The Supreme And Sufficient Word - [Psalm 19]

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really it is a privilege to be here. I love being around God's people who love the word, who love the gospel, who love
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Jesus, who love to proclaim that. I'm sure you're aware of it, just living in this part of the country that's no small thing to find a church that does just that.
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And it's the same way where I'm from, I'm from the northwest, but where I live in parts of Asia, it's difficult even to find missionaries who want to teach the
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Bible. I was telling this small group last night that I was asked by a Burmese pastor to train pastors,
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Burmese pastors, informally outside of the seminary responsibilities I have. I said, well you know, I don't really do coaching or leadership training or any stuff like that,
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I just teach the Bible. He said, well we've been looking for somebody who could teach the Bible, you're the first missionary who said he wants to teach the
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Bible. And he said, we have been looking and looking and looking, we cannot find people who want to teach the
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Bible. They have a lot of other agendas, a lot of other programs that they want to teach, but not that. And, yeah, it's, you know, missionaries are not, they're not actually special saints, they're just, they're products of the churches that send them.
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There are a lot of Bible -less churches that send missionaries, and that's a good segue into my message, because I find that there are a lot of ministers and missionaries who are seeking ways to refresh their souls, that they are looking to false practices of spirituality to do that.
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Some things I hear that missionaries go to are even the member care centers in parts of Thailand that serve these burned -out missionaries from other parts of the world, they'll propose things like yoga spirituality, or just listen to your life, listen for the voice of God in your life.
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Having a Quaker silent worship clearness committee to discern your inner light.
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Word of faith stuff, like speaking, speaking into your life to make some, to create something, prayer labyrinths, soaking prayer, experiencing
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God in music over against in, in the word or in sermon. Looking to other religions, even, for perspectives or practices of spirituality.
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Spiritual direction, inner healing, lectio divina, imaginative prayer, theophastic prayer, and then the list goes on and on.
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But this, what this list tells me is that, well one, missionaries and ministers are not immune to, to fatigue, to exhaustion, to difficulty and struggle.
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But they're also not immune to false teaching and to being deceived or misled. And what, what
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I hope to do when I interact with these missionaries, I've been serving as an interim preacher at the international fellowship in the city that we live in.
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I, I went through a big series this last fall on the supreme and the sufficient word. And I, I hope to push them in the direction of going to the fountain of life to refresh their souls and to stand on the rock which is
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Christ exalted from the word. And too often I fear that they, they go to poisonous water or dirty water or they, they settle for standing on quicksand.
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And that's what these other spiritualities do for them is they get them nowhere and they make them sicker than they already are. And, and to be honest,
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I see a lot of people who leave not just the field, but the faith sometimes because they are so discouraged because they can't hear
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God's voice in these other mystical practices and they, they, they do not treat the scriptures as though they were sufficient or, or supreme.
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They might say they are, and I mean, even the doctrinal statement of their sending agency might say so. But they, in practice, they don't live it out.
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And it shows, and it, it's like termites in the, in the wood of their soul. It eats away at them, and little by little, it's, you know, it's, it's never a huge blowout, it's always a slow leak.
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And it's a slow leak, and little by little what they're trusting in, what they're eating is shown in, in whether or not they stay on the field or whether or not they stay in the faith.
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So, my prayer for you today is that the Holy Spirit would leave an impression through the word that the
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Bible is supremely authoritative and totally sufficient for truth, and faith, and joy, and holiness, and consolation.
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And that as, if you were to walk out and somebody would say, what was the sermon about? I would hope that you would just remember mainly that the word is supreme and sufficient, it's authoritative and adequate.
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And I hope to contend for that from Psalm 19 this morning. But before I get into Psalm 19, what
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I normally do when I'm speaking in front of the international fellowship, or even my students, is I say, even in a missions class with my, the pastors from, from all over Asia, I want them to bring their
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Bibles. They might not think that they need to bring their Bibles to a missions class, but I try to teach missions as much as possible from the text.
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And to give them as much as I can draw out of the text that relates to missions, and make that the supreme textbook for them.
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And one reason I, I do that is because it's good for them to, to see how I'm reading it, how
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I'm interpreting it, and then to recognize and be familiar with where it is on the page. So that if they're sharing the gospel, or doing discipleship, or teaching a lesson, they're able to go back to where they saw it in the sermon or in the lesson.
