Hiding His Word in our Heart

Psalm 119 as a Poem of Prayer, Meditation, and Suffering

We come tonight to Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible. We are on our second stanza tonight, Psalm 119, beginning in verse 9. The Hebrew letter now, remember, 22 stanzas. Each one begins with a new Hebrew letter.

We're seeing the first stanza on Sunday mornings right now for the month of February. But the second stanza begins with the Hebrew letter Beth. And we have eight verses now. Each one of these verses in Hebrew begins with this letter giving us some insight and delight into God's word.

Now, let's talk about genre for just a moment. So the Bible is not written in one genre. You know, what genre is the Bible? Well, there's multiple genres. For example, right now on Sunday morning, we are in an epistle.

We are in Ephesians. So Ephesians is written very logically, orderly, in a linear kind of way. Paul builds arguments. You know, you have the first three chapters, and then talking about rich theology, and then the last three chapters, how does that apply to the life?

That's kind of how an epistle is written. But we're not in an epistle, we're in poetry. And this Psalm, it's not building an argument. It's not linear in the sense of, okay, you've learned this, now you're going to learn this.

Rather, Psalm 119, it's more cyclical. So in other words, you're going to notice in this Psalm recurring themes. Let me just give you three main themes in Psalm 119. The first is prayer. So Psalm 119 is a prayer.

For example, look at verse 9. How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word. Who's he talking to? He's talking to God. It's a prayer. Secondly, meditation is a recurring theme.

And we're going to talk about that tonight. But meditating on the word of God is a major theme in Psalm 119. And then a third major theme is suffering and trials. For example, look at verse 25. My soul clings to the dust.

Give me life according to your word. So this theme of suffering and trials comes up again and again. And so just notice that as we go through Psalm 119, we will repeat ourselves a lot. And that's okay, that's the purpose of the Psalm.

It's written in that way. The goal of this series on Sunday nights for Psalm 119 is to rekindle within our hearts an appreciation of, and love for, and desire for the word of God. So that's what we're doing.

So let's read our text and consider tonight what it is to hide God's word in our hearts. Would you stand with me? Psalm 119, beginning in verse 9. How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word.

With my whole heart I seek you. Let me not wonder from your commandments. I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Blessed are you, O Lord, teach me your statutes. With my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth.

In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes. I will not forget your word. Father, help us to love your word more than we do.

There's not a soul in this building tonight that has a perfect love for your word or that has arrived that needs no increase in their love for your word. Pastor Jacob and myself, every person in this room, we need to grow continually in our love for your word.

Help us to do that tonight. Help us to be people of the book, to follow your truth, to live out what it says, to see how it points us to our King Jesus, to share it with others. We pray your blessing over tonight in the preaching.

And we pray it in Jesus' name. Amen, you may be seated. So in verse 10 and 11, we have the Hebrew word for heart in the text. With my whole heart I seek you. In verse 11, I've stored up your word in my heart.

A little bit of review.

The Problem of the Human Heart and the Need for a Regenerate Heart

God created our first parents, Adam and Eve, to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever. Satan deceived Eve as to her purpose and then Adam outright rejected God's goodness toward him by disobeying the command that God had given.

This, in their worship to God, they directed their worship ultimately unto themselves. And so now the problem with the human heart is we seek to glorify self and enjoy self forever. So the Bible, so Jesus says things in the Bible like this.

Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual morality, theft, false witness, slander. That's Matthew 15, 39. Okay, so people today say things like this. Follow your heart. That's bad.

Or people say, God knows my heart. You don't understand what you're saying when you say that, right? Yes, God does know your heart and He knows that apart from Christ, apart from being born again, the human heart is filthy.

It's in a perpetual state of rebellion and dissatisfaction and all these things. And so it's deceitful and disordered and depraved. It may or may not acknowledge that there is a God, but its chief desire is always to exalt self.

If it could force other people to worship it,.

It would do so.

And you've seen people in history that have done this, right? As the old preacher once said, what's down in the well comes out in the bucket. And so we see this in our culture daily. People's lives are consistently ordered around their heart.

And their heart worships self. Like we live in a culture and a day, teenagers today, young people today, middle-aged people today, old people today, you can't tell them anything because their heart is after self supremely.

