The Word at Work

Psalm 119 as the Final Hebrew Stanza and a Love Song About the Bible

Well, tonight we will, Lord willing, it is my plan to finish Psalm 119, Psalm 119. We have studied this passage for a while now and of course on Sunday nights sometimes other men preach and sometimes Pastor Jacob preaches and sometimes we've done different things and so it's 22 stanzas.

For the most part we have gone a stanza, a sermon, but there have been a few sermons that we have adjusted that a bit. But here tonight we find ourselves in the final Hebrew stanza and I have a few words of exhortation to consider.

And so would you stand with me as we honor the reading of God's word? We are all the way down now in verse 169. Let my cry come before you, O Lord. Give me understanding according to your word. Let my plea come before you.

Deliver me according to your word. My lips will pour forth praise for you teach me your statutes. My tongue will sing of your word for all your commandments are right. Let your hand be ready to help me for I have chosen your precepts.

I long for your salvation, O Lord, and your law is my delight. Let my soul live and praise you and let your rules help me. I've gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek your servant for I do not forget your commandments.

Father, would you help us tonight as we conclude this great song? Bless us and keep us and make your face shine upon us. God, our ways grant us peace. Help us to be people of your book. We pray in Jesus name.

Amen.

May be seated. This is, you know, the longest chapter in the Bible, and we're not sure who it was.

Written by.

Some would say David. I told you Brian Borgman's argument is Daniel. And then it could just be anybody because that's one kind of thing about the psalm.

Itself.

I'm kind of glad we don't know the author because it could be anybody in the sense that this is every believer's disposition when it comes to the word of God.

We love the Bible. We love the Bible.

One indicator about a child of God is they love the word of God. They want to hear from God. They want to know God more. And so we have a high view of the Bible. We have a high view of the Bible in this church.

We believe it is the inerrant, infallible, inspired, breathed out word of God. Every jot and tittle will stand for all eternity. All 66 books. It was written by men, but these men were worked upon in such a way that God has preserved precisely what he has wanted to say.

We have a perfect treasure of his word. This is God's book. This is his word, and we trust it.

We believe it.

The Word of God Fuels Our Prayers

A few things tonight we'll see from the text. The word of God works in the life of the church and in the life of believers. So let me give you a few thoughts there, and then I have a few concluding exhortations from the psalm.

But the first is that the word of God fuels our prayers. Number one, the word of God fuels our prayers. So the text says, verse 169, let my cry come before you, O Lord. Give me understanding according to your word.

Let my plea come before you. Deliver me according to your word. Friends, I want to submit to you tonight that we really learn how to pray when we learn how to read the Bible. The Bible and prayer, they go together.

I think one time Charles Spurgeon was asked that very question. What's more important, the Bible or prayer? And I believe he said, what's more important, breathing in or breathing out? And so the reality is that the word of God actually helps to fuel our prayer.

Here's an analogy or an illustration. Picture prayer like a fire. For fire, you need oxygen and you need fuel. So the oxygen in our prayer, I would say in this analogy, is the Holy Spirit. You can't have prayer.

You can't have a fire without oxygen. And the oxygen is the Spirit of God. But the scriptures are the fuel. The scripture is the wood. The Bible is what shows us, what I mean is, the Bible is what shows us how to pray.

The disciples asked Jesus, teach us to pray. You don't just know how to pray in every church. Now, in one sense, prayer is just the reaction of the believers, just talking to God. But to understand really the words to say and how to pray and the things we ought to pray for, the Bible is instrumental in teaching us this.

Notice in both of these verses, the psalmist says it. Let my cry come before you, O Lord. Give me understanding according to your word. In other words, help me to understand how to pray according to your word.

Help me to understand all that you're doing in my life according to your word. And then verse 170, let my plea come before you. Deliver me according to your word. Now, what does that mean? Deliver me according to your word.

That he had promises from the scripture in mind as he is praying. So here's an encouragement to you. How do you know if what you're praying for, if you're on the right track with what you're praying for?

