July 23, 2026 - Deuteronomy 22 & Psalm 143

We read Deuteronomy 22 and Psalm 143, then we slow down on Psalm 143:10 to reset how we think about discerning God’s will. We reject the “cosmic Rubik’s cube” view of guidance and lean into a simple prayer that trusts God’s Word and God’s Spirit to lead us on level ground. 

For more information about Compass Bible Church South Valley, visit compassbiblesv.org. Keep reading. Keep growing. God’s Word is a lamp to your feet, and a light to your path. 

Transcript

Welcome And Today’s Reading

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Lamp and Light Bible Plan, where we are seeking to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength with God's word lighting the way. I'm Josiah Smith, Lee, Pastor of Compass South Valley. Today is Thursday, July 23rd, 2026.

Deuteronomy 22 Read Aloud

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Listen intently to God's written word. Deuteronomy 22. You shall not see your brother's ox or his sheep going astray and ignore them. You shall take them back to your brother. And if he does not live near you, and you do not know who he is, you shall bring it home to your house, and it shall stay with you until your brother seeks it. Then you shall restore it to him, and you shall do the same with his donkey, or with his garment, or with any lost thing of your brothers, which he loses and you find, you may not ignore it. You shall not see your brother's donkey or his ox fallen down by the way, and ignore them. You shall help him to lift them up again. A woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God. If you come across a bird's nest in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs in the mother sitting on the young one or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. You shall let the mother go, but the young you may take for yourself, that it may go well with you, and that you may live long. When you build a new house, you shall make a parrot pet for your roof, that you may not bring the guilt of blood upon your house, if any one should fall from it. You shall not sow your vinegar with two kinds of seed, lest the whole yield be forfeited, the crop that you have sown in the yield of the vineyard, you shall not plough with an ox and a donkey together, you shall not wear cloth of wool and linen mixed together. You shall make yourself tassels on the four corners of the garment with which you cover yourself. If any man takes a wife and goes into her and then hates her, and accuses her of misconduct, and brings a bad name upon her, saying, I took this woman, and when I came near her, I did not find in her evidence of virginity. Then the father of the young woman and her mother shall take and bring out the evidence of her virginity to the elders of the city in the gate. And the father of the young woman shall say to the elders, I gave my daughter to this man to marry, and he hates her. And behold, he has accused her of misconduct, saying, I did not find in your daughter evidence of virginity. And yet this is the evidence of my daughter's virginity, and they shall spread the cloak before the elders of the city. Then the elders of that city shall take the man and whip him, and they shall find him a hundred shekels of silver, and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought a bad name upon a virgin of Israel, and she shall be his wife. He may not divorce her all his days. But if the thing is true that evidence of virginity was not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done an outrageous thing in Israel by whoring in her father's house. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman and the woman, so you shall purge the evil from Israel. If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only a man who lay with her shall die. But you shall do nothing on the young woman. She has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor, because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help, there was no one to rescue her. If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days. A man shall not take his father's wife, so that he's not does not uncover his father's nakedness.

Psalm 143 Read Aloud

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Psalm one forty three. Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my pleas for mercy. In your faithfulness answer me in your righteousness. Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you. For the enemy has pursued my soul, he has crushed my life to the ground, he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead. Therefore my spirit faints within me, my heart within me is appalled. I remember the days of old, I meditate on all that you have done, I ponder the work of your hands, I stretch out my hands to you, my soul thirsts for you like a parched land. Answer me quickly, O Lord, my spirit fails. Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit. Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul. Deliver me from my enemies, O Lord, I have fled to you for refuge. Teach me to do your will, for you are my God. Let your good spirit lead me on level ground. For your name's sake, O Lord, preserve my life. In your righteousness, bring my soul out of trouble. And in your steadfast love, you will cut off my enemies, and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul, for I am your servant.

Tyler’s Absence And Prayer Request

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Now I'm sure you have noticed that we are missing 50% of who is on the podcast. Mr. Tyler Sanborn is suffering right now in Hawaii. Him and his family are there. They are at a wedding of a family member, and Tyler is there for the week. So that's why I am doing the podcast all by myself. But you can, if you think of Tyler and Sadie, you could be praying for them. Pray for just a great time with family, pray for safe travels on the way back. I think they'll be back this weekend. So just pray for a sweet time there in Hawaii and just enjoying the beauty of God's creation.

