SPEAKER_00: Psalm 119, obviously not the whole thing.
SPEAKER_00: We're just in verses 1 through 8 this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Now, there is a library in Cambridge, England that contains many of the oldest intact pieces of the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: One of which is what's called the Nash Papyrus, which contains parts of the Old Testament that date back to even before Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So it's really interesting to see all these manuscripts at the library in Cambridge.
SPEAKER_00: One of the most interesting and fascinating documents in all of human history writing is the Hebrew Bible, which the large majority of it, we would call it the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: The large majority of it, about 99% of the Old Testament, was written in Hebrew.
SPEAKER_00: Hebrew is the original language of the Old Testament, with a couple of exceptions.
SPEAKER_00: And within that Bible, within the Hebrew Bible, within the Old Testament, there is one piece of literature that stands out above the rest in its structural ambition, and that is Psalm 119.
SPEAKER_00: It is the longest chapter in the entire Bible.
SPEAKER_00: It's 176 verses, spanning the full sweep of the Hebrew alphabet from the letter Aleph to the letter Top.
SPEAKER_00: Now, how many letters are in the Hebrew alphabet?
SPEAKER_00: Kids, do y'all know?
SPEAKER_00: 26.
SPEAKER_00: That is right for the English alphabet.
SPEAKER_00: See, I tricked you.
SPEAKER_00: I set you up.
SPEAKER_00: You're right.
SPEAKER_00: 26 letters in the English alphabet.
SPEAKER_00: In the Hebrew alphabet, there are 22 letters.
SPEAKER_00: So Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, each of the 22 stanzas takes its name from a letter of the Hebrew alphabet as it goes through that.
SPEAKER_00: Now, it gets even crazier.
SPEAKER_00: Every verse in each stanza begins with the same letter.
SPEAKER_00: You don't see it in English.
SPEAKER_00: You just have to trust me that it's there in Hebrew.
SPEAKER_00: So in the Hebrew language, when they said, this is the Olive stanza, so every verse is going to begin with the letter Olive.
SPEAKER_00: So it's just a masterpiece, beautifully written and structured in a manner with the intentionality of, we're going to do this in a very poetic manner.
SPEAKER_00: Think about what that takes to write 176 verses, all of them meditating on a single theme, the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 119 is all about the word of God, and to do so with this rigid constraint system of an acrostic, of an alphabetic acrostic, verse by verse, letter by letter.
SPEAKER_00: So many scholars have studied Psalm 119 over the past thousands of years, 2,000 years.
SPEAKER_00: Franz de Leach, a 19th-century Old Testament scholar, called Psalm 119 the Christian's golden ABC of the praise, power, love of the use of the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: And the great church father Augustine confessed that he could not fully grasp Psalm 119, that every time he thought he had grasped it, that he had plumbed its depths, he simply found more there to treasure.
SPEAKER_00: But this morning we're just going to sit in the olive stanza, the first eight verses.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to get a taste of Psalm 119 by studying part one of its 22 parts.
SPEAKER_00: And as we read these verses, I want you to notice something that we're pressed to see.
SPEAKER_00: We often miss in verses like this.
SPEAKER_00: And this is very important for us as believers.
SPEAKER_00: This psalm is at its core not a lecture about duty.
SPEAKER_00: It is a love letter about delight.
SPEAKER_00: It is not an instruction manual dressed up in poetry.
SPEAKER_00: It is the overflow of a heart that has tasted something wonderful, the living word of God, and it cannot stop talking about it.
SPEAKER_00: So let's read this text together, Psalm 119, verses 1 through 8.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart, who also do no wrong but walk in his ways.
SPEAKER_00: You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently, oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes.
SPEAKER_00: Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.
SPEAKER_00: I will praise you with an upright heart when I learn your righteous rules.
SPEAKER_00: I will keep your statutes.
SPEAKER_00: Do not utterly forsake me.
SPEAKER_00: So we're going to move through this in five parts this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Part one's the great declaration.
SPEAKER_00: We see in verses one through three, the psalm opens up with a declaration.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a prayer, it's a declaration.
SPEAKER_00: It opens in the third person.
SPEAKER_00: We don't see the word yet I and you, but a sweeping observation about the blessed life.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed are those whose way is blameless.
SPEAKER_00: And now this is an intentional move.
SPEAKER_00: We have to know that when we come to Psalm 119, um, you know, we we believe all of scripture is breathed out by God, is inspired by God.
SPEAKER_00: One thing you need to know about Psalm 119, everything there is exceptionally intentional.
SPEAKER_00: It's very intentionally placed.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist begins where the entire book of Psalms begins.
