O How I Love Your Law!

Good morning. It's good to have you all here with us. I have a question. Do you love God's law? Do you love God's law? Are you lacking in wisdom and understanding? The two things are closely related. And as we read through our section today of Psalm 119, we are going to be talking much about God's law and loving God's law. I just want to make one quick aside as I talk about the law of God today. Calvin says that all scripture is either the law of God or the explanation of the law of God. And so as we look and think about loving the law of God, we could say, do you love scripture? Do you love the word of God? The law of God as it's used in Psalm 119, there's not a...

He uses many different types of law. He uses commandments, the law of God, the word of God, the precepts, all these different words to describe scripture. And there are slight nuances, but we're not just thinking about the 10 commandments, but the word of God as a whole, the scriptures. So our section in Psalm 119 today is the mem section. And in the beginning of this section, the psalmist declares his love for God's law. And then the rest of the verses show how this deep love of God's word plays out in a believer's life. And this is one of the reasons that I actually have wanted to preach through Psalm 119, is that Psalm 119 is really the story or the words of a man who loves God's word. It is his daily delight.

thrives on and it should be our daily bread god's word is life to us without god's words we would shrivel up and die spiritually we would have no life in us and so my hope this morning is to challenge you and to encourage you to grow in a love for god's law for his word that we would look and that we would see its effect in our lives and that we would see it work its way into every aspect of our lives and of who we are. Now please stand as we read God's word. This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever mine. I have more insight than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.

I understand more than the aged because I have observed your precepts. I have restrained my feet from every evil way that I might keep your word. I have not turned aside from your ordinances, for you yourself have taught me. How sweet are your words to my taste. Yes, sweeter than honey to my mouth. From your precepts I get understanding. Therefore, I hate every false way. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So I ask you again, do you love God's law? It's striking to me that the psalmist declares with such passion that he loves the law of God. Often, I think we do not love laws because a law to us is viewed as restrictive and restrictions are negative.

We don't necessarily mind laws that affect people out there and people that are not us, especially if the law restricts behavior we don't like or if it's restricting things we don't care about. But we don't like laws that restrict us and are inconvenient for us. Generally, we think that what we want is what will make us happy, what will bring us pleasure. But not so the psalmist. The psalmist loves God's law and he rejoices in it. He does not view God's law as negative in the slightest. The psalmist's attitude towards God's law is one that can only be true of a Christian. In fact, on some level, every Christian must love the law of God because, and the reason that the wicked, cannot love the law of God or rejoice in it is because the law of God is judgment and death to the unbeliever. The reason the Christian loves the law of God is because to the Christian, it's life, it's joy. For the unbeliever, the law requires perfect obedience and they're incapable of doing that. The law has no mercy. It's the standard by which

They're judged and they cannot stand up underneath it. All that the wicked have under the law is judgment and condemnation. Their disobedience to the law condemns them to hell. But for the believer, it's different. For the believer, the law begins as a mirror. What is a mirror? You look into it and reflects the truth back to you. So the law shows us our sins. The law shows you the undeniable fact that you are a sinner and cannot save yourself and are in need of a savior. But not just any savior. A savior who is perfect and holy in every point of the law. The law teaches our need of and points us to Christ, who is the only perfect.

The only one who obeyed the law at every point without failing at all. He is the only man who was perfect and has ever kept the law perfectly. And the law does not only reveal to us our need, but as Christians, there's another use of the law. The second use is that it's a map. Not only is the law a mirror for us to reveal our need, but it's a map. After opening the Christian's eyes to their need of a savior, the Holy Spirit continues to use God's law as a mirror to reveal our sin so that we can be sanctified. And through that revelation, and though the revelation of that sin in our lives is uncomfortable and painful often, the Christian loves the law for doing that work because Christians want their sin to be eradicated.

And for it to be removed and eradicated, we have to be able to see it, to be exposed. But with that, the law is a map. It guides the believers. It teaches us what we should think, how we should think, the things that we should say, and the things that we should do. And the beauty is that as Christians, as we become conformed to the law of God, the word of God, what happens is we're actually conformed to Christ, the Savior, the man that we love. Now, this is because the law of God is not random. It's not random rules that God made. The commands given to us by God are never arbitrary. God is good, and his law is good, meaning that God's law teaches us about the very character of who God is.

