You Word Is A Lamp

This morning we're going to be focusing on just one verse out of the longest Psalm, longest chapter of Scripture in the whole Bible, Psalm 119. Before I read that verse, I want to tell you what we're talking about. And this being the first Sunday of the new year, I want to take a little bit of time to talk about resolutions. Not because I think they're good, or because I think they're bad, or because I want to try to coerce you into making resolutions of your own if you haven't already. This morning, my whole goal, is to simply take the occasion that we have in front of us, because it's a new year, when we're all thinking about what 2021 was like and what we hope 2022 will be like, and say, here's something I want to put on your radar as a Christian that should be something you're resolving to do better at. And it's not something flashy. It's not something necessarily exciting to us until we do it, and then it becomes exciting.

My goal this morning is simply to show you the importance of God's word in your daily life. And the reason I want to do that is because I think too often we don't have a respect or an honor or a devotion to the word of God that we should have as his people. There are so many voices, so many authorities, so many people saying this is true and that's true that I suspect that the Bible has come down in its authority in our lives. Related to that, I don't know that we are as wise concerning what the Bible says as generations that may have gone by. My concern is not to say we're worse than everybody else, but to say we have the same word that God has always given to his people. And it is our responsibility to be students of it, to understand it. I'll tell you a very short story. The company that does the cleaning for the daycare, is a Christian father and son. And the son owns the business, but the father's usually the one who's here cleaning. And we had an elders meeting a couple of weeks ago, and I was out talking to him. He had just come a few minutes before. And to talk to him, and he's probably in his 70s. And theologically, he's not the same as I am and stuff, but I'll tell you, to talk to him, one thing that was absolutely apparent to me, and he's not a pastor, he's just a guy. He vacuums our carpets for a living.

his knowledge of the Bible and his commitment to what God had said and his understanding of it was humbling to me. Because I thought, this guy's spent his life. The fruit was evident. He spent his life reading and studying and learning about the scripture. And I thought, as I talked with him, talked to Daryl, I thought, you know what? I want to be like Daryl. And we were joking about our theological differences and stuff, but I admired him and I thought, This man loves God's Word. This man has studied and has read and has prayed and has been faithful to God for decades and decades. And I want that to be true of me. And I want that to be true of you as well. And so, as I said, my goal this morning is to show you the importance of God's Word in your daily life. My hope is that you will be stirred up to read and to study the Bible more regularly, not just for a few weeks or months, but for the rest of your life, so that in time, you'll become like Daryl.

None of you know Daryl. Maybe you know Daryl. You know Daryl. Were you standing there for the conversation as well? You were. Yeah. And so our text this morning is Psalm 119, verse 105. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. This is the word of the Lord. Thank you. You may be seated. Now the general context for this verse. As I'm nervous to pull verses out of context generally, I like to preach bigger chunks so that we don't get out of square with what the text is saying. What is the context of this verse? Well, Psalm 119 is King David's psalm. It's like a book. It's organized with chapters. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has eight verses that come after it. And each one of those verses has a repeating theme. And then you go through to the next letter. So it would be like...

If we said A is for apple and then we had a sentence about apple and then we said B is for ball and we had a sentence about ball, that's the way this whole psalm is set up. And so it's in chunks of eight and it's all about the law of God. The whole thing is about the law of God. And so here in the middle of it, in the middle of one of those stanzas, David says, your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. And so I want to talk to you a little bit this morning about lamps and light. I was talking with Dan George recently.

He's an electrician. He's giving us counsel about the house we're building, the electrical stuff in there. And so we're discussing the difference between functional light and decorative lights. You can have a really pretty light fixture that doesn't provide much light to a room. But every room needs to have light in it, right? And so we're trying to figure out how to balance the difference, the tension between functional lights and pretty lights. Can lights can provide a lot of light. but they're not all that attractive to look at, right? You don't put can lights up over your dining room table and say, isn't it beautiful? Look at our nice light fixtures. You want something that's attractive. Here, David's talking about a functional light. He has a path, he's walking, and he needs to see what's on the path. And so the word of God, he says, your word is a lamp to my feet, it's a light to my path. He's saying, your word is a practical, functional, useful tool.

