Psalm 119:33-40
I want to invite you to turn
with me in your Bibles to Psalm 119. We are going to explore
Psalm 119 verses 33 through 40 together this morning. And that
will be on page 513 of your Pew Bibles. Psalm 119 verses 33 through
40. Now, if you are familiar with
Psalm 119, you’ll discover that it is the longest chapter in
the Bible. This is the longest chapter in
the Bible. It’s almost smack dab in the
middle of it. And it is a chapter where the psalmist is turning
his attention to the word of God and he is expressing great
delight in that word because he is delighting in God. And so what the psalmist does
here is he he enjoins the word of God to God himself. He doesn’t
separate them. And he finds that as he plums
the depths of God’s word, as he reads it and meditates it,
and as the spirit works within him to have his life shaped by
it, he finds himself to be one who is enjoying God. In fact,
that’s the title of the sermon this morning by intent because
as we gear ourselves into the word of God, we find who God
is and what he’s like and what he has done and what he promises
to do for us. And as we do that, we find ourselves
enjoying God as well. So with that in view, let’s hear
God’s word now from Psalm 119, beginning in verse 33. Teach
me, O Lord, the way of your statutes. and I will keep it to the end. Give me understanding that I
may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart. Lead me in the path of your commandments,
for I delight in it. Incline my ear to your testimonies
and not to selfish gains. Turn my eyes from looking at
worthless things and give me life in your ways. Confirm to
your servant your promise that you may be feared. Turn away
the reproach that I dread, for your rules are good. Behold, I long for your precepts
and your righteousness. give me life.” Amen. This is God’s holy, inspired,
and inerrant word to us this morning. Well, let me talk to
you in light of that a little bit about Italian food. It seems
to go very well, right? I’m not Italian, but I love Italian
food. And I recently discovered that
there are over 350 types of pasta. There are lots of enies and atonies
and eddies and onies and all the different words that go at
the end of it, but really at the end of the day, pasta is
just a noodle, right? It’s some type of noodle. It’s all the same thing, but
it takes a different shape, a different form, a different texture. but
the substance is actually the same thing. Well, when you read
Psalm 119 here, what you have are various different words used
to describe the word of God. And all of them speak of God’s
revelation, of God speaking to us, as we just sang, speak O
Lord. Well, how does he speak? He speaks by his Holy Spirit
through his word. His word is brought to bear upon
us by the Holy Spirit. It is breathed out by him. And with each word that we discover
in this passage, you get a little bit of a different texture to
it. You get a different angle to it. And so we see words here
in this passage like your law, your way, your testimonies, your
commandments, Your precepts, your rules, your word, your judgments,
your righteousness, your statutes, your truth. This is woven throughout
the fabric of Psalm 119 and really throughout the fabric of scripture
as well. See, food is something that delights us. Pasta, for
most of us, brings us pleasure. And perhaps it would have been
much wiser of me to have waited to the end of the sermon to start
talking about food than doing so at the beginning because I
want you to anchor into this. But we all think about this,
right? There are foods that come to
mind and we can smell it, we can taste it. We know the texture
of it, the aroma of it, and it brings us pleasure and satisfaction. It nourishes us. It takes our
empty, withering stomachs and fills it up, and it gives us
energy and strength and fortitude. That’s what food does. It causes
everything to work within us, to work inside of us, and without
it, we shrivel up and we die. And so while food provides the
fuel to our bodies, it’s God’s word that provides the fuel to
our souls. It’s the very living and active
word of God that nourishes us. And as we feed upon it, and as
we drink deeply upon it, we taste and see that the Lord is good. When was the last time that you
really stopped to consider the goodness of the Lord to you? I mean, we look around and we
experience so much in life that can lead us to believe that God
is taking a Memorial Day vacation at the beach somewhere. That’s
how we feel sometimes. Have you not looked at what has
happened over the course of the last week and asked yourself,
how long, oh Lord? Where are you? Why did you permit
this to happen? Where are you? And you look at
the circumstances of your own life and you ask the same questions
sometimes. But when you can peel back for
a minute the layers and stop and consider all that didn’t
happen that would have happened had God’s goodness not been providentially
at work in your life. then the disaster would be exponentially
worse. Not to mention the positive side
of it that all of the rich blessings that you experience in this life
and all of the promises that you have in the life to come
is purely because of God’s goodness to you and the unmerited gracious
