Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

Well, no discipline is more important in the spiritual life than the daily reading and application of God’s Word.  Do you mind if just say that again?  No discipline in the spiritual life is more important than the daily reading and the application of this book we call the Bible.  In fact, somebody once said that a Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to somebody who isn’t.  Think about that for a moment.  And think about how the exact opposite of that is true as well.  A dusty Bible is the sign of a disheveled soul.  Now, the well-worn pages of any Bible tell a beautiful story, don’t they?  Every tear in the page of a Bible, every crease in the leather binding, it marks a spot where somebody met with God.  And some people’s Bibles, you open them up and there are notes that are scribbled in the margins.  There may be verses that are underlined or highlighted.  And, by the way, I encourage you to do that because it reminds that person and it reminds us of a time when the Spirit of God brought the Word of God alive in their hearts, and they couldn’t help but jot down a thought or jot down an idea there.  Some Bibles are tear-stained.  Or they have coffee spills in them.  And I love that because it’s a reminder that this book and the owner who studies this book…that this book, to them, is not a table decoration in their home that is collecting dust.  It’s not a family heirloom.  This is their lifeblood, and they’re in it every day.  And their tears fall upon it as they do battle or as they come before the Lord in prayer.  Or they’re with it in the morning, they’ve got coffee stains on it, or whatever it might be.  Some of you have lots of different copies of the scriptures and you’ve worn them out.  I remember years ago my wife, she wore out her Bible.  And she didn’t want to buy a new one.  She just wanted a new cover to it.  So we sent it off to some, you know, binder, and it came back, at least from the outside, looking as new as ever.

0:02:28.9

We live in a country where we are blessed to have the Bible so freely available to us.  There are some parts of the world where it’s illegal to have a Bible.  And we have to smuggle Bibles into those parts of the world just to get people a copy of the Word of God.  This country was founded upon biblical principles.  It is fair to say that we were a Bible nation when this country was founded.  Leaders in American history have spoken about the profound impact that the Bible had on the founding of this country and on the formation of this country.  For example, President Andrew Jackson said, “The Bible is the rock upon which this republic rests.  Abraham Lincoln said, “The Bible is the best gift God has given to men.  All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book.  But for it, we could not know right from wrong.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “We cannot read the history of our rise in development as a nation without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic.”  And then Roosevelt went on to say, “I suggest a nationwide reading of the holy scriptures.”  Boy, wouldn’t you like to have presidential leadership like that today.  And then more recently, Ronald Reagan said, “Of the many influences that have shaped the United State of America into a distinctive nation and people, none may be said to be more fundamental and enduring than the Bible.”  We are a Bible nation.  It is woven into the fabric of our history.  We are a Bible people.  We bring our Bibles to church.  We come to worship God, and part of that is the opening up of His Word.  You don’t come…at least, I hope you don’t come to hear what Ron Jones has to say.  I hope you come to hear what God has to say.  That’s why I want you to turn to the pages of His Word and we read His Word and we study His Word and we ask questions about it.  And we want to hear a word from God.  We want the Spirit of God to teach us and for the Word of God to leap off the pages into our hearts and to change us from the inside out.

0:04:41.9

Well, all of that leads us up to our study this morning, which is from Psalm 119.  I love Psalm 119.  It is the longest chapter in the book of Psalm, but more than that, it is the longest chapter in the Bible.  It is 176 verses.  So I hope you don’t have anything to do this afternoon, ‘cause we’re gonna go…no, we’re not.  But it would take us all day long to go verse by verse through 176 verses.  It’s the longest psalm in the book of Psalms.  It’s the longest chapter in the Bible. That’s why one scholar calls it a “giant among the psalms”.  And it really is.  In fact, other Bible scholars and Bible teachers down throughout church history believed it was.  And that’s why Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the prince of preachers, in his Treasury of David- it’s a two-volume set I have in my library on all of the psalms- he dedicates 349 pages to Psalm 119.  And impressive as that is, that Spurgeon would do that, another puritan preacher by the name of Thomas Manton wrote three volumes on Psalm 119, 1677 pages.  So Psalm 119 is a “giant among the psalms”.  But the most unique aspect of Psalm 119 is the fact that all 176 verses, with just a few exceptions, all 176 verses mention the Word of God.  I mean, this psalm is dripping with the psalmist’s passion and his deep desire to get to know God through the Word of God.  He’s not just interested in the Word of God, but it’s through the Word of God that he gets to know the God of the Word.