The law is his character. So the law of God is not arbitrary and it can't be different because it actually flows from God himself. And for his law to be different would mean God would have to be different. And so the law of God is good. So you cannot love God and hate his law. To love one is to love the other. So do you love God's law? Do you love his word? Now, some of us may hear that question and our honest answer would be something like, I want to. I wish I loved God's word, but I don't feel like it. We often will feel dry and distant. We know we should open our Bibles and read them, but it's a struggle. And I'm not saying that if that's true of you, you're not a Christian, but it may mean your love has grown cold.

And what you need is for your cold love to be heated up, to become fiery again. But I will say that if there is no love of you, if there is no love for God's law in your heart, no love for his word, then you're not a Christian. Every Christian has some love of God's word in his heart. It may be weak, and it may be small, and it's definitely never as great as it needs to be. But every Christian has a love for God's word on some level as it is what has given us life. The Holy Spirit working in us, bringing God's word to us is what sparks life in us. So the question may be better asked, how can we grow in our love for God's law? A love for God's law is given to us when we become a Christian.

As I said earlier, until the point, that point, until we come to Christ, the law is judgment. But once we're saved, we begin to have a taste for spiritual things. And so there are three things in this psalm that I want us to walk through that help us to grow in our love for God's law. The first, what we're going to talk about is that love for God's word leads us to meditation on it. Second, meditation gives us. true wisdom. And then third, true wisdom produces a sanctified life. Each of these things, when practiced, will build on each other and will have a compound effect on each other. In other words, as you meditate on God's word, you will grow in love for it and you will grow in understanding for it. This will help you to grow in obedience.

As you obey God, you will learn to love God and his word more. This will cause you to want to meditate on God's word more. And so these things, as you practice them, will build and build. It's incredibly powerful in the life of a Christian, which is why I think we're often under such attack when it comes to spending time in God's word. To reading it. How many times do you sit down to read God's word and you remember you didn't send an email that you needed to send. You didn't send a text. You needed to communicate with someone. You sit down to read and your children start getting into a fight. You sit down to read your Bible and someone calls you. You sit down and then a Facebook notification or something goes off. Some ding on your phone, right?

We're constantly under attack from distractions when we try to begin to read the Bible, to pray, and to meditate on God's word. And I think part of the reason that is is because if we were actually to practice what the psalmist declares in this psalm, our lives would be incredibly different because we would have the power of a holy life given over to the service of God. So the love of God's word produces Meditation. The first verse. Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. You know, I have met very few Christians who have said that they didn't believe it was necessary for them to be reading God's word. Many Christians struggle to be in God's words consistently, but they always feel and think that it's a failure to not be reading it. And it is. If we love God, we will be in his word.

What if I don't feel that love right now? Well, don't wait for that feeling to come before you begin to read his word and study it. Go to the word anyways. Even weak, distracted, and imperfect time in the word is often how God begins to stir up our love for him and his word again. It won't happen by neglecting it. It's rather by beginning the process of reading and studying his word that he will begin to warm our cold hearts. Think about it like this. Would you ignore a letter from your wife or your child or your husband? If they wrote and communicated to you, would you ignore that communication? Of course we wouldn't.

If we love someone and they take the time to write something to us, we read it. How much more so ought we to take time to read the word of God, the one who created the world, and the one who created you and knit you together in your mother's womb? When he has taken the time to communicate to you, how much more so ought you and I to take time to read and to marinate in the words he's given us. But it's not only that, it's that God saved us. And so we ought to be filled with love for him. And if we do, then that will spur us on to spend time in and meditate and think about the word of God for us.

One of the other reasons that we ought to be doing this and loving God is to think about is that his word is filled with encouragement. It's filled with beautiful promises that he gives us for our lives to comfort us and strengthen us when we're weak. We need to be in his word because it instructs us. If you were told to drive to Amador, California, Without any direction. Would you try driving there without directions? How many of you have ever heard of Amador, California? I didn't. No worries. I just said, what is the smallest city in California? It's over 2,000 miles away. How many of you would try to drive there if your life depended on it without any directions? Of course we wouldn't. Well, the Bible is God's instruction to us how to navigate through this life. And you would be foolish.