Look to the word. Look to the scriptures. The scriptures have many practical functions in our life as believers. But one function is that they provide for us fuel to pray. We have this all over the place.

For example, Matthew 6, and we call it the Lord's prayer, the model prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. That is the kingdom power. It's in the King James, so I don't know. That is the kingdom power, glory forever.

There we go.

So that's a textual variant there. But the point is, we know that. And the point of that prayer is not just to just verbalize it and just say it. Actually, the point of that prayer is Jesus is teaching us, here's a structure for how.

To pray.

Here's how you pray. And the model prayer is really just a summation of what the Old Testament has already taught God's people how to pray. So, for example, Abraham appeals to the attributes of God when he prays.

Or Hezekiah lays out an argument before God when he prays. Or David rests in the covenantal love of God when he prays. Or Jeremiah laments when he prays. And there's so many other examples that we could use.

When you pray the word, sometimes Moses says things like this.

Remember your word.

Jacob says things like this.

Remember your word.

Remember his word. Of course he remembers his word. But I think God loves his word so much that he loves his people quoting it to him. He loves that his people know his word and would take it back to him and say, God, do.

This.

Prove yourself, obviously, in a reverent and humble way. Of course, we can learn in the scriptures specific things that we should be praying.

For.

For example, Paul says that we should pray for our leaders. Paul talks about praying for the lost. James tells us to pray for the sick. John tells us to pray for other believers. And there's so many more examples that we could use.

But the psalmist says, give me understanding, verse 169, according to your word. He wants to understand. He wants to pray. The word gives us actual words to say. You can hear what I'm saying. You can actually take the words of the Bible and you can pray them.

For example, you see this in the psalm. Go all the way back to verse 18. Psalm 119, verse 18. This is a prayer that you should pray. Psalm 119, verse 18. Open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.

That's a good prayer before you wake up in the or not. You can't pray before you wake up after you wake up in the morning before you read the Bible. That's a good prayer to pray. Open my eyes, O Lord, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.

I know that God is pleased with a prayer like that, of course, assuming right motivation. How do I know that God is pleased with a prayer like that?

Because this is in his word.

And so the word of God fuels our prayer. If you're struggling with prayer, one encouragement I have to you is pray scripture. Open up the Bible and pray what the Bible says. Pray the Psalms. Pray a portion of the scripture that you read in your daily reading.

Of course, in 170, we see verse 170. The psalmist prays for deliverance. And we see here, let my plea come before you. Deliver me according to your word. That he's saturated in this prayer for deliverance in the scriptures.

So there's a connection between being saturated in scripture and having a healthy prayer life. So that's point number one. The word of God fuels our prayer. Secondly, the word of God, it's working in the life of the church.

It's working in the life of believers. It feeds our praise. It fuels our prayers. It feeds our praise. So now look at verse 171. My lips will pour forth praise for you teach me your statutes. My tongue will sing of your word for all your commandments are right.

Of course, we understand we have a high view of the Bible, but we understand we're not saying the Bible is God. We don't worship the Bible. But you understand what we believe about scripture and what we've been reading in our catechism, what we've already read and again in the 1689.

But we don't understand God rightly apart from the scriptures. We have general or we have general revelation, the sun, the moon, the stars. We sing about that just a minute ago. They all extol the glory of God.

They all preach to us that God is glorious. But you don't know God. You don't know the attributes of God. You don't know God in a or all the attributes. God, you don't know God in the saving way. You don't know the gospel apart from the scriptures.

And so the psalmist, the psalmist says in verse 71, that his lips are going to pour forth praise because God teaches him his statutes. The reason that the psalmist is singing is because God teaches him his statutes.

God's statutes are righteous. God's statutes, first and foremost, reveal our unrighteousness. The law, first and foremost, is a hammer that breaks us, shows us that we can't attain to it, that we can't measure up to it, that we can't keep it.

