… to Sunday school teachers.  Are they THE BEST or what?!

They don’t do it for money or praise (since they get the latter so infrequently, and the former almost never) but rather give a good deal of their precious time for one reason:  to help others, often the next generation, often children.

I remember my Sunday school teachers like it was yesterday.  Most of them didn’t have impressive jobs or incomes or titles, yet I’ve remembered them regularly as I’ve journeyed through life ever since.

One in particular had an outsized impact on me, on my life and especially my future (now my present).

As noted on the home page and in other posts, ever since I heeded God’s call for my life to memorize the ENTIRE BIBLE, I’ve found that He and/or it – the Bible itself – has been revealing to me, to my mind’s eye, a very specific method to accomplish that.  How true it is that God’s calling NEVER LACKS God’s provision, so I’m not surprised by this development at all but nor was I expecting it.  But I can’t even begin to tell you how grateful and blesses I’ve been by it, as it hasn’t just made this historic goal actually doable but has literally revolutionized my life, because it has revolutionized my mind, my entire way of thinking, my entire thought process.

And I’m 99.99% sure that it’ll have the exact same effect on countless others when He finishes revealing it to me and I can thus share it.  My sense is that I’m around 75% of the way there so I expect this to occur in the not-too-distant future and what a total GAME-CHANGER and (literally) world-changer it’ll be, no doubt about it.  It will make it EASY (and, believe it or not, FUN!) for virtually ANYONE to memorize and retain unthinkably-large amounts of text.  My hope and strong recommendation of course will be for them to use it 90+% for Bible memory but the fact is that it works for everything else, too.  Just like EVERYTHING in the Bible does!  (1 Timothy 4:8 – “For bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for ALL THINGS, since it holds promise for the PRESENT LIFE and also for the life to come.”)

I am so excited about this!  Please be praying that the Holy Spirit and the Bible itself will keep it coming, will keep revealing this to me, will keep filling in that final 25% so I can share it with everyone and have the great pleasure and honor of seeing it benefit them as it has me.

But back to that childhood Sunday school teacher.  Before I had any inkling that decades later God would call me to be the first person in known human history to memorize the ENTIRE BIBLE, He used that Sunday school teacher to give me my very first taste.  I remember it as though it were yesterday.  He was teaching us the books of the New Testament and helping us memorize them so we could turn to a passage quickly whenever the Bible was being taught, and he gave a very common but unknown-to-my-young-brain-until-then mnemonic device of acronyms.

USA, CIA, FBI, DOD, TSA, ICE – the government certainly hasn’t been bashful about using it, that’s for sure. =)  And he was in the military so that all fits perfectly but the way he used it with us, with that church room of around 15 kids, was to remember the correct order of Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians, and he did so via “General Electric Pepsi Cola”.  (A friend later said his Sunday school teacher used this variation:  “General Electric Power Company” – that’s good, too, probably even a little better… whatever works best for you  as I often say.)  And that was all I needed!  I had been memorizing Bible verses for a few years at that point thanks to BMA and AWANA (can we also give a big hand for all AWANA workers?!  What a great ministry that is!) but this seemingly small aid took it to a whole other level.

I hope that ALL of the teachers reading this will never forget that even the smallest statement out of your mouth, even what might seem like a “throwaway line” can make a HUGE difference in your students’ lives and even effect change on the whole world as I think will be the case in this instance.

To all teachers – and especially Sunday school teachers – thank you, thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart (and I’m sure your students’, if not now then certainly when they’re older).  Lord bless you richly for investing your time and energy and insights for eternal dividends.  Indeed, “your labor is not in vain…” (I Corinthians 15:58).  I’m living proof.
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