Transcription
This is a bold Eagle. He's a legendary hunter who has mastered the art of catching fish. He also happens to hold the secrets to memorizing scripture. Let's imagine us Christians are bold Eagles, and the verses we want to memorize are tasty fish just waiting to be poached.
The eagle does these three things to ensure his hunt has the best chance of success. So today, we'll learn how to do the same. As someone who's been reading the Bible for almost 23 years, I couldn't stand the constant reading, covering, reciting, and writing out verses of the traditional memorization method. So, I simply changed the strategy.
This one requires no commitment and no repetition, and you can memorize not only verses but entire books of the Bible. And hey, if you find this video useful, or you're just like bald eagles, why not subscribe? It really helps out.
Now, if you're anything like me, you've probably got a handful of verses that you really love and you want to be able to recite from memory. Well, unfortunately, with this method, you're going to get way more value than just that. We're going to analyze the eagle's hunt in three stages.
The first stage is surveying the river. Before diving head first into an icy cold river with no tasty fish inside, the eagle must first survey the river from above and plan out his attack. Let's say you want to memorize Ephesians 2:8. A great choice, but let's not dive head first like this guy. We need to plan our attack first.
Think of the river like a book you're reading, and the fish within it like the verses you want to remember. This method works with every single book in the Bible, and you only ever need to do this stage once per book. Our goal is to get an eagle's perspective on the book, and you can do that by answering these three questions: Who wrote it and when? Who were the original audience? What is the purpose of the book, or why does it exist?
Feel free to Google these answers and to write them down somewhere. This is your reconnaissance mission, surveying the river for a successful hunt. Let's answer them for the book of Ephesians.
Question number one: Paul was the author, sometime during his ministry after Jesus' Resurrection.
Question number two: The Ephesian church is the audience, a large multicultural gathering pastored by Paul's protégé, Timothy.
Question number three: The main purpose of Ephesians was to encourage the early Christians to be united together under Christ, both Jews and Gentiles.
Now, we've created a lens to view this book through. We know some basic information that is essential in helping our memory process, or in this case, our hunt. The river has been scoped out, so it's time to now identify the big fish.
Our eagle friend knew this river boasted some pretty tasty fish, just like how you knew the book of Ephesians had this banger of a verse in it. But we have a problem. We still need to memorize it. The Ephesians 2:8 fish is still swimming away with unsuspecting bliss. So, we've studied the river, let's now study the target.
This is the part of the process I call mapping out your Bible. For this, you need a physical Bible and one that you're willing to write in. Now, hang on. Don't panic. You'll be fine.
First, find and mark each chapter in the book. When you mark them, take note of which column they're in and roughly how far down they are. Remembering the physical location of these numbers will be really important as we progress. Think of these chapters like runs of a river, broken up by some descending rapids. Each one flows into the next, so knowing what came before is essential for catching the big trout.
Next, find where your target fish likes to swim. In our case, our Ephesians 2:8 fish happens to be in the second run of the river, chapter 2. But there's a lot of space in that section, so where can we expect to find this big guy? Well, Ephesians 2 has 22 verses, so we know that verse 8 will be in the first half of the river's run. If you're a visual person, sketching out a river diagram like this might be helpful to you.
So, you physically mapped out your Bible, identifying where the chapters start and end, and you've also identified where our verse fits within the chapter. Now, you want to mark the memory verse and do your absolute best to remember its physical position on the page. This will be very important in our final step, which is following the current.
It's almost time for us to swoop in for that sweet catch, but the fish is in a current that continues all throughout the river. We need to find out what the current is and where our fish is within it. This is the most important step for memorizing scripture.
Most books of the Bible have a current flowing through it, either a theme, a story, an argument, or something else. In Ephesians 1, Paul talks a lot about our adoption into God's family. Ah, it makes more sense now. We learned that Paul's purpose in stage one was to encourage the early Christians to be united together under Christ, so in his intro, he's making the case that Jews and Gentiles are adopted into the same family, so division should stop. Pretty smart.
In Chapter 2, he continues his argument using the analogy of death and life to address one of the first problems causing division, boasting. This step takes a little more time and will be different for every book, but there's always a current. We just need to find it.
So, Ephesians 2:8 sits at the end of Paul's argument. "It is by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not of yourselves it is a gift of God." Makes sense why the fish is in this particular area of the out, because the current has taken him there.
Side note: Books like Proverbs and Psalms may be the hardest to find currents in, as lots of verses are one-liners or separate chapters, but they have been assembled in a certain way, so keep looking for that flow.
Notice I haven't talked once about reciting or recalling the exact words of the verse because each translation differs slightly from one another. I found it far more effective to memorize the purpose and context behind the verse because it seems to stick in our brains a little bit better than just rote repetition.
So, next time someone's trying to remember that verse about grace and boasting, you'll remember the book of Ephesians. Then, you'll recall the mapping of your Bible, physical location of the chapters, and your brain will naturally drift down the current until you reach the verse. And when you recite it, it won't be perfect, but it's far better to memorize meaning without words than words without meaning.
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