that I need in my life. As I walk, I need light to show me where I'm going. And so the Bible is not something that we as Christians ought to think of as a placeholder for value. It sits on our table and collects dust. But we've got the nice family Bible. It's a practical thing. It's a functional thing. It's a tool for you to use. What happens to the tools, whether you men, they're the tools in your garage, or you women, they're the tools maybe in your kitchen or in your sewing club, wherever. What happens to tools that don't get used? They rust. They don't work. They just don't work. They stop working. You forget how to use them. You ever gotten something out, some tool, and you get the thing out, and you're like, oh, I don't remember how to, you know. The Bible's the same way. If you don't use it, if you're not conversant with it, You will not know how to use it. You won't know how to understand it. It's a skill that you have to cultivate. And so you can imagine walking down a path with a really dim light. You would not be happy with that, would you? And what would the result be if you had a really dim light walking down a path? You'd end up going really slow, and even still you'd probably end up falling down or tripping on something or getting hurt or getting lost.

And so when David says, your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path, you'd understand that if you were walking down a path, you would want a bright light. You would want one with big batteries in it, right? One that's going to show you everything you need. Sort of like those headlights that are in the new cars when you drive at them and you think they have their brights on, but they don't. They're just these really bright blue or white or whatever color they are lights. Super functional. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks about light. And he says this, he says, lights a lamp and puts it under a basket. But on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Now Jesus is speaking here about his people, us, the disciples, being the light of the world. But this parable also demonstrates the foolishness of hiding a light under a lamp. Have you ever had a lamp in your house and the shade was just too dark? It wasn't functional. It didn't provide light for the room. Jesus says the purpose of a light is to illumine the space.

And so the purpose of the word is to show us and to teach us about our lives, about this world that God's made. A light is supposed to remove darkness so that what was hidden in the darkness is now exposed by the light. We could multiply and discuss example after example of places in the Bible where it talks about the light. Jesus is the light come into the world in John. But here King David says simply that God's word is a lamp and a light. I want you to think for a minute. In your own house, if you've lived there a little while, do you walk through your house at night in the dark? Some of you might not. Some of you may have Legos on the floor or something that you don't want to step on. But I would suspect that a number of us actually do walk through our houses in the dark at night, whether we're going to the kitchen or going to the restroom or going to the thermostat or whatever it is we're doing. I bet that we actually walk through our house in the dark. I do. And you know where every door is and every doorknob is?

You walk through, and it's not the same as if your eyes are closed. It's weird. In my house, if I close my eyes, I'm disoriented. But in the dark, when I can't see anything, you know where the corners are and the doors, and you get where you're going, and you don't mind walking around in the dark. Now, why don't you mind walking around in the dark in your house? Because you're familiar. You're familiar, right? Some wall's not going to grow up overnight for you to walk into. Some door's not just going to magically jump out in front of you. But where there's not familiarity, or where there's danger, what's the first thing you want to do? You want to turn on the light. You want to turn on the light. And so as soon as there's something you don't know, or something where you don't have complete knowledge, like the sort of knowledge where you would walk through your house in the dark, that sort of knowledge, as soon as you're in an environment where you don't have that level of understanding of what your surroundings are, we all reach for the light switch, and we say, give me the light. I need the light. And that's what David's getting at with...

The word of God. He says, your word is a light to me in an unknown, dangerous environment. I like to go hunting. And lights are very important if you go hunting. And it's all related to the darkness. Some people would be afraid to walk in the dark into the woods even with a light. But it is a scary thing. Sometimes you hear things in the woods when it's dark and it gets your heart racing. You hear something go crashing through the woods. You can't see it. But you hear something that wasn't far away go running. Maybe it was a deer. Maybe it was a coyote. Maybe it was the neighbor's dog. So hunters like to have lights when they go into the woods early in the morning. They want to be quiet, and they realize, if I don't have a light with me, I'm going to step on every branch, every stick. I'm going to trip. I'm going to fall. And what's worst of all is I could get lost. You go wandering into the woods in the middle, you know, an hour before the sun's going to come up, and you're going to walk a mile back into the woods.