0:06:30.4

Now, there’s something else unique about Psalm 119.  And that is that it’s arranged according to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.  If you take 176 and divide it by 8, you come up with 22.  And that’s exactly the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.  And ti’s arranged in sections of eight verses according to the sequence of the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet.  So the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet is Aleph.  And you can’t see this in the English, but in the Hebrew language the first eight verses all begin with the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet.  And so on and so forth through all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and through 176 verses.  Now, that’s not gonna change your life tomorrow.  I understand that.  But it’s just something unique to know about the “giant among the psalms”, which is Psalm 119.

0:07:25.0

Now, I’m going to resist the urge to go verse by verse through all 176 verses.  I think that would be tedious.  There are volumes out there written that way, and you can study them on your own.  What I want to do is lift some of the major themes from this great book and from this great chapter.  And there are seven of them that I’ve found.  Seven is a perfect number in the Bible, so that’s a good number for us to go with this morning.  There may be more themes that we can uncover, but here are at least seven things that we will learn from Psalm 119 about the Bible and how it can impact our lives.  Okay?  Are you with me so far?

0:08:05.0

So, number one, from Psalm 119 we learn that the Bible is, first of all, the highway to happiness.  Let’s just start where it starts in verse 1.  Psalm 119:1-2.  It says, “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, and who walk in the law of the Lord!  Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart.”  I said that every verse mentions the Word of God.  In verse 1 it mentions the law of the Lord, in verse 2 His testimonies, elsewhere His rules, His commandments, so on and so forth.  Lots of different way the Word of God is mentioned there.  But I like the way Psalm 119 begins because it reminds us that the blessed life start with the Word of God and our relationship to it.  The word “blessed” reminds us of a series of what we call beatitudes that Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount.  He gave us a highway to happiness, didn’t he?  That word “blessed” means supreme happiness or exalted joy.  And the psalmist uses that word.  This is of the form of a wisdom psalm.  The word “blessed” tells us that.  And he tell us “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord!  Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart.”  Now, this goes against the common notion of our day, which says if you want to be truly happy, then live and let live.  Do whatever you please.  Indulge yourself.  Fulfill every desire and you’ll be happy.  Well, just the opposite is true.  We know this from scripture, but we also know it from everyday life.  I mean, you live that way and eventually you’re gonna hit a brick wall.  We’re not designed to live and let live.  We’re designed to live within the structures that God has given to us.  Another common notion of the day is to say that, “Oh, if you live according to the Word of God, God’s Word is going to restrict you and it’s gonna put you in a straitjacket and you’re not going to be happy.”  Again, the opposite is true.  The psalmist comes right out and he says, “If you want to live the blessed life, if you want to be supremely happy and exalted in joy, then walk in the law of the Lord.  Keep His testimonies and seek Him with your whole heart.”  Are you doing that, friends?  Are you a Bible person?  Are you a Bible family?  If I were to look at your Bible, is it falling apart or are you falling apart because you’re not spending much time in the Word of God?  So, first of all, we learn from Psalm 119 that it is the highway to happiness.  By the way, Psalm 119:1-2 also reminds us a little bit of the first psalm in the book of Psalms.  All the way back when we began this summer series on the Psalms, we started with Psalm 1, which is also a wisdom psalm that teaches about the blessed life.  “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly or stands in the way of sinners or sits in the seats of the scornful.  But his delight is in the law of the Lord.”  We learned all the way back in the first psalm that the blessed life is connected to delighting ourselves in the law of God.  And so it shouldn’t surprise us that Psalm 119 begins that way in verses 1 and 2.

