Potluck at the Park

We very often read the Bible as standalone testaments, books, chapters, verses, topics… We miss the big picture story, and we don’t understand how all those separate parts fit together as a unified whole.

Writers talk about their “elevator pitch” – a 1-2 minute summary of a writing project that delivers the gist of the story and theme simply and quickly (to the agent or publisher you managed to trap in a confined space for a brief time, like an elevator). Can you do this with the Bible? Honestly, for a long time I couldn’t. I could summarize parts, but I couldn’t summarize the whole story in a way that made sense and told a complete story.

I challenge you to write your own elevator pitch story for the Bible, and then add an elevator pitch for each book of the Bible as you study it that fits into the overall narrative. As you get more familiar with the details, I challenge you to commit more and more of your knowledge to memory so you can walk through the story of the Bible by heart whenever you want and start remembering where to find specific stories and verses.

Start with the elevator pitch summary level and then add layers to your knowledge as you zoom in, like a memory verse for each book, then a one line summary of each chapter in a book, then a memory verse for each chapter, and then memorize longer sections like whole chapters or books. (Jude is very short; my daughter has already scoped out that 2 or 3 John would be even easier because they each take up less than a page.) The goal of this challenge isn’t to memorize the whole Bible word for word but to become familiar with the overarching story and comfortable knowing how and where the details of what we study fit into that single simple narrative. The side effects of working on this challenge will be remembering details of patterns that repeat and where you read them, having the text dwell richly in you as you spend time doing the memory work, and being able to tell the Bible story simply and clearly to anyone as well as be conversational with the details.