“Be a Tree” – A Novel Approach to Scripture Memory with Paul Van Allen

It’s a new approach to Scripture memory that aims to ground you in the full context of each passage you’re memorizing. Listen as Paul Van Allen explains his new system and why he’s so passionate about seeing people be “grounded” as it says in Psalm 1.

More on Paul Van Allen:

• YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcjwxGQ4UmM3by43evJW5RQ
• Be a Tree Website: https://www.beatree.net/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/4mationstation

Paul Van Allen Interview Transcript:

Paul Van Allen:
The project that I’m on is very informed by Psalm chapter one, and so not only do you have the positive image of the tree rooted deeply by streams of water like unmovable. Yeah. Language that we use today just in mental health is to be grounded, to stop and be grounded in something, just to be grounded in the fact that you’re even alive, that you are a human being, that you have ears and eyes and you can feel things and smell things like that. Even that type of grounding of just being on the earth is not there because of this thing right here, the internet. But what Psalm one has for us is an image of being grounded that even, I mean, the most ungrounded person 3000 years ago think of just like a shepherd under a tree. They would’ve been so zen compared to us so simple, and yet they still need to be grounded.
And then you have this opposite image in ins Juan of the wicked that are progressively parking themselves into places and postures and intersections that are deforming of who they are, so that the image at the end is that the wicked are like chaff. They’re this wispy light, literally ungrounded thing. You toss ’em up and get ’em anything up in the air and that there’s any breeze at all. That chaff is gone. It’s just totally gone. And so I think that the 3000 year old wisdom there, it just has coinage for today and I resonate with it. Yeah, I’m really in tune with how I feel depending on where I’m going for my dopamine diet and a lot of money is being spent to capture my attention and to pull it into places of deformation and could go down a long list of ’em. But there’s really sort of like a thousand ways away, and one way back to being grounded, and Psalm says it’s to be the person who is obsessed with God’s word. So not only they’re thinking about it all the time, but they’re delighting in the word of God. It’s not a chore for them anymore. They have actually become the person that is infatuated with God in his word

Josh:
Starting in December of last year, I was jumping into getting ready to hit 40, so now 40. I don’t know if you knew that, Paul, but Wow. Part of my thing was, hey, I want to be a little healthier running into my forties. And so I, I’ve been doing a lot more exercise, a lot better diet, and I think a lot of that was actually monitoring, not just cutting out foods or counting calories, it’s realizing how much of what I’m eating, what it is, and how unhealthy that actually is. And the more that I actually wrote it down, if I went through and wrote down exactly what I ate for the day, I would look back at the end of the day and just go, oh my gosh, that was a lot. And I didn’t realize how much I was consuming throughout the day. And I feel like we do that same thing even with you’re saying with the devices and all of that. And it is hard, and it’s taking a lot of my effort and energy to not display for my own boys, my two boys that dad’s always on his phone, and that’s not a message that I want to give to them. You know what I mean?

Paul Van Allen:
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s, it’s addictive, let’s be honest. I mean, it’s addictive. That’s why we’re instinctually reaching and grabbing for it. So I big believer in, and I want to keep exploring the brain science behind all of this, and then really the brain science. I’ve got a master’s in New Testament from Dallas Seminary, and as I worked on Bible genre work and all that deeper stuff, it sort of informed me in the back of my mind that one, why is this book so elusive? In some ways it’s sort of a frustrating book. Why don’t you get to the point, Jesus, why don’t you get or Old Testament, wait. Yeah, there’s lots of circular stuff, stuff that’s almost like, is this meant to infuriate a western person? But it’s it. But as you slow down and in memory and meditation, I think you begin to experience some of the genius of the way that the book is written. So thinking about the road that you drive down all the time at 70 miles an hour, if you were to slow down to 20 miles an hour, you might be like, oh my gosh, I’d never noticed any of this around me.

Josh:
And I feel like it’s probably similar to when if you were to come visit my home here in Thailand, even just driving you around and you going, oh, that looks cool. And more than likely I’d look over there and go, you know what? I never noticed that before.

Paul Van Allen:
Yeah, right. Yeah, there’s an over familiarity, I think, for a lot of us that have been believers for a while, and that’s part of what the upside of going into memorization and meditation is. It’s kind of a engagement at a level. Don’t, you’ve probably read the whole Bible a number of times, but I’m going, what? Oh, wow. Yeah. And it’s different though too because I think that the modern Bible reader when they scan, they’re looking for something new. Oh, I’ve never seen that before. And that’s kind of like if you make a testimony about scripture, it’s more like, oh, I never noticed this before. That happens, but I’m talking about something deeper too. That’s like, I’ve seen that there before, but wow, I get it now. Now it’s meaningful to me. And so for me, it’s about penetrating deeper into us too, because I’ve been a professional Christian for a long time.
I’m interested not so much in what is our speculative sort of confessional theology though that is important. It’s like if I was to cut you open or cut me open and be able to see what is actually operating inside of us, and that’s where memorization on its own, you could turn that into just a duty. But Psalm one says it’s the person who’s delighting. And I use the word obsessed for that. Although one guy that I know was like, what? Don’t say obsessed about the Bible, obsessed is bad. I’m like, have you ever been in love? You know what I mean? Yeah. Have you ever been smitten? I mean, I think that’s what we’re trying to get at here. And so it’s fun to be Yeah,

