–– Paul Schlehlein

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The religion of Islam produces learners capable of quoting the entire Quran, their holy book about 10% the size of the Bible and about 80% of the New Testament.  

A town in Nigeria has yielded at least 10,000 students who have memorized the entire Quran from the same parchment. Hour after hour they pour over the book, reciting it before their teacher, many of them between 12-15 years old. Since paper can sometimes be a luxury in Africa, these hafiz (Quran memorisers) learn it by ear or on wooden tablets.  

This is where we are helped by the Lesser to the Greater argument, which teaches that if the lesser is true, then the greater is also true. For example, if drinking a cup of motor oil will kill you, then drinking a gallon of motor oil will kill you. In Scripture, if it’s lawful to rescue your neighbour Jim’s sheep from a burning house on the Sabbath, how much more is it lawful to rescue Jim from the burning house on the Sabbath (Mt. 12:10-11). Now if young boys are able to memorize an uninspired book about brooding legalism, how much more can Christian youth memorize divine words that give joy and life? Christians should be memorizing a lot more Scripture than they are. 

Believers have always emphasized the study of Scripture and some have memorised huge portions of it. Fourteen centuries before the Quran was penned, Deuteronomy 11:18 said: 

“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.”

Spurgeon and Memorization 

It makes me think of a story C.H. Spurgeon told about his boyhood. His grandparents loved the hymns of Isaac Watts – as all good Christians should – so the granny offered young Charles a penny for every Watts hymn he could put to memory. Spurgeon, a precocious child, began devouring the words of Watts, the way a termite eats a southern yellow pine.

Spurgeon’s success was putting his grandparents in the poor house so that Grandma had to cut her reward in half. Then their home became overrun with rats, so the grandfather offered the same reward for each varmint Charles killed. This seemed more enjoyable to Spurgeon – at least at the time – so he turned his attention away from four stanzas of Watts to four-legged weasels.
He later regretted this boyish decision, saying: 

“No matter on what topic I am preaching, I can even now, in the middle of any sermon quote some verse of a hymn in harmony with the subject; the hymns have remained with me, while those rats for years have passed away, and the shillings I earned by killing them have been spent long ago.”

Counsel for Scripture Memory

I encourage my children, disciples, friends and church people to memorize large chunks of Scripture, and often reward them for doing so because I know that a Christian will never regret memorizing the Bible.

On your journey towards Scripture memory, consider these three words of counsel.
1. Obey the Scripture You Memorise
We could tweak James 1:22 to say: “Be doers of the word, and not memorisers only.“ James says this is like flexing in front of the mirror for an hour, then later forgetting the colour of your hair.

I’ve heard that billionaire Bill Gates memorised the Sermon on the Mount in his youth. His pastor offered him a trip up to the Space Needle in Seattle if he could memorise the 2000-word text. He quoted it without error. But today he’s an agnostic. All that flexing did him no good, just like the Jews that studied the Bible without ever finding Jesus Christ (Jn. 5:39). 

2. Memorise Scripture to fight sin

Psalm 119:11 says, “Thy word have I had in my heart that I might not sin against thee.“ How did Jesus fight against the temptations of the Devil? He quoted scripture. When Satan shoots his arrows at us, we fight back with the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God (Eph. 6:17). 

3. Don’t Stop Memorising

Ezra was not a child when the Bible says of him: “Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel” (Ez. 7:10). 

Memorising becomes more difficult in the adult years. Just as Joseph stored up grain during the years of plenty, a man should store up God’s word in his youth. If God has blessed you with a good mind, use it early for Christ’s word, which should dwell in you richly (Col. 3:16). 

The reason you must do this is because the Word of God is precious. If I offered $1,000 for every verse memorised to all the people who passed me in the street, the money would fly from my hands. But the Bible is worth more than a thousand or a million dollars. David said he loved Scripture above fine gold. Today, a single 1oz. Krugerrand costs about $2,500. David loved the Bible more than a whole box of these gold coins. 

I read somewhere that a man from India memorised the decimals of Pi. You know, 3.14159265 and so forth. The decimal places are infinite, or well over 1 trillion. This guy was blindfolded and took 10 hours to recall 70,000 digits! The brain is a fascinating gift, of which we only use a portion. And yet, what good did those digits serve that man? Think of the hours he took, the days, weeks, and months to memorise meaningless numbers.

When I was in Malawi, I sat in the dust during a Muslim funeral procession. The imams and sheikhs quoted portions of the Quran they had memorised in Arabic, even though they did not know the language! They memorised only the sounds. This is like the Catholic Church, which still has its priest perform in the dead language of Latin.

But Scripture is not this way. It comes in a language we can understand. When we eat it, the words bring joy and delight to our hearts (Jer. 15:16). 

These are the three points we must remember: Do the word, fight with the word and keep on memorising the word.