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And I want them, and, and I pray this for, for you, and I'm, I'm sure this is true of, of you in this church, but that you would find, they would find their, their security, that they would find the authority of what's being said, not in my humor, or charisma, or personality, or ability to entertain, or tell stories, or to motivate with big vision, or to impress with academic knowledge, but that the authority and sufficiency of anything that I say would be directly derived from the word of God alone, and how it points to the living word.
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And so, the preacher's job, the, the, even the seminary teacher's job should be just to, to preach the word, to be ready in season and out of season, to reprove, to rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching.
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For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth, and wander off into myths,
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Paul says to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4. So, my job is not to motivate, to captivate, to fascinate, to entertain, or to amuse, my job is not to scratch an itching ear, and you know, heresy and false teaching, it's not always in what is said, a lot of times it is, but often, it is also in what is left unsaid.
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And so that, that's a good example of what you see sometimes on the mission field, like this
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Burmese pastor who wanted some missionary to teach the Bible. It's not that when they come in and they do these other, these other things that those are terribly bad things.
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I mean, there's, there's some things they do that are, aren't good. But the fact is, is that they're showing that the sufficiency and the supremacy of what they have to teach rests in their pragmatic methods, but not in the word of God.
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So that, what they're doing is they are promoting a false teaching by what is left unsaid, they're not promoting the word.
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And so, we need to be a people who keep it center, because that is where we get our authority from.
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We need to be bold enough to say everything it says, even it's hard and knotty places with its hard and sharp edges, but humble enough to say no more, to get out of the way and let
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God speak for God. And, and not get in the way and, and interrupt his speaking through the word.
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Now, I tell the church in Thailand that if they will bring the word to the service, I'll bring the word in the sermon. If they bring the word in their hands,
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I'll bring the word to their heart. And because it's, we live in a culture, and the problem with our culture, it's global now, it's not a western culture, but the problem is, is it's very anti -authoritarian.
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It's increasingly self -oriented, and it's hostile to authority in a lot of ways.
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It's anti -authoritarian and egalitarian in that it increasingly despises differences of roles and hierarchy and rank.
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Truth becomes relative to our personality and our preference. Certainty is dismissed as arrogance and tolerance is promoted as humility.
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When our confidence in absolute truth and authority has been eroded, inevitably
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God gets dethroned or degodded, and we create him then in our own image.
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And, and we also, we breathe the air of self -orientation. Our access to immeasurable amounts of information and different perspectives and diverse opinions and self -promoting platforms.
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It, we are barraged with many different opinions and, and ways to express ourselves.
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And it's this culture of instant gratification, and that we have access to anything at any time.
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It creates in us a sense of pragmatism. In other words, if it works, it must be true. It creates in us a sense of just perpetual impatience.
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If it takes too long, then it's time to upgrade. It creates in us a sense of entitlement. In other words, if it's available to some, then everybody deserves it.
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It creates in us a sense of anxiety. There's so many opinions and so many options. It's so difficult to make a, a decision.
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And then we also become so self focused or self oriented. We, we wonder how we're being recognized, how we're being promoted, how are we being perceived.
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And we, we too, too often, even, even in the global culture, this is not just a
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Western problem, this is, I mean, this is a huge problem in Thailand that people are just so, so self oriented.
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I was explaining in the Sunday school that Thai people would rather not wear a motorcycle helmet because they don't want to mess up their hair because they would, they might look bad if they took the helmet off.
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They'd rather risk their lives. And there's, I see, I see deaths nearly every week because of motorbike accidents.
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Because they weren't wearing a helmet. And I'm told that it's, they would rather risk their life than risk a bad hair day.
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And it's just everywhere. It's, it's, it is the air we breathe. It's Babylonian culture to the
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T. And it's something that we as Christians, we have to swim upstream against this. We have created, not just in this culture, but in the global culture, we've created our own postmodern priests or pastors, our own postmodern churches and ministries and sacred scriptures based upon those perceived problems of ourselves.
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The perceived problem is maybe that we're wounded or sick, but it's not that we're dead in sin.
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Our pastors become experts, doctors, sociologists, analysts, politicians, psychologists, celebrities, and our churches have become places of therapy.