how easy would it be for you to get lost and get disoriented and not know where you're at? Hunters take lights. They need lights. The woods become a much more dangerous place without lights. Not because some wild animal is going to come attack them, but because they may well fall into a creek and get soaked, or they may trip over a root and sprain their ankle. And so for a hunter, lights are essential for safety, for protection. Now, if it's true of hunters that they want lights when they go into the woods, For safety. Shouldn't we want the word of God to be as handy to us as a light for safety and for protection in this world? Here's the question. Do you need protection? And we say, oh, yeah, I need protection. But I think too many times we think we've got enough light in our head. If we think theoretically about it, we go, no, I don't like to stumble around in the dark. But practically, hunters get lost every year stumbling around in the dark.

Because they didn't take their light with them. They didn't have their light. And I think many times in our lives we do the same thing. We don't carry a light with us. And the brighter the light is, the better off we'll be. So how do you get the word of God to be a bright light? That's the question we're heading towards. Well, first, I'll tell you, it doesn't happen by chance or by osmosis. You have to be exposed. If you want the word of God to be useful to you, you have to be exposed to it. There's no shortcuts here. There's no shortcuts. I think some of the most difficult questions I get asked, like just the random off-the-cuff questions, is that people come and say, what's the Bible say about X? And X is this mountain of complexity. But what they're coming and asking is, yes or no? And I'm going, this is not a yes or no question. This is a complex question. This has lots of variables. It may be the answer's different depending on the circumstances you find ourselves in. But I think many times we come to the Bible,

Just like that person. We come to the scripture like it's a vending machine. When we want an answer, we walk up to it and we say, okay, I'm going to look and see what it has to say about this or about that or about the other. It just dispenses it when we need it. Simple, short answers. And sometimes that's okay. But it shouldn't be our life's goal that we would handle the Bible like we would a vending machine. Where we walk up to it and we simply want an answer. A couple comes in for marriage and they say, My husband won't lead me and my wife won't submit. And I go, there's a lot, a lot, a lot to be said about that. You simply knowing these facts doesn't actually solve the problem. It doesn't make for a good marriage for you to know you're supposed to lead and you're supposed to follow. That knowledge by itself, without its context that the scripture provides it, is not all that helpful. All it does is tell you they're not doing their job.

And so the Bible becomes, in those sorts of situations, a very dim light. A very dim light. If we were to take that example and flesh out, does the Bible have anything more to say to husbands and wives about how to have a godly marriage other than who's the leader and who's the follower? Oh yeah, lots and lots and lots of it. But if we come and we just want a short, quick answer, we're not going to be helped. And so for the word to become useful in our lives, it means we have to be exposed to it a lot. throughout our lives. It's the new year and many people are thinking about new Bible reading plans and I am as well. And the thing that people always talk about is, I often feel like, it's just what I think, I don't know if it's true of you, but I think it's true. Everybody talks about reading the Bible in a year plans and it's, in my impression, just sort of this thing that's held up as like, this is what the godly people do. Like, they read the whole Bible every year and that's what you're supposed to do.

And it becomes this unspoken competition between Christians about who the godly ones are. Who's going to do the real reading? Who's going to really commit? Who's going to read that four or five chapters a day? And then you'll get the person who says, oh, well, I'm going to do a six-month plan. Because they just come in as the overachievers and just have to make everything. You're going to one-ups everybody. Now, am I saying that you shouldn't read the Bible in a year or six months? I'm not saying that. The plan I follow is a Bible in a year plan. So I'm not here to cast shade on this or say this is better or not. My point in saying this read the Bible in a year plan, at least I think it's become something that it wasn't originally intended to be. I don't think it was originally intended to be a thing you could brag about. I think it was meant, it was created to be the sort of thing that got you conversant with the scripture. That was the goal. It was meant to say you need to be exposed a lot.

to the Bible. And we think that you could read the whole Bible in a year, so we think you should. Not so that you could look at your brothers and say, oh, I'm more godly, or I know so much more, but because we need that much exposure for it to be helpful to us. Now, why don't people read the Bible in a year? To some people, they say, oh yeah, I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it. And other people look at that and they're like, yikes, that's a lot. Four or five chapters, that might, I can't do that in five minutes. They get intimidated by it.

