Hidden in My Heart (Psalm 119:9-16)

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Good morning. My name is Kyle. I serve as the pastor of discipleship and Family Ministries here. Excited to open the word with you together. So what I need you to do is grab your Bibles, turn to Psalm 119, and that will be on page 496, if you’re using one of those black pew Bibles there in front of you, or maybe underneath. And as you do that, if you’ve been here the last number of weeks, Brandon has kind of been on a break from preaching. He’s on vacation right now, which means we have the opportunity to hear the word preach from some of our interns and some of our staff here, like Jake and Reeve and Alex. And so hopefully you’ve been blessed by their ministry as they’ve opened the Word with us. I get the opportunity to do it today, and Alex will finish us up in this five week kind of summer at Cityview series starting next week, so we’ll finish up then. But hopefully you’ve been blessed as they’ve been able to open the Word and to be able to encourage them and see them equipped, as we pray that one day the Lord will send them out into different churches and be able to open the word with them and grow in that way. So hopefully you’re in Psalm 119 because I want to read Psalm 119 nine through 16 together as we start off. So let’s read our text this morning, starting in verse nine. How can a young person stay on the path of purity by living according to your word. I seek you with all my heart. Do not let me stray from your commands. I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Praise be to You, Lord. Teach me your decrees with my lips. I recount all the laws that come from your mouth. I rejoice in following Your statutes as one rejoices in great riches. I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways. I delight in your decrees. I will not neglect your word. I want to pray again for us before we dive in here, Lord, this is your word. These words that we just read are from you to us. There is much that you have for us this morning. So we’re praying that you would teach us as we just sang, teach us Lord, speak to us, O Lord, and change us through your words. We give this time to you, and we expect that you will work in our hearts today. We love you, and we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen. In 2015 a guy in India memorized and then recited 70,000 decimal places. In pi 70,000 it took over 10 hours, and he was also blindfolded, so that nobody thought, you know, maybe he was reading something. In 2018 there was a 10 year old who memorized the Quran, and then a 55 Year Old At the same time as him, also memorized the Quran over 6000 verses. Comedian and magician Justin Willman claimed during a TV interview recently that when he was 12 years old, he memorized over 40,000 plus zip codes in the United States. And then two weeks ago, when I was up at Lake Geneva, speaking to the students, all the campers spend the week memorizing Scripture, dozens of verses, sometimes whole chapters of God’s word in a week. So my question is, what’s your experience with memorization or meditation, like when I bring those words up. What comes to mind? Maybe Awana, maybe VBS, maybe youth group, maybe getting paid by your parents to memorize Scripture. And you know, once we’re stop, once we stop getting made to kind of memorize Scripture with some of those things when we’re younger, because most of those things are things we do when we’re kids up through teenage years, like once somebody stops telling us we have to do this, we generally stop doing it. Is that right? We generally stop doing that until you get to Cityview and you get into journey groups, and one of the first things we talk about is you are going to have to memorize Scripture. And it’s an area of pushback that we’ve gotten a lot from many of you, in fact, and some of your leaders, feel the pushback too, not just in week one, but throughout as we keep adding verses and we keep having to go longer and longer in reciting these verses. And I’ve done journey groups long enough and had enough conversations with people of memorization to know the two most common things we hear from people are things that I think you believe. I’m not saying you’re lying, but they are false. Does that make sense? I don’t think you’re lying. I think you’re just mistaken. And these are the two things I’m not good at memorizing, right? I’m not good at memorizing, like or I don’t have time to memorize. So both those things are said a lot, and I don’t believe either one of them. And I say that because, after doing journey groups for nine years, I am amazed at how many people can memorize large chunks of Scripture and recite it, especially after they said I don’t have time. Time, or I’m not good at memorizing that’s why I say I don’t believe it. The other reason is because I have seen your faces in the service or in other moments where somebody says a verse reference, and you memorize it in Journey group, and you look around at other people in your journey group, like, hey, we memorize that. I know that verse. Like, I don’t actually even look at my Bible, I know it. And there’s something in your face. It’s like there’s this kind of joy, like, I know this. I worked hard at doing this. And so again, this is something that I think we say these things, but they’re not really true of us if we actually discipline ourselves to meditate and memorize and then to have other people keeping us accountable, which we’ll talk about a little bit more as well. And then this book was written by God, the Holy Spirit, right? And he gave the words to the authors, which means he wants you to know these words, which means he wants you to know that you can memorize, because he will give you what you need so