Preached at Clearnote Church, Indianapolis on July 13, 2025. Songs courtesy of My Soul Among Lions .
Sermon Notes
Summary
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Psalm 119:33–40 rests on a sober understanding of human depravity. Without clear knowledge of sin, justification, conversion, and sanctification become empty ideas and people accept inadequate remedies. Every child of Adam is naturally inclined toward rebellion, so the psalmist does not trust his own insight or willpower. He repeatedly asks God to teach him, give understanding, make him walk in the commandments, incline his heart toward the testimonies, turn his eyes from vanity, and establish his promises. Saving knowledge is humble: it sees personal corruption clearly rather than mastering everyone else’s faults. Knowledge must then lead to obedient action, but obedience responds to Christ’s finished work rather than earning favor. Covetousness, digital distraction, pornography, entertainment, approval, and other vanities compete for the eyes and slowly kill spiritual life. God’s Word instead revives. Believers who feel stuck should pray this passage, meditate upon it, and ask the Spirit to redirect their desires. God’s mercy, the sinner’s inability, and genuine humility make such pleading possible, and his promises assure that he delights to answer those who seek him.
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We have, well, I was gonna say we have a major problem today in our culture, but we have many major problems. But one of the major issues today and a foundational problem, both in the church and in our culture, is something that would make it hard for us to understand this psalm. And that problem is that we do not understand our sin we don't understand the depth of our sin jc ryle i'm going to read you a little quote or maybe a longish quote from jc ryle but he says this very plainly this is from his book holiness and it's very helpful he says the plain truth is that a right knowledge of sin lies at the root of all saving christianity to be saved to be a christian you have to have a proper understanding of sin Without such doctrines as justification, conversion, sanctification, are words and names which convey no meaning to the mind. The first thing, therefore, that God does when he makes anyone a new creation in Christ is to send light into his heart and to show him that he is a guilty sinner.
The material creation in Genesis began with light, and so also does the spiritual creation. God shines light into our hearts by the work of the Holy Spirit, and then spiritual life begins. Dim or indistinct views of sin are the origin of most of the errors, heresies, and false doctrines of the present day. If a man does not realize the dangerous nature of his soul's disease, you cannot wonder if he is content with false or imperfect remedies. I believe that one of the chief wants of the church in the 19th century has been and is clearer, fuller teaching about sin. And I would say the same is true of the church in the 21st century. We need to have a clear.
distinct view of what sin is. And if we don't take into account our sinfulness and the sinfulness of the people around us, we can't understand what's going on in our culture. And we won't understand what's going on in our own lives. And we won't understand our need of God. Everyone who is a descendant of Adam was born with original sin. That means all of us, because we're all Adam's descendants. That means that every one of you and every sweet little baby you have are corrupted sinners. We are born with a corrupt nature. We're born dead in our sins and trespasses. And this is the indisputable truth which is taught throughout all of Scripture and is clearly evident in creation.
Genesis 6.5 says, Jeremiah 17.9, And if you need more convincing, just read the book of Ecclesiastes. The entire Bible is filled with the theme of man's sinfulness. And yet we're prone to denying it. And so is our culture. You'll read your parenting books and they'll speak about how to draw the goodness out of your child. They'll downplay and reject corporal punishment. You'll hear people talk about gentle parenting. All this talk about drawing goodness. out of someone is a denial of original sin. Any talk of following your heart, of my true heart, of being the best version of yourself is an attack on your understanding that you are a sinner in need of the grace of God. You need to beware of all those who rail about other people's sins and the sins of other races while not acknowledging their own sin.
or trying to minimize their sins. Anyone who can go into great detail and depth and declaring to you other sins, yet when they're asked about their own sins, they fumble around. They can barely come up with anything. And then they'll mumble something about being, well, I was inconsistent in my Bible reading this week and I didn't pray as much as I should have. That is someone. who doesn't understand their sin. And they think they're a pretty good person. Never trust a man who can tell you about everyone else's sins and will constantly talk about them and their faults and how it's with their genetics and their IQ and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And will never deal with or rarely deal with the sins in their own life and the sins of those who he is leading. That is a man without understanding.