To say, I love God, I'm a Christian, I want to walk his ways, and then not spend time reading what he's given us to help us navigate through all of these things. So if we love God, we're going to be in his word. But how do we understand God's word? How do we understand what we read in scripture? How does it penetrate into our hearts and minds? Well, the first thing I want to say, as I've said, is that the love of God does not start with us. It's actually given to us by God. The love of his word is implanted in our hearts. So the first thing that we must do is pray for understanding. God, through the Holy Spirit, is the one who teaches us and reveals himself to us through the Bible. In verse 102, it reminds us that the, you teach me.

Right? I have not turned aside from your ordinances, for you yourself have taught me. You yourself have taught me. So one of the first things is that we ought to be praying and seeking for the Holy Spirit to give us understanding of the word, because that comes from God. And if you feel dry, then pray to God and say, I don't, it's not right that I should be so cold towards you and your word. Give me a desire for your word. Give me a love for it. In earlier verses in Psalm 119, this is what the psalmist is praying, that the Lord would help him to delight in his word. And that is a prayer that God delights to answer. Now, he goes on in the second part of our first verse, and he tells us that we meditate on it all the day. Now, this does not mean that we only read the Bible all day and we don't do anything else.

In fact, reading God's word is not the same thing as meditating on God's word. The reading or the listening to God's word is what begins the process of putting it into our head and into our heart so that we begin to do the work of meditating. And it's worth saying that meditating is not what our, what the Bible means by meditation is not what you will get from social media. Eastern mystic where you have these mantras and you empty your mind and all this stuff. That is not Christian meditation. In the Bible, you're never commanded to empty your minds. Rather, you're to fill them and renew them with God's word. And so the picture to think about when we think about meditating is a cow. Cows have four stomachs.

or they have a stomach with four compartments, and it's to help them digest their food. And so they chew up their food, and they swallow it, and they cough it back up, and they chew it some more, and they swallow it. And this process of swallowing it, but then it's not quite digestible, so they have to cough it up and chew it more. That's meditation. We take a verse, or two verses, or a section, a story of Scripture, and we read it, and we think about it. We think about the words, what words stick out to you. What are the ideas? Roll the story around in your head. Ruminate on it. Do this while you're driving, while you're on the toilet, while you're standing in a line, on your work breaks, on your downtime at work. Do it while you're washing dishes. Whenever your solution to something is to...

Pull out your phone and start looking like this. Don't pull your phone out. Pull your Bible out. Recall a verse that you've memorized. Meditate on it. Fill out a three by five card in your pocket with verses on, and then just pull that out and read it, right? I don't say that because I'm good at that. That's what I'm trying to instill. In meditation, we're seeking to understand God's law and what it is teaching. How can I apply these verses to my life? The Westminster Shorter Catechism says, what do the scriptures principally teach? Does anyone know? The scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God and what duties God requires of man. So whenever you read scripture, ask those two questions. What does this teach me about God? And what does it require of me? Think about it. If you do this, If your go-to is to meditate on scripture, to memorize scripture, to put it in your heart, if that is your go-to thing, what will your family worship look like? How fruitful will those discussions be with your kids when you have digested God's word so that you are able to just feed it to them? If you do this, when will you lack for a,

beneficial, fruitful, useful topic of conversation. How transformed would our conversations be after church if this is what was running through our minds constantly? The word of God, what he's teaching us. How deep and how rich would our fellowship be and would it grow if this is how we spent our time? Was just reading through God's word and seeing what it has to teach us. When I was writing this sermon, I was sitting upstairs in my bonus room and we have these big windows and you can see the chickens outside. And they were all out playing and all of a sudden they all like ran in. It was weird. It's very nice out, middle of the day. And then I saw a hawk just sitting on a branch near where they were, right? And so they all...