0:11:34.3

The second thing this great psalm, this “giant among the psalms”, tells us is that the Bible, the Word of God, keeps a young man pure.  Let’s scroll down to verse 9, 10 and 11.  Listen to this.  “How can a young man keep his way pure?  By guarding it according to your word.  With my whole heart I will seek you,” he says, “let me not wander from your commandments!  I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.  Now, I love the question that the psalmist asks here.  He says, “How can a young man keep his way pure?”  We could also ask it this way.  How can an older man keep his way pure?  Because the answer is the same.  And he does it “by guarding it according to your word.”  This book, this book will keep your life on the straight and narrow and will keep your heart pure.  I remember many years ago I met a young man who was Mormon.  And he told me about a unique way he guarded himself against sexual immorality.  And this was one of those conversations that spilled into, kind of, the TMI world, the “too much information” world.  He told me about a special undergarment that he wore.  I didn’t see it.  I just assumed that it was there.  The best way I can describe this is it was sort of like a piece of long underwear that you wear in the cold winter months.  Only he wore it all year long to protect himself against sexual immorality.  It started at his neckline and went all the way down to his ankles and came out to about here, just above his wrists.  And I said, “Why in the world would you wear such a thing?”  And he said, “Well, if I kind of get involved with a girl and things go a little bit too far, by the time I get to this it really puts the brakes on.”  I mean, you can’t make this up.  This is a true story.  Now, I commend anybody who anything to protect himself or herself from sexual immorality, but I’ve got something better than a piece of long underwear.  It’s the Word of God.  It’s the Word of God.  What does the psalmist say here?  “How can a young man keep his way pure?  By guarding it according to your word.”  He says in verse 11 there, “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.”  One of the great commentators on the book of Psalms is a pastor named James Montgomery Boyce.  And he asked this question.  He says, “What is the condition of your heart?  Apart from the grace of God in your life, it will always be occupied by such filthy, evil spirits as lust, greed, pride, and self-love.”  He says, “If you try to drive these demons out by yourself, they will only return in greater numbers and your latter state will be worse than the first,” a reference to something Jesus said in Luke 11.  And then Boyce goes on to say, “God alone can cleanse the heart, and He does so through the agency of His Word, the Bible.”  And this is what Psalm 119 tells us.  Hey, are you storing up God’s Word in your heart?  Another translation says “Thy word have I hid in my heart.”  It speaks not only of reading the scriptures, but of meditating upon the scriptures and memorizing the scriptures, so that when that time of temptation comes, the Holy Spirit has some arsenal buried deeply within your heart to fight truth with the temptation that the devil is going to bring your way.  That’s how a young man keeps his way pure.  It’s directly associated with his relationship with the Word of God.  And that’s true throughout all of life.

0:15:17.8

So we learn from Psalm 119 that the Bible is a highway to happiness, that it keeps a young man pure.  Here’s something else we learn.  It’s a flashlight in dark places.  Look at Psalm 119, and let’s scroll all the way over to verse 105.  Here’s one you might’ve committed to memory.  I memorized this verse when I was a young kid.  “Your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”  “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”  We might say in our language the Bible is like a flashlight in a very dark world.  And this verse 105 reminds us that we do live in a very dark world, darkened by sin and darkened…our minds apart from Christ are darkened in our understanding, the scripture says.  And apart from the lamp and the light that is the Word of God, we are destined to stumble around in the darkness trying to find our way.  But we need the Word of God to light our path and to enlighten our minds.  Now, not everybody bleives this.  In fact, there are cultural influences that date all the way back to the 17^th and 18^th century during the Enlightment Period or the Age of Reason that would say, “Oh no, the most enlightened minds are not those who chase after superstitions and myths that are found in faith and religion in the Bible.  The most enlightened minds are those who engage with human reason and through science and through empirical observation.”  That was the age of the enlightenment.  It started in Europe, and it made its way over the American colonies.  And while we were founding this country as a Bible nation based upon biblical principles, there were also influences that said, “No, the most enlightened minds don’t chase after those kinds of superstitions.  It’s all found within your two ears here.”  Human reason was elevated, and we still have those cultural influences with us today.  I just say hogwash.  Okay?  The most enlightened minds are those who are enlightened by the Word of God.  “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”  To say it another way and to borrow the words of Jesus, “Thy word is truth,” Jesus said.  The most enlightened minds are not the most educated minds in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League.  It’s the minds that are saturated with God’s truth and who walk through life with the flashlight of the Word of God to light the path before us and to enlighten our minds and enlighten our hearts.  We live in a dark world, and we need the light of God’s Word to guide our paths.  The fact that we live in a dark world also makes it a frightening world to some.  If you think back to the origins of contemporary Christian music, you may remember a song that Amy Grant ran to top of the charts.  It was based on Psalm 119:105.  It was titled “Thy Word”.  And Amy Grant used the language of scripture.  The words went something like this.  “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”  And then she said, “When I feel afraid and I think I’ve lost my way, still You’re there right beside me.  Nothing will I fear as long as You are near.  Please be near me to the end.”  And she took from Psalm 119 comfort in knowing that when we saturate our hearts and our minds with the Word of God, which is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto my (0:19:00.1) path, as we journey through this dark world darkened by sin, that we need not fear, because God’s Word is like that flashlight that shows us the way to go.  Profound truth here just in one of the 176 verses found in Psalm 119.