favor that he has had upon you when you didn’t deserve it at
all. That’s the good news of the gospel. God has been good
to us. We sing around Christmas time
that great song that’s based on Psalm 98, joy to the world,
right? That great Christmas hymn. And
we sing that line that he rules the world with truth and grace
and makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness
and the wonders of his love.” Aren’t those great words? And
as you sing them, and you sing that joyful tune, the reality
of those words start to burrow into the crevices of your soul. And who God is becomes someone
who’s not just this distant, unmoved mover in the sky somewhere
who’s impersonally just pressing a few buttons and spinning the
world into order and checking out. He’s personal. He’s checked in. He’s actively
involved. And when we discover that, we
discover Him to be the greatest delight of our life. And that
is why all over this Psalm, the Word of God is not merely an
it. It’s not just a thing. It’s not
an it. The Word of God, the Bible, so
to speak, is intimately tied to the one who inspired it. to
the one who breathed it out, and all of its perfection, and
power, and sufficiency, and authority. See, when the psalmist speaks
here, and this psalm is a prayer, ultimately, to God, he’s reflecting
God’s words back to him, and he refers to it not just as the
law, the word, the commandments, he refers to it as your word,
your law, your commandments. And so this word that we read
comes from the very mouth of God to us. You want to hear God
speak? You don’t need to wait for some
audible voice somewhere or some big sign on the side of the freeway. or try to over-spiritualize the
interpretation of certain events in the world or circumstances
of your life, you wanna hear God speak with authority and
clarity and with absolute certainty that it’s Him speaking and not
just indigestion, you turn to the Word. That’s where you look
to because that’s where He speaks. And so what the psalmist is doing
here is, what he’s not doing is he’s not allowing God and
his word to be separated. He won’t allow that. And so the
place that scripture has in his life is absolutely central. His life is oriented around the
word of God. Everything that he does out there
is shaped by what the Word says, and that’s what his longing is
for. That’s what he wants, because
he knows that very often it’s not the case that his life looks
like the Word. It’s very often that the decisions
he makes and the words he speaks is not ultimately shaped by the
Word, but his prayer here is that it would be So when he doesn’t
want to enjoy God, when he doesn’t want to abide in God, when he
doesn’t want to follow God, at least he wants to want to do
those things. Does that make sense? He wants
to want God. And that’s kind of woven through
the trajectory of this prayer. And so friends, listen to me. If the Bible is on the periphery
of your life, then God will be on the periphery of your life. If it’s just kind of skating
around the edges, then God will skate around the edges. And something
else, something’s gonna fill that gap. It’s not gonna be a
donut hole. Something is gonna fill the gap
of the word. Your life will be galvanized
by something that shapes your life. And if it’s not the word,
then all Jesus is gonna become to you is some self-help guru
who you lean into when your boat’s starting to take on water. So
what I wanna zero in upon this morning is what is driving the
psalmist to sit down in a quiet place somewhere and put pen to
paper, so to speak, and write this out. What is motivating
this psalmist here? What does he want? And what I
would suggest to you is that what the psalmist wants more
than anything in the world is not an it or a thing or a what,
it’s a who. Does that make sense? He wants
a person. He wants God. He doesn’t want
just more academic knowledge about God. Look, you and I, there
are people out there who do not know the Lord at all, but they
know the Bible. They understand theology as an
academic discipline. They’ve memorized biblical texts.
They’ve understood biblical structure, but the Spirit hasn’t regenerated
their soul. And what the psalmist wants is
he wants a new heart, a heart of flesh, so that he delights
in God above any other delight in his life. He wants to find
his greatest treasure and his greatest joy in God. I mean,
how do you explain what he says here otherwise? Verse 36, he
says, teach me. Verse 33, he says, teach me.
Verse 34, he says, give me. Verse 35, he says, lead me. Verse 36, he says, incline my
heart. Verse 37, he says, turn away
my eyes. Verse 38, he says, confirm to
your servant. Verse 39, he says, turn away
the reproach. And verse 40, he says, I long
for your precepts. I mean, this is what’s going
on in his heart. He wants God. Sometimes you’ll hear people
say, and their motivation is very good in this, and so I don’t
wanna be critical when I say it, but sometimes you’ll hear
people say, you don’t go to church to get something, you go to church
to give. You’re in the church to serve,
not just to be a consumer. And for sure, we live in a profoundly
hyper-consumeristic culture. There is no doubt about that.
