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Amen.
Please remain standing for the reading of God’s Word.
This evening we take a little break from our consideration of Isaiah to look at a passage
and explore a passage from Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible.
I believe it covers six pages in your few Bibles, but we’re going to consider the second
section of Psalm 119, that is to say verses 9 through 16, the title of my sermon this
evening, storing up God’s Word in our hearts.
Psalm 119 verses 9 through 16, you’ll find that beginning on page 606 in your few Bibles.
This is the Word of God.
Hear it with reverence and awe.
How can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to your Word.
With my whole heart I seek you, let me not wander from your commandments.
I have stored up your Word in my heart that I might not sin against you.
Blessed are you, O Lord, teach me your statutes.
With my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth.
In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches.
I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways.
I will delight in your statutes.
I will not forget your Word.
Dear friends, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God endures forever.
Please join me in your hearts as we pray for the Lord’s blessing upon the preaching of
his Word.
Gracious and holy and sovereign God, you are glorious and you are awesome, infinite in
your majesty, and yet you stoop to speak to us.
And you speak to us in Christ, this Word of grace known as the Gospel.
We thank you, Lord, that you have made your way clear to us, that you have given us your
Word as a lamp to our feet and a light into our path.
We ask, O Lord, as we consider this portion of your God-breathed, inerrant, infallible,
that your Spirit would open our minds and our hearts to behold wondrous things from
your Word.
Humble us, make us teachable, Lord God, make us malleable.
We would ask, O Lord, that the seed of your Word would find a reception in hearts that
are made good soil by your sovereign Spirit so that it might bear much spiritual fruit
in our lives unto sanctification.
We pray, Lord, that you would set a guard over my lips, that I, your unworthy servant,
might only speak that which is faithful in your sight and edifying to your people, and
most important of all, glorifying to the name of Jesus our Lord, for it is in his name that
we pray, and all of God’s people said, Amen.
You may be seated.
Again, the title of my sermon this evening is Storing Up God’s Word in Our Hearts, and
have a lot of material from this section of Psalm 119.
So if you have your sermon outline, I may or may not get through all of the points this
evening.
I’ll keep my eye on the clock in the back, but this evening we consider this important
section of Psalm 119.
It’s all important, of course, because it’s all the Word of God.
Well, dear friends, the Protestant Reformation was an incredible thing.
The Protestant Reformation was an amazing and great historical work of Almighty God.
It wasn’t just a revival.
You know, revivals come and go.
They are often brief and they don’t last often, but the Reformation, we still feel its ripple
effects today, and it’s because of the Protestant Reformation, brothers and sisters, in God’s
providence that we are gathered here this evening at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
With the coming of the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath came a renewed emphasis
on Christian education and catechesis of all of God’s people, and especially the Christian
youth, all of which led to an explosion of new Protestant confessions of faith and catechisms.
The Reformers and their followers recognized the importance of grounding the people of
God in the Word of God, and grounding the people of God, therefore, in the doctrinal
gospel truths that are revealed in the Word of God.
The Reformers recognized that this was vitally important, not only for the general spiritual
welfare of the Christian population, though that certainly was the case, but also in that
polemical environment.
It seems that the Reformers also saw such grounding in the faith as necessary in helping
their fellow Protestant believers to unlearn the errors and heresies of the Roman church,
which had held sway over the people for so, so long, and also to inoculate the Protestant
faithful against the papal church’s efforts to win them back to Rome.
And this is why they labored to provide the church with translations of the Bible into
the common language of the people, thus making the Word of God accessible not only to the
educated clergy, but even to the so-called ordinary, uneducated believer, the lay people.
And this is also why the Reformers and their followers sought to produce biblically sound
catechisms, especially for the instruction of baptized Christian youth and new converts
to the faith, many of whom were often expected to memorize these catechisms word for word.
In this way, the Reformers and their followers sought to encourage God’s people to hide or
to store up God’s Word in their hearts, that they might be preserved from sin, from heresy,
from unbelief.
