Psalm 119:9-16 (December 31, 2023)

Psalm 119 and the Blessing of the Undefiled Way

Turn with me to Psalm 119 and we'll get started. So, as you're turning there, Psalms, I like to say them this way, they are more of a beautiful way that God has given us to view the way that Israel did their religiousness.

So, Psalms were written to be sung within their services and things like that, and they give us a beautiful picture of the Israel's philosophy and theology of how God was and how He acted, but also it gives us a beautiful picture of how they worship God and how they treated His word and things like that.

And so, as we get into Psalm 119 verses 9 through 16 today, we're going to see that all of Psalm 119 is all about the importance of God's Word. And it's divided into different sections with different focuses.

So, we're going to talk about the second section today, which is from verse 9 through 16, but a little bit of backstory on the first section. I want to read the first two verses of Psalm 119 so we can kind of get a little bit of background.

So, starting in verse 1 of Psalm 119, Blessed are the undefiled in the way who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with the whole heart. So, the whole Psalm starts out with this blessing to those who are undefiled in the way.

It's a blessedness to those who seek God, and it is meant to show that there's a certain level of amazingness that comes from not living in a corrupt life, not living in a corrupt way. Now, as we continue on, we're going to see that the author understands that he is not undefiled.

He is defiled in his way. So, if you continue on reading, you get to verses 5 and 6, and we see that in verse 5, the author of this psalm begins, Oh, that my ways were directed to keep your statutes. Then I would not be ashamed when I look to all your commandments.

Our psalmist realizes that it is so blessed and beautiful to be undefiled. However, we get to verse 6, and he is ashamed when he looks at God's commandments. We ask, why? Why? Because he realizes that because of the Lord's commandments, he is no longer undefiled.

At his core, he has disobeyed the commandments and is defiled. So, when we go into today's passage, keep that in mind. Okay, so I'm going to begin in verse 9. I'm going to read all the way through to start off with, and then we'll kind of go through what we're going to talk about today.

So, beginning in verse 9. How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to your word. With my whole heart I have sought you. Oh, let me not wander from your commandments. Your word have I hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you.

Blessed are you, O Lord. Teach me your statutes. With my lips I have declared all the judgments of your mouth. I have rejoiced in the way of your testimony as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and contemplate your ways.

I will delight myself in your statutes. I will not forget your word. This is the word of God to us this morning. Let us pray before we get started. God, thank you for this day, and thank you for this opportunity to get to speak to a church that I am proud to call home and proud to call family.

I ask that the words that I say today not be cleverly illustrated words that I choose to say to my family this morning. I ask that the words that I say be words that come from you, and that you would guide me this morning.

In your name I pray. Amen. All right, church. So, verse 9. I'm going to call an overview of this entire passage. It lays out the main point that the author is trying to get across in this section of the psalm.

It's a question and an answer. He asks a question saying, how can a young man cleanse his way? And he says that the answer in the next verse is, by taking heed according to your word. One important thing to note is taking heed.

I had a little bit of work on this, and it's actually a super active term. It's almost to the point of a soldier as guarding sort of post. Like, taking heed is not just a, I know what your word is and I choose to do it.

It's a, I am actively in every moment standing here on guard according to the word as to what I do. And as we continue on, that is the major theme of this whole verse. It's not just the importance of God's word, but that the only way that I can cleanse my way is through the word of God.

Seeking God With the Whole Heart and Hiding the Word in the Heart

As we continue, so looking at verse 10, we're going to read that with my whole heart the author has sought God. I'm going to stop here for a second because I got blown away at this for a moment. I started thinking about what it means to seek God with my whole heart.

And in that I realized how few people I think I could name or have ever met in my life who can really look at me and say that with every single piece of my heart I have sought after God. Yet the author can say that, and we look at the very next passage, very next section of that verse, and he says, let me not wonder from your commandments.

The author realizes that despite the fact that I have searched God with my whole heart, I still know how easy it is to just to fall away from the commandments. I know that because he's worked with God for his whole heart, he knows that it is so easy for him to just deviate slightly from those commandments.

And as we go on from there, we see that he has a desire to live according to the word so that it can cleanse his way, but he knows that it's very easy to fall. So verse 11 is probably the most well-known verse in all of Psalm 119.

It is your word I have hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you. This morning I want to urge you as church that you've probably heard this verse a hundred times in your life. I want to urge you church to hear it with fresh eyes today, because we're going to look at it in a really, really practical, a really, really interesting sense as we get into the rest of this chapter.

But I want you to look at it and go, okay, what could God be teaching me today in this verse? Because we all know that, we as people know, as Christians that we know in our hearts, okay, yes, the word keeps me from sin.

But I want us to take a second today and really focus on the how of that. Because I really think if we can get the how nailed down mentally, it will change how we act and how we treat the Word of God.

