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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > God wants us to experience his Word as absolutely delightful | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) Hymn 82 Psalm 1 (after the Law of God) Psalm 119:37-39 Psalm 19:4-5 Psalm 24:1-3 Scripture reading: Romans 7:7-25 Text: Psalm 19:10-11 (but read the whole Psalm) |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
Whenever someone wants to do their public profession of faith, an elder and I sit down with them and ask them some personal questions about their faith. One of the questions I always ask is: how do you feel about God? If it isn’t right away clear what I’m asking, I’ll say, “You know, like what kinds of emotions do you experience with respect to God?” The reason I ask this question is in our Form for the Public Profession of Faith. The third set of questions leads us off with, “Do you declare that you love the LORD God…?” How we feel about God is therefore important. Christians should be people who love God.
And the Bible teaches that people who love God should also love and treasure his Word. That’s stressed in two of the Psalms. One is Psalm 119, which we just sang. And the other is Psalm 19, which we just read.
Psalm 19 is often remembered for the way it speaks of the two ways God reveals himself. He reveals himself in creation – that’s in the first six verses. Then he also reveals himself in his Word – that’s in verses 7-11. The first we sometimes call general revelation and the second we call special revelation.
Our focus this morning is on God’s special revelation in his Word. Verses 7-9 put forward several objective truths about God’s Word. There are objective truths about what God’s Word is. It’s perfect, sure, right, pure, clean, true, and righteous. There are also objective truths about what God’s Word does – it revives souls, makes wise the simple, rejoices hearts, and enlightens eyes. It objectively does all these things.
But then verses 10-11 switch to a more subjective approach. These verses are how about how the believer experiences God’s Word. We’re meant to experience God’s Word for ourselves as absolutely delightful. This is what God wants for us.
However, there’s a huge problem. The Apostle Paul lays out this problem in what we read from Romans 7. Within every believer there’s a battle going on. Paul says in Romans 7:22 that he delights in the law of God in his inner being. There’s part of him that does love God’s law. But there’s something left of his sinful nature in him that has a different perspective. That part of him hates the law of God and doesn’t want to submit to it. There’s an inner conflict. It’s something we all experience, myself included.
Do you struggle to love the Word of God? Do you delight in it? Perhaps you’d answer by saying that sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. But whatever your answer might be, Psalm 19 holds out to us a vision of what we should aim to become.
How we become what Psalm 19 envisions for us has everything to do with Jesus Christ. In him we have abounding grace for when we don’t love and delight in the Word of God like we should. Through what he did on the cross, God has mercy on us and he forgives us for our shortcomings in how we feel about his Word. And at the exact same time, we also have the perfect righteousness of Christ given to us as a free gift when we believe in him. He has always loved God’s Word perfectly and delighted in it like every human being should. Jesus has done that in our place. So God does look at us through the lens of his Son and he does see people who are perfectly delighting in his Word. And on account of that, he gives us the status of righteous, justified in his sight. The gospel encourages people like you and me who have struggles in loving and appreciating God’s Word the way we should. Our standing with God doesn’t depend on our performance of his will and it doesn’t depend on our emotional experience of his Word either. It’s all grace and for that we can be deeply thankful.
Now having said that, Christ is also at work in our sanctification, in helping us grow as his disciples. He wants us to look like him. He wants us to share his attitude towards God’s Word, his emotions concerning it, his experience of it. Christ wants us to delight in the Scriptures in the way Psalm 19 describes. So we take the vision described here and we turn it into our prayer. We ask eagerly and earnestly for the Holy Spirit to help us change the way we experience God’s Word so that it more and more lines up with Psalm 19, that it more and more lines up with how Jesus fulfilled Psalm 19.
With this sermon, I want to encourage you in your love for God’s Word so you’ll spend more time in it. Spending more time in it personally, but also spending more time in it with your brothers and sisters. This will help you to grow as a disciple of Jesus Christ – that’s what God wants for you. Listen, I’ve never known anyone to grow as a disciple of Christ by spending less time in God’s Word. The way the Holy Spirit helps us to grow is through the Word. The Bible is crucial for spiritual growth. That’s why we’re looking at this passage here this morning.
Now before we get into the meat of the passage, let me just give some credit where credit is due. The points for the sermon are really nicely alliterated – all beginning with ‘p.’ I didn’t come up with that. I read those points some years ago in a blog post by Tim Challies. The sermon is mine, but I’ve borrowed the points from him. So using those points, we’re going to see how God wants us to experience his Word as:
- Precious
- Pleasurable
- Protective
- Profitable
David says that God’s Word should be treasured in the heart of the believer. It has enormous value. He writes in verse 10, “More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold…” Gold is a metal that’s always been highly treasured. Fine gold is the best gold with the least impurities, and therefore the most value. While there are some gold deposits in Israel, they weren’t known or exploited in ancient biblical times. Gold had to be imported from other lands – and that increased its value even more. It was truly a precious metal. So David is telling us that nothing on earth compares to what God has given in the Scriptures in terms of preciousness, not even the biggest heap of gold.
