Why Levi Lusko Memorizes Scripture (+ the method he learned from Louis Giglio)

Pastor and best selling author Levi Lusko once asked Louis Giglio his method for memorizing the book of Ephesians. He then went on to secretly memorize the entire book of James and surprised his congregation by reciting the whole thing one Sunday morning! Here’s what he learned from the process and why it matters for YOU to memorize more Scripture.

Learn more about Levi Lusko:

• His Website: https://www.levilusko.com
• His church: https://freshlife.church/
• His sermon on Scripture memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=issT2lsnOAw

Levi Lusko Interview Transcript

Josh Summers:
Was it more nerve wracking to preach a sermon in front of people or to recite an entire book that you had memorized?

Levi Lusko:
It is so different. I’m really, really glad. I got some good advice from someone who had done it before, and the advice was practice in front of somebody, and I never practiced my sermons. I have friends who every week rather a sampling of humanity and do a test sermon. I know JP Kuda talks about bringing staff members in, preaching it. They rank him like Olympics, and then he changes it, and I’m like, I couldn’t do that. I know Pastor Craig Rochelle brings in some different people on the office staff and young old male female, different races literally and speaks. And then they give him feedback based on their personal perspective and he tweaks it just my step, my process. I’m more mercurial stormy artist, and I think if I did that, I would need to change the message out of creative integrity by the time I preach it. So I never do any kind of out loud with human ears when I preach.
So when I got that advice, it was sort of like, oh no, I might not like it by the time I get to it. Of course I’m going to like James. But I thought, that’s interesting. I wonder why that would be so important. So I did it. I got together our interns in my backyard and I did it to him, and I immediately got a deer in the headlights moment because every time I had ever done the book of James from February till August when I finished it, I had been alone by myself and I had no eyeballs looking back at me. And so all of a sudden I was like, oh dang, there’s eyeballs looking at me as I’m saying this thing. And it caused me to literally have a panic moment of where am I at in the text. So I was really grateful that I did that so that by the time I got to the stage, it was more familiar. Now again, people are still dropping phones and their ring camera is chirping every Sunday happens in church, but the dress rehearsal really did help out a lot. That’s

Josh Summers:
Awesome. I remember I haven’t done this very often. This scripture memory is more personal. I think it is for a lot of people. Not many people have a chance to say it on stage, but I do remember speaking in front of a group and there was a woman, she happened, of course, be right in front of me who I knew. She had pulled up the text and she was following along word for word, and anytime she would wince, I would, oh no, I felt really self-conscious having her just sitting there talking about it.

Levi Lusko:
Yeah, that is a good point. I did invite that. I asked people in our church didn’t know I was doing it, but I just said, Hey, turn in your Bible slip book of James, and we want to all be on the same page today out of the new King James version. So if you have a different version, use your iPhone and get James out in the new King James. So they didn’t know what I was going to do. And what was fun was that every end of the chapter I could tell they were like, is this going to be it? Is it just chapter one? Is it just chapter two? So there’s almost this energy every time I rounded the corner into the next one, and then of course when I ended chapter five, there was this celebratory moment.

Josh Summers:
So now that you’re a little bit removed from that, what kind of feedback have you gotten from people who weren’t expecting something like that? Was it just incredibly encouraging? Were there people that in the church that are now starting to memorize a lot, lot

Levi Lusko:
Of that, having a lot of, as you can imagine, considering that you’ve given your life over to pushing people to this? Yesterday I preached and at the foot of this stage, a woman came to me and said, Hey, I was so inspired by that talk you gave on Bible memorization. I started memorizing one Peter and I just finished chapter two yesterday. I was like, well, first of all, sweetie Gonzalez over here. That’s very rapid. Then I said, what’s been the best thing about it for you? She goes, well, I hadn’t told my husband I was doing it. He didn’t know. We went on a hike yesterday and I felt like I was supposed to tell him. So I sat him down on a rock and stood up and he didn’t know. And I just quoted two chapters of one Peter and she said they had just the most tender Holy Spirit moment on the rock in the middle of this trail. And I was like, man, that’s beautiful. And so there’s been that kind of a story, and I just think that’s very rewarding. I didn’t do it with the intention originally of actually doing it on stage. It was like you said, just personal.

Josh Summers:
Yeah, yeah. I completely get that. Einstein is quoted as having said that you should never memorize something that you can look up in a book. And I don’t know if he actually said that or not. I think that you and I, especially when it comes to scripture, would obviously disagree with him on parts of that. For you having gone through and memorized James perhaps even gone beyond that and the sermon that you gave on those takeaways from what were the big things that really stood out to you now that you have memorized in the importance of that for you?