We even live in a day where in the name of self-exaltation, we see people mutilating their bodies as they reject their God-given gender. We have paid professionals that will perform surgeries on children to mutilate bodies all in the name of the exaltation of self.

It's interesting, right? The love of self is causing people to destroy themselves. This is why the Bible says, claiming to be wise, they became fools. Now Jesus says where your treasure is, your heart will be also.

So the road rager, the porn addict, the transgender woman, the workaholic absentee father, the young mom living vicariously through her daughter, they all have one thing in common. Their treasuring that is worshiping self.

Okay, but what about when we come to this psalm? All that to say, that's not what's happening here because in verse 10, the text says, with my whole heart, I seek you. Now what has happened, friends, to the psalmist's heart?

It has been made new. It has been born again. You say to yourself, I'm just so wrapped up in self. My heart is following self. I just can't get rid of self, self, self, self, self. Well, maybe the issue that needs to happen in your life, you need to be born again.

The psalmist's heart here is a regenerate heart. It's seeking not self, but God. It has new desires, new affections. The born again man or woman has removed self from being the center of their reality to seeking God above all.

So for those who are born again, the word of God is like honey. It is sweet. We want to know what it says. We want to know what it teaches and we want to know what it commands. So let's get into our outline, just two big points.

I'll get you with the second point because it has some sub points, but the first point is this, the purpose of knowing God's word. Number one, the purpose of knowing God's word. So verse nine, how can a young man or woman or old man or old woman keep his way pure by guarding it according to your word?

Now, why would this be a question for the psalmist? Why does the psalmist have a question about purity? Why does he care about purity at all? Because he knows the goal of life. The goal of life is to know God and enjoy him forever.

And those who know God and enjoy God seek to live in purity of life. They seek to live holy. Holiness is not a burden to them. It is now their desire. So that's why it says in verse 10, with my whole heart, now think about that for just a moment.

With my whole heart, I seek you. What do you love tonight?

What captivates you?

What do you delight in? You understand that here's Christianity today. Christianity today in too many places is just trying to force people to behave. You know, quit doing this. Quit doing that. Let's do a hundred different things at church.

We'll get people to come to church. Let's figure out how we can just force people into a behavior modification so that we can just, we can do good or be a light in this world or whatever. But true biblical Christianity is not about modifying people's behaviors, first and foremost, it is about seeing people's hearts changed.

And the psalmist says, what captivates his heart is Yahweh. With my whole heart, I seek you. He's captivated by God so he doesn't want to wander from the commandments of God. I want to do what you say, God, because I'm captivated by you.

Not sports, not family, not the cares or pleasures of the world, it's the Lord. Friends, has Christ captivated your heart? Seriously, have you turned from your sin and trusted Christ? Do you know one test for that?

One test for have I turned from sin and trusted Christ? Do you love the word of God? Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word. The word points us to Christ. John 5 .39, Jesus says,.

You search the scriptures.

Because you think that in them you have eternal life and it is they that bear witness about me. And so the whole Bible points us to the work of Christ, why we need him because we're sinners, what he has done.

Being born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, bearing the wrath of God on the cross, raising again. Christ is the God-man who has come to rescue us by giving his body and blood on Calvary under God's judgment and rising again in victory as our perfect representative.

So what is the purpose of knowing God's word tonight? It is to know Christ and deepening in our knowledge of Christ is deepening in our walk with him. It's not that the purpose of knowing God's word is purity for the sake of purity, right?

So you have those.

When I was in high school, were they called purity rings or something?

When I was in high school,.

I lived like in that age of youth ministry where there was like the purity pledges and the purity promises. And it was basically like you try to do this. Those things aren't wrong in and of themselves, but it's kind of like those things became an end in and of themselves.

So you had this like emotional service and you're like, I'm gonna wear a purity ring and I'm gonna give a purity pledge and all. And again, it's not that those things are wrong.

In and of themselves,.

But they kind of became the end instead of the means to the end. So you understand the means, the purity is we want to know Christ, right? It's not purity for the sake of purity. It's I want to walk with the Lord Jesus.

I love Christ. It's not about I can brag about my purity. It's I love Christ and I want to walk with him and be his servant. I've stored up your word in my heart, verse 11, that I might not sin against you.