That is a man who doesn't pray a prayer like what we just read in Psalm 119. See, none of us really want to deal with our sin. It's very easy to think we're good people. We all want to buy into the idea that we're not that bad, that our sin isn't too smelly. God sure had to work hard to sanctify those people over there who are real sinners. But we're almost good. We just need a little bit of sprucing up. This is a message that our culture will sell you and sell you and sell you. And all of us here look pretty well put together on the outside. But listen, the Pharisees looked really well and put together on the outside. And God didn't have very good things to say about them. He called them whitewashed tombs and broods of vipers. The mature Christian knows their own sins and is willing to say with Paul that they are the chief of sinners.
and mean it. Not just say, I'm the chief of sinners, but you know that guy down there who's actually a lot worse than I am. The mature Christian doesn't wink and nod and smile as he admits to being the chief of sinners. I say this because the truth of our total depravity is the thing that undergirds the pleas of the psalmist. He knows that he needs God's mercy and he knows that his heart, apart from Christ, is prone to wandering. That he doesn't need God to act once and then he'll be good. Rather, he knows that he needs God's dedicated attention or else he will go straight back to his sinful ways like a dog returns to its vomit. And of course, this is what makes the gospel such joyful and wonderful news, isn't it? It's that God does what is impossible for us to do. God opens the eyes.
of our hearts and minds towards our sins. He revives our hearts. He makes us alive so that we can respond to the good news, the good news of the gospel, that Jesus came and lived a perfect life, was the perfect sacrifice for us, that he bore all of our sins and paid their full penalty so that we are free. If you are a Christian, God took on your sin. Christ clothed himself with your sin, paid the penalty, died, rose again, leaving it, and he took his righteousness and he dressed you with his righteousness. This is something we can't do on our own. Christianity is not about doing things for God. Christ did the work. Everything that we're called to do in our obedience is in response to the things that Christ has done. It's not because we earn credit with God.
It's done. The work was finished. That was all Christ. Now, this is part of the reason why we have to understand the depth of our sin. If you don't understand your sin and its depth and the impossibility of you doing good works, then you will inevitably think that your salvation rests on you, that you have to do good things to get in God's good graces. And you can't. Your sin is so corrupting. You can't do anything that is not corrupted by sin. That's what necessitates God doing all the work. And then in love for him and the work that he's done, we respond in obedience. Now, all of this I want as the backdrop to the Psalm because in it, the psalmist is pleading again and again. Every verse is him pleading for God to act, to change him.
Because he knows and he realizes his own sin and that he can't do it by himself. So in verses 33 and 34, the psalmist begins with pleading for God's understanding and his teaching. And 35 through 37, we're going to look at his pleading for transformation. And third, we're going to look at his pleading for preservation to be established. So first, teach me. Teach me, O Lord, the ways of your statutes, and I shall observe it to the end. Give me understanding that I may observe your law and keep it with all my heart. We learn here that knowledge is necessary, that you cannot just follow God. It's not just a feeling. It's not just an acknowledgement or something, but that there actually has to be some understanding.
you need God to give you the understanding. That it's not something that man can attain on his own. Now, the godly psalmist does not think that he has this all figured out, does he? The psalmist is a humble man who pleads with God to give him knowledge and understanding that he needs. And note that there is an implicit assumption. He doesn't have to get knowledge of sin. He knows the ways of sin. He knows the ways of the world. What he needs to be given to him is the knowledge of God's ways. You don't naturally know how to follow God. You don't naturally know the ways of the Lord. Those are things that are spiritually discerned. Those are things that we have to have God reveal to us. We don't have, no kid needs to be taught how to hit. No kid needs to be taught how to disobey and rebel. None of us need, we all know how to do those things, but to follow God.
to know the way of truth, that must be revealed to us. And so the psalmist asks God to teach him. And this is a theme throughout the whole Psalm 119. He's begging God to teach him, to give him understanding, to reveal things to him. And we should ask, do you pray this? The psalmist relies on God to reveal truth to him. David didn't reach or Daniel. or Paul, none of them reached a point where they were so far along in their walk with God that they didn't need God to continue to give them an understanding of his truths. This psalmist is relying on God to understand what to do and what it means to walk in God's way. And so we ought to be humble and not think that we know all things or that we have sufficient knowledge.