that you can do that, because memorization is vital, so trust God with it. Now we’re finishing up, like I said, next week, with our summer at Cityview series. And if you’ve never been here before, summer at Cityview just means we have a bunch of different preachers come up besides the normal of Brandon, and we kind of get to bring a text that means something to us or something that we think the congregation needs to hear. And this morning, I hope I’m bringing both of those. This is something that I feel really passionate about, and something that I really feel our church needs to be reminded of. Again, I say that knowing like Alex and Jake and Reeve preach some heavy passages like Romans eight and Ephesians one and the story of Samson. So we got, like, some thick theology and really tough narrative to preach from. And I’m coming from Psalm 119, the longest book in the Bible, and a whole chapter, the longest chapter in the Bible, with basically 98% of the verses talking about God’s word. Because today I really want to get very practical. I really want to get very practical for all of us to walk out of here with some things that we could say. I could do that today, and that is with meditation and memorization. Because I believe you could devote yourselves to these practices, or spiritual disciplines or habits of grace, whatever you want to call them, you will experience what Dallas Willard says is absolutely fundamental to spiritual formation. He goes on to say, if I had to choose between all the disciplines of the spiritual life, I would choose Bible memorization, because it’s fundamental way of filling our minds with what it needs. This Book of the Law shall not depart out of your mouth. That’s where you need it. So how does it get in your mouth? Memorization. So here’s my purpose. My purpose this morning is to persuade you that to make meditation and memorization a priority in your daily life. All right, I’m very intentional with those words to make it I don’t think I have to convince any of you that it’s good, but my hope is to persuade you to make meditation and memorization a priority in your daily life, so that the message of Christ will dwell richly among us, right? So this isn’t just an individual thing. The more we all memorize and meditate together, the more Christ’s word will dwell richly with all of us whenever we open our mouths, whether that’s in conversation, everyday conversation, in marriage, in parenting, in the workplace, in conflict, in evangelism, in discipleship, meditation, memorization of God’s word changes All of that, because it shapes everything we say and it shapes everything we feel as well. So I’ve said memorization a lot, but we are talking about meditation and memorization this morning, because they go hand in hand, because if you memorize, you have to meditate on God’s word, and if you meditate, you can’t really help but memorize the words you meditating on, the more time you spend in these words. So we’re gonna talk about them together. And it’s always important to ask the question, what is the purpose? What is the purpose of this? I mean, this simple question of what is the purpose can save us from doing a lot of meaningless things, a lot of things that just distract us from what’s really important, and it also keeps us, hopefully focused on the right path, the things that we should be doing. When we say, what is the purpose? And we are going to look at the purpose of meditation and memorization, but we need to know first, what are these two words and what do they mean biblically? Okay, so I’m not defining them on how the world defines them, but what does the Bible say about these, because this is gonna help us distinguish between what we know about meditation, especially in kind of many different areas where our mind probably goes when we hear that word, compared to what Scripture tells us. The same thing with memory, right? Because we kind of have this idea of meditation as a practice that helps us to. Empty our minds, or to center ourselves, or to do certain things that are outside of what Scripture says. And then we have memory over here, which we all memorize a lot of different things. Some of them are those useless facts that nobody cares about except for you, but you memorize them. And those are just kind of things, like for learning. And sometimes it’s just you’re interested in things, and so you memorize but what do they mean? Biblically, like when the authors of Scripture are talking about these two ideas, what are they saying? So first, meditation, meditation is not an emptying of your mind. Meditation is a filling up of your mind with the Word of God, and you turn it over and over and over again in your mind until your heart is changed. That’s what meditation is, to take God’s Word in to fill your mind and heart with it, and to keep turning it over again and again and again until it gets in you and changes your heart and what you do on the outside. And we know what this looks like, practically. So depending on your age, this illustration I’m gonna try and hit all ages. Maybe you come from the generation where you used to get mail from people that you loved, like physical stuff with a stamp on it, and you’d be waiting at the mailbox for these things, and when you got it, and it was probably a significant other, somebody you were dating, somebody that you missed a lot, and you would open it, you would read it. You did never, you never. Just read it one time. You would read it and you’d read it again, and you’d read it again. And then, if you’re like, more my generation, we just passed notes in class, right? And so you’d be passing these notes in class. You didn’t want the teacher to get it because you didn’t want them to read it, but you’d be passing these notes. And