All of this serves as a backdrop to the historical practice of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church
and other confessionally reformed and Presbyterian churches of strongly encouraging their members
and especially their covenant youth to memorize the church’s authorized catechism.
In our case, of course, in the OPC, that has historically been the shorter catechism, and
we’ve encouraged our covenant youth to memorize the shorter catechism.
Well, my friends, as you may be aware, sadly, the practice of encouraging the memorization
of Holy Scripture and the shorter catechism seems to have fallen on hard times, even within
the only perfect church or the overly persnickety church, depending on your perspective.
In other words, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
How could that be?
Well, truth be told, friends, even many candidates for gospel ministry in the OPC, indeed, even
many ministers of the Word have only memorized portions of the shorter catechism and not
the catechism in its entirety.
And I say this from personal experience, for to my shame, I admit this is true in my own
case, although I am seeking to remedy this deficiency, but I’ve only memorized about
a third of the catechism.
I’m very familiar with the contents of it.
I’ve been through it many, many times, but I haven’t memorized it word for word.
And so a covenant youth in the 1800s from a Presbyterian Church would run circles around
me when it comes to knowing the catechism.
Now maybe you’re thinking to yourself, come on, pastor, I mean, it’s not a big deal.
It’s just it’s just a catechism.
It’s a human document, and that’s true.
It is a human document.
It’s not the Word of God.
It’s not on the same level with the Holy Scriptures, but it is a faithful summary of the Word of
God, the teachings of the Word of God.
And speaking of catechism, brothers and sisters, whether you and I realize it or not, we are
all being catechized each and every day.
Say, well, how is that?
We are being catechized.
We are being given messages by our culture.
We are being given given messages.
We are being presented with a worldview that we are to believe and to embrace and to adopt
for ourselves.
We are being catechized, for example, every day by our media, by our decadent secular
culture, by our secular educational institutions, by our musical and entertainment industries,
by our governmental agencies, and the list could go on and on.
But sadly, very often the contents and the worldview of this cultural catechesis with
which we are being daily bombarded from so many fronts is often in direct contradiction
to the Word of God and to the biblical truths that are summarized in our catechism.
And so I would suggest to you that this is all the more reason, brothers and sisters,
to recommit ourselves to storing up God’s Word and its truths in our hearts.
And I think a wonderful resource to encourage us in doing so is our passage for this Lord’s
Day evening.
And so let’s turn our attention to our text for this Lord’s Day evening and as we focus
on the opening three verses of this section of Psalm 119, I want us to consider first
of all the sanctifying power of God’s Word, the sanctifying power of God’s Word.
The psalmist asks in this opening verse, verse 9, how can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to your word.
With my whole heart I seek you.
Let me not wander from your commandments.
I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.
Now let’s take a step back for a moment and consider Psalm 119 as a whole.
We always need to locate the texts of Scripture that we consider within their broader context.
And in terms of the broader context of Psalm 119 in the words of one commentator, this
is an elaborate, ingenious, and passionate meditation upon the law of the Lord.
But let me pause there.
When you hear the term law, what often comes to your mind?
In our contemporary context, our contemporary Christian context, when we hear about the
law of the Lord, we tend to think of legalism.
We might even think of Phariseeism.
But as this commentator goes on to explain, law in the Old Testament should not be confused
with Pharisaic legalism.
The Hebrew word is Torah, meaning teaching.
It could also be translated as covenant instruction.
It stands for the will of God revealed to Israel.
It is the loving instruction of a parent.
The Torah, the law of God, is not legalism like earn your salvation, merit God’s grace.
It is the loving instruction of a parent, and the psalmist points us, rightly so, to
a passage in the Proverbs.
Let’s turn to Proverbs 4 and look at verses 1 and 2, Proverbs 4, verses 1 and 2.
And here Solomon, again, writing in the genre of wisdom literature, he says this,
Hear, O sons, a father’s instruction, and be attentive that you may gain insight.
For I gave you good precepts.
Do not forsake my teaching.
The term teaching there is a translation of the Hebrew term Torah.
This is a father’s loving instruction, and that is how we are to receive, as believers,
the law and word of God.