And some of the reasons they get intimidated by it is they go, well, I can't interact with that much content. If you're talking, the plan I use has you reading four different places. So you're reading four different books of the Bible at any given time, and you're supposed to be tracking and thinking about and engaging with all this, and it's just overwhelming. And some people say, I don't want to do that. And so they're quiet, and they come up with some other plan. My point in bringing it all up to you is simply to say, if you want the Word of God to be helpful to you, You have to be exposed to it a lot. And I'm not opposed to people listening to the scripture, but I'll tell you, you won't get nearly as much out of it if it's just background noise. You want to listen to your podcasts or your books that way, that's fine. But it's the Bible, and it should have your attention when you're engaging with it. It should have your attention. If the best you can do is while I'm driving, you'll get the kids from school or on my way to work, then that's fine. But give it your attention while you're doing it.

You need lots of exposure to it for it to become helpful to us, familiar to us. I have this thing I do with myself. Whenever I read, one thing that irritates me is when people just cite the chapter and verse, but they don't actually put the passage in. So this is just a thing about me, okay? It drives me nuts when they do that because then I have to go look up what they're doing. Sometimes there's a hyperlink and you can hover over it and it shows you. But you know what I do when people put big block quotes of Scripture in? whatever they're writing, do you know what I want to do? I want to skip over it. Why do I want to skip over it? I already know what it says. I'm familiar with that passage. That's what I think. And I don't think I'm completely crazy. That is what I think. And so what I do is I discipline myself to read it every time it's in an argument. Someone's writing a blog post or something that I'm interested in hearing their case. I discipline myself to read the section of Scripture.

that they quote every time. To keep myself from just being like, oh, I know that, I know that, I know that. Because I think that's one of the reasons we don't read the Bible very often. Or when we do, we don't engage with it the way we should. Because we have in the back of our minds this idea, I know what he says there. I know what happens there. But when you read it, and you engage with it, and you take the time to pay attention, you'll be surprised how often you realize parts of the passage that you didn't realize before. It may be because of what's going on in your life. It may be because of conversations you're having with other people. Different parts of the passage will stand out to you in a way that they didn't before. And so you have to be exposed to Scripture a lot. You have to dispel the lie that you know what it says. If you know what it says, good. I'm glad. You don't know everything it has to do with. You don't know everything about it. Read it. Pay attention to it. How else does the Word become useful to us?

as a light to guide our path the word requires curiosity when you read it okay some i don't want you to think oh the pastor's talking about reading the bible and what he wants to do is make sure that i i check my box every day i'm not arguing for you to check your box every day i want you to care about me engaged with what you read i want you to be curious how much should you read for family devotions this is one of the places where The rubber meets the road with this question. How long do you make your four-year-old sit there and listen once you get past children's Bibles? How long? How long? I don't know. What I know is that what you should have or aim to have in addition to, if you can, is you should have conversation about what you read. It can be three minutes. Ask him a question. I've told you guys this before to engage my kids. Sometimes if I'm reading a passage that I know is going to have the same word show up a lot,

I tell my kids every time I pause, and I haven't done this in years with you guys because the older kids have gotten older, but I'll stop and I'll say, okay, whenever I stop reading, you say Jesus or whatever the word is that's showing up because it shows up half a dozen times. And I'm trying to get them to be engaged in it. And I want you to count how many times that word shows up. And when we're done, I want you to tell me how many times we all said it. And it gets my kids paying attention. They're tracking now. I want my kids to pay attention.

Because I want them to engage with what God is saying, and I want them to have questions about it. Are questions bad? I don't think questions are bad. Is there such a thing as an ungodly or sinful question? Yes. But if one of your children, or when you're reading, if you read it and you go, why? Why'd he do that? Why'd God allow that to happen? I mean, the question I had, as we were reading Matthew 2 today, and I was talking about Herod, the question I had is, Lord, why do all those babies have to die? Why'd you let Herod do that? And the passage said, so that the prophecy would be fulfilled, that in Ramah there'd be weeping and they wouldn't be comforted and all these sorts of things. But you're looking at it and you're going, this is something that's uncomfortable and it seems wrong. And Herod was wrong to do it. But as you read it, you should be like, wait, what happened? What did he do? Why'd he do that? Why'd God allow that? Why'd God do these things?