Discerning God’s Will Without Panic

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Now, one verse I want to point out in Psalm 143 specifically is verse 10. Teach me to do your will, for you are my God. Let your good spirit lead me on level ground. Now, so often I get questions as a pastor about what is the will of God. Specifically, people are asking that question as it pertains to their life. What is the will of God for my life? And so often I find that Christians can feel this sense of desperation or maybe even hopelessness when it comes to understanding and discerning the will of God for their life. Sometimes we treat the will of God, I've described it in the past, as some sort of cosmic Rubik's cube that God has messed up all the colors of and thrown into the corner for us to go and try to figure out and solve on our own. And so oftentimes we can feel behind the eight ball, we can feel frustrated, it feels like it's some unsolvable mystery. And I believe verse 10 of our psalm today hopefully takes uh hacks all really to all of those wrong beliefs. God is not some sort of vindictive, punitive God in the sky with his arms folded, uh, just looking down his nose at those who are trying to discover his will. Uh no, that's not the kind of God that we have. We have a good father who loves to get good gifts. He has spoken very clearly in and through his word. He wants us to understand who he is. And I believe here in Psalm 143, verse 10, that's exactly what we see. This is a prayer, another prayer of David, and David's asking, teach me to do your will. Now just think about that for a second. The mere fact that David is praying and asking, Teach me, teach me to do your will. There's an assumption kind of undergirding this that God's will can be taught. It's something that can be learned, it's something that's accessible. It's not something that's aloof, and it's not something that is some sort of cosmic mystery that we have to solve the Rubik's Cube to understand. Uh no, this is something that can be discerned and and grown in. Teach me to do your will. So even just that prayer, I think, gets us in the direction of recognizing that God wants us to understand what his will for our lives is. So again, David prays that prayer, teach me to do your will. And as a result of that, here's what he says, for you are my God, let your good spirit lead me on level ground. Not only can we ask and discern the will of God, we can pray that God will help us to grow in understanding it as he teaches us, he is our God, but we can also be confident that in following God's will and in learning it and discerning it, you can be confident that the Spirit of God will lead you into the will of God, which David describes as level ground, a sense of sure-footedness. It's not rocky, it's not bumpy, or at least in this sense. Of course, we we recognize that the Christian life is filled with challenges. But uh, just the way that David puts it here, teach me to do your will, let your good spirit lead me on level ground. There's a sense in which when you're pursuing the will of God, you can have confidence that you're on level ground, that you're standing where you ought to stand. Now, level ground doesn't necessarily mean easy ground, but at least it's ground that you know where you are. You have a sense of sure-footedness, and even go back to what Psalm 119 says, uh, letting the spirit and the word guide you. God's word is a lamp to your feet and a light to your path. And so I see here just a great encouragement for you to understand if you're wrestling with what God's will is, uh that this is a verse that hopefully brings you some level of comfort. Now, of course, people, when they ask that question, really what they're wondering and what they're asking about oftentimes is very specific, nuanced situations. What's God's will for my life with my kids? What's God's will for my life with my job? What's God's will for my life in my marriage, or whatever the case may be. And so some of those things we don't have direct lines, of course, to scripture. God doesn't expressly um answer all of those questions, at least in the ways that we would want in scripture. But what I what I can say is that what you know, what Paul talks about in Thessalonians, this is the will of God for your life. I mean, that's just a verse, it's like a trumpet that just announces here's the will of God, your sanctification. So, what's God's will for you, Christian? God's will for you is for you to be sanctified. That's the verb form of holy, to be made holy. God's will is for you to be conformed greater into the image of Christ. And so when you think about God's will, I want you to pray verse 10. God, teach me to do your will, for you are my God. Let your good spirit lead me on level ground. And once you have that primary focus of God's will being your sanctification, your conformity, your maturity in Christ, then some of those more minute, or maybe I shouldn't say minute, but more specific contextual questions that you're asking about the house that you should buy, or uh what you should do for a career, or uh, you know, the specific circumstances that you find yourself in that you're wrestling with what's God's will for me in this, uh, that will flow downstream from the fixed reality of your sanctification being a top priority, a top concern, as it were, from God Himself. And then you can go to Psalm 143, verse 10, and pray, teach me, Lord, to do your will. For you are my God, let your good spirit lead me on level ground. For your name's sake, O Lord, preserve my life and your righteousness, bring my soul out of trouble. And you can have confidence that as you pray that again to be taught God's will is to assume that you can understand it. That it's something that can be grown in, it's something that can be comprehended.

Deuteronomy 22 And God’s Holiness

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Now, in Deuteronomy 22, another chapter with some interesting laws, kind of broken down into three sections. We have duty towards uh lost property and neighbors, specifically with ox or sheep or animals of that kind. That's really verses one through four. There's a sense of ownership that people were to have on behalf of their brother. Uh, even though that wasn't their animal, even though technically it wasn't their responsibility, they had an obligation. The duty extends to any lost possession belonging to a neighbor and includes, again, of assisting, feeding, protecting, providing for an animal, uh, even in when they're they've collapsed into a ditch and someone's trying to help them out, there's a responsibility to be neighborly. Now, even those four verses are so foreign uh to the culture that we live in, isn't it? I mean, how often do we hear people say, not my job, not my responsibility? And there's some level of you know, certain certain circumstances that being the case, but here the expectation for the Israelites, their community that God was forming, was that they had an obligation, they had a legal responsibility, even to be neighborly, to love their neighbor as themselves. And we see, of course, the the great commandment to love the Lord your God, love your heart, soul mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself, uh, really flushing itself out in these laws and the ways that they treated others. And then we have a sort of boundary marker, you could say laws in verses five through 15. These cover clothing, gender, um, even a sense of uh vineyards and birds and things like that. And then the chapter ends. This is perhaps some of the most difficult verses for us to read in our context, but it ends with laws concerning sexual conduct, or specifically, I should say, sexual misconduct in verses 13 through 20. So there's laws concerning sexual immorality, even marital disputes. Uh, you know, there's false accusations being made by a husband accusing his wife unfairly of having uh premarital uh unchastity, and you know, there's an interesting sort of dynamic here, but there are laws for uh the men, there are laws for the women, and of course, what you can see in these laws is a great concern for purity, a great concern for following God's commands, for being a society that treated their sexuality as something sacred, as something that God designed for a specific purpose with a specific intention to operate within a specific context. And of course, the surrounding nations uh they knew nothing of these laws or these concerns. And so this was part of God's way of forming and fashioning a people for his own possession who would showcase his holiness to the watching world around

Final Encouragement And Closing

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him. So hopefully you're encouraged today as we read Deuteronomy 22 and Psalm 143, specifically, Psalm 1343, verse 10, that says, Teach me to do your will, for you are my God, let your good spirit lead me on level ground. Have confidence that you can discern, understand, and pursue God's will by prayerfully being dependent on God's word, being empowered by God's spirits to be led on level ground. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on the Lamp and Light Bible Reading Podcast. For more information about Compass Bible Church South Valley, visit compass Bible SV.org. Keep reading, keep growing. God's word is a lamp to your feet and a light to your path.