Psalm 119:9-16
How can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to your word.
With my whole heart I seek you;
let me not wander from your commandments!
I have stored up your word in my heart,
that I might not sin against you.
Blessed are you, O Lord;
teach me your statutes!
With my lips I declare
all the rules of your mouth.
In the way of your testimonies I delight
as much as in all riches.
I will meditate on your precepts
and fix my eyes on your ways.
I will delight in your statutes;
I will not forget your word.
Welcome to Getting ready for Sunday, a podcast of first Lutheran Church. Each week I introduced the readings for the upcoming Sunday with some notes and explanation so you can be ready for worship when you arrive. I look at the Old Testament, song, epistle and Gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday and offer a few notes and explanation. The psalm for Sunday March 17, is from Psalm 119, verses nine through 16.
How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word? with my whole heart, I seek you let me not wander from your commandment, I have stored up your word in my heart, that I may not sin against You. Bless it, are you Oh, Lord, teach me Your statutes. With my lips, I declare all the rules of your mouth in the way of your testimonies. I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts, and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes. I will not forget your word. Here ends the reading. Psalm 119 is a lengthy Psalm all about God's word. Psalm 119 is also the one where it says Thy Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. It's divided into sections. Each section is based on the letter from the Hebrew alphabet. So we call it an acrostic. This section is the second one or bathe. Let's dive in. How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word. There is great wisdom in being able to learn from the wisdom of others. Lots of people have the kind of wisdom that you gather from a lifetime of making errors, and then learning from your mistakes. Anybody can do that. If you step on a rake and it smacks you in the face you learn maybe don't step on a rake. But when someone says, Don't step on that rake, it's even better to learn from that person by not stepping on the rake. And that's sort of the question going on here. When a young man without wisdom wants to follow God, to keep his way pure, to walk the right path. What do you do? The answer is by guarding it according to your word. The word of God is there to make foolish people wise to make the simple, wise and the people who need to know more understand. God's word is there for us to give us that a young man who has no wisdom of his own through experience, can learn the wisdom of God through the Word. And can't we all benefit from that. And so this almost responds with my whole heart I seek you. Let me not wander from your commandment. The desire of a Christian who seeks after God is to follow God's commandments. And we may not always do well at it, we may not always like wanting to do it. In fact, sometimes our sinful nature pulls us away. But in the end, we all want to serve God. And I think that is part of the heart of a Christian is that the new heart that God gives us in Christ prays out to him, let me not wander from your commandments. The next one continues. I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Now, hearing God's word and having inside us especially I think memorizing God's word and understanding his doctrines and teachings is a great way to be reminded every day of our duty and our desire to follow God's commandments. But it is also a way to lead us to pray. Lead me away from temptation, oh, Lord. And that's what this is asking. This is not so much like look at what I've done. This is God use your word to guide me away from the sins that my body and my mind and my sinful flesh want me to do? It continues, Blessed are You, O Lord, teach me are statutes. There's a reason blessing for God also comes tied to the statutes. The rules of God is that God the psalmist knows that blessing comes from being with God and following his ways. It continues with my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth in the way of your testimonies. I delight as much as in all riches. So the psalmist here is saying I speak Your word with my mouth says all the rules here. This is one of the things that Christians and all the way back into the Old Testament have done is that we are constantly speaking God's word. Our divine service Sunday worship is filled with the Word of God, we speak it back and forth, we pray the Psalm we, we hear it read, the pastor preaches on the word. And then we respond with the Creed, the summary of what God's Word says, there is always God's word going all throughout the service. And we're constantly speaking it as a liturgy as a repetition of what God has done for us. And it teaches us to delight in God's testimonies as much as No, no, even more than all the riches of the world. The psalm continues, I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes, on your ways, I will delight in your statutes, I will not forget your word. This is truly the response of a Christian who loves God and loves his word, right? I will think about your teaching, I will fix my eyes on what you would have me do, I will have joy in your rules. And always remember your word. Now, this is sometimes aspirational for us, right? You know, the sinful flesh hangs on and sometimes we groan and struggle, but the delight, while we do have that delight in our inner being, as St. Paul says, even when the sinful flesh tries to pull us away, there is something within us given to us by the Holy Spirit that delights and enjoys God's wisdom that loves to serve Him and wants to do everything that he calls on us to do. And that's the hope and prayer of every Christian right to meditate on God's word and delight in what He has for us to do. That's all we have for today. We'll see you on Sunday. Bye
Transcribed by https://otter.ai