And so as we're looking at this passage, we understand that the author goes, okay, I need to cleanse my way. How can I cleanse it? By taking heed or guarding myself according to your word. The word which I have hidden in my heart that I may not sin against you.

He gets to this realization that the word keeps him from sin. Now we may as a church gloss over that. The author clearly does not. We get to verse 12 and it's a beautiful capturation of a beautiful statement.

He goes, blessed are you Lord, oh, blessed are you oh Lord, teach me your statutes in verse 12. In that, he is expressing a passion that he has reached a point where he realizes the Word of God is powerful enough to keep me from sin.

And he can do nothing yet praise the Lord in that. How often do we as people make that realization and gloss over it? I think it's a lot of it to do with we don't really realize how beautiful of a statement that is.

That the Word of God solely and alone with the Spirit of God working in our lives can keep us from sin. That's the only thing that can keep us from sin is the Word and the Spirit. The author hits that realization and can do nothing but praise God and ask him to bless God.

And he also asks God because he realizes that he needs to know the Word of God. He needs to know the statutes of God to be able to live the Word. And so he gets to this, he praises God and he asks, begs of God, please teach me your statutes.

Because he needs God to, he needs God to do this. As we continue on, we're going to take these last four verses and hit them and they each have a very specific, almost principle-like component to keeping the work, keeping the commandments of God.

Each one contains a different piece, not all the pieces I don't think, but some of the most important pieces as to how the Word keeps us from sin. So let's read verse 14 together. So, with my lips I have declared all the judgments of your mouth.

With my lips I have declared all the judgments of your mouth. I started looking at this one, reading this one, and one verse in the New Testament stuck out to me. And it kind of went along with this idea of that from the abundance of the mouth, the heart speaks.

We've all heard that. It's in Luke 6, Luke 6 .45. I'm going to turn there and read it real fast. Luke chapter 6, verse 45. A good man out of the good treasure in his heart brings forth good. And an evil man out of the evil of his heart brings forth evil.

For out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks. We get to the New Testament and it's the same principle, but it's the principle that whatever is filling you, whatever you have inside is what you're going to speak from.

The author realizes this and says, that with my lips I have declared all the judgments of your mouth. The author wants to get across the idea that there's a piece of, there's a piece to talking out the Word of God that is directly related to with you keeping the Word of God.

And so we as people look at this and go, okay, so if out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, then if I continue to speak the Word with people, if I am in community, if I am in the church, if I am with this body, this family here, and I am speaking the Word to one another, and we are conversating, then that Word, it comes from somewhere.

It comes from the abundance of our hearts. And then we have seen in verse 11, that if the Word is hidden in our heart, it keeps us from sin. There's a connection there, that the Word in our heart both flows out into speech and keeps us from sin.

There's a huge connection there, and there's a huge application to be taken from that, which we'll get to in a moment. Continuing to verse 14, we look at verse 14, it says, I have rejoiced in the way of your testimony as much as in all riches.

The psalmist here is writing a verse and he says, I have rejoiced in the way of your testimony. This part here, it's not, I didn't realize how much was actually wrapped up in this verse until I really, really sat and scratched my head for a little bit.

Because like, yes, of course I'm going to rejoice, but rejoicing in the way of your testimony is beautiful. And what I really saw was interesting was that word, as much as in all riches. The psalmist is making an equal statement here.

He is equaling the rejoicing that God's testimonies bring us to the rejoicing that it would be to receive all riches. Now, all riches, all means all. So this is not riches as in just, oh, I became a billionaire today.

This is as in all of the riches of all time in all of the world. Like, this is everything. And we notice that he says that the rejoicement that the word brings us is the same as all riches. In my life, I never see that.

That the word brings that much rejoicing as it would if I had received all riches. And I urge you, church, to evaluate your life and see if within your life does the testimony of the word bring a type of rejoicing that is all riches.

Meditation on the Precepts and Delighting in God's Statutes

Looking at verse 15 now, we get down to another really interesting sentence. So, I will meditate on your precepts and contemplate your ways. Meditation here with the same idea of, it's a deep, I'm going to use the word, pensive thought.

It's a deep, intentional moment of sitting and focusing on something. Not the modern Western idea of meditation where you sit in your circle and you have your bongo drums or whatever. That's not what meditation in this sense is.

It's a deep and pensive contemplation of something. But I'll meditate on your precepts and contemplate your ways. So there's a deep thought element to knowing the word in your heart as well. It's not all just feeling and not all just, I have to acknowledge it.

It's a, I'm racking it over in my brain constantly. And day in day out, racking it over in your brain and revolving around it. The last verse of this section of the psalm is verse 16. I will delight myself in your statutes.

I will not forget your word. We reach verse 16 and there's something really, really cool here. This was the verse that really stuck out to me the most in my study because I was stuck on this one question.

I said this verse very clearly says that I would delight in the statutes of God. For it's very obvious to me that I should always be delighting in the presence of God. Like that's, that's easy, right?

But the statutes of God to me seemed interesting. Like in my head I know that it's probably good to delight in the statutes of God. But that the statutes of God, that His, the law and the way that He's designed for us to live, the way that He has created us, should actually delight me.

I started to rack that over my brain and think about it and I read a couple of different things on it and I really ended up having this beautiful realization that God was like, this is why you're delighted, this is why you should delight in my statutes.

It's because God as Creator has designed us in certain ways. He's designed us to work in very specific fashions and in doing so He established and wrote to us the exact way that we're supposed to live in His statutes.

He established a law code, He established an outline to make us the best way and most fulfilling way that we can live in His Word. That is why it's delighting. We can find fulfillment in the Word of God for a lot of reasons.

One of the biggest reasons is because living your life according to anything but the Word of God will always come up short. If you live your life according to anything other than the Word of God, it will pale in comparison to the fulfillment that can come from living the Word of God and living the commandments and design that the designer has put in there for you.

I'm reminded of the illustration of you can use a screwdriver as a hammer but it doesn't quite work as well. Right? So if I sit there and I take my screwdriver and I'm trying to drive it a nail, it'll work but if I had a hammer it would work so much better.

The Word of God, the way that He has designed us, works the same way. We can try to do some of the stuff around about our own and it might work for a little while but in the end it's never going to fulfill in the same way doing it the Word of God says can.

Practical Commitments for a New Year in the Word

So what? We've gone through, we've seen these four areas. These four areas that we just kind of hit on briefly are a beautiful way to explain how the Word of God keeps us from sin. To finish up today, I've got those four different ideas but they're more of an applicational side of that.

So something that I want to urge us, not me, not you, us as a church together in community to do and to change the way we think so that we can use the Word of God to keep us from sin. Two of these are ideas, two of them are actions.

So the two, I'm gonna go through the ideas first and then we'll go through the actions in just a moment. So the first idea is that we need to value the Word of God as much as all riches. This is a harder thing to do than it sounds, right?

Like, okay, I'll just value it as hard as all riches. But what wouldn't you do, what wouldn't you sacrifice? I can prove to you real fast that you don't value the Word of God as much as all riches. What wouldn't you do, what wouldn't you sacrifice to get all riches in the world?

Would you get up 30 minutes earlier? Would you stay up 30 minutes later? Would you spend a little extra time here, sacrifice some time with these people, with this group of friends, with that, not watch as much football, do this or that?

Now what wouldn't you do to get some time in the Word of God? There's not a lot on that list. Would you be willing to get up 30 minutes earlier? Would you be willing to stay up 30 minutes later? Would you sacrifice some time with football?

Would you sacrifice some time with your friends? Like, this really hit me hard, hit me hard at least. Of that, one of the biggest reasons I'm not willing to, every day, without mistake, be in the Word of God is because I'm not valuing it as much as all riches.

And so going on from there, the second big idea is finding fulfillment in living the Scriptures. So this could kind of be a practical thing too, of like, you've got to actually live the Scriptures. But you've got to understand that all of the things that we can search for in this world will never fulfill in the same way that the Scriptures can.

And we must be willing to give up the fulfillment that money, football, friends, etc., etc., fill in the blank with whatever you're finding fulfillment in. We must be willing to sacrifice that for the things that the Word and the designer who made us to work a certain way, made us and sacrificed those things for what He has given us to fulfill us.

And for what He can fulfill us in. So those are two big idea areas that I want us as a church, that I look forward to using in my own life as the end to the new year. But I want to encourage us as a church to do that.

The next two are more on the avocation, on the physical, like, actually do this side. The first one is meditation. So we looked in verse 15 and saw that we're supposed to meditate on the precepts and contemplate on His ways, because those will guide us to hiding the Word in our heart and doing that.

One, you can't do that without spending time with Him. Like, you've got to spend time with Him. Moving forward, we want to start every year, like, every New Year's people always are like, what can I set for New Year's resolutions?

What can I do this? And we always look at it, and like Pastor Rick and I said, like Pastor Rick told me to say earlier, and what I think is a beautiful way to say it, is we always want to come into the New Year with a new slate.

Like, we want to come in with a clean slate. And, like, that's such a beautiful thing to say, in that everyone wants to come into a new year with a clean slate, yet no one's willing to execute and carry that out.

What I want us to urge as a church is meditation. And not in a, go lock yourself in a room for four hours with nothing but you with the Word and just sit on the floor and meditate. That's not, that's not practical, that's not healthy, that's not good.

You're not ever going to achieve that as a new person who's just starting out studying the Word. What I want to say is maybe something a little bit more practical than that. Whether you've been studying the Word for years, or you've been studying the Word for days, you can start somewhere.

Pick a plan that aligns with, not your lifestyle, with your place in the Word. If the Word has the value that we say it has, you'll make time for it. It's just a matter of picking a plan, not that fits your lifestyle, but one that fits where you are.

As a new believer, I would not encourage you to sit and try to pray for three hours straight. That's a terrible idea. You're going to drain yourself really fast. As a new believer, find someone, spend time with the Word in community, because you've one, got to be taught how to do it before you can actually go do it yourself, but also spend time in the Word by yourself in smaller increments.

Maybe set aside ten minutes or so every day. After you've read the Word, set aside ten minutes afterwards. Say, I'm not doing anything for these ten minutes. I'm going to spend these ten minutes doing two things.

One, prayer, and two, spend those ten minutes, one, praying, and two, asking God to speak to you in a very specific way of, okay, I just read this. Like, I just read a chapter, or I just read a couple of verses, or whatever you just read.

God, what do you want me to do with that? Like, I just read something about who knows what. How should my life change because of what I've just read? That question alone, you'll find, will change the way that you read the Scriptures, because if you're willing to not just look in the Scriptures and go, boom, I'm opening the Scriptures and trying to find something that you can apply in there, but if you will allow God after you to come in and say, okay, you may be able to go in and find a way that you think it applies, but I want you to use it in this way.

Spend some time allowing God to really penetrate you. Spend those ten minutes and really let Him get in and pick some weeds in your garden, so to speak. The last one is less of a personal push. It is a personal push, but it's more of a push as us as a church.

The New Year starts tomorrow, and like we've said a couple of times, we all want to start with a clean slate every New Year's, but I think that this New Year's, I want to push us to do something a little different, right?

Instead of just saying, I want to start with a new slate, let's actually put a plan into place to make that effective. I want to urge us as a church, maybe you in this room are like me, and you have been studying the Word for a few years of your life, but you still struggle daily to be in it.

Maybe you are a few years along in your faith than I am, because I've only been a Christian for, gosh, seven years now. Seven years as of midnight tonight. But maybe you've been a Christian for thirty years, and you spend time in the Word countless times a week.

Whether you're on either side of those terms, or you got saved yesterday, there is an intentionality to be made with speaking the Word. In verse 13, we see that. That there's a connection between speaking the Word and hiding it in our hearts so that it will keep us from sin.

In that, I want to urge us as a church to begin speaking the Word to each other. Not just in the, Pastor Rick comes and speaks every Sunday morning, or we have midweek family fellowship where we kind of gather together and ask some questions and talk.

I want it to be more intentional and personal than that. Look around this room and you'll probably find people on all sides of that coin. And I want you to, as you're going today, and as you're going over the next few days, to find some people in your life.

Maybe it's a spouse, or a friend, or a sibling, or someone who's older than you, or younger than you, which would be beautiful as well, who can come alongside with you. And you too can begin, one, holding each other accountable to actually spend time in the Word and value the Word above riches.

But two, actually speak the Word together. It's a beautiful thing when me and a buddy of mine decided to sit down together and not just hold each other accountable for the Word, but that we would actually hold each other accountable in the Word.

And once a week just get together and go, hey, what did you see this week? Asking that one question. What did God tell you to apply this week? What did God tell you to change about your life this week?

It's a beautiful step from just, oh, they're holding me accountable to the Word, to, oh, this actually is really beneficial for both of us. Because that person is going to see things in the Word that you didn't see.

That person is going to know things about the Word that you don't know. Especially that person that is longer, farther along in their faith. But if that person's not as far along as you in that faith, take a person under your belt that you can go, okay, let's do this together.

And let me teach you how to study the Word. Let me teach you how to do this. Because it's a beautiful thing to see a Christian who has been in the Word for so long, be able to bring someone along and share that passion with them.

It's actually a calling that we are told to do. Like, throughout the New Testament, we see the demand to make disciples. That's what this is. That's what we're called to do, is to teach them all that He has commanded us.

That's what the Word commission is. To make them disciples and teach them all that I have commanded you while we're going to the nations. And so, I want to urge us as a church to practically do that over the next year.

It starts tomorrow, though. So, get ready. Alright, so this year, commit to the Word. Commit to valuing the Word. Commit to allowing it to fulfill you more than riches, money, people, and fame could. Commit to meditating on the Word and commit to speaking the Word with one another.

If you are willing to commit to these certain areas, what you'll find is that the ability for you to hide the Word in your heart will grow exponentially. And if your ability to hide the Word in your heart can grow exponentially, so can your ability to not sin.

I'll pray for us, and then I think Pastor Gary is going to come and do our last song. God, thank you for this day. Thank you for the opportunity to get to stand and speak to my home church about something, about your Word, something I'm really passionate about.

I ask that you will please urge us not just to live the Word, but to speak it with one another. Amen, we pray. Amen.