I Memorized First Thessalonians
Earlier this year, I stumbled across a blog post from Andy Naselli, a Bible professor at Bethlehem College & Seminary. It starts like this:
I recently spent about sixteen months memorizing First Corinthians and then recited it as a sermon to my church.
If that action-packed sentence doesn’t grab your attention, the included video will. It took him nearly an hour to quote Paul’s letter from memory. I was captivated.
He included a couple links to articles he wrote about the experience. The first, 14 Reasons to Memorize an Entire Book of the Bible was motivating, and even a little convicting. The second, 11 Steps to Memorizing an Entire Book of the Bible was empowering. I felt myself being drawn to the challenge, and then I saw this quote down in the comments section: “There is no better way to become proficient in Greek…than the regular memorization of the Greek text.”
I’m not a Greek student, but I do spend most of my days frustrated with my limited ability to speak Russian. I knew that spending so much time forcing a Russian text into my brain would only do good things for my language acquisition.
It took nearly three months. I began memorizing on May 8 and finished on July 31. After that, I just practiced over and over and over again. I fell behind every now and then, but my goal was to learn one new sentence every single day. It was not easy, but it was a very rewarding challenge.