If the word's going to become useful to you, it does require for you to engage with curiosity or with a desire to understand what you're reading. You're not just simply threading the words through your eyes. How does what he said make sense? Why did God do things this way versus that? If you just read for the sake of reading and comfort yourself with, I already know what this says, the word won't end up being a lamp to your feet. And so when you read the Bible, I said, how long should you read? And Luis said, I don't know if you guys heard, Luis said, half a chapter. That's fine. It's perfectly fine. Talk for a few minutes about it with your kids. You say, I don't know what to say, and I'm not a pastor. And I'm like, okay. Then you've got to learn. You don't have to learn to be a pastor. You don't have to learn to be articulate and all these sorts of things. You just have to learn, like, well, what was the main point of what we read? What did Jesus do? Okay, he walked on water. Okay, well, let's talk about that for a minute.

Why can he walk on water and why did Peter fall when he walked through the water? Because God's not like us. He's able to do stuff and bend the laws of nature. He has such authority and such creative power over all of creation. He can do anything he wants. He can walk on water and we can't do that. And this is one of the reasons we ought to love him. Because he can do things that we can't do. And then pray with your kids. Pray with your spouse. Asking God to help you understand it, to help you believe it, to help you remember it. I'm not trying to put the bar high. I'm trying to put the bar low. I'm trying to put it down where every one of us can get a hold of it and say, I can do that. I can do that. Another thing I'll say that kills curiosity or desire to understand is systems of theology, ways of interpreting Scripture.

that cancel out. It's like they black out. It's like it redacts part of Scripture. We just can't read that or talk about that or think about what that means because that cuts across the grain of what we know the Bible teaches. I was recently talking to a guy who is just getting engaged with Reformed theology and trying to figure out what in the world it is and all of this stuff. And he's come from a very different church background where they regularly had revivals and altar calls and all kinds of stuff that would be very foreign. worship here. And we were talking. We had a while to talk. He says, I just don't understand. There's so many questions that we never asked. We weren't allowed to ask. You're not allowed to question that. To ask that question is to question the Word of God. This is just how we do it. Maybe you're not questioning the Word of God, but you're questioning our tradition. And you're not allowed to do that. And that's destructive. No system of theology should keep you from

Trying to figure out what God said. No conception of God. No commitment to protecting God's honor or commitment to making sure that he appears loving all of the time. These are some of the things that we deal with in our society. When Katrina went through New Orleans and flooded the whole thing and Rick Warren was being interviewed. And the simple question to him was, where was God in Katrina? And Rick Warren could not bring himself to say he was in the wind. What he said was he was in the people handing out the water afterwards. Now why would he say that? Except that he was trying to protect God's image. He was like, if I say the truth, which is that God is, you know, we have Jesus commanding the wind, right? Like God has authority over the wind and here comes the wind and the rain and the flooding and the destruction. If you won't say God was in the wind, not just in the people who were handing out water, he's in both places.

But if you won't say the former, he was in the wind, why? Because you don't want people to think God's mean. You what? I don't think he thought it. I think we have cultural pressure on us to always be nice and play nice and make God always nice and neat and safe and comfortable and affirming. And he's not all of those things all the time. There's more to his character than just simply those things. I often tell people when you don't expose people to the whole character of God, the part that you do expose them to becomes useless. What is God's love without God's justice and his wrath? What is the value of heaven if there is no hell? Why do you want to go to heaven if there's no other place that you could end up with? Yeah, right. And so we ought to be curious.

about what God has done. And if you read, you won't have to read far in scripture before you start being like, wait, he did what? What happened? Like, why? That was not what I would have done. That's often my thought is, that's not what I would have done. But if you have a system of theology or you have some sort of conception of God that has to inform your reading or your understanding of God, it will not be a lamp to you. His word will not be a lamp to you. It'll be useless because you're like, well, we can't say that part. We can't acknowledge it. We can believe it. We just can't say it. We can't acknowledge that that's the truth. The other thing I'll tell you about, you might be thinking, oh, well, I'm just, what you're pushing for is to become students of Scripture. And I am pushing that you become students of Scripture. But some of you, not all of you, but some of you already like to study Scripture. You're already students. You love to read and you love to take in theology. A word of caution to you. Studying theology does not necessarily make the Word of God a lamp to you. It can.