SPEAKER_00: I preached on Psalm 1 a few weeks ago.
SPEAKER_00: We saw how it opened with the same Hebrew word, Ashrai, which is blessed, happy, enviable, deeply flourishing in a way that really counts.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 119 is in a real sense an extended meditation of Psalm 1.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 1 held out, if you remember, held out this vision of a blessed man who delights in the law of the Lord and he meditates on it day and night.
SPEAKER_00: And we learn that in Psalm 1, that's referring to Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 119 then explores what delight looks like from 176 different angles or different facets and perspectives.
SPEAKER_00: So ultimately, Psalm 119 is the footprints of Jesus, the blessed man that we see in Psalm 1.
SPEAKER_00: And if we are followers of Christ, if we believe in Christ, this is the way.
SPEAKER_00: You want to follow Christ, then his footprints are all through Psalm 119.
SPEAKER_00: So let's see his footprints here and walk the way in which Christ walked.
SPEAKER_00: Now think of Psalm 1 as the cover, the front cover of the book of Psalms, and Psalm 119 is the book itself, opened wide and examined in full.
SPEAKER_00: Now the blessed life in these first three verses is described in three interlocking and interweaving ways.
SPEAKER_00: First, it is a life that walks in the law of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And notice the word way, it's a path, it's a direction of travel.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist is not describing some static condition, but a dynamic journey.
SPEAKER_00: The blessed life is not achieved at some moment and then simply possessed, it is walked.
SPEAKER_00: And the road it walks is the law, the Torah, the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: Now the word Torah needs a little bit of unpacking.
SPEAKER_00: You've probably heard that word, because in English we have loaded the word law with connotations that can mislead us.
SPEAKER_00: We tend to hear law when we think of courtrooms, we think of fine print, and most commonly checklists, compliance checklist.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the checklist of things that you must do to be a good Christian.
SPEAKER_00: And that, my friends, is not what Christianity is about.
SPEAKER_00: The Hebrew word Torah is better translated as the word instruction, the word of a loving teacher, of a guiding parent, or the word of a God who delights in leading his people in the right paths.
SPEAKER_00: Torah appears only in the singular in this psalm, suggesting it is the global term for the totality of God's revelation to his people.
SPEAKER_00: Not a collection of rules, but a unified speech of the living God.
SPEAKER_00: An old shepherd will know the paths through the hills that a Taurus would never be able to find.
SPEAKER_00: Travelers will follow him safely there.
SPEAKER_00: The law of God is not a fence.
SPEAKER_00: The law of God, the words of God is not a fence around your life.
SPEAKER_00: You're keeping me from good things, God.
SPEAKER_00: You got this fence around me.
SPEAKER_00: I can't go anywhere.
SPEAKER_00: Because all you got is rules.
SPEAKER_00: The law of God is the voice of the great shepherd, leading you to better pastures.
SPEAKER_00: The believer, God is not this restrictive fence that keeps us from better things.
SPEAKER_00: He's the voice calling out to us, leading us to infinitely better things.
SPEAKER_00: If only we're to follow the voice of the great shepherd, because he's the only one that knows the way.
SPEAKER_00: You're not going to find it on your own.
SPEAKER_00: You can look forever.
SPEAKER_00: You will not find a better path apart from God.
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, it's a life that seeks him with the whole heart.
SPEAKER_00: We're still in part one, three, three subparts in part one.
SPEAKER_00: Track with me.
SPEAKER_00: Second, it is a life that seeks him with the whole heart.
SPEAKER_00: So in verse two, we see this shift.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist begins by talking about keeping testimonies, but he names the real goal, seeking him.
SPEAKER_00: And this is crucial for us as a people of God.
SPEAKER_00: The law is not the destination.
SPEAKER_00: God himself is.
SPEAKER_00: The testimonies, the precepts, the statutes, all of these are means to an end of knowing and loving and walking with the Lord Himself.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the great danger for all of us in studying Psalm 119, and I would say the great danger for all of us in thinking about Christianity and studying Christianity altogether, especially as we teach it to our children, is that we inadvertently turn it into a religion of the book and a religion about laws rather than a relationship with the God who speaks through the book.
SPEAKER_00: But read rightly, Psalm 119 is a reminder that this pathway to God is followed out of a right placement of ultimate delight, not out of mere duty.
SPEAKER_00: What do you delight in, brothers and sisters?
SPEAKER_00: There is nothing that will fill you like the God of the universe.
SPEAKER_00: And he's giving us his word on how to follow him.
SPEAKER_00: Now, thirdly, it is a life that does no wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 3, who also do no wrong but walk in his ways.
