How to Study the Word of God, Part 2

Scripture:
Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will make you free”. (John 8:31-32)

I memorized this verse many years ago and it has been a tremendous encouragement to me both in my spiritual life and in my evangelism efforts. Like many verses of Scripture God has a way of teaching us more and more each time we revisit how we apply His Word to our lives.

In keeping with the theme of this series of blog postings, I was thinking about one of the Bible study methods that I use frequently and remembered a Bible truth I learned from a word study in Genesis chapter 4 where Adam knew Eve and she conceived and bore children. The word knew in this verse from the context is clearly referring to Adam’s physical relations with Eve implying an intimate and experiential knowledge. This same word in greek (ginwvskw) in John 8:32, meaning “to know, understand, and perceive”, carries with it more then just a superficial knowledge but a knowledge that is deeper and more personal.

The past couple of years, in an attempt to better manage my time and how much of it I spend in the Word of God, I decided to take advantage of the many hours I spend commuting to work by using that time for more spiritual endeavors, like praying, praising God in singing and listening and memorizing the Word of God. The first two, praying and praising God, did not take too much preparation. I was already listening to Gospel music while I drive and only thing I needed to be careful about was when praying was to make sure I kept focused on my driving at the same time.

Listening to and memorizing Scripture took some preparation however. Since my car is relatively new, it has a CD player with mp3 capabilities. It occurred to me that if I recorded passages of scripture on CD I could easily listen to or memorize Scripture. There are many websites with free downloads of the Scripture in audio or mp3 format. These are good if you wanted to do what my last posting suggested on How to Study the Word of God. By listening to the Scriptures on CD you can “read” larger porstions of Scripture while driving or you can saturate yourself with smaller portions by listening them over and over. I find that many times a get a different perspective on a passage of Scripture by listening to it instead of reading it. I also find that if I listen to a passage while I am reading it on my computer I can easily mark a passage in yellow (if I have pasted that passage in my word processor) and take notes at the same time.

As for memorinzing Scripture, I found it was difficult trying to record only portions of an audio file so that I could record it multiple times for memorization purposes, so I downloaded and purchased a text-to-speech program that had a save-to-mp3 feature. Here is how it works. I paste the portion(s) of Scripture I want to learn or memorize into this text-to-speech program. Then I repeat smaller portions of the passage multiple times with a gap between each repetition so that when I play it back, I have time to repeat out loud what I just heard. So, for example, I would type “Romans 2:4” three times with a space between each time, then I would type part of the verse three times with spaces between them too. I would continue to do this until I have the whole verse typed the way I want to learn it and then I would save it to an mp3 file.

Now this takes a couple of tries to figure out how much you can memorize at a given time and how much time to put between each repitition but it is amazing how fast you can learn Scripture just listening to it over and over again. Over time I have developed a series of “levels” for memorizing scripture that I have found very helpful and maybe in a future blog post I can go into this method of memorization in more detail.

Pulling this all together, knowing the Word of God takes more then just reading Scripture or listening to a preacher expound the Scriptures, it takes consuming the Word of God and making it a part of your very soul and one way I have found is memorizing Scriptures.

Request:
That we come to know God but memorizing His Word.

Prayer:
Thank you Lord for giving us your Word and for how we can know you and your ways from it. Fill us with your Spirit and help us be more like you.