We should seek God to continue to give us more understanding and a greater depth of understanding so that we can walk more wholly and perfectly in his ways. 1 Corinthians 2.14 says, But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him. And he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised, right? And remember what we just read in the scripture reading, that Jesus had to go so he could send the helper, the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is the perfect interpreter of God's word. And so if we want to understand the ways of God, if we want to know them, then we must be diligent to pray with the psalmist that the Lord would teach us his ways and that he would give us understanding. We won't be able to observe them.
We won't know the way to go. Thomas Manton says this. God's children, he was a Puritan preacher who wrote, you know, I'm preaching 22 sermons. Thomas Manton preached 190 sermons on Psalm 119. Multiple sermons on one verse. But he says this on this section. God's children are sensible of their own insufficiency. And so the need of a constant dependence upon God. Sound and saving knowledge is ever humble. They have clearer light than others and so best see their own defects. This is a mark of a godly man. This is a mark of someone who you should listen to. If someone has all sorts of knowledge and is not depending on God for their knowledge and they're not humble and they have clear light of everyone else's sins and not their own.
Flee such a man. Manton goes on quoting Proverbs. He says, surely I am more brutish than any man and have not the understanding of a man. A holy man or a godly man is most sensible of their own corruptions and see most the excellency of the object. If any man thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know. They study their own hearts and are so conscious to many weaknesses that they know how easily they are misled by the wiles of Satan and the darkness of their own hearts. Whereas presumptuous formalists go on boldly and in the confidence of his own wit runneth headlong into temptation. Again, run away from anyone who does not have an understanding of their own sin.
And a humility that comes through that knowledge. The psalmist here has humility. He understands his dependence on God. Don't trust people who do not depend on God. The next section of the psalm, the psalmist pleads with God to change his heart. He begs God. He needs God to change his heart to desire good things. And to help him maintain the desire for good things. See, we have to have knowledge and understanding, but it does no good for things to sit out there with just knowledge. The knowledge then calls us to action. It calls us to obedience. Obedience is necessary. Again, not because obedience earns us something with God, but rather our obedience is a response to what God has done for us.
I mean, it's striking that he says, make me, right? Make me shows his dependence on God. It's not like coercion in the sense that he's just like, God is forcing him to do it per se, but it's this dependence. It's cause me, enable me to walk in your ways. Because the psalmist is realizing that apart from God, he will not walk in God's ways. Now, then he says that God needs to incline his hearts, his heart, right? Incline my heart. Think about that. What is your heart inclined towards? What do you seek after? One of the simplest ways to see what your heart is inclined towards is to look at how you've spent your time.
is to pull out your phone and look and see when it says how many minutes you spent on each of these different things. What is your heart inclining towards? Think about it. What are you desiring? What do you sit and think about and yearn for? The psalmist wants God to incline his heart towards his testimonies. And notice then it says not to dishonest gain. Now, Maybe a better translation for that would be covetousness. And the idea here is that God's testimonies, the truth of God's word, God's ways are opposed to and incompatible with covetousness, with the desirousness of worldly things. And no one has to teach us to desire worldly things. We're born with those desires. But the question for us is, Is the desires of our heart oriented towards personal gain, towards the things of this world, or is it oriented towards God's word? And the next thing he asks is that God would turn away his eyes from looking at vanity. Now this, this is a shot across the bows in our culture, isn't it? Because in our world today, we have an endless array of vanity.