Levi Lusko:
Interesting. Yeah, as you said that about Einstein, my mind gravitated to probably another butchered

Josh Summers:
Quote

Levi Lusko:
Of Einstein, and it’s that human beings only use 10% of their brains or whatever. I found as one of the points, and I’ve since then have researched and found it to be quite true. I felt like brain became more elastic in the process of challenging it in that way, I found myself more capable and able and skillful at all memorization. And while the first chapter was cumbersome, I got better as it went on, and I found my mind almost like when you work out a ton that your biceps are like, oh, we know it’s coming. We’re ready to get broken down and built up better. So I would say I found myself using untapped potential in my brain, and of course the spiritual benefits being numerous as well, and the emotional benefit, that was one of the biggest surprises for me was the effect of calming down an anxious state through my average time was 15 minutes.
I could do it a lot faster in the cold plunge if I needed to because I didn’t want to stay in the cold plunge for 15 minutes. But if I sat and did it slow, it was about 15 and I found man on the back end of that 15, a calm, tranquil state, which of course is partially due to breathing, but also due of course to God’s word. And then finally I would say you’re pulling from some part of your brain that you’re not always in that long-term storage. And I found that to be quite soothing. Now, whether you call it lizard brain or prefrontal cortex or whatever, your fight flight, flight response state, that place that we tend to live in a lot, bills, kids stresses, and my daughter’s driving right now, she’s going to be okay. She went 74 miles an hour. I just got alerted whatever. And I’m going, now I’m living in this other state that involves my soul, involves my memory, and I would come out of it almost always like cool deep water. And so I think that’s one of my favorite benefits besides challenging my unused brain.

Josh Summers:
Yeah. Was there a particular reason that you went for the book of James versus either something else or even just individual verses where you could, oh, I’m just going to learn this verse so that I can quote it when I need to calm down as opposed to something that’s a little more long?

Levi Lusko:
Well, it was my wife’s idea. So Jenny gets all the credit here. As I said in the sermon, which you listen to, it’s on YouTube, why scripture memorization matters. The
Preacher was Dawn Sree Wilkerson. She was giving a talk on Fannie Crosby at Vu Girl, her church in Miami Women’s Ministry. She talked about Fannie Crosby, the blind hymn writer who had memorized a significant portion of the Bible, the whole Penit tube Psalms like Gospels ridiculous. What are we talking about here? But this girl was a phenom and she had the benefit of one less sense to deal with. So of course, everything else they say becomes more honed. So Don Cherise says this all, and I’m just like, who is this girl? And Jenny felt the same. And so Jenny goes, I’m going to start memorizing stuff more. And so she memorized Psalm 40 for her 40th birthday, Psalm 92. And then when the new year began, she goes, I think I’m going to do a whole book of the Bible, the book of James. And I was like, you have fun with that girl.
But then as I tend to, I go, I’ll do that with you. I love the thought of doing that together. She ran half marathon and I hate running. So I started running just to spend time with her. People are like, oh, you us love running now. I’m like, no, I like my wife. But she quit running after the marathon and I’m still running. Who’s the sucker now? I ran this morning. It turns out I like it. So again, I start doing James because Jenny did James, and then I fall in love with it. I finished the whole thing. She gave up after chapter one. She hasn’t even finished it. And I’m like, you keep doing this to me here. Got that addictive personality, which it makes me unable for better or for worse to back down from a challenge that I started.

Josh Summers:
And I really appreciated a lot of the points that you shared in that sermon, why it matters to memorize scripture and strengthening your mental muscles that you’re talking about reshaping the substance of your life, all of that. If I can take a step for a moment into the more practical side of things, what was your approach to memory? Was

Levi Lusko:
It

Josh Summers:
Just a lot of repeating over and over? Did you have another way that you would do this? And then how much would you memorize per day versus reviewing?

Levi Lusko:
Yeah, good. Louis Giglio memorized the book of Ephesians 20 years ago, maybe a little bit less than 20 years ago, and I had known that forever. He did a sermon where he said nothing but the book of Ephesians as his sermon. He had told me that forever ago. So it was in my head. So when I decided to do it, I texted him and said, Hey, what was your method? And he said, laminate, laminate the book on a sheet of paper, and then this thing can go with you anywhere. A laminated paper is bulletproof. You can take it in the shower, you can have it in a hot tub, you can have it always with you. So first thing I did was I put James front and back font hen maybe I think it was on a sheet of paper and had my assistant laminated for me.
And then I just always had it with me, and I took it in the sauna, I took it in the shower, I took it in the whatever. But most of the time I would really just after my quiet time, before I began my daily readings, just sit and work on one verse and review what I had memorized 10 minutes on it, nothing more than that. But then the kicker was I would hand it to one of my kids and say, test me. And I would go through it and they would buzz me. If I got a word wrong, I’d be, gosh dang it, I’m not ready for that one. Go back. And that was it. It was not much. It was 10 minutes in the morning and then usually one or two review sessions a day. And then if I was, the other thing I would do is if I was driving, I would say it uphill. I do uphill skiing in the winter where I tour up the mountain and then

Josh Summers:
That sounds terrible.

