Keep sharing good news without ads.
Psalm 19:7-14
There's a parable in there somewhere about being prepared, I guess. You know, 2023 is over.
Today is the last day. It's a unique year. 2023 is one of those rare years, if you think about it, where both the first day of the year,
January 1st, and the last day of the year, were both on a Sunday. Now, this happened back, what year was it?
I believe 2017, maybe it was. But it will not happen again for, because of leap year and those things.
It won't happen again for 11 years. 11 years. Now, for some of you, that doesn't seem like that big a deal but I began thinking about that and I realized in 11 years,
I'll be 48. My oldest son will be 27.
11 years. How old will you be in 11 years? How old will your children be in 11 years?
And if you're, you know, around my age or older, you know that used to 11 years were like, that seemed like forever.
A decade anymore goes like that. And you understand that before long, you'll wake up and we'll be talking about this again.
It'll be 11 years down the road. Lord, teach us to number our days.
I believe a lot of good things happened in 2023. We added in 2023 another pastor.
I think he's all right. We reworked our constitution and bylaws to better reflect who we were.
We adopted, I think, a better confession of faith. Moved from the Baptist faith of message to the 1689.
We renamed our church from Perryville Second Baptist Church to Providence Baptist Church.
We saw two baptisms. My daughter and Jacob's son.
We saw some families join the church. We became more closely connected with churches in Mexico.
Missionary work in Belize. We added a family from Belize. Our members now who are here with us this morning who will be returning soon, who we have covenanted with to watch over, to love, to partner with and see the gospel take root and take hold in Belize.
A lot of good things. And yet this morning I want to encourage us that we must never grow complacent as a church.
As we leave one year behind and look forward to what the Lord has for us in the next year, we must always consciously be seeking reformation.
And that is not reformation according to what our government may say, according to what men may say, according to what our culture may say.
A local church must always seek reformation according to the word of God.
Turn in your Bibles please this morning to Psalm chapter 19. I want to challenge us today as a church to saturate ourselves in the
Bible in 2024. May Providence Baptist Church, may the people here always be known as people of God.
The book. May we be characterized as a people who have the Bible ever on our lips, who sing of it, who talk of it, who daily read it, who gather around our families in family worship.
We memorize Scripture together. We sing the Bible together. We share
Scripture with those in our community. We preach the gospel to those in our community. All these types of things are the things we want to be known for.
We want to be known as people of the book. Because above all, this is the
King's book. And it is by feasting on this book that it's not about checking off a box.
It's about knowing the God who has given us this book. Our triune
God has revealed himself to us unworthy creatures in this book through Christ.
What a glorious God we have that has revealed himself to us. Therefore, we are adherents to the
Word. Here we stand, we can do no other. And I want to consider this morning
God's wonderful book. We'll be reading from Psalm 19, beginning in verse seven. Would you stand with me as we honor the reading of the
Word? David writes, The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.
The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever.
The rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them is your servant warned. In keeping them there is great reward. Who can discern his errors?
Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins.
Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Father, thank you for this book.
I pray this morning that we would see the chief end of this book as Christ, knowing
Him, and what He has done for us. Help us to understand the purpose of this book.
Help us to not see this book as a mere duty or burden, but as a delight.
Lord, shape us. Help us to be willing, even this morning, to say, expose to us the areas of our weakness.
Show us the areas we need to grow in. Show us by Your Word. And give us the faith to follow You, even if it's difficult.
Let us be people who adhere to what Your Word has to say. To love it, to trust it, to believe it.
We pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated. A number of years ago, you know how it is.
Listen, you can relate to this, especially probably dads. But a number of years ago, we were putting together something on Christmas Eve.
I don't remember what it was. Some sort of, I think it was like a tricycle type thing, like a big wheel type thing.
I don't remember what it was. But I, as a man, attempted to put this thing together without really consulting the instructions.
And I came to the end of it, and I had a few parts left over. And I remember
I had to look at the instructions. It turns out I'd missed a step. But in order to get back to that step,
I had to like undo the other 15 steps, right? Like put this thing together in 2 ,700 easy steps, right?
Because I'd missed a spot, I had to go all the way back and realize that this idea that they'd put on the box of some assembly required was a lot bigger deal than I was ready for.
