Want to be Solid and Grounded like a Tree?
Psalm 1 contrasts a person who is light and wispy and blows around in the wind like chaff with one who is like a solid tree rising up by a river bank. What a contrast! The wispy chaff person is being formed by shallow stuff while the grounded tree person has trained their mind to love God's word and to obsessively delight in it. The internet (along with other addictive foods, substances, and materialism) has trained our brain to get dopamine from things that make us shallower and more anxious. The internet is a wispy chaff making machine. There is a way to train our brains to be rooted and grounded: Subscribe and Join the Be A Tree Club Today!
How to Start Being Like a Tree Today
There are many good ways to memorize God's word (the only wrong way is to not do it at all) but Be A Tree system will bring you deep into verses of Scripture passages that will also help you build out a systematic knowledge of whole books of the Bible using the Peg System!
Topical vs. Contextual Memorization?
There are great reasons to memorize topically...going for parts of the Bible that are pertinent to real problems and questions in your life helps you to latch on to them...it also can help you to get a three dimensional view of an issue if you get multiple passages on the same issue. One possible downsize is that people often are taking these verses out of their context in their chapters and books and when you do that its easy to partially twist the original meaning for your own purposes. One way of avoiding that is to memorize passages in their context...marking them in your Bible. You can also try using the Peg Memory System below which turns your focus from the question you are asking to what each book and chapter of the Bible is saying. Here are the brief steps of getting peg verses in each chapter of a book:
STEP 1: Download the Bible Memory App.
You can get it here for 20% off with our promo code, but the free version works well enough to get started. Be sure to get the phone app.
STEP 2: Pick a book of the Bible.
Ideally with a new, paper NIV Bible, find a book that you want to go deep into. A short epistle (like Philippians or 1 John) is a great start place to start.
STEP 3: Look over the first chapter of the book and pick a verse.
As you read through the chapter, settle on a verse (or two, if necessary) that sticks out to you or captures the idea of the chapter. Highlight the verse. This will be your peg verse for the chapter.
STEP 4: Add your peg verse to the Bible Memory App.
STEP 5: Memorize the verse over the next 24 hours using the Bible Memory App.
The app has a lot of cool tools and features, but the important thing is to start!
Make the app prominent on your phone (first page!) and commit to using the app before you open your social media, news, games, or whatever other else you've been using for your dopamine hits.
A good goal is to open the app to review your verse at least 4 times over the next 24 hours.
STEP 6: Repeat 1 through 5 with the next chapter.
Work through the next chapter, and don't forget to keep reviewing the first peg verse when it comes due. The Bible Memory App will start to space out your reviews, though, so that you won't be overwhelmed!
That's it. If you kept up with this for most days for a single year, you could memorize a verse from each of the 260 chapters of the New Testament in a year--and also come away with a grip on the 27 books of the Bible that will be better than many (if not most) seminary and Bible school grads!
This Youtube Video shows how you can do topical studies but still retain the context by organizing your passages by both topic and Book. Make sure you subscribe to us on Youtube!
Bible Project Videos provide amazing introductions to Books and Themes. Psalm 1 is so central to formation in God that they did a whole video just on it and how we change to be treelike by meditating on God's Word!
Watch this video to get a glimpse of how I use the Verse Locker app to launch a verse into my short term memory and then the Bible Memory App to move it into my long term memory.
Delight like a Kid in God's Word! (also subscribe to the youtube channel!)
260 vs Bible Memory Peg System
Are you someone who likes a challenge? If so click on this link (If not, DON'T click on that link click on this one and if you are completely freaked out click on this!)
