Well, tonight we were able last Wednesday to jump into Psalm 119, and we're just going to jump back into that because there's so much there. So if you have your Bible, if you would join me in Psalm 119, and we're going to read the second stanza of Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is a 176 verse song, and it's broken down into 22 eight verse sections. There's 22 Hebrew alphabets, 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, not 22 Hebrew alphabets.
That would be odd. And so the first letter is Aleph, and what you find if you were to read in the Hebrew, the Old Testament, each of the first eight verses start with the letter A, and it goes into that. And then the second stanza is verse 9 through 16. What we're going to look at tonight is the Hebrew word Beth, and each one of those eight verses would start with the letter, that letter in the Hebrew alphabet and so forth.
So when you have 22 different letters, times 8 brings you to 176, and that's how they came up with that layout. So let's read those verses tonight. Verse number 9 says, Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way by taking heed thereto according to thy word. With my whole heart have I sought thee, O let me not wonder from thy commandments. Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. Blessed art thou, O Lord, teach me thy statutes. With my lips have I declared all the judgments of thy mouth.
I have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies as much as in all riches. I will meditate in thy precepts and have respect unto thy ways. And if you read verse 16 as we close, I will delight myself in thy statutes. I will not forget thy word. And that is our prayer tonight, Father, that your word would be infused into our hearts with joy, with delight, that we would long for your word more than even our necessary bread. Sustain us by your life-giving word.
Let it be our spiritual meat and drink. And I pray tonight for the teens, for the kids' classes and all those working in those ministries, our other adult classes going on, that your hand would be upon each one of them. I pray for the sanctifying work of your word in our hearts. Lord, how much we need to be cleansed, how much we need to be secured by your word to you. And I pray that you would allow our hearts to grasp the depth of the word of God tonight. Open our eyes that we may behold the wonderful things out of your law. This is our desire, this is our prayer. And if anyone's lost, that they may come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.
We ask it in Jesus' name. And God's people said, man, you may be seated this evening. Last week we began to look at Psalm 119. It's really a goldmine of spiritual wisdom. I find myself when I read Psalm 119 getting extremely excited.
I get ramped up the more I begin to read this chapter. I just so enjoy the focus of this Psalm. And Psalm 119 really is carrying the idea of the treasure of God's word, the value of God's word, the immense importance. The great prince of preachers, Charles Spurgeon, once said, I hold one single sentence out of God's word to be of more certainty and of more power than all the discoveries of all the learned men of all the ages.
That's a, quite frankly, that's a staggering thought. And Charles Spurgeon was a genius, brilliant beyond the normal. He was a incredible mind. I think they said he wrote, would have been around 130 some books.
He would study 18 hours a day, died in his early 50s, 56 I believe it was. But there are eight different words as you go through this 176 chapter, 76 verse chapter. It's the longest chapter in the Bible. And what is so interesting about it is the focus of this chapter is entirely upon the word of God. Out of the 176 verses, there's only six verses that don't make a direct reference to the word of God. So out of 176 verses, only three do not make a direct reference to the word of God.
It's an incredible thought. There's eight different words that the author uses in reference to the word of God. He calls it the law, testimony, he calls it precepts, statutes, commandments, judgments, the word and promise. And so as you go through this chapter, that's what you'll find. Again, it's just a long acrostic of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. And if God's going to write 176 verse chapter, the longest chapter, it would seem like, why would he do that? And why would it stand out so much from all the rest?
It's not like there's other ones like that. And what is the theme? What is the focus?
What is he trying to draw attention to? And again, it's the word of God. It's the primacy and we believe here what the Reformers believe. We believe in sola scriptura, which is Latin for sola, which is only in scriptura, obviously the scripture. So it's we believe that the scripture alone is the final authority and no authority is to usurp that. The word of God stands as the bedrock upon what we believe and what we build upon. It is not the pastor's opinion. It is what does the Bible say, right?
You're not looking for suggestions here. You didn't come here tonight to find out what's pastor's opinion on the matter. We have a lot higher authority than that. Praise God for that, right? And so the theme of this chapter is the practical use of the word of God in our life. And the author had such a high view of the word of God in Psalm 119, one of three, says, how sweet are thy words into my taste, yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth. He had such an overwhelming love for the word of God in Psalm 119 verse 20 says, my soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto thy judgments at all times.
And last week we saw the priority of the word of God, the pursuit of the word is the priority of the word I should say is found in the pursuit of the word because what you prioritize, what is valuable to you, you will begin to pursue after. Show me a man's pursuit and I'll show you what he prizes. Show me what he longs for. Show me what he laughs at, what he gets adrenaline rushes from. Show me what he's excited about. Show me what he writes on the shirts that he wears. Show me what he's thrilled by.