But I use that illustration to remind us, things aren't going to work unless you read the book.
And I think there's an application there for us in this morning's sermon. Take up this book and read it.
Obviously, it's more than an instruction book. It's more than just life's little instructions for us.
But we are to be people who know the Scriptures. So I want to consider, first of all, the necessity of the
Word of God. The necessity of the Word of God. The Bible is 100 % necessary for knowing the
Gospel, for maintaining spiritual life, and for knowing God's will.
I'll say that again. The Bible is 100 % necessary for knowing the Gospel, for maintaining spiritual life, and for knowing
God's will. Now notice, the reason I say that is because the Bible is not necessary for knowing there is a
God. The text teaches us that. I didn't read it, but back up to verse one.
The heavens declare the glory of God. Now listen, this is what, I'll say this and then
I'll read it. David is teaching us here that all of creation, like the psalm that we just sang,
Psalm 8, the fish in the sea are declaring the worth of God. You go down into the depths of the sea and you found these weird looking creatures.
Why do these creatures even exist, right? They've got all these tentacles, or maybe they look weird and they got an eye over here in a weird spot and they swim around, they do weird things.
Why do they exist? They're declaring the worth of God. There's a sermon being preached right now.
You're like, well yeah, I know that, I hear it. No, no, not me, right? There's a sermon being preached right now that has been preached every second of every hour of every day since time began.
It has been preaching and it hasn't ceased preaching and that is God is glorious.
The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech. You understand the poetry here.
Day to day, there is a speech being poured out day to day that's a universal language.
And night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor are there words whose voice is not heard.
That is, whether you're in Asia or Africa or North America or South America or even you're doing research on the continent of Antarctica there's not a place in the world today in the universe.
If you're on a space station and you were able to go 10 ,000 light years away in the universe, still there, creation is preaching.
Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the earth. In them he has set a tent for the sun which comes out like a bridegroom.
So think about the sun here. Comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
So it rises, sets, its rising is from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of the earth and there is nothing hidden from its heat.
That is, everywhere the sun touches, right? In my mind just jumped a
Lion King reference, right? Everywhere the light touches, if I could do the James Earl Jones voice.
Everywhere the sun touches, God is being proclaimed.
There is not a soul in the world today that does not know
God exists. There is really no such thing as atheists.
Now I know you know some atheists and I know some atheists, but in their heart of hearts, the problem is not lack of knowledge, it's lack of belief.
They know God exists. There is enough evidence that God exists.
It's being proclaimed. God is glorious. Yet, because of sin, you can look at this later this afternoon,
Romans 1, 18 through 20 teaches us, mankind knows there's a God, but if you will, they're in the ocean, they've got the beach ball and that is knowledge of God and they've taken the beach ball and they've pressed it underneath the water and they're holding it there, suppressing, that's the language of Romans 1, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.
There is evidence of God in all creation because God is being proclaimed by the sun and the moon and the stars and the fish and the snow and the deer and the trees and the newborn cry.
God is being proclaimed in all creation as glorious. Mankind looks at that knowledge and says, no, we will not believe that and they suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
So our confession, chapter one of 1689 rightly says, the Holy Scriptures are the only sufficient, certain and infallible standard of all saving knowledge, faith and obedience.
The light of nature and the works of creation and providence are not sufficient to give the knowledge of God and His will that is necessary for salvation.
Therefore, I say again, the Bible is 100 % necessary for knowing the gospel, for maintaining spiritual life and knowing
God's will. So when you get to verse seven, there's a switch. Did you not, just look in your Bibles and just see if you notice something.
What is the difference between God in verse one and how
God is referred to in verse seven? I don't think that this is accidental.
In verse one, if you know the Hebrew, you have Elohim is used.
The heavens declare the glory of Elohim, the glory of God. That's just a generic name for God.
But then in verse seven, we have God's covenantal name used,
Yahweh. The law of Yahweh is perfect. I don't think that's by mistake.
The only way to know God personally because of our sin is through His revelation of Himself in His word.
