Memorize the Bible! 88 Verses Every Christian Should Know and Understand to Increase Their Faith by Adam Houge

This fourth book of the bundle I “purchased” for free from Amazon consists of Bible verses Houge believes are particularly advantages for Christians to know – he presents them first in context and with his own commentary, then on their own for easy memorization.

There really isn’t much more to say about it. I neither condemn nor fully endorse his commentaries. I think there are some verses he included that I would not have, and he neglected some verses I would have included, but that is also a matter of personal preference. It’s all God’s Word – you can’t say any of them are really the “wrong” choice.

Honestly, even for the listed price ($2.99 on the inside cover, $0.99 on Amazon right now), I would say this is worthwhile, and I got it for free, so I can’t complain. Personally, I think that with some editing it could have made one tidy little book that was both helpful and more enjoyable to read, but then the books were compiled after having been written.

How to Memorize the Bible Fast and Easy by Adam Houge

So, I bought a book on Amazon called How to Memorize the Bible and Study It More Effectively by Adam Houge. It was free at the time, and is currently $0.99. As it turns out, this book is actually four books, all written by Houge:

• How to Memorize the Bible Fast and Easy
• How to Memorize the Bible in No Time Flat
• How to Get the Most from Reading Your Bible 
• Memorize the Bible! 88 Verses Every Christian Should Know and Understand to Increase Their Faith

I figure best case, I get some useful tips on scripture memory, and worst case, I find they’re useless and I wasted space on my Kindle for about a month, during which I did not miss it.

So far, I have only read How to Memorize the Bible Fast and Easy. I would say that the introduction and first four chapters of this book are useless. They are all making the case for why it is good to memorize scripture, which, if you have acquired for yourself a book about how to do that, you probably already know. His writing style is also very repetitive, not in the sense of providing reinforcement, but in a way that suggests he doesn’t know where he is going and doesn’t do another pass for editing (I am keenly aware that I too am guilty of this flaw at times).

In the fifth chapter, “Applying the method,” he actually gets some worthwhile content, which I summarize like this:

1. Pray for assistance from Holy Spirit
2. Stick with passages you understand and want to apply in your life.
3. Rote memorization: repeat the verses over and over until you know them. Break the passage into manageable chunks and do a little each day
4. Allow God to lead you in what to memorize, rather than following your ego. If you follow the Holy Spirit’s leading, He will bless your efforts and make you successful. (He gets confusing here, saying *not* to recite a verse multiple times in this method, which is essentially what rote memorization is. I feel I must be misunderstanding something.)
5. Don’t try too hard to remember the specific reference numbers. They are the first thing you will forget, and they are not important unless you plan on citing every single individual verse. Instead, memorize by the chapter first, and then learn the reference numbers for passages you are likely to reference.
6. Give yourself a refresher every couple of months, it is much easier than relearning from scratch.

That’s basically it. I haven’t put it into practice yet (I’ve literally just finished reading it, at time of this writing), but it seems like stable advice, except for the confusing bit about not repeating what you’re supposed to be memorizing by rote. I would say I plan to try it, but Houge channeled Yoda and declared that if you “try” this method, you will fail, but if you “do” this method, you will succeed. He also makes some rather presumptuous claims that this is “God’s method” and that anyone who is saved will definitely be able to put it into practice, which seems to me to ignore the fact that different believers are differently gifted in and by the Holy Spirit. Still, he doesn’t suggest any immoral practices, and the advice seems good.