0:19:19.7

Well, here’s something else that we learn from this “giant among the psalms”.  The Bible also comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.  Let’s look at a number of verses here.  Psalm 119:28, “My soul melts away for sorrow; strengthen me according to your word!”  Verse 67, “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word.  Verse 71, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.”  Verse 76, “Let your steadfast love comfort me according to your (0:20:00.1) promise to your servant.”  What promise?  The promise he found in God’s Word.  Do you find yourself and your soul melting away for sorrow this morning or needing comfort?  You find comfort in God’s Word and in the promises of His Word.  Even when the circumstances of your life seem to run contrary to what you k now to be true in God’s Word, we find comfort in what we know to be true and let God work out the rest in our circumstances.  I love that the psalmist says “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word.”  All right?  God used His Word and the afflicting circumstances of his life to correct him and to bring him back in line.  To say it again, the Bible comforts the afflicted and it afflicts the comfortable.  It has a marvelous way of doing that.  William Wilberforce was a British statesman known for leading the charge for the abolition of slave trade throughout the British Empire.  Some of you are familiar with his work.  And in 1819, I found it interesting, he wrote in his diary, listen to this, “Walked today from Hyde Park Corner, repeating the 119^th Psalm in great comfort.”  Hey, would it be a little bit challenging if I said to you that there was a time not too long ago when people really committed large portions of scripture to memory, including Psalm 119?  All 176 verses of it hidden deeply in their hearts.  And here was just a little indication that Wilberforce was among those.  And as he was walking from one place to another, he says, “I just went over those verse in my mind, repeating the 119^th Psalm, and it became a great comfort to my soul.”  I don’t know what circumstances he was facing at that particular time, but he just reached in to this treasure chest of Psalm 119.  And it comforted his heart.

0:22:05.9

Here’s something else that we learn from Psalm 119 and how the Bible impacts our lives.  The Bible, listen to this, tastes sweeter than honey and is better than gold.  Let’s look at a number of verses here.  First verse 103.  “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!”  Verse 72, “The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces.”  And then this makes me think of Psalm 19, not Psalm 119 but Psalm 19, which is another great psalm in the book of Psalms that just speaks in a high and lofty way about the Word of God.  In Psalm 19:10 it says, “More to be desired are they…”- “they” being the commandments of God, the laws of God, the Word of God- “More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb.”  You know what this says to me?  That the psalmist had allowed the Word of God to so penetrate his heart and to saturate his mind that nothing satisfied his life quite like the Word of God did.  You could pile up the gold on one side and the sweet honey on the other side, and he says, “Take it all away.  I ‘d rather have the Word of God, because it satisfied me more than any amount of money or any amount of food that might tantalize my taste buds.”  Do you desire God’s Word like the psalmist does?  Is it sweeter to you than honey?  Is it more desirable to you than chasing any pot of gold on the other end of some rainbow?  What I hope you’re beginning to sense here is just the passion that psalmist has for the Word of God. He just can’t get enough of this stuff, just like you may not be able to get enough gold in life or enough of sweet honey.

0:24:06.7

Here’s the sixth thing that the Bible does for us that we learn from Psalm 119.  It makes us wise.  Look at verse 98 through 100.  “Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me.”  Verse 99, “I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.  I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts.”  I love…he talks about his enemies, teachers and the aged, all people that we might think have great wisdom.  A lot of us think in our culture that the wisest minds are found in the places of higher educations, in universities and colleges, in certain leagues like the Ivy League.  That’s where you’re gonna find wisdom.  No, let me tell you something.  The freshman student who saturates his heart and his mind with the Word of God is wiser than the Harvard tenured professor who scoffs at the Bible and calls it full of superstitions and myths.  This is what the psalmist says.  In fact, I encourage your students to go to college this fall or maybe into your high school classroom and just remember, “I have more understanding than all of my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.”  This is where wisdom begins.  It begins when we saturate our hearts and our minds with God says and with what God thinks.  And when you go into an educational environment armed with the Word of God, then you can kind of chew up the meat and spit out the bones.  And sometimes you say, “Wow, my professor really doesn’t know very much.”  Sometimes it takes a while for science and professors and universities to catch up with what God already knows.  And the student is sitting there saying, “I know better because I know what the Word of God says.”  So it makes us wise.  Wisdom has nothing to do with age.  Did you see that?  He says in verse 100, “I understand more than the aged.”  Why?  Because “I keep your precepts.”  I know some older people that are just old, but they’re not wise.  And the gray hair doesn’t reflect any wisdom because they’ve not been people of the Book.  From God’s Word we get wisdom and we grow in wisdom.

