(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

Hello everybody, it's me, Mr. Paul23, back with another video. In this video I'm going to be explaining why and how you should attempt to memorize scripture, how to memorize the Bible. Now it's much easier to have verses and passages which are important for teaching and preaching the word of God and the doctrines of the word of God. It's easier to have it put to memory than it is to continuously go back to the book to pick up a Bible and see what it says every time. Now you can just memorize, I guess, where the verses are, or even actually just memorize the scripture itself. So as many have done before, I made it my goal, personally, back in December to actively attempt to memorize scripture, to put verses to memory so that I can quote them and have it on my heart. And my goal is to memorize at least one chapter a week. If it's a longer chapter, such as John chapter 1, which has 51 verses in it, then I might split it up into two or three weeks, but for the most part it's been about one chapter a week, and that's about 20 to 30 verses. So far I've memorized Romans 3, Genesis 1, the first 42 verses of John 1, Romans 4, Hebrews 1, Genesis 2, Psalm 2, and Acts 1, and currently I'm working on John chapter 2. That's not counting the dozens of other scriptures, the other verses I memorize just from doing these videos where I talk about biblical verses all the time. You know, constantly reading them and talking about them helps me memorize them, but it's also from listening to sermons or watching other videos on YouTube about the Bible has helped me memorize these verses. And a lot of them are verses which are important for teaching the gospel, such as John 3.16, For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Romans 10, 9, For if thou confesseth on the mouth of the Lord Jesus, believeth in thine heart, that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. And also Ephesians chapter 2, verse 8 to 9, For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves is the gift of God, and not of works, so that any man should boast. And there are a lot of other ones, particularly ones that are important for teaching the gospel, because those are the things that I think we should memorize the most, but there are a lot of other scriptures which you could put the memory in. Personally, if it wasn't obvious by the fact that I make videos on YouTube already about the Bible, I want to be a preacher, I want to be a pastor in the future. So if somebody out there who's watching this video wants to be a pastor as well, if you want to teach the Word of God, you should know the Word of God, you should have it memorized. I don't think somebody should really be a pastor if they've never really read the Bible, or don't really know that much about the Bible, and they need to turn to everywhere, and I say everywhere meaning that they don't actually know anything of what they're reading, or what they're talking about. I don't think anybody who hasn't memorized scripture should actually be a pastor, they should actually know the Word of God. And both common sense should tell you that, but the fact of the matter is a lot of pastors don't know the Word of God in America today, or even in other places around the world, especially when it comes to the weak, the lukewarm churches who have people who teach weak sermons that's more just inspirational speaking and not actually preaching the Word of God. People just get a theology degree and then expect that to mean that they can be a pastor and they can teach the Word of God now, and that just means that they can start preaching. But no, the Bible teaches in 1 Timothy chapter 3 verse 1 to 4. This is a true saying. If a man desires the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach. Okay, so the phrase to focus on among these list of things, and there's more after that, I just stopped at verse 2, but the phrase to focus on is of course what I ended with, apt to teach. One who holds the office of a bishop or pastor, the leader of a church, should be apt to teach the Word of God. The Bible also says in Joshua chapter 1 verse 8, This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein. For then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. Matthew chapter 4 verse 4 says, But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Psalm chapter 119 verse 11 to 16 says, Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee. Blessed art thou, O Lord, teach me thy statutes. With my lips have I declared all the judgments of thy mouth. I have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies, as much as in all riches. I will meditate in thy precepts, and of respect unto thy ways. I will delight myself in thy statutes. I will not forget thy word. So it's an actual command from God in Joshua 1.8, it's an actual command from God to learn his word, to store it in your heart, to meditate on it. So if you want to know how to memorize, that's what this video is for, that's what I'm here to teach you. And this is a method that's worked for me personally. It may not work for you, it may be different for other people, but it's worked for me. So for some it may be easier than others, depending on what they do on a day-to-day basis, because it either requires