A Word in Season: Revived in Love (Psalm 119:159)

Can you and I call God as our witness that we truly love every word that proceeds from his mouth?

The psalmist could in Psalm 119 and verse 159 when he said,

Consider how I love your precepts. Revive me, O Lord, according to your lovingkindness.

He is happy to spread his heart before God that the Lord might see his love for every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

He's not boasting in his obedience. He would, I think, be very conscious that too often he does not do what he knows is true, that he does not pursue that which he truly loves.

But it is nevertheless love that motivates him. He delights in what

God has said as a revelation of God and his own character.

There's nothing he wants more than to do what God requires and to follow in his footsteps.

And so he expresses before God that heart of love toward him and then goes on from this very sweet declaration to a very sweet supplication or petition.

Consider how I love your precepts. Look and see my appetite for your word, my delight in it as that which comes from you.

Revive me, O Lord, according to your lovingkindness. Give me increasing life.

Establish and strengthen and enliven me. Grant grace to me to close the gap between what

I know and what I do, that my love, which motivates me in all of my service, may increase, that my attainments in godliness might advance, that I would no longer be grubbing about in the dust, as it were, that I would look up and live up to the light which

I have. And revive me, O God, not according to my love to you, not according to my affection for your word, not according to my appetite as far as I know it and understand it, but revive me,

O covenant God, according to your lovingkindness. What a wonderful measure to rely upon in pleading in this way.

What an expectation we might have if we cast ourselves upon the tender mercies and faithful love of the

God of our salvation. We are putting ourselves in his hands.

We are asking him to deal with us in accordance with infinite love and goodness and faithfulness, to look upon us in mercy, to recognise the fact that despite our love for him, which he himself has granted and worked in our souls, that nevertheless we are not what we ought to be and not what we long to be.

We recognise that this strength for service, that this appetite for godliness, this is heaven worked, this is the spirit's operation in our hearts.

We have a sense that we are stumbling and struggling at times. There may be particular battles that we're fighting, particular points at which we feel a coldness, a dullness, a deadness creeping into our hearts and into our lives.

And so we tell God, we spread our hearts open, say, oh

God, you know that I love you and I love your word, and therefore

I'm pleading with you that you would stir me up according to your loving kindness, that you would deal with me as God and my

God, and that you would draw out my heart toward you, that the love that I have might increase, that the obedience that I demonstrate might advance, that the faithfulness which

I show may be ever more deeply rooted. Is this not something that is worth longing for, worth praying for, worth pleading for with the

God of heaven? There he is in all his kindness and goodness, all his loving kindness, all his abounding faithfulness, a

God who is slow to anger, quick and rich in mercy, always ready to bless, always swift to pour out favour and goodness.

And here we are laying ourselves before him and pleading that he would lift up our souls according to his matchless loving kindness.

So it's good for us to cast ourselves into the hands of a gracious and generous

God to confess our love and to ask that wherever there may be an absence of it or a coolness in it, that he would enliven us again according to his loving kindness.