It is the loving instruction of a loving father.
And here our loving Heavenly Father says to us in verse 9, by the Spirit, through the
psalmist here, how can a young man keep his way pure?
Now, some of you might say, I’m not a young man.
Maybe you’re a young lady or an old lady or an older man or what have you, and you say,
well, this must not apply to me.
This is only speaking about those crazy young men.
Well, we need to understand that this terminology, young man, this and similar terminology is
used in the wisdom literature of the Bible to denote a disciple of the Torah.
In other words, by using this terminology, the psalmist is not to be understood as limiting
his focus only to young men, although I will say that young men have always faced some
unique temptations toward impurity and sin and abusiveness and so forth.
But rather, this statement applies to all who would faithfully follow the Lord and would
hide his word in their hearts, as Dr. Willem van Dameren points out.
The psalmist, as a wisdom teacher, asks the rhetorical question, how can a young man keep
his way pure?
As a teaching device, similar to that found in the Proverbs, the young man is a disciple,
also known as my son in Proverbs.
And again, just to show, give you some indication when we compare scripture with scripture that
this is how this terminology is often used, let’s again turn to the Proverbs, Proverbs
two verses one through five.
And here again, of course, we recognize Proverbs as part of the Word of God, it’s for all of
God’s people, but notice how Solomon, by the Spirit’s inspiration, addresses his readers.
He says, my son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making
your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding, yes, if you call
out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for
it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the
knowledge of God.
Again, this is an encouragement to all of us, whether we’re men or women, whether we’re
young or old, to treasure the covenant instruction, the gracious Word of God and to be attentive
to it, to seek wisdom from the Lord’s Word.
We also see this emphasis in Ecclesiastes.
Let’s turn to Ecclesiastes 11, look at verse nine, and the reason I want to have us look
at a couple of these verses from Ecclesiastes is that, again, while this is wisdom terminology
that applies to all of God’s people, again, I think there’s a special concern for young
men here as well.
Ecclesiastes 11 verse nine, rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer
you in the days of your youth, walk in the ways of your heart and in the sight of your
eyes, but know that for all these things, God will bring you into judgment.
This is a warning, and then skip down to chapter 12 verse one of Ecclesiastes.
Remember also your creator in the days of your youth before the evil days come and the
years drawn near of which you will say, I have no pleasure in them, and so forth.
Remember your creator in the days of your youth.
The youth today, by the way, as an aside, there is so much hopelessness among the youth
of today, especially among young men.
We think about our own culture as it’s been influenced so heavily by sort of a toxic feminism,
many of our boys and young men are lost, they’re told by our culture that they’re toxic, their
masculinity is toxic, that they’re a problem.
Certainly sin causes men and women to become toxic.
There is such a thing as toxic masculinity, even as there is equally such a thing as toxic
femininity.
Sin ruins masculinity and femininity.
But this passage, our passage for today, offers a message of hope for the young boys and the
men, young men in our culture who are wanting to know, is there a good way to be masculine?
Yes, it’s called gospel masculinity, it’s called godly masculinity, it is the masculinity
that is spoken of in this verse.
How can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to your word.
By guarding it according to your word.
What does that mean?
What does it mean?
To guard our ways according to the word of God.
Well the more interpretive translation, the new international version translates it by
living according to your word, by living according to your word.
We guard our way according to the word of God by seeking to live in faith and obedience
to the word of God.
Brothers and sisters, it’s important for us as disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ to
seek to know the word.
We seek to know the word by reading it, by studying it, by sitting under the faithful
preaching and teaching of the word, by meditating upon it.
But we need to understand that knowledge that we gain from studying the word must nourish
a living faith that translates into action.
It’s not enough just to hear the word.
We need to be doers of the word as James reminds us in James 1 verses 21 through 25.
I know we’re skipping around a little bit here, but consider again this familiar passage,
James 1.
We’re going to start at verse 21.
He says therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness, in other words repent,
turn away from the filthiness and rampant wickedness of sin, and receive with meekness
the implanted word.
