The Long-Lost Spiritual Discipline

Dannah Gresh: Are you rooted in Scripture? Here’s Glenna Marshall.

Glenna Marshall: If you are rooted in God’s Word, delighting in it, mumbling it aloud day and night, you will flourish and bear fruit of faithfulness in every season. No matter the circumstances in your life, God can cultivate fruitfulness and faithfulness when you are rooted in God’s Word, meditating on it day and night.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast for January 9, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh, and our host is Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of A 30-Day Walk with God in the Psalms.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: At the start of each new year, we like to take much of the month of January to just refocus our hearts on the importance of God's Word. We talk about ways we can get into God's Word and get His Word into us. Today we are going to be talking about a topic that when I mention what it is, you may be thinking, Oh yay! I love that! Or you may be thinking, Oh no! I can't do that!

Okay, here's what it is: we are going to talk about Scripture memory? Maybe you grew up learning and reciting verses by heart as I did growing up—and I'm so thankful for that upbringing. Or that might seem like a foreign concept to you. You may be thinking, I am eighty years old, and there's no way I can remember even my phone number, much less Scripture from God's Word. And then maybe you wonder, Does it really matter if I know parts the Bible from memory?

Well, reading the Bible is important, but when we know and can recall what God says in His Word, that changes how we go about all of life. It impacts our thoughts as we go about our daily chores. It impacts how we respond to an unexpected crisis or when a tragedy comes into our lives. Having Scripture at the forefront of our minds causes us to see everything in life—big and little— through a kingdom, godly-minded lens.

One of my friends who is passionate about memorizing God’s Word is Glenna Marshall. Glenna is a pastor’s wife, a mom, and an author. She's still young enough that memorizing Scripture maybe isn't quite as hard for her as it is for some of us who are getting older. But Glenna suffers from an auto-immune issue that keeps her in almost constant pain, so this isn't easy for her. You can imagine the vital role Scripture memory plays in her life. That's because God’s Word can be a source of great comfort in the midst of suffering.

We were so blessed to have her speak at our True Woman conference last fall, where shared a message about hiding God’s Word in our hearts. She made us think, and at times, she made us laugh. She made us think, That's something I could do more of, and I'd like to. Today, let’s listen to part one of her teaching now on why Scripture memory matters. Here's Glenna Marshall.

Glenna Marshall: Yesterday, before I got on the road to drive up here, my husband sat down to pray with me, and the thing that he prayed just choked me up. He said, “Lord, I pray that the women who attend this session, that when they leave, that Scripture will be like honey on their lips. That it will be so sweet to them, that they see the worthwhile pursuit of storing it up in their hearts.”

And that is my prayer for you as well. I’ve prayed for you all. And I’m just, again, so encouraged that you’re here to talk about memorizing Scripture. I feel like memorizing Scripture is a spiritual discipline that has sort of fallen on hard times. I kind of refer to it as the long-lost spiritual discipline.

And so, today, what I want you to leave with . . . I want you to leave with two things:

I want you to leave feeling inspired to memorize Scripture.

And I want you to leave feeling equipped to memorize Scripture.

So the way I’m going to structure this session, I really want to give you sort of some whys behind why memorizing Scripture. I want you to have some reasons. “What is the why behind this?”

And then I want to shift and give you some hows, because I have a feeling that a lot of you are pretty convinced that you should memorize Scripture, and you just want to know how. You want to know if there’s a secret that I’m going to give you that’s going to help you leave with the how that you want.

But before we get to the how, we’re going to get to the why. And I just want to give you a little background about myself about why I’m even up here talking about memorizing Scripture.

So, I grew up in West Tennessee. I’m sure you can hear it. I live in Missouri with my husband where he’s a pastor, and we’ve lived there for almost twenty years. But I grew up in West Tennessee, and in the South—and maybe it’s not just limited to the South—but there was a program in the Baptist church of my childhood in the late eighties, early nineties. And we called it “Bible drill.” Now, it’s West Tennessee, so we called it “Bable drill” (spoken with a drawl—laughter)

Now, you may know it as “Sword drill,” depending on where you’re from. And so if you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, let me break it down for you. You take the children of the church, like ages six to twelve. You teach them a handful of Scripture verses to memorize, and you teach them the books of the Bible in order.

