What is the purpose of memorizing Scripture since I have a Bible available all the time?

We live in a time when memorization is routinely scorned, an attitude summed up in the ubiquitous phrases "rote memory" and "rote learning." Memorizing, we are told, discourages creativity, critical thinking, and conceptual understanding.

This scorn is odd. It doesn't seem to jibe with our everyday experience. After all, training to be a doctor or a lawyer entails memorization—a lot of it. We don't foolishly assume that the creativity of actors or musicians is crushed by the formidable feats of memory their art demands. And what makes a good quarterback? In part it's because he spends countless hours in the film room, studying defenses, looking for patterns to memorize, so that—in the midst of the action, with a 290-pound lineman who runs like a cheetah and hits like a sledgehammer bearing down on him—he will make the optimal decision in a split second.

What great athletes do when they study game film, what outstanding actors do when they learn the lines for their next role, is a special case of what we all do from the time we are born, an ongoing enterprise of memorizing and forgetting, largely conducted without conscious intent or awareness. "Whenever you read a book or have a conversation," the prize-winning science writer George Johnson reminds us—and, we might add, whenever you cross the road, change a diaper, or make love—"the experience causes physical changes in your brain. In a matter of seconds, new circuits are formed, memories that can change forever the way you think about the world."

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