Skip to main content

Memorising scripture

Our home group has been memorising Psalm 91. This is a step up from Psalm 23. My memorisation app says there are 273 words in Psalm 91.  I can now recite all of it! That's a lot of words to remember in precisely the order they appear! What has struck me as I have been memorising these psalms is two things :

First, words come alive. I have found that the words I struggle to memorise are words that I miss easily when reading the passage. Words that unlock the mean of passages or even the entire psalm. For example as I have read psalm 91 I kept missing a key word in these two verses :
"Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place— the Most High, who is my refuge— no evil shall be allowed to befall you, no plague come near your tent" (v9, 10 ESV).
The word I missed repeatedly was "allowed". It speaks to the sovereignty of God over all that comes near him! And once you focus on that word the entire psalm fits into place. For example, because God is the one that permits or allows things to happen, he is already victorious even against the lion and the serpent!

Secondly, prayer comes alive. I have found that when I now have a moment to pray, I am not lost where to start. I don't always want to just pray me, me and me prayers. Of course God is interested in me, but what I really want is to pray according to his words. With memorising scripture I have now found myself praying a variety of prayers.

Recently when I was commuting to work, rather than read, I felt like being lost in prayer. And immediately the words of Psalm 23 appeared and I was able to pray through them expositionally. It allowed me to digest the words again and own the words. At the same time as I pray, I preach to myself! This is particularly so when I am driving. I now increasingly switch off the music and recite a psalm! In short not only is my prayer life growing fuelled by memorisation, but living in the word is growing!

Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2013
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pornography as Occultism

There is a kind of helplessness that a man engaged in pornography exhibits. He often speaks of it in terms of a “struggle” or an “addiction.” Now both of those terms are accurate, I believe, but they distance a person from his sin in a soul-decaying manner. Pornography is not just an addiction; it is occultism. The man who sits upstairs viewing pornography while his wife chauffeurs the kids to soccer practice is not some unusual “pervert”; he is (like his forefather Adam) seeking the mystery of the universe apart from Christ. That’s the reason the one picture, stored in his memory, of that naked woman will never be enough for him. He will never be able to be satisfied because he will never be able to get an image naked enough. I say pornography is occultism because I believe the draw toward it is more than biological (though that is strong). The satanic powers understand that “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). They understand that the pornographic ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

The Wound of Sin

Bless the Lord, O my soul, that when you were playing with the bait, unaware of the hook like so many others, He opened your eyes—allowing you to see your folly and danger so that you might flee from it. And now, be careful that you do not grasp at any of the devil's temptations, lest he ensnare you with his hook. For though you may be restored by grace, it will not be without a wound—just as a fish sometimes escapes the hook but swims away injured. That wound may bring sorrow and take long to heal. And you have already known this to be true. THOMAS BOSTON  ( Source : The Art of Man-Fishing) A sobering truth from Thomas Boston. Sin always damages. God always restores His children when we fall but it is never without the wounds. We often carry the scars of our sins. This is another m reason for us to avoid sin altogether. Sometimes in our presumption of His grace, we tend to be antinomian. Boston is warning that such an attitude is foolish since sin always damages. It always leaves ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Pussy Riot as the Messenger

I have always thought there was something uneasy, or something not quite right about Pussy Riot and the western media reaction to it. It was not just the desecration of the Orthodox Church Cathedral. I could not placed my finger on it until I read this assessment by Vadim Nikitin : How many fans of Pussy Riot’s zany “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s erudite and moving closing statement were equally thrilled by her participation, naked and heavily pregnant, in a public orgy at a Moscow museum in 2008? That performance, by the radical art group Voina (Russian for “war”), was meant to illustrate how Russians were abused by their government. Voina had previously set fire to a police car and drew obscene images on a St. Petersburg drawbridge. Stunts like that would get you arrested just about anywhere, not just in authoritarian Russia. But Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democrac...
2 comments
KEEP READING →