Then, you get them a team t-shirt, and you go to another church, and you make them compete. (laughter) And the way the competition works is: They stand up there. They recite the verses. And whoever can recite it the best, the most, I guess, perfectly, word for word, without getting hung up, if they can find the book of the Bible the fastest, they win points.

And they compete with other churches. If you were like me, you were a little Pharisee with pigtails and saddle shoes. This was your dream because this was your moment to look better than everybody in the whole world because I had a good memory as a small child, as they often do. They’re sponges. And this was my time to shine. I could recite anything.

Those years in Bible drill, I’m sorry to say, were my last foray into Scripture memorization until my late thirties. I memorized probably, I don’t know, twenty-five to fifty verses as a child, and then I never came back to it again.

When I was in my mid-to-late thirties, parenting young kids, I noticed a besetting sin in my life that the Lord kept bringing to my attention over and over again, and it was the sin of anger.

I felt like I would simmer, simmer, simmer, simmer, and then just boil over—at my kids, my husband, usually just the people I loved the most. Why is that? (laughter) And I would come to the Lord in the morning. I was a faithful Bible studier, a faithful pray-er. I loved to pray. I loved to study. I loved to teach the Bible.

And yet I would come to the Lord morning after morning and confess the sin of anger again and again and again and again. And sometimes I would just say, “Glenna, do you even know God? Have you ever even actually met Jesus? Because if you had, you would not still struggle with this ongoing sin in your life over and over and over again.”

One day I was praying about my anger, yet again, and just asking the Lord, “What is it that I am missing here because I cannot seem to have any victory over this area of sin?”

And in His kindness, He brought to mind a verse that I memorized as a small child in Bible drill. It was Psalm 119:11. “I have stored up Your word in my heart that I might not sin against You.” Now, as a six-year old, it would have been KJV 100%. (laughter)

I thought about that verse. I wrote it down in my journal. Prayed about it. And thought, Is this what I am missing? In order to not sin against the Lord, I should store up His Word, hide it in my heart. So what does that look like?

So I began to experiment. I started, as many of us do, by googling—not by memorizing, but by googling. Write that down. (laughter) So, I googled, and I stumbled across encouragement to memorize long passages of Scripture.

One of the things I stumbled across was a podcast that Nancy Wolgemuth had given with Revive Our Hearts where she was interviewing someone on Scripture memorization, and Nancy talked about memorizing the entire book of Revelation. And I thought, No way! (laughter) No way is that humanly possible. Nobody can do that.

But Nancy’s not lying. She’s not a liar. So I believed her and took that as encouragement—a little intimidating—but I decided, “Okay, what do I have to lose? I’m going to start small.”

So, I started with a psalm. I think it was Psalm 46. And then I moved to another psalm.

And then I moved to the book of James. And I spent an entire year memorizing the book of James.

And then I moved to the book of Colossians, and it took me eighteen months to memorize Colossians.

And more recently I have moved to the book of 1 Peter, which is where I am currently memorizing.

And I have to tell you, after several years now of memorizing Scripture, that I am sold on this discipline for life. Because nothing has armed me to fight my sin like thinking about God’s Word.

I don’t even know if I can explain it properly, but there is something that happens when you fix your mind on this inerrant, true, good, forever eternal Word of God. The Bible is not like any other book. It is God’s Word. It is inspired by Him. It is “breathed out,” to use Paul’s language in 2 Timothy. It is God’s Word.

And something happens to our hearts when we think about the words of our Lord. God’s Word is His chosen means of revelation of Himself. So we can’t know God or think about God apart from the way He has given us to know Him, which is His Word.

With time, thinking about the Word of God all day, rehearsing it to myself over and over as I buried the truths of Scripture in my brain, it changed me. I have noticed major areas of victory in the sin of anger in my life. Something that I truly thought was not possible.

