shawnethomas

(Preached at First Baptist, Pauls Valley, OK 9-21-14)

When I was in college I went on a mission trip to Switzerland and Germany. During the trip we also made a one-day visit to Paris, but in many ways I was disappointed by the city. It was dirty, both physically and spiritually, and after about half a day there, I sat down on the curb of one of the city’s streets, depressed. But I had recently begun to memorize scripture, and had just learned James Chapter 1. Without anything else to do, I decided to just begin reviewing that chapter as I sat there: “James, a bondservant of God, and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the 12 tribes who are dispersed, Greetings! Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance …”. The more I quoted of that chapter, the more God’s Spirit began to lift me up, until I got to :12, “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance …”. By that time, I was “revived” and ready to go back at it! God had used His word to lift my spirits. This was the first of many times in which I have found scripture memory to be one of the greatest blessings of my lifetime.

This morning we are continuing our series, “The Disciplines of Disciples.” Jesus commands each of us as His disciples to deny ourselves, take up His cross daily, and follow Him. And I Timothy 4:7 tells us that we are to “discipline (ourselves) for the purpose of Godliness” as His disciples. We have seen that some of those disciplines include having a morning time with God in the “pure milk” of His word, and in organized prayer, following the Model Prayer outline that Jesus gave us, as well as continuing to walk with God all throughout each day through the discipline of spontaneous prayer. The discipline we are going to look at today is “The Discipline of Scripture Memory” — and I am going to ask each of you here today to make a special kind of commitment to it when we close our service this morning. Right now, let’s read together Matthew 4:1-11, where we find one of the best examples of the Lord Jesus using scripture memory in His own life, as an example to us:

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