Writing God's Word on our Hearts

I have had the priviledge of reading a book called Heavenly Man, it is a biography of a Chinese preacher and the hardships he has endured for the cause of Christ. At 15 years old, he fasted and cried out to God begging for a bible, when he finally received the bible he began to memorize it a chapter a day, in less than a month he had memorized the entire book of Matthew.
Reading the book, caused me to ask myself how my life would be different if I had memorized an entire book of the bible, particularly a gospel. Just think how much easier he would be to share Jesus, if you even just had the sermon on the mount memorized. With all of that being said, I don't think it is necessarily beneficial to memorize scripture out of obligation, or out of a desire to please men, but I would love to feel that kind of hunger for God's word. I would point out that memorization of scripture can be a good thing, but if you make it an obligation to memorize one passage or book, and poor all your energy into that one passage, you may ignore promptings from God to look at other areas of scripture. In conclusion I think it is important to spend time meditating on the scriptures, and memorizing them, but to have balance, so that we are still free to vary from one passage to another.