0:26:28.3

And then, finally, number seven.  The Bible, listen to this, gets me out of bed in the morning and awakens me at night.  Psalm 119:147-148, “I rise before dawn and cry for help; I hope in your words.  My eyes are awake before the watches of night, that I may meditate on your precepts.”  And then verse 62, “At midnight I rise to praise you, because of your righteous rules.”  I say the Bible gets me out of bed in the morning and it awakens me at night.  In the middle of the night I get up and I go grab my Bible.  And I run to again saturate my heart and my mind with the Word of God.  Do you have that kind of relationship with God, where the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night are thoughts that you have from the Word of God?  I was watching television the other day, and there is a country music station here in Washington, D.C.  I think it’s WNZQ.  I love country music.  One of my radio dials is tuned to it.  You’ll often hear me listening to all that country stuff.  But here is what their television advertising was encouraging us to do, to listen to WNZQ first thing in the morning and the last thing at night.  Now, I love country music, but I don’t want to wake up in the morning filling my heart and my mind with WNZQ or CNN or FOX News or any of that.  I want to fill my mind, the first thoughts in the morning, with the Word of God.  And the last thoughts at the end of the day I want to do the same thing.  And there are times that God awakens me in the middle of the night, and I take that to mean I’ve got to go grab my Bible, just like the psalmist said, and get into His word.

0:28:18.4

Seven things, seven themes from Psalm 119 about how the Bible impacts a life. Now, let me give you two applications real quickly here.  Two applications.  First of all—and these are simple things—but we’ll talk for a few minutes about them.  Number one, love God’s Word.  If you get nothing else from Psalm 119, learn to love God’s Word.  Let me just read some verses here, and you get a sense of the psalmists passion for the Word of God and his love for the Word of God.  Verse 16, “I will delight in your statues; I will not forget your word.”  Verse 24, “Your testimonies are my delight; they are my counselors.”  Verse 77, “Let your mercy come to me, that I may live; for your law is my delight.”  Verse 81, “My soul longs for your salvation; I hope in your word.”  Verses 47-48, ”For I find my delights in your commandments, which I love.  I will lift up my hands toward your commandments, which I love, and I will meditate on your statutes.  Verse 159, “Consider how I love your precepts!  Give me life according to your steadfast love.”  Verse 174, “I long for your salvation, O Lord, and your law is my delight.”  And my favorite among all these verses is verse 97, “Oh how I love your law,” the psalmist says.  “It is my meditation all the day.”  If you read Psalm 119 all the way through, you can’t help but be impressed with the psalmist’s love and passion for the Word of God.  So much so that some Bible scholars and commentators sort of accuse David, if he’s writer of this, as loving the Word of God more than the God of the Word.  And I think that’s an unfair accusation, because David fell in love with God through His Word.  And he delighted in the Word.  He loved the Word of God.  It was his meditation all day long.  He couldn’t get enough of the Word of God because he was in love with the God of the Word.  And certainly we need to guard against something we might call bibliolatry, which is a kind of idolatry which worships the Word of God, not the God of the Word.  But, friends, you fall in love with God by falling in love with His Word and vice versa.  To love God is to love His Word.  Jesus says, “If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.”  When I was in seminary one of my professors illustrated this idea by adding to our reading list a book written by Mortimer Adler years ago.  It was titled How to Read a Book.  Can imagine in a Master’s program having to read a book titled How to Read a Book.  But, believe it or not, Mortimer Adler wrote this book, and it became a New York Times Bestseller, a best-selling New York Times book on how to read a book.  And years ago it was advertised in The New York Times, and it had a picture of a young man who was reading a letter.  And he seemed to be pouring over every word.  And the advertisement copy in The New York Times went like this: “This young man has just received his first love letter.  He may have read it three or four times, but he is just beginning.  To read it as accurately as he would like would require several dictionaries and a good deal of close work and a few experts in etymology and philology.  However, he will do all right without them.  He will ponder over the exact shade of meaning or every word, every comma.  She has headed the letter “Dear John”.  What, he asks himself, is the exact significance of those words?  Did she refrain from saying “dearest” because she was bashful?  Would “my dear” have sounded too formal?  Maybe she would have said “Dear so-and-so” to anybody?  A worried frown now appears on his face, but it disappears as soon as he really gets to thinking about the first sentence.  She certainly wouldn’t have written that to anybody.  And so he works his way through the letter, one moment perches blissfully on a cloud, the next moment huddled miserably behind an eight ball.  It has started a hundred questions in his mind.  He would quote it from heart.  In fact, he will, to himself, for weeks to come.”  And then at the bottom of that New York Times ad copy it says, “If people read books with anything like the same concentration, we’d be a race of mental giants.”  Dr. Hendricks in seminary used to take that illustration and turn it around.  And he said, “If people read scripture with anything like the same concentration, we would be a race of spiritual giants.”  Love the Word of God, because you know what?  It’s God’s love letter to you and to me.  And when that little light bulb goes on and you begin to understand what the pages of scripture are, God’s love letter to you and me, you’ll pour over every word and every phrase.  What did He mean by this?  What did He mean by that?  Until it just becomes part of who you are.  It’s God’s love letter to us.  Love the Word of God.  And if you kind of have a blasé relationship with the Word of God, read Psalm 119, all 176 verses, and just pay particular attention—I just read a few of them—to how many times the psalmist says, “I can’t get enough of this.  I delight in Your Word.  I love Your Word.  It is my meditation day and night.”

