What time is it?

Once upon a time, there was a little boy.  Throughout his childhood, this boy went to church with his family.  But as he grew up, he drifted away from the church, from faith, from God.  He finished his school, found a job, got married, had a family — all the normal ways of life.  Church and God didn’t even enter into his mind for many of those busy years.  But then, things got difficult.  He had troubles in his work, in his family and in his marriage.  The sadness and stress made it difficult for him to cope.   Depression and discouragement settled in.  Then one night, he was jolted awake out of a deep sleep…

But wait,  you need one more piece of information for this story.  When this man was a child, he learned a Bible verse– just one.

When he awoke, he was startled.  He felt like something had caused him to wake up.  Was there someone in the house?  Had he heard a loud noise?  But everything seemed fine, all was still.  He rolled over and looked at his digital alarm clock on the nightstand.  It was glowing the time– 3:16 am.   3:16 in large, piercing numerals captivated his vision.   As he gazed at the time, the words to the verse he had long ago memorized, John 3:16, ran through his mind.  Words that had been hidden away for decades now rang clearly in his thoughts.  3:16 — John 3:16.    Eternity seemed to join hands with the temporal, and the one minute of 3:16 am seemed to stretch on beyond the 60 seconds of its normal boundaries.  3:16.  The clock didn’t change.

As the man remembered this verse, the one verse that he had memorized, his eyes were opened to the truth of the gospel.  He turned to the Lord in repentance and faith and found salvation.  He passed from death to life at 3:16 am.

This was the testimony that a man shared at a church I was visiting several years ago.  Before a crowded church, he gave his simple story of how one verse memorized as a child brought salvation to a troubled, struggling adult.

If you read my post, Scripture Memory Rewards, you know that I memorized many verses when I was a child.  Most of them are still “in there” and God often brings them to my mind. When I have opportunity to minister to children, I try to emphasize scripture memory.  And, if I were to select only one verse for a child to memorize, it would be John 3:16– the verse that has been called the gospel in a nutshell.  (See  my page, What is the Gospel?, where  I use the verse John 3:16 to explain the gospel of salvation through Jesus.)  Each verse memorized is a seed of the living, active word of God planted where it can be later brought to life.  In Isaiah 55:11, we have the promise that the word of God will always accomplish the purpose for which God sent it.

I would love to see comments of how God has used memorized verses in your life.

John 3:16  —  For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

With Joy,

Kathleen

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