Tips for Memorizing Scripture

Introduction

I’ve memorized somewhere around 2000 verses from the Bible over the last year, so I figured I’d write down some of my tips for extended Scripture memorization. I’ve used these ideas to memorize the Sermon on the Mount, John, Romans, Ephesians, and a handful of smaller passages. But I’m no expert. I’ve only been at it for about a year, and I’ve sort of fallen off the wagon of consistency in the past few weeks. So take this all with one or many grains of salt. Nevertheless, here are some tips/notes, in no particular order.

Don’t be intimidated. Just start.

I know it might sound daunting. The idea of memorizing an entire chapter or book of the Bible may seem crazy at first. Memorizing one or two verses back in third grade was hard enough. But if you take it slow, it’s a lot easier than you probably think. Start with just one verse a day. Just pick a book or chapter and start learning one verse every day. It won’t take more than 5-10 minutes each day, plus another few minutes to review previous verses. The verses will stack up faster than you think.

1. Psalm 23 will only take six days.
2. Isaiah 53 will take less than two weeks (12 days).
3. Romans 8 will take a little over one month (39 days).
4. The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) will take three and a half months (110 days).
5. The entire book of Galatians will take less than five months (149 days).
6. The entire book of Ephesians will take just over five months (155 days).

Keep in mind that this assumes you stick with a pace of one verse a day. If you speed it up at all (which I suggest below), the verses will go by even faster. At my typical rate of 10 verses per day, Ephesians would only take a little over two weeks.

Use an outline.

In my experience, when reciting a longer passage, I rarely struggle to remember any given verse. Instead, I find myself forgetting what verse comes next. I constantly finish one verse and forget which verse follows it. Once I jog my memory with the first word or two of the next verse, the rest of the verse rolls of my tongue. This is because the words in the verse aren’t the only data your brain needs to store; it also needs to store the location of the next verse in your memory. It’s similar to a linked list in programming. Each node (i.e. A, B, C, D) represents the collection of information needed for each verse:

For this reason, an outline helps tremendously. The outline will help you remember the location of each successive verse. If you’re familiar with the overall structure and flow of a passage, it’s a lot easier to remember what comes next.

To get the outline in my head, I usually read through the passage or book before I start memorizing. Then I find an outline online and study it. And while I learn the passage, I intentionally map each verse to my mental outline.

Unfortunately, some genres and writing styles will be harder to form an outline for than others. Paul’s letters, for example, are usually pretty easy to track because he’s often presenting a logical argument. But more poetic passages tend to be trickier. Apocalyptic literature can also be pretty difficult — Revelation is darn near impossible for me.

Memorize in paragraphs.

As I said above, I always struggle to remember what comes next in a passage. Memorizing in paragraphs helps with this. When you memorize multiple verses (a paragraph) in one day, your brain forms a stronger connection between those verses. It’s easier to remember what comes next within each paragraph. You still have to remember what paragraph comes next, but that’s often easier because those paragraphs map much more closely to the mental outline you hopefully have.

To go back to the linked list analogy, memorizing in paragraphs is like reducing the number of nodes in the list. You have to store more verses in each node, but that part is usually easier. And in return, you minimize the number of next-verse-locations you have to remember (which I find harder to remember).

Or for another analogy, in case programming isn’t your thing (or you just hate linked lists), it’s a lot like choosing a route with fewer turns for a drive or run. The complicated part of a drive is the intersections. Once you’re on a road, it’s smooth sailing until your next turn. Similarly, once you know what verse comes next, it’s easy to recall the actual content of the verse. Each day or session that you add new verses represents an additional intersection on the route from the beginning to end of the passage. If you memorize in paragraphs, you’ll only have a few confusing intersections to remember. If you memorize just one verse per session, you add way more intersections to remember.

For example, if you memorize Ephesians 1 in paragraphs, you’ll memorize in four paragraphs with just three intersections where your brain will have to work harder to make the leap to the next paragraph. If you instead memorize it verse-by-verse, you’ll memorize 23 distinct verses — that’s 22 different intersections where your brain has to memorize.

The downside is that it takes longer to memorize a paragraph each day. But your memory is like a muscle. After a few weeks or months of memorizing one verse a day, you’ll probably find that a paragraph isn’t so bad.