Show me what he talks to other people about, what he's riveted by. As I begin to say that, some of us start thinking about sports, right? And there's nothing wrong with cheering on even a losing Bengals team as a Bengals fan. That is a long and enduring attachment isn't it? Suffrage is the old word for that. But when you and I begin to think about what thrills our hearts, does the word of God come to our minds?
It should. And what a blessing it is to have people in your life that prioritize the right thing, pursue the right thing, and influence you in the right thing. Sunday we talked about how the most cursive thing in the world is sin. Sin is the author of our misery.
Matthew Henry was right when he said that. It is the cause of our misery. It is the author of pain.
It is the author of heartache. It is behind every divorce. It is behind every family problem. It is behind every company that gets caught up into brokenness and tragedy and country and everything else that finds the downfalls as sin is lurking and just infused into our world. And so the author of this psalm starts out by sharing how the word of God is a divine tool that the believer can have victory over sin with. The word of God is a cleansing agent. It is a requirement for us in order to find victory over that which we could not find victory otherwise. You and I can't defeat sin. It's too much for us. Sometimes people ask, will God give you more than you can handle? Yes.
Absolutely he will. That's why a lot of you are here. Because you learned he'll give you more than you can handle.
Y'all with me? You hit life and it was more than you could handle. And you realize I can't hold all this myself. But he won't give you more than he can handle with him. That's why the Bible says I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Peter couldn't handle walking on water, but he could walk on water with Jesus. So one of the great truths that we have to learn is our always and utter dependence upon God. That's why I say when you raise your kids you don't raise them to be independent. You just transfer dependence from you to God.
They're eternal dependence, right? On God. We always must understand that I can do all things only through Christ.
It's not that I'm sufficient to think anything as of myself as 2 Corinthians 3 verse 5 says, but our sufficiency is of God. So how can we live with victory over the great evil of sin? Tonight I want to look at the cleansing work of the Word of God.
How it can do that. And we're going to look at four things tonight starting in verse 9 and 10. The first is you must heed to the Word of God. You have to come to the Word of God and heed it. Verse 9 says wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his ways.
Spurgeon writes never was there a more important question for any man. It is surprising that people didn't come to Jesus and say Lord how do I get victory over sin? I mean would anybody else think that would be a good question to ask Jesus?
I mean how do I get victory over the things that I say, the ways that I feel, the outbursts I have, the frustration, my lack of patience, other struggles that we can deal with in myriads of ways. And so starting out with a question here was a very Jewish way of teaching. This was a rabbinical method of bringing people into the place that you wanted to teach them by guiding them with a question. He wants to get them to the Word but he wants to first lay the foundation to propel them there. Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his ways? What do you think he young people would say? This is the battle.
And it's not even wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his ways, wherewithal shall an old man cleanse his ways. Here he is asking how does that happen? And questions are great ways of teaching. They also, questions allow you to know where someone is. Don't do all the learning for people.
That includes your own children. Like learn to ask them questions. Not because you always need the information because it's not that you don't know the information. It's because you want to know if they know it.
So what do you think about this? I think it's a great question to ask your child sometime. Why do you believe the Bible? Why do you believe there's a God? Why do you believe in Jesus? Wouldn't it be good to have that conversation with them before they go to a university and get asked that by a professor?
Would that be important to have? Wouldn't it be important to have that conversation before somebody sends them a YouTube video that's off the wall and gives one side? I find myself, I don't even, so recently one of Richard Dawkins' fellow atheists became a believer. Ayiri is her name and she was a Muslim, grew up in Islam and then for about 10 years she became an atheist traveling all around the world, communities in Europe and all throughout America mocking Christianity, mocking Islam. She said, but then I began to find myself so empty. She fell into such a depression she didn't want to live anymore. And all the psychologists and all the psychiatrists that she was going to weren't helping. You kill God and you kill reason and purpose, right?
I mean you're here for nothing, you mean nothing. So when you create that hole, this vacuum, and if you study Darwin, I mean Charles Darwin was a, you talk about a mental case, and I don't mean, like he was a brilliant guy but he couldn't even like survive in society. He had all kinds of health issues but he couldn't even hardly, it was just, if you just read his biography, the guy was really, really could be intelligent about some things but when he killed God he killed so much that it destroyed him, it destroyed him from the inside. He actually went to a theological university, he was going to become like a preacher. And so when he turned against God, his biographer said that his life was like one long attempt to destroy God.
That's why creation of evolution allowed that opportunity. But it was just interesting hearing this converted atheist who was just talking about the utter emptiness of their life, utter despair, utter just meaningless. And when finally she had one of her psychologists or somebody tell her, why don't you just call out to God, it seems like it's more than physical, it seems like it's a spiritual thing. And when she did that, it so impacted her in such a dynamic way it's just changed her life, gave her peace, joy, fulfillment, and it drives Dawkins crazy.