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Clinics, hospitals, sports arenas, movies, TV, the internet, malls, restaurants, social media, our ministries are education, tourism, therapy, entertainment, hobbies, and those scriptures that we, we go to whenever we have problems,
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Google, Facebook, Christian books, conferences, lively experiences.
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But when we do that, though we might profess the word of God is supreme and sufficient, we are betraying what we are really trusting in.
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The word of God is supreme and sufficient, and the way the enemy gets into our lives is by undermining our understanding and our trust in the
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Bible. And he does this by doing what he did from the very beginning, by asking the very first question. Did God actually say, you should not eat of any tree in the garden?
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Genesis 3, 1, right? A few things in this dialogue to, to recognize is that the serpent, he asks a question, he twists
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God's word, and he treats God's word as unreasonable. So first he asks a question that was intended to make
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God's word seem unclear to Eve, he's asking a question with an intended consequence.
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He's not looking for information or clarification, and then he twists what
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God said. He, God did not say to Eve that she couldn't eat of any tree in the garden.
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God said, you may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in that day you eat of it, you shall surely die,
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Genesis 2, 16. And then the serpent treated God's word as silly or unreasonable.
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You can hear it in how he, how he asked the question. He says, did God actually say such and such?
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So if someone were to ask you after the service, did, did Evan say that he wanted people to bring their Bibles on Sunday?
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Well, that question is simple. It's looking for clarification for information. There's nothing wrong with that. But if someone said, did
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Evan actually say he didn't want people to come to church if they didn't bring their Bibles? Now that twists what
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I said and it calls into question the reasonableness of whatever I did say. And it creates confusion.
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It doesn't, it's not looking for information or clarification. It's, it's intended to mislead. And so let's be sure of this, that the scripture is
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God's self -revelation. Where the Bible speaks, God speaks. Where the
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Bible stops speaking, God stops speaking, period. The Bible does not contain the word of God.
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The Bible does not become the word of God. The Bible is the word of God. It is the word of God.
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We don't look to the Bible to support our thoughts and our vision. We look to the Bible to submit to God's thoughts and God's vision.
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Moreover, God upholds his word to the degree that he upholds his holy name.
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Psalm 138 verse 2 says, I bow down in your, toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and faithfulness.
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For you have exalted above all things your name and your word. It's a
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Hebrew parallelism. What, what that means is there's two things put together as complimentary, as mutually interpretive.
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So in other words, show me a man who honors the word of God and I will show you a man who honors the name of God.
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To the degree that you enjoy the word of God, to the same degree you enjoy him.
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If you do not hunger and thirst for God's word, you don't hunger and thirst for God. So let's look at one of the most explicit passages on the supreme authority and comprehensive sufficiency in scripture.
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That's Psalm 19. I'm going to read from starting in verse 7 to 11. I'm not going to do the first part.
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I'll refer to it, but not read the first part. It says, the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.
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The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
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The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the
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Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the
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Lord is clean, enduring forever. The rules of the
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Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold.
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Sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.
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Moreover, by them, as your servant warned, in keeping them there is great reward.
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So, first of all, this second half of Psalm 19, it's being compared to the revelation of God in creation that's recorded in verses 1 to 6.
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So, creation, it declares God's wisdom and power and majesty. In verses 1 to 6, it declares knowledge of the creator
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God, of Elohim. Now then, if you look at the text in verses 7 to 11, you see the effects of the revelation of Yahweh in the scriptures, of Yahweh in God's special revelation.
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Verses 7 to 11, they declare knowledge not just about the creator God, but about the redeemer
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God, about the covenant -keeping God, about Yahweh. David is using synonyms for the word of the
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Lord. He uses words like law, testimony, precepts, commandment, fear, rules.
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They're all ways scripture refers to itself in the Old Testament. This is supposed to communicate comprehensiveness of the scripture, that all of the words of the
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Lord are supreme and sufficient. And it lists out four explicit benefits in verses 7 to 8 that encourage us to treasure and love the word of God.
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And then it tells us that there is reward in keeping the word of God, that it is reward that's greater treasure than gold, that it is reward that is sweeter than honey.
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You see this in verse 10. So, the four benefits set forth as illustrative of the life -giving power of Yahweh, of His word, are first, that God's word is perfect.
