Hiding God's Word in Our Hearts.

Once upon a time, a long time ago (well, not that long ago, since I'm only 24 ;)) I joined the teen Bible quizzing team at my church. In case you don't know what that is, which I suspect very few people do, it's like "Jeopardy", only all about the Bible. We studied a book each year, or in my case 2 books, 1 & 2 Corinthians. We had certain verses to learn and certain questions to practice. A quiz meet would consist of several teams coming together one Saturday per month to compete against each other. You had to really know your stuff. Memory verses had to be verbatim. I remember because the first time I stood up for a memory verse I missed it by leaving out 4 tiny letters, a-l-s-o. As in, "...when you are tempted, He will ALSO provide a way out so that you can stand up under it." 1 Corinthians 10:13(b) You could challenge answers from other teams, you could challenge the verbiage of the questions, if the question asked "according to such-and-such-a-verse" your answer had to be from that verse. It was all very cranial, and I completely enjoyed it. I built some good relationships that year, in fact, I think I'm friends with my entire team on Facebook, including the coaches!

The result of all that is that all these years later, I can still quote many of those verses, verbatim. While some of the references are fuzzy, the words are still very familiar. If you start talking about Corinthians chances are if I don't know it exactly, I can probably find it in a few page turns!

It struck me last summer that hiding God's Word in one's heart never leaves them. It also hit me that I have not been teaching my children scripture, and right now, while their minds are sponges, is the perfect time to teach them. And so we began as a family to memorize God's Word.

We began with a favorite of mine, 1 Corinthians 13. The whole chapter. Yes, my newly 3 year old Izaak, who could barely pronounce most of the words, learned the whole chapter. It took us about 2 months. Next we learned Psalm 71. It was something I was reading that had meaning to me. Those 24 verses took us from September until the end of the year. When we finished that my daughter recommended Proverbs 3. Currently we are learning verses 31-32, hoping to complete the last few verses by the end of February, making these 35 verses the fastest chapter per verse that we have learned so far!

It's kind of funny because every now and again when we try to start Proverbs 3, we actually begin the first verse of Psalm 71. Oops.

If you want to know how we do it, stay tuned. I'll write a post soon to describe our method. And maybe, just maybe I'll figure out how to get the videos off my phone and post the sweetest 3 and 5 year olds saying their chapters!