How Christians Respond to the Bible

Psalm 119, we are on the second to last stanza.

As far as the outline goes, the plan is to get through this stanza tonight, but I was just kind of thinking as we're singing and some things on my heart about the outline.

Maybe we get through it all, maybe not. We'll just see. I understand I read one time that there's a fine line between a long sermon and a hostage situation, and I get it that Sunday morning we kind of give our attention and the primacy of preaching and not that we don't on Sunday night, but kind of our main gathering is

Sunday morning. And so it's not my desire to I don't even know if I could if I could preach for two hours a day.

I don't know our our Christian forefathers would would laugh at us. A short sermon, maybe in the seventeen hundreds would have been 90 minutes.

Right. So but it's the way things are. All that to say, I'm not going to hold you hostage tonight, but I do want us to consider our text.

Psalm 119 is just a reminder, because, you know, we Sunday night, sometimes other people preach, sometimes we're doing different things.

And it's been a few weeks since we've been in Psalm 119, but this is the longest chapter of the

Bible. Now, we read you remember we read in starting this sermon series, we read through the whole chapter, the hundred and seventy six verses.

So most of us in here, you've read it. But some people have never read Psalm 119 because it's too long and it's this psalm that actually magnifies the loveliness of God's word.

Matthew Henry, I highly recommend his commentary. You won't find an agreement with everything. He he wasn't a

Baptist, but a lot of it you will find an agreement with. But Matthew Henry, his family growing up, they would meditate on one verse of Psalm 119 a day.

And so one hundred seventy six verses, basically, they would get through the whole song, the whole chapter twice in a year.

And so he extols the riches of this psalm to us.

And believers see the beauty of God's word. And what's on my heart as we kind of begin tonight, in fact, let's do this, let's read it first, not the whole song, just our stanza.

And then I have some things I want to make an appeal toward. I'll make some more of these later in the year and then we'll get into as much as the outline as we can.

Would you stand and we're found our way to verse one hundred and sixty one. Not a whole lot of chapters that you can say we're in verse one hundred sixty one, but we're in Psalm 119 verse one hundred and sixty one.

Princes persecute me without cause, but my heart stands in awe of your words.

I rejoice at your word like one who finds great spoil, I hate and abhor falsehood, but I love your law.

Seven times a day, I praise you for your righteous rules. Great peace have those who love your law.

Nothing can make them stumble. I hope for your salvation, O Lord, and I do your commandments.

My soul keeps your testimonies. I love them exceedingly. I keep your precepts and testimonies for all my ways are before you.

Father, would you. Remind us tonight of the beauty of your word, remind us of the grace that you give us, remind us of treasure we have in these scriptures because they point us to Christ, they point us to the plan of salvation, they are the way that we should.

Order our lives, our churches, our families, the way we conduct business, the way we interact with people, the way we post on social media, the way we pray.

All these things should be ordered and rightly divided by what your truth teaches us in the scriptures.

We pray, O God, that we would leave this place not merely convicted, but we would have great hope in your word.

Would be encouraged to be a people of the book. The Providence Baptist Church would be a bunch of Bible readers.

We'd love the scriptures. And we'd stand fast upon them. God, you've given us great, great, great.

Blessing and having a copy of the Bible in our own language. And we pray that we would utilize this blessing for the glory of Christ, we pray in his name.

Amen. OK, so I'm just going to give you the outline and maybe we'll pick back up on it next week or we may finish tonight.

I'm kind of leaning towards we won't. But the whole premise of the sermon tonight is a believer's response to God's word, how believers respond to the

Bible. And I just want to highlight seven things from the passage. I'll just mention them now and then we'll go back to the first one.