So like, why does the psalmist care about this? Because those who are in Jesus desire to live according to his word. Now, tonight, there are some young people here. There are some young men here. There are some young women here.

Well, I'll start with the young men. Verse nine is directed. It has a direct, a first application to the young men in this room. How can a young man keep his way pure? So listen to me. So first and foremost, young men, there is a direct application here for you that you need to hear.

So the idea in the text of guard, it's the same word, the same Hebrew word that God gives to Adam in Genesis 2 .15, or that we learn about Adam. And that is, it says, the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

Now, the word for keep it, so Adam's responsibility in the garden was to work it and keep it. Now, what does it mean to keep it? Well, the Hebrew word for keep it is the same for keep, is the same word we have in our text in Psalm 119 verse nine, which is translated as guard.

So the idea in the garden is Adam was to be the protector of the garden. Adam was placed in the garden to work the garden and to be the defender of it, to protect it, to guard it, to keep it pure. Satan comes into the garden, what happens?

Adam should have confronted him with the word of God. Satan comes in, he seeks to deceive Eve, Adam should have been the defender, he steps up in front of his bride and he says, no, this is what God has said.

But he doesn't.

He fails.

Thankfully, the better Adam, the last Adam, does step in front of his bride and says to Satan, it is written, and defends her. But the first Adam didn't do this. But now the born again psalmist says that the young man can keep his way pure.

Look at the text. How can a young man keep his way pure? This is a question, right?

Don't you have this?

Young men in this room? Teenage, I don't wanna call you boys, teenage men, young men in this room? Don't you have a desire to guard your way, to keep your way pure? How can you do that? By guarding it according to the word of God.

Like we talked about in Ephesians, God's word is a sword, but it also a shield. So let me tell you this, young man, this is a serious matter for young men. And verse nine, as I said, is particularly directed at you.

How can a young man keep his way pure? Why is this? Why is verse nine directed particularly at young men? Because of your season of life, and because of the temptations of young men. So I'm just gonna tell you, I'm gonna speak as, I'll speak a little incognito here, if that's not the right word, or maybe a little bit of innuendo here.

But you'll understand what I'm saying. So you live in the 21st century, and you say, you know, it's just hard in the 21st century. I've got access to cell phones, I've got access to internet, I've got access to things that generations in the past, they didn't have access to these things, so they didn't have to deal with the things that I'm having to deal with as a young man today in the 21st century.

The theological term for that is baloney. Because in the text, the psalmist is concerned about purity. I'm gonna just tell you tonight, take away the phone, take away the internet, take away access to whatever the case may be, and you haven't eliminated the purity issue, right?

Because people have been dealing with sinful desires since the fall of Adam and Eve. And so how do we deal with it then? How can a young man keep his way pure? Eliminate all the internet, and it works.

Wrong.

Now, parents, we need to be careful. The internet is a wonderful tool, it's a dangerous tool. So I'm not being foolish. You must be wise about cell phone usage, about internet usage, you must be wise.

But the text says, how is it that a young man can keep his way pure? And the answer is, by guarding it according to the Word of God. So young men, you must take seriously guarding your ways according to God's Word.

This is a serious matter. It is not something that we play around with. You can make decisions as young men tonight that will affect you and people around you for generations to come. And so the solution to making wise choices and godly choices and choices pleasing to Christ is, first of all, we have to rest ourselves in Christ, put our faith in Jesus, not in ourself.

In and of ourselves, we're weak, we can't do it. In and of ourselves, we need the grace of God, we need Christ, we need forgiveness of sins. So we put our faith in the gospel, and then we get serious about guarding our ways.

According to Scripture.

And the application, of course, extends beyond just young men. That's where it starts, because that's directly in the text. But then we move beyond that. Young women, teenage girls in this room tonight, or those who are almost teenagers, I think we have both represented, you need to guard your way, too, according to the word of God.

It's not just like boys have purity issues, and if they would just clean their act up, then girls, they would be fine. No, ladies, you need to guard your way according to the word of God. Older men, older women, everyone in between, we need to take this seriously.

How can we keep our ways pure? By guarding our ways according to Scripture. We must be diligent in aligning our ways with God's. How do we avoid these things, the world, the flesh, the devil, as they conspire against us?

Like, how do we, these things lead us to impurity. How do we keep our ways pure and holy? How do we avoid just raging at our children, snapping at our children, being harsh with our wives, avoiding watching or looking at things that we shouldn't?