Choose a translation.

I recommend choosing one translation and sticking with it. It’s more satisfying that way. Not all translations are created equal, though. I memorize with the ESV because I prefer a more literal translation for my Bible study. But literal translations are a lot harder to memorize because they’re more faithful to the original language — which means the English version suffers. The English translations often ends up feeling choppy and unnatural, which is much harder to memorize. If it wouldn’t bother me to have different books memorized in different translations, I would switch to a slightly less literal interpretation like the NIV. If you’re going for maximum memorization efficiency, you might even use something like the ERV (Easy-to-Read Version), although you’ll definitely lose a lot of the faithfulness to the original text.

Use a physical Bible — the same one.

Make a point to memorize out of the same physical Bible. Don’t use your phone. Don’t use one Bible here and another there. There’s great value in using one physical copy of the Bible where the words never move. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stuck in my recitation, only to picture the words on the page of my trusty old Bible and suddenly remember what comes next.

Review schedule.

If you want to remember the stuff you memorize, you’re going to have to review it. At first, it’s pretty simple — just review everything every day. When I first started memorizing, I learned Ephesians first. It’s short enough that I reviewed every verse every day. Even by the end of the book, I still only had to recite at most 155 verses each day, which usually took 15 minutes or less.

But as you memorize more and more, you’ll need some kind of schedule. Even if you wanted to, it’s simply not feasible to review 500 verses every day. You can make your own schedule, or you can use an app like BibleMemory to track your verses. It will automatically schedule review, then increase the time between each scheduled review each time you successfully review a verse. The downside is that the app requires you to manually type out each verse to mark it reviewed, which is pretty slow.

Let stuff go.

I was once young and naive. I thought I would be able to hold on to everything I memorized. But you just can’t. There’s a limit. It’s not that your brain can’t store all the data. In fact, memorizing the entire plain text of the Bible would only require about 0.000001% of your brain’s total capacity. The problem is the review. After a while, it just starts to get overwhelming. If you plan to memorize new verses indefinitely, eventually you’ll hit a wall. When you have thousands of verses to review and thousands more you want to memorize, you simply can’t find enough time to review it all.

So it’s best to plan to let verses go. You’ll still retain most of the benefits of memorizing the verses even if you can’t recite them verbatim any longer. For starters, you’ve still probably read each verses hundreds of times. The ideas will forever be firmly rooted in your brain. Verses will still conveniently pop into your head at opportune times.

With this in mind, there are a couple of ways to approach memorization. The general idea is that once you have a really solid grasp on a passage or book, just stop reviewing it. One option is to put a solid number on it. In his little booklet, “An Approach to Extended Memorization of Scripture,” Andrew Davis recommends reviewing each verse for 100 days before letting it go. I take a looser and more subjective approach. When I feel like I have a passage firmly rooted in my mind, I stop reviewing it. For shorter passages and books, I’ll wait to let the early verses go until I’ve finished the whole thing — it’s just rewarding to be able to confidently recite the whole book in one sitting. But for longer books, by the time I reach the last verse, I’ve long since let the first few chapters go.

How to memorize.

People suggest all sorts of weird strategies. Maybe they help. I don’t know. I’ve never felt the need for them. I just use repetition. I just read the verse aloud a few times, then try to say it without looking. After three or four tries, I usually have the verse down. Now that I’ve been practicing for a while, I can typically memorize a verse in less than a minute.

To help solidify it, I try to revisit new verses a few times on the first day. I’ll memorize in the morning, then review them twice later in the day. This helps ensure that I haven’t completely forgotten them by the next morning.

Memorize verse references? Nah.

Some people recommending learning verse references with each verse, but I don’t. I get the appeal. It’s cool to think that you could hear any verse from a book and identify the reference or vice versa. And it would definitely help make sure your memorization isn’t purely linear.

Depending on your goals, you may decide it’s worth it. But if your goal is just to get Scripture into your mind like me, I just don’t think it’s worth it. Ultimately, it’s just more information to store in your brain for each verse. Although it’s fun to imagine being able to identify any verse from the New Testament one day, the reality is you’ll probably never have such a firm of a grasp on a body of verses that large. As I said above, you’ll probably need to say goodbye to quite a few books or verses well before then anyways.