ran away because they were scared of this hawk, right? They're protected. They have a roof, whatever. And I was thinking about it and I was thinking about, you know, there's scripture talks about sin and Satan running around like a roaring lion and fleeing temptation. So if you look at this hawk and you think there's sin, there's the devil, there's the danger and all the chickens ran into the chicken coop for safety, right? So just as an example, right? ruminate on God's word. Look at nature and think what we can learn about how God works. There's lessons all around us, but we won't see them if we're not meditating, if we're not thinking about God's word and making applications to it, to our lives. Now, if you do this, if you give yourself over to the meditation of God's word, It will have a radical effect in your life. The psalmist gives us three examples of what this meditation leads to in his life. First, he says, your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever mine. Wiser than his enemies. Oh, the idea that we have here is one of action. God's commandments will teach you what to do and how to do it.

They will teach you what is good and what is bad, what to do, what to avoid, what is harmful. God's word will teach you how to act in life. This is opposed to the righteous man's enemies who follow crooked paths. The wicked are consistently described throughout Proverbs and the Psalms as devious, following crooked paths, setting up, Pits and snares for the righteous man. But the righteous man avoids their pits and their snares because he walks according to God's commandments. Therefore, he doesn't fall into them. He can see them. And what happens is the wicked end up falling into their own snares. We saw this earlier in Psalm 119, where he says, the arrogant have dug pits for me, men who are not in accord with your law. If you are in accord with God's law, It helps you to avoid all of those pits and snares. The enemies of a Christian are worldly people, and they may be very clever, very strategic, very persuasive in whatever they're trying to sell you, in whatever they're trying to pull you into, but they are focused on today, on this life, temporary gains, blind.

to the eternal consequences of their actions now. But the believer who is shaped by scripture, he has eyes that are focused above. So he can see beyond the momentary and he can understand what truly matters. And so a Christian is one who will live for eternity, not just the here and now. And what he says at the end of that verse, is that they are with him his his laws that god gives him are always with him so they comfort him he says for they are ever mine so the laws that he has the the laws of god the word of god is something that doesn't just disappear in time of need but it's there it helps you it guides you helps you to navigate through all the pitfalls and the treacherousness of this life. So we ought to be careful that we don't become envious of the worldling's ability to work the systems to get ahead through their lying or their cheating. A Christian doesn't measure who wins in the moment. We measure things by what leads to righteousness, what leads to good.

What leads to greater holiness? The second thing he says is that I have more insight than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. And this is one of the verses that makes me think that maybe Daniel wrote Psalm 119. David, we would presumably have been taught by godly men who love the law of God. You look at the Psalms that he wrote. But here, Daniel... If it is him, this fits very perfectly because he's in Babylon being taught by all the wisest magicians and thinkers and wise men in the world at this time. And yet he says, I'm wiser than them. Think about when he's first brought in and they're like, here's all the dainties from the king's table. And Daniel says, no, not for me. I'm going to eat as God prescribed in his law.

And the benefit that it had on him and his body and his friends. Why does God's commandments give him more insight? Well, God's word teaches us who God is. His word teaches us of God's lordship, of his goodness, of his justice, holiness, mercy, of his fatherhood. God's word teaches you who man is. Man's sin. Man's insufferable pride and his need of a savior. How many problems do we have in our country, in our schools, in our world that we're trying to solve with awful solutions because people assume that man is good? They don't understand where the wickedness in man's heart comes from. That sin is not out there, but it's in here. It's our fallen nature derived from our father, Adam. Not just external things, stimuli. You cannot truly understand the world if you do not understand God. And you cannot truly understand man if you do not understand God. Calvin starts his commentary by saying this. Do you need to know God or do you need to go, man? And he says, you need both.

And if you get man wrong, you'll get God wrong. And if you get God wrong, you'll get man wrong. And the only way to truly understand that is to understand the truths which are contained in God's word. And so if you will study and meditate on God's word, on his testimony to you, you will have more insight than all these supposed intellectuals and all the talking heads on your social media and podcasts. Because... True wisdom comes from God. Proverbs says many times that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. If you want to know what's right and wrong, if you want to know what true justice is, then you have to know what God says because he is the source of all goodness and righteousness and justice. And I was thinking about this too with you guys who are in school or who are heading off to college.