How do we keep ourselves out of compromising situations? How do we prevent covetousness or gossip or self-righteousness? How do we stop making everything about us? How do we do these things? We take the word of God and we guard our ways according to what Scripture says.

The purpose of knowing God's word is that we would enjoy God and glorify Him. Okay, secondly, are you born again? Then this is your desire. The purpose of knowing God's word. Secondly, practical steps for knowing God's word.

So the purpose of knowing God's word is that we know Jesus, we deepen our relationship with Jesus, we'd result of that, we'd walk in purity. So if that's the purpose of knowing God's word, you hear me tonight saying, guard your ways, guard your ways, guard your ways.

Okay, how do you do that, right? Are there any practical steps from this psalm that I can use tomorrow, Monday morning, in my walk with the Lord? Yes, there is, and I'm glad you asked that question. There are five ways, and I'm going to discuss them from the text.

Practical Steps for Hiding God's Word in the Heart

Number one, so obvious, right? If you're gonna guard your ways according to the word of God, okay, number one, read the Bible.

What?

Pretty obvious, but look at verse 15. The second half, really, but I'll read the whole one, because we'll come back to the first half in just a minute. I will meditate on your precepts, and then look at the second half, and fix my eyes on your ways.

If we're gonna be a people who guard our ways, we need to be a people who fix our eyes on God's ways, right? So look at verse nine. How can a young man keep his way pure? Well, another answer is verse 15b, fix my eyes on your ways.

You want your way to walk his way. Then we need to fix our eyes on his way. We need to habitually be in the Bible. The Bible needs to be part of our daily routine. The psalmist wanted to fix his eyes on God's way.

I'm just gonna tell you this evening that we don't have enough. One of the problems in our country today, and we can pick on the left and all that, obviously that's a problem, but let me introduce to you another problem you might have not considered.

And that is we don't have enough conservatives today who are committed to fixing their eyes on God's ways. So I think it's very important for us. In fact, I'm telling you, you need to know what's going on in our country.

You need to pay attention. You need to think about the things that are happening in our country. This is important. I'm not dismissing that, right? This is important for you to do. But what if we were wholly committed, even more committed, not merely to knowing what's going on in our country today, but what if we had a resolute commitment to not only know what's happening in our nation today, but that we were so committed to fixing our eyes on what God's Word says?

There's a congressman in Oklahoma. His name is Dusty Deavers. I've gotten to know Dusty over the last couple of years. I had the privilege of recommending, nominating Dusty for second, maybe it was first VP, I think it was second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention last summer in New Orleans.

But Dusty has made headlines recently because of the bills that he's introducing in Oklahoma. Some of these bills include abolishing abortion. They include, that is the equal protection of life. That is whoever murders a child needs to be held guilty before the law for murdering the child.

All parties involved. He has introduced bills for banning, making pornography illegal. He has introduced bills to end no fault divorce, that anybody can just get divorced anytime they want just because of irreconcilable differences or whatever.

He's introducing godly legislation into the state of Oklahoma and there are people having a field day with that. I saw the other day, there's a clip of Jimmy Fallon just blasting him on the late night show, just blasting him, making fun of him.

Like, oh, here's this old backwards guy living in the past. He's wanting to ban pornography and people are laughing at him and railing at him. Okay, I commend to you men like that in our culture today because they have a backbone.

Because they're not afraid to just say, I don't want a recovery of the 1950s in our culture. It's not that I want to just go back to some great time in the past. What I want is to have our country fix our eyes on God's ways.

Word to God, so you understand, we could get our country, let's say we get our country back to how it was in the 1950s and you can trust your children being out more and it's a nice moral society, but we don't know Christ.

Then we failed. So I got a little bit off topic there, but the idea is we want to fix our eyes on God's ways. And in order to do that, we have to just know the Bible. So we have to read the Bible. Secondly, study the Bible.

Verse 12 says, blessed are you, O Lord, teach me your statutes. We want to be taught by God. Verse 16, I will delight in your teaching. Your statutes. Are you a learner? We don't want to just read the Bible, but to study the Bible.

What a privilege we have in America with unhindered access, not only to the Bible, but other great resources. You can listen to great podcasts. And don't be afraid to ask me, I'm not going to judge you.