SPEAKER_00: Let's not rush past this.
SPEAKER_00: This is not self-righteous boasting, because we can kind of think, man, I've kind of failed this morning.
SPEAKER_00: I've sinned already today.
SPEAKER_00: This is a description of a trajectory, of an orientation.
SPEAKER_00: Those who have turned to walk with God rather than against him, who have aligned their lives with his ways rather than with their own instincts.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this can be overwhelming to us as a people to read something like he who does no wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Our first thought is just immediately that, well, that's not me.
SPEAKER_00: But we must know that as we follow Christ, this is a path.
SPEAKER_00: This is not a checklist.
SPEAKER_00: We're seeing his footprints ahead of us, his perfect footprints, and ours are kind of squiggly, but we have this orientation on this path toward Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the man or the woman described in this passage, in these first three verses, is not perfect.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not telling you to be perfect, but the man or woman in this passage is pointed.
SPEAKER_00: And the pointing, this whole heart orientation of life is toward God and toward his word.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what the psalmist calls blameless.
SPEAKER_00: The Hebrew word tamim means complete, whole, integrated, a life that's not fractured between service of God and service to self, but unified around this love of God.
SPEAKER_00: Is your life oriented towards Christ?
SPEAKER_00: So the application of this this morning is not, hey, are you sinless?
SPEAKER_00: Have you sinned this past week?
SPEAKER_00: Get out your checklist.
SPEAKER_00: But to ask is, are you oriented?
SPEAKER_00: Are you pointing towards Christ?
SPEAKER_00: Is the trajectory of your life, your words, your thoughts, your actions, do they regularly point to Christ?
SPEAKER_00: Not perfectly, but regularly.
SPEAKER_00: All right, the second part, the turn from declaration to desperation in verses four and five.
SPEAKER_00: We have a little bit of a tone shift here.
SPEAKER_00: We start seeing the word you.
SPEAKER_00: You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently.
SPEAKER_00: Now the psalmist has been making observations about the blessed life in the third person.
SPEAKER_00: Now he turns to address God directly.
SPEAKER_00: He says, you.
SPEAKER_00: This is the first you in the psalm, and it gives us reason to notice this shift change in the tone.
SPEAKER_00: We're not simply reading a moral, uh, philosophical essay.
SPEAKER_00: This is not some epic poem such as the Odyssey.
SPEAKER_00: We're not reading it as someone would read some 11th grade English lit assigned reading.
SPEAKER_00: We are overhearing a prayer.
SPEAKER_00: This is now turning into a prayer.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist is not lecturing us.
SPEAKER_00: He is talking to God.
SPEAKER_00: And then comes verse 5, one of the most honest verses in the entire psalm.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes.
SPEAKER_00: Now you should, when you read that, we should feel the achiness of that passage, of that verse.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes.
SPEAKER_00: We just described the blessed life.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist just described this blessed life.
SPEAKER_00: He held out the vision of this one who is blameless, who walks diligently oriented towards Christ and the law of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And now he confesses that person is not yet fully me.
SPEAKER_00: And yet, this is simultaneously not the cry of an unbeliever.
SPEAKER_00: It is the cry of a believer who loves God's word and longs to be shaped by it, wants to soak in it like a nice hot bath and know it more completely than he currently does.
SPEAKER_00: There is a gap between the psalmist's aspiration and his attainment, between this vision of the blessed life and the reality of his present experience.
SPEAKER_00: Brothers and sisters in Christ, this should sound very familiar to all of us, shouldn't it?
SPEAKER_00: This longing to be more in tune with God's word.
SPEAKER_00: And I would say if this doesn't sound familiar to you, this longing to be more in God's word, I got good news for you, brother.
SPEAKER_00: I got good news for you, sister.
SPEAKER_00: You can come to faith in Christ this morning and get saved.
SPEAKER_00: Profess uh Christ as Lord of your life, repent of your sin.
SPEAKER_00: Profess Jesus is Lord and believe your heart that God raised you from the dead, and you will be saved.
SPEAKER_00: But all of us as believers should identify with this idea of longing to be more in God's Word.
SPEAKER_00: During our college years at ETBU, Courtney and I had the great privilege of singing in the ETBU concert choir under a world-famous choral director by the name of Mr.
SPEAKER_00: Jim Moore.
SPEAKER_00: And Mr.
SPEAKER_00: Moore was an expert at choir directing.
SPEAKER_00: And just to just to be there, every Monday through Thursday, every day at 2 o'clock, we went to practice.