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Second thing by way of application is to live God’s Word, all right.  I said this was simple, but it’s profound to put into practice.  Listen to a few verses, starting with 4 and 5.  “You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently.  Oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statues.”  Verses 44 and 45, “I will keep your law continually for ever and ever, and I will walk in wide places, for I have sought your precepts.”  Verse 60, “I hasten and do not delay to keep your commandments.”  Verse 63, “I am a companion of all who fear you, of those who keep your precepts.”  Verse 101—I love this—“I hold back my feet from every evil way, in order to keep your word.”  Remember, Jesus says, “If you love me, you’ll keep My commandments.”  It’s just that simple, right?  And then He calls us His friends.  We love God’s Word.  We don’t love the Word of God more than the God of the Word, but we fall in love with God through the pages of scripture.  And we don’t do ti just to scratch our intellect and to say, “Oh, I know this about the Bible and that about the Bible.”  We do it to live God’s Word, to put it into practice.  Years ago, Steve Farrar wrote a book, and in there he talked about the difference between spiritual anorexics and spiritual bulimics.  He said a spiritual anorexic is somebody who just, every once in a while, feasts on the Word of God, which is his spiritual nourishment.  Maybe comes to church couple times a month, but in between never really reads the Bible.  You look at that person’s soul, and they are spiritually anorexic.  He says a spiritual bulimic is somebody who takes in the Word of God.  And rather than applying it to his life and living it out and putting it into practice, he regurgitates it right back up, never digested into his life to where he becomes one with the Word and the Word becomes one with him.  Spiritual anorexics.  Spiritual bulimics.  Where are you in the midst of all of that?  Do you love the Word of God?  So much so that it’s your meditation, your first thought when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night, and you’re thinking about what God is saying to you.  You’re pouring over those words. You’re meditating on it all day long as you do your grocery shopping, as you go to work here, there and yonder.  And are you saying, “God, how can I put this into practice so that I can be more like Jesus?”

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If David wrote Psalm 119—and we don’t know who the author is—but if David wrote it, I guarantee it’s one of the reasons he’s called a man after God’s own heart in the scriptures.  Because you can’t have that said about you and sort of have a disinterest in this book called the Bible.  “Oh, it’s a nice table ornament in my house collecting dust,” or, “It’s a family heirloom.”  No, wear the thing out.  Wear out two or three Bibles in a lifetime.  Fall in love with God as you fall in love with His Word.  Let’s pray together.

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Father, thank You for Your Word.  And thank You that You have given us words in the scripture that just light our fire and our passion.  Father, maybe there is someone here today for whom Bible reading and Bible study has just become a little bit dry and meaningless.  And they’ve just sort of lost that loving feeling with You and with Your Word.  I pray that today is a day when we just fall in love with You all over again.  And, Father, maybe we need to go back to some of those old disciplines when we first started in the Christian life, or at a certain time in our life where we carved out time every day to be with You and to read this love letter, this success manual for life that You’ve given to us.  Father, guard us from being people who possess a copy of the scripture, but that’s as far as the relationship goes.  Father, I pray that You would take Your Word in whatever way it was delivered this morning and whatever verse might have leapt off the pages here from Psalm 119, and use it to transform us from the inside out.  Make us people who love You and love Your Word and who live it out; who live by this book because it’s the most life-changing letter we’ve ever received.  Help us to cherish it as much as we cherish our relationship with You, and pass it on to the next generation and make sure our children and our grandchildren become people of the book and grow up in a nation that honors Your Word, because that’s the kind of nation that You honor.  And we pray this in the name of Christ and for His sake, amen.

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