But we see different ways that the psalmist is responding to the word of God. And I remind you tonight that when

I say the word of God now, the psalmist did not have a completed canon of scripture. We understand that when

I say the word of God, I'm talking about the books of the Bible, the 66 books of the

Bible from Genesis to Revelation and how each one is written by men who are divinely inspired by the

Holy Spirit in such a way that what they write is what they wanted to write, while simultaneously being exactly down to the very word, down to the very jot and tittle, down to the very syllable, what the

Holy Spirit has for us to hear. So this is the infallible, inerrant word of the living

God. Now, we see the psalmist respond to it in seven ways, and I'll just give you those points now.

We'll walk through as many as we can. He responds in awe. That's there in verse 161.

My heart stands in awe of your words. We'll get to that in just a minute. He responds by rejoicing.

Number two, he responds by love. Number three, he loves the word. Number four, he responds in praise.

Number five, he responds in peace. He has peace. That's in verse 165.

Great peace have those who love your law. He responds in hope. And then seventhly, one of the responses he has is obedience.

Now, I remind you that Psalm 119, the preeminent one that Psalm 119 points to, the quintessential one, the law keeper, if you will, is

Christ. Of course, we read Psalm 119 and much of we say, well, I can never do that perfectly.

Well, of course you can't. That's why we need Jesus. So the Psalms as a whole, by the way, point us to Christ.

He is the righteous one. He's the one, for example, in 167. My soul keeps your testimony.

I love them exceedingly. Christ Jesus did that for us. And then we seek to mimic that as we have born again hearts by the grace of God.

Now, the first point here is that the psalmist responds to God's word in awe.

So number one, believers should respond to the word of God in awe. Verse 161, princes persecute me without cause, but my heart stands in awe.

Of your words. In awe. Now, the psalmist here is.

Experiencing persecution from people of note, you see there in verse 161, princes persecute me, so it's not just a run of the mill crowd heckler, it's not just some random anonymous troll on social media.

He says it's princes who persecute him. And yet he's not in awe of the persecution, is he?

He's not in awe of the princes, is he? What does the text say that he is in awe of princes persecute me without cause?

But but my heart stands in awe of your words.

It's. It's amazing how much awe and wonder I'm putting those in quotes, how, quote, unquote, awe and wonder of the world will cause us to stand in amazement and at times how little we have in awe of God's word.

Now, I want to make an appeal to you as we begin tonight. We love believers, love to be in awe, we love the

Bible. So a few just practical notes because of the time of year that we're in,

I would say this any time of year, but particularly I think of God's mercy this season that we have, by the way, really encouraged by, you know, sometimes on Sunday nights we gather and there are fewer folks.

I'm really encouraged by you being here tonight. Thank you. That encourages me. But this time of year, we think about or we should

I think we should think about it's just a natural time to think about. Your approach, your personal approach to the scriptures.

I do not think that and I'm I'm my I am in this category, I do not think that there's a person in here, including me, there is not a person in this room who cannot take account of their time in God's word, their meditation on God's word, their memorization of God's word.

There's not a person in this room that could take an account, take an assessment of their time that they spend in the

Bible and not walk away saying in twenty, twenty five, I should improve. In twenty, twenty five,

I should grow in this area as this year dawns, as I as I come to the end of twenty, twenty four and as I begin twenty, twenty five, there are areas in my life that need to improve as I spend personal time in the scriptures

I brought up here with me to the pulpit. You can get these free, but this is free. Whoever wants these, you can order these from Chapel Library.

You can you can make a donation or you can just get them free. You can also find them free on the Internet. But this is

McShane, Robert Murray McShane's. We talked about him a little bit at lunch today. This is Robert Murray McShane's calendar for daily readings of the scriptures.

And if you do this, you'll make it through the Old and New Testament once.

And then I've never actually done the McShane plan. And I have friends that do it every year, but I think you make it through maybe

Psalms and Proverbs twice. So this is this is not the only option.

You can have this, by the way, if you want it. But it is one option to consider next year in twenty, twenty five.

