FinishYear 2012 - Memorizing 1 John and James

I've already written about my project to memorize Romans 5-8. This project is something else entirely. Rather than memorizing a few chapters (no small feat), I'm planning to memorize two complete books of the Bible. I will be working on memorizing 1 John and James. According to the schedule that I've worked out, it should take me about 19 weeks to memorize 1 John and 20 weeks to learn James. This is at a pace of about 6 verses per week.

I was very blessed to receive this notebook from one of my students as a Christmas present. I was quite pleased to see it because I was actually planning to go to Target that afternoon and purchase one. Receiving this little notebook/journal was actually an answer to prayer.

I typed up the verses to 1 John in a Word document with text boxes set to be about the size of a 4x6 index card. After typing them up and printing them out, I cut them out and pasted them into my journal, one card on every other page, leaving a blank page to write on.

On the blank page, I have listed out the days of the week and left some space below to give me a place to write my thoughts and reflections over that week's passage that I am memorizing. Next to each day of the week, I will keep track of how many times I have reviewed the passage that particular day. My goal is to read through/recite the passage at least 10 times each day. I actually think it will be more beneficial to review the verses several times throughout the day instead of trying to do all 10 recitations at the same time.

As I advance week to week through memorizing the book of 1 John, I will actually spend more time each day reviewing the old verses. I mean, what good is memorizing verses if you aren't going to use them? I'll say my new verses, then recite the old verses in order to have the context of the whole passage. After memorizing 1 John, I am going to spend a few weeks reviewing the whole book each day before beginning the book of James.

The reflection area on each page is for me to record what God is teaching me through the verses that I am learning that week. I can record how many times a phrase is used, how God allowed me to recall that passage, or how it is helping me to grow in my faith.


Here is a link to another blog where I got this idea. I hope that you will consider joining me, even if you don't take the time to put together a memory journal of your own.