Changing Forever How You Think

We are memorizing these verses together as a congregation:

Colossians 2:6-7
⁶ Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, ⁷ rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

John Wilson reflects on the neglected practice of Scripture memorization:

What was common 50 years ago has not entirely disappeared, but neither is it common anymore. In part, this change reflects attitudes in the larger culture. We live in a time when memorization is routinely scorned, an attitude summed up in the ubiquitous phrases "rote memory" and "rote learning." Memorizing, we are told, discourages creativity, critical thinking, and conceptual understanding.

This scorn is odd. It doesn't seem to jibe with our everyday experience. After all, training to be a doctor or a lawyer entails memorization—a lot of it. We don't foolishly assume that the creativity of actors or musicians is crushed by the formidable feats of memory their art demands. And why is Peyton Manning such a dazzlingly good quarterback? In part because he spends countless hours in the film room, studying defenses, looking for patterns to memorize, so that—in the midst of the action, with a 290-pound lineman who runs like a cheetah and hits like a sledgehammer bearing down on him—he will make the optimal decision in a split second.

What Manning does when he studies game film, what Helen Mirren does when she learns the lines for her next role, is a special case of what we all do from the time we are born, an ongoing enterprise of memorizing and forgetting, largely conducted without conscious intent or awareness. "Whenever you read a book or have a conversation," the prize-winning science writer George Johnson reminds us—and, we might add, whenever you cross the road, change a diaper, or make love—"the experience causes physical changes in your brain. In a matter of seconds, new circuits are formed, memories that can change forever the way you think about the world."

The impact of most of what we memorize is not so dramatic as to change forever the way we think about the world. But it is real, and its consequences accumulate over time. Hence the choices we make about what to put in our mind are of lasting importance. "Memorization of Scripture," Dallas Willard writes, "is one way of 'taking charge' of the contents of our conscious thoughts, and of the feelings, beliefs, and actions that depend on them."