Josh:
I was going to say, I’ve heard you say, and I, I’m trying to remember your exact phrasing because I really liked it. I’ve heard you say before talking about scripture and let’s say our obsession with it, where formerly like you would what? Just licking the steak. Do you know what

Paul Van Allen:
I’m talking about? Yeah, yeah. So this was from a sermon that I preached a few months ago on how do we taste like Jesus from Matthew five where he says, be the salt of the earth. And Americans always want to take that passage and say, oh, well salt was used to preserve blah, blah, blah. But he doesn’t say, oh, if you not able to preserve, then we’re going to throw you out. He says, if you don’t taste a certain way, if you’re not that have a certain sort of essence, then, and I think it is either in Luke or Mark, it actually says this salt is good for nothing, not even to be thrown on the manure pile. It’s like this would ruin perfectly good manure if you, this salt doesn’t taste salty anymore. And so what kind of struck me was they’re in Matthew five and you have the be attitudes, and the next verses taste this way.
Well, how did Jesus taste like that? Well, he was born chapter one, he stays alive. Chapter two gets to Egypt, chapter three, he’s baptized in chapter four, he faces down the devil in chapter three, he’s filled with the spirit and baptized. In chapter four, he faces down the devil and he quotes the quotes Deuteronomy to him at a place of great weakness in trial that comes out of him. And I’m like, he has deeply digested the word of God into him. And I was like, I think these days, especially these days, especially post-internet, and I’ve even seen stuff about how the internet even changed from the MySpace days where you would sit there and read it was having a page, it is having a newspaper on a screen now. The scrolling popping at you, clicking the quicker videos, the TikTok of the YouTube shorts, all of that, your dopamine sensors are so shot that you need more stimulation.
And so I liken reading scripture, and I’m not saying this is for a hundred out of a hundred people, but I think 90 something out of a hundred people had this experience. They open the Bible after being haven’t been on their phone, and that they start reading it and their eyes gloss over, but they get to the end of the whatever they were going to read, and they close it and it’s like it. It’s like they didn’t ingest any of it. So I was thinking we went out for a really nice steak, and I was like, man, that it would be getting this steak perfectly. I love my steaks medium rare, and there’s great steakhouse here in Austin. And then you get that thing out there and you just smell it and maybe lick it, and then you’re like, check, check please. And you just leave that thing on the plate.
You don’t even take it home, you know, almost got nothing out of it because 10 minutes later, an hour later, the rest of the day is you’re not going to change the person. We don’t do that reading because God’s up there sitting there saying, Hey, did you get some reading in today? We have to ingest it. And because of the internet, we actually need to memorize more than we needed to before. So I like to say that back 3000 years ago, shepherds had to memorize because they didn’t have enough words around. They didn’t have Barnes and Noble and they didn’t have digital words for sure. You just didn’t have words written down and you maybe couldn’t read. But now we have to memorize for the opposite reason. There’s too many words. I mean, we are just bombarded with words. I mean, the podcast cue, you could never even keep up with your own podcasts that you want to listen to, and that’s just daily coming or Hey, I can refresh my Google news thing and get a dopamine hit two minutes later or try to. And so we have to memorize because I basically don’t read your Bible, eat your Bible. And that’s what doing with meditation and memorization.

Josh:
Yeah, I’ve always you, you’ve said that to me at one point a while back, and that’s kind of stuck with me. Just this idea of you’re not just going to lick a steak if you don’t eat it. It’s not going to become part of you, not going to benefit you in any way. There’s no benefit in that. And yet, I think it’s a great analogy for the way that we often approach scripture. It’s like, okay, I got my five minutes in, or I got my 10 minutes in, or I just read whatever my reading plan told me to read. So that’s done. And it’s totally to break out of that though, honestly,

Paul Van Allen:
To me, this is a life hack for Christians in an internet age. Now, I do know some Christians, most of them are older who they have trained themselves to read in ways that are more, they’re meditative reading, and they may not actually sit there and use apps or use flashcards or do whatever to actually memorize scripture. I mean, I say if you’ve in the Protestant world, John Piper, and he always says, missions exist because worship does not exist. I say memorization exists because meditation does not exist. So meditation memorization works is there because we need meditation, not necessarily the opposite. So I know people that meditate their way to virtually memorizing passages. I’m not a big stickler about making a mistake on a Bible verse. I want to really lose myself in God. That’s the only way that we can delight, because you’ll see plenty of examples of people who, I mean James one says, you can basically hurt yourself by over-exposure to the scriptures and under digesting and dig part of the digesting pro processes an obedience and conviction experience at times. Yeah.