Receive the gospel by faith in Christ, which is able to save your souls.
But then it goes on to say, but be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.
For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently
at his natural face in a mirror.
For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.
But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being
no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.
By the grace of God, let us seek to guard our way according to the word that we may
be doers of the word.
And as we move on to verse 10, it says, the psalmist says with my whole heart I seek you.
With my whole heart I seek you.
And then he says, let me not wander from your commandment.
He makes an assertion or he makes a statement about the state of his heart, but then he
also offers a petition to the Lord.
We see here in this verse that the psalmist is devoted to God’s word, and he’s devoted
to God’s word because he is devoted to the God of the word.
He seeks Yahweh, the faithful covenant-making, covenant-keeping, redeemer God, the God who
had rescued him, redeemed him.
He seeks Yahweh, we are told, with his whole heart.
But is this a boast?
Is he saying, Lord, I’m so great, I seek you with my whole heart?
No.
The point of this statement is that when it comes to his faith commitment, the psalmist
is all in.
But at the same time, this is not a self-righteous boast.
For the psalmist, in the very next line, recognizes his own weakness, his own proneness to wander.
For he humbly petitions the Lord, let me not wander from your commandments.
He knows that his heart is prone to wander.
Even though he seeks the Lord with his whole heart, his heart is prone to wander.
Notice again, by the way, the close connection between seeking the Lord and keeping his commandments.
You cannot claim to be seeking the Lord if you despise the Lord’s commandments.
A living faith in the living God is always accompanied by a serious-minded commitment
to the Lord and to his Word, as well as a humble, repentant, teachable spirit willing
to recognize its own ongoing sin and weakness.
But then we get to the verse that forms the basis for the title of my sermon this evening,
verse 11.
I have stored up your Word in my heart that I might not sin against you.
In a recent sermon, I pointed out the fact that in the Bible, when the Bible uses the
term heart, it’s not just talking about the emotions.
In our culture today, when we talk about the heart, if we’re speaking of the heart metaphorically,
rather than speaking about that physical organ in our chest that pumps blood through our
bodies, when we talk about the heart, we tend to mean the emotions.
Oh, his heart was not in it, we say.
Well, that means he wasn’t emotionally connected to that.
But in the Bible, the heart represents the control center of the entire person.
The Bible says that it is with the heart that a man thinks.
The heart is the source, the control center of our intellect, our emotions, our will,
our entire being.
And so when the psalmist says, I’ve stored up your Word in my heart, that means I’ve
sought to, by the grace of God, make it part of my entire life.
I’ve received it into the control center of my life.
Why?
That I might not sin against you.
And so we see the psalmist seeks to store up or hide or treasure God’s Word in his heart.
Why?
In order that his heart and life might be guarded against sin.
Dr. Van Gamaren issues an important reminder in his commentary about the significance of
this.
He says, the act of hiding God’s Word is not to be limited to the memorization of individual
texts or even whole passages, but extends to a holistic living in devotion to the Lord.
So in other words, it would be wrong and sort of a shallow reading of this passage to say,
well, all this means is that we need to memorize scripture, memorize sound doctrine and all
of that.
Well, that’s part of it, but it’s the goal of memorizing and making all of this part
of you that your whole life might be under the influence of the Word of God.
But at the same time, this holistic living of a fruitful life of discipleship to the
This is not possible without encountering the sanctifying power of God’s Word.
And such an encounter is not possible without diligent use of the means of grace, such as
sitting under the faithful preaching and teaching of God’s Word, as you folks are seeking to
do this evening.
As you’ve come to church, I hope you’ve come to church not because you think, oh, well,
if I go to the evening service in addition to the morning service, I’m really special
to God.
God’s really pleased with me, right?
We’re earning points with God.
No, no.
We come to church, whether we come once or twice, and I’d encourage you to come twice
every Lord’s Day as you’re able.
As we come to church, we come to hear the Word of God, to sit under the faithful preaching
and teaching of God’s Word.
We come to worship the Lord.
We come to be built up in our faith and strengthened.