The entity being something that's empty. It's without lasting value. It's inconsequential. And think about this, okay? Eyes are so important. In some ways, your eyes are the currency of today. Because everything, you know, the money that you pay for advertising is directly related to what? The number of views you have. The number of followers. The number of clicks you get. They want to know how many eyes are on the thing. The more eyes that are on it, the more valuable, right? And so everybody is fighting for your attention. Everyone is fighting to get your focus. So what are you giving your attention to? Are you giving your attention to vain things? Are you giving it to YouTube, to social media, to your video games, to pornography? Just the rabbit hole that the internet is. I mean, how many of you?
How many times have I looked up something on Wikipedia and you just click, oh, that's interesting. And that's interesting. And you just go down the rabbit hole of reading, reading, reading. Endless sports. Notice what he says. Incline my heart to your testimonies. Turn away my eyes from looking at vanity. And think about this. The next part of that is. Revive me in your ways. You know what that means? It means that when you give your attention to vain things, it will kill you. Vain things will sabotage you. They'll kill your walk with God. Conversely, turning away from vain things and giving yourself to God's testimony, to his word, to his law will revive you. It will make you alive.
And listen, I know that you guys have experiences if you're a Christian. I know stories of your guys' lives, of people who have been enslaved to particular sins. And as soon as that sin is given up, you feel alive. I see joy in your face because you're no longer giving yourself to that particular vanity, but you begin to give yourself to the things of God. And what joy and happiness pervades your life as soon as you give over your life to the things of God rather than the bondage of sin. Of course, our hearts are deceitful. And so they keep telling us that the sin is what will bring you joy and pleasure. And yet we know if you're a Christian, you know, you've experienced as a Christian that when you give yourself over to the things of God, true joy and happiness results. And that...
all these other things are vain and actually depress you. They actually suck away your joy. They actually suck away your happiness. They're leeches. And yet our sinful hearts keep wanting to go back to it. So it seems hard, right? It seems impossible that we could give up vain things that ensnare us. And yet that's true if you're trying to do it apart from God. But with God, All things are possible, and he can break us free of these ensnaring vanities. This is why we must consistently, daily plead with God to turn us away from vain things and turn us towards his godly paths. We must continually plead with God to give us a change, inclination of our hearts. You think of an incline, something you slide down, right?
Is the incline, is the thrust of your heart towards holy things or towards vain, covetousness, wicked gain? What does your heart incline you towards? What do you think you can't let go of? Is it your phone? Is it video games or movies, TV, social media, man's approval? What sort of sins do you feel in bondage to? Is it a sexual sin? Is it alcohol? Is it drugs? Is it laziness? Is it pride? Give it to God. Never cease to cry out to God to change the inclination of your heart. Your inclinations are lying to you. Whatever the vain thing is that promises joy and fulfillment, it is a lie. And if you give it up, you will feel alive.
Giving it up will bring you joy and hope and satisfaction and peace that you cannot understand because that's what God promises. That when you give up all your worries and you give up these vain things, you will have peace that surpasses understanding. Give yourself to things that are not vain. That means pursue holiness. Pursue holiness. Seek after God. Read the Bible. Pray. Love your husband, love your wife, love your kids, love the church. Give your time and your energy to things that will last, not to vain things that dope you, that put you to sleep, that kill you. Well, as you come to the end of the psalm, the psalmist turns to God and asks for God to establish his word to his slave.
God's ordinances are good. His righteousness brings life. As I said, it revives you. Notice he uses the word revive again. That means to make alive. Give yourself over to obedience and plead with God to incline your heart to obedience and it will bring you life. And what the psalmist then says is he says, you know, turn away the reproach which I dread. Isn't that sweet? Because the psalmist, who is realizing his own sin. He's realizing his dependence on God. And then he's acknowledging that to pursue God, to obey God, to walk in the way of God is sometimes a frightening thing because there will be reproach. You know, we already said that things are spiritually discerned and foolish people don't understand them. And so...