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It's blameless. So, therefore, the consequence is that it revives the soul.
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It refreshes, restores, it awakens our hearts. And you know, throughout church history, whenever expositional preaching and the centrality of the word come to the people of God as the supreme source of life in the church, reformation, revival, awakening follow.
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And that's what these, when I deal with these pastors or these missionaries who are going to, they're going to poisoned fountains, they're going to dirty, brackish water to find refreshment in these foreign spiritualities, that's what they're looking for.
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But they're not going to the source of life, they're not drinking from the fountain. There is refreshment to be found in the
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Bible alone. And second, God's word is sure, it's dependable, it's trustworthy. So, therefore, what does it do?
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It makes wise, even the simple, not just the educated and the elite. And third, God's word is right, it's just.
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And so, what does it do? It gives joy to the heart. There is joy in absolute truth.
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Truth should lead not only to criticism of other opinions, but truth should really lead to joyfulness and a winsomeness, that we should be a happy people, that we are given truth.
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We should be able to speak truth in a winsome, joyful way, because it's good news.
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It's good news. In our day of lawlessness and tolerance, there is something life -giving to the heart to know that God's word is right and just about everything it says.
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And fourth, God's word is pure, it's radiant, it gives light to the eyes.
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Enlightened eyes, it's a Hebrew expression for this internal joy that radiates through the face or through the eyes.
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So, in other words, it's an imagery of just as Elohim, He created the sun for light in creation.
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So also, Yahweh has given His word as light in redemption.
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The word is like the sun to our souls. It warms us, it strengthens us, it gives us light, it preserves us.
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And when you see Christ stand forth as the fulfillment of all the scripture, when you see
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Him stand forth from the text, it illumines your heart and it makes you rejoice, it enlightens your eyes.
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So now, if you back up and you notice that life -giving imagery used here, the word of God, like a sun, it's supremely sufficient to breathe life into our souls, to make our minds wise, to make our hearts joyful, and to open our eyes to see beauty.
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And this is theological poetic imagery of Yahweh giving, breathing spiritual life into His people, similar to how
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He, as Elohim, breathed physical life into Adam. It's the same type of imagery.
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It's this filling, the scriptures are God breathed, they are God's breathing out, they are
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His inspiration, as Sinclair Ferguson calls it, it's His outspiration. He's breathing out
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His life and that's what He does to revive our souls, to make us live.
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And then in verse 9, it describes the fear of the Lord as clean, as enduring forever.
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And it's a reference to keeping or to treasuring or to applying or living out the word of the
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Lord. So, fearing God and keeping the word, they work together, they go hand in hand.
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In Deuteronomy 8, 6, it says, you shall keep the commandments of the
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Lord your God, how? By walking in His ways and by fearing
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Him. So, in other words, how much you seek to keep and obey the word of God reveals how much you fear
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God. Verse 10 of Psalm 19 says that the word of God, in verse 10, is to be desired more than gold, but then he takes it a step further, even much fine gold.
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In other words, the scriptures are not just more valuable than money, they're more valuable than a lot of money, even the best money and a lot of it.
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It also says that the word of God is sweeter than honey. And again, he takes it another step further, even the drippings of the honeycomb.
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In other words, the word of God is better than the most excellent, lavish tasting food, even an extravagant amount of that food, more than the ability you have to eat.
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The word of God is not just sweet as honey, it is that, but it's a dripping honeycomb that's inexhaustible, that you cannot get your mouth around.
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You cannot eat it all. It is lavish. You can never master the Bible, but the
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Bible must master us. It is more than enough. If it is boring to us, the problem is not with the
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Bible. Now, if the richest man in the world were to tell you that for every verse of the
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Bible that you memorize this year, you would be rewarded one million dollars. And as you master the scriptures every day, you would be served the healthiest, best tasting food and more food than you can ever eat.
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How diligent then would we be to memorize and to know and to keep the word of God?
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How jealous and hungry would we be for the word of God?
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In verse 11, it says, in keeping the word, there is great reward. Not, it doesn't just say there's benefits to keeping the word.
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No, it says there is reward and it is great. There is great reward in keeping the word of God.
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You know, famished people, starving, real starving people, will walk across deserts to find water and food.