Josh:
I think the irony as I’ve even thinking about this is we’re creating content via this interview that’s going to go on, and it will probably get chopped up into YouTube shorts going down to that minute in the hopes that we could draw people out of that. You know what I mean? I think that’s kind of

Paul Van Allen:
Absolutely.

Josh:
I should find the irony of all that. Oh, go ahead.

Paul Van Allen:
No, no. Yeah. I mean, Jesus came in into down to earth. Somebody has to go into TikTok and save somebody now. I don’t want to go in there. Yeah, I’ll go anywhere. But there

Josh:
Exactly that. That’s the one place I have yet to step foot in. I can’t do TikTok.

Paul Van Allen:
Right. Yeah. Well,

Josh:
I love what you’ve shared so far. You’ve shared some great stuff, Paul, and one of the things that I really wanted to save some time for is I really like your approach in how you, you’re talking about being a tree, your website, be a tree.net, and you talk about basically this process that you use for memorizing. I think it’s a verse chapter. Can you kind of walk us through what that looks like?

Paul Van Allen:
Yeah. And really honestly, kind of good old fashioned, second Timothy two, I want people to be able to handle the word of God as a worker who’s not ashamed. And so what I came up with is what I’m calling the peg memory system. So what do I encourage people to do? I’m not as ambitious as like, Hey, let me take on the whole New Testament. I will just start with the first word and end all the way at the end with amen. Yeah, I mean there are people that pull that off, but that seems beyond my view of possibility for my old brain. So what I do is I take a book of the Bible and basically say to people, take any book of the Bible, maybe start off with a short New Testament book or something and just read chapter one and take a yellow highlighter and just pick a verse that sort of speaks to you that you think would be enriching to meditate and memorize on.
Don’t necessarily pick the one that you already have unless you’re like, man, I know that verse, but I never could remember where it was. And I say, you could go ahead and grab that one. Sometimes it’ll be two verses just because the thought gets too broken at the verse level, and you really need to get a meditative full thought. You need two verses together. And then, so highlight that in your Bible. Don’t highlight anything else. The only thing that turns yellow in your Bible are memory passages so that you know what you end up with, and then you just go through and do that for the whole book. Some people just do one a day and then 16 days in a row and you got Romans 16 chapters. For me, sometimes I’ll just go through Romans. I’ll just spend an hour just looking at it and just picking out 16 verses loaded into the Bible memory.
I use two apps and then get going. And so then that turns, there’s 260 chapters in the New Testament. So I’m just flipping through my New Testament here. Here in First Corinthians, you can see I’ve got a chapter four and a chapter five, and then I’m not into all the mnemonic stuff. I need to learn a lot more memory tricks from you and stuff. And I would never have thought I would be the person that would want the little picture, but I realize that the one thing that’s hard about this is, I’m trying to remember 16 verses and just remember numbers that are associated with them. And that was the trickiest part for me. And so doing a picture is especially helpful and just could be the goofiest little stick figure thing, but that what’s the picture

Josh:
Meant to show?

Paul Van Allen:
It’s meant to just some something that evokes a moment in that passage. And so Joel, I was working on Joel today. Joel chapter two says, render your hearts and not your garments. And so I just have this heart that’s sort of torn open, just ripping open, and I don’t have to describe, it’s not like I’m putting on a comic version of the whole verse. It’s just one thing. So I know, oh, Joel two, because I can pick you go one, two, and three then. So ActX ax, I was sit working actually soon. I just wrote my 20. Is that ax or is that Matthew? So anyway, just kind of messing around. I’m a little adhd. So I sat at church and just did my 28 chapters of ax. And then I can sit there and actually walk through the storyline of Acts basically in 28 snapshots.
And that I’m finding is giving me all the juice and the nutrients of that meditation and memorization, but then also being respectful of the canonical approach to scripture so that the broader thought of the person with more time and more ambition could just memorize all of Ax, but in a few days I can do that to ax. You know what I mean? So I’m basically been doing this for a few months and now I’ve been a little intense about it, but more or less have the New Testament wrapped up. And I’ve been doing it with some psalms and I’ve been trying it on different genres of scripture just to see, hey, does this continue to add value in different parts? I tried it in Revelation and I thought, is this going to work in Revelation? Oh man, I mean that was probably the most just joyful week of memorization and meditation. You go and pick one chunk. Now that I have to say there were lots of two and three verse sections because you have these sort of zoom out from heaven sort of synopsis prayers and praises and this imagery. I will say I’ve hit the commentary a couple of times in there cause perplexed by wait, what’s going on with this thing? But for the most part, I let the scriptures just talk to each other.