guess what? You didn’t just throw that note away at lunch. You kept it and you read it. And some of you maybe still have some of those things to this day, or maybe it’s text messages or voicemails where you’re hearing a person you want to hear. You want to hear their words, they said something meaningful to you, and you want to keep it because you want to go over it again and again. And that’s how we should come to God’s word of meditation, Lord, tell me again. Tell me again who you are. Tell me again who I am, over and over again. So that’s meditation. Memorization is the storing up of God’s Word in our hearts, so that God shapes our thoughts and our emotions and our actions. So that’s meditation memorization according to scripture. That’s what it’s talking about when we see these words and these ideas throughout Scripture. So the purpose, then, of meditation and memorization. What is their purpose? And the answer is right there for us in verse 10. Verse 10 says, I seek you with all my heart. I seek you with all my heart. Like these words are key to any time we come to God’s word. And this is very different than the purposes of those people I mentioned at the very beginning. Let me tell you the purposes of why these people memorize what they did. The guy who memorized 70,000 decimal places of pi did it because it was a challenge. He thought he could do it and he did it. The young man memorizing the Quran did it because he thought memorizing was fun. How many of you used that word before the older man did it because he believed, and I quote, Allah Almighty, gives memorizers the highest level of placement in paradise. So he’s looking for that highest placement. If I do this, I can be getting this for the comedian, magician, he broke both of his arms, and he had nothing to do over the summer, so his parents gave him a book with 40,000 plus zip codes in it. Like that sounds more like a parenting issue to me, but that’s what they gave him, and he did it. And the campers at Lake Genevieve youth camp, they get to come up on stage and get a patch that they get to collect over their summers there. Like these are the motivators for a lot of what they’re doing, the purpose for what they’re doing. And it would seem, though, that the purpose of meditation and memorization is just to know God’s law. Like, what does God say? I mean, the rest of verse 10 says, Do not let me stray from your commands. So why does he start by saying, I seek you with all my heart. It’s because the psalmist knows something that we often overlook. It’s so easy to overlook that in our desire to follow God’s commands, we miss the God behind the commands. Does that make sense? We want to follow what God says. We just miss who he is and why he has these words in there to begin with. So we need to understand first, I seek you with all my heart. I seek you. Do not let me stray from your commands, because if I seek you, I’m going to want to do what you say. So when you seek we are looking at the God behind the commands, and when we know him, it changes the way we view his commands. It changes the way we view what he says. This is why John can say in first John five, three, this is love for God to keep His commands. And his commands are not burdensome. Have you ever read the Bible and seen all the commands it could seem like a burden, and John is saying no, if you know God. And you know his love, his his commands are not burdensome, because we know he is a good God who loves us and has our best interests in mind, and that’s what he’s coming from. When he gives us his words and his commands, it’s from a place of love. So when we seek Him and we know him, we hear his commands differently. It’s in God’s Word where we discover who he is, because that’s where he reveals himself to us, His will, His plans, his purposes, his thoughts, on and on we can go. So in other words, to meditate and memorize on God’s word is a way for us to sit down and say, God, I love you. That’s what we’re doing when we come and meditate, meditate and memorize his word we’re saying, I’d rather spend time with your thoughts than my own. I’d rather spend time with your thoughts than what the people on TV and the Internet think I want to spend time with you because I love you. It’s agreeing with David, as Robert read for us in Psalm 63 verse one, when he says, You God, are my God. Earnestly I seek you. I thirst for you. My whole being longs for you. In a dry and parched land where there is no water. Are you earnestly seeking Him? Are you thirsting for him? Do you long for him? And when we do, when we seek God and we know him better, when we understand what he’s done for us through the gospel, that he’s made a way for us to be saved through his sons, life, death and resurrection, then we should be coming to meditation, memorization, with joy that we get to spend time with this kind of God. So that’s the purpose. The purpose is not to know more stuff. The purpose is to know God better, to seek Him with all our heart. And then when we do, we want to do what he says. We want to do what he says because we know it’s best for us. So let’s look at some other motivations, then for meditation memorization. That’s your second point. There in your notes, the motivation for meditation memorization. In Psalm 119 we see dozens of verses that speak about different motivations for spending time with God, but I want to narrow it down just to kind of what we see here in verses nine through 16, and I see four different motivations. The first one, it’s a motivation of, I want to live a holy life. I want to live a holy life. Look at verse nine. How can a young person stay on the path of purity by living according to your word. When we truly know the Lord, when we seek Him with all our hearts, we know who he is, what