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How many of us walk across our room to pick up our Bible and feed on the word once a day? When the
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Bible is clearly understood and clearly preached in its right context, it produces certainty in our minds.
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It creates conviction in our hearts that it is true and trustworthy and dependable. And that awakens confidence in a communion with Christ and the certainty that he is greater than all gold and sweeter than all honey.
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And John MacArthur has helped me see this. He said one time, and I heard, clarity leads to certainty, which leads to conviction, which leads to communion.
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And that progression has always helped me think through this. Clarity, you see this, for example, in Psalm 119, verse 130, says the unfolding of your words gives light.
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It imparts understanding to the simple. And that leads to certainty. Psalm 119, 160, the sum of your word is truth.
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And every one of your righteous rules endures forever. And that leads to conviction or confidence.
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Psalm 18, 30, this God, his way is perfect.
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The word of the Lord proves true. He is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.
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And then that leads to communion. And I love this from Isaiah 66, too. It says, but this is the one to whom
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I will look, he who is humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word. And I love what
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Jesus says in John 14, 21, whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.
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And he who loves me will be loved by my father. And I will love him and I will manifest myself to him.
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You know, the Psalms, they open with this promise. This is the best way to understand the rest of the
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Psalms is by reading the introduction. It kind of sets the stage for how to treat the rest. Everything that is to come.
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It says, blessed is the man. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.
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But on his law, he meditates day and night. His delight is in the law of the
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Lord. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season and its leaf does not wither.
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And all that he does, he prospers or he is successful. Now, because prosperity, success, blessing, they have all been hijacked in English by self -help psychology and secular leadership terminology.
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It's important to remember what success or prosperity actually means biblically. Essentially, it means this, it means acting wisely, living in the fear of God and thus or therefore experiencing his favor, thriving the pleasure of God's rewarding grace, enjoying the benefits and the blessings of being among the faithful.
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The Hebrew word for blessing or prosperity or prosper, it can be used to refer to a vine that thrives,
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Ezekiel 17, 9, or to a weapon that prevails in Isaiah 54, 17.
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Now, there is great blessing in meditating on the word and in keeping it.
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And that's the idea of the law of the Lord. It's reviving for the soul. So we meditate on it and we keep it, we obey it.
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But where does the courage to obey what we meditate on, what we want to keep, where does that courage come from?
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And it comes from the command in Joshua that we see and is the same command or the same promise in Psalm 1.
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It's through the act of meditating or memorizing the Bible, Joshua 1, 8.
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The negative command says, don't let this book depart from your mouth. And then there's the positive command, but meditate on it day and night.
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So in the Bible, you see what's happening here in the Bible, there's a clear relationship between meditation and what goes on in your mouth.
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Matthew 12, 34, Jesus says, out of the heart, the mouth speaks. And then at the end of Psalm 19, in verse 14, it says, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you.
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In other words, the psalmist is viewing them as a similar action. They're related to each other. So the word for meditate means to chew on, like a cow chews its cud, or to mumble repetitively.
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And so one way to meditate is by handwriting the verse or verses over and over and maybe circling things that stand out to you that maybe the
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Holy Spirit is illumining through the text. That's in Deuteronomy 17. The kings were supposed to write out the sacred scriptures over and over and over again.
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And then another way to meditate is to read aloud to yourself the verse over and over.
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Maybe emphasize a certain word or a certain part each time. Reading aloud, maybe emphasizing the subject or the verb or the object or something that stands out to you.
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And you know, as a side note, it might seem strange to practice this way of Bible meditation through reading aloud, but it's actually been the general practice up until recent generations.
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Up until the 18th century, in most cities in the world, before the
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Enlightenment, before the Industrial Revolution, the loudest place in any city was the library because that's where people read aloud.
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People always read aloud. And so silent reading is really a... It's a recent phenomenon. It has always been that...
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And it still isn't... When I was in China, it was very common to know who the
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Chinese Christians were because they're sitting at the bus stop, they're sitting in their little shops or their little noodle stands, and they're reading their
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Bible aloud over and over and over and over again because they're memorizing. That's how they do it. That's just naturally how they do it. And even when they read regular books or in the newspaper, a lot of times they'll read aloud.
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And that's just a natural thing. There's something the way God has wired us to use our mouths when we are trying to take in or to digest something.