And God's law here is perfect. David is for the word is Torah, the Hebrew word there, the law, the
Torah of the Lord. So he's referring to the Torah, but with a completed canon of Scripture, that means we have a whole
Bible now, we can apply everything that David says here to the entirety of the
Scriptures. So in the Bible, we have a perfect revelation of God that is necessary to know
Him and His will. The law of the Lord is perfect. And then he says that it revives the soul, reviving the soul.
David is not saying that we get revived by keeping the law. In and of ourselves, of course, we cannot do that.
What he is saying is that the word of God is the instrument by which God uses to revive our soul, to bring revival to our soul.
Without the word, we're utterly lost, we're hopeless, condemned by the testimony of creation, but with nothing to point our hearts toward reconciliation.
But the word of God reveal how that reconciliation is possible through the gospel.
That is Christ's life, death, burial, resurrection for sinners. In other words, you can't look at the sun and the moon and the stars and see
Christ's righteous work. You can't look at a beautiful night sky and say, oh, Jesus died for me. You can't see that in creation.
That's only revealed in the Scriptures. In the Bible, we see
Christ on every page. We see our need for Him. We see Him prophesied.
We see Him coming in the flesh. We see His perfect and holy life. We understand Him as the only way to God.
We see His death for sinners as a substitutionary wrath -satisfying sacrifice.
We see His victorious resurrection of triumph. We see God's command to all mankind to repent and believe the gospel.
We see it as our duty to place our faith in the finished work of the Son of God. There is no other place,
I'm saying, to get this truth outside of the Bible. And the
Holy Spirit uses His own word to revive the soul, to regenerate the heart, to enlighten our understanding of who
God is and who we are and what Christ has done and our great need for Him.
This is the necessity of the Word of God. Before moving on, let me say to the church that we're in constant need of repentance, constant need of renewal, constant need of reassurement, constant need of recalibration.
Friends, the Word of God is necessary to bring these things into our life.
Oh, I just wanna be closer to Jesus. I wanna be a better husband. I wanna be a better wife. I wanna be a better worker.
I wanna bring more glory to Christ. You will not do that apart from the Word of God. It's the
Word of God that revives the soul. Secondly, I wanna talk about the authority of the Word of God.
That is the necessity now, the authority of the Word of God. The Bible bears authority, the highest authority on our lives.
Friends, to disobey or disbelieve the Bible is to disobey or disbelieve
God. Well, you're making the Bible God. No, no, no, we're not saying the Bible is God. We're saying the
Bible is a perfect treasure and revelation of God. We're saying the Bible is the
Word of God. So we're saying the Bible is how God speaks to us. Now, look at our text. With a completed canon of Scripture, we can understand these words that David uses here to apply to the whole
Bible. So the law, the testimony, the rules, the commandments, the fear, the precepts, they are all different ways here of referring to the
Scriptures. And notice something in our text. What does David keep repeating in this
Psalm about the law and the testimony and the rules and the commandments and the fear and the precepts?
He keeps saying, they are of the
Lord. Now, let me just, I don't know if this will be helpful to you or not.
Let me do some translation as I read this. Very simple. I'm just gonna read
God's covenantal name here, Yahweh. Some people say Jehovah. I think Yahweh is a better translation.
And I'm just gonna put it in the possessive, because that's what it is, of the Lord, of Yahweh, that's possessive.
So I'm just gonna put it in the possessive and read it and see maybe if it helps us a little bit. So just listen to this.
Yahweh's law is perfect, reviving the soul.
Yahweh's testimony is sure, making wise the simple. Yahweh's precepts are right, rejoicing the heart.
Yahweh's commandment is pure, enlightening the eyes. Yahweh's fear is clean, enduring forever.
Yahweh's rules are true and righteous altogether.
Friends, the Bible is God's. Therefore, we are under the authority of God as mediated to us in His word.
If you say to me this morning, I'm under the authority of God, but I don't listen to the
Bible, then friend, you are not, for practical purposes, acknowledging the authority of God in your life.
The authority of God in your life is the Bible. Deuteronomy 8 .3
says this way, man shall not live by bread alone, but what? Every word that proceeds out of the mouth of Yahweh.
Our transcendent, holy, triune God has given us His own word. Every single word in Scripture is from the mouth of God.