he’s done for us. We want to live for Him, living a pure life. We could substitute the word pure with holy. How can someone stay on the path of holiness, living for the Lord, pleasing the Lord? Because when Jesus came and lived for us, and He died for us, and He rose from the grave, and we believe that we receive His holiness, His perfect righteousness, that’s what we get, and now we get to live that out in our life. That’s what Paul means when he says, live a life worthy of the gospel. This is who you are. So now walk in it. You’ve been adopted as a son or a daughter. So now live in your family the way that your family goes about their business. And this is what Jesus did. So let’s follow him in Philippians, 48 Paul famously says, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy. Think about such things. That was the first verse I was challenged to memorize from my disciple maker in high school, memorize that verse. He said, You’re going to use it, and not just in a sermon, you know, you’re going to use it every day. And he’s so right? And where do we find these types of things in here, not in the world? Whatever is true, noble, right? Pure, lovely, that’s all in here. So that’s where we go. The path of purity is one that leads straight to God. Okay, the path of purity leads straight to God. And the way a young person, or anyone, any age for that matter, stays on that path is living, according to this book, all the way back in Psalm one, starting off the entire book, we see that those who they have a delight in the law of the Lord, and they meditate on it day and night. And when they do, what does it say? You are blessed, you will yield fruit and you will prosper as you stay on the path. Wrath of purity. So we want to live that holy life. We want to look more and more like Jesus as we follow Him. We want to live out what First Peter what First Peter says As obedient children do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance, but just as He who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do. Be holy, because I am holy. And it isn’t a secret how we live this holy life. We listen to what God says and we obey it. Because what did Jesus do? He listened to God’s word and he obeyed it perfectly. And so for us, we want to follow in his footsteps. Say, what do you say? God? Now, I want to live that, and the best way to do that is to meditate and to memorize and hide God’s Word in our hearts. So that’s the first motivator. The second motivator is to fight temptation. Look at verse 11. I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. This is probably the one we think of the most, this verse when we’re talking about fighting temptation and sin in our life. And years ago, in high school, I think middle school or high school, I got this bright orange little book that was put out by John Piper and his ministry of desiring God, and it was called fighter verses, okay? And every chapter was a different temptation or sin, and about a handful to a dozen different passages that you can use to memorize, to fight temptation and sin in your life. And as I used that, as I read through that, and kind of started to memorize some of those things, I remember the phrase, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. You guys heard of that before, right? And I was thinking about that like, okay, don’t, don’t come unprepared to or with the wrong equipment to a fight when somebody has something better. And as you’re thinking about the Christian life, the devil is too good at what he does, and he’s been doing it too long to be distracted by anything we can throw at him anyway, we think we can overcome the temptation that he might lay before us, the only thing that defeats him time and time again is God’s word. That’s the only thing. And so when we have the sword of the Spirit, says in Ephesians six, right the Word of God, when we have that, we need to use it. We need to bring the right equipment to the fight. We need to bring the right tool, the right weapon there. And when Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness in Matthew four, that’s exactly what Jesus did. He was able to cut through the lies and the false promises and the twisting of words without giving in. And he didn’t do it by some new teaching. He didn’t do it by saying, hey, my mom and dad told me I shouldn’t do this. He didn’t sit there and say, like, weigh the options, like, Oh, if I do this, if I do that. He just said, No, this is what God’s Word says. So he used the time tested truths of the Word to defeat Satan, and like a master soldier, he wielded that sword perfectly to attack every single one of the devil’s twisting of God’s word, and he defeated it so they were completely destroyed, because the word was hidden in his heart like think about it. Jesus was not walking around the wilderness with scrolls. He couldn’t look it up. He couldn’t pull up his favorite Bible app. He couldn’t ask chatgpt. What do I do if I’m faced with this situation? Because here’s the thing I know about sin, if we wait too long, we’re gonna give in. So we’re waiting to, like, find the magic verse somewhere, advice somewhere, we’re gonna give in. So we hide it in our hearts that we might not sin against Him. So it’s gotta be there already. We gotta be able to pull it from somewhere. It’s gotta be in our hearts, so that we can then use it in that situation. So Jesus had the right words in the right moment in that situation. He chose obedience to God’s word, rather than giving in like Adam and Eve did, because they questioned God’s word, and Jesus says, No, this is what God’s Word says, And he lived within that. So in order to fight temptation, we need to use the word that we know can destroy the devil’s schemes and his lies. Third motivator, we