Now, I do still struggle with anger. It is something that the Lord is going to sanctify out of me until the day I see Him face to face. One day—Heaven rules. Heaven rules over anger, and I will be free completely. But in the years that I have spent hiding God’s Word in my heart, I have seen Him reshape my heart and change the way that I think. With Scripture memorization and the help of the Holy Spirit, I’ve seen the Lord renew my mind, help me find victory over sin (like anger), deepen my affection for the Lord, dilute my love to the things of this world, and know how to encourage others.

Thinking about the Word of God changes you. It’s a means of sanctification—memorizing Scripture is.

So I want you to walk away from this session with some tips for memorization for sure—I’ll give those in just a little bit—but I want to sort of dive into the why behind it, so let’s start with some biblical exhortations.

Now, if you are looking for a command, like, “Thou shalt memorize Scripture,” you will not find it. (laughter) I have looked. It is not there. However, you will, throughout the whole Bible see exhortations to meditate on God’s Word. You will see precedents of the people of God, patterns of the people of God memorizing and thinking about God’s Word throughout Scripture.

Even the way that some of the Bible is structured is done in such a way as to encourage memorization. And so, while you won’t find an explicit command that maybe you want, there are plenty of exhortations or strong encouragements in Scripture that someone who loves the Lord will also honor His Word and give it a place of primary position in their life.

It is through God’s Word that we know how to live as His people. The only way we know how to follow Jesus is through God’s Word that He has given us that tells us how to do so.

If you go back to the Old Testament, to the book of Deuteronomy 11 (you can turn there if you want to, or you can just listen. I’m not going to be there long), when God is giving the Law to Israel. He has rescued Israel out of 400 years of slavery in Egypt. These are His people. He has called them unto Himself. They’re going to be His people. He’s going to be their God. He’s keeping promises that He made to Abraham back in Genesis.

He has redeemed them from slavery. So, now they’re out of slavery. He’s going to take them to a land that He has promised to give them. It’s His land. He’s going to give it to them. They don’t know how to live as His people. They were former slaves to a pagan idolatrous nation. So what do they know of God? What do they know of how to worship Him? What do they know of belonging to Him?

So God gives them His Law to remind them of who He is and of who they are. And He says many times, “I am your God, and you will be My people, and I will dwell among you.” Beautiful, beautiful statements about God and who He is to His people throughout the first five books of the Old Testament. Then He tells them that He is giving them His Law so that they will remember who He is and what He has done, and He gives them some really specific instructions.

So if you look at Deuteronomy 11, verse 18, He says this . . . this is God speaking to Israel through Moses.

You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house and when you’re walking by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to give them as long as the heavens are above the earth. (vv. 18–21)

I love this passage so much. There’s so much to visualize here.

So what God is saying is He knew that these people would forget. They would forget His miraculous signs that He did to bring them out of slavery. They would forget the pillar of cloud and the smoke that guided them as they left Egypt. They would forget those things, and they would run over and over and over toward the idols of the pagan nations around them. They were forgetful people.

The first shiny thing that they see, they’re just running right after it. I feel that temptation. Don’t you? I’m so distracted. I give my worship so freely to anything that entertains me or temporarily satisfies me. I mean, we are not that different from Israel. So God knows that they are forgetful. He tells them, “I want you to lay up My words in your heart. I want you to store them there and in your soul. And you shall put them on your person.”

And then He says, “You shall teach them to your children—talking of them at home, talking of them when you’re out walking by the way, when you’re getting up in the morning, when you’re going to bed. Keeping God’s Word ever before their faces, ever in their mouths, before their eyes and in their mouths, and in their hearts.”

Now, Israel took this very, very literally, and they developed these things called phylacteries and mezuzahs. And basically these were little—I really don’t even know what to call them—compartments? Devices? Something small. And they would put the Shema from Deuteronomy 6 printed out in them. And the mezuzah, they would put on the doorposts of their house, and the phylacteries, they would wear on their person to remind them to have God’s Word ever with them.

