By Paulo Anaro
Same with memorizing short verses, no matter what others says, there's nothing spiritual about memorizing long passages from the Book. It takes patience and determination to pull it off, meaning just about anyone could do it if they wanted to. Talent doesn't come into play here. At least, not as much as most people make it out to be.
Everyone's got their own system of memorizing scriptures. I have my own system. You should have your own system, too. But for the sake of clarity, I'll share my techniques here, and you can go ahead and amend it to suit your own style of learning.
Here goes.
1. Select a passage you want to memorize.
2. Read it over and over to familiarize yourself with the length of individual sentences. Take a few minutes to sit down and read it from time to time during the course of the day. Familiarity is very important. So read slowly and carefully, savor each word, enough to allow them to stick.
3. The key is to understand the meaning of the passage well enough until the words promptly attach themselves in your head without much effort. Conduct a Bible study, using a commentary to help you grasp a more solid understanding of the scripture.
4. Try writing a brief outline of the scripture on a 3x5 card.
5. Sometimes I break up a passage into smaller paragraphs to help me digest it easily.
6. One of the most crucial techniques in scripture memorization is getting down the first five words of each paragraph. It's important you learn this technique, or some other variation of it, because trust me it made a huge difference when I was just starting out.
7. Let's begin. Start memorizing the first batch.
8. Don't move on to another batch until you could recite the first one quickly and without errors. You should be able to write it down with no mistakes. If you can do this, then you did well.
9. If you're coming from a long break, go back and recite everything out loud before getting down to work on a new batch. It helps organize your thoughts and puts you in the proper mood.
10. It's easy to lose track of why you're memorizing scriptures in the first place. Learning the Bible by heart is a huge spiritual achievement. But the true intention behind it is to achieve, on some level, a deeper understanding of the holy teachings in ways that simply isn't possible by reading it directly from the page. Meditate on the message of each verse after you're done memorizing it.
There you go. That's my system—10 steps all in all—to memorizing scriptures from the Bible. It isn't perfect by any means, but it worked for me and cut down everything I needed to learn by at least twice the time. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, feel free to make changes to it. Everyone has their own way of doing things, and scripture memorization is no exception.
Good luck!
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