You're going to make my day. You're going to make Pastor Jacob's day if you come to us and say, hey, could you recommend a couple of good preachers I could be listening to during the week? Yeah, Jacob Robinson, that's one.

No, could you recommend a couple of good podcasts or could you recommend some outside study sources so I can know the Bible better? Boy, we're going to jump at that.

We're going to love that.

We want you to be taught God's word. It's why I want you to take advantage. It's why, and people are really kind of weird about this. Someone, they're not here tonight, so I can say this, but someone the other night got some free resources out of the foyer and they're like, okay, but really, how much do I need to pay for these?

And I was like, nothing, they're free, right? I think we feel weird sometimes about taking stuff and also something else, maybe you think because these things out there in the foyer are free, you think that they're worthless, but we put some really helpful material out there because we want to see our church family grow.

So take advantage of it. Look at that stuff, find something that interests you and seek to study, to be taught by God, to grow in the word, to read the word and to study the word. Thirdly, to memorize the word.

Verse 16, again, he says at the end, I will not forget your word. My dad used to tell me this because it was usually after something I did that was foolish. He said, Quatro, the mind is a terrible thing to waste and there's some truth in that.

There's a lot of truth in that. The mind is an amazing, the brain is an amazing organ. It's amazing how much you have memorized. It's so funny, it'd be like a great challenge. I could play you a song from your senior year of high school that you haven't heard since your senior year of high school and I could start playing it and say, finish the lyrics and you could do it.

It's just like stuck back there somewhere, right? You're like, oh, I can't remember where I left my keys. I'm not pointing fingers at Connell because I do it too, right? But the brain is amazing. All the things that we have, how you can walk by a store or a restaurant and you can smell something and it can trigger a memory, right?

It's amazing how the brain works. But when it comes to memorizing the Bible, we just, we make that excuse sometimes, you know, I just don't have a good memory. 662 -4545, that's the number to my grandparents.

I don't know who would answer if we called it now. I just remember that. I can remember how it sounds, the tone sounds. I mean, the young kids today, they're like, what are you talking about tone?

Like, what?

No, I used to pick up the phone and it had like a dial tone and then you press the buttons and it made a noise. We learned how to play jingle bells on that. But the idea is our memory is amazing and we need to use it for the glory of God.

So yes, some people in this room tonight have amazing memories, some of us not as amazing memories, but we all have the idea, we all have the ability here to go along with the psalmist at the end of verse 16 to not forget the word of God, to store it up.

Verse 11, I have stored up your word in my heart. You think about that for just a minute. We keep making deposits of the word of God into our hearts so that when we battle sin and joylessness and temptation, we are ready, we have the scriptures ready.

The Holy Spirit comes to our heart and our mind and draws from that bank the scriptures so that we are ready and we can fight temptation. We don't have to do it alone. We have the Holy Spirit within us and we have the word of God that we've stored into our minds and our hearts to not forget it so that we can be the people that God's called us to be.

We must be memorizers of the scriptures. Go to God, go to God. Confess your need to memorize scripture better. And I believe the Lord is pleased to answer that. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you equip. As a church family, we wanna encourage that.

So we do this little thing with Psalm 1 right now and it's really Gunner's idea to push this more publicly. I'm really appreciative of that. Not that others didn't think of it too, but you never want Gunner to have too big of a ego, but really it was his idea and it's a good idea because we want to encourage our church family to store the word of God in our hearts.

This isn't just something that children need to do. We need to do this as well, to not forget God's word. Next, number four, meditating on scripture. I've got this one and one more. Verse 14 and 15. In the way of your testimonies, I delight as much as in all riches.

I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. So this is not talked a lot about in churches anymore and that is the meditation of scripture. So we talk about Bible reading, we talk about Bible study, we talk about even Bible memorization, but we don't talk about meditating on scripture.

And really, the old computer, Geigo, G-I-G-O, the whole computer lingo, but I mean, it's not too difficult, really just means garbage in, garbage out. That is like whatever you put into the computer, that's what you're going to get.

Like, so if garbage goes in, the output is going to be garbage, but there's an analogy to us. So you consume so much Netflix or so much social media or so much even good news, like maybe even like Fox News or maybe someone like Tucker Carlson, like you just consume, consume, consume, consume, consume, consume, consume all that at the expense of scripture.