You know, following God, what will your in-laws say? Or your parents? Or the people next to you? Or the world? Or your boss? All these different people. We have all these things. Like, what will people say? Or what if I risk all I have in the pursuit of God and he doesn't pull through? And then this reproach, this shame, right? You think about Elijah. If God didn't send fire, he risked it all. But God's no man's debtor. We must trust God and trust him that he tells the truth and that your sinful inclinations, that the old man that we are trying to put off in his works is a liar. And so when he says that laziness and worldly pleasures are going to bring you more joy and will be better for you than following God and giving up all to serve him, that it's a lie.
And that actually, if you want joy and happiness in your life, that you should follow God's commands. Don't be afraid. Plead with God to help you to not be ruled by your fear of shame or reproach or of judgment from others, but that you will be bold to seek after his ways because that will bring you life. And remember, the psalmist comforts himself because he says, for your ordinances are good. Revive me with your righteousness. He's reminding himself, right? That though our sinful nature inclines us towards sinful things and promises us that that's where hope and joy and pleasure will be found. He's reminding himself that actually what's good is God's way. That God's law is actually what's good.
The final thing about this that I'll say is that this pleading comes from three things. The pleading of this psalm comes from three things. First, the knowledge of God's mercy and God's willingness to change our hearts and our desires. To plead with God would be an exercise in futility if we didn't know that he loved sinners. The whole purpose, the whole reason why they would turn is because he knows that God will answer this plea, that God will show mercy. Think about why didn't Jonah want to go to Nineveh? Because he knew if the Ninevites would turn, God would show mercy, right? And so he didn't want to do it. And there's this reality that...
We should plead for these things because we know God is a good and merciful father and we'll hear these pleas and we'll answer them. The second thing is that these pleas flow from a knowledge of his inability to pursue God on his own. Listen, you don't plead for God if you don't think you need God to follow him. If you think you're a pretty good person and your understanding of your depravity and your sin is shallow, then you will not pray this prayer. This prayer requires humility and a knowledge of your heart and a knowledge that there but for the grace of God go I. That our natural inclination is towards sin and depravity and that we need God to pull us back and to restrain us.
And the third thing I'll say is that this requires humility. No proud man prays and pleads with God in this way. It's antithetical to pride because you have to acknowledge your inability, your inability to change your own heart, your inability to act in accordance with God's word on your own. And here's the thing. If you want to be stressed and anxious, try and do it on your own. And you'll be stressed and anxious because the strength must come from outside of us. It must come from God. And so beware of people who do not have a humility and a dependence on God. Every one of us should be pleading with God in these ways. And I tell you, if you are feeling stuck, stuck in a sin, stuck in some old sin, if you're in a rut, then you need to pray through this section of Psalm 119. You need to memorize it. You need to meditate on it. You need to make this part of your thinking. It should be so ingrained that this is the framework through how you think. If you are lacking information, knowledge, understanding, if you've slipped back into your old habits, feel that you don't know the way forward, this section of Psalm 119 is written for you.
Because he says at the beginning, right? To give him understanding of his way so that he can walk in the way of the Lord. As husbands and wives, we should pray this together. If you're stuck, you're trying to get out of a rut. How do we go? How do we proceed? Pray through this together. And here's what I'll tell you. This prayer, prayed by a humble sinner, is one that God will delight to answer. There are so many promises of God. To seek and you will find. To knock and the door will be open. To seek first the kingdom of God. And all these things will be added unto you, right? Just give yourself to this work. Pray this and see what God does. Pray for understanding. If you're scared to lead your family in family worship and you're like, what am I going to say about the Bible to my kids or my wife? What are they going to think about me? Well, pray for understanding.
Pray and pray and pray and be diligent to write down thoughts as you read scripture. And then as God grows you and changes you, you'll be amazed at the truths that he reveals to you. But it comes from this recognition that we are sinners in need of a mighty God. And we have a mighty God. We must recognize our need and we must depend on him every day, all the time. not trusting in our own strength, but depend on him. Let's pray.