Levi Lusko:
Wonderful. You get to have the mountain yourself when no one’s on it and you get to watch the sunrise rise on top of a snowy mountain. What’s better than that? So I put a head

Josh Summers:
That sounds nice,

Levi Lusko:
The uphill, it is what incredible prote. I put the headlamp on and I suffer uphill. And I would always begin before I’d put an audio book on by saying that day’s scripture or the whole thing. And then if you can do it with a higher state of heart beating too, because your mind tends to prioritize lifesaving function when it gets to beat about 180, 1 90. So doing it then was very challenging, but it would beat it in more. But then one last tool that I did use on airplanes somewhat was the Bible. There’s an app, I think it’s called verses, and it allows you to put whatever you want to memorize and then it does fill in the blank.

Josh Summers:
So I promise you this isn’t a leading question. I do want to hear from you. There are so many parts of being a Christian where there are different disciplines that we can prioritize, whether that’s fasting, obviously spending time in God’s word, scripture memory for you, where do you see scripture memory fitting in? Is it one of those where it’s like seasons or something that you do highly prioritize for believers that are in your church? Or how would you approach that? Is that

Levi Lusko:
It’s always been important to me. I’ve never done something so ambitious, and I’m working now on another book, and I’m also simultaneously beginning the process of memorizing a series of scriptures that will be a part of a spoken word segment of a tour I’m doing. I’m going to be on a little tour with a friend, and we’re going to be preaching both of us doing worship, both of us. But then there’s a segment where we have this idea of doing a series of Old Testament call out New Testament response scripture readings. So we’ll see how that goes. If she can do it and I can do it, it’ll be awesome hopefully. But before this, I had done, I had challenged our church to memorize very small portions. We all did Psalm 1 28 together, we did the Apostles creed together. We did Psalm 23 together. I don’t know, I’ve just kind of intuitively realized this more, but since having done it more and looked into it and then almost just realizing, wow, this is really an underutilized, under-recognized form of worship and also perhaps a lost art in your, as you mentioned, open of a day of Googling where we can get it all and we sort of take for granted how significant it is, and we give over our memory to dumb and dumber quotes and to Drake lyrics and to banalities, and we don’t treasure God’s word more than our necessary food.
And I think that’s where I’ve been convicted, and I’ve wanted to live out of a higher conviction on that.

Josh Summers:
I really liked your analogy in that survey where you talked about memorizing scripture is similar to downloading the map before you have to go onto airplane mode so that you can be guided even if you don’t have the signal always ready. And I thought that was a great analogy.

Levi Lusko:
The Holy Spirit is going to use what you’ve heard. Jesus told his disciples, the spirit will bring back things to your mind that I’ve spoken to you, and I think he can do that with a verse. You heard a time in church or read during your quiet time, but once you’ve committed it to memory, you’ve ascribed and assigned a greater weight to it, right? It’s weighty now to you. It’s significant, it’s valuable. You’re not treating it flippantly. It takes work. It takes a sense of honor, priority, cherishing, which is all Psalm, Psalm 19, honey, it’s gold, it’ss the fire. It’s a hammer. All these things that the scripture says of itself, we’re saying, I believe that’s true. And then in those dark moments, how much easier does the Holy Spirit have of bringing things to your mind that you’ve assigned to memory than something that’s just sort of floating around in the ether? And now I think he can just be like, he has an easier time just handing it to you. So

Josh Summers:
If you were to, we’re talking to people that are in ministry, so I’m around a lot of people that are in ministry. Has, have you seen that kind of bringing to remembrance, has that played a role in the way that you’ve prepared for future sermons or prepared for things of the future where it’s like, oh, wait a second. I remember James said exactly this has that come up, was you’ve done