You should have a plan. How am I going to read the Bible next year? Now, I know that we've done a plan and we've gone through which

I haven't been doing that plan. I just I wanted to try to do that plan, but I'm kind of in a habit. And you can ask my wife.

I'm kind of an old man about things sometimes. So I'm in a habit of reading through the scriptures, reading through the whole Bible every year.

So from January to December, that's I make sure I read through the entire script, do some other things with it. But but that's one of the things

I'm committed to. Now, I'm not saying that to be a faithful Christian, that you absolutely have to have read the entire

Bible every single year. That's not what I'm saying. I'm simply asking you tonight, would you take assessment of your time in the

Bible in twenty twenty four and would you would you seek God to search your heart and where have you fallen short in that area and then ask

God to help you improve as you enter into two thousand and twenty five? Is there anybody in here who would say,

I don't need that, I don't know, I'm good, I'm perfect in my Bible reading. I don't think that there would be a person, including myself, that would say that I need to improve my time in the scriptures.

Why? Because I want to be in all of God's word. I just want to say something about that. I want to be in all princes persecuting that cause.

But my heart stands in all of your words. Can I just say that we should be in all of the

Bible itself? We should be in all of the providence of God. The very fact that we have the scriptures in our own language.

It's an impossibility without God overseeing it. The blood that has been spilled, the the corruption that is that has tried to been made on God's word, the attempts to overthrow it, the attempts to destroy it, the attempts to get rid of this book.

And here we are, here we are. I almost said two thousand years later, but it's not just the New Testament, it's also the

Old Testament. So here we are some six thousand years later and we have a completed canon of scripture from Genesis to Revelation in our own language.

Not only that, have you considered the providence of God that you live in a nation and a time period that you can read?

You can read what you say. Think about for just a second, for the for the history of the world, you're in a minority.

The fact that you live in a country that's free and you live in a place that you have access to the

Bible in your own language and you can read. You're a literate person.

This is a this is to the text. Awesome. Right. This is we should be in awe at the providence of God, of the gift and the mercy and the grace that he's shown us that we have this in our language.

They killed people for this. They're killing people around the world today for this.

And here we are. And we have it laying open. And some let me if I could just step on your toes just a little bit in love on Sunday night.

Some of us don't bring our Bible to church. I don't know where it's at.

I mean, I appreciate hey, I appreciate the affirmation. You trust your pastor so much. You don't even need to bring your

Bible. I'm just saying that's that's not healthy. Right. Right.

I don't have anybody particular other than my children in mind. But if that lands on you, then would you consider that men have died?

Women have died. People have died to get this book to us. And we ought to be be a people who bring it and are eager to open it up and to read it together.

You know, we live in a world today. Again, I'm talking about being in awe of the word of God. Princes persecute me without cause.

But my heart stands in awe of your words. You understand why I think we're not going to make it through all seven points.

But you get it that we live in a world today. OK, not only do we,

A, have the copy of the Bible in our language, B, we're able to read it.

C, I'll add this. There is like unrestricted access to the

Bible and to Bible helps today. Do you know and some of you, you may not know this.

And so it's like, hey, let me tell you and I can help you and I can point you. But did you know that there that you can get the

Bible for free online? I have the Bible in multiple translations, even in, well, this one's not free, the original languages, but maybe you can find that free.

But I have that just at the touch of my hand. Here it is. I'm carrying it around. Isn't that amazing?

Not only that, but I have access to come. I have access to solid commentaries for free. I can pull up right now for free

Matthew Henry's commentary. I can pull up now for free John Gill's commentary.

I can pull up now for free John Trapp's commentary. And I could go on and on and on.

These are all free. These are all at the right at our fingertips.

God has let us live in a time period providentially where we have access to all these things.

And yet I wonder, do you not wonder? I wonder if percentage wise we are not one of the most biblically illiterate generations.

Isn't that mind blowing? It mind blowing to me that we have access to the Bible in America like never before.