But to push back against that idea, I would say, no, you actually
come to gather in worship, to hear the preached word, not just
to give, but to get. So you come here to get, you
come here to get God. You sing, you pray, you hear,
you read, you take the supper, so that you would get God, so
that you would be filled up, so that when you leave here,
your worship would not just be within these four walls, but
that it would go into worship and all of life. So that when
the flaming darts and arrows come at you, you are equipped
and you’re grounded and you’re rooted like the tree planted
by streams of water that yields fruit in its season. And when
that storm comes, it doesn’t blow over like some rinky dink
little twigs sticking out of the ground somewhere that when
a five mile per hour little comes and it knocks over. That’s what this psalmist desires. He wants to get God. In verse
33, he says he wants to keep God’s word to the end. In verse
34, he says he wants to observe it with his whole heart. The
next verse, verse 35, he says he wants to delight in it. Pleasure and worship are not
at odds here. In fact, they’re the same thing.
He wants the pleasure delighting in God’s word. He wants to just
be steered away from selfish gain. He knows that that’s the
orientation of his heart, so he needs the grace of God to
steer him away from that. And he wants to flee the lusts
of the flesh and the lusts of his eyes so that he’ll enjoy
life in the ways of God. Verse 38, he wants to fear God,
which means he wants to honor him above all the other things
that he honors in life. And he wants to, in verse 39,
enjoy the rule of life that God has established for the good
of his people. See, the whole psalm is about
what this guy wants. What’s underneath, So much of
who you are is what you most desire. We’re desiring people. What is it that you desire? Whom
is it that you most desire? For this psalmist, he wants the
aroma that comes out of his life to be the aroma of God. He wants the words that come
out of his mouth to be flavored. with God. He wants his sense
of the world, his sense of himself, his sense of other people. his
thoughts, his desires, his actions, his feelings, all to be at least
as saturated with God as the water in the Atlantic Ocean is
saturated with salt. You can’t taste one drop of it
without tasting the salt, and he wants, when his life encounters
other people and lives before the Lord, for people to discover
that there’s not one drop of this guy that hasn’t encountered
God. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful aspect of our life? Fundamental
principle of our life? What do you want? The great theologian Janice Joplin. You know the song that she sang,
right? Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? Is that what you want? A little more of this and a little
less of that in your life? Or ultimately, in the core of
your being, do you want God? Do you want your life to be shaped
by Him, like the potter shapes the clay? Or would you rather
be just shaped by the trends and the values of the world,
which shift back and forth about as frequently as the fan does
in my bedroom in the summertime. I mean, it’s just here today,
gone tomorrow. I mean, look at the sexual revolution,
right? We’re talking about things today
that we didn’t even talk about three or four years ago. What
are we gonna talk about in three or four years from now? It’s
just, that’s how it goes. And people’s lives are shaped
by that, they’re galvanized by it. Or do you wanna be shaped
by the God who was the same yesterday, today, and forever? The God whose
steadfast love never ceases and whose mercy never comes to an
end. What do you want? Who do you
want? That’s the question that you
need to reckon with this morning. So what is the evidence going
on here within the psalmist’s life? What are some things that
we can discover from plumbing the depths of this passage that
we can learn about what the psalmist most desires. Three things I want to point
your attention to before we leave that God brings about in our
lives in order to stir up our desire for Him. Here’s the first thing, and we
see this in the heart of the psalmist, the first thing that
we need in our lives to stir up a desire for Him is this,
we need to have a sense of our need. We need to have a sense
of our need in order to have a desire for Him in the first
place. Verses 36 and 37, lay this out. Incline my heart to
your testimonies and not to selfish gain. Turn my eyes away from
looking at worthless things and give me life in your ways. Now,
why does he talk about selfish gain and looking at worthless
things? Because he knows that naturally that’s the way that
he goes. When you press the power on button in his life, that’s
what turns on. Not desire for God, but desire
for worthless things. Looking at worthless things.
Desire for selfishness. That’s what he tends to go towards. Look, all of the commandments,
when you look at the 10 commandments, all of the law of the Lord. They’re all ultimately issues
of the heart. So the actual sins that we commit,
the dehumanizing of people, the dishonoring of people, the covering
up and telling half-truths or partial truths or blatant untruths,
the lusts and the jealousy for who they are or what they have
or what they can do or whatever it is, what they’ve accomplished,
our pride towards them over how we view ourselves in light of
who they are. Whatever it is, it says I must
have this, I must have that in order for my life to be valid. And so those actual sins are
actually issues of the heart. It’s what’s going on in here
that is manifested out there. And so we look to worthless things. We naturally have an unhinged
desire for them that has no reference to God. That’s who we are by nature.
