As preached by Timothy O'Day.
"Every material blessing is empty without the Lord."
God's good word will lead you to...
1) Want God (57-58).
2) Repentance (59-60).
3) Praise God (61-62).
4) Fellowship (63-64).
God’s Good Word Leads Us
Psalm 119:57-64
Listen to this hymn by John Wesley,
“I want a principle within
Of watchful, godly fear
A sensibility of sin
A pain to feel it near
I want the first approach to feel
Of pride or wrong desire,
To catch the wandering of my will,
And quench the kindling fire.
From thee that I no more may stray,
No more thy goodness grieve,
Grant me the filial awe, I pray
The tender conscience give
Quick as the apple of an eye,
O God, my conscience make;
Awake my soul when sin is nigh,
And keep it still awake.
Almighty God of truth and love,
To me thy power impart;
The mountain from my soul remove,
The hardness of my heart.
O may the least omission pain
My reawakened soul,
And drive me to that blood again,
Which makes the wounded whole.”
These words convey truth to which all God’s children can relate. We love the Lord and do not want to sin, but we still find in our hearts the desire to sin.
This is why Wesley pleads with the Lord to make his conscience all the more tender, which is what we need as well. Repeatedly running into sin can callous our hearts to the point that we do not feel the weight and evil of it.
How can our conscience be made tender to the reality of sin? One of the chief means God uses is his Word. God’s Word.
As we continue our study of Psalm 119, we see that God uses His Word to lead us to where he wants us to go. As you probably remember, Psalm 119 is the longest of the Psalms. The main message of this Psalm is that God’s commands—his words, precepts, testimony, statutes, commandments, law, judgment, and all that he says—display his goodness and love; they provide what is needed for man. Psalm 119, like the other Psalms, is a poem. It contains 22 eight-verse stanzas, which move through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The first line in each stanza begins with it’s respective letter, meaning that verses 57-64 all begin with the letter Het in Hebrew. Writing the psalm this way is meant to show that God’s Word provides all that you need.
The main idea of verses 57-64 is that God’s Word will lead you where you need to go, not specially but in your affections. Specifically, God’s Good Word will lead you in four ways. Let’s examine each.
God’s Good Word Will Lead You to Want God (57-58)
As this section begins, what might catch your eye is the promise that the psalmist makes at the end of verse 57, “I promise to keep your word.” That is a huge commitment. If you aren’t careful, you could walk away thinking that this verse, and this psalm as a whole, is a focused merely on obeying God. Now don’t get me wrong, obedience to the Lord is wonderful, but not as an end in and of itself.
In these two verses, we see that the psalmist does want to obey God, but not merely obey God. Let’s walk through these verses carefully.
In verse 57, the psalmist confesses that God is his portion, meaning his inheritance. By inheritance, he does not mean an add-on. Today, if you receive an inheritance, it might be nice, but it doesn’t revolutionize your life. But in Israel, when you received your inheritance, it meant you received from your family the allotment of the promised land passed down to you. Your inheritance was your future. It was your place. It was how you would live. So when the psalmist says that the Lord is his inheritance, he does not mean that the Lord is a nice addition to his life. The Lord is his life.
The Lord is all that he has, so it is no surprise that he promises to keep his word. He wants to keep his word because he truly wants God. This becomes clear as verse 58 comes into view,
“I entreat your favor with all my heart; be gracious to me according to your promise.”
When he entreats God’s favor, he isn’t calling for simple material blessings. The pattern in Scripture is that God’s favor is God giving himself to his people. The psalmist is entreating God to give himself to him, that he may know him, experience him, and be with him.
Consider what Moses says to the Lord after Israel rebels by making an idol with the Golden Calf. God tells Moses that he will let Israel live and will send them to the promised land, but he will not go with them. That is to say, he will give Israel material blessing, but he will not give himself (Exodus 33:1-3). How does Moses respond? “And [Moses] said to him, ‘If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, sot hat we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?”
Every other blessing is hollow without the Lord.
Or consider David. He is God’s anointed king and experiences special fellowship with God. He could ask the Lord for anything. In Psalm 27:4, we see what he asks,
“One thing I have asked of the LORD, that I will seek after: that I may dwell in in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and inquire in his temple.”
Every other blessing is hollow without the Lord.
Or consider Paul. He was advancing in the esteem of all of his peers and was making a great name for himself. But then he encountered Jesus Christ and he saw the beauty and goodness of God. This led him to say in Philippians 3:7-8, “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the suppressing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.
Every other blessing is hollow without the Lord.