Now, we do not have to do that. I think the principle here is to keep God’s Word ever before us—before our eyes and in our mouths and in our hearts—so that we don’t forget who He is, how He has loved us in sending Jesus to save us from our sins, and who we are now in Christ to follow Him in freedom and in obedience and in love.

Do you sometimes feel—if you are a regular Bible studier, maybe like a morning Bible-study person. That’s me. I love all the morning people. Maybe you’re an evening person. Those are okay, too. I go to bed at nine, so I don’t get you. (laughter)

But do you ever feel like you spend your time in the Word, and you have this great time of study and prayer, and you close your Bible, and it’s like you’ve closed the door on Jesus for the rest of the day? And you feel so distant from Him because you’re busy. You’re working or you’re parenting or all of the things that you have on your schedule, and you might not even think of Him again until the next morning when you get out your Bible. Does anyone feel like that?

I have found that Scripture memorization is a way to keep me tethered to Jesus throughout the day, to keep coming back to the Word over and over and over again. Scripture memorization bridges the gap between your Bible study and your Bible living.

I think that meditating on Scripture all day long, that practice keeps you tethered to the Lord. It keeps you praying without ceasing. It keeps your mind coming back to the gospel over and over. You'll see how the gospel applies to your day, throughout your entire day, when you are meditating on Scripture.

I think that Scripture meditation is a great way to follow the principle of keeping God’s Word before your eyes and in your mouth and in your heart. It keeps you tethered to Christ all day long.

Another passage to consider: Psalm 1. This was a psalm I memorized with a friend a couple of years ago. We actually memorized this together when our church was closed for a little while during the pandemic. And we would FaceTime each other and rehearse it to each other.

And then one Sunday our pastors were preaching, and one of them wanted to read that psalm and asked us to share the screen and recite it. The fear in my heart. (laughter) It actually wasn’t the recitation that was satisfying to me. It was the work of memorizing with my friend that was so encouraging.

But I love this psalm because it really sets the stage for all of the psalms. And it gives us a great picture of what biblical meditation, what Scripture memorization, does and can look like.

So, Psalm 1 starts off,

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers. His delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.

So you have this man who’s called “blessed” or “happy,” depending on your translation, and he avoids sin—walking, standing, or sitting in sin. And you can see the progression of sin there. He’s walking with it. He’s standing in it. And he sits, and he’s camped out in it. Sin will always take you further than you want to go.

So the way he avoids sin is by delighting on God’s Law.

And in the psalms, you’ll see the word “Law” used many times. It’s referring to God’s Word. The people of the Old Testament would have been referring to the Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. We are so privileged to have the entire Bible. So when we hear “Law,” we can apply all of Scripture in a passage like this.

So “his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on the law he meditates day and night.” Now, this word “meditates,” in the Hebrew—I am not a Hebrew scholar. My husband is. I am not. So I check my Hebrew with him. But the Hebrew for this literally to “mumble aloud to oneself.” That’s what it means. “Mumble aloud to oneself.”

So when I say the word “meditation” in this session, I am certainly not referring to worldly meditation. It’s important that you understand the distinction between biblical meditation and what I would call the Eastern religion, mysticism forms of meditation, where the goal is to empty your mind and achieve some kind of peace.

There is never going to be any peace in here if it is empty. It’s like a black hole. I do not need a black hole of chaos in my mind. (laughter) That is the last thing I need.

When we’re talking about biblical meditation, we are talking about filling up to the very brim with God’s Word. Biblical meditation is mumbling God’s Word aloud to yourself. It’s just as simple as that. So when you have this word “meditation” like this in the psalms, I want you to always think, “mumble aloud, mumble aloud.” I’m going to come back to that.

What this man does in Psalm 1, he avoids sin by delighting in God’s Law, mumbling it aloud to himself morning and night. This is a man who is prizing God’s Word.

And the psalm goes on to talk about how, it compares him to a tree that is planted by a stream. And in whatever season it is, whether it’s fall, spring, summer, winter, whatever season, he is flourishing and bearing fruit because he is perpetually fed and nourished by the stream of water. The tree is rooted in the stream.