That’s who we are by choice. That’s the way that we work,
and so this psalmist has a sense of the depravity of his heart. I mean, he goes to God and says,
nothing in my hands I bring, simply to thy cross I cling. Naked, come to thee for dress. Helpless, come to thee for grace. Foul, I to thy fountain fly. Wash me, Savior. or I die. That’s how he goes to God here. He knows his depravity. He knows
his need. And so let me ask you something.
Does that at all describe you? Do you know, have you ever or
lately comprehended the great need that you have for the grace
of God in your life. Because that is what is just
shaping the psalmist’s heart here. Because if you don’t have
this acute sense of your need, then all Jesus is ever gonna
be to you is just a therapeutic fire insurance salesman to keep
you out of hell. That’s all he’ll be. People who desire God have a
true sense of their need. The second thing that we need
to see about this psalmist here that shows us that he’s enjoying
God, he wants to enjoy God, he wants to desire God, the second
thing is this. He not only has a sense of his
need, but he has a humble, teachable spirit. His disposition is humble and
teachable. And we see it here. He says,
teach me, lead me, give me, incline me, turn me, confirm to me. You
can’t go more than a full sentence without saying, bring it to me,
Lord. I need you. How many of us can look back to certain
stages of our lives And remember when we thought we really knew,
like we knew ourselves, right? Like we understood ourselves,
we knew where we were going, and we had just an accurate understanding
of ourselves and God and the world. We just knew how it worked. And some of you were laughing
because you got a little bit older and you realized I was
truly the village idiot of North Carolina at that stage of my
life thinking that. I mean, I did not know that. I didn’t think I needed any more,
and now I’ve made my mistakes, I’ve committed my sins, I’ve
learned more about my heart, I’ve learned more about my frailty
and my weakness. And I know more and more and
more how I just need to be taught and to be engaged by God all
the time. That’s the psalmist here. The bad news moment of the day
is that no matter how much you’ve grown, matured over the course
of your life. You and I are nowhere near having
had arrived at some utopian place in the Christian life. My GPS, when I get to a destination,
it says, you have arrived. And I think, no, I haven’t. I’ve not arrived yet. If you
only knew, have you really arrived there? Have you really arrived? The psalmist here, he has a teachable,
humble spirit. And finally, third, he not only
has a sense of his need, he not only has a teachable, humble
spirit, but his heart is open. See, he knows if he’s gonna desire
God, He can’t shut it down as if he’s figured it out. He needs
to lay his soul bare before the Lord. He needs to have an open
heart. In verse 18 he says, back earlier in Psalm 119, if you
look at verse 18, he says, open my eyes that I might behold wondrous
things out of your law. You know, before we read the
Word and we hear it preached here on the Lord’s Day morning
and evening, very often I will pray and I would not be surprised
if Brian prays, that he would open his eyes, our eyes, all
of our eyes, to behold the wondrous things in the Word because our
hearts are not naturally open, our hearts are naturally callous.