Where God’s Good Word Leads Us: Obedience for God’s Pleasure
As you read the Bible, you see how powerful, good, and awesome God is. If you aren’t careful, familiarity can blind you to the grandeur of God. As you read Genesis 1, don’t be blind to the awesome power of God. He creates from nothing and makes all things good. He doesn’t create slaves but makes man and places him in a position of honor.
As man falls into wretched rebellion against his goodness, God is merciful. Instead of extinguishing man, he provides for his needs and makes a promise that one day sin will be conquered and rooted out of this world by none other than a man of his choosing.
As the Bible unfolds, God’s goodness is contrasted and highlighted again and again with selfishness, stupidity, and sinfulness of man. Don’t be blind to it. Soak it up. Breath in the majesty of God especially when you get to the Cross.
How Wanting God Changes Obedience
When you want God, obedience changes from “Have to” to “Get to.” Obedience is not a burden but a pathway of experiencing God; it is living in his pleasure and for his pleasure.
The pursuit of obedience can be fraught with danger because of our sinful hearts. We might want to obey God’s Word in order to earn a righteous standing before God. Or we might want to obey in order to win the approval of other people around us who see us. But you cannot earn your righteousness before God. And if you obey for the approval of man, you are engaged in an empty pursuit. What will man give you?
Obedience is a delight when you see that God is worthy and you want to please him. Obedience is NOT a burden when God is great. It is a burden when you do not see God as great but still feel obligated to walk in his ways.
Obedience: An invitation or an obligation?
As you read God’s Word, do you see his instruction as an obligation imposed on you or as an invitation to experience his goodness, greatness, graciousness, and glory?
How you view his commands will change based on if you want God or not. Take up God’s Word, see who he is, and grow in your desire for him.
You want to worship and only the true God is worthy of worship. You will worship something. God’s Word is his call to wake you up from your stupor of self-worship and his invitation to see and savor the God who is true and will fulfill you.
but as you see God, be prepared for what comes next.
God’s Good Word Will Lead You to Repentance (59-60)
Verses 59-60 carry similar ideas, look down at those verses with me,
“When I think on my ways, I turn my feet to your testimonies; I hasten and do not delay to keep your commandments.”
What is he saying? He is saying that God’s Word leads him to consider his own ways and, as he considers his own ways, his heart is inclined to change how he lives to conform with what God says.
This is more than merely accepting God’s Word to be right and acquiescing to it. Have you ever done that with God’s Word? You read it or hear it spoken to you and you say, “I guess that’s right,” and then go about obeying it, but with an attitude of reluctance?
That isn’t what the psalmist does. He hastens to obey in verse 60. He is zealous to obey.
While the word isn’t used here, this is a description of true repentance. Repentance is a changing of your mind—what you think and what you believe—which inevitably leads to a change in your living.
Consider Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1-10. He was a tax collector who defrauded people. He would take more than he needed to take for taxes in order to enrich himself. But then he encounters Jesus and his thinking changes. And this change of thinking and belief about what matters and what is good leads him not only to return the money he had stolen but also to give back more. In other words, he charged himself interest and then returned it to those whom he had wronged.
God’s Good Word Opens Our Eyes to See Reality
Reading God’s Word leads us to encounter God like Zaccaeus did. God’s Word is like an alarm clock that can wake us up from a dream.
I remember one time I was having a pleasant dream. Blissful even. Then the song changed on my car radio and I woke up, just in time to turn my steering wheel away from the ditch and stay on the road.
My pleasant dream was not the reality; it was what my mind was consumed within that moment, but it wasn’t real. While I felt fine in my dream, the reality is that I was about to crash.
In God’s kindness, he can use his Word to wake us up from the fantasy we are living in and show us reality.
Or imagine another driving scenario. Imagine you are driving down I-15 but then suddenly realize you are driving the wrong way into oncoming traffic. Such a realization would not lead you to say, “I’ll just turn around at a convenient stopping point.” No, you would immediately hit the brakes and try to get out of the way and turn around because if you continue you will face destruction.
That is repentance—a change of mind that makes you hastily change your actions.
Be Prepared for Change As You Read God’s Good Word
As you read the Bible, you should be prepared for moments in which God’s Word challenges you. If you read carefully and honestly, God will confront actions that do not fit with the truth, attitudes, and desires that are contrary to him, and beliefs that are flat-out wrong.
Tim Keller once said, “If God never disagrees with you, you might just be worshipping an idealized version of yourself.” If you steadily engage with God’s Word, it will become clear that God does not always agree with you.
