Psalm 119:8-16
and you may be seated. Well,
it’s again, always a privilege to be back here at First ARP
in Burlington, especially at the beginning of a new year.
It’s great to see you all. It’s a privilege to come and
worship Christ with brothers and sisters in the Lord and to
look to him this morning. And we’re going to do that in
God’s Word. So if you have your Bible, I want to invite you to
turn with me to Psalm 119. Psalm 119, and we’re going to
be exploring verses 9 through 16. If you’re looking for that
in your Bible, it’s on page 512. Psalm 119, I’m sorry, verses 9 through 16. And I don’t know if you’re the
kind of person that makes New Year’s resolutions. I did for
a while and usually broke them by about 9.30 in the morning
on New Year’s Day, so I kind of gave up on that. But, you
know, people do that. I mean, you know, the commercials
you’re going to see on TV right now are for Planet Fitness, right?
Everybody’s going to go join Planet Fitness for whatever it
is, $10 a month or, you know, just basically nothing. You know,
they’ll go four or five times in January and then that’ll be
it and forget to cancel the membership and Planet Fitness will get rich,
right? And you know, you’re gonna change how you spend your money
and your time and you’re gonna make all these, you know, commitments
as you begin a new year. And really, at the bottom of
that is an expression of what people want, right? What they
desire. And my question for you this
morning is, what do you desire? Whom do you desire? Let’s pray and we’ll consider
that as we read this word. Father, we need you this morning. We need you to open the eyes
of our heart that we might behold the wonderful things in your
word. We need you to chip away at the
callous native nature of our souls, to remove the scales from
our eyes, so that we will behold you and delight ourselves in
you. So take your word and by the
power of your spirit, apply it to our lives for the sake of
your glory and for the sake of our joy. We pray in Jesus’ name,
amen. Psalm 119, beginning in verse
nine. How can a young man keep his
way pure by guarding it according to your word? With my whole heart,
I seek you. Let me not wonder from your commandments. I have stored up your word in
my heart that I might not sin against you. Blessed are you,
O Lord. Teach me your statutes. With my lips, I declare all the
rules of your mouth. In the way of your testimonies,
I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts
and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes.
I will not forget your word. Amen. This is God’s holy, inspired,
and inerrant word. May he write its eternal truth
on all of our hearts this morning. So what is it that you desire?
Whom do you desire? This psalmist here is speaking
of his life, a desire to keep his way pure, desire to know
the Lord, desire to be anchored into him and to him alone. And the way in which he is going
to do so is by being grounded to and tethered to the very word
of God. See, we so highly value Scripture,
and you’ve noticed it if you’ve discovered just the pattern of
this worship service so far this morning, that this time together
began with the Word of God. God’s Word called us to worship,
and we will end with a benediction where God sends us by His Word
into the world. and our songs and our prayers
and our confessions and everything in between has been totally saturated
by the Word of God because it is through the Word of God that
we look. It’s the window through which
we look to discover who God is and who we are. And that’s what the psalmist
so desperately wants to know here. It’s his greatest desire. in California where I am from. I’m from the San Joaquin Valley
of California, Fresno. It is the literal land of fruits
and nuts. It is where everything grows.