And I wonder, do you think if you went to the average household in America, let's say let's back it up.

Let's say 200 years ago. What year is it? Twenty twenty four. So if my math's correct, that would be 1824.

So you go back to 1824 to just the average household and you ask some questions about the

Bible. I feel like my premise is I could be way wrong. My hypothesis is that if you went to the average household 200 years ago, that family worship would be more prominent, that there would be more biblical literacy.

They didn't have the Internet. They didn't have access to these free resources. Well, how could that possibly be?

Because, beloved, they were in awe of the Bible. They saw it as a treasure.

They read it. This is not me trying to beat you up. I'm trying to be an encouragement. But sometimes we have to think through the hard things so that we can spur on to the good things.

I will say this to a lot of good things in life are are hard, aren't they? Right. I wish

I do wish, Lord, I wish that the way that God would help us to know the Bible is that if we just slept on it, if we just put it on our head as a as a pillow at night and then we would wake up and we just know everything in the

Bible. Don't you? Like, God, wouldn't that be easier? Like, I wish that I really do.

I wish that we could just somehow just keep beating our head on the book. And then

God would like just put all the information from the book into our brains and into our hearts. That would be great.

I would love that. But God and his wisdom and his kindness and his providence has chosen not to do that for his people.

Rather, the encouragement to God's people is we are to be a people who open up the book and take our eyes and we put our eyes on the pages and we read it and we and we are prioritized, by the way, the preaching of God's word.

This isn't just an individual thing, but also together we corporately we put ourselves underneath the teaching of God's word.

We put ourselves into into groups and in time Sunday school and men's Bible study and women's Bible study where we are.

We are feasting on the word of God and we're sitting under the preaching on Sunday morning and Sunday night, the preaching on Wednesday night, the teaching of the word of God.

Why? Because we're in awe. We're in awe of God's words. We're in awe of the law of God that extols his holy majesty, that gives forth his his radiant purity.

The law is not separate from God. The law shines forth who

God is. It shows forth his holiness. And we read the law and we're humbled to the dust.

But we're in awe of the of the majesty and righteousness of God.

We read the Bible and we are in awe of his grace. This great God, even at the moment of the fall, we see that he promised redemption, the seed of the woman that that's fulfilled in the virgin birth and the birth of our savior.

The seed of the woman would come to crush the serpent's head. We are in awe of his grace at the very moment of rebellion.

We see grace dripping all over the pages. We're in awe of his providence, how all of these things work.

Like, how could this be? Have you ever considered like you read world history and all these things that we read like Abraham and Moses and David and these things when you read world history?

No one cares much about these things. They're all just a little blip. They want to talk about Alexander the

Great and stuff like that. And these things are just a little blip on the radar. God was taking care of sometimes that maybe this is a bad analogy and maybe

I shouldn't even be so transparent about this. But sometimes I have felt that our church is like a little candle.

And and and and it's like if the wind picks up just the wrong way, if it just blows too strong.

That was loud. But that brought the point, I wish I meant that on purpose, the candle goes out.

But then I'm reminded God's got this little candle. God's surrounding it with his sovereign hands.

And that's just like he did in the Old Testament. And we read that, we read this all this story of all these things and we're in awe of his providence and we get to the

New Testament and we are in awe. Again, I'm preaching from verse 161. Princes persecute me without cause, but my heart stands in awe of your words.

We're in awe of the grace of God in the New Testament and the new covenant and how all this came to fruition, exactly how it was supposed to, everything lined up exactly how it was supposed to.

And we're in awe that God, we're in awe of the mystery of the gospel that is shown to us and that its fruition is not just Jews, but Jews and Gentiles together into one body and the church.

We're in awe of the church. We're in awe of God building his kingdom and we're in awe that the gospel is marching forth around the whole world.

And we're in awe that God has chosen the foolishness of preaching to save his people from their sins by the work of Christ and his perfect life being righteous in our behalf and then dying like we talked about this morning as our sin bearer and then raising again on the third day.