When that happens, what should you do? Do not despair. Repent, and turn your feet to be in line with his testimonies. God provides a way of atonement for your sin. In the Old Testament, God’s saints would make use of his provision of sacrifices. Obeying God’s law was not meant to be the source of our righteousness before God. Rather, God has provided a way for us to be made right before him through faith in his provision. In the Old Covenant, the saints were made righteous by faith in the sacrifices that God provided in the Law. These sacrifices were not sufficient in and of themselves, but they pointed forward to the sacrifice that is sufficient: Jesus Christ, God the Son incarnate. Jesus Christ absorbed the wrath of God you deserve for sin and lived the righteous life that is required of you.
Do you want to hasten and not delay in keeping God’s commandments? Then do not delay in confessing your sin before him and believing that Jesus Christ is your righteousness. That is his command. And as you receive Christ, confess your sin, and live by his grace, you will be empowered to grow in keeping his other commands. And you do not keep these commands in order to earn your righteousness but because you are made righteous in Christ.
As you walk in this command to trust in God’s provision for you, you will see sin differently, which leads us to our next point.
God’s Good Word Will Lead you to Praise (61-62)
Verses 61-62 shift attention away from how the psalmist is responding to God and turns to how he responds to other people because of God. Look down at verses 61-62,
“Though the cords of the wicked ensnare me, I do not forget your law. At midnight I rise to praise you, because of your righteous rules.”
In one sense, we are all wicked because we have elected sin in our lives. But that is not what the psalmist is saying in these verses. In the psalms, the wicked are those who have rejected God and do not want to walk in his ways. The wicked are doomed to destruction, and the psalmist knows it.
Knowing this reinterprets for us how we should hear the invitation of the wicked to join in their wickedness. Such an invitation can sound pleasant, but when you are steeped in God’s Word, the invitation to sin can be seen for what it really is: a snare that leads to death.
In case you aren’t familiar with trapping, a snare is a cord that is used to trap an animal. It is placed on the ground and food is set in the center of it. Then, when an animal goes for the food, the snare is pulled and the animal is trapped, doomed to death.
God’s Word shows the psalmist that the pleasure promised by sin is really a trap that leads to destruction. What the psalmist is saying is that the wicked would ensnare him, but when he hears their invitation to join in their wickedness, he instead remembers God’s law, which reveals the reality of temptation to him: it will lead to death whereas God’s Word will lead him to life.
Your Life Is Worship, So What Will You Worship?
Worship is not a choice. You will worship. The wicked worship, but they do not worship the true God. Your actions and choices arise from your heart and flow out of what you worship—who you aim to please.
Sin is worship. It is worship of anything other than the one true God. But true praise is delighting in who the true God is.
Instead of joining in the false worship of the wicked, which is sin, the psalmist uses God’s Word to direct him to true worship—the praise of the one true God. As he remembers God’s law, verse 62 tells us the result:
“At midnight I rise to praise you, because of your righteous rules.”
Do you see what he is doing? It’s exactly what we need to do. Instead of focusing on the pleasure promised by sin, he redirects his attention to the pleasures of God and dwells on them.
Do you find yourself easily ensnared by temptation? Then take up God’s Word. It isn’t like a magical incantation; God’s Word is like a new set of glasses by which you can see things as they really are; or as purifying water that will over time wash away the muck that blinds your vision to what sin really is and what sin really does.
Where people often go wrong is that they think the Christian life is primarily about saying “no” to the pleasures of sin. That’s a half-truth. As you follow Christ, you must say no to sin. But in saying no to sin, you are also simultaneously saying “yes” to the pleasures of God. That’s what verse 62 is all about.
He is praying to God at midnight because, as he dwells on God’s righteous rules, he cannot wait to praise God for it.
Do you know what that means? God’s commands are not just rules to obey. They are delights to be enjoyed. God’s commands, his rules, his instruction is enjoyable because they come from God and lead us to commune with God. If you are in Christ, his rules just “fit.”
When I was in high school, I had a size 28 waist. Those days are long gone. As time went on, my waist expanded, but for several years I kept wearing the same clothes. If you have ever done this, then you will know that it is not comfortable. Eventually, I got pants that fit and it was almost enough to make me sing.
As you come to Christ, you are changed by his word. The way of sin just doesn’t fit anymore. You cannot be comfortable with it because what you want is God!
Yes, it is hard to throw out your old way of life because you are used to it, just like you are used to old clothes. But if you are in Christ, the old ways of sin just don’t fit anymore. You can’t be comfortable in them. As you throw out the old ways and put on God’s ways, you don’t find drudgery. You find freedom! You want to sing as you meditate on and practice God’s ways.