a lot of time or a lot of concentration. If you don't have a lot of time, you can probably get through a chapter in two or three hours or so, but it requires a lot of concentration in order to do that. But if you have plenty of time to get this done, maybe you're younger, maybe you don't really have a job, maybe you don't have much to do yet, you could probably use this method while multitasking and get it done throughout the day. And I learned how to do this from Pastor Stephen Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Church, he has a video on it on YouTube, that's where I learned about it, but I modified it a bit so it could work for me, and I've added some tips, so it's a little bit different from what he from his method, but for the most part it's like the same general concept. So what I do every week when it comes time to memorizing the verses, I either spend some time writing out the whole chapter on a piece of paper, and here's an example. This is an old one I just kept in on my desk. This is Romans chapter four from a few weeks ago. And I did this the first few weeks, I wrote him out on a piece of paper, wrote out the chapters on paper first, and found that it was easier to memorize this way. Now, that may just be because I quoted them for longer too, it might not just be because I wrote it down, but it has been proven, it has been shown by like scientific studies or whatever, that writing down something helps you memorize it easier. Also I find that some of the chapters that I memorized back then, like Romans 3, have simpler language. Genesis 1, for example, is kind of hard to memorize because there's a lot of repetition, and there's a lot of, the verses are kind of long, and there's a lot of chunks and things like that, or big chunks and things like that, so I think Genesis 1 is a lot more difficult to memorize than Romans 3. But it is well known, as I said, that writing down something can help you memorize it, basically because you actually have to focus on the words that you're writing, and you're not just writing random stuff, you actually know what you're writing when you're writing it, you're not just mindlessly chanting it, and that's the next step, chanting the scripture, chunk by chunk. But it's not mindlessly, so get rid of the mindlessly part, you just have to chant the scripture. So let me give an example, let's say you want to learn Psalm chapter 2, I would start with a small chunk out of the first verse, so why did the heathen rage, and then you just say it over and over again, why did the heathen rage, why did the heathen rage, why did the heathen rage, why did the heathen rage? And do this over and over again for several minutes before moving on to the next chunk, the next part of the verse. And continue to do this until you finish the entire passage you want to memorize it, that's a chapter, then get to the end of the chapter. Psalm chapter 2 is only like, I think 10 verses long, so that's pretty easy to memorize. I think I only did that in like an hour and a half or so, probably even less than that. But something you also want to do after learning about 3 or 4 verses, I tend to stop and quote the verses a couple times just to piece together little chunks, so why did the heathen rage, so then after I learn like the first let's say 3 or 4 verses, I just say, I just stop and quote those verses that I just learned before moving on to the next verses. So why did the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, let us break their bands of sunder and cast their cords away from us. So that's the first 3 verses of Psalm 2. Now don't just stop when you get to the last verse. When you go through the whole chapter, don't just stop and say, okay I'm done, I'm finished that's it, I memorized all of it because that's not going to work. What I do then is I go through the whole chapter first a couple of times with help so I keep my computer open if I'm using my, like a website or an app or something, or I keep my bible open or I keep the paper unfolded that I'm using to read off of that I wrote down. I do that and after a few times after reading it out and memorizing it, then I close it and I only open it again when I need help, when I can't really think of what I need to say. So for each chunk I try to shoot for about 2 or 3 minutes of repetition of chanting the word before moving on. So you know why the heathen rage, why the heathen rage, just do that for 2 to 3 minutes. And assuming that a verse usually has about 3 chunks in it, again it depends on the verse, there are some verses that are like super long and it probably have like 6 or 7 chunks in it and then there are some verses that have like only a few words in it and then it's only one chunk, but just on average probably about 3 chunks it should take about 2 hours to memorize 20 verses with an extra 20 or 30 minutes afterwards for the additional time spent quoting sections of the chapter and the whole chapter. So this is just a general time frame, you do not by any means need to shoot for this, you don't need to do it in 2 hours, this is just me saying something that I tend to do. There's no actual limit, I mean if you do it in 3 hours, if you do it in 4 hours, I'm sure you might even be able to memorize it better than I have. So as I said in the