but only if it's informed by love. Without love, it becomes a club to whack people over the head with. Not a lamp, but a club. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul said, If I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And so for the word to become a lamp, you have to read it with faith and with love. Love for those around you. So how do you make the word of God? or pursue having the word of God being a light to your path and a lamp to your feet. Or I said that backwards. First, I would tell you, it cannot be a lamp or a light to you if it's not authoritative. If it's not authoritative. If what the Bible says is like just a competing idea for the truth, it won't guide you. Because you don't want it to guide you. If you avoid certain passages or certain topics,

In essence, what you're doing is rejecting the authority of God, or at least of that passage, as it pertains to that topic. And so what it means is, when you walk down the path, your batteries will go out at certain points. And you'll smack it, trying to get it to come back on, but it won't come back on. And then you're left in the darkness at that point. And that'll be the dangerous point. How do you make the Word of God a light for your path? First, come to church. Go to a church. Come to the church. that teaches the Bible. Now that may seem like you don't have to say that. What do you mean? And I'm telling you, I've talked to people in this room and I've talked to many people outside of this room that said the church we went to didn't teach the Bible. Like we go to church and they didn't, the Bible never was read. It was barely mentioned during the sermon. It just wasn't brought up. Don't go to church like that. Don't. They won't do you any good.

You need to know what the Bible says and what it means. And that is the church's job, is to teach those things. And so if the church won't do that, through every means they have available to them, they're leaving you in the dark. This morning, I didn't know, I didn't look. John, we sang the Ten Commandments. And I have mixed feelings about that song. One, it's very long. And I don't think it's that interesting musically. John just told me a song I liked wasn't interesting musically. Maybe if we had more musicians today. But I think, man, it's long. And I think, oh, it's repetitive. And then I think, it's what's taught me to remember the Ten Commandments. That song. Singing it. It's good for us. John, it's good for us. Here's your Brussels sprouts. It's good for us. How much scripture do we learn by the songs we sing?

Music is a great communicator. I've got it down as another point, but I'll bring it up now. Music is a great way to help you learn Scripture and learn truth, provided that it's good music. I don't mean good instrumentally. I mean good words. A lot of what passes for Christian music today is not going to help you in this area. I've had people, I think it was recently you just told me, was it you who told me you don't like Christian music? Jody? It wasn't you? But somebody else told me that. I thought it was you. I guess not. And they're just like, I just don't, it doesn't, it just, it always says the same thing. It's like, it's just so narrow in its approach and it's all about God's love and it's all about performance and it just doesn't teach me the Bible. It doesn't help me worship God or grow. It just becomes this like white noise comfort. Music is a very good help to you in learning scripture, if it's good music.

Things like the Ten Commandments are helpful to sing. There are times when we sing the Lord's Prayer. It's helpful to sing. And so you want to go to a church that's goal is to expose you, in whatever ways they can, to the Word of God. Through preaching, through teaching, through singing, through reading, through praying. Exposure to the Word. You want a church that does that. That's really important. I can't overemphasize that. That's really, really important. Because if they're not teaching you the Bible, they're teaching you something else. But that other thing they're teaching you, nowhere in Scripture does it say will be a lamp to your feet and a light to your path. Now, you may have a church that does all of that. But if you just go through the motions at church, it won't do you any good. You'll reap what you sow. He who sows sparingly will reap sparingly. I remember years ago we had a conversation in a membership interview with a kid. And we asked, what does it mean to be a Christian?

And he looked at me and he smiled real big and he says, it means we sing in church. And he was convinced that was the whole definition at that point in his life of being a Christian. He was struggling with answering questions. And when we asked that question, his eyes perked up. He smiled. He knew what it meant to be a Christian. You sang at church. And it wasn't all of it. It meant to be a Christian, right? But he understood something. And I'm convinced what he understood was simply from his mom or his dad saying to him, honey, we're at church and we're Christians and Christians sing at church. I think that's probably all that happened. But it resonated. It stuck with him. And he goes, we sing at church. Well, what's that mean? Well, it means he used to come to church and not sing. And his parents saw that as a bad thing. And they said, no, when you come to church, you need to sing. Give yourself to it. If you just come to church and you don't sing and you don't engage, oh, I don't want to read. I don't want to sing. I don't have a good voice. You will reap what you sow out of that. Give yourself to it.