And as you drive through some of the rural areas of the San
Joaquin Valley, you’ll notice signs that will, they’ll be political
signs, but they’re not what you think of the typical California
political signs. They ordinarily have to do with
water policy. You know, that’s a real, you
know, for lack of a better term, sexy type of political discussion,
isn’t it? Water policy. Doesn’t that sound
like a lot of fun? They’re talking about water because
it’s so scarce there. I mean, they get 10 inches or
so of rain every year. And they grow all of these crops,
and they have these huge cities. So there is this political contention
between the farmers, which don’t have a lot of political clout,
but grow all the food, and the big cities where all the people
live. And who’s gonna get the water? And so you’ll see signs
in the middle of Central California that say things like, food grows
where water flows. And in that San Joaquin Valley,
where there’s all this farmland, you’ll see land that has the
richest soil on earth, that can grow these incredible crops,
all the produce that you would buy. at the grocery store and
it just sits there dormant. And it’s not dormant because
they’re just letting the soil rest, it’s dormant because the
farmers are not allocated enough water to grow anything on those
fields. And I wonder if it’s not the
case that many professing followers of Jesus Christ are like that
dried up farmland. They’ve sort of withered on the
vine. due to neglect, due to a lack
of the water of life, the soul nourishing water of God’s refreshing
word being poured into their life. And they’re dried up and
they’re parched and they’re cracked, even though they profess to follow
Jesus. It’s not that God has neglected
them or neglected us, it’s that we have neglected God and we’ve
neglected to drink deeply from him. See, this Psalm here, Psalm
119, is in many respects about our growth in the grace and in
the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. That’s
the psalmist’s desire. He wants to grow. He wants his
roots to go deep into the ground. He wants water to nourish him. He wants to have all the nutrients
in his soul so that he will grow strong and that when the winds
and the waves crash up against him of the spiritual and social
and cultural forces going on in the world, he doesn’t capitulate
to it. He doesn’t just crash down and
just turn into a destroyed product. He wants to be able to withstand
those storms. That’s his desire, to see and
to savior his Lord who has so graciously poured out his abundant
love upon him. and forgiven his sins and cast
them into the depths of the sea. That’s what his desire is. So what do we observe here? Let’s talk about two observations. I want to dig first more deeply
into the psalmist’s desire. And then I want to discover the
means to accomplish that desire. His desire and then the means.
And so his desire that kind of begins here with the first question
that is asked in verse nine. How can a young man keep his
way pure? What he’s saying is, how can
I live a holy life? Because by living a holy life,
I’m gonna live a happy life. I’m gonna live a contented life.
I’m gonna live a life that is in line with the way that God
has designed me to most flourish. How can I live that way? How
can a young man keep his way pure? Now, he’s asking this And
most commentators believe that he is, writing this as a young
man, reflecting on his youth, how could he be going about this? But it’s a good question for
any of us, regardless of where we’re at in life. Regardless
of if you’re a man or a woman or younger or older, wherever
you are, it’s a good question for anyone. And It is a question,
though, that is sort of specific to young men here that he’s thinking
of, because when you think of young men, what do they tend
to be high on? Passion and energy, right? They’ve got a lot of passion,
they’ve got a lot of energy, and the temptations of life,
the world is kind of just alluring them to just be galvanized by
that, and it’s exciting, and it’s so easy to cave into that. So they have a lot of passion
and energy, but they may not have a lot of moral grounding
and reasonableness. That frontal lobe has not fully
developed yet, right? But also the maturity of the
soul hasn’t. I mean, you think of, There’s
this man, Felix Baumgartner, probably not a household name
to you, but I’ll tell you about who Felix Baumgartner is. He’s
a daredevil, right? And he decided that he was going
to try to set the world record for the highest parachute jump
from way up there in the high altitudes. And so he takes this
hot air balloon into the stratosphere. I mean, he’s 100,000 feet up
into the air. And he jumps out from 128,000 feet. And he reaches
a speed, a top speed of 844 miles per hour. That’s Mach 1.25. He thought he was going to die,
that’s what he said. I mean, can you imagine your
body moving at a speed like that? Now, there is a fine line between
taking a calculated risk and full-fledged stupidity. And I don’t know how I’m going
to die, but I know how I’m not going to die. and it’s not gonna
be by jumping out from 128,000 feet, but it’s people who do
things like that, and if it goes badly, they sometimes think,
well, that wasn’t a stupid decision, it was just bad luck. Next time if I try it, it probably
won’t be so bad, it’ll go just fine, right? And so there’s a
lot of thought in our youth, and even in our age, and even
in our age, if we don’t, anchor ourselves to the Word of God
about short-term gain, but not about the long-term pain. And this psalmist understands
that about himself. He understands that about the
nature of how people operate We’re all like this when it comes
to the things of Christ. We’re all lured by something
that just grabs our souls. And so in verse 10 here, he prays
that he would not wander, with my whole heart I seek you, let
me not wander from your commandments. He knows that by experience.
I mean, how many of us can look
back over the course of our lives and go, I was wandering from the Lord
there. Or maybe over the past week,
I was wandering from the Lord. We sing it, right? Prone to wander,
Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. That’s your default mode. When
the on button is pushed in the morning, that’s where your heart
naturally goes. It doesn’t naturally go to Jesus,
it naturally goes to wandering. And so he knows this about himself.
