A month a ago I bought my first guitar. I didn't know a single chord or even know how to hold the thing. The fresh aroma of wood poured out of the sound hole. The rustic brown body was untarnished. When my friend strummed it's first chord I heard a gloriously rich sound. I instantly fell in love with the beauty of this instrument.

I took it home, tuned it, printed out a chord sheet, saw where I should place my fingers for a chord and strummed. I slowly learned D, G and A. With these chords I could finally play- quite poorly- a song. I was excited. I learned more chords by the desire to know more songs. Those succession of chords that made up a song became personal and more beautiful.

I have seen a correlation between learning scriptures and learning the guitar. If we are only armed with three verses in our memory we are like a guitarist armed with the knowledge of only three chords. We are limited. We have a limited view of God's word, and we can't fully delight in it. In times of temptation, what will we rely on? In times of pain, what clear words of God can we take comfort in? When chaos overtakes us, where is there sanity? Until we put scriptures into our minds and apply them to our life, God's words are not as personable or as beautiful as the guitarist's favorite song.

A music fan may enjoy the complexity of Pink Floyd's song “Comfortably Numb,” but until he learns the lyrics, applies them to his life and even goes as far as learning the chords, that song is just noise with patterns. God's words need to soak into our minds so that we are no longer conforming to the ways of the world, but are transformed in our minds.

Many of us are not content in just sitting and listening to music. We must interact with it by singing it in the car or shower, or even dance to it. So it is with God's word. Unfortunately many of us, myself included, only hum the tune of God's word and at most mutter under our breath some words that faintly resembles scriptures. But we should sing it boldly and play it out in our lives loudly. And when we have a large storehouse of verses in our minds, they blend together in our daily lives until our minds become aligned with God's, and that the best song of all.

May the song of His word be on our singing tongues and reverberate on the strings of our hearts. May his word be as clear in our minds as a strummed E note.