The Heart of the Matter

In our local congregation, we have recently started a two-quarter study on the Sermon on the Mount.   We will be studying about Matthew 5 - 7 during Bible classes,  Sunday morning worship and Sunday night worship continuing through the month of September.   In conjunction with this, my family and I decided to challenge ourselves to memorize as much of these 3 chapters as we can.   We are only a few weeks into the process, but I am already so humbled by these 111 verses.   Our preacher has been saying that "the heart of the matter is really a matter of the heart," and I see so much in these verses that is practical and applicable to MY life today!

Would you like to join us in our memory challenge?   I can guarantee you will be blessed by your efforts!  We each have very different learning styles, so it has been fun to watch everyone working on the verses.    I am a visual learner, so I have created colorful documents to help me memorize.  My husband is more auditory, so he recorded the verses and listens to them on the way to work.   My daughter and I both like typing out what we have memorized so we can check them, and my son loves to repeat them out loud over and over and then write them to check.   While we are each learning differently, we have the same goal, and it has been a great encouragement to me so far!

Bonus fun for families - each time one of us memorizes an additional verse, we are adding a glass bead to a clear vase.   At the end September we will count up our total number of beads between the 4 of us, and we will have family game time...1 minute of game-playing per glass bead!    Just a little extra motivation for when things get difficult! :)