He has given us this word for our good and His glory. He does not lie,
He does not deceive, He does not play games. He has given us His word not as an optional thing for us to read or obey or whatever when we want to, but because there is major reassembly required in our lives and the
Holy Spirit uses His word to move us, to shake us, to give us life, to transform us into the people
He wants us to be. Jesus had a very, so some people are like, the
Bible's not my highest authority, Jesus is. That sounds spiritual, but it's actually,
I want to say S -T -U -P -I -D, but foolish, it's dumb.
What do you mean Jesus is your highest authority, but not the Bible? Jesus had a high view of the
Bible, by the way. In John 10 .35, He said, Scripture cannot be broken. Then when
He said in Matthew 24 .35, He said, heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
What? The Rocky Mountains will pass away? The Mississippi River will pass away? The Nile River will pass away?
The continent of Africa will pass away? The United States will pass away? But the words of Christ will not pass away.
Friends, you cannot have Jesus as your highest authority unless His word is your highest authority.
I heard a person say once, listen to God's voice above all else, even Scripture. That doesn't make sense, because Scripture is
God's voice in written form. Men wrote the Bible as they were moved by the
Holy Spirit so that Scripture is 100 % God -breathed. This is God's voice to His people.
So anything that you feel, or any kind of tradition, or anything that might be culturally accepted, or anything and everything else is subservient to the
Scripture. So for example, you say, I feel this way, but the Bible says that. Your feelings are wrong, your
Bible is right. I, you know, it's just traditional. Hey, you know what? I understand, we're not in the 50s no more, dude.
Like, it's okay if a man and woman need to live together outside of marriage. It's okay, it's the world that we live in.
It doesn't matter what the culture says. It's what does the word of God say? It's not your tradition, it's the
Scriptures. It's not your feelings, it's the Scriptures. It's not the way it's always been done, it's the
Scriptures. It's always the Bible, because this is Yahweh's word. The Bible is our supreme standard, because it is the voice of God in written form.
To disbelieve or disobey any word in Scripture is to disbelieve and disobey God. Thirdly, now
I'm tempted to say finally, but that signals to the listener that the plane's landing.
And if we are making our descent, it's gonna be a minute here. So I'm gonna get, you know, keep the seat belt fastened is what
I'm saying. Thirdly, the sufficiency of Scripture, because I'm really building up to this point.
I think Psalm 19 is one of the greatest places that we can look to to help us affirm the sufficiency of Scripture.
I also think that a denial of the sufficiency of Scripture is one of the main problems that we have in churches today.
That is, now listen, I'm talking about conservative churches. I'm talking about churches that if I stood in the pulpit and I said, this is the word of God, they'd say, amen.
I'm talking about conservative churches. I think one of the greatest problems in conservative churches today is a practical denial of the sufficiency of the word of God.
John MacArthur said this, all truth necessary for our salvation and spiritual life is taught either explicitly or implicitly in Scripture.
The 1689, our own confession, says the whole counsel of God concerning everything essential for his own glory and man's salvation, faith, and life is either explicitly stated or by necessary inference contained in the
Holy Scripture. Both of those definitions, what MacArthur's saying, what the 1689 is saying, both of those definitions say everything that we need, everything that is essential for the glory of God and for our
Christian life is given to us in the Bible. God doesn't set forth the idea of Christianity and then say, you know what, guys, you just take it and you run with it.
You look at the world today and you decide what you think is best. You look at churches today and you decide what you think is best.
You get advice from the philosophers and from the cultural elites and from the presidents and leaders of the world today and then you take their thoughts and you mix them with some of my thoughts and then you come up with a conglomeration of Christianity that will save the world.
You do it. I think it's good for you to do that. No. We have in the
Bible and in the Bible alone everything we need to know
God and to live for his glory. It teaches us the wonderful truths of the gospel, of the church, the
Christian life. Let me just read these verses again, 7, 8, 9. The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise to simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.
The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The rules of the
Lord are true and righteous altogether. Walk through those for just a moment, those attributes with me.
This is the attributes of Scripture here. It is perfect. That is, verse 7, the law of the
Lord is perfect. It is whole. It is complete. Perfect, that means it is not lacking.