I can tell you, if you, I'm not encouraging you to go read atheists, this is just something that I like to sometimes do because I like to see where they're coming from and where they're talking about things. But the emptiness that they have, the void, the Carl Sagan's, the guys that just, remember the old shows Cosmos and he would go on there and it just, but at the end of their life, they just, just a great void of emptiness and nothingness. Aren't you thankful we have purpose in life, reason to live? It's incredible the amount of purpose that you have every single day.
I'm talking to a man this afternoon who knows his days are numbered in the single digits. He says it's a very hard thing to die. And I began to share with him the magnitude of his purpose in these last days that he has. Incredible purpose. You know, Jesus not only called us to live well for him, but he also called us to die well for him. You have reason in not only the easy, joyful, happy times of life, but also in suffering. He has infused you with eternal purpose. Eons will reflect what you've done for God, not just in living, but in dying.
Incredible purpose. Why is there pain? Is the servant greater than his master? If Jesus suffered, should I not?
Should I not endure hardships? We live better in our country than like 99.9% of most human beings that have lived on this planet. Right? I mean, listen, we have three inch lower lumbar support. We got armrests. We got cushioned seats. I mean, you know, we got a controlled climate.
We live physically better than most kings did throughout history. Right? You sit in a car that's cushioned. You hit a button while your wife's asleep and it heats that up and she wakes up mad.
It's hilarious. There's all these things you can do now. But it's an incredible thing and sometimes we lose sight of that. But I can tell you, sin is a real assault against us and how do we deal with this? And so he comes and he asks the question, wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his ways? How do we get clean? How do we get clean?
How does that happen? And a clean life is received by those who sit and listen to the right truth. He says, wherewithal shall a young man cleans his ways by taking heed thereto according to thy word.
You take heed to the word of God. If you want to be a wise person and grow, you need wise teachers to grow from in life. Being a great learner comes from being a great listener. Proverbs one five says, a wise man will hear and they increase in learning. One thing I found about wise people, you know, you have Dr. Steve down here, he's got a PhD and he's down here writing down more notes than probably anybody in this room tonight. There's a reason the intelligence and he would hate me saying any of these things. He's probably writing down, please do not ever say anything like this again.
He'll write me a letter on it. But he just keeps learning. And that's how I think the majority of you are.
That's why you're here tonight. You're wanting to learn. And you don't always have to write stuff down to learn, but I can tell you, you remember like 50 to 70% more when you write stuff down.
It's an incredible help. But learners just keep learning. The wise get wiser. Wise people don't watch. They don't do this all day.
Right? They have too many more important things going on. There's something they need to gain.
It doesn't mean that you don't have times of relaxation and entertainment, but it means that that doesn't absorb and control you. Life is too valuable, isn't it? It's too precious to waste. Proverbs one eight says my son, hear the instruction of thy father. How often Jesus would say, he that had ears to hear, let him hear. He said, Jesus said to his faithful disciples, but blessed are your eyes they see for your ears that they hear.
And that's what I would say to you tonight. And so are you one who is wise enough to listen to the teachers that God's given you in life to explain the word of God? That can be a Christian mentor. That can be a parent. That could be a friend. That could be a life group leader.
That could be a pastor or teacher. Listen to what Proverbs nine eight says. It says, reprove a scorner, reprove not a scorner lest he hate you, but rebuke a wise man and he'll love you. Give instruction to a wise man, he'll get wiser.
Teach a just man, he will increase in learning. You ever try to reprove somebody for something they're doing foolish and they get mad at you? That's not a reflection on you.
That's a reflection on them. We all used to be that when we were kids, right? Parents would get on us and we would get upset and we were lacking knowledge.
Proverbs 13 one says a wise son hears his father's instructions, but a scorner hears not rebuke. And so one thing I would point out for the teacher to start with a question lets the learner know that this is one of the most important questions they need to be asking themselves. This is a leading question.
How can I rid myself of sin? You need to know that. Youth do not always know the right questions to ask. They don't, when I went to college I didn't know what I needed to know. Anybody know what I'm talking about when you went to college? It's like that would have been helpful if I realized what I needed to know back then. Like I wish I could revert back to even high school. I just, I was a terrible student never, but now I'm a great student. But I was not a good student back then. I played sports and I was going to probably be a police officer or something and I thought in law enforcement and God redirected that and I'm like, oh, I probably should have been listening in all these classes like, you know, learning how to write properly and all this stuff that I couldn't stand.
And I spent the rest of my life like writing and studying and learning and so playing catch up on some of that for quite a few years. Teachers guide people where they need to learn and let me ask you, when you have people in your life you're trying to instruct, have you ever slowed down and thought, instead of telling them what they need to know, ask them a question to see if they can get there. You know, Jesus would ask questions like, who do men say that I the Son of Man am? Do you think he didn't know?