meditate and memorize because then we can worship rightly. Okay, we can worship rightly. Look at verses 12 to 13. Praise be to You, Lord. Teach me your decrees with my lips. I recount all the laws that come from your mouth. We can only worship rightly when we know who we are worshiping and why they are worthy of our worship. And when it comes to worshiping God rightly, we need him to tell us how to do this, rather than us creating things on our own. And to do this, we must meditate on His Word. We must have his words hidden in our hearts and do what these verses say, because God is going to teach us through His Word. We take it in. In it changes us. And then our lips recount. Our lips recount, or you could also substitute the word recite. So we recite everything the Lord has taught us which leads us to praise. That’s why we sing what we do like we strive to have the components of this service be centered on the word. And I hope you can see that even today, I don’t think Alex gave you any information about the announcements. I’m like, what time and all that kind of stuff. Like, all the stuff you guys can read. He said, go to the dogs game, because there’s a great opportunity for fellowship. Like, we want to even preach the announcements. So we say, like, why would we want to do any of this, these things, because you guys can read the facts. So let’s talk about why it’s important to be there the words that we choose. We want them to be centered on the word, so that we’re singing God’s word back to him, our prayers, our time around the Lord’s table here in a few moments, centered on the word and what it says to us, so we can worship rightly. When we do what God tells us to do, say, this is how you are to worship. This is what you should be doing. And when we meditate and memorize in God’s word, and we have it hidden in our heart, it’s a lot harder for us to have wrong views of God and to express wrong views of God in worship. And lastly, fourth motivator, we want to know God’s will. Look at verses 14 and 15. I rejoice in following Your statutes as one rejoices in great riches. I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways. So the word statutes refers to like boundaries that God has given in our life to help us live that holy life that we talked about earlier. So that’s kind of what statutes are like. Let’s keep you here. Okay? And then precepts refers to God’s guidance, his guiding principles in our lives, which isn’t always like that black and white law. He’s just saying like, these are the types of things you need to be taken into consideration. So it kind of reads a little bit more like maybe the wisdom in Proverbs. These are generally true. These are these are generally how things work. And so here’s these guiding principles. When you’re making decisions, you kind of want to take these things into account. Yeah, maybe this person will decide this way and you’ll decide that way. But are you using the same guiding principles to come to that conclusion? So that’s kind of what statutes and precepts are. And when we take those together, what we see here is God’s will for us is to make us holy, as we’ve already talked about, to look more like Jesus, which means we need to listen to his words and his guidance and his boundaries on our life. One of the most common things I’ve heard from students over the years, especially as they’re getting kind of into that college age, or even in college, is I want to know what God’s will is for my life. And I’m sure all of us could Amen that some point we sat down with somebody and say, What is, what is God’s will for me? What does he want from me? And after talking about it more and more with students over the years, it’s clear that what they want is God’s audible voice to say, do this. And I can never sit there and promise that they will ever hear that. Or if you can’t hear the audible voice, let him close every door, because if he does, what happens a window opens. I mean, these are things that we probably all said or heard and might think are biblical, even though they’re not right, like a door and a window like kind of thing. But so it’s like, well, what is, what is God’s will for my life? And the thing is, we can’t look ultimately and find our name in here and say, God says do this, but what it does say is that he’s making all of us more like Jesus. That’s his will for us to make us look like Jesus and conform everything we do to what He wants us to do. And that can happen in all sorts of different areas, regardless of what college you choose. Can you live for the Lord there? That’s his will for your life, no matter what job you choose. Can you work for the Lord and not for men. That’s his will for your life. You see, God’s will for life is to make us look more like Jesus, which means we might have different ways of him doing that in our life. So are we looking at his word and seeing his statutes and His precept and his teachings? Are we letting all that inform our decisions? Because if we do, we’ll start to see like, Yes, this is where God wants me to go, and this is what he’s gonna do in my life as he takes me there. So it’s not necessarily looking for that audible voice, but what does he put in his word? How does he want me to look more and more like Jesus, regardless of the choice I make? So those are the kind of four motivators that I see here in Psalm 119, nine through 16. As I mentioned, there’s many more, many more benefits to Scripture memorization that we could cover before we come to the last point. We need to start to see how we put all this into practice. Okay? And the first thing that we need to do is we need to look at the excuses for why we don’t do this. I’m sure. You’re in your own mind, there’s been at least one excuse that’s popped up throughout