The Apostle Paul, okay, the Apostle Paul, he’s knocked down on the
Damascus Road. He confronts Jesus, he’s dramatically
converted. The Lord uses him to write most
of the New Testament. He plants churches and bears
witness to Christ to a world that had never heard his name.
And he writes in Romans 7 that it is his heart that the good
that he wants to do, he doesn’t do, and the evil that he doesn’t
do, he finds himself doing. This is the ongoing battle of
his life. This is your battle. I don’t
care if you’re 90 or you’re nine. That’s what’s going on in all
of us in some measure. And if we’re not anchored to
Christ, and anchored to his word, then we’re gonna drift. And the theologian D.A. Carson
says that no one drifts towards holiness. I mean, think about
it. A cruise liner out in the middle
of the ocean turns off its engines, the anchor is pulled up. It’s
not just gonna drift towards the harbor. It’s gonna drift
wherever the currents are going. That’s where it’s gonna go, and
that’s where you’re gonna go. If our lives are not enjoying God
supremely, if He’s not our greatest desire, if His word isn’t just
engraven in our souls, that’s where we’ll go. We’ll just drift,
we’ll just coast through life. And how many of us, how many professing Christians. How many
churches, how many people, how many times in your life over
the past week or month or year has that been where you’ve gone? I mean, so many times. Because
that’s native to us, that’s natural to us. So the psalmist here,
he’s having a moment of spiritual maturity and he asks this rhetorical
question, how can We keep our way pure. How can we, as people
who’ve rested in the grace and merits of Jesus Christ alone,
credited to us in the gospel, who are already recipients of
Jesus’s mercy to us, how can we more deeply enjoy God? How
can our lives more faithfully be shaped by who he is and what
he is like? Is that your heart’s desire? It seems like what matters to
God more than anything else, is that you find your greatest
satisfaction in Him. And that’s not because, He’s
not having that desire because He’s some egomaniacal narcissist. He’s having that desire for us
because He knows that’s how He’s created us to live for joy, how
He’s created us to live to flourish. He wants what’s best for us,
what’s best for you, and it’s to find your satisfaction in
Him. To have your hopes and your ambitions
and your decisions and your priorities filled with the aroma of Christ. And is that what you want for
yourself? Is that what you want for yourself?
Is that what you want for your children? Is that what you want
for this church? Is that what you most desire? Is how you think and feel and
speak expressing that desire? Is it what you want for your
family? Do you want your neighbors, the people in your life who don’t
know Jesus to come to know the joy of knowing Jesus? Is that
your desire? See, that’s the psalmist’s desire
for himself. Is that your desire for yourself
and for your church and family? So that’s his desire. What’s
the second observation we want to make here? The means to that
desire. And we find it again in verse
nine right off the bat here. How can a young man keep his
way pure? Here’s the answer. By guarding it according to God’s
word. In other words, the pure life.
the life of joy in God. It’s created as the Holy Spirit
brings the Bible to bear upon our lives. As the Spirit bears witness with
our spirit, confirming in us that yes, this is God’s word,
God is speaking to me. God is working in me, God is
burrowing this into my soul. That’s the desire that he has
and the means to accomplishing that desire is by being grounded
in the word of God. How do you know that God is speaking
to you? I mean, wouldn’t we just love
it if God just audibly spoke to us, right? Just said, you
know, this would be, this is what you ought to do, this is
probably what you ought to not do, this is, you know, if he just
kind of just spoke directly to us. Well, open the Bible and
read it out loud and you’ll hear God speaking to you. because
God is speaking to you directly in and through his word. That’s
how he speaks to you. How do you know that that word
is taking root in your life? It’s when your lips and your
lives begin to display what is the thrust of God’s word. When
your hopes in life are not ultimately shaped by what the world is telling
you that your hopes ought to be or that your native inclinations
are telling you that your hopes ought to be or your upbringing
tells you that, but when the word shapes those things, when
the word and the promises of God are shaping your hopes, when
the decisions that you make are based upon the promises and precepts
of God, when you love your neighbor when they’re not so easy to love,
when you pursue justice and you stand for all that is good and
right and true, regardless of whatever attacks may be upon
you for following Christ as he reveals himself in his word.
