Ben Them, Day 30: Memory Verses

At Sunday School - which is the most terrible name you could really give anything - we were encouraged to learn memory verses, verses from the Bible, just a sentence or so, and ideally the reference so we could find them again. Many of y’all will know some. John 3:16, ‘for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life’ is the classic, but Romans 12: 20 is up there with it: ‘do not conform any longer to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind’ - excellent advice, though on its own you could interpret it in almost any direction. Politically I’m sure it both means ‘don’t be wooed by liberal ideas’ and ‘don’t stick with conservatism and orthodoxy’, which completely cancel out. It’s meant far more spiritually, but I’m aware there are issues taking it as something wholly standalone.

Some American churches advocate ‘The Romans Road’, the idea you can get the whole gist of salvation by reading, remembering and most of all following the book of Romans, 3:10, 3:23 6:23, 5:8, 10:9-10, 10:13 5:12 and 8:1, in that order. I wasn’t taught that, but if you look them up it’s a great set of memory verses, practically a great passage.

There are a lot of verses I can quote from memory, either because they were assigned to me as memory verses, or they stood out when reading the Bible, or especially because there was an engaging sermon on them, or especially especially because I wrote a song using Bible verses and ended up singing them a lot. I don’t think many people will have ‘Levi was yet in the loins of his fathers when he met Melchizedek’ or ‘who is made, not after the law of carnal commandment but after the power of eternal life’ on their memory verse bingo.

The history of memory verses goes back before the verses were even numbered. Before being committed to scrolls the Old Testament was passed on through oral tradition - meaning everyone heard, and remembered with, in those days, astonishing accuracy. Islam teaches that it is highly blessed to memorise verses, or even entire Surahs of the Qu’ran, and many devout Muslims try to memorise as much of the Qu’ran, generally in Arabic. Even those who don’t typically speak in Arabic know this to be a good and blessed thing with rewards in the hereafter.

Books are a boon, of course, and like computers they’re a brain extension, an external hard drive, meaning we need to remember far less. If we didn’t have google or even Encarta we’d probably have to get better at remembering things like names, metric/imperial conversions, contact details or how to clean an oven. How many phone numbers do you know?

We all have Bibles, and now even computer-searchable ones, meaning memorising passages now seems much less necessary than it did a few hundred years back. But I think it’s a mistake to give up remembering and do everything by checking a reference. Look up the words and they’re there, then gone in the blink of an eye. Learn them and they live in your mind. Make them part of your mindset, and you’ll be ready with confidence to bring them out. Not for nothing does the Bible call itself a sword. It’s a tool to weild swiftly and readily.

One thing I’ll say against memory verses: they’re good but they’re short. They’re quoted and remembered out of context, which means you can probably interpret them pretty freely depending on your needs. Far better to quote the verse but be able to quote the whole passage. And I’m probably too wary when it comes to quoting single verses out of context. Jesus did it all the time, though he did it in a culture where he knew his audience would know scripture back-to-front.

Still, I’d like to go back and learn more of them. I watched and very much liked ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ this week, and it has quite a bit of Leonardo DiCaprio lounging in his pool learning lines. If he can learn lines and speeches - and if I’ve been able to learn dialogue in the past, I should be able to learn a whole chapter of the Bible, if I only set my mind to it. If you’d like to return to memory verses, why not learn your favourite psalm - mine is Psalm 8, which is handily short. I also like the idea of learning the entirety of Philemon, a book which is only a single page long, 335 words in the Greek text, though I’ll pick a worthwhile English translation. A little longer than Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’, which is 262 words. Could I learn both? That is the question? There are speeches I learnt long ago - the ‘indomitable’ speech from Doctor Who or First Witch’s ‘A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in his lap’ from the Scottish Play, Macbeth which for me is the highlight of all Shakespeare. They’re still perfectly clear in my mind. Why not take Philemon or Acts 26 to heart, and write it there, like an internal tattoo, as an act of devotion and spring cleaning, and be transformed by the renewing of your mind?