Now if you look closely at verse 10, you’ll see the reference is to “they.” What are “they”? That’s referring back to God’s Word the way it’s described in verses 7 to 9. But I want you to notice how God’s Word in those verses takes a particular form. It’s “the law of the LORD,” his testimony, his precepts, his commandment, his fear, and his rules. Do you notice a theme in those ways of describing God’s Word? They all have to do with God’s Word of instruction or direction. It all has to do with how God expresses his will for how we should live as his children. So while it’s certainly true of God’s Word in general, here the focus is particularly on those instructive or directive portions of Scripture. There are a couple of things we should draw out of that.
First of all, not only in the world, but also in certain corners of Christianity, there’s a negative attitude towards God’s law. When Christians are down on God’s law, we call that antinomianism – against-the-law-ism. Antinomianism is not only unbiblical, it’s anti-biblical. The Bible stands 100% against it. Scripture teaches us in both the Old Testament and New Testament to love God and his commandments. Psalm 19 even teaches us to delight in them and so does Psalm 119. We’re to have a positive attitude towards those parts of God’s Word where he instructs us in how to live for his glory as thankful believers.
The second thing to draw out of this is that if God’s instructive Word is supposed to be this valuable and precious to believers, then how much more so shouldn’t God’s Word of promise in the gospel? We shouldn’t pit one against the other. We should love both. But the gospel is what the law is pointing us to and leading us to. Christ is who the law is pointing us to and leading us to, particularly in the way it exposes our sin and misery. Thus it makes sense that we would value the law, but value the gospel even more. The gospel is the greatest treasure of all in God’s Word. This is why 1 Peter 1:19 calls the blood of our Saviour precious, incomparable to perishable things such as silver or gold.
Next we want to see how God’s Word is pleasurable. David says in verse 10, “…sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.” Today the sweetest substance known to human beings is a chemical compound called Lugduname. It’s at least 230,000 times sweeter than table sugar – that’s incredibly sweet. But the ancient world in which David lived didn’t even have sugar. The sweetest thing they knew was honey. There was some domestication of honey bees, but most honey would have come from the wild and it was a rare delight. Even today, honey is considered a wonderful pleasure, especially when you have varieties like leatherwood and Manuka. Just as we take pleasure in the taste of honey, God wants us to take even more pleasure in his Word.
There’s a Jewish rabbinic tradition connected with our passage. It apparently goes back to the medieval period. It has to do with going to school for the first time. The children here know that going to the school for the first time is usually a big step. Now imagine that before you go to school for the first time, you’re parents take a page of the Bible and put some honey on it. Then you lick the honey off the page. Yum. It’s a tradition and some Jews still do it today. It’s meant to instill in the mind of the child that connection between pleasure and God’s Word. Like we take pleasure in honey, we should take all the more pleasure in Scripture.
But how can we do that, practically speaking? No one can take pleasure in Scripture apart from the work of the Holy Spirit in them. So it starts with him. We can and should pray for the Holy Spirit to help us find pleasure in God’s Word. But the Holy Spirit also gives us direction in God’s Word in how to do this. He hears our prayers and directs us back to the Word for his answer. Let’s read together from Proverbs 22:17-18. In his book Reading the Bible Supernaturally, John Piper has a really good explanation of how this passage teaches us to take pleasure in God’s Word. He says the first thing is to “incline your ear.” Lean in. Focus. When you read God’s Word, don’t just let the words drift by you. Then second, “apply your heart to my knowledge.” When you do that, you will find it pleasant. Piper writes, “You rub the nose of your heart in the beauty of the knowledge. If the heart is not feeling anything, you say to your heart: Heart, wake up!” You can think of it like a steak on the grill. You can hear it sizzling. You can see it sizzling. If you get close enough, you can smell it. Yet there’s still no taste in your mouth. What can you do? Is there anything you can do with the steak of God’s Word? “You take a knife and you cut off a piece and you put it in your mouth and you chew slowly, and then you swallow, and you taste. In the same way you say to your heart: Eat, heart. Eat! Taste and see that the Lord is good.” This is how we grow in learning to find God’s Word pleasurable.
So God’s Word is to be experienced as precious, as pleasurable, and now let’s look at how it’s also meant to be experienced as protective. David says in verse 11, “Moreover, by them is your servant warned.”
David calls himself God’s servant. He was the King of Israel, yet before God he is a servant. David knows his place and so should we. If the King of Israel considered himself to be God’s servant, how much more shouldn’t we? We’re meant to serve God, not ourselves.
And he says that God’s Word, especially the instructive and directive bits warn him as God’s servant. Let’s dig into that a little bit. How does Scripture warn us? About what sorts of things do we find warnings in Scripture? Just in general terms, Scripture warns us about sin and its effects. In his Word, God warns us that sin is displeasing to him, but it is also destructive to us. So knowing that danger, why would you do it? So Scripture is like a sign posted near a cliff, warning us not to come near because of the danger of falling and dying. In fact, the Hebrew word for “warned” here in Psalm 19 is actually found on warning signs today in Israel. Modern Hebrew has borrowed this word from Biblical Hebrew.