SPEAKER_00: So we I we got to sing in this top-notch choir that had, I mean, there were like eight parts, nine parts, ten parts, you know, of about 80, 70 to 80 of us in this choir.
SPEAKER_00: And just, I mean, to be a part of something so special was a lot of fun to me.
SPEAKER_00: I'm a baritone, so I got to I got to sing in that, but just to watch Mr.
SPEAKER_00: Moore work, it was it was you're beholding greatness, just to sing under this man's leadership.
SPEAKER_00: And his ability to hear the choir as a whole, and yet to also hear every single voice while we were singing was a beauty to behold.
SPEAKER_00: So many times in practice, he would stop us because he could hear one person's voice that was oh, you're you're you're you're flat that needs to come up.
SPEAKER_00: During practice, he would regularly stop us to work on things that that only he could hear, but he could hear them.
SPEAKER_00: Because he knew the music and the craft so well.
SPEAKER_00: This is the cry of verse five.
SPEAKER_00: God, I know that your way is better.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that my way would be more aligned with your way, so that I can apply this better to my life.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this gap between aspiration and attainment runs throughout the whole of Psalm 119.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist is not some monastery stoic who's who's uh achieved some kind of moral mastery over himself like some kind of Christian Jedi.
SPEAKER_00: This is not some monk in endless meditation.
SPEAKER_00: This is a pilgrim who's being shaped on the path informed by the word of God, who sometimes fails, who sometimes stumbles, sometimes falls, and who gets up and returns again and again and again to the God who speaks the truth.
SPEAKER_00: Again, this should sound very familiar to you, brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow pilgrims on this journey, as we too who are all in Christ, should experience this in this already not yet phase, saved but not yet glorified, we still deal with the flesh.
SPEAKER_00: We can say with Paul, I don't do the things I want to do, the things I don't want to do, I keep doing.
SPEAKER_00: But if you are in a state of distance from God, in the midst of failure, I would want to encourage you this morning and tell you that God is very near to you this very moment.
SPEAKER_00: He is not far.
SPEAKER_00: He does not derive pleasure or joy in dangling himself away from you based on your actions.
SPEAKER_00: God loves his people, he's always near to his people.
SPEAKER_00: God's outlook on his people, this is what it means to be a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: God's outlook on his people is not viewed through who we are, but through who Christ is.
SPEAKER_00: And I've got news for you.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is perfect, and he's glorious, and he's righteous.
SPEAKER_00: And so when he died on the cross and said it is finished, and he resurrected from the grave, and then when we profess faith in Christ and his righteousness is put onto us, imputed, it's a good theological term, means it's put on, when it's put on to us forevermore as God's people, God looks at you and he sees the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: He is never far from his people, he's always near to you, even in your stumbling.
SPEAKER_00: Get up.
SPEAKER_00: Get reoriented on that path to follow the footprints of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, the shame we fear and the shame we flee.
SPEAKER_00: In verse six, then I shall not be put to shame, having fixed my eyes on all your commandments.
SPEAKER_00: Verse six introduces one of the most potent human experiences, shame.
SPEAKER_00: We've all felt shame, unless you're a psychopath or sociopath.
SPEAKER_00: I can't remember which one of them, both of them, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: But all of us in here have experienced shame.
SPEAKER_00: We know it.
SPEAKER_00: That hot face sinking awareness that we have been exposed, we've been found out, we've failed, we've failed to live up to what we know is right.
SPEAKER_00: There's this gap between who we want to be and who we are, and that's now been made visible, whether that's been made visible to just God or whether that's made invisible to others, maybe that's visibly known to the public.
SPEAKER_00: There is shame in falling short.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist connects obedience to freedom from shame.
SPEAKER_00: When his eyes are fixed on the commandments, when his attention, his meditation, his daily orientation is toward what God has said, then he does not need to fear exposure, because a life lived transparently before God and in the light of his word has nothing to hide.
SPEAKER_00: Now there is a kind of person who is terrified of the light, who does their worst work in secret, who builds a public image and then guards it anxiously, because they know what lies behind it.
SPEAKER_00: The anxiety is the long shadow of shame.
SPEAKER_00: But the person whose ways are increasingly aligned with the word of God lives differently.
SPEAKER_00: Again, not perfectly.
SPEAKER_00: We've already seen the honest cry in verse 7, but they have brought their life into the light.
SPEAKER_00: They have acknowledged their sin, and they have sought the God who forgives and the word that shapes.
SPEAKER_00: And in that transparency before God, there is a liberty, there is a freedom from shame that the world does not understand.
SPEAKER_00: And honestly, so many times we have difficulty understanding it.