We come to hide God’s Word in our hearts that we might not sin against the Lord.
We come to fellowship with the Lord through His Word and by His Spirit.
But encountering the sanctifying power of God’s Word, it does indeed come especially
in the corporate assembly and in the public means of grace, but it also comes through
private acts of reading, studying, and meditating upon and memorizing the Word of God.
We are encouraged throughout the Scriptures to do that.
And I want to, again, take us to a couple passages in Deuteronomy as well as a passage
in Colossians to highlight this.
Let’s turn back to Deuteronomy chapter 4 and look at verses 9 through 14.
Deuteronomy chapter 4, verses 9 through 14.
Moses has, again, exhorting the children of Israel at preparing them to enter and conquer
the promised land and he says this, only take care and keep your soul diligently lest you
forget the things that your eyes have seen, unless they depart from your heart all the
days of your life.
Make them known to your children and your children’s children.
How on the day that you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, the Lord said to me, gather
the people to me, that I may let them hear my words so that they may learn to fear me
all the days that they live on the earth and that they may teach their children so.
And you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain while the mountain burned with
fire to the heart of heaven, wrapped in darkness, cloud, and gloom.
And notice that he’s reminding them of the mighty acts of God’s redemption in the Exodus
and how the Lord brought them to himself out of their slavery in Egypt.
Verse 12, then the Lord spoke to you out of the midst of the fire.
You heard the sound of words.
He communicated verbally.
You heard the sound of words but saw no form.
There was only a voice.
We have a word-based religion, not an image-based religion.
God reveals himself not through images but through the word.
Verse 13, and he declared to you his covenant which he commanded you to perform, that is
the Ten Commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone.
And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and rules that you might
do them in the land that you are going over to possess.
Again, we see this emphasis on being diligent to hide God’s word, to remember and recall
the word of the Lord and his mighty acts of grace and salvation and judgment.
We see this also emphasized in Deuteronomy 6.
Let me just read quickly Deuteronomy 6, verses 4 through 9.
And Moses says to the children of Israel, he reminds them of their basic confession
of faith.
The hero Israel, the Lord our God, Yahweh our God, the Lord is one.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with
all your might.
And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.
You shall teach them how?
You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your
house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise.
You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your
eyes.
You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
In other words, the word of God will always be before you.
You will always keep it in mind in the forefront of your mind.
But some might say, well, that’s just Old Testament stuff, Pastor Jeff.
You’re quoting to us from the Old Testament.
Well, let’s look at one verse in the New Testament, Colossians 3, 15 to 17.
The Apostle Paul writes the following as he’s urged the Colossian believers to put on as
God’s chosen ones, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, and so forth.
He says this beginning in verse 15, And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to
which indeed you were called in one name, and in another name, and in another name,
and in another name, and in another name, and in another name, and in another name,
to which indeed you were called in one body.
The peace of Christ is to rule in our hearts that it may rule in the church, and it goes
on to say, and be thankful.
And then notice verse 16, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing
one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness
in your hearts to God in whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name
of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Notice verse 16, We are exhorted to let the word of Christ dwell in us richly, not just
dwell in us as individual believers, but dwell among us, dwell in us as the church.
What is the word of Christ?
What is that referring to?
That’s referring to the gospel, the good news of salvation through the obedient life, the
atoning sacrificial death, and the glorious bodily resurrection and ascension of our Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ, the good news of Christ.
Let this good news, we are told, dwell in you richly.
That’s really what hiding God’s word in our hearts is all about.
And why are we to let the word of Christ dwell in us richly so that we might be established
in him, so that we might not sin against him, but indeed live lives that by the grace of
God are pleasing to the Lord.
Well, there’s much more that can be said about this passage, and I don’t think I’m going
to get to my final points.
Sometimes when you begin your sermon research, you think, okay, I can condense this down,
but then you realize there’s so much here to consider.
As we close our time in the word this Lord’s Day evening, I want to just close with a couple
points for your consideration and application.
First of all, brothers and sisters, we see in this passage the sanctifying power of God’s
word.
