Redemption Hill Church is a church that places the highest possible value on God’s Word. We believe God has revealed himself and his purposes for humanity in the pages of Scripture. We believe that the Bible is true, trustworthy, and holds immense practical instruction for our lives. One of the ways we demonstrate our reverence and love for the Word is through meditating on it and memorizing it. We like to call this practice medimemo  (props to our friend Jeff Capps for coming up with this term). Medimemo is the practice of meditating on passages of Scripture with the goal of memorizing them and applying their truth to our lives. Don Whitney has said that, “Reading is exposure to Scripture, but meditation is the absorption of Scripture.” Thus, we could say that meditation is the practice of absorbing Scripture through regular repetition and reflection.

The biblical warrant for meditating on God’s Word could not be clearer. God commanded Joshua to meditate on the Book of the Law day and night in order to lead his people and experience his blessing (Joshua 1:8). In the Psalms, King David said the blessed man is the one whose “delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Ps. 1:2). The phrase “day and night” in these two verses is a merism, which mentions two extremes to include everything in between as well. In other words, God desires for his people to think on his word from the sound of the alarm clock until they hit their pillow again at night. The gospels also teach us that Jesus meditated on the Scriptures and hid God’s Word in his heart. Perhaps no greater example is found than when he resisted the temptations of Satan by quoting Scripture each time (Matt. 4:1-11; Lk. 4:1-13). When he was in this wilderness conflict with Satan, Jesus did not pull a scroll of Deuteronomy or the Psalms out of his cloak. No, he had meditated on Scripture to the point where he had it memorized.

While we believe this should be a regular discipline of individual Christians, we also meditate on the Bible together as a church. The primary way we do this is through our Community Groups. As we are studying through the gospel of John in our Community Groups, we are meditating on and memorizing verses like John 1:14 “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” and John 6:35, “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” I love what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in one of his classic works, Life Together: “Why do I meditate? Because I am a Christian. Therefore, every day in which I do not penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of God’s Word in Holy Scripture is a lost day for me.” That is the approach to life and Christian living that we want to take at RHC.