Hebrews 9 & 10...

(Tim, w/thanks to David) Watch this. Precisely why was it that we all stopped memorizing Scripture?

Comments

[David Gray]

That was tremendous! The only odd thing to me was to hear people clapping after hearing that. It ought not leave a believer unmoved but that wouldn't be the way it would move me...

[Michal Crum]

Praise God for His Word. This recitation is a wonderful reminder to me that the Scriptures are living and active. How can I forget? But I do.

[Clint Mahoney]

It really is funny. I don't think I've ever memorized an entire section of scripture and remembered it for long. However, in school I memorized Hamlet's soliloquy and still remember most of it - I didn't understand Shakespeare well until then - I need to do this with scripture.

I personally didn't like Ferguson's recitation just because of the way he talked but it was good.

[Mark Priestap]

Outstanding.

[Fr. Bill]

Meshing this blog with another one on singing psalms ...

Lots of testimony over the centuries confirms that some form of "singing" is what vastly facilitates memorization. We deployed this technique when learning Hebrew conjugations and Greek declensions in seminary. Tables of each with scores of otherwise alien phonemes could be captured in memory if we would simply put them to some sing-songy chant. Test time was a riot -- a room full of men, sub-vocally muttering barely audible sillysongs of foreign jibberjabber. But, it worked. And it has always worked.

I know a scholarly Orthodox priest who sings the entire Psalter each week from memory -- in English, the next week in Latin, the next week in Greek, the last week in Hebrew. Orthodox and Coptic monastics in North Africa sing the entire Psalter every day -- all 150 Psalms.

Such seeming feats of memorization are not at all unusual in Bedoin cultures, which also uses a form of chant/song to weld long geneologies into memory.

And, yes, it can work here. A group of men I monitor in a demonstration project called Men at Worship report easily memorizing Psalm texts which they have chanted regularly. And, in one of these men's home, I participated in the going-down-to-bed-for-the-night ritual with his sons who are not yet old enough to read, but who can sing the text of Psalms, 1, 8, and 15 with Daddy, because that's what they had been doing for a while by the time I visited them.

[Ren]

Ryan is a friend of mine from Bob Jones U. He does an amazing one person performance of Spurgeon. He's done it in churches all over America. Great guy.

[Eric Wilson]

Parents, don't miss the early years. Memorization is so easy for young children.

My 4 year old recently memorized Psalm 100. It took less than three weeks, with about 5 or 10 minutes a day. At first I required nothing of him, except that he listen. Then I would occasionally ask him to repeat a line, and then two. Then he was repeating more than I asked, and now he knows it better than I do.

We invest so much in our children. Why not make this type of effort? Few things will be such an enduring blessing. (Eventually, your child will stop playing soccer . . .)

[Keith Knowlden]

This is inspiring - comments included. Thanks.