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One thing that made this clear to me, that Scripture was something
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I had to digest is because I started to imagine, what if I lost a page or a verse in my
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Bible? Because what sparked this in me was, I was talking to a
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Chinese brother one time, and he said, we don't have enough Bibles for our church, so we tear out Bible pages, and we pass them around, and we all read it.
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We memorize maybe, I'll memorize Galatians this month, and then I'll pass it on to somebody else, and they'll do that. And then I'll get maybe a couple of Psalms, and we'll just pass them around.
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And I just thought, man, what if I didn't have a Bible? Maybe not just my own language, but just a personal
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Bible. What would I be missing if I didn't have a whole Bible? And one time I got a
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Bible, and there was some errors. There was a misprint, and what I mean is there was an inkblot that blotted out a couple of verses.
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And now I had the same Bible, the same translation in another old Bible, and I could have just gone and written over it.
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But for a second, I felt a little anxiety, and I thought, I'm being ripped off.
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I am being ripped off. I am missing something. There's a certain amount of treasure that I am missing by not knowing what those few verses say.
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Now, if a verse or a word departed from your
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Bible, and it got whited out or blotted out or a page got ripped out, would we feel like we have lost gold?
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How much gold would we feel like we've just lost? If a verse or verses have departed from our soul, how much gold would we feel like we have lost?
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How malnourished would we feel? If Psalm 19, 7 were blotted out from your
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Bible by a misprint, and you never knew, you never knew that the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul, would you feel like you are missing immeasurable amounts of gold, immeasurable amounts of good food, that the law of the
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Lord, the teaching of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul? Think about that. We should view
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Bible reading as we view eating. Deuteronomy 8, 3,
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God says, man doesn't live on bread alone. Man lives on every word that comes from the mouth of the
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Lord. Meditation is chewing on, it's eating, it's digesting the word of God. And it's why when you're surrounded, if you're in a land that's surrounded by disease and famine, the evidence that you are not famished, that you are not diseased, but that you are prosperous, that you are thriving, that you are successful, the evidence of that when you're surrounded by famine is that what?
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You're chewing on and feasting on good food day and night. Your hunger is being satisfied and your strength is being renewed every day.
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One writer I've read observed that in the early church and up until the medieval era, almost all
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Christian clergy, pastors, they were expected to have memorized significant portions of the
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Bible. And one guide for these pastors in training, these priests in training, was that they would have had to memorize all of the
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Psalms. Now, Luther had all of the Psalms memorized. And they say that one historian says that Augustine, he didn't just write in Latin, this historian says he wrote in the
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Psalms. In other words, the Psalms so penetrated and saturated his soul that when he wrote, it was as if the
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Psalms was a second language to him, that it came out in everything that he wrote, that he was just quoting Psalms here and there and he was sticking them together.
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And it was just, it filled his mind so much more than the nuances of Latin did.
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And that's why a lot of the church fathers and even medieval ancestors, they would consider the stomach as the metaphor for memory.
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The stomach was a metaphor for memory. So when we today talk about devouring a book, we actually are following the same mindset that they used to have.
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They used to think of devouring the Bible, actually eating it, digesting it, letting it sink down. One of my former
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PhD professors would say that meditation is like dipping a teabag into hot water and letting it sit for five minutes or so and letting it saturate and pervade the hot water so that it colors and flavors the hot water.
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But if you just do Bible reading without any sort of meditation, it doesn't mean you have to meditate on every verse that you go through, but maybe just a couple.
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If you just do Bible reading and skim over everything, it's just kind of like taking the teabag and dipping it in for just a second. There's not really much evidence that it was ever there.
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Now, sometimes you just have to do that, but he's always told me that sometimes you just have to let it saturate and color and flavor your mind.
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And that's where our minds start getting transformed by the word of God. And we start thinking God's thoughts after him and we start walking in his ways.
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When the word of God colors and flavors our worldview, our thinking and our affections and our wills, it makes obedience to Christ that much more enjoyable.
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And that's where we start experiencing the blessings. Thomas Watson, the old Puritan, he said, the reason we come away so cold from reading the word is because we don't warm ourselves at the fire of meditation.
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We don't eat from the Bible until we're full because we don't often believe that it is sufficient.
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We might nibble or snack on the Bible, but we don't eat from it as though it were enough or inexhaustible or sufficient.