As you do this, there is another joy you will find. You will find that God’s Word hasn’t just changed you, but others around you with whom you can now fellowship.
God’s Good Word Will Lead You to Fellowship (63-64)
As you see God and learn to want him, you will turn from sin and praise God. When that happens, you will look around and find others doing the same thing.
The church is the community of the redeemed who corporately want God, turn from sin, and worship him as his people. This is the reality that is spoken of in verse 63,
“I am a companion to all who fear you, of those who keep your precepts.”
This verse, and verse 64 which we will address in a moment. Have massive implications. As we close, let me just lay them out for us.
No Room for Individualism
First, God’s Word does not leave room for radical individualism. As God changes you by His Word, you are necessarily connected to all others that he changes by His Word. God’s work of salvation in Jesus Christ, that is announced by God’s Good Word, binds us together as we come to Christ. God’s Word declares that Christian community, namely the church, is not an option but a necessity. God makes us companions that need one another. Just as you cannot help but be born into the family, when you place your trust in Christ you cannot help but be born into the church.
The only question that remains is whether or not you will embrace your family or reject them. As you honestly deal with God’s good Word, you will not be able to reject God’s family for long. To reject the church is to reject following God’s good Word.
No Room for Gracelessness
Just as there is no room for individualism, there is no room for gracelessness in God’s church. The church is made up of those who, as verse 63 says, keep God’s precepts. God’s precepts—his instruction, rules, and commands—are not works of righteousness. If you use the law to try to make yourself righteous, then you are misusing the law. Luther and Calvin both rightly referred to the Law as a mirror, as James 1 does as well. The mirror of God’s law is to be used for 3 things: to show us our sin, show us our need for a savior, and then, as we come to Jesus as Savior, show us how we can live lives that are increasingly conforming to Christ. God’s commands, then, are not stones to be used to weigh us down, but pavement to be used to direct us where to God in our Christian lives.
If you use the law to try to prove your righteousness, then you will end up never confessing sin. Confession will only prove that you are a failure if the law is how you will prove your righteousness. You will end up trying to show your ability by hiding your sin.
But if you use the law as God intended—to reveal your heart and lead you to Christ—then confession will not be a burden, but a pathway of freedom. You will confess sin because it will highlight the ability of Christ to save you and change you.
No Room for Indifference
This is what we see in verse 64,
“The earth, O LORD, is full of your steadfast love; teach me your statutes.”
The church, the community of the redeemed, have eyes to see what others miss: the loving-kindness of God in all creation. As we learn God’s statutes together, we can see more and more the goodness of God together. In this sense, God’s Word is like the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is a decree issued during the Ptolemaic dynasty, but the reason it is noteworthy is because the decree was written on stone and in different languages. At the time the stone was found, no one knew how to read Egyptian. But since the decree was written in Egyptian and Greek, philologists were able to use the Greek which was known in order to gain a greater understanding of the Egyptian which was at the time unknown.
In a similar way, creation speaks of God’s goodness, but you cannot truly decipher what is being said because it is in a language you don’t understand. God’s Word opens up all creation for us to see and understand the goodness of God. As God teaches us his statutes, we do not just learn how to know God. We also learn how to live in accord with his steadfast love in all creation.
Conclusion: Do you want God? Are you longing to turn from the false worship of sin and put on praise to the true God? Then join with God’s people. You do that by placing your trust in Jesus Christ. The incredible reality of the gospel is that Jesus Christ acts as your substitute and thus makes repentance, forgiveness, and fellowship with God and his people possible. Here is what he does
Your sin deserves God’s wrath
So God the Son takes on flesh, becoming a man, in order to act as your substitute.
He lives the life you were supposed to live, a life of perfect obedience.
He dies the death you deserve to die—not just a physical death on the cross, but a death bearing the weight of God’s wrath.
He rose again from the dead showing that he really has conquered death and has ushered in the new creation.
And now he invites you to come and be united with him in the New Covenant. You join the covenant by placing your faith in Jesus Christ. When you do this, you receive his Spirit and belong to him.
You can get in on this. But if you have this mercy, then you will suffer the full weight of punishment for your sins.
So come and receive God’s mercy. You can do that today, even where you sit by crying out to him and trusting in Jesus alone for your salvation
Then you can tell us about your faith in Christ and be baptized to declare you are a part of his people.
God’s good Word reveals God’s goodness to us. Come taste and see that the Lord is good. Let’s pray.
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