SPEAKER_00: We need to rightly use shame, people.
SPEAKER_00: That shame, we need to mortify the sin.
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: Mortify the sin.
SPEAKER_00: Have an appropriate shame over sin because it's an offense to a holy God.
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to do it anymore because God is magnificent.
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to do anything that goes against what this God says.
SPEAKER_00: So let's use shame in that manner.
SPEAKER_00: But the manner that we're not going to use shame is where the devil tells you you're not good enough for God.
SPEAKER_00: You're not good enough for Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That shame is a lie from the pit of hell.
SPEAKER_00: Because, again, let's go over this again.
SPEAKER_00: If you have professed faith in Christ, you've repented of your sin and you've looked to him.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to tell you again, because this is important.
SPEAKER_00: This is not just some theoretical thing out in the realm.
SPEAKER_00: This is truth.
SPEAKER_00: The righteousness of Christ has been put onto you.
SPEAKER_00: So when God sees you, he sees Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And so there's there's no shame in that.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: Now, God's not up there just saying, I just see Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Go, I'm not, I'm not worried about your sins, you little knuckleheads.
SPEAKER_00: I'll see you when you get to heaven.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Psalm 119 is about.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, you're in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So this is how we now live this life oriented towards the Jesus that covers us in his righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: And here's this Christological connection.
SPEAKER_00: All the Psalms are about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Even though they're they're written before Jesus, they're all about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus Christ is the only one whose eyes were most fully and perfectly fixed on all the commandments of God.
SPEAKER_00: He alone walked the blameless way without any deviation.
SPEAKER_00: He alone sought the Father with a completely undivided heart.
SPEAKER_00: He alone can say perfectly and without qualification, I will keep your statutes.
SPEAKER_00: And it is only in union with Him, only being covered by the righteousness and being formed by the Holy Spirit that we begin to walk in this way ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the blessed life described in the opening verses is not at its root an aspiration for us to achieve something through our own willpower.
SPEAKER_00: It is a description of the life of the Son of God, which he shares with us as his brothers and sisters.
SPEAKER_00: And he told us, after I'm gone, I'm going to send a helper.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit is coming to help you live a life oriented to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Fourthly, praise that grows from learning.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 7, I will praise you with an upright heart when I learn your righteous rules.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 7 is remarkable for what it does not say.
SPEAKER_00: It does not say, I will praise you when I fully understand everything.
SPEAKER_00: It does not say, I will praise you when I have attained perfection.
SPEAKER_00: It says, when I learn, when I'm in the process of learning.
SPEAKER_00: Now, praise is not something that we wait to do at the graduation ceremony.
SPEAKER_00: You don't die and get to heaven and your praise starts there.
SPEAKER_00: I'm arrived.
SPEAKER_00: I'm glorified.
SPEAKER_00: Now the praise starts.
SPEAKER_00: Praise belongs in the classroom.
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to your classroom.
SPEAKER_00: It is what we do in the midst of our failures.
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, Christ has no value.
SPEAKER_00: But we know that he's infinitely valuable.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, because of Christ and his death and resurrection, we can rightly praise God with an upright heart that has been made upright by the Holy Spirit through the work of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It is a work of God, not of ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: So, yes, dear brother and dear sister, praise God in the midst of your failures and your falls.
SPEAKER_00: His ear is never closed off or far from you.
SPEAKER_00: Think of a child learning to read.
SPEAKER_00: The moment when those letters stop being just arbitrary squiggles and they begin to form words.
SPEAKER_00: That moment's a moment of joy.
SPEAKER_00: It's not just an accomplishment.
SPEAKER_00: Every page turned is not just a lesson, it's a cause for delight.
SPEAKER_00: If you ever sat with a child that's learning to read and they're going through their first storybooks, the learning itself is the occasion for praise.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist understands something that our performance-driven culture struggles to grasp.
SPEAKER_00: God is not waiting, and he's not withholding his presence from us until we have passed our theological exams.
SPEAKER_00: The encounter with his righteous rules, his judgments, his just and good ordering of the world is itself the occasion for worship.
SPEAKER_00: Every insight from his word that teaches us to be more oriented towards Christ is a cause for praise in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: Every time the Spirit illuminates a passage to us and something clicks, every time we hear something in a sermon that realigns our hearts with Christ, something fits, something becomes a little bit more alive.
SPEAKER_00: Every time we're singing these truths, boy, we sang some good songs this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Christ's our hope and life and death.
SPEAKER_00: These are truths that I've known for years and years and years.
SPEAKER_00: These are moments of praise.
SPEAKER_00: This is why the Puritans read their Bibles the way that they did.