Levi Lusko:
That? I mean, I would say if you rolled back the tape for the last six months of my ministry, podcasts, sermons, conversations,
Hospital visits, if you were to listen back to that, you’d go, wow, dang. There’s probably more percentage of James in that six month period than there is in any normal six month sampling of my ministry life, which is not a mistake. What do they say? You talk about scarves and later on your Instagram ads are going to be like, Hey, there’s scarves. So how do they know I’m looking for Honda Accords? Well, because talking about it into microphones, right? So because of virtue of me focusing on it so much, I’m probably seeing more opportunity for it than I probably normally would. And I’m realizing, and James is a very relatable book. I mean, he talks just about every subject you can think of from horses and waves to tongues and fires to these sorts of things. So I have definitely found it coming up and popping up.
So I like that, right, because that’s been what I’ve been giving my working memory. So here it sits, ready to be deployed, and as I’ve moved on now and I’m in a different section, I’m excited to see how that works, but it’s also going to layer in with all this there too. So it’s almost like I just have a bigger cache of weapons and the Holy Spirit doesn’t just have to go, Hey, grab the spear. It’s like, well, we also have this, whatever they call that thing that has the chain and the big ball with spikes on it at the end. And Hey, do you need just a throwing star today? Cool, we got that too. As opposed to just being limited down to every time we get into a fight, we have a machete. Yeah,

Josh Summers:
I think when it comes to, we’ve talked a lot about obviously scripture memory, but within the context of one, the context of that, that’s one of the reasons why I personally memorizing longer portions of scripture as opposed to just individual verses. I feel like you having memorized the entire book of James, you get the context you’re not going to, it’s a lot harder for you to pull something out of context. You know what I’m talking about,

Levi Lusko:
And I do feel like I understand. I’ve taught through James twice in my ministry life, verse by verse every bit of it. The first time I called it high fidelity, the second time I called it called the Wild, and having labored over the book of James for months on end, multiple times throughout different decades of my ministry, I feel like if I did it again, it would be a different ball game because I feel like I understand the panorama more. I always thought his turn in chapter five was bizarre to the rich, but I feel like I understand it now. I feel like I sense what he was getting at where he was saying and the illustration he was making better because of the nuances and the return of phrases and the callbacks and just the masterful way that it all is a theater and a canvas more so than just like, oh, don’t you love it? That when we’re going through a hard times, we can thank God for it, or if we need wisdom, we can ask for it because you get the kind of sense and you see where the trees fit into the whole forest.

Josh Summers:
Yeah. Do you have an answer for me? I’ve always, when I get to the end of James memorized the book of James as well, and I’ve always felt like I get to the last verse of chapter five, and I’m almost like, and that’s the

Levi Lusko:
End,

Josh Summers:
The end.

Levi Lusko:
Well, because there is nothing, there is no real

Josh Summers:
End exactly there. And so I’ve always felt like I am missing what it is that made James just

Levi Lusko:
Stop. Maybe there was more and it got lost or something. Yeah, it does feel like he just has been building to something, but then doesn’t, and maybe that’s what he wants. Maybe he wants to create a sense of suspense because that’s what faith is going to feel like. If it doesn’t have works, there’s a pent up. What are you going to do about it now? And that’s really where he’s kind of leading. So maybe that’s why he wanted us to feel the unresolved tension that he’s been building, building. And then it’s like, wait, are you kidding me? And literally even doing it as a performance piece, it did not feel like a crescendo by any means. It felt like,

Josh Summers:
And

Levi Lusko:
That’s the book of James. It’s like, that’s it. Yeah.

Josh Summers:
I mean, as a pastor, you’re obviously really good at analogies, and the one that I think you ended that sermon on scripture memory with was a can of paint. And I liked that idea of, yeah, you can carry a can of paint around, but it doesn’t really amount to much unless you apply it somewhere. When it comes to memorizing even smaller or larger portions of scripture, what would you say to somebody that’s looking to take that and apply that to their lives, whatever it ends up being?

Levi Lusko:
Yeah, no, that’s good. Yeah. As you said that, what came to my mind is some random anecdote I had come across years back about how that most arsonists are firefighters, which is kind of disturbing to think about, but it also kind of makes sense because that’s their wheelhouse. That’s where they spend all their time. And also perhaps looking to drum up business, which is interesting. But I think it just goes, oh, wow. If you fight fires all day, you end up sadly, if you’re not careful, that passion becoming a danger. And I think the same way can be true. The disciples, sorry, the Pharisees and the disciples of the Pharisees who were worse than they were, their problem was not how much they knew. They knew plenty. In fact, Jesus called ’em out. You searched the scriptures thinking in them, you have eternal life. But they would testify of me, and I think we can miss the whole point and we can memorize it all. But if it’s not leading to more beautiful, more kind, caring more lives of sharing the gospel, lives of loving our neighbor, then it’s like this one Corinthians 13 clinging of the symbols. So our goal isn’t just to get it all in us, it’s to live it out. DL Moody said to put the Bible on the bottom of our shoes and to walk it out into this world. And so hopefully that’s where it leads us. Not like where we become on some sort of Bible jeopardy, but that we live lives of grace.

More Bible Memory Resources

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• Want to listen to more interviews? We have amazing Scripture memory interviews here!

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