Psalms 119:167 Soul's Love Story

This is the Truth Network. to do with oxidation, fire, chewing, chewing on things, you know, getting all the nutrients out of something. It's just rich and very rich as it begins to letter, I mean, it begins the word shalom, it begins the word shamayim, which is heaven. It begins the word shabbat, so much to do with rest and tranquility, but also has to do with shekar, which is falsehood and lying. And so it's a really, really interesting word. And excuse me, well, it's a letter and it's a word because it's the letter shin. And every letter as we talk about is Jesus in its own way. And so really, really cool letter as we're coming in, this is the second, the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet. So we're coming in for a landing and this one would be the delight in the fear of the Lord anointing for the letter shin.

And as I said, it's a keeper and you'll understand why I say that in a minute. So in English, it reads, verse 167, my soul hath kept thy testimonies and I love them exceedingly. And so here we have, interestingly from my perspective, the Psalmist coming in for a landing in the next two verses on the letter keep. As we see that he has used that word, in fact, if I was to use the words that are repeated in the 119 Psalm, I did episodes at the very beginning when I introduced this of words that were repeating. Well, keep is one of the words that is repeated. It's actually repeated 21 times throughout this Psalm. And it's absolutely critical word in all the Bible.

You're gonna find it in so many critical places. Like if you love me, you will keep my commandments. And he put Adam in the garden to what?

To keep it. And what Cain said about his brother, I'm not my brother's keeper. So this word is a significant word, very, very significant. And the Psalmist uses it 21 times in the 119 Psalm. You might even remember in the early verses, blessed is he who keeps his testimonies and seeks him with his whole heart.

And it said, oh, that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes. In other words, that word is repeated over and over and over again. And as you might guess, it begins with the letter shin. It's actually a shin and then the letter mem, which of course is the word for kingdom and messiah. Both those words start with the letter mem. But in so many ways we can see in the mem section that it means more. And so that would be more chewing.

And then the last letter in the word keep in Hebrew is letter reish. And so after we chew on more and more and more, it heads us in the right direction. We make the right choices. As a result, we have clean animals that do a whole lot of chewing.

They chew the cud, right? And in so many ways as we chew on the word, we're treasuring it. And that's the idea of keeping. So what it says is my soul, which is a nafesh, and you can hear the shh sound at the end of nafesh because guess what? Your soul ends with that same letter because you are a word burning soul. In other words, as we chew on the word, our soul digests that stuff and it's meant to go in there.

So the last letter in the word soul, which is nafesh in Hebrew, is that letter shin again. And it matches up beautifully with this idea of keeping things in our soul. And so it says I'm gonna keep those testimonies in our souls. And really neat if you keep this idea of using keep and testimonies, you're gonna see when you get to the end of the Bible in Revelation, you know, Satan, if I'm not mistaken, it's in Revelation 14 where it says the dragon was wroth with the child of the woman and went after those who kept his testimonies.

Look at it, it's right there. In other words, you wanna be an enemy of Satan, that's the right team to be on by the way, then keep testimonies, right? And your soul is the place that those get kept just like Christian in a pilgrim's progress, right? He kept his testimony in his bosom. Well, he actually, we keep it in our souls.

That time when Jesus, your Easter morning, when Jesus appeared to you, whether he appeared to you through the scriptures or something that you were reading, maybe he appeared to you through a dear friend who came in a moment when you needed it, like my friend, I was talking about that time in the hospital that came and held my hand. There's all sorts of different ways that your testimony is kept in your soul, but this is just a delight. I mean, a delight in understanding the fear of the Lord is to keep his testimonies, is to keep, you know, again, this word's gonna be used throughout the 119 Psalm.

And what is it that we're gonna keep? We're gonna keep all these things that the psalmist keeps repeating. We're gonna keep his commandments. If you love me, I'll keep my commandments. We're gonna keep his statutes.

Those are the high, hard ones, the union. We're gonna keep his precepts, which is our prayer times and our going to church and all those things. And again, with the idea being that we are going to treasure these things. I mean, it's the whole message behind the letter, and as we see it, in the delight, in the fear of the Lord. So when I look in my own life, if I wanna dig for treasure in my soul, I think of the testimonies, either the testimonies where I saw Jesus show up for somebody in scripture, like the woman who was caught in adultery. And I love that line, and I think about it a lot, where Jesus says to the woman caught in adultery, the woman, where are your accusers, right?

Because when you're in his presence, you can have no accuser. So there's a testimony from the New Testament that you can think of that your soul can keep. Or maybe you got testimonies from the Old Testament, say where Joshua was fixin' to have to deal with Jericho, and there he met the angel of the Lord, and he said, are you on my side or theirs?

There was a testimony or the testimony of when God came for Samson, when he was blind, and he took his hands between the two pillars. In other words, we got all these testimonies that we know in the Bible. But the testimonies in your own life, the time that Leslie had run away, and Jesus came to me and told me, everything's gonna be okay, and he pulled up the driveway. And the story of Johnny Hendricks, where Jesus told me how to talk to him, that a deal is a deal, if you remember that story. In other words, story after story after story of where Jesus showed up in my life are the testimonies that make me come alive.

But also, as we share those, it says you're gonna receive power from on high, right? In the book of Acts, right? To be my witness. Well, the idea, if we witness, in other words, we're telling our testimony, whatever it is that we saw God do in our life, or what we saw God do through his word, or what we saw God do in someone else's life, sometimes we know somebody else's testimony. Those are things that get in our souls. And as we share them, right, that is the power, right?

The people say, oh, wow, yeah, I want that. That's what I want, a relationship like that with the living God, and that through Jesus's death, that's the ultimate testimony, that he died, that he bled for us to pay the price for our sin, that we could have a relationship with God. And that's the testimony of Jesus Christ that's described in Revelations, right, that makes Satan so wroth. Well, let's all go out there and make Satan mad today and share our testimonies. Let's all go out there and make Satan mad today.