But for the covenant believer, which the psalmist was, for those who are born again and trusting God's mercy and grace in Christ, we know that Christ has fulfilled this law on our behalf. And so for believers then, we sing about the word and we sing about the law, not because we think we obtained salvation through it, but because our desires are now changed.

This is our new relationship with the Lord. And look there in specifically verse 172. I love this. My tongue will sing of your word. Do you ever listen to a song and you're like, I wonder if that's biblical?

We talk about songs sometimes. I'm not, I won't name any. Sure, I will. Death is arrested.

I think about that.

Reckless love.

I think about that.

Is that really biblical? But here's, you want to know how you always know if a song is biblical? If it's singing the scriptures, right? If we're singing what the word of God says, or the truth that the word of God explicitly gives us or even implies, then we're singing good songs.

We always want to measure the songs we sing, not by necessarily how it makes us feel, or not the kind of beat, or maybe not how well Gunner does or Alex does or whatever. We always want to measure what we sing by the word of God.

We should sing, we should sing the word of God. The word of God, the word of God feeds our praise. The word of God teaches us the things that we ought to be praising God for. My tongue will sing of your word for all your commandments are right.

The righteousness of God. Here's the thing about this too. Like a lot of times, a lot of songs sing in 2025. Are about God looking at us like a boyfriend or something. God looks at us like a high school young man looks at his crush or whatever.

But when we think about what the psalmist says here, he says my lips will pour forth praise for you teach me your statutes. My tongue will sing of your word for all your commandments are right. In other words, he's praising God for who God is in his righteousness, and his justice, and his holiness.

And so it's not wrong to sing about the love of God, but we ought to have a right view and a balanced view and a right understanding of God. And we ought to extol him for all his statutes and commandments.

We seem to talk about praise in verse 175 again. Let my soul live and praise you and let your rules help me. And so the psalmist's life is a life of praise. And he requests that God would help him, that his rules would help him in this life of praise.

I just remind us, we know this here, but just a reminder, the word actually instructs us on how we are to worship God. It's very interesting to me, the arguments that I see about this. But people say, you know, the most important thing about worship is sincerity of heart.

Well, that's not that's not necessarily true, because you understand that you can be very, very sincere in your heart. Very sincere. And you can be sincerely wrong. You understand? And so the word of God is what teaches us how we ought to worship.

Now, feeling I'm not I'm not dismissing feeling. God gave us feeling. God gave us emotions and emotions are not wrong in and of themselves. But emotions don't drive us. Truth must drive us. Emotions must not orchestrate the worship service.

Truth must orchestrate the worship service. You understand how that works. And so the word of God teaches us how God would be worshiped. Of course, there are times that people come to church on Sunday.

They go through the motion of singing. They're not moved. One of the reasons I would argue is because the rest of the week, they hadn't spent any time in God's word. Their minds and their hearts aren't being drawn to the truth of Scripture.

So the word of God fuels our prayers, the word of God feeds our praise. Thirdly, I'll mention this. The word of God functions as our plumb line. So moving along in the psalm, I'll just read 173 and 174.

Let your hand be ready to help me for I've chosen your precepts. I long for your salvation, O Lord, and your law is my delight. Now, for the believer, the word of God fuels our prayers, feeds our praise, and it functions as our plumb line.

You know the genius of a plumb line. All you need is just a heavy object and a string. You don't really need much besides that. And if you could tie the string onto a weighted object and you can hold it up, gravity will do the work.

And what are you going to have? You're going to have a straight line. You're going to be able to measure whether or not, and this is ancient. In fact, I would just make an observation. It's funny how all our modern technology and sometimes the ancient builders outbuild us.

But you understand what a plumb line does is it shows whether or not a wall or a board or whatever you're building is straight. Similarly, in the Christian life, the word of God is our plumb line. The psalmist requests God's help.

And his basis for that plea is that he had chosen God's precepts. That's 173. Let your hand be ready to help me for I have chosen your precepts. I mean, think about that. That's just a simple application.