Of course he knew. And then he wanted them to confess what they were going to say and then he says, but who do you say that I am? Adam, where art thou? It's not that God lost Adam and Eve in the garden. God doesn't ask questions for his own benefit, he asks it for our benefit and things that we need to do, self-reflection. And so when I talk to an atheist, I never get emotionally charged and upset with them, I just say, what brought you to that? And they usually tell me about a family member that died, some situation and so I find out they're an emotional atheist, they're not an intellectual atheist, it's more of just a pain in their life. Then I ask them, so when you rid yourself of God, how does that fix it? If there is no God, how did that remedy it for you?
Or did that just allow you to be able to supplant anger on an entity that you choose not to believe? Why the rage against God and not the rage against the boogeyman? If there is no God, then he's equal to the boogeyman, right? You don't ever hear anybody saying, I don't believe in a boogeyman, I'm anti-bogeyman. But why anti-God? I think it's because the rage of pain is inflicted on who they know is there and they want to blame him for it.
The blame that is shifted there, it just evidences his reality because nobody rages against like aliens or anything else, right? But what is the answer to the question in verse 9? He says, take heed to the word of God.
That's the answer. It's taking heed to it. The word heed there is talking about pay close attention, keep it, guard it, watch over, observe it.
Incredible needs to be your discipline in it. When you are given directions, and I was teasing about this, I can't remember if Sunday or last week, but when you ask somebody sometimes in an older generation, like, hey, what's the address where I'm going? They sometimes are slow to give you the address. They begin to describe like how to get there from where you are.
And the millennial generation, which I'm at the very tip of that, we're just like, really the address is really all I need to know because I have a guy on my phone who will tell me exactly, I even have a picture pulled up and it'll direct me there. And so you just, but you could have the best map, but if you don't follow that map, it doesn't matter how good the map is. You've got to pay attention. You ever go down the highway, this is the worst. And you're traveling and your wife falls asleep. You're like, honey, I will get there.
I will not get off the wrong exit. But somehow you turn your volume down too far. And so when the little guy's like, take an exit in a half mile, he's too quiet. You don't hear him because you love your wife so much, you're going to let her sleep and you're not going to turn her heat on when it's 95 degrees outside to heat her up like a biscuit. So I'm, you know, and what happens is that you're like, ah, you know, you know, you look up and you find it's like quickest U-turn you can make. You're like, oh no, stay asleep honey.
Now the heater, you're in real trouble because she wakes up hot and you're out of direction. It's not good, but you can have the right directions, but if you are not paying attention and taking heat to that, you'll get off. So you can have the word of God, but if we are not taking heat to it, if we're not paying attention to it, friends, we can get off. That's why the Bible says be doers of the word and not hearers only.
That causes deception. When you think about Matthew 7, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says you can build on the rock if you hear the word of God and do it. But he says, whosoever hears my words and does them not is a foolish man who builds on the sand. The only difference between building on the rock, building on the sand, being wise or being foolish is obedience or doing what you've heard. That means that everybody here tonight is on the cusp of wisdom or foolishness. We're either going to walk out of here as wise or foolish based upon whether we obey or disobey God's word. And so do you take heat to the word of God?
Do you take heat to it? You know, pursuit exposes priority. Pursuit exposes priority. Jesus, if you wanted to know what his priority was, you just read places like Matthew 18, 12 when he says a sheep wanders away and he goes after it. Luke 19, 10, for the son of man has come to seek and to save that which is lost.
Pursuit evidences priority. Notice the pursuit of the psalmist in verse 10. He says, with my whole heart have I sought thee. Oh, let me not wander from thy commandments.
Not part of my heart, not just a little bit. He says, I have gone all in on this. This is a whole hearted pursuit. This is reflective of verse 2, Psalm 119 verse 2. He says, blessed are they that keep his testimonies that seek him with the whole heart.
Let me ask you this question. When in your life did you come to realize God is more than what you understood him to be and you really went all in heartwise for him? When did you really go all in heartwise where you were like, I pursued him with all of my heart.
Have you arrived there yet? If you haven't gotten to the point where you pursue him with all of your heart, what do you think the problem is? Is it that God's not that valuable, his word is not that valuable, or that I don't recognize the value? You know, the guy with one leg because he had to have one amputated values walking more than the person that has two legs. The person who had a near death experience cherishes every day a little bit more than the person who did not because they begin to recognize the value of those things. A lot of us woke up today, we didn't value the ability to see as much, but I can tell you people who go through glaucoma and they go through different eye surgeries and they can get their vision back at some levels, they're like, man, I just, I'm so thankful to be able to see clearly. And so just understand tonight, God's value is so much more than we can realize. Sometimes we just don't see it because we take it for granted. And so the next question is how can you practically take heed to God's word? So the first thing is take heed to it, pursue it.