There is nothing lacking in the Bible that you need to know about God or the
Christian life. It is perfect. It can revive the soul, or in other words, transform the person.
Sometimes in your evangelistic conversations, you say, I just don't know what to say to that person.
Whenever you come to a point that you don't know what to say to a person, how about just giving them the
Scripture? How about just saying, I don't know everything that I'm supposed to say to you right now, but I do know this.
Jesus commands us in Mark 115, repent and believe the gospel. Jesus tells us in John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that He gave
His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. I know that in Acts 16, 31,
Paul and Silas told the Philippian jailer to believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.
Quote the Bible. You can't go wrong with quoting the Bible because God is pleased to use the
Bible, His perfect Bible to transform the person. Let me move on. It is perfect, it is sure. I'm just following along the text here.
It is perfect, it is sure. The testimony of the Lord is sure. That is, it is trustworthy.
You can count on it. It is convincing. The Spirit uses it here, it says, to make a simple, undiscerning mind skilled in all the issues of life.
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. Hey, we can joke about Arkansas, right?
We're just simple folk here. We put our shoes on on Sunday to come to church. Listen to me.
It is the Word of God that makes simple people discerning people, wise people.
The Word of God takes the simplest of minds and transforms it into discerning after the righteous and holiness of Christ.
It is right. I'm just following along. Look, now I'm on verse eight. The precepts of the
Lord are right. That is, it points to the one right way, the narrow road.
It points us to Christ, who is our only source of eternal joy.
It is our sure compass. Again, the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.
That is, when we read the Bible, and when a Christian, when a regenerate heart reads the Bible and hears the commands of the
Bible and says this is what it looks like to be a Christian man, to be a Christian woman, to be a pastor, to be a church member, to be a deacon.
This is what it looks like. We don't feel an overwhelming sense of burden and drudgery. Rather, our hearts are rejoiced.
We are rejoicing because we want to do the will of God. Rejoices the heart.
It is pure. The second half of verse eight, the commandment of the
Lord is pure. That is, in this sense, it is clear. That is another area we're battling today, if you just listen closely, is the perspicuity of Scripture.
Now that's a long word to communicate something simple. It means clear.
The clarity of Scripture. That is, the Bible is clear. Some people want to say things like this, well, you know, everybody just has different beliefs about the
Bible, so you just take this and I'll take that and I'll go my merry way and you go your merry way and it really doesn't matter.
No, this is an indictment against God because it says to us that God doesn't know how to talk to His people.
Now, that may be true of me. I can give confusing commands. I can give commands to my children that confuse them.
It's actually, they may be being disobedient or it may be I just gave confusing commands.
Is this our view of God? That God does not know how to communicate
His Word to His people. Now, I understand not all passages are easy. I think that's by design.
I think there are difficult passages to interpret because God wants us to study and to grow and to do the hard work, but the message of God's salvation through the perfect work of Christ, it is plain and a lot more of the
Bible is plain and simple than some people try to make it out to be. It is pure. Next, it points us to a proper perspective of God.
Verse nine says the fear of the Lord is clean. Again, these are all attributes of Scripture, so this is not a subjective fear of the
Lord so much as it's talking about the Scriptures. The words of God are the fear of Yahweh.
It's clean. That is undefiled. It's not mixed with error.
It's not that you have to reach through the Bible and say, okay, well, this part's true and that part's not true.
No. It's infallible and inerrant. It does not pass away. And then it is true.
It is true. In other places in Scripture, like John 17, 17, it is truth.
So it is true truth. It is true. It is the book that is the standard for judging the life and eternal destiny of every person.
It is the book that is the standard for judging the lives of men.
When you communicate what the Bible says, you are not judging someone in the sense that it's being used.
So for example, if you say to a person, no liar will inherit eternal life, all liars will burn in the lake of fire, you are communicating
Revelation 21 .8. You're not judging someone. You're communicating what the judge has said.
You're communicating the Scriptures because the Scriptures are true. They are reliable.
It gives us the very will of God for our lives. Now, you can read, and you know me, come to my study and see,
I can let you borrow a lot of books. We can read much wisdom in others' writings. We can gain, we can glean truth from schooling and such, social interaction, even certain television shows, you know.
