the seeming monotony of the memorization process. But if you are willing to endure it, you will eat the fruit of meditation.

Yet, even the process of meditating on Scripture is not immediately experienced as spiritually enriching. Meditating on Scripture requires the continual repetition of a verse of Scripture in the mind. Think of the words of a verse of Scripture as a broom that is used to sweep every other thought out of the mind. Meditating on Scripture is simply about giving the word of God your undivided attention.

The fruit of meditation is revelation . . . that chairotic moment in which the Spirit of God suddenly breathes life into the words of a verse, causing it to explode within your mind and heart in a symphony of life! There is no greater joy, no deeper place of intimacy with God than when suddenly his word becomes alive in you and you become alive in his word! The joy of that moment is so intense that experiencing it once is enough to provoke you to the pursuit of deeper depths in the word of God for the rest of your life!

But most Christians have never experienced this because they simply don’t give enough of their attention to the words of Scripture. Rather than seeing the words of Scripture as a source of spiritual life in God, contemporary Christianity has come to see the words of Scripture primarily as a source of practical wisdom for living a better life in the world. And what is often referred to as revelation is in actuality nothing more than insight or understanding that is derived from Scripture, rather than an actual life-giving encounter with God that is almost symbiotic in nature. In the moment of revelation, God’s life and your life seem to become one life. Not that you become God, but you experience your life being swallowed up in his glory as the light of his word becomes blindingly powerful.

My dream is to create a pathway toward a life of revelation for every believer. I long to see revelation become the new normal.

However, after a full month of creating the Indwell Podcast, I’ve realized that I need to scale back a bit in order to make the resource more sustainable, accessible, and effective.

If you tuned into the podcast from the beginning, you’ve noticed that I’ve shifted over the past week from having a different guest in every episode to going solo. I made this shift for two reasons: First, the process of recruiting new guests and producing recordings with them became logistically overwhelming. Knowing myself, I realized that if I continued on that track I would only last another month or so before I fell off the indwell wagon. Second, I received feedback from some subscribers that it is easier to follow the recitations when it is just me than it is when I am learning the verse with a guest. While having a guest with me is cool, I’m finding that it’s not as effective as going solo.

With that said, I’ve decided to make one more important change following the completion of Isaiah 60 that I’d like you to know about. Going forward I will no longer include the time of prayer at the end of each episode; I’ll simply teach the verse and give you ample opportunity to learn it thoroughly. And I’ll also include a recap of the previous verses in the chapter periodically so that you can expect to actually remember the whole chapter by the time you get to the end of it! This is what I do with my daughter every night; we not only go over the verse of the day, but we go back over the previous verses so that those verses make their way into her long-term memory.

I find this change to be necessary in order to focus our attention on accomplishing one thing in each episode. Trying to do more than one thing will result in doing no-thing. At a later date I plan to add a prayer stream of some sort to the Indwell Podcast to empower your growth in that dimension as well. But for now, let’s focus on allowing the word of Christ to indwell us richly!

I’m so thankful to God for the opportunity to create and host Indwell. It’s been so spiritually enriching for me already, and I anticipate that as the resource grows and develops all of us who are a part of the Indwell community will continue to grow with it. Thank you so much for receiving this resource! I cherish the thought that we will grow up together into him who is the head as we speak God’s truth with hearts full of love by the power of the Holy Spirit.