this time, in these last 30 minutes, at least one excuse. Maybe it’s the excuse that you’ve used throughout your life. Maybe it’s something new. And so what I want to do is I want to just kind of confess something to you, and I hope it will encourage you as you think about what you need to confess in order to make this a priority, and then to encourage you that this is something you can continue to do. So three and a half years ago, I gave a sermon on meditation memorization, and some of you were like, well, you just used the same thing. No, I used different passage. Didn’t really look back at my notes at all, except for a couple kind of these application things that I want to talk through with you. And the reason I did this and chose this topic for this time, and I did it during Christmas break. It was kind of that first Sunday of the new year. And so we were talking about spiritual discipline. So that’s why we talked about it. And so why do this again? Because I need it as much as you do. No matter how many times I preach on this, I need to be reminded that I should be doing this. Because when I started this, or when I gave the last sermon I remember, I I said I was 10 verses into memorizing the Sermon on the Mount at the time, and I finished the Sermon on the Mount. And then I was like, All right, well, let’s do first, John, like, Sermon on the Mount wasn’t actually that difficult. You’d probably be surprised how much of the sermon on the mount you have memorized if you’ve been in the church. So that wasn’t difficult. I was like, All right, let me go to my one of my favorite books is first books is first John. I was like, oh, First John is kind of easy to read, no to memorize, not not possible. The reason I say that it is possible, but the reason I say that is because John writes in a way that’s very circular. He keeps coming back to the same idea over and over again, but he says it slightly differently. So I was getting verses all messed up, like I couldn’t figure out which word was where and which part of this, this was which chapter it was in, and it was just really, really hard. So I left some more days in between, and then I come back to it, and then I left more days in between, and then I came back to it, and then I left weeks in between, and then months. And finally, I was like, I’m not memorizing anymore. And then in 2024, as some of you know, I was writing a Family Devotional, and the whole purpose around the Family Devotional is scripture memorization, but I was really busy writing. So what did you think I neglected memorizing Scripture? And so I sat there, I was like, What in the world am I doing? If it’s that important, why is it not a priority in my life? But because I’m busy, I don’t have the time anymore, and all it is is an excuse. It’s an excuse. And so while I’m doing this, I’m neglecting memorization. So I said, No, I need to start doing it again. And so just little by little start to chip away. Just start to chip away, just little by little every day. So I’m back at it again and needing this reminder again. So I’m guessing the last three and a half years, unless you memorize the whole Bible in those three and a half years, you probably need the reminder too. So that’s why we’re here now. So let’s look Lastly, at the practice of meditation and memorization. Try and get really practical here on some things to do. Look at verse 16, I delight in your decrees. I will not neglect your word. So the first question we always need to ask ourselves as we wrestle with whether what we need to confess is, do I delight in God’s word? Do I delight in it? If we do, it should be easy to memorize. If you don’t, then it might just you’re gonna look at meditating and memorizing as all work without any real benefits. So do we delight in it? That’s what needs to happen first. So if you don’t delight in it, we need to pray that the Lord would stir in our hearts and help us to delight in His Word. And then, instead of looking at this as something you have to do. We need to come at it from a different perspective, that we get to do this like I think you have to do it to have God’s Word in your life. But we also get to there’s no reason God needs to give us any of this. And he does, and then he saves us, and he opens our eyes and our hearts to understand what he says. And so we get to be in His Word, and we get to know who he is, like a love letter to us. We get to search it out and say, who are you? What have you done for me? What can I do for you? How can I live my life in a pleasing way for what you have done for me. So we get to be in this word. We get to hear the very words of God. So let’s rejoice that we get to do this. Look at Psalm 119, verse 97 Oh, how I love your law. I love your teaching. I meditate on it all day long. Look at later or earlier in Psalm 119, 48 I reach out for your commands, which I love, that I may meditate on your decrees like I want to meditate. I want to think on your words over and over again so I read. Out for your commands that I love. When we love His Word, we meditate on it, and then we start to memorize it, because we want to keep it with us always. And so listen to job 2222 Eliphaz is talking now to job, and he says this, accept instruction from his mouth, from God, and lay up his words in your heart, like job, you’re going through massive suffering. If you want to get through this, accept God’s instruction and lay it up in your heart. Make sure you keep his words with you always. And what I love about meditation and memorization is it includes so many other spiritual disciplines as a part of it. So really is this kind of one that you can get a lot of different things in because different things in because to meditate and memorize, you have to do what first read it alright? So