I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens. You know, the guy on the History Channel, I don't know how much truth you can glean from that.
But even certain television shows, we can glean truth. But at the end of the day, what I'm trying to communicate here is they are all imperfect for sufficiently understanding everything we need that pertains to Christ, His church, and eternal life.
We depend on the Bible. I'll make a comment, it's not affecting most of you in here, but I'll make this comment because I think it fits here.
Some of you, this is important to everyone, but you need to listen carefully. But there's debates today about philosophy and how natural religion, natural theology,
I should say, natural theology, philosophy, I'm using those terms synonymously. Let me say this.
Any doctrine of God that we develop that begins with man is ultimately going to lead us to the wrong
God. Where we have to begin in our understanding of God is where God has revealed
Himself to us in His Word. This is where we start. So I believe there has been a massive breakdown happening in conservative churches over the last couple of decades.
Intellectually, we affirm the necessity of the Word of God. We affirm the authority of the
Word of God. Intellectually, we affirm the sufficiency of the Word of God. But practically, this is not lived out.
Okay, preacher, give us some examples. Well, I'm glad you asked that because I wanna give you some examples. Our methodology of evangelism, our methodology of worship or missions or ecclesiology, how we do church, these things are based upon studies or experience or what the experts say or what works and not upon the
Word of God. Why are you going out preaching the gospel? Why are you going out knocking on doors?
Why are you, that doesn't work. Studies show that doesn't work. I don't give a cotton -picking care about your studies.
I wanna do what the Bible says to do and it doesn't matter to me what culture has to say. I want to be a man of the book and this must be the desire of every regenerate heart.
The scriptures are enough. I don't even know if you can say cotton -picking from the pulpit anymore.
I think that's offensive. But you understand what I'm trying to say. I don't give a rip.
Is that better? I don't know if that's better. I don't care what the culture has to say.
We will not be pragmatist here. We will not be scared to be different here.
May we fear God more than man because we don't have the right to do things outside of God's word.
I read the other day, it was an emotionally gripping story, but I read the other day about a conservative pastor who'd been dealing with some stuff and it was hard and he showed up to church one day and the music leader called and he couldn't come and he just didn't feel up to it.
He was like, man, I can't lead music. I can't preach. So he called his deacons and they just canceled service that day.
The corporate worship of the living God on the Lord's day, canceled. I'm just trying to tell us, this is a disregard for what the word of God says.
When we do things like dismissing worship or adding to worship or letting culture dictate our practices over God's word, we are saying that we are smarter than God and that we ultimately don't care what
God says. We create wrong ideas in our mind about who God is and about what
He wants. I am convinced. So the problem is, the problem is when you talk to so many people who profess to be
Christians today in our culture, the problem is not that they, let me rephrase that.
The problem is that they have convinced themselves in their mind that they are following Jesus. They have convinced themselves in their mind and heart that they love
God. But here's the great problem. So how do I know? So this is my encouragement, my exhortation, my warning to you.
How do I know that I'm not like that? How do I know that I haven't just invented Jesus in my mind and I'm following the wrong
Jesus? Friends, it's the scriptures. We must, these are the plumb line, right?
These are the standard. We look at our lives, we look at our church, we look at our families and we say, are we ordering these things by what this says?
And if we are not, then the God we have in our heart and mind is a God of our own invention and not the
God of the Bible. David says in verse 10 and 11, more to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, buy them as your servant warned in keeping them there is great reward. Oh man.
Now, some of you, you like spinach, but maybe for the children and the rest of normal people,
I'll use spinach as an example. Aren't you glad he's like, he doesn't say the
Bible's like spinach, tasteless, but good for you. No, and I know this speaks to the
Carter's heart here. The Bible is like honey, honey.
What is honey? It's sweet. It tastes good. It's a Bible. It's not a drudgery.
It's good for you and it's sweet like honey and it's more valuable. All the time that we spend, the time that we spend to make a dollar and the time that we worry about money and David is sitting here shouting at us in this psalm, the
Bible's better than money. It's more valuable than gold, even much fine gold. It's better.
