In his book, "The Great Omission", Dallas Willard writes extensively on the church's failure to actually make disciples. We have separated being a "Christian" from being a disciple, literally a student or apprentice of Jesus. To him, the spiritual disciplines are of vital importance for shaping our lives after Christ by indirect effort (since we cannot, by our own effort, simply be like Christ, we must undertake other activities which by God's grace transform us into Christ-likeness). One of those disciplines is Scripture memorization. This is what Willard writes:
God is not pushy--for now, in any case. He is not going to overwhelm you if you don't want Him. He gives you the power to put Him out of your mind. And even if you want Him, you have to seek Him. Now, I realize that there is a sense in which He is already seeking you, and I am not tring to dispose of that, but we misunderstand what is our part and what is God's part. God is ready to act. He is acting. We are not waiting on Him; and if it doesn't hurt your theology too badly, He is waiting on us to respond. And you know we have a problem here. As I often point out to folks, today we are not only saved by grace, we are paralyzed by it. We will preach to you for an hour that you can do nothing to be saved, and then sing to you for forty-five minutes trying to get you to do something to be saved. That is confusing, to say the least. We really have a rpoblem with activity and passivity in our theology. I can't being to deal with all of that here, but I simply am calling attention to it.
We have to think about working with God on the contents of our minds. David says in Psalm 16:8, "I keep the Lord always before me." I keep the Lord always before me. I keep the Lord always before me. What do we say to Daivd? Synergism! Works! "I keep the Lord always before me; because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved." Here is our action at the heart of that great messianic Psalm, which I wish I had time to talk more about because it has so much to say about spiritual formation.
How then, shall we set the Lord always before us? Bible memorization is absolutely fundamental to spiritual formation. If I had to--and of course I don't have to--choose between all the disciples of the spiritual life and take only one, I would choose Bible memorization. I would not be a pastor of a church that did not have a program of Bible memorization in it, because Bible memorization is a fundamental way of filling our minds with what they need. "This book of the law shall not depart out of your moth" (Joshua 1:8). That's where we need it! In our mouth. Now, how did it get in your mouth? Memorization. I often point out to people how much trouble they would have stayed out of if they had been muttering scripture. Our friend Bill Clinton would have done much better with that. Muttering scripture. You meditate in it day and night. What does that mean? Keep it, and therefore God, before your mind all the time. Can anyone really imagine that they have anything better to keep before their mind? No!
- Dallas Willard, The Great Omission, pp. 57-59