you get to read God’s word. And then as you meditate, you are actually kind of studying God’s word, because you are starting to make more connections to what God’s word says other places, and it takes you to different places. And so you’re actually studying God’s word as you meditate, and then as you pray. Well, one you should be praying as you meditate and memorize that the spirit is actually using this word in your heart to change you. And then your prayers change, because now you’re praying God’s word back to him, rather than your own words. And that’s an amazing thing to see. You’re praying for your dependence on him, and you use all those same words in your prayer life, and then you read in silence and solitude, or try to at least. So all these different things can happen when we take the time to commune with God, to commune with our Savior, and we can see so many things happen in that meditation and memorization of God’s Word. So I pray that this morning, like I said, I try to persuade you not just that this is a good idea, but to hopefully make the effort to do this daily, to do this daily, because I think it is something that we need to think about daily, because it says meditate on its law day and night, right? And there’s something about doing it every day, and it’s different than reading God’s word every day. It’s different than serving. It’s different than all these different things. This is something we could do every day, because we take it in these smaller chunks. So I hope you have a renewed vision for this. So what are some things that you guys can do that, if you’re if you take notes and you like, like, here’s the list. Here’s the list portion for you. Number one, start, like, small, really small, like Jesus wept, small, right? The shortest verse. All right, you got that one. You’ve got one. Now go a little bit longer. I think Psalm 117 is the shortest chapter in the entire Bible. It’s like two verses. Now you got a whole chapter read, memorized, so But seriously, start small, something manageable, so that you can see victory early. The biggest problem with this is we start and we go big. I’m gonna read the Bible in 60 days. The whole thing, have you read the Bible before? No, okay, let’s go a little bit smaller. Same thing with memory, like grand plans. Gotta start somewhere. Start small. See some victory, some success. Early on, be able to say it a couple days in a row, and then you start to move on. And the beautiful thing is, if it takes you 345, days a week, 100 days to memorize one verse, guess what you’ve been doing in all that time, meditating on it, meditating on it. So it’s a good thing. It doesn’t matter how long it takes you. So start small. Second thing, use what works. Use what works, because consistency is a big part of memorization. Like, there’s people that have come up to me before, and I’ve talked to my kids about this too. They’re like, so how can I memorize faster? I don’t know. Like, the only thing I know is, like, read it and then to say it, and then to read it and to say it, and you just keep repeating that. I mean, that is what memorization is. There’s really not this, like, magic thing that you’re gonna find that’s gonna make it so much easier. You just start so you use what works for you and that you can do consistently. So if you’re somebody who can read and repeat, keep doing that. Maybe you’re a person that needs to listen to it, so use an audio Bible and listen to it and just keep that on repeat. Now, for some of you, you need to hear your own voice because of your cadence and how you read. So record it on your phone and just play it over and over again, then say it with it. But use whatever works, whatever you can be the most consistent with third keep it simple, right? Keep it simple. It’s just repetition. So keep it simple. Do it over and over again. Five times you need to say it. 10 times you need to say it 100 times, whatever it takes for you. Just keep it simple. And then finally, don’t give up. And the way you’re not going to give up is by getting other people involved. So you need some accountability in your life. So do this with someone else. Like, just say, Hey, are you gonna do this? All right, I’m gonna do this. Like, let’s pick something together, or let’s at least check in every day so that we make sure that we’re continuing to do this. So get somebody else involved. If you in Journey group, you know that this is helpful, because every week you’re gonna have to say it in front of somebody else. You. Yeah, so it’s helpful. It’s not meant to cause shame or guilt. It’s just meant to encourage us as we go. And then you can just simply ask somebody, maybe they’re not doing it with you, but just encouraging you, supporting you along the way. And so those are just kind of a few things. There are all sorts of different tools and resources you could use to memorize. I’m not going to give those all to you, but if you have questions, you can always ask and shoot me an email. I can show you all different kinds of apps and books and resources and things that you can use to memorize. But like I said, use what works for you. So I don’t want to give you, you know, three things you should use that isn’t going to work for you. So talking through that more would be, would be helpful, but those are a few things that I just want to again at the practical level for meditation and memorization. And so I want to speak as we close here to a few different groups of people, and you might fit into multiple groups. Okay, you might fit into multiple groups. So if you’re here and you’re investigating Christianity, like you’re just, I just need to read the Bible, get into it. I would say memorization is probably not the best way to go, but meditating is so what I would encourage you