If I said to you, can you memorize a passage? You would say, oh, it's hard for me to memorize a passage. My brain just isn't like I used to be.
But I said, hey, listen, if you, every verse you memorize between now and next Sunday, I'm gonna give you $1 ,000.
You would find all of a sudden how much of a recovery you have of your memory now, right?
And I'm telling you, the Bible's better than that. It's better than $1 ,000 that I could give you.
But we're now in a state of Christianity where we have masses amount of people who say that they are
Christian, but they're biblically illiterate. Given the access we have today to God's word,
I believe we are the most biblically illiterate generation that has ever existed, ever.
May that not be true of us here. Who can discern verse 12 now?
Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins.
Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression.
And then verse 14. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. God is our rock and our redeemer. David penned this psalm, but one from the line of David came to be our redeemer.
Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, who lived sinlessly, who is as,
I love, hey, when Gunner uses the word quintessential, I know it's gonna be a good day. Jesus is the quintessential fulfillment of Psalm 1 and Psalm 19 and Psalm 119 and all the psalms, right?
Like, this is, Jesus points us to Christ, the sinless one who obeyed the law for us, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, who was crucified for our sins, dead and buried and rose again on the third day.
He alone is our redeemer. There's redemption in no one else but Jesus if you go to Him in faith.
And David says, if we want to live lives, essentially, if we want to live lives that love Christ, then we're gonna need to be in His word.
Why? Well, presumptuous sins, you saw that in verse 13. That's blatant disregard for God's commands.
Yet so many Christians can get caught in these because they don't give serious attention to God's word.
The redeemed don't want to just guiltily obey Scripture. Rather, they desire to please
God because we love Him. God has given us a perfect layout of what pleases
Him and how to do so in His precious word. Many people think today, how it is
I'm supposed to please God? We were talking to a man in evangelism a few weeks ago. I broke his stick.
You can ask Alex and Jacob about that if you want to humble one of your pastors, myself,
I'm talking about. Anyway, this man said that he was talking to God and that God said to him, what's important to you?
And the man said, my truck. So God said to him, then that's important to me.
And he said, what's important to you? And he said, my wife, which I thought is funny. He put his truck first. He said, well, then that's important to me.
But you understand, I'm not trying to be too harsh on this man. That's the way a lot of people think that they please
God. They please God by just living however they want and trying to do right in their own eyes.
And then God just comes in and He blesses that. And I'm pleading with us here to understand this morning that the way that we please
God and understand His will for our life and live the way that He desires us is by conforming our life, surrendering our life to what this book says.
May the Bible not be a burden to you. Do we value the privilege of heavenly counsel?
So much more that I want to say, but I don't want to just belabor a point. So here's what
I'm going to do for the remainder of the sermon. The city's getting close, the plane is coming closer.
I want to issue a challenge to you for 2024.
God has blessed us in 2024 because we get an extra day. It's a leap year.
366 days. My challenge is this, that everyone in this room, if not providentially hindered, if you're not hindered providentially by sickness or disaster or calamity, that we would read a portion of God's Word 366 days straight.
That begins tomorrow. This book gives us the mind of Christ.
What poor, wretched creatures we are. These little bitty viruses that we can't even see, they can knock us down, they can take our lives.
We're so dependent, we're so helpless, we're so miserable and wretched in and of ourselves, but here we have the mind of Christ.
We can be filled with Christ and His mind and His heart and His Word, and I'm saying take up and read.
What are your habits with this book? Do you believe what
God's Word has to say about itself? Do you really believe that it is like a fire and a sword and a hammer?
Is the Bible just a conservative talking point for you, or is it merely a nice idea?
If God's people were to wake up tomorrow and really be committed to reading the Scriptures every day, perhaps the great dust cloud itself by shaking off so many unused
Bibles would be enough to spark revival in our nation. All of a sudden tomorrow they wake up and they're like, what is all this dust everywhere in the
United States? The people of God have woken up and have shaken the dust off their Bibles and are committed to reading.
What would that be like in our nation and in the world? I understand there's days of sickness and tragedy and disaster and unforeseen issues, but if I can set aside the thousand qualifications that we could come up with for a moment and let you hear my heart here,
I would say this, for the average person in this room on an average day, when you do not read a portion of God's Word, it is not because you can't, it's because you won't.