Would you make that choice tonight? No matter what, God's word will be our standard. God's word will be our plumb line. You know, it's funny, but if you begin to try to look at a wall, maybe it's just me because I'm not really a carpenter and my dad can tell you that.

My wife can tell you that. But if you begin to try to measure one wall or you kind of try to see if it's straight by the other wall, it's like it's going to the looks are going to deceive you.

You're going to be wrong.

You're going to say, well, that looks straight until you get everything together. And you're like, whoa, we're way off somewhere. And you can do this in life. So you can look around and you can say, well, you know, I see so-and-so living this way and they're kind of doing church that way.

And if we measure ourselves according to them, I think we're OK.

We're probably OK.

Well, the reality is if you don't use the plumb line, if you don't use the scripture,.

You will be off. You will be off.

And I've told you this before. Imagine, OK, we're going to Florida. It really won't work. Yeah, this will work. OK, we're going to Florida. Imagine going to Florida that I'm just a little bit off, just a little bit off in Perryville.

I just set the trajectory just a little bit off. Well, the closer that we or the further we move away from Perryville, what happens to that error? It gets greater and greater and greater until I find myself in the Gulf of America, right?

That's what we call it now, is that right? And so I never hit Florida.

Why?

Because the degree off in one generation is going to be magnified in the next generation. And by the time you get to the next generation, it could be off altogether. Do you understand? So just being a little bit off, just saying, you know what?

Let's just let's just rest on our laurels. Let's just rest on on the things that we've always done it. We don't really need to examine this. We don't really need to look at this. And once you begin doing that, you're going to go in the wrong direction.

But the psalmist says, I long for your salvation, O Lord, and your law. Listen to this. Your law is my delight. Your law is my delight.

It's my delight.

When we assess our lives by the plumb line of Scripture, it is not out of slavish fear so much as it is a delight to to be in the will of God.

You understand?

Like I want like, God, just show me. Give me what it is that you want me to do. Show me what you want me to do, because your laws is my delight. Because now as a new covenant believer, it's been written on my heart.

And I want to do what you say, O God. And it's my delight. It is a fearful and foolish thing to operate without Scripture as our plumb line. This is our authority. The word of God is sufficient. We don't need God.

We do not need God to say one more thing to us in the Scriptures. We have enough. We have everything that we need in them.

They are our authority.

There's not a higher authority. The 1689 is not an equal or higher authority to the Scriptures. Your pastors are not an equal or higher authority to the Scripture. Tradition is not an equal or higher authority.

The church is not an equal or higher authority. This is the authority. It's necessary.

It's clear.

This is God's word. And then we get to 176. It's interesting, isn't it? It's so interesting that this whole psalm ends with a verse like this. I've gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I do not forget your commandments.

Now, I'll say this. Lots of thoughts about this verse and why the psalmist does it. But, you know, I think that the psalmist acknowledges even at the end of his verse, all these things, all this chapter, all these things that he's been saying, you know, about seeking God and meditating on the word of God and his and the word of God is his delight.

All these things he's been saying at the end of the verse, I believe we have an open and public acknowledgment of the need of the psalmist for grace. He needs God to seek him or he's sunk. He needs to measure his life.

And by the way, you're never going to understand your need for grace unless you have the plumb line to make sense. So if you're always measuring yourself, I was like, I measure myself by Jerry, you know, or whatever.

I measure myself by Jacob. Those are not good. Those are great brothers. And there are brothers you should look to and model your life after. But they're not the plumb line, right? The plumb line is the scriptures.

So we'll always use the scriptures. Because what you'll often do is look to someone that's not so faithful and you'll justify yourself. Hey, man, I know I'm not everywhere I need to be, but I'm better than that guy, right?

I'm better than him. But people are not the standard. It's the scriptures. The psalmist knew he had gone astray because he knew the scriptures. So if you look at your life and it doesn't match up with what the Bible says, not quattro standard, not anybody else's standard.