You have to be aware of professors who do not know God. They will be very smart. They'll probably teach you a lot. They may be friendly and they may be good teachers, but beware that if they do not know God and his word, their ideas, their solutions will be distorted and you will have a wisdom that they do not have if your thinking in life is rooted and grounded in the commands of God. So don't be in awe of any man, no matter how smart and wise he seems. If he rejects God, Scripture's summation of him is that he's a fool. And so Daniel says, the psalmist says, I am wiser than all my teachers. So we need to meditate and work on understanding God's word, not just consuming it, but reflect.

Write down the thoughts that you have when you read it. Call someone, work through, talk through what you're thinking. See if how you're approaching subjects and issues in this world are actually Christian. If your approach and your reaction to them line up with what scripture says. In doing so, you will have much greater wisdom than the wisdom of this world or those who the world accounts as smart. The psalmist goes on and he says, I understand more than the aged because I have observed your precepts. There is a correlation often between age and wisdom, often simply because of experience. When you've ridden a roller coaster a few times, you tend to know where the hills and the bumps, all these different things, right? So older people may have seen more, they've lived longer, they've experienced, but Age and experience doesn't mean that you have a correct interpretation on what's going on. It doesn't necessarily mean you have better sight. And we have this old saying, practice makes perfect, right? Except it doesn't if you're practicing in error. And if you spend a longer time practicing in error, you're just more proficient at the error. It can...

reinforce wrong and unhelpful patterns. Here's what the psalmist says. Obedience actually produces a true understanding. We think, I need to understand, then I will obey. But that's not even true. And we know that because how many sins do you commit every day while knowing that they're a sin and that they're destructive to you? And you know the pain that they will cause. And you can understand the goodness of what God says and why he commands you not to commit the sin, and yet you give yourself to the sin anyways. Simple understanding does not just keep us from sin. It may help, but it doesn't just keep us from doing what we ought not to do. However, obedience, even when we do not have a full understanding, will actually lead us to greater understanding. Why? Because...

Practice, obedience clarifies the truth. Think about this. So when I took a welding class in high school, and the first two weeks were just reading books about welding. And they're necessary because you're using explosive gas and very hot metal. You could really seriously hurt yourself if you don't know how to use an acetylene torch correctly. So you have to have all this teaching, right? However... After two weeks and then you go in the booth and you have a wire welder for the first time or an acetylene torch for the first time and try and use it, all of a sudden you see the disconnect between theoretical understanding and actually putting into practice the things that you've been taught, right? So you don't have to always understand why God commands something. When you actually put it into practice, You'll actually begin to have a depth of understanding that you could never gain before actually acting in faith. Obedience will align you with reality because God made the world and then he told us how best to operate within it. Do what he says. The other aspect of this is that actually our sin clouds our judgment. So we think, oh, we understand. You don't understand. You think, well, if I was just told I would understand.

The more sinful you are and the closer you are to your sin, the harder it is for you to even see clearly. So as you pursue holiness and righteousness and obedience, all of a sudden, your eyes begin to see more clearly, and then you actually may gain an understanding. Obedience beats experience every time. Experience is the most costly teacher there is. Experience is the most... costly teacher there is. You are far better just blindly obeying God's word and not knowing why and not putting all the pieces together than going out and experiencing why God commands you not to do whatever you're tempted to do. And Christians who have learned by experience will always tell you that.

You don't want the experience, and you only want the experience out of your naivete. The Bible's wisdom is not theoretical. It's not something that stays in our head. The psalmist shows us that true wisdom will always work its way out in how you live. This doesn't happen overnight. You won't gain the insights that he's speaking of to be more insightful and more understanding than his teachers and wiser than his enemies. This doesn't happen overnight. This won't happen tomorrow. You probably won't feel any wiser tomorrow. But over time, if you stay in God's word, God will begin to quietly reshape how you think. Well, the third point is that true wisdom produces a transformed life. He says in 101 and 102, I have restrained my feet from every evil way that I might keep your word. I have not turned aside from your ordinances, for you yourself have taught me. Meditation helps with obedience.