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Now, there's so many different false meditations out there. That word is just thrown around all the time anymore.
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And so you have to clarify what it is and what it isn't. False meditation says, empty your mind. You get that in a lot of terminology.
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But biblical meditation says, fill your mind. False meditation desires mental passivity.
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But biblical meditation requires mental activity. False meditation says, visualize to create your own reality.
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But biblical meditation says, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is holy, whatever is pure, whatever is good, set your mind on these things.
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Let your mind think about these things. Set your mind on things above, not on things below. Now, it's significant to remember that we all meditate whether we realize it or not.
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Our minds and our hearts and our wills, they're always active. Habitual sin is essentially misapplied and misdirected meditation.
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Because if a person, say, commits adultery, it was because that person let their mind think over and over and over about that person, another person, and eventually their desires followed and they make choices based upon those desires.
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And their wills are compelled by the strong desires of their hearts and their hearts are led according to where they set their minds.
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Habitual sin is always a meditation fail. We know how to meditate. It's just we are not active in actively filling it with the
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Bible. We do not do that enough. Meditation, it's like magnetism.
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In a sense, you get pulled in the direction of your meditation. Our hearts are magnetized to move toward whatever our minds are set on.
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And so as we make choices, we make choices according to the strongest desire of our hearts.
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And so the Bible becomes reviving to the soul when we start to meditate on the word of the
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Lord day and night, meditating on it, chewing on it, spending a few minutes in the morning and thinking through it.
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And you know, in the Psalms, it talks about, I meditate on your word in the night watches. They believed that the new day started when the sun set.
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So when it got dark, the new day was starting. So a lot of times they would meditate and they would start the
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Bible memory before they went to sleep. And then their brains process it all night long so that in the morning it's there, it's solid in their mind.
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And that's actually how I did Greek and Hebrew is my Greek prof taught me how to study late at night and then my brain processes it all night long.
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And that's how I've learned Chinese and a couple other languages, just by letting my brain do all the work when
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I'm sleeping. It's a little extra credit information there. But that is how
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I do Bible memory now is I do it at night and then I sleep on it and it's stuck in my head in the morning. J .C.
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Ryle, the old Anglican Bishop, he says this, it's a great book, it's a thin little book. I use it for even some of my classes and discipleship is called
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Bible reading. You get it on Kindle for probably a dollar or less. He says this, show me a person who despises
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Bible reading or thinks little of Bible preaching and I hold it to be a certain fact that he is not yet born again.
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Tell me what the Bible is to a man and I will genuinely tell you what he is. He says,
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I believe it to be a signal evidence of the Spirit's presence when the word is really precious to a man's soul.
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Love to the word appears preeminently in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He read it publicly.
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He quoted it continually. He expounded it frequently. He advised the Jews to search it. He used it as his weapon to resist the devil.
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Almost the last thing he did was to open the understanding of his disciples that they might understand the scriptures.
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Ryle goes on to say, I am afraid that man can be no true servant of Christ who has not something of his master's mind and feeling towards the
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Bible. A neglected Bible is plain evidence that you do not love God. The health of a man's body may be generally known by his appetite and the health of a man's soul may be known by his treatment of the
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Bible. And he asked this question, what are you doing with the Bible? Now I would close with this appeal.
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This is an old chorus that I learned years ago and it's always stuck in my head, but I love it.
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It just sometimes just comes to my head throughout the day and it reminds me just to come to the book, to not let the book depart from my mouth, but to go to the law of the
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Lord for my refreshment, to go to the law of the Lord to awaken my mind, to find joy in its sureness, in its trustworthiness.
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The chorus goes like this. The Bible is the written word of God. It tells about the living word of God.
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On every page, on every line, you'll find the son of God divine. If you want to learn to know the king of kings, if you want to learn of all the heavenly things, read the book, learn the book, let the book teach you.
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Let's pray. Our great God in heaven, who are sufficient for these things,
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Lord, we are. We're all sinners, but we thank you that we have been justified with Christ.
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We are united with him in his death and resurrection. We long for that day that we will rise to new life on the new earth and reign with Christ.
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Oh God, we pray, keep us faithful. Keep us faithful until that day and I pray that we would be sanctified and kept faithful by your word, for your word is true.