Blessed are they that pursue with their whole art. Secondly, by hiding God's word in verse 11 and 12. Verse 11 says thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against you.
So when you recognize the evil of sin, when you desire victory over sin, when you recognize a pure heart comes from being washed with water by the word, you will, you will see the value of God's word. The word hid here is a Hebrew word safan. It means to hide treasure, to treasure up.
You know, in those days they didn't have banks. So if you had something that was very valuable, you would go dig a hole and you would put it in the ground. You would, you would put it somewhere in the earth, you would treasure it in the earth. And so the idea of safan, which really just means to hide, by connotation began to mean also to treasure. Some translations translate it that way. Thy word have I treasured in my heart. It really, the right translation is thy word have I hid in my heart, but because it became to mean what is treasured by what is hid, it carried that, that further connotation. So the idea is that the word of God is so valuable, just like you would hide some treasure in a field because it was so precious to you that you wouldn't want anybody to take it. He says you need to hide his word like a treasure in your heart. And the idea is not that you would seek to keep it from people, but that you would value it so much that you would want it to be stored up in that which is the most valuable part of you, which is your heart, your inward person.
Job 23 12 says, neither have I gone back from the commandments of his lips. I have saffonned or esteemed or treasured the words of his mouth more than my necessary food. Proverbs 2 1, my son, if thou will receive my words and saffon or hide or treasure my commandments with thee. It's the idea of valuing them. And it creates a response by the one who values it to the point where they're now infusing that into their heart. The Bible teaches that the heart of man is the source of our action. Proverbs 4 23 says, keep thy heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of what?
Of life. So our life, what comes out on the outside is directed immediately by what is on the inside. It is our brain of operation. Now, when we think about heart in the United States in our culture, we think about the emotional capacity. We think about more of that side of it, the affection side. But the heart is much more than that in the Bible.
It's really the control center. There are actually 370 references to the heart in the Bible. The heart is the driving portion of a person's being. Jesus emphasizes the heart in Luke 6 45.
He says, a good man out of the good treasures heart bringeth forth that which is good and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil out of the abundance of the heart of the mouth speaketh. And so Jesus taught that sin originates in the heart. That's why he said, it's not just adultery with a woman. He said, but if you have lust in your heart, that's the beginning stages and really what adultery is. The adultery started on the inside. It just showed up on the outside. Covetousness starts on the inside.
It shows up on the outside. It's critical that we understand that the heart is the issue when it comes to behavior. We must realize all sin is a heart problem, that the bad or good that comes outside of us starts on the inside of us. But you need to know this, that outward change without inward change is hypocrisy. How did Jesus feel about those who cleaned up the outside, but the inside was not clean?
Listen to Matthew 23 25. He says, woe unto you scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, you may clean the outside of the cup and the platter, but within are full of extortion and excess. He says in verse 26, thou blind Pharisees, cleanse first that which is within the cup and the platter, that the outside of them may be clean. Also, you have to start on the inside.
You imagine somebody coming over to eat dinner and you clean the outside of the cup and the inside's all filthy. You know, it would just be a disgusting reality and that's the way God's viewing this. That's why Christianity needs to be authentic. It needs to be real and genuine. I think that's and I think that's why we're seeing almost a revival happening in the millennial generation and some of the youngers is because they're so sick of the facade and the fake and the world system.
They're like, give me something that's real, that's genuine, that's authentic, that I can hold on to, something with substance. And I've been so encouraged by the increase in the young people in our culture that are beginning to turn to the Lord. It's an incredible thing. It's one of the most shocking things I've ever seen in 20 years of ministry.
I've been doing this for 20 some years. I've never seen the ramp up like this. I mean the millennials, the 25 to like 40 year olds, 44 year olds, 28 through 44 year olds, there's an 80% increase in church attendance in that group from pre-COVID to post-COVID.
That's insane. The baby boomers, the 65 and overs, there was a 0% increase from pre-COVID to post-COVID. We're not losing the older generation or the younger generation, we're losing the older generation. Isn't that tragic? Thank you if you're in that baby boomer and you're not allowing COVID to control you. Amen.
Because the culture lied to us about some things, some things they told us the truth on, but a lot of that was a control tactic by I think many. And if you're watching right now, come on back. Right? And all God's people said, because we love you.
Right? I can see you. Oh, I see you. I can see them right now. They're like, well, I'm going to turn it down and I'm just going to listen, but I'm not going to watch.
He won't see me. Some people can't make it on Wednesdays. That's understandable. It's a busy weeks for people, but it's important to be in the house of God.
Isn't it? And so the great majority of teaching today is on behavior modification. You need to change your behavior and it is important to change behavior, but it's not behavior modification that we need. It's regeneration that we need. We need a new heart. We have a corruption. We have a depravity on the inside. This is Romans eight, seven and eight. For the carnal man is an enmity against God. It is not subject to the law of God. Neither indeed can be so that they that are in the flesh cannot please God.
