“Do you have any Scripture verses to back that?” said my discipleship leader as my group was huddled around the campfire during our nightly debriefs in Utah. He was asking a simple question about which verses talked about the triune nature of the God that I believed in, but I struggled to answer him. I have grown up in a church my whole life and always known about the Trinity, but I never took a deep look into why I believed in it. How was I supposed to defend my faith if I didn’t even know where the evidence was for it?
Through sharing my faith during this trip, I was exposed to the fact that I did not have a solid enough biblical foundation for the basic beliefs of Christian orthodoxy.
I know I have been changed by the appeasing sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and I now desire to fulfill the Great Commission (Matt. 28:16-20) and bring this joy to all peoples of the world. But in order to do this effectively, God has shown me that I need to bolster up my knowledge of His inspired Word. My discipleship leader always had a biblical passage to point to whenever we asked him a question, and so at the end of the trip I asked him how I could gain this knowledge of the Scriptures that he had. He said that when you enjoy something or are fully invested in it, then it will become easy to have it imprinted on your heart.
I have practiced Scripture memory before but have never fully grasped the impact it could have on my ability to clearly lay out the Gospel to someone who is in need of such good news. Because of this trip, I have changed my Spiritual Rhythm of Scripture memory to not only include chunks of Scripture but also topical verses so that I will always “be prepared to make a defense for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). But not only that, I also have a renewed zeal to write the Word of God on my heart because I know how powerful and life-changing it is.
Isaiah Neal, Class of 2027
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