How else can you make the Word a light for your path? Read the Bible regularly. I talked about this somewhat earlier, but you need to know what the Bible says. And coming to it like a vending machine, when you have a particular question, will not get you very far. It'll give you about as much spiritual nutrition as you'll get out of an actual vending machine. It's just not helpful. When you have a particular question, you can ask it. But when I say read the Bible regularly, I'm saying... over the course of decades of your life. That's how you become conversant. You can't run through and rush through growing, stretching your mind to understand and contain things that people have spent their whole lives studying and teasing out. But you do want to make as much progress as you can in that area throughout your life. So that when you're a grandma or a grandpa and your kids sit on your knee, they go, Grandma and Grandpa studied the Bible.

They know what it says and they believe it. And it's evident by their knowledge and it's evident by their lives. There's fruit. An example of the Bible, you know, regular Bible reading or knowledge of Scripture being a protection to you would be Jesus' temptation when he was out in the wilderness. When Satan came to him and tempted him. Throw yourself down here from the pinnacle of the temple. For the Bible says that he won't let you harm yourself. Jesus says, no, but the Scripture says you shouldn't put the Lord your God to the test. It protected him. Now you say, well, he knew it. He's God. And I say, I know. But there's a reason that that's in the Scripture. It's for us to teach us that you can avoid temptation by knowing Scripture. Or you can combat temptation. Maybe that's a better way to say it. You can fight against temptation by knowing the Scripture. So whether you want to do a Bible in the year or a chronological plan,

or a chapter or even a passage a day. Those are all fine. Engage with what you're doing. Engage with what you're reading. It's more important that you do it regularly than that you do it perfectly. Now, one caution I will give to you. I don't really like the verse of the day because it gives you no context. And it's really easy to twist what any particular verse of the Bible says when you take it out of context. And so, At least a passage. At least some chunk of it, some cohesive part of it. And then think about it. You're like, well, I can't read the Bible in a year and think about everything I read. And I go, I know, that's fine. If that's overwhelming to you, then don't read the Bible in a year. Read a passage and think about it. What did it mean? What's it mean? Why did he say that? Do I do this? Don't I do this? How do I do this? How can I help my family with this? Do it regularly.

And with all of the other noise going on around with everyone else is reading so much and doing so much and talking so much and arguing so much and they have such a great understanding of theology. I'd rather that you had a good understanding of what you do know than a very shallow understanding of lots of stuff. Having a good understanding of less things will do you more spiritual good than having a very shallow understanding of everything. It'll make you look good if you have a shallow understanding of everything on the internet. Because you can talk for a few times, but then you move on and you go, what good is it? Dig into it. It's a lifelong pursuit. Next, how else? Ask your elders questions that you have. Earlier I said sometimes people come to me and the hardest questions they ask are, what does the Bible say about X? But if that's the beginning of a conversation that goes on of like, okay, well, we can work on that, but I don't have a five-minute answer for you.

we need to there's more to it then we have a good thing going on ask your elders you'll get a better answer from them because they know you then you'll get from the internet okay quora got questions right type in your bible question and halfway through your question you realize apparently lots of people have asked this question and then up pops god answers or quora or whatever you'll get a better answer from your from your elders Because they know you and they can understand the context that's leading you to ask the question. What else? Supplemental reading. What do I mean by supplemental reading? Well, I mean, it's like the Scripture is a lot like a puzzle. What do you always want to have handy when you're putting a puzzle together? The picture. What is the puzzle a picture of? I need something to organize because all I've got is 100 or 500 or however many pieces of these little tiny...