Paul, Romans 7, 18. I know that in me and my flesh was no good thing. We are bent towards sin.
We choose to do the wrong. And so external transformation is hypocritical. Internal transformation is genuine relationship with Christ. And so we need God's grace that alone can change our heart. I sat down with a man today who has been given a new heart this last year. He went from being lost to found, from being dead to alive.
He went from being a sinner to now one who is following Christ, who loves Jesus, who spends hours in the word loving the truth of the gospel. And I can't do that for somebody. I have no ability to do that. I am so powerless.
No ability. It is only God that can do that heart work. Listen to Ezekiel 36, 25 and six.
Ezekiel 36, 25 and six. Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you and you will be clean. From all your filthiness and from all your idols will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you and a new spirit will I put within you. And I will take away the stony heart of your flesh. I will give you a heart of flesh and I will put, look what he says, I will put my spirit within you and calls you to walk in my statutes and you shall keep my judgment and do them.
God, do that for me and everyone here. Infuse your spirit, fill us with your spirit. You have baptized us in your spirit. Let us walk in the spirit that we will always walk in your statutes and your judgments and always do them.
You agree with that? I mean, that is our passionate desire, isn't it? Isn't that a great verse to say, God, do that for me. Give me that clean heart. Do the work on the inside I cannot do.
Hebrews 10 16 says this is the covenant I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law into their heart and in their mind will I write them. That's what God alone can do. We can't, you want to do that for your kid? You think you can do, you think you and I can give our kids a new heart? Show me a parent that's overly frustrated. I'll show you a parent trying to control their kid. We've all done it.
If you have kids, you pull your hair out, you put it back, sometimes you just throw it away. It's an endeavor in patience. It's an endeavor that elevates our own inability and maybe you have a relationship in your life with somebody you're like, man, if they could just, what you have to do is take that and pray that and the gospel is what produces that. You say, well, they got saved, but there's been no change, then they didn't get saved. There is no such thing as an unchanging gospel.
You believe that? I mean, Lighthouse believes that. Lighthouse will preach that till I'm no longer the pastor here and the next guy better preach that. We believe that when Jesus comes in, he's going to do something. How on earth could you come in contact with the living God and there's no life from it?
This is the reality of that. Notice the outcome from the word hidden in the heart, verse 11, that I might not sin against thee. You begin to have this pure heart. Thy word have I hidden in my heart. How do you hide the word of God in your heart?
Let me give you a couple of things. First of all, you got to read it. You got to get in the word of God. Friends, every one of us should spend at least 30 minutes a day reading the Bible.
You say, well, I don't have 30 minutes, then do whatever you can, but begin starting somewhere. When you take time for the word, it doesn't take time away from your day. It actually gives you time.
What happens is you begin to prioritize life and what really matters begins to carve away that which doesn't really matter in life. Begin to study. You know the difference between reading and studying is this. Those who study the Bible ask questions. If you just read it, you just read it. But when you study, you ask questions.
That's why here journals and 242 on Sunday nights is so essential. And you need to learn to ask questions because through our here journal process, that's what it does. You ask questions like, what does this verse mean? Why did he write that? What's the context?
Who's the people? What's the situation he's writing to? Why did he use that word? What's that phrase mean?
What's the verse after that mean? If you don't have a good commentary set, you can utilize tons of online options. Go to Bible Hub, Blue Letter Bible, Lagos, which is a wealth of, it's the best.
Lagos is the best, but it's, I mean, it takes a minute to kind of learn the curve of that. I would start probably with Blue Letter Bible. If you have questions, go to gotquestions.org.
It's a great place that has doctrinally sound Bible answers to like 20 some thousand questions. Get a good Bible commentary set. Memorize scripture. Begin to memorize scripture.
When Dawson Trotman, who was the founder of the Navigators, became a Christian in 1926, he was driving a truck from a lumberyard in Los Angeles. While driving, he would work on memorizing a verse a day. During the first three years of his Christian life, he memorized his first thousand verses. When's the last time you memorized a verse out of the Bible? Let me just say this. I have had a revival of loving to memorize scripture. I don't say that. God knows my heart.
I'm not trying to lift myself up. I have found it to be the most riveting thing that I've done in the last, I don't know how long. I am so thrilled to memorize the Word of God right now.
I look forward to it so much in the morning. I can't hardly stop to go to the next thing. I'm like, man, I need to get to, but I just, I memorize those verses that I preached tonight. I just enjoy just soaking those in and I'm like, I really need to begin to break these down and like put a message together. But I wanted to memorize back through the book of Philippians, so I got chapter one down and I'd read it forward and backwards and I just love having the Word of God in my heart. And it's been such an internally energizing joy.