Josh:
So lemme me see if I can summarize my understanding of this and see if I get, so essentially what you’re doing is you’re kind of creating an outline of a book by only doing one verse or two verses per chapter. But you’ve gone through, you’ve read that chapter probably multiple times and then you’ve chosen the verse or two that really for some reason that’s jumped off the page to you. You feel like the Holy Spirit’s just kind of brought that to light for you and that’s what you memorized for that particular chapter. And then by the end of the entire book or section that you’re doing, you’ve got one to two verses per chapter that kind of provide a little bit of a chronology, a little bit of an outline, but also kind of a main point that hopefully because you’ve chosen it isn’t taken too much out of context. Just providing a good, Hey, this is an anchor for this chapter and I can go back and look at the rest of it if I need to. Is that about right?

Paul Van Allen:
I mean, one of the things it does, it gives you kind of this intimate, I call it a peg system because it gives you this peg, almost like a foot peg or a rock climbing, I don’t know if pegs even what they call it, but something to grab onto. And then, boy, I found I really want to carry my bible around with me, especially to church. We kind of got out of the habit of doing that at my church. I mean, everybody’s just got their phone or it’s printed up, but it’s like, no, I need to be able to B, basically, I don’t plan to ever turn to a chapter of the Bible again without either a highlighter, cause I’m going to pick a verse out of that chapter if there’s not already a yellow verse or a pin to basically add value to that chapter by noticing the context.
So what’s really interesting is after you’ve memorized that passage for a little bit, then you go back whenever to that chapter and it’s like, whoa, okay, not only now, now I’m seeing that verse more clearly cause I’m noticing the things that led into it and led out of it. I’m noticing the whole chapter. It’s kind of putting some lenses on that are bringing it to light. And so that’s where I’m taking notes and there’s lots of playful things to do. I’ve done this exercise where I print up my verses on the Bible memory app. You can do that really easy for flashcards, but rather than doing it for flashcards, I use it as like, okay, here’s 16 verses in Romans. Let me now have my Bible open and go sort of draw lines and be like, what’s the connecting thought from chapter one to chapter two?
What happens here? No, I need to make note of this first. And just, it’s been great to do in community and it’s one of the things that I highly recommend is that we’re going to actually, at my church just starting on Sunday, we’re going to start going through the gospel of John, is that we’re inviting people to join a WhatsApp group and let’s do some of this work together and I’ll lead them. So doing this stuff in community, definitely to any listener out there that’s like hasn’t hung out and had food with a Christian and shared with them, closed the internet now and go have lunch with somebody. You know what I mean? Because this is so fun and so you know, could get lost in this, but this is to go be lived out in the world. And of course you and I both have kids, so we don’t have an option to not do that.
But I’m thinking of the old retired guy at home that’s like, this is more fun than golf. And then it’s like, no, you also need to do this in community. And I will say a couple of other things. Just one definitely would say feel free once you say you’ve done your book to after a while, go back and expand a passage. So I’ve second Corinthians five and Romans five. I was just like, I’ve got to just add more in here so that those sections have a lot bigger highlighted area in them now, and I’m all four memorize the whole chapter. But you know, could basically start off and say, let me get, it’s almost like let’s get all the meat off the bones we can. And so I don’t necessarily need to do all of the exit stuff that Paul does in Romans 16, but I did pick up the Romans 1620. Now the God of peace will crush, crush Satan under your feet. Even in that sort of, it’s like, ah, I love that imagery.
But it’s like, hey, there’s some chapters was like this whole thing. This is boneless wings. You know what I mean? You’ve got to eat the whole thing. And so you’ve got to memorize Romans eight at some point, or Colossians three, Colossians one, two, and three. So I’m not against that at all, but I’m like, Hey, why don’t you go ahead and do this deeper work. 260 verses. You have the whole New Testament and I will say I have multiple degrees in Bible and New Testament. I have a tighter, I feel like I have a tighter mastery and grip of actually the text after four months of doing this than I have ever had the day I got did a four year, who knows how many dollars degree at Dallas Seminary. I would not have been able to stand up with the scriptures I’m able to do right now.

Josh:
I hope you were encouraged and inspired by that conversation. I really enjoyed getting to talk to Paul. If you want to learn more about him and even this system that he just talked about, you can go to be a tree.net where you can learn all about that. He’s got the videos, but I’ll also have a link to his YouTube channel into the description below this video. If you enjoy these kind of interviews, the best thing you can do is like this video and subscribe to the Bible Memory Gold Channel so that I can continue to produce these and make them available to you. You can watch other interviews right here. Thank you so much for your time and God bless.

More Bible Memory Resources

Are you interested to memorize more of God’s Word? Check out the various resources we have available on Bible Memory Goal:

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