How do you know that the Spirit’s working in your life? When you
love what The Bible calls us to love when
what you love is informed by that, informed by the word, when
what you want for yourself and what you want for others is informed
by the word. This psalmist wants his whole
life to be encompassed by the word of God because the word
of God is how he’s gonna delight himself in God. But see, one
of the things that we need to understand about the time and
the place in which we are living in this moment is that Just about
every single major institution in our country is seeking to
eliminate the influence of the Word of God. They’re seeking
to eliminate the influence of the Bible. In other words, there
was a time when the authority of Scripture was being subverted.
And that’s still happening. They’re trying to undermine the
authority of the Scripture. But it’s already assumed in our
world that the Scripture doesn’t have ultimate authority. And
so because it doesn’t have ultimate authority, which is ultimately
saying because God either doesn’t exist or he doesn’t care, he’s
too far off or he’s a malevolent God or he’s checked out or he’s
not powerful, he shouldn’t have authority in our life. And so
because he shouldn’t have authority in our life, he should have no
influence in our life. And the way that he has influence
in our life is through the word of God. So we’re trying to not
only remove his authority, we’re trying to remove his influence.
That’s what the institutions of the world are doing. That’s
what you see when you turn on your television, you see the
commercials, you see the, when you turn on your social media,
when you drive down the road and you see a sign on the side
of the road, when you go to work, all of that, go into Target,
whatever it is, it’s all being pushed at you and your soul already
bent that way. It already calls into question.
You don’t get three chapters into the Bible before the authority
and the sufficiency of who God is is being called into question.
That’s what’s going on in all of us. And the world is just
pouring fuel on the fire of what’s already within us. The autonomous
self is the God of the age. And so if that’s the case, and
if it’s the case that none of us are drifting in the direction
of God and the direction of holiness, how do we push against that? The psalmist here gives, in a
prayer to God, in the form of a prayer, in the form of a poem,
he displays some very practical points to us, doesn’t he? In
verse 11 here, I’ve stored your word up in my heart. So he realizes
that he needs to store the word of God up in his heart. That’s where he needs to go because
his heart is already natively full of all of this junk. And
so to get rid of that, he needs to expel it. The Puritans, Thomas
Chalmers, he said there’s, what we need to get rid of the inclination
to sin and to fall into these traps in our life is to have
the expulsive power of a new affection. In other words, to
expel the filth and to fill it up with something else. If you
expel something from a cylinder, all you’re going to
have is an empty cylinder. You need to fill it up with something
else. And what he’s saying is, I want to store it up. I want
to store your word in there instead of the filth. And so this is
the practical advice. Read it. Meditate upon it. Pray
through it. Sit under it. Hear it. Taste it. See it. Sing it. Get
the Word into your life. Store up the Word of God. Memorize
it. That’s not just something, okay,
here’s your New Year’s resolution, go do it. It’s, like, that’s
just the shape, that’s how our life ought to be oriented. It
ought to be oriented around the Word of God. Because it’s oriented
around God. In verse 12, he says he wants
God to teach him his statutes, because in discovering the word
of God, the law of God, he’s gonna find freedom and joy in
God there. So that’s gonna take a measure
of intentionality too, right? The storing of God’s word, the
desire to learn the statutes of God, those things take intentionality.