beginning, this all depends on how you are. I'm planning on doing this on the Sabbath each week, so I have free time to focus on this, but if you decide to do it on like a work day, there are a few tips I'll give you to make it easier. First, take smaller chunks. It's hard to multitask to actually do your work and get your work done and to think about something and to say something when you're speaking a 10 word piece of scripture, so try to shorten it, try to get something smaller. Second, spend longer on that chunk as well. So when you're focusing on something else, it's going to take a longer amount of time to commit it to memory. For example, when I first memorized Romans 3, that was the first chapter I memorized, I had my family over at my house because it was Christmas that day, and I was sitting downstairs snacking and talking to my parents and helping my mom prepare dinner and things like that, so it took me about 5 to 6 hours to memorize a chapter because I was focusing on other things, but I was taking longer to quote each chunk. I was spending maybe 5 or 6 minutes on it instead of 2 or 3 minutes. So the 2 and a half hour time is only for when you have nothing else to do. For example, when I learned John chapter 2 the other day, I basically just sat in my bed for 2 hours, it was the Sabbath, and I occasionally just looked at the scripture I opened. I had a thing on Bible Gateway on my computer, I just had the page open, I just looked at it, I read the verse, I quoted it, and I looked away for 2 or 3 minutes, and then when I was done with that, I just looked to the next chunk and I read it and memorized it. So that's just... Doing that is what is 2 or 3 hours if you have nothing else to do, if you're just sitting there and focusing entirely on memorizing scripture. So it's all about concentration and how much time you have. But then after that, there's another step. So once you actually have it memorized, once you actually have it down, you want to retain it in your memory. So how do you do that? Well, once you memorize it, you need to quote the passage, just memorize every day for one week. So the next day, quote it, then quote it the next day after and so on for 6 additional days. Then after doing that, quote it once a week for a month. So just for an example, let's say you start learning a passage on April 1st. You want to quote it last on April 7th. You want to quote it April 1st to April 7th, then quote it again on or around April 14th, then on or around April 21st, then on or around April 28th, then on or around May 5th, so 4 total weeks. And then from that point on, try to quote it once a month for the rest of your life. And I haven't gotten to that point yet because I've only been doing it for a couple months and the only passage that I've gotten to the month point is Romans 3 and Genesis 1. And it's only been once, I've only, actually I've said Romans 3 twice and then Genesis 1, I should quote this upcoming week, which is, I'm filming this on March 11th, it might be uploaded sometime in the future, but so maybe when this is uploaded I will already have quoted Genesis 1 twice like, by months. So, but doing all of this, I keep digressing and I don't know why, but whatever. That's just how I am, I guess. All of this will put the scripture in your long-term memory by doing it once a month, so eventually perhaps even a few years, even if you go months without quoting it, maybe let's say you forget a few years down the road you forget to quote something, you'll still be able to put it together from memory even after a few months if you do it so much that it's in your long-term memory, you've been doing it for years, it's something that you just completely learn by heart. And finally I want to make one last tip which will probably make this whole thing a lot easier, make a day to plan out what scriptures you're going to memorize, because it's easier when you have a plan so that you can see ahead of time which verses to quote and at what time you're going to quote them. So make sure to get it right so that you memorize, so that when you memorize something you quote it every day for a week, you quote it every day for a month, or every week for a month then every month from then on. So if you're shooting for a new chapter every week the schedule might get messy, you just have to work through it. My schedule was messy, I had to do a lot of going back and forth and doing all kinds of bumps and flips in my brain in order to get it down, I planned out at least until July of this year, so I have all the scriptures I want to memorize throughout the next four months or so. So that's how to memorize scripture, hopefully it works for you I hope this helps, it might not just chant it, just try to retain it in your memory, that's what you need to do. If you have any other questions feel free to ask this method has definitely worked for me, and I don't know, maybe there are some people out there who watch this video who actually know me personally in real life, like I can walk outside or go to my church or go to my school or whatever, and people who watch these videos might know me and see me there so maybe if you want to ask me to quote a scripture I might be able to. Thank you everybody for watching, I hope this helps, thank you and goodbye.