shareyourstorynow.org

TODD AGNEW: My parents were just amazing Christians and so my mom really raised me, you know I had my little ABCs of Bible memory verses book, and as a little, little, kid I was already memorizing scripture and it really became a part of who I was. I didn’t really even realize how integral it was until years later, just a few years ago I had a friend that was my age that just kind of went, “How do you always know the Bible answers to things?” I was like, “I don’t, I don’t know the answers to lots of stuff.” He goes, “No, I don’t mean you know everything but you just have an innate knowledge of the Bible, you just respond with verses and those kind of things.” And that’s just from growing up, that was just ingrained in me as a child.

Then I hit a really tough time in my life at about 27, 28 years old, and you know thought I was going to get married and it didn’t work out, and I’d moved away from my friends to another part of the state and was by myself. It Christmas season and I was doing youth ministry and wasn’t very good at it, and it was just a rough time, and all my students, I couldn’t be a part of my lives right then, ‘cause they all had to study for finals. And the college group I was working with, they were all studying for finals, and all the sudden for the first time that semester, I was really just alone. I was like, “God, I’m really having a hard time here. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to focus this.” I just went, “You know what, if they’re going to study, I’m going to study. What should I study?” So I decided to memorize Philippians. I was like, “I’ve never tried to do anything like that before. I’m pretty sure I can’t do it, but I’m going to try. While everybody else is studying, I’m going to try and study this.”

So I’d go get on the treadmill in my apartment every day, and would put out all note cards and I’d sit there and try to memorize stuff, and ended up memorizing the entire book of Philippians.

And to this day, it’s still one of the most powerful things that I’ve done in my life, not because I go impress people with it or that I taught amazing sermons after that, but when you place the Word of God in your heart, he is faithful to place it in your life. By me putting it in my heart, God was able to stir it into my life all day. It was one of those life-changing things that has happened to me.

Actually I was sharing with a friend awhile back and had to confess like, you know, I haven’t done it again. I don’t know why we do things like that. I don’t know we find that God works in powerful ways, especially when we put scripture in our lives, and then we say, “Yeah, but I’m getting too busy now, and that was a great experience for them,” but that’s so easy to do, so that’s still right now really one of the things that I’m starting to try and figure out again, how can we make that work in a day-to-day kind of thing.