SPEAKER_00: They did not read scripture quickly to check off a box for scripture reading of the day.
SPEAKER_00: They read slowly, expectantly, like the every every passage was pregnant.
SPEAKER_00: They're just waiting for each verse to give birth to some beautiful meaning to them.
SPEAKER_00: And they had a heart ready to respond because they knew that every encounter with the word of God is an encounter with the God of the Word.
SPEAKER_00: Fifthly, the resolution and the plea.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 8, I will keep your statutes.
SPEAKER_00: Do not utterly forsake me.
SPEAKER_00: The Olif stanza ends with a resolution and a plea.
SPEAKER_00: Two things pressed together.
SPEAKER_00: It's almost kind of like a paradox.
SPEAKER_00: I will keep your statutes.
SPEAKER_00: That's a commitment.
SPEAKER_00: I'm resolved.
SPEAKER_00: I will keep your statutes.
SPEAKER_00: This is not wishful thinking or a pious sentiment.
SPEAKER_00: It is a deliberate act of the will.
SPEAKER_00: It's a declaration of intent.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist is not waiting to feel like it.
SPEAKER_00: He is not saying, I'll try.
SPEAKER_00: This is like a groom and a bride at the marriage ceremony.
SPEAKER_00: I'm dedicated to you till death do his part.
SPEAKER_00: That's a commitment.
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's ever been to a wedding where the groom or the bride says, I'm gonna try.
SPEAKER_00: We take vows.
SPEAKER_00: We commit it's you and you alone till we die.
SPEAKER_00: That's what the psalmist is saying here.
SPEAKER_00: I will keep your statutes.
SPEAKER_00: And immediately, in the same breath, he says, Do not utterly forsake me.
SPEAKER_00: And why does this resolution need a plea?
SPEAKER_00: Because the psalmist knows himself, just like you and I know ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: He has already heard the cry of his own heart in verse 5, oh, that my ways may be steadfast.
SPEAKER_00: He knows the gap, he knows the weakness, he knows that the resolution of verse 8, I will keep your statutes, will not hold without the power of God sustaining it.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is not a contradiction, this is mature piety.
SPEAKER_00: The great men and women of faith throughout scripture make bold commitments to God, and they do so while casting themselves wholly on his grace.
SPEAKER_00: Peter said, I will never deny you, and was utterly wrong about the strength of his own resolve.
SPEAKER_00: We read in scripture, I believe, yet help my unbelief.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist here is wise.
SPEAKER_00: He says, I will keep your statutes, but immediately adds, But God, you must not abandon me to my own resources.
SPEAKER_00: Because my own resources are not sufficient.
SPEAKER_00: The final plea, do not utterly forsake me.
SPEAKER_00: It may sound familiar, but it reverberates from the cry of desolation in Psalm twenty two.
SPEAKER_00: And it is from Psalm twenty-two, which Jesus put on his own lips on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist's fear of abandonment, his desperate plea not to be left utterly alone, is answered in the one who was forsaken utterly on the cross, so that those who are in him might never be forsaken.
SPEAKER_00: The do not forsake me utterly in verse eight finds its ultimate answer not in the psalmist's own faithfulness, but it finds its answer in the faithfulness of God who gave his son to be forsaken in our place.
SPEAKER_00: Here is the gospel hidden in the prayer of a Hebrew poet.
SPEAKER_00: Here is the grace at the end of the alphabet's first letter in Psalm 119.
SPEAKER_00: And this is the gospel message for you this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Christ was forsaken by God so that we don't have to be.
SPEAKER_00: Christ experienced something on the cross that God's people will never come near to.
SPEAKER_00: And that is God's unrestrained wrath.
SPEAKER_00: So now all who call upon the name of the Lord, who confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord, turn and repent from their sin and believe in their heart that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, will be saved and never forsaken.
SPEAKER_00: But that's only for God's people.
SPEAKER_00: It's only for those of us who are in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I want to draw your attention to something neat about this passage before we conclude and gather all this together.
SPEAKER_00: A brief observation.
SPEAKER_00: Throughout Psalm 119, the psalmist uses eight different words for the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: In the Oliph stanza alone, we encounter seven of them.
SPEAKER_00: I've listed them for you in your notes.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 1, law, verse 2, testimonies, verse 3, ways, verse 4, precepts, verse 5, statutes, verse 6, commandments, verse 7, rules.
SPEAKER_00: And then in verse 8, we see the word statutes again.
