So commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these words of mine. Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. Teach them to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. [Deuteronomy 11:18-19 (NLT)]
For thousands of years, during their weekday morning prayers, observant Jews have worn tefillin. Sometimes called phylacteries, they are small black leather boxes attached to leather straps. Inside the boxes are four sections of the Torah from Exodus and Deuteronomy. The verses pronounce the unity of one God in what’s called the Shema, the promise of blessings for obedience and warning of retribution for disobedience, the obligation to remember the Jews’ bondage in Egypt, and the responsibility to transmit their faith to their children. One box is strapped on the left arm so to be near the heart and the other is strapped on the forehead. The placement symbolizes that God’s word is to be impressed upon both the heart and soul.
I don’t have words from Exodus and Deuteronomy written on parchment and placed on my body, but I do have sticky notes with Bible verses stuck on my bathroom mirror and on the wall by my desk, along with a verse-filled envelope in my purse, and lists in my journal and by my bed. Struggling with my Lenten discipline of memorizing Bible verses, I’d put them in a box on my forehead if I thought that would help! A few days ago, however, I realized part of my problem—the verses I was memorizing were someone else’s choice and not mine!
Several years ago, admitting my inability to quote Scripture, I asked how a church friend always seemed to have the perfect Bible verse on the tip of her tongue. “Verses are easy to memorize,” she replied, “when they mean something to you.” Recalling that conversation, I scrapped the ready-made list of Bible verses I was using and selected some verses of my own.
While all Scripture is worthy of memory work, we each have verses that speak to us personally, as if God spoke those words just for us (and, indeed, He did.) We’ve probably underlined them in our Bibles or written them down in our journals. These are the words that speak directly to us about something in our lives and they’re the ones we want to be able to pull out of our memory banks. While it’s still difficult to memorize the verses I’ve selected, it’s gotten easier. Instead of my Lenten practice feeling like a burden, it has become a joy. The point of this memory work, however, is not to impress someone with my ability to quote Scripture at the drop of a hat. The point is to internalize those words—to make them truly a part of me.
One of my pastors suggested that, no matter how we choose to observe Lent, we should make its six weeks different from the other forty-six in the year. While I’m making these six weeks of Lent different from the previous 3,674 weeks of my life, I hope to continue memorizing meaningful verses in all the remaining weeks God chooses to give me. Rather than putting those verses in tefillin, however, I will slowly, but joyfully, tuck them into my heart and soul.
Jesus replied, “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water. … But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.” [John 4:10,14 (NLT)]
A young pastor friend admits to not being good at reciting Bible verses from memory. A product of the computer/Internet age, he just taps in a key word or topic and, almost instantly, the verses are right in front of him in whatever translation he wants. There’s no need to memorize verses when, with just a few keystrokes, the words appear. I may read the Bible every day and predate the age of computers but I’m no better at knowing verses by heart than he. If I remember my passwords for both computer and Internet, I can find whatever verses I need. While that works when I’m researching or writing, my desk is not where most witnessing opportunities occur. I could plead age as an excuse but I didn’t memorize Bible verses even when my brain was younger and possessed far less useless trivia than it does now. My pastor friend and I both profess to love God’s word and yet we don’t seem to love it enough to learn it by heart.
Having heard that I write Christian devotions, the man looked across the dinner table and asked, “Have you always been religious?” The unexpected question from a Jewish man I barely knew caught me off guard. While I knew he wasn’t asking for a long salvation story, I needed to answer his simple question. I faltered through a brief explanation that I couldn’t remember a time I didn’t consider myself a Christian but that my faith grew deeper as it carried me through some really rough spots in life. Having no idea where I’d go from there, I heaved a sigh of relief when the table’s conversation moved to another topic.
On the last day of 2017, the liturgist at church read Malachi 4, Revelation 22, Proverbs 31, and Psalm 150 – the last chapters of the Old and New Testaments, Proverbs and Psalms. It seemed fitting on the final day of the year to hear the final words in Scripture. It was only later that I learned there is one more psalm, but don’t look for it in your Bible. Unless you are Greek Orthodox, it probably won’t be there. Although both the traditional Hebrew and Christian Bibles have only 150 psalms, the Greek translation known as the Septuagint includes Psalm 151. We have to go back a bit in history to understand why the discrepancy.
I woke to yet another cold dreary winter day. Troubled by a variety of concerns and hoping to improve my glum mood, I turned to Psalms. Unfortunately, I made a bad choice in Psalm 88. Written by Heman the Ezrahite, I saw that originally it was to be sung to the tune “The Suffering of Affliction” (which should have been my clue to read no further).
Devotions of the Heart 