And you won't experience it, I'm telling you, I only say it because you won't experience the joy unless you begin to do that. And if you use excuses like, well, I just can't memorize, I would ask you a question. If I paid you a thousand dollars for every verse you memorized from now to Sunday, how many do you think you could memorize? If you would memorize for money and not for the joy of the Word, which one is really your idol?
What do you value? I'm telling you, we got some, probably some people, I wouldn't do it for money. You'd be the first to do it for money. Maybe lining up, just don't tell preacher I did this. John 11, 35, Jesus wept. A thousand bucks, right?
You'd be all over that, all day long, baby. That's right. But I can tell you friends, Jesus memorized scripture and he's in the wilderness. He was quoting verses. He didn't have a Bible with him. We know he was just quoting verses. All through the Bible, you see guys just taking it and just unleashing the Word of God.
I think about Peter on the day of Pentecost. He didn't have the Torah with him. He's standing up and he starts quoting out of Joel. He's jumping around.
You have Stephen in Acts 7. He quotes out of Genesis, jumps over to Isaiah, back to I think Jeremiah. He's jumping all over the place, just unleashing the Word of God on them.
Where did they get that? They had it in their heart and they're just exploding the Word of God out. And I'm telling you, they didn't have the New Testament. They didn't have a bunch of hand copies like we do today. I'll never forget when I was in a church in Missouri and one of the missionaries came from China and he showed us a handwritten Bible. He said, the Word of God is so precious where I'm at. He said, the whole Bible handwritten.
Because they weren't allowed to have it and where they would take like a page and pass it around different ones and they would take it home and memorize it and bring it back and share pages and stuff. I told the church I was teaching on scripture memorization this last Sunday night. I think if I'm ever in jail, wouldn't it be a wonderful thing that if the Word of God was taken from me, I could still have chapters of the Bible and even books of the Bible that I could write out by memory. How valuable that would be. How valuable would the Word of God be if you had no access to it physically, but you could hold on to it in your heart and no one could touch it.
To be able to share it with somebody. Friends, I can tell you this, there's nothing you're going to value this week more than the Word of God. To value the Word is to value God. What you do with the Word is what we really do with the God of the Word.
So hide it, treasure it. He says in verse 12, blessed art thou, O Lord, teach me thy statutes. When you hide the Word of God, you treasure it and you see God is the one to be your teacher.
This is illumination. This is verse 18, open my eyes to be old, wondrous things out of thy law. If you were to read through all of Psalm 119, what you would find is he keeps saying, teach me thy statute, teach it to me, teach it to me, teach it to me. We go to God and say, God, open my eyes, help me understand this truth.
He'll show it to you. Thirdly, heeding the Word, hiding the Word. And thirdly, we find victory over sin through the Word of God by heralding the Word.
In verse 13, he says, with my lips have I declared all the judgments of thy mouth. Now the Word of God comes out from inside of us. Our mouths are really a window to our heart. Our lips tell on us. What you cherish comes out. You know, like they say, what is in the well comes up in the bucket. The psalmist has treasured the Word of God, hidden it in his heart, and now his lips are affected by that. And whatever is in someone's heart always comes out. You just listen to them.
If they get around you, they will find out what you really love. What do you spend time talking about when you're at home, when you're at work, when you're at church, after the services? I think it's okay to talk about different things in life, but I think Jesus in the Bible, in Christ, and souls, and spiritual truth, and ministering the Word to one another, there should be some evidence that begins to bubble out. If you were around Martha, what do you think she would talk about?
When you get this place cleaned up, when you do this over here, when you get lunch, dinner, dinner ready, when you get, I mean, you know what I mean. Praise God for precious, you know, home keepers like that, and those who minister in that way. But if you were around Mary, what do you think Mary would talk about? She would, she's just consumed with the Word. What do you think Job would talk about? You think Job would talk about possessions? You think Job would talk about the material things? I think he would be so consumed with the God of the Word and the Word of God that that's what he would be cherishing.
Who's the last person you discuss the Bible with? I can tell you, it is an incredible encouragement. When you grow in the Word, you will, by osmosis, you will begin to infuse that joy and influence and heat into other people. It just pushes into their life organically without even knowing it.
You won't even mean to. It's like, you ever get around somebody and they begin to share something and you just feel so convicted, you're just like, man. And they don't even mean anything by it, they're just talking about what God's doing in their life and this and that, and then you're, yeah. And you go on and because of the joy and excitement and passion they have for God, it's like, man, what's wrong with me?
And I can tell you, there's been people like that in my life that have just been such an encouragement. In Psalm 119 or verse 14, he said, I have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies as much as in all riches. Like his joy for the Word is more than any riches that could be offered him. Psalm 119 72 says this, the law of thy mouth is better unto me than thousands of gold and silver. If you want victory over sin, begin committing God's Word to your heart. God's Word will begin to be a protective wall on the inside of you. Sometimes when people struggle with certain sins, I say, you need to build the wall.