Our hearts are hearts of stone by nature. You weren’t born with
just this you know, sort of state of neutrality, and you were just
persuaded one day to buy into it, like a used car salesman
persuaded you to buy your car, no, your hearts are totally shut
off. And now because of the Holy Spirit
and his grace to you, he’s chiseled away at that and he’s poked a
hole in it and he’s pulled it open and he’s shown the light
of Christ into your heart and by grace alone you received him. But we see him dimly now. We
have the hope that one day we will see him as he Fully and
truly is, but we deal with the lust of the flesh. We deal with
the lust of the eyes. We deal with the pride of possessions
and it’s still there. And yet, he’s pierced this open. So he’s saying, open it further. Chip away at the hardness even
more. Let me see you and delight in
you. Give me an open heart. That’s what he so profoundly
desires. That’s what he wants for his
life. See, there’s so much in here
about the law, the word, the rules, we see rules. I mean,
that doesn’t sound like very fun way to live your life, just
according to a bunch of duty and rules and law and so forth,
like that. We often feel as if the law is
restricting our freedom, if it’s preventing us from enjoying life
and enjoying God as we’re intended to live. But think of it this
way, a spouse, when a husband and wife, they come up here and
they stand before each other, they look into each other’s eyes
and they make vows and they say that I will have you, take you
and hold you from this day forward for better or worse, for richer
or poorer, in sickness and health, to love and to cherish as long
as we both shall live. The woman and the man, they stand
here and they make those vows to each other. There are a lot
of rules, there’s a lot of duty implied in that, and you do not
know what it’s gonna, you don’t even know what you’re saying
then. In sickness and in health, when you go through a loss of
a job, a loss of a child, cancer, tragedy, the things that you’re
just gonna go through as you’re married for more than 25 minutes. You realize that those rules,
those vows you’ve taken, they’re easy to say and they’re hard
to live out, aren’t they? You know that. You don’t even
have to be married to know that. Just stop and think about it
for a minute. But the desire for one another
in that marriage and the joy in that marriage between each
of them is not going to flourish as one or both of the spouses
decide to disregard those vows. to disregard that duty, in fact,
that’s gonna destroy their relationship, that’s gonna destroy their marriage,
and it’s gonna bring both of them great sadness, great hardship,
great difficulty, when the vows aren’t adhered to. The joy comes
when you can walk through the valley of the shadow of death
together, and you’ve kept those vows in sickness and in health
for richer and poorer, and good and in bad, and you get to the
other side and you’ve grown deeper in your understanding, deeper
in your love, deeper in your cherishing of one another, and
you’ve done so because you followed the vows that you committed to.
And see, that’s how it is with our relationship with God. God
is merciful to show us how we ought to live before Him. And we don’t follow these laws,
these rules, and some begrudging sense in order to gain or keep
God’s saving mercy upon us by no means. That’s another gospel.
You ever hear that? It’s from the pit of hell and
it smells like smoke. We don’t do this in order to gain God’s
saving grace. We do it because his grace is
already at work within us and his spirit’s working within us
and we live that way for his glory and for our joy and for
the love of our neighbor. And so, let me just say one last
thing before we leave. Many years after the psalmist
wrote these words, God would send his only begotten son to
save his people for their sins, right? From their sins. He came
to redeem and adopt and forgive us and to declare us righteous,
clothed in all of his righteousness. And that’s the hope that we have
in this life and in the next. You and I right now, if we trust
in Jesus, have the substance of what this psalmist could only
anticipate. We have Jesus, and he is coming
again, and in the midst of your pain, and in the midst of your
suffering, and in the midst of the deepest, darkest sin that
only you and the Lord know about, the thing going on in your heart
that is between you and Him alone, and in a world that seems like
it is on the brink of disaster every minute of the day, we can
have the confidence that He has come and He has lived and He
has died and He has conquered sin and He has ascended to the
right hand of the Father. He has put all of His enemies
under His feet. He is ruling and reigning and
His Spirit is at work within His people and in His church.
There is a better chance of the sun not going down tonight and
not coming up tomorrow than there is of him ever leaving or forsaking
you. And so if that’s the case, you
have every reason in the world to anchor yourself to him. To
cling to him and cling to him through his word, to know him.
You’re not knowing stuff, you’re discovering a person, a person
of God in his word. And let me say this too, the
saving love and mercy of Christ is only for those who receive
him. It’s only for those who receive him, it’s only for those
who believe in him and place all of their hope in life and
in death and in Jesus Christ alone. But here’s the deal, he
promises that he will not cast out one person who comes to him. He will never cast them out.
But in order to come to him, you need to recognize your need. You need to have a humble spirit.
You need to have an open heart. Lay your deadly doing down, down
at Jesus’ feet. And stand in him and him alone
gloriously complete. So with that in view, may it
be that not one of us leaves here this morning, not one of
us leaves here this morning without finding our hunger and our cravings
for pleasure and order and blessing, forgiveness, all of those things
to be found in anyone or anything else. than in our faithful Savior,
Jesus Christ. Amen. Let’s pray. Lord, we pray now and forevermore
that you would open our eyes that we might behold the wondrous
things in your law because your word is a lamp unto our feet
and a light into our path. Speak to us throughout the rest
of the day and the course of our life. Let us not be conformed
any longer to the pattern of this world, but to be transformed
by the renewing of your mind. This we know can happen only
by your grace. So it’s to you that we look,
the gracious and faithful Savior, Lord Jesus Christ. And it’s in
his name that we ask this. Amen.