SPEAKER_00: These are all facets of a diamond.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you have a diamond, you're looking at it under, you know, when when you're when you're getting an engagement ring, you get really good about a diamond, but I'm like 20 years out from that, so I've kind of forgotten it all.
SPEAKER_00: But you look at it under the little iscope thing, and you just see all these facets, and there's different reflections off of all the facets, and you can see like the color and the grading, and I can't remember how all that works, but y'all know what the diamond has these different edges.
SPEAKER_00: Each of them catches the light from a different angle.
SPEAKER_00: That's what these words do.
SPEAKER_00: They teach us about the word of God from just a slightly different angle.
SPEAKER_00: The law teaches us morality, that there is a right and wrong, there is a good and evil.
SPEAKER_00: The testimonies remind us that God's word bears witness.
SPEAKER_00: It testifies to who God is, to what he has done.
SPEAKER_00: His ways delineate for us that there is a path to God, that he has not set himself distant from us.
SPEAKER_00: He could have, but he chose not to.
SPEAKER_00: But we are able to walk the path that his son blazed for us.
SPEAKER_00: The precepts remind us that God cares about detail.
SPEAKER_00: He watches over the specifics of our lives.
SPEAKER_00: The statutes carry the weight of a binding obligation.
SPEAKER_00: This is not advice.
SPEAKER_00: This is covenant speech.
SPEAKER_00: The commandments declare God's authority.
SPEAKER_00: He has all the right to tell us how to live.
SPEAKER_00: The rules remind us that God is a just judge who will vindicate his people and hold those who are not his people to account for breaking those rules.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 119 is in itself a reflection of the entirety of the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: The word of God and his promises speak of a God who not only commands, this is the best part.
SPEAKER_00: It's all the best part, but this is the best, best part.
SPEAKER_00: God not only commands, but commits.
SPEAKER_00: He makes unattainable commands for a people attainable through his sacrifice and through his power.
SPEAKER_00: And what summarizes all these words together and this thought process together, it's the covenant name of the Lord used 22 times in Psalm 119.
SPEAKER_00: Imagine that.
SPEAKER_00: This name of the Lord that is used 22 times in Psalm 119, once for each stanza, it is the name of God, his covenant name, Yahweh, which means the covenant God, the God that has bound himself to his people in love, who will not abandon them, who speaks to them with all authority and tenderness of a faithful covenant partner.
SPEAKER_00: The law of God is not the voice of a stranger, it is the voice of the one who has pledged himself to us.
SPEAKER_00: Let me bring this home.
SPEAKER_00: From the olive stands of Psalm 119, three marks of a life well lived in the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: First, the blessed life is one of wholehearted direction.
SPEAKER_00: Verses 1 through 3 painted a picture of someone oriented toward God, not someone who's arrived, but someone who has pointed in the right direction and walking, however imperfectly, with consistent intent to follow Christ.
SPEAKER_00: The blessed person does not love God on Sundays and live for themselves the rest of the week.
SPEAKER_00: They seek Him with the whole heart.
SPEAKER_00: This is a unity of life, not compartmentalized faith, but the integrated devotion into every aspect of our life.
SPEAKER_00: Imagine a compass.
SPEAKER_00: We've been re-watching the Pirates of the Caribbean movies at my house.
SPEAKER_00: You remember the compass that Jack Sparrow has?
SPEAKER_00: That's real wiggly.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah?
SPEAKER_00: Imagine a compass.
SPEAKER_00: It trembles, it wobbles, it swings, but it always returns to north.
SPEAKER_00: The blessed life is not one of perfect steadiness, but it is a life in which the needle always comes back to God.
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, the blessed life is one of honest tension.
SPEAKER_00: Verses five and four and five give us this gap.
SPEAKER_00: The gap between aspiration and attainment.
SPEAKER_00: What we know we ought to do in attaining it, between the vision of the blameless way and the reality of our stumbling wall.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist does not pretend that this gap does not exist.
SPEAKER_00: He names it, he aches over it, and he brings it to God in honest prayer.
SPEAKER_00: The honesty is not defeat, it's the condition of growth.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the person who thinks they have no gap, who imagines they have arrived fully to the conformity of the word of God, is in the most dangerous position of all.
SPEAKER_00: Because pride shuts the door on grace and growth in our life.
SPEAKER_00: But the person who says with the psalmist, Oh, that my ways may be steadfast, that person is in the right posture, open to the shaping work of God's Spirit through God's word.
SPEAKER_00: And third, the blessed life is one of dependent resolution.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 8, I will keep your statutes, do not utterly forsake me.
SPEAKER_00: That's how Christian obedience works, my friends.