And we're in awe that the demanded response of this is to simply repent of your sins and believe the gospel to put your faith in Christ.

Even tonight, some of you may need to do that. Repent and believe and trust Christ. We're in awe of these things.

We're in awe of the reality that Jesus is coming back. He's coming back for his church and he's going to judge the wicked and he's going to gather his bride to himself and we're going to reign with him forever.

I'm just saying tonight that we need to be a people who are like the psalmist, who stand in awe of the words of God.

I think about Isaiah 66 to Isaiah 66 to says this.

All these things my hand has made. And so all these things came to be, declares the

Lord. But this is the one to whom I will look. He who is humble and contrite in spirit.

And trembles. At my word. You want

God to look at you? The answer should be yes. Do you want revival in our nation?

I hope your answer is yes. Do you want revival in your heart and your family and this church in this town?

Look, I'm just going to tell you again, this is speaking a little bit frank, but I'm so tired of smelling pot in our town.

I run around the town. That's why it's like it's not just a random thing like I run. So I'm out in the open. I'm in the air.

I don't know, can you get contact high from marijuana? I don't know. But if anyone can, it would be me because I feel like sometimes

I'm running through and I'm just like, what's going on here? I walk by people, I've knocked on doors and you open up and all you smell is marijuana.

I've walked by people who've just gotten out of their car and it's like it almost knocks you over. Like this is in our town.

I'm not in Colorado. A few years ago, we were in Colorado and we're like, this is great. And then the marijuana shops were everywhere.

And then we was like, it's all you smell. Well, let's get back home to Arkansas. But here we are here. Well, what am

I trying to say? I'm just trying to say our little bitty Bible Belt community, our little bitty Bible Belt community is a is a sinful community and it needs revival.

It needs the work of God. It needs his grace. Well, what can we do? Yes, we can preach the gospel.

Yes, we can pray. We must do those things. We should do those things. We should give priority to the church. But also in all of that, we must be a people who tremble at God's word.

We love his Bible. Friends, this is God's book and we love it.

We're in awe of it. This is to whom God looks, who trembles at his word. You think of an

F5 tornado. We stand in awe of a

F5 tornado. We stand in awe of its massive power and its destruction. We don't love

F5 tornadoes, though, right? But the psalmist was not in this type of awe. How do

I know? Because look at where verse 167 says, my soul keeps your testimonies. I love them exceedingly.

So here's what I'm talking about tonight. If we are in awe of God's words, then it is a glad the awe spoken up here is a glad and reverential awe.

It is an awe that is motivated by healthy fear, but also true and godly love.

As we submit to the word of God, the psalmist understood that God's word is just that, the word of the living and sovereign king of the universe.

I'm preaching to the choir, I guess I should say, in one sense. I get it. I get that I understand and to pat you on the back and to commend you and encourage you.

I love our church and I know our church is full of Bible readers because I talk to you and you talk to me about reading the

Bible. And I love that. And I'm not trying to beat anyone over the head. I'm just trying to encourage us tonight that we must grow as we think about leaving one year and entering into another year by God's mercy.

If we make it to another year by God's mercy, we must be a people who are like the psalmist here and want to be in awe of God's words.

We want to be in reverential submission to the word of God. We try to take that seriously here.

We had to have a kind of an awkward conversation. I don't think it was too awkward. But, you know, sometimes when we take the

Lord's Supper, we have to have awkward conversation with people. We just have to say, hey, look, here's how our church practices the

Lord's Supper. We believe as we fence the table, it's only for baptized believers that are not under church discipline, that are members of a church.

And so sometimes that makes things kind of awkward. And it's on my mind because, you know, it happens. And I do fear,

I'll confess to you, I don't, some of you may laugh at this, I actually don't want to offend people.

Like I don't, like that's not my goal. It's not my goal to walk around and offending people.