What is God's standard? What does the Bible say? And if your life doesn't match up with the plumb line, then it reveals that you continue to need grace.

And that's true for all of us.

If we're honest, there's always an area. This isn't pessimistic, but there's always an area we need to grow. We need God's grace. We need it every day. And look at the prayer. God is pleased to answer a prayer like this.

Seek your servant.

I've strayed.

Come find me.

I'm like a lost sheep who's foolishly wandered from the fold. But now I can't get back. Help me, God. Rescue me. You think God honors a prayer like that? Amen. You know, the kind of prayer God doesn't honor is the prayer from a cold, proud heart.

God, I thank you. I'm not like that, dude. But the prayer he does answer in here is the prayer say, God, seek me. I need you. One of the biggest problems that you have in your life as a Christian sometimes is to just miss the grace of repentance.

You're confronted with something and you're just going to stubbornly hold on to it and pretend that you're better than you are. When the psalmist and the Bible and God himself invites us to pray like this, I've gone astray like a lost sheep.

Seek your servant. Help me. You know, it's a covenantal prayer, a prayer of a believer, because he says, I do not forget your commandments. The point is that he understands that God's word is the plum line.

So don't neglect the means of grace. This is God's own word. It is necessary for us to know God and to do what he has called us to do. And all of these things that we've mentioned, will we say, as the psalmist says here in this psalm, I've chosen your precepts.

I pray that we will. Now, I just have a couple more exhortations. So we remember tonight that the word of God fuels our prayers and the word of God feeds our praise and the word of God functions as our plum line.

Remember Christ and the Gospel in Psalm 119

Now, let me give you two more exhortations as we conclude our psalm. Psalm 119. What a great song. The first exhortation is this. Remember Christ. Psalm 119 is not about how you need to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and just do better.

Ultimately, it points us to Christ. Ultimately, Christ is the fulfillment of this psalm. Every area that you've fallen short with God's word, Jesus Christ has kept. And Jesus Christ has paid for our sin debt on Calvary and risen again from the dead.

You need to remember the gospel from Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is not a club that we use to beat everybody else over the head and say, well, we went through that. We know that. It is a psalm that points us to Jesus Christ.

Remember Christ. In Christ is all the wisdom of God. In Christ is our regeneration and our justification and our sanctification. Because Jesus came, because he is truly God and truly man, because he lived a righteous life, because he paid our sin debt on Calvary, bearing the wrath of God, because he rose again, we are free now by the spirit of God in our lives to look this way to the Bible.

Because of what Jesus has done. So rest in him. Some of you tonight, perhaps even on a Sunday night, you need to repent and believe the gospel for the first time and come into a saving relationship with Christ.

Remember Christ. And then I have a unique illustration. That I want to leave you with. Remember the foundation of the gospel? Not going back on that, the foundation of the gospel. But as we understand the gospel, there's a change that we have when it comes to the Bible.

And we live, I've told you this already, but we live in unprecedented times. I'll just go through this again real quick. First of all, we have the completed canon of Scripture. For 6 ,000 years, for most of that time, 4 ,000 years at least, the people of God did not have a completed canon of Scripture.

So that puts us in the minority. Number two, we have the Bible in a language that we can read and we know how to read. That puts us in a minority. Thirdly, we have access to the Bible like never before in human history.

Have you ever considered, if you have a smartphone, have you ever considered, I carry the whole Bible and just right here. I can listen to it whenever I want. I have commentaries. I have whole books. I have library.

I have like maybe like 7 ,000 books or something in my Logos library. It's just wild. The access I have to the Word of God. And remember that to whom much is given, much is required. And so I want to encourage us tonight with this.

And I told you I would get to this. This is the illustration and it comes from the text this morning. Now in the text this morning, God gives a command to the Babylonians and to the Medes. And he says to them, so the walls have fallen down, as it were.

