Knowing God through His Word — Part 7
More about Memory
God cares about our memories. Might the dementias of aging be a weapon of the destroyer to stop the older generations from passing down precious memories and history to the younger generations? Moses exhorted the Israelite children to
Remember the days of old,
Consider the years of many generations.
Ask your father, and he will show you;
Your elders, and they will tell you. Deuteronomy 32:7
God gave Moses specific and practical directions to help His people remember their covenant with Him. He told them to set up memorials and instructed the men to wear phylacteries on their arms, that is little boxes with scriptures written inside. He gave Moses songs to help the people remember Him, He established offerings, feast days and days of fasting for remembrance and He instructed mothers to bake special cakes to teach little children His commands.
In the New Testament Jesus gave believers communion, a sacramental meal of bread representing his body and wine, his blood. In receiving communion, believers remember and receive the life Jesus willingly laid down upon the cross so that we might live in Him. God wants us to remember Him.
Thus, it behooves us to cooperate with God and strengthen our memories of Him and His Word. Memory works every time we put something into our brains, file it away, keep it for a while and find it again—it involves processes of encoding, storage, retention and retrieval. Here are a few tips to help you memorize God’s Word and store it in your heart and mind.
Cultivate attention and focus— WANT to remember
We remember what we give our attention to. For example, a man and his wife are walking down the street looking at cars. Bill wants a Honda; he remembers seeing seven Hondas in one block. Sarah wants a pretty color; she forgets all the black, white tan and gray cars but remembers seeing a silvery blue something, a little red one and a green van.
Work with your own learning style
Visual learners learn by pictures and seeing; kinesthetic learners learn more easily by acting out what they want to learn; auditory learners need to listen, talk or sing their lessons. Some of us need a bit of all. If you memorize best when you’re moving around and talking out loud then walk and talk to yourself about what you want to recall. But if you learn best when it’s quiet and you can write it down, better turn off the music, get out a pencil and paper and write down what you want to recall.
Work with how the human mind works
Meaning makes sense in our minds. Learning nonsense material is ten times harder than learning something meaningful. If you want to memorize a verse or chapter, get understanding first. It will shorten memorization time. Take time to lookup words, think about a passage, pray it through and apply it to your life.
Every little bit counts
Don’t try to learn a passage in one long sitting. Many small amounts of practice and repetition eventually build a memory. That’s why advertisers play short bursts of the same commercial (or variations thereof) over and over again. After reading and thinking the first verses of Psalm 1 for several days, I was surprised to say them without “working” to memorize them.
Spread learning out over time— the primacy/recency principle
Our minds tend to recall more from beginnings and the endings of conversations, movies, songs and books when the content is of equal interest and equal emotional impact. That means that we forget more content in the middle. Try memorizing in modest time chunks, not marathons. Taking frequent breaks to give more beginning and ending points will help you to remember more.
Practice makes perfect
This is the “use it or lose it” principle. Schedule time to repeat for retention. Review is essential to remembrance.
Forgetting is natural— Review
Most of us forget about 80% of what we learn within two days. It takes only a small bit of effort to cooperate with our built in natural memory rhythms and increase recall. Since recall peaks in about ten minutes after an hour’s work, take ten-minute breaks. Then review what you’ve learned. This strengthens most memory traces to last about twenty-four hours, so in twenty-four hours review the material again; this next impression usually lasts about a week. A follow-up review in about a month will hold a memory for about six months. A six-month review should secure the information in your long-term memory forever. Don’t worry if your memory takes longer to kick in and definitely don’t decide you can’t memorize— especially at first.
Agree with physiology
Memorizing is like muscle building: it takes time and effort to build new brain cells and patterns.
Networking —The principle of association or linking
Lots of memory links make recall easier. Methods that use association are called mnemonics. There are many kinds of mnemonics. There’s a great list of them at http://learningassistance.com/2006/january/mnemonics.html
We all use mnemonics. Reminding yourself that you have to turn right at the Marathon gas station to go north on Woodland Ave to get to Center Street and find Thad’s house is a mnemonic device. It links a street name with visual information, a place and a direction. Be intentional about making associations as you memorize your Bible.
And remember, when you’re exercising your memory to learn the word of God and get to know Him better that it’s
Not by might, not by power, but by My Spirit says the Lord of Hosts.
Zechariah 4:6