And they're like, what are you talking about? I said, if you have a temptation, say for example, you have a chocolate cake in front of you and you're like, I'm cutting out sugar and carbs. Now, if you can eat a chocolate cake and it has no carbs and sugar, you're eating pure cancer, but it's whatever. I eat the whole thing and it has zero calories.
It's gotta be something you're eating, right? So anyway, but don't write me a letter and tell me all the health stuff, really, it's no good. But if you don't want to give into that, you don't want to put it right in front of you. You want to make it hard for you to get to it. You want to make it a challenge. So what you do is you begin to create walls in your life where it's like for you to ever get to a sin, you make it very difficult for yourself to get to that.
It's very difficult. You remove yourself. You put barriers up and the greatest place you can put the barrier is inside of your heart. You begin to make a bulwark of the Word of God around your heart against sin. And I can tell you the Word of God creates that formidable wall that is a protection for you. So let me bring us to the last point.
We'll wrap this up very quickly. Victory over sin comes through heeding to the Word, hiding the Word in our hearts, heralding His Word from our lips, sharing it with other people, telling other people about it. And as you tell other people about it, it brings such joy to your own heart. And number four, by honoring the Word of God, verse 15, He said, I will meditate on thy precepts and have respect unto thy ways. In verse 15 and 16, there's really four pieces to this. The way you can honor the Word of God comes in four ways. First is you honor it by meditating on it.
When something's really valuable, you dwell on it. Seven times in Psalms 119, He talks about meditating on the Word of God. Verse 15, He says, I will meditate in thy precepts. He begins to dwell on it. Psalm 119, 97, O how I love thy Lord is my meditation all the day. Meditation here refers to thinking on it, musing on it, speaking on it, reflecting on it all throughout your life. Your honor of the Word also comes through respecting its authority over you.
In verse 15, the second part of that, He says, not only will I meditate on it, but I will have respect unto thy ways. You hold it with weightiness. You carry the Word of God with some heaviness in your life.
It affects you. It rules over you. The idea here is just like a workman would be led by a rule, by a governing system of law by which he is putting together a construction project and he's following those directions and he has to stay inside of those bounds and follow that guide. So the Word of God becomes that authority in our life.
We honor it by submission. And then thirdly, you honor the Word of God by delighting in it. Verse 16 says, I will delight myself in thy statutes.
God's Word is really a true delight. I mean, it is, if you lose your joy in the Word, it's because of this. Two things, typically. Number one, either sin is coming into your heart or number two, you stop sacrificing for the Word. It's almost always one of those two things. Sin is coming or I, like God's Word isn't a sacrifice for me anymore.
What happens is this. You went from like, well, I was getting up early and I was reading and praying, but then that wasn't no longer a sacrifice. Well, that was easy to do.
That was easy. That's like drinking water now. You know, for all of us that got off like pop, it could be hard at first, right? You're like, man, I've got a headache. But then after like a few weeks or a few months, you're like, it's not hard to not drink pop.
No, chocolate cake sitting on the mousse and the ice cream and you just caramel with the nuts. It just becomes almost a mental covetousness right now, right? And don't bring me one of those, right? Don't bring me into sin. Don't tempt your pastor. Build the wall right now, Josh.
Build the wall. I am trying to. So we must realize that there are things that can distract our delight in this. If you were to wake up tomorrow or this week sometime and just say, you know, I'm going to carve this time out and sacrifice and give more time to God. I want you to ask yourself after you've done that, do I feel a greater joy from that? When you carve time out to memorize the word of God and spent 20 minutes to memorize the scripture, you will be shocked the joy that comes from doing that.
It's an incredible joy too. And then number four, you honor the word of God by not forgetting it. This is another way to honor the word of God in verse 16.
He says, I will not forget thy word. If you have kids, you know that that can happen, right? I thought I told you to clean whatever up. Didn't I tell you to do the dishes?
Didn't I tell you to take this in? And what happens when they don't always honor the word of their parents, they don't remember it. And so we can be like that with God. And when we honor God, we won't forget it. We'll remember it. We'll hold it in high regard.
Do you hold the word of God in high regard? And so in conclusion, sin is the most devastating thing to ever hit the earth. It is behind all of our problems, pains and heartaches and devastations. Therefore, the most blessed thing in our life is to have it removed. We're going to battle this until the day we go to heaven. And for you and I to find victory, we must heed the word of God. We must obey it, not to just have them out, but Father, we have to hide it and treasure it in our heart. We need to herald it and communicate with other people. And we need to honor the word of God by giving it weightiness in our life. And so I pray tonight that we would be hearers of this and also doers of God's word. Amen. Let's all stand this evening.