to do is open up a gospel, maybe mark, maybe John, just start reading, and then stop yourself after a few verses, and just think on it for a little bit. Just meditate on God’s word. Just roll it over and over again. What did Jesus say? Did he really just say that? So go back and read it again and again and just start to meditate on God’s word and pray that God would reveal Himself to you through that practice. If you’re already somebody who meditates and memorizes, maybe here this morning, you’re like Amen to that. I do this. I love this. My encouragement with you is like, maybe challenge yourself a little bit more. So I know some people who really are good at fighter verses, like memorizing all the fighter verses, memorizing Scripture like promises of God. Maybe now it’s time to start doing chapters or entire books. So there’s all sorts of resources out there will help you memorize large chunks of Scripture and be able to track that. So I would just challenge you to do that. And maybe, if you do this by yourself, challenge somebody else to come alongside with you. Okay, so if that’s you and you do that, I think there’s some ways to challenge yourself in that, to those of us who can get puffed up with Bible memory, because that’s an easy thing to fall into, because our pride is right there, and we think, Oh, my goodness, I got so much scripture in my mind, I can show off. And this is a real temptation for some but here’s the problem, if you get puffed up, what that means is you probably have a lot of it in your mind, but it’s not getting here. If you’re puffed up, you’re getting a lot of information in a lot of verses, but it’s not actually transforming your life. So if that’s you, if you got that temptation, slow down. Meditate more, memorize less. Meditate on what God’s Word is actually saying, see how it applies to your life, and then start to memorize. But we need to come in humility to this practice, to any kind of adults out there who have the excuse like, oh, I used to be able to memorize, you know, when I was younger, I can’t do that anymore. All right, it’s an excuse. It’s not true. All right. It’s not only possible when you’re younger, easier, maybe, but I never promised it would be easy. So it is something that you can actually do. If you give me a doctor’s note that says I am incapable of memorizing, I know you can at least meditate. So meditate right? Get that verse and read it over and over and over again. And I won’t promise you, but I think you’re gonna memorize it. All right, so just if that’s your excuse, if that’s the one you go to try that to kids, if you are younger, I’m saying anybody college age and younger, if you want this to be a practice for the rest of your life, you need to start now. It needs to be a discipline that you put into your life now a rhythm that you get into. And so I would say, even as you’re younger, like, read the Bible less meaning, like less text, and spend more time meditating on smaller portions, memorize it. I think you’re gonna see the huge benefits of that, and we’ll keep you going in memorization as you get older, far too many people have waited too long to get into this practice. So really spend time with it as you’re younger, and see the blessing of it in your life early on, and then to families. Just do this together. Find a verse that’s simple for little kids to say through your parents and memorize it. Say it together around meals, at bedtime, whatever it might be, there is nothing better than seeing the joy on a kid’s face when they know a Bible verse that they hear. I mean, you’ve seen it, I know it, right? When they hear something or somebody says, Hey, does anybody know this verse? And they’re like, oh my goodness, I know it. Like the joy on their face is like, I know God’s word. I can recite it. And we want that to happen always, because we want them to get excited about the God that they’re learning about. Want them to get excited about what he says in His Word. And finally, my last encouragement to you, there is no pressure to memorize, to meditate a certain amount,
because, again, pick a verse, meditate on it. It will bring honor to the Lord that you are spending time rolling his thoughts, his words over and over. And over again in your mind. So there’s nothing that says you have to do this much by this time or this much by that time, like today. Just spend the time today memorizing, meditating on His Word. Dawson Trotman, who started navigators. If you guys are familiar with navigators, they’re big into kind of the topical memory, memory system, and he got saved through Scripture memory that he had done when he was a kid. So he memorized verses in church, but wasn’t a believer, and one day he’s driving, and verses start to pop up in his mind that he had memorized when he was a kid, and he gave his life to Christ through God’s Word planted in his heart years before. And so he decided, I think everybody should know these right? So that’s why he created the system that he did. That’s what navigator continues to use to this day. And so this is what he says. He says it’s hard for the flesh to think God thoughts. It’s hard to concentrate on spiritual concepts. The brain doesn’t like to think, especially if it’s on spiritual matters, we like to sit down in a nice, soft chair and a cool breeze and float to heaven on a flowery bed of ease. I’m that way, and I know that in life, there are a lot of things that come easy, but getting the word of God in your heart through memorization isn’t one of them. It’s spiritual. Anything spiritual is work, and my flesh and blood doesn’t like work, but it can be done, and we can do it. And so that’s my encouragement to you. We can do it. You can do it, and it’s totally worth it when you get to know God better. Let’s pray.