My Challenge

Something has occurred to me over the last week or two. It seems that I have been leaving God at home when I go to work. I certainly hadn't intended to do it. I was having some good times with God in the morning, but as I got into the hetic demands of the day I left Him behind and tried to do everything in my own strength. I am certainly aware of spiritual aspect of our daily work from reading such websites as Faith in the Workplace and High Callings Blogs, but I guess I wasn't doing anything about it.

The effect of this was that I was loosing the peace of God and falling into frustration when things got hard. I'm not sure when I made the decision, or exactly what lead me to it, but I decided I was going to begin memorising some scripture. In particular, Psalm 103. I had read this recently, and had been touched by it. I had a sense that memorising this would be beneficial to me.

This seemed like a daunting task. This wasn't a spiritual discipline that I had practiced much as an adult. As a child growing up in a Christian School I had learned the value of memorising scripture, but the last time I had done this was about ten years ago at youth group. An entire chapter (though admitedly a short one) seemed like a lot to commit to memory but nevertheless I decided to begin, knowing that I would not be doing it in my own strength.

I didn't know what the best strategy for memorising was, so I just started with a few verses the first day, continuing to recite them back to myself all day long. That was Thursday, which was quite a difficult hectic day for me. Dispite this, I went through the whole day with a sense of God's peace. I have found a great benefit from memorising scripture. It causes you to meditate on it. I was chewing on those verses all day long, sucking out every bit of goodness that they had. I even used those verses as a spiritual weapon to attack against negative thoughts and feelings that would enter my mind. It seemed a great victory.

On Friday I added a few more verses, but once the day got started I failed to chew on them like I had the previous day. I allowed myself to get distracted by the rush of things I had to accomplish and the stress won out. The contrast of those two days has taught me something valuable about the power of memorised scripture.

Psalm 119:11 says "I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.". That is so true. A few days on and I can now recite over half of Psalm 103 word for word, and I regularly think about what those words have to say about my God. I am getting very excited about the concept and am already thinking about what passage I will memorise next. Psalm 29 is looking like a strong contender.

So, I have taken up the challenge, and I would recommend it to anyone. If you start memorising scripture I am convinced that you will grow spiritually through the experience.