And I think the picture we are to take from this, the metaphor, is: Look, if you are rooted in God’s Word, delighting in it, mumbling it aloud day and night, you will flourish and bear fruit of faithfulness in every season. No matter the circumstances in your life, God can cultivate fruitfulness and faithfulness when you are rooted in God’s Word, meditating on it day and night.

 

The act of mumbling God’s Word aloud helps you to avoid sin because you are delighting in God’s Word and not your sin. The more closely you live to God’s Word, the farther you will live from your sin. And I can tell you that from experience. The more closely you live to God’s Word, the farther you will live from your sin. I can only explain that as the powerful work of the Holy Spirit. He is pleased to sanctify me through His Word. What a gift that is.

Another psalm to quickly look at (and I’m not going to read this whole psalm). I just want to draw your attention to Psalm 119. You don’t have to turn there. It is a very long psalm.

What’s interesting about this psalm, it doesn’t come across in the English so much to us, but you’ll notice the sub-sections with the little Hebrew words. So it was written in an acrostic form in order to encourage memorization. And what Psalm 119 is is a celebration of God’s Word. It’s a beautiful celebration of God’s Word.

I would encourage you—if, when you leave this session, you’re thinking, Well, I want to start somewhere, memorizing something—consider starting with Psalm 119, or at least a section of Psalm 119.

You’ll see several words used interchangeably: precept, Law, testament, testimony, command, statutes. All of those words are used interchangeably to refer to God’s Word. The psalmist in Psalm 119 just celebrates God’s Word over and over and over, and talks about how God’s Word gives him joy, sustains him in suffering, keeps him far from sin, encourages him, counsels him, gives him wisdom, helps him to know how to encourage others. It’s a really beautiful psalm as a celebration of God’s Word.

And so, when you read it, you will be encouraged. I would encourage you to go there at some point.

A New Testament passage, Colossians 3:16, where Paul is writing to the Colossian church, and he says to them: “Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom. . .” and he goes on, “in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”

“Let the Word of Christ live in you richly.” Not just a little, but lavishly. “Let His Word lavishly take up residence in your heart.” I love that picture that Paul gives us.

Now, the Colossian church, New Testament church—first century, so at that point, the Scripture, what we would call the “closed canon of Scripture,” was not closed at that point. The Scriptures were still emerging and being written. Colossians itself—New Testament epistle, written by Paul—they would have received it.

And at the same time, their access to the written Word would have been very, very limited. The availability of tools, like papyrus and ink and all of the things that they would have used back then, would not have been something that they would have had access to like we have paper and ink and pen. It’s just not the same.

So how would the Colossians have let God’s Word live in them richly? They would have had to memorize. They would have had to gather together as a Body of Christ to hear the proclamation of God’s Word. And they would have hidden it in their hearts together to take it home because there was no Bible for them to take home. There was no Bible app to take home and scroll through or listen to. They didn’t have that. So in order for God’s Word to dwell in them, they had to put it there and hide it in their hearts.

Nancy: Glenna Marshall has been giving us some biblical encouragement for memorizing Scripture. Thankfully, the Bible is way more accessible to us than it was to the Colossians, but we need to hide the Word in our hearts just as much. I hope Glenna's talk has inspired you to saturate your mind with God’s Word.

This month, our team has put together a great tool available to help you do that. We call it our Savor and Share Scripture Cards are a set of fifty-two cards featuring a variety of Bible verses. You can focus on one every week of the year or stick them in different places where you’ll see them often and be reminded of the truth. They’re a beautiful and practical to savor God’s Word‚ to keep it in front of you and in you, and to share it with others.

You can get your own Savor and Share Scripture Card set this month when you give any amount to Revive Our Hearts. We’re so grateful for your gift, and this resource is one way we want to thank you for your support. Just visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959 and be sure to request your Scripture card set.

Now that Glenna has given us some background on the “why” of memorizing Scripture, she’ll be back tomorrow to equip us with some ideas for how to actually do that. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants you to experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV unless otherwise noted.