The more we eat and breathe God's word, the more we will desire it and desire to keep it. I've used this example before, but anyone who has taught someone to drive, or if you remember back to when you were learning to drive, you're driving down the road, and then you see a fire truck doing something, and you look at it, which way does the car go? Wherever the driver looks, right? Beginning drivers don't know how to drive straight while looking out a window. They always turn towards it. Well, this is us in life. Whatever is before our eyes is where we'll head towards. So by meditating on God's word and thinking on it, then that's what will guide and direct our lives.

But if we're always putting garbage and things in it, then that's what we're going to head down. And so when he says, I've restrained my feet from every way that I might keep your word, it's like the meditating on God's word helps you to understand how to keep God's word. And then it helps you to actually walk down the right path because that's what's before your eyes. That's what you're thinking about. The thing that we think about is what we learn to desire. Advertisers know this, right? They come up with catchy jingles. So that I can go da-da-da-da-da. And you all know exactly what I'm referring to, right? It's like they put these things so that it will get into your mind, so you'll desire things, you'll be hungry when you hear it. What if you were consumed by the reading of God's word? What if that was what was always pouring out of you? How would that reshape your actions, right? Because...

Because what you're fixated on is what will shape how you act and interact with the world around you. One of my favorite parts of this psalm is, you yourself taught me. God and the person of the Holy Spirit is who teaches us. Meditating on God's word by ourselves would be fruitless. But the Spirit teaches us and gives us understanding. And as obedience, as we meditate and obey, obedience will take root in our lives and something surprising will begin to happen. You know what will happen as you give yourself over to obedience? This is so cool. You'll love it. Notice what he says. How sweet are your words to my taste. Yes, sweeter than honey in my mouth. Like as you begin to obey God, he will reshape and reform your desires. He will reshape what you love into the image of himself. And the...

Holiness that you thought was boring and stifling will become your delight. And this is tied to how it ends because he says, I hate every false way. I hate wickedness. You can't love goodness and wickedness. You say, it's a weird psalm because he begins with, oh, how I love your word, and then he ends with hatred. But what you realize is these are flip sides of the same coin. If you love righteousness and holiness, you will hate wickedness. The two things are incompatible. The reason God hates sin so much is because he's so holy. He cannot love sin and love righteousness, and neither can his people. So if you're struggling with sin, love God.

Work towards loving God. Work towards obedience that will increase your love and hope and desire in God. As you obey, God will change your heart to where you love obedience more. And as you begin to love God's word and love him and you begin to love holiness, it will actually build in you a hatred for evil. We all start out as sinners. We all start out as... Men and women in love with sin. And we actually, when God gives us life, he gives us, he begins that work of changing what we love and desire. But that's a process throughout all of life. And we have to grow in our love of him and our hatred of our sin. And that's sort of this fight that we're coming to. But obedience will help you in that. If you actually just begin to obey. What sins are you struggling with?

What are your sins are you struggling to hate? The answer to killing it, in part at least, is to love God and obey him. It's not to simply try and stop doing the sin. It's not to just conjure up a disgust for the sin. Our culture is constantly trying to teach us to not be disgusted with sins. If you want to learn to be disgusted by sin and to reattune what should be normal and not normal and what we should hate and what we should love, Go to the word of God. Meditate on it. Learn to love God. And that will reshape your tastes. That will do more than anything else to help you obey and to hate false ways. So let's remind ourselves and look at what the psalm has shown us. Love for God's word should lead us to meditate on it. And this meditation on God's word will lead to wisdom. And wisdom will lead to an obedience.

And our obedience to God will produce joy in our lives. And our joy and obedience will lead to a hatred of our sinful ways. Where are you in this chain? If you are feeling like what this psalmist is saying does not describe your life, don't be discouraged. God grows us through time. The idea of growth implies time. I recommend that you begin with prayer. Ask God to grow in you a love for his word in your life and then start reading. Maybe begin with the Gospel of John. Read it and reread it. Pray over the parts that are difficult. Meditate on the words of God and what it has to say to us. To grow, we start by seeking to know God more, to love him in his ways. And this will lead to a hatred of sin and of sinful ways.

and a greater love for God than we can imagine. Let's pray.