But if we want to get more particular, we don’t have to look further than the book of Proverbs. The book of Proverbs is full of warnings. I’ll just share a few of them. Already in chapter 1, readers are warned not to turn away from wisdom. Proverbs 1:32, “For the simple are killed by turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them…” Proverbs chapter 5 gives a powerful warning against adultery and in case you missed it, there’s another one in chapter 7. The adulterer is compared to an ox going to the slaughter, “he does not know that it will cost him his life.” Adultery has laid low many a victim, it says in Proverbs 7:26, so don’t do it. In Proverbs 10, we’re warned to walk in integrity, because “he who makes his ways crooked will be found out.” And in Proverbs 15, God warns us to watch the way we use our words, “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” And there are many more examples both from Proverbs and elsewhere in the Bible.
Loved ones, God’s intent is that we would experience the delight of being protected by the warnings of his Word. To have that happen, we need to be familiar with them. We have to study God’s Word and learn how he directs us away from the paths of sin because he wants to protect us from ultimate harm. As we hear those warnings and with the help of the Holy Spirit put them into practice, we’ll learn how good they are and we’ll delight in them.
The last thing we’ll look at is how the believer is meant to experience God’s Word as profitable. We’re at the last words of verse 11, “…in keeping them there is great reward.” You could also translate that as “in keeping them there is a great result.”
You see, when we read this we shouldn’t reach the conclusion that there is some kind of earthly transaction taking place, a quid pro quo. You know, we keep God’s commands and then we automatically and always get something in return. Sadly, there are those who teach that. It’s a false teaching known as the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel teaches that God rewards Christians with earthly wealth, health, and prosperity. I once accidentally preached at a church which taught this in Mexico. It was a small church in a dirty old building in a slum. Before I preached, the pastor stood at the front and told the people to give more to the offering. He promised them that if they would give 10 pesos, God would give them 100. If they would give 100 pesos, God would give them 1000, and so on. If they’d only be faithful, then God would bless them with more money and they wouldn’t be poor anymore. After the collection, I was invited up to preach and in God’s providence I’d decided long beforehand to preach on Psalm 73, the psalm about how the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer. Many other places in the Bible teach us too that when God promises a great reward for keeping his Word, or a great result, it’s not about prosperity the way the world understands it. It’s not about a full bank account or anything like that.
So how should we understand this? First of all, a great result of keeping God’s Word involves glory to him. When we keep his Word, we show we love him and we bring our praise and thanks to him. God’s Word is therefore profitable to us as it leads us to live in such a way that we’re making much of him. You see, instead of right away jumping to the profits towards us, we should be looking outwards and upwards. Our inclination is to right away think of ourselves (what will I get from this?), but if the great commandment is to love God with all our being above everything else, then surely we should start with him and start with his glory.
Then if the second great commandment is to love our neighbours, then we should look outwards to them for a great profitable result of keeping God’s Word. When we keep his Word, we do good for the people around us. God’s Word is therefore profitable to them as it leads us to show love to others in need.
But then last of all, there is a great result for ourselves too when we keep God’s Word. God’s will in Scripture is designed for two great purposes, two connected purposes: his glory and our good. It is good for us when we keep God’s Word. It doesn’t mean that life will automatically and always go smoothly and we’ll never struggle with our health or with our finances or relationships. But when we strive to keep his Word, we have the means necessary to go through all those circumstances in the best way. Even if we’re in prison like Paul, we can still be content and rejoice. Even if we’re broken and diseased like Job, we can still say, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” Even if we’re facing much uncertainty and trouble like the prophet Habakkuk, we can take joy in the God of our salvation, the one who is our strength. In this way, the personal profit that comes from keeping God’s Word runs much deeper than what the prosperity gospel falsely teaches. The profit here is far richer. As someone once said, a Bible that’s falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn’t.
Loved ones, we live in a culture where few people read. Sadly, books aren’t valued by many. But if we’re Christians, there’s one book we just can’t ignore. God’s Word is supposed to be THE book for us. God not only wants us to read it and study it, he also wants us to find it enjoyable and delightful. Because he knows that such a way of experiencing his Word brings praise to him and good to us. So brothers and sisters, I want to encourage you again to be busy with God’s Word. Do that yourself, but also with others. And as you’re doing that, pray for the help of the Spirit to delight in what you’re taking in. Then speak to your heart and encourage yourself too to find God’s Word precious, pleasurable, protective, and profitable. AMEN.
PRAYER
Glorious God in heaven,
Thank you for the precious gift of the Bible. We love your Word, but we want to love it more. We delight in it, but we want to delight more. So we pray for the help of your Holy Spirit so that we would always experience your Word the way you want us to. Please help us to always find your Word delightful. Please bless us as we read your Word as individuals and as families. We pray for your Name to be exalted by us and for those around us too to be blessed by what your Word teaches us.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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