There's going to be an issue. We need to feel our mind. Worldly meditation is emptying our mind, scripture meditation is filling our mind, filling our mind with the word of God. One easy way to think about it is just slowing down, slowing down and thinking.

I can read, you can read two, three, four, five chapters of the Bible really quick and be done, close your Bible and be done for the day. But meditation is slowing down and thinking, not just glossing past a verse, but stopping and thinking about a particular verse or passage of scripture.

It's exercising thought, it's exercising faith. It's I'm going to think about the truth of this verse or these verses, even if I don't feel like it, I'm going to allow my mind to think on this truth and let it fuel my heart.

I'll just mention this, in order to do this, your time in the Bible, you have to have time of non-distraction. For most of us, that probably means you need to be up so you can have time before others.

Because once, well, maybe it's just me, maybe, you know, remember, I live in a house of eight people so maybe it's just me. But if I am trying to read my Bible with everybody up,.

I struggle.

There's a lot of noise, there's a lot of tears and blood sometimes. It's just the reality of the Nelson household. So I have to get up and I have to spend time in the Word.

Without that distraction.

You've got to put the phone away. You've got to turn the television off. You've got to have time where your mind can unplug from everything else and just focus on what God's Word has to say. So that you can meditate, verse 15, on God's precepts.

And then finally, I'll mention this. So how do we guard our ways according to the Word? So we read the Word, we study the Word, we memorize the Word, we meditate on the Word. And then there's a final point mentioned in these verses.

We teach it. Look at verse 13. With my lips, I declare all the rules of your mouth. Not everyone in the church is a pastor. Of course not, that would be weird. Not everyone in the church is a Sunday school teacher or a Wednesday night teacher.

But every person in this room who is a Christian is a disciple. And disciples, one of the characteristics of a disciple is disciples make disciples. So one practical way for you to know the Word of God in your own life is to declare the Word of God to others.

Who are you discipling on a regular basis? Well, maybe moms, it's your children, or it's your grandchildren. Or maybe men or ladies you're meeting on a weekly or regular basis with another brother or sister.

You're reading and thinking about the Word. You're meeting regularly with someone to bring them further along in the faith. All Christians in some form or another ought to be doing this, verse 13, with my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth.

It's commanded for us to do, to make disciples. It helps others. But then in an application for tonight, it helps you. When you teach the Word of God to others, when you go over the Word of God with others, when you teach it to your children or your grandchildren or husbands leading their wives or men in a Bible study or women in a Bible study, whatever the case may be, when we're doing these things, when we are looking at the Scriptures and explaining them, it helps us to know it too.

Now, obviously, there certainly can be some danger here, and we're not allowed to just go and teach something contradictory to the church or whatever. I understand that. There's rightful oversight of the leadership of the church.

Pastor Jacob and myself are responsible before God. We'll answer to God for the type of theology and teaching that happens here. But just as a general rule, this ought to be the reality of families and homes and Christians.

With my lips, I declare all the rules of your mouth. By the way, one more comment there, and then we'll conclude. All the rules of your mouth. That is, we want to know everything God says. We don't wanna just know what He says about the things that make us comfortable, but even about the sins we struggle with.

We want to know what God's word has to say. Okay, so conclude. Do you want to know Christ?

If you're a Christian,.

If you've got a new heart, the answer is yes, you must know His word.

How?

Read it, study it, memorize it, meditate on it, teach it. Are you perfect in these areas? No one's saying that. No one's saying that. I don't think we have this issue here, but there's been times in my past ministry that you start talking about stuff like this, and people are just like, ah, no one's perfect, you know, I don't have to worry about this.

No, no, no, we're not saying we're perfect, but we're saying we desire these things because we're believers. So spend some time, even this week, praying about improving in these areas, even as you rest in the finished work of Christ.

We need to be reminded tonight of our need for grace, that God has made atonement for our sins in Christ Jesus, even the sin of neglecting the Bible. So go again to our great high priest, receive forgiveness, and seek to have this resolved.

Let us have tonight repentant hearts, resting in God's grace and seeking to be a people who love the scriptures and wanna live by the book. Simple thought, simple message, but I hope that the Lord has spoken to you tonight through his word.