SPEAKER_00: Not passively waiting for God to do everything, and not proud self-reliance that attempts everything in our own strength, but active, determined commitment.
SPEAKER_00: I will follow Christ, held together with a desperate, honest dependence.
SPEAKER_00: Do not forsake me.
SPEAKER_00: This is grace-fueled obedience.
SPEAKER_00: It is the language of a child who puts their hands in their father's hand and says, I'm going to walk, but don't let me go.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the lens through which all this work is done is Jesus Christ, the true singer of the Psalms.
SPEAKER_00: When we read Psalm 119, 1, Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the way of the Lord, we should hear the voice of the one who did that, the voice of the one who did walk that blameless way perfectly and completely.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus did not merely keep the letter of the law, he embodied its spirit.
SPEAKER_00: He sought the Father with that undivided heart.
SPEAKER_00: He did no wrong.
SPEAKER_00: He walked in the ways of God without deviation from the manger to the cross to the empty tomb.
SPEAKER_00: And when we read verse 5, oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes, we hear the longing of a human heart that knows its weakness.
SPEAKER_00: And we also read in scripture, Jesus took on the weakness, not the weakness of sin, but the weakness of the flesh, of hunger, of weariness, of suffering, of temptation in the wilderness, of agony in the garden.
SPEAKER_00: And he prayed with that longing, and he was hurt.
SPEAKER_00: By the Father.
SPEAKER_00: And then we see verse 8, do not forsake me utterly.
SPEAKER_00: We hear the prayer that was answered at the cost of the cross.
SPEAKER_00: He was forsaken, so we would not be.
SPEAKER_00: You need to understand, verse 8, do not forsake me utterly.
SPEAKER_00: Without Christ, if there is no garden, if there is no cross, if there is no tomb, you are all eternally forsaken by God.
SPEAKER_00: Rightly so.
SPEAKER_00: We don't deserve his love.
SPEAKER_00: We don't deserve his grace.
SPEAKER_00: We don't deserve his mercy.
SPEAKER_00: We deserve right now for the floor to open up under us and hell to swallow us forever.
SPEAKER_00: But God forsake Christ on the cross so that he could say, here is a people that I want back.
SPEAKER_00: Something was taken from him at the garden when sin entered humanity.
SPEAKER_00: And he said, I want them back.
SPEAKER_00: I want my people to be back.
SPEAKER_00: And in order to do so, somebody had to be forsaken in our place.
SPEAKER_00: And it was Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, the blessed life described in these eight verses is not an impossible standard that's held over our heads to condemn us.
SPEAKER_00: It is the life of the Son of God offered to you as a gift.
SPEAKER_00: We walk the blameless way, not by our own perfect performance, but by being united to the one who was blameless, whose righteousness covers us, whose spirit works in us, whose word shapes us from the inside out.
SPEAKER_00: The olive stanza begins with the word blessed and ends with the words, do not utterly forsake me.
SPEAKER_00: That is the span of the Christian experience, the joy of the blessed life and the honest cry of the dependent heart.
SPEAKER_00: And both, both the blessing and the crying are held in the hands of God who has promised to never let his people go.
SPEAKER_00: And so we look to him and we lean on him intently, like a child reaching up for the hands of the Father, and we say, Oh Lord, help me keep your statutes.
SPEAKER_00: Do not forsake me.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, that is our prayer.
SPEAKER_00: Help us to keep your statutes well.
SPEAKER_00: Do not forsake us.
SPEAKER_00: Father, give us a passion to be obedient to your word, to live a life oriented towards Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And Father, simultaneously, know our complete dependence upon Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And Father, I pray if there are any in this room that don't know Christ, that they would understand their standing before you right now, that they stand condemned before you, that you are not their father, you are not their friend, that you are their enemy.
SPEAKER_00: And outside of Christ, they will remain your enemy.
SPEAKER_00: So I pray that the Holy Spirit would blow like the wind into their heart and replace their heart of stone with the heart of flesh, that they would repent of their sin, profess Christ as Lord and Savior, and be saved this very moment.
SPEAKER_00: Father, I pray for the saints in here, those who have been saved.
SPEAKER_00: We continue to live in this already not yet phase.
SPEAKER_00: We're saved, we're not yet fully adopted, not yet fully glorified, and we struggle with what the psalmist talks about here.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we all have our sins that we struggle with.
SPEAKER_00: Father, I pray that you would give us the spirit to mortify sin in the flesh.
SPEAKER_00: That each and every day we would walk more closely and nearly to you.
SPEAKER_00: That we would see your footprints ahead of us, and we would be more consistently oriented towards Christ.
SPEAKER_00: In his name we pray.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.