And little kids will pick them up and they're looking and they're trying to figure out, what is this little piece? But it doesn't matter what that piece is until they know how it all fits. What is that piece a part of? We actually do need to have the Bible systematized in a way that it makes sense to us. You can put a puzzle together just being like, I'm looking for that piece right there. And you go look through 500 pieces for that one piece. You can do it that way, but you aren't going to get the puzzle built. You don't have the time to do it. You actually need help. And in the same way that you need help when you put a puzzle together, you need help when you study Scripture. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. In fact, I think it's a failure and maybe even rebellion for people who will not listen to people who have studied before them and know more about a topic than they do. I think you should read, and you should study good men. What I will say is, if you have a question, I will...

always recommends you that you read people who aren't alive anymore and didn't come from our generation. And the reason is they don't feel the same societal pressures that you feel. Which translation of the scripture should you use? We use the NASB 95 here. They just came out with a new version. And the new version's not as good because the translators and editors feel pressure from our society to translate it a certain way. And so do authors who write systematic theologies and supplemental... Theologies in our day, they feel the pressure of our day. So their light's going to go dark at the points where you most need light. Read people that are dead and gone. The old guys, the dead guys. If you want to know what to read, talk to your elders. Talk to me. We can recommend things that will be maybe harder language-wise to read, perhaps, but often not.

You'll need to read other stuff besides the Bible to help you understand the Bible. If you want a basic, like, help me understand the Bible, what should I use? Get Matthew Henry's commentary on the Bible. It's not terribly long. It's only six volumes. But it's a commentary on the whole Bible. Or you can get the abridged version that's even shorter. Matthew Henry is helpful. He's simple. He's easy to understand. Read it along. When you have a question and you're reading your passage, just go read Matthew Henry. He's not going to talk about all the Greek and the syntax and all of the stuff that is going to be confusing to most of us. He's just going to be like, here's what it means. Here's what the apostle was saying or here's what Jesus was saying. You'll need supplemental reading. Finally, what I'll say, I'll end with this. You have to trust what the Bible says. You have to trust it. If it's going to be a lamp, you have to trust it.

You say, well, what if it says things that are uncomfortable or costly or unpopular? This is a question of trust. What do you trust and what do you value? What's most important to you? Is being socially acceptable most important to you or is the truth most important to you? The words that should be on our lips as Christians is the Bible says or the Bible teaches. If those words don't ever come out of our mouths, we don't have a lamp in our hands. We need a lamp in our hands. We need to know what the Bible says and teaches. One of my sons was just asking me yesterday, a few days ago. Micah was asking me. They were having an argument in sixth grade about women pastors and whether that was appropriate or not. And, you know, four or five kids were arguing about it. And he says, I know that it's not right, but I don't know why. And nothing made me more happy than to have him come ask me. Now, that's a big question, right? I mean, I can quote to him 1 Timothy 2.

But that's not the end of the conversation. That's the beginning of the conversation because he's got to go figure out how to sort it out with his classmates. So he needs a lamp in his hand. And he's going to need to be, not just people say, well, the Bible says, because someone else is going to say, well, yeah, but that's not what it means. You want to have confidence in what the Bible says, and that requires that you spend time learning about it. And when others disagree with what the Bible says, you want to be sure that what you believe and what you say is actually true.

Not just true because you think it's true or not just true because it's a fun thing to say to them and you like to argue, but true because God said it. And so you have to trust what God says. And you have to accept the implications of what he says for your life. To have the word as a lamp to your feet and a light in your path is not to study the Bible academically, but to study it personally and to seek out what it means for you in your life, which you'll find out oftentimes is not distinct from what it means for many other people.

And so if you want the Bible to be helpful to you and to be a protection to you, you have to be a student of it. You have to spend time reading it. You have to be taught. And in time, you'll see the growth of it. Or maybe the other people, maybe people around you will see the growth of it. And so this is what I'd like to see us commit ourselves to this coming year, that we're going to spend a greater amount of time devoted to the Word of God in the year to come than we have in the year past. And if that's a Bible reading plan of some sort or another than good. But give yourself to what the Bible says. You have questions, ask them. Follow out and tease out the path to see what God says. And you'll be better for it and you'll be protected by it. When David says, it's a lamp to your feet, what he's saying to you is, it's God's will to give you protection in this world. To not see you fall and be consumed, but to be protected and to get where you're going.

Let's pray.