Emily's Testimony From Sunday

This past year, we challenged you to the 12 Bible Verses Every Californian Needs to Know bible memory challenge. Emily was one of a handful of church members who stuck it out and memorized all 12 verses. We asked her to share how the Lord met her as she memorized Scripture. Here’s her testimony from Sunday:

Bible memorization has been part of my life for a big part of my life. When I was 9, 10, and 11, my church participated in a program called Children’s Bible Drill, where kids memorized about 15 passages a year and went to competitions to test memorization and other Bible literacy skills. I will always be grateful for the women in my church who coached Bible Drill and gave an already-nerdy homeschooler a place to both be challenged and to lay the foundation for an important spiritual discipline.

My learning about Bible memorization took another leap when I started at a Christian law school that was unusually Christian, even for a Christian law school. If you look at the topic of law in the Bible, you’ll find that law, memory, and meditation pretty much always go hand in hand. Now, memorization is a huge part of surviving law school, and if you are at all interested in nerding out about memorization strategies, law students are your people. But we were encouraged to put studying, memorizing, and meditating on God’s Word ahead of the legal stuff. And we learned from professors who lived out these priorities in their lives and in their law practices. During this time I observed something: when people memorize God’s Word, it comes out in their conversation and in their prayers. Jesus told this parable in Matthew 13: “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” What a privilege for us to be able to store up and then share God’s very words with each other by praying them for each other.

All this to say, I believe that Bible memorization is important. I have seen it bear fruit. But fast forward from kid Emily to law school Emily to mom Emily, and life was happening, but memorization was not. 

So I was grateful last January to be given the gift of a Bible Memorization Challenge. The first verse we memorized was John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” When you spend time with God’s Word, the very Word of God comes to meet you. Not just words on a page, but Jesus himself. That happened for me this year in these twelve passages. I couldn’t recite them all for you right now, which for the perfectionist in me is pretty horrifying. But I know that over the last year twelve passages have had a chance to work on me, and hopefully to work themselves deeper into my heart and life. 

Thank you to our pastors for making memorization a priority in 2019. Thank you for throwing a tired mom a lifeline in the form of a goal: work on memorization instead of just thinking about working on memorization. 

Let’s be people who memorize God’s Word together. Let’s store that Word in our hearts so that it comes out in our everyday conversations—hopefully sometimes without us even noticing!—and in our prayers for each other. May we all become like the scribe in Jesus’ parable, sharing treasures new and old.