Jim

We’re almost done with memorizing Philippians.

Well, actually, according to the system we’ve been using, we still have 100 days to go over the book every day. That’s excellent, because obviously the early parts of the book are going to be better memorized than the latter parts. I’m still a little shaky in chapter three, and am working to get chapter four down properly, although I am working on the last two verses today and tomorrow.

Overall, I’m happy with the way this is going. This seems to work for me for a number of reasons.

Practically speaking, I’ve found that I’ve been able to use the verses 1) in personal life 2) in family life 3) in the life of the church (for example using the book in sermons). There have been times I’ve literally quoted parts of the book in my sleep, and that’s pretty cool.

So this has been a tremendous benefit already, and if I can really get it even more deeply memorized I’m sure it will be useful for the rest of my life.

So then, the question is, what to memorize next?

I kind of wanted to go with a longer book after doing a trial run in Philippians. But which book?

There were a number of possibilities that came to mind. There are certain books that I may tend to use more in ministry here, just because of the nature of the book, although hopefully we are sharing “the whole counsel of God” withe people. But Romans, for example, is a great book to memorize. Maybe not as exciting as it could be, because I did basically memorize it a number of years ago. But Romans is always worthy of more study.

Another book I tend to use a lot because of the culture/circumstances that we’re in is Hebrews. Hebrews is also handy because it could be memorized in one year at about the same pace as we went through Philippians. There aren’t many books that fit well into a year. (The closest would be Daniel, but we would have to go a little faster to fit it in.)

An Old Testament book would be great to memorize, such as Genesis or Isaiah, but those are very long books. Once you get under 400 verses in the OT, you get into the very tiny prophets mostly.

There are also the Gospels, any of which would be great to start with. They all have their own benefits. But they’re all pretty long too, with Mark being the shortest.

But I think I might bite the bullet and go with the Gospel of John.

Now John is long, but not like Genesis or Isaiah. According to our list in the memorization booklet, it’s 879 verses. At the pace we memorized Philippians (which we did in five months), that’s somewhere around 3.5 years of memorizing.

One bonus of memorizing John is that we’re going through it this year (and possibly beyond?) on Sunday mornings at church. It’s by a different author, and it’s a different genre, even though we’re still in the NT. And obviously it’s a fantastic book!

Also, memorizing a large book is a bit different from memorizing a small book like Philippians. You can look at the booklet yourself for instructions (see this post), but I’ll try to talk about it more early in the year. There are also ways to memorize at a faster pace.

So probably what I’ll try to do is go at about the same pace for the first 100 days of 2015, while I’m also reviewing Philippians every day. Then we’ll see how it’s going, and maybe pick up the pace to memorize the rest of the book in less time. Either by the end of 2015, or maybe by the end of 2016.

If you memorized Philippians, how did it go? Are you going to try to memorize another book in 2015? Which book? Anyone want to take a shot at John?