Verse 13. With my lips, I declare all the
rules of your mouth. He’s saying that he wants every
word that comes from his mouth to be informed by God’s word. The words that come, I mean,
are they useful for building up? Are they beneficial? Are they honoring to God? Are
they loving to your neighbor? Are they faithful? That’s what
he wants to come out of his mouth. Verse 14. In the way of your
testimonies, I delight as much as in all riches. As in all riches. I was in Miami a year ago. I was about to quote Vanilla
Ice to you, but I’m going to not do that. Anyway, there’s
this, well, If you go to Miami Beach, there’s
a line in the Vanilla Ice, Ice Ice Baby song where it talks
about driving Lamborghinis in Miami Beach. I mean, there’s
just so much wealth there. I mean, people are just like
shaped by the riches of life. And you can find that in Burlington,
right? You don’t have to go there. Look
around here. There are people that are just
like, they just want more and more and bigger and the best
and the newest and the brightest and the shiniest and the blingiest. That’s where they go, for joy. And it’s all gonna rot and decompose
in a trash dump someday. And what this psalmist is saying
here is that he wants to delight in God’s testimonies, in God’s
word more than he delights in any riches of the world, more
than anything. Verse 15, I will meditate upon
your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. His gaze being
set upon the Lord. His thoughts meditating. That’s
not Hare Krishna stuff. That’s stopping thinking about
what you’re reading, about what you’re hearing, and thinking
about how you can apply this to your soul, and how it’s gonna
manifest itself at home, at work, and your leisure, and your time,
whatever it is that you do. Think about how the word of God
is gonna shape your life. That’s what he so desires. Verse 16 again, he wants to find
pleasure. Just as we saw in verse 14, he
wants to delight in the word, and again in 16, he wants to
delight in the statutes of God and not forget it. He wants to
remember it. You know, when you want to remember
something, you make sure you do it, right? You send a notification
on your phone, you write it on a Post-it, you put it on your
refrigerator, you put it in your planner, you do whatever it is
that you need to do in order to remember something important,
right? He wants to remember it. He takes
it that seriously. He takes it that seriously. He’s
dedicated to it. The growth and grace, my friends,
it does not occur on the osmosis program. You don’t just take
your Bible and stick it under your pillow at night and sleep
for your eight little hours of sweet dreams and wake up and
you’re sanctified in the morning. That’s, sorry, bad news moment
of the day, that’s not the way that it works. It takes dedication
to the Word of God. It takes being here on the Lord’s
Day, hearing the Word of God preached, reading it throughout
the week, investing yourself, making an investment in God and
His Word because that’s whom we were created for. That’s how
we’re created to live for joy. That’s how we’re created to navigate
this life without being totally gripped by all the anxieties
that the world is totally telling us we ought to be anxious about
and afraid of and shaped by and all these things. He’s gonna
be anchored to the word of God. Let me finish with this. Two
Lamborghini stories. which is two more than I’ve ever
told in my life, but here’s another one. I was in my minivan with
my wife and four kids. We pull up to a stoplight, this
was a few months ago in Greensboro, and up next to us pulls a guy
in a Lamborghini. And I rolled down my window,
and I said, want to race to the next light? So he kind of smiled and did
that guy thing. The light turns green. And I
mean, by the time I looked up, he was already there. And I’m
zero to 60 in a minute or two. And he’s already at the next
light. I mean, this car that he’s driving,
this is, I don’t know, a half million dollar car that he has. And if you have a vehicle like
that, you’re not going to go to the Walmart parking lot and
park it next to someone’s, you know, 1986 Chevy, you know, beater
that’s blowing out smoke in the back, right? That’s not what
you’re going to do. You’re going to park as far away
as you can, you know, there’s going to be ten parking spots
on each side before you, you’re not going to get anywhere near,
because you’ve invested so much into that car, he’s treasured
it. And here’s the point. If you
are in Christ, then the treasure that you have
is so much more valuable than someone’s half million dollar
sports car that one day is going to be recycled and turned into
someone’s, you know, belly button ring that they bought for $9.99
at Claire’s. You have the greatest treasure
in the whole world. Jesus has come for you. He has not only forgiven all
of your sins, the ones that nobody knows about, the ones that would
make you run and hide into the darkest hole from anyone that
you’ve ever met if they found out about it. He has not only cast them off,
and he remembers them no more, but he has filled you to the
brim with His righteousness, with His love, with His mercy
that will never, ever, ever let you go. He has stored up a place for
you in His kingdom forever, and you can’t screw that up. And if you know that you have
received a love so amazing, so divine, then that grace compels
you, and it demands your soul, your life, your all. So cling to him with a Kung Fu
grip and do it by investing your heart and your mind and your
energy in the time of your life into his word so that you would
glorify him and enjoy him forever. Amen, let’s pray. Father, your word is breathed out by
you and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training
in the way of righteousness so that we might be firmly equipped
for every good work. It is the lamp unto our feet
in a dark world, the light unto our path. So may we love it because
we love you, and may you stir that love into our hearts. We
pray this in the name of him who came such a distance for
us, our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.