Everybody's panicking in the streets. And God says to the people as they're coming in to Nineveh to take it over. He says essentially, I'm paraphrasing a bit, but he says essentially, look at all the treasure.

There's untold treasure, plunder, plunder, plunder.

And so they did.

Here's the analogy. Here's the illustration. If God would tell a wicked regime, a wicked country, wicked nations to come in and to plunder earthly treasure, how much more, friends, does our great God tell to his people tonight to open up his book and plunder, plunder?

There's treasure, right? There's treasure.

And so many Christians, I was listening on the way over here. And I don't mean to just be rude or a jerk when it comes to Caleb. But I was coming over and they were talking about on Caleb. They're like, hey, you know, sometimes you just don't know what to read in your Bible.

So send us an email and sign up for Caleb's verse of the day. And we'll send you a verse. Now, I get it. I'm not saying it's sinful to do that, per se. But I'm just saying that's not plundering, right?

In fact, it's going to be crazy that your pastor, one of your pastors would say this to you. Stop reading Bible verses.

What?

What do I mean by that?

What did you learn at church tonight? Well, one of our pastors said, well, you got to stop reading Bible verses. But hear me what I mean by that. Stop just reading the individual verse. Stop just saying this is the verse of the day.

But plunder the scriptures.

Plunder, plunder, plunder. Don't walk along the road and just kick the little gravel here and there. And every now and then you find a shiny little piece of gold. And you pick it up and say, oh, isn't that nice?

And you put it in your pocket and you go about your day. Instead, beat your head against this book. I understand what I'm saying. Beat your head against the book.

Let it get in you. Know it. Pour yourself over it.

Open it up in front of your sons and in front of your daughters and say, hey, listen, this is what it says.

Let's read it together. Let's pray it together.

Take it with your spouse.

Open it up. Read it together. Pray together. Share it with a friend.

Talk about it when you go along your way. That's the whole point of Deuteronomy 6. As you're going along your way, you talk about it. Your friend says to you, how was your weekend? You say, oh, my weekend was good.

You know one of the reasons my weekend was good?

I heard the Word of God preached.

And we talk about the Bible.

We plunder it. It's a treasure. Friends, it's a treasure.

What is one thing we should learn from Psalm 119?

The Word of God is a treasure. Know it.

Learn it.

Let us get into it and see its beauty. The one thing you'll never regret, you'll never regret, is knowing the Word of God more. Seeing Christ in its pages. Seeing God's plan for the nations. Seeing the beauty of the church.

Seeing how we ought to structure our homes and our worship and how we ought to live. And seeing the kindness and compassion of God. All these things.

But we won't plunder. We won't plunder.

God says, listen. The walls are broken down. You have everything you need in Christ. Here are the treasures. Here's the silver. Here's the gold. Here it is. All of it. Well, what do you want us to do, God?

Plunder it.

Mine. Yeah, but if I spend, you know, five minutes in the Bible, I'll lose five minutes on social media. I'll lose five minutes on TikTok, which I have no idea if TikTok is in or out. I have no idea. But people saying different things, whatever.

I'll lose five minutes on YouTube. I'll lose five minutes on my Netflix. Listen, these things are of eternal value. To be in this book and to plunder its truth and to glean the beauty that God has for his people in this book.

I'm not here to convict you. That's not my role. It's the Holy Spirit's role. But maybe you would consider tonight your habits with this book based on Psalm 119. Maybe for some of you, you need to toss out some of the readings.

If you have Jesus Calling by Sarah Young, you should definitely toss that out. But maybe some of you just need to consider, man, I'm reading books about the Bible, but I'm not reading the Bible. Or maybe some of you need to consider, I'm listening to things about the Bible, but I'm not in the Bible.

I just want to encourage you.

Let us be people who, based on Psalm 119, we believe what it says. And we want to plunder the truth. We want to dig. You know, sometimes, you know, it's just like, please just don't think. I don't want you to think that like I'm an intelligent person.