It's not for lack of ability. It's not for lack of access. Here it is. I don't even know how much this weighs.
I have on this device every word, the 66 books of the
Bible. And here it is in my pocket. When I don't read, it's not for lack of ability or access, it's lack of desire.
Now that's a serious indictment. I understand that. I'm saying something very weighty to you.
I am saying you still need to grow in grace. You still need a more sanctified heart.
You still need Christ. You sin against His great grace and kindness when you fail to take advantage of something that 99 % of human history could not do.
And that is to take up, listen, 99 % more than that, 99 .99999
% of human history could not do what you can do. And that is you can take up a Bible that is completed from Genesis to Revelation.
You can take it up without fear of arrest or imprisonment or jail. You can take it up and you can read it, not in Latin, not in Greek, not in Hebrew, not in Aramaic.
You can read it in English. They even have translations out there that us simple Arkansans can understand.
You can pick up the Bible and you can read the Bible and you can understand the Bible. We have a great privilege that 99 % of human history has not had and we sin against God's great kindness when we don't take advantage of this.
You should know the Bible better, but the world has distracted you.
Now, that can either make you mad. You can kind of, you know, be like, I ain't listening to that guy.
He's adding new rules. Nowhere in the Bible does it ever say one time, you have to read the
Bible every day. True. You win that one, response.
Nowhere in the Bible does it ever say that I have to speak to my wife every day. You will not find a
Bible verse, you'll search in vain that says, a husband has to speak to his wife every single day.
Frankly, there are some days I'm just busy. I see my wife in the car.
I see my wife in the home. I see my wife in church, but I'm busy.
Would you let me pastor this church if that's the way I treated my wife? Please say no. Then why would it be okay if I treated my
Bible that way? And why would it be okay if you treat your Bible that way? So you can get mad and you can push back or you and I can humbly confess our sins our misplaced desires, our misplaced priorities and we can remember the grace of our
Lord Jesus and we can take up his book and read. I set Christ before you today that when you read this book, it is not about,
I thought I had a little, I had a Bible reading plan in here somewhere. It's not about just checking off the boxes.
It's about knowing God. It's about knowing who God is.
Is there a single soul in this room today who would say, I don't need to know any more of God.
Oh, don't be foolish with such a claim. We need God and God is willing.
Here's Christ before us, ready to be sought by us if we'll seek him in his word. Here he says, come and seek me.
The reality is, and I didn't come up with this, you can have as much of Christ as you want. You see, you already have as much of Christ.
So plead with God to increase our want and let us be people of this great and wonderful book.
Let me read again verses seven through nine. The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.
Lord are true and righteous all together. Is there a single day in your life that you would say you don't need this?
That you don't need to know God? That you don't need the mind of Christ? Man, let me give you the hope.
Well, what might change in your marriage, in your life, in your home, in our church, in this town, in our country, if we took the
Word of God so much more seriously? If we said, you know what?
Okay, challenge accepted. 366 days straight. Now, don't do it. Don't do it just to do it.
Do it because you hunger for Christ. This isn't about getting through the
Bible in a certain amount of time. Hey, look, I think it's important to read through the
Bible. I personally do it on a yearly basis. You may not do that.
You may have never read through the Bible. You may wanna take a three -year plan, a five -year plan. Right now, our church is gonna start a two -year plan.
I do think it's important to get through all of the Bible, but that's not even the ultimate point.
The ultimate point is seeking God in His Word. And if we sought
Him for 366 days straight, if we adjusted our life according to its precepts, if we continually sought reform in our church according to its instruction, if we believed its necessity, if we bowed to its authority, and if we trusted its sufficiency, what might happen in this place?
Oh, may our triune God grant us this grace. Oh, the glory of Christ set before us in His Word in God's wonderful book.
Friends, will we take up and read? Let's pray. Father, I thank
You for Your Word, and I thank You that as we come to a close of another year, that we are a people who have been given such a tremendous privilege.
Who are we, God? Who are we here in rural Arkansas that You've given us such a high and wonderful blessing,
Your Word, in a language that we can understand, with access to it. Who are we that You've given us such beauty?