When the word of God is blessed by the sovereign Holy Spirit who applies that word to the hearts
of God’s elect, it is powerful in its sanctifying effect.
God’s word is powerful.
You can’t sanctify yourself.
Sanctification is a work of God’s free grace, we’re told rightly in our catechism.
It’s a work of God’s free grace.
We don’t sanctify ourselves.
Certainly, sanctification has effects, and God uses means in our sanctification such
as the diligent use of the means of grace, but nevertheless, the Lord is the one who
sanctifies you.
You don’t contribute anything to your sanctification just as you don’t contribute anything to your
justification.
It’s all of grace and grace alone.
We see again in this passage the sanctifying power of God’s word, for it asks, how can
a young man keep his way pure by guarding it according to your word?
The word of God has the power, when blessed by the Spirit, to guard us against sin and
preserve us in the way of faith and holiness.
But of course, this side of glory, our hearts are still so prone to wander, and so that
being the case, beloved, with the psalmist, let us petition our Lord in the words that
he used in verse 10.
Let me not wander from your commandments.
We all have wandering hearts.
Let us pray that the Lord would take these wandering hearts and fix them steadfastly
on faithfulness to Jesus, who has been faithful to us in his covenant mercies and grace.
Another lesson that we can glean by implication from this passage, beloved, is that it is
a dangerous thing to just dabble in Christianity.
We see that the psalmist is serious-minded in his pursuit of the Lord.
He is serious-minded.
He says in verse 10, with my whole heart I seek you, and I have stored up your word
in my heart, verse 11, that I might not sin against you.
This is a serious-minded believer.
He’s not just dabbling in the faith.
He’s devoted to the faith because he has received the grace of God who has devoted
himself to the psalmist’s salvation.
When it comes to the Lord Jesus Christ, to his claims, and to his gospel, you and I need
to be all in or not in at all, because if you are not all in, then you’re not in at
all.
I don’t want to veer off into politics, but we’re all aware of the recent assassination
of Mr. Charlie Kirk.
Whatever you think of his views or politics personally, his theology had some deficiencies
as well.
There are some things that I would have disagreed with him on, but nevertheless, one of the
things that he loved to say to young people, he would give advice.
He would say, don’t put off marriage too long.
Get married, have kids, and go to church.
It’s my understanding that reports are coming in that in the aftermath of his assassination,
many folks, many young people are taking his advice and going back to church.
That’s a good thing at one level.
It depends on what church they’re going back to.
We want them to go to a church where they’re going to hear the gospel.
What I fear, brothers and sisters, is it’s great, it would be wonderful to have people
visiting the church because of Mr. Kirk’s, the late Mr. Kirk’s exhortations to go to
church.
That would be wonderful.
We want to welcome all who inquire about the things of the Lord.
What I’m concerned about is that we live in a time where there is so much dabbling.
You’re scrolling on your phone and you look at something that looks interesting and you
click on it.
You dabble in it for a while.
Maybe it leads you to a podcast or to an interesting site, but then you get bored and you moved
on and you move on.
You can’t do that with the claims of Christ.
You can’t do that with biblical, historic Christianity.
When it comes to Christ, you can’t just dabble with him because he claims to be Lord and
he indeed is Lord, risen from the dead, King of kings, Lord of lords, and he’s the one
who says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.
What about you, dear listener?
Are you all in when it comes to trusting Christ and Christ alone for your salvation or are
you only dabbling in Jesus?
Don’t dabble, trust.
Come to him as he’s offered to you in the gospel.
And so in closing, by the grace of God, let us brothers and sisters earnestly seek to
store up God’s word in our hearts.
How do we do that?
Well, again, I mentioned earlier, we do that through being here when the word is being
opened up and read and proclaimed and taught, being with our brothers and sisters in church,
hearing the word of God.
We do that also through daily Bible reading.
You know, I remember many years ago, this was a different presbytery.
This was way back when.
I remember one time, I think I was either a young minister or a licensure at the time.
I remember there was a licensure exam, I think, no, actually an ordination exam of a young
man that I was