I know some others are currently in a sermon series on Matt 5-7. Here are some thoughts as I go along; others may be able to sharpen my understanding and praxis.
I plan to produce flashcards and cut them up more and more each week, so people's memorisation deepens each week. We sometimes forget that memorisation is not a black and white matter. A good start would be to see two columns of flashcards and be able to match up mourn with ...comforted and hunger & thirst with ...be filled. In reality, many mature Christians have memorised around 10% of the Scriptures. Hard to quantify, of course, but just because we can't recite Isaiah from beginning to end doesn't mean that we haven't memorised a lot of it. Some of us can have a fair shot at telling you some of the contents of any given chapter in Isaiah. We should aim for memorisation in a whole range of ways; perhaps get people to memorise the contents of Mark, for example, or in the case of the Beatitudes, to know it word-perfectly, because it's kind of poetic: it's recorded in such a way as to make it easy to remember.
I used to know the Beatitudes a bit like a cricket line-up, (I always think of Hunger & Thirst as a solid No.4 Batsman :-) ), although it only gets up to batsman no.8! Better, I suggest, to line up each Beatitude with a day of the week, with Persecution squeezed in to the events of a Friday evening, which frankly might be quite apt since people here sometimes get fired up to do dastardly things after hearing some chap get hot under the collar midday on Friday. So, here it is with Saturday is the first working day of the week:
Memorisation
I am offering a watermelon as a prize for anyone who can recite the Beatitudes from memory in Behdini Kurdish. Maybe next week it'll be a bunch of grapes... then a punnet of peaches... and then a plain old apple.I plan to produce flashcards and cut them up more and more each week, so people's memorisation deepens each week. We sometimes forget that memorisation is not a black and white matter. A good start would be to see two columns of flashcards and be able to match up mourn with ...comforted and hunger & thirst with ...be filled. In reality, many mature Christians have memorised around 10% of the Scriptures. Hard to quantify, of course, but just because we can't recite Isaiah from beginning to end doesn't mean that we haven't memorised a lot of it. Some of us can have a fair shot at telling you some of the contents of any given chapter in Isaiah. We should aim for memorisation in a whole range of ways; perhaps get people to memorise the contents of Mark, for example, or in the case of the Beatitudes, to know it word-perfectly, because it's kind of poetic: it's recorded in such a way as to make it easy to remember.
I used to know the Beatitudes a bit like a cricket line-up, (I always think of Hunger & Thirst as a solid No.4 Batsman :-) ), although it only gets up to batsman no.8! Better, I suggest, to line up each Beatitude with a day of the week, with Persecution squeezed in to the events of a Friday evening, which frankly might be quite apt since people here sometimes get fired up to do dastardly things after hearing some chap get hot under the collar midday on Friday. So, here it is with Saturday is the first working day of the week:
Sat Poor in Spirit
Sun Mourn
Mon Meek
Tues H&T for Righteousness
Wed Merciful
Thurs Pure in Heart
Fri Peacemakers
Fri night! Persecuted
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