I don't like when people are like, you may just think I'm some sort of impervious Teflon, you know, mafia leader or something.

I hope you don't think that of me. But you may just think that my heart is just impervious. It's not.

I hate I hate it when people get mad at me. I don't like it. I don't like offending people. I don't like people being upset with me.

All of that. I'm just a man. All of that hurts. But what I'm trying to say is what

Pastor Jacob and I are trying to do is we're trying to be a say and say, OK, if I have to, if I do, though,

I don't want to offend people, but if I have to make a decision and over here a person is offended and over here

God is offended, well, which way am I going to choose? It's hard. And I failed. I have failed in past.

I have failed. I've let this person not be offended and I've offended God. And God has been merciful to me.

And I hope that I have repented truly of those things. But when it comes down to it, what

I'm trying to say to you for your home, for your family, for your friends, for your neighbors, are we going to offend

God? Are we going to offend man? I don't want to intentionally offend man. But when it comes down to it,

I never want to offend God, right? I want to be in awe of his word. And so as we think about how we do church, as we think about church membership, as we think about baptism, as we think about the

Lord's Supper, as we think about the preaching, as we think about guarding this pulpit, as we think about just church discipline, as we think about all these things that we do and how we worship and the things that we do here and the things that we don't do and the guardrails that we put up, all these things, they must be flowing from a heart that is standing in reverential awe of the word of God.

The princes may persecute me. Verse 161. The princes may persecute me. The friends, the neighbors, the people on social media, they may persecute me, but it will be without cause and my heart is going to stand in awe of God's words.

This is just what's on my heart as we enter into this section and you can see how we're not going to any other points, so.

But you can see how this is applicatory.

To all of us in here. Myself included. I guess in a few words of application and close, one would be be in awe of God's word because it tells you the story you need.

It tells you of Christ. It tells you someone mentioned me today. They were encouraged by my sermon this morning.

They said, thank you. And I don't know how to respond to that really, because it's all of God's grace. But one thing

I've said to this particular person is, uh, well, I just preached what was right there in the text. It's all, it was just in the text, right?

I was just trying to say what the text said. And you should be grateful that we have a

Bible that just plainly tells us this is what God's done for us. So let us be in awe of the

Bible because it tells us of Christ's righteousness, of his substitutionary death, of his resurrection.

Be in awe of the Bible because you know that if you trust in Christ, that means you're born again and that his law is written on your heart.

I, in fact, I'd warn you, if you love, if you say that you love God, but you don't love the

Bible, something is amiss. Maybe you're just in a, in a very backslidden state as they call it.

Maybe you're a Christian, but you've just wondered there for a minute, but it could be, you're not actually a

Christian because if we love God, we love his word. We're in awe of his word.

Why? He's written his law on our heart and we want this. And then finally, let me just say, as I mentioned earlier, as we began the sermon, would you do assessment and hold me accountable?

Ask me about it. In the coming few weeks, what's today? The eighth. So we have 24 days or something until, uh, the first, you can count that up if I'm right, we have just a few weeks until the first.

Between now and that time, will you take assessment of your Bible intake and will you, will you rejoice in the areas you found success?

I hope that you look at 2024. You say, you know what I've, I've, I've moved in a positive direction since 2023 and 2022 and 2021, and if that's you praise

God, amen. And then you'll also be willing to own areas you failed. And you remember

Jesus bore our sins, right? Including the sin of neglecting God's word. So what do we do?

We go to Christ. And what do we do? We confess our sins and he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us of all unrighteousness.

And we lay ourselves before the feet of God. And we say, God, I haven't read the

Bible in every way that I should have this year, help me practically to move in that direction in 2025,

I'm rambling. Rest in the gospel. Let us be people of the book. Amen. Father, I thank you for your word.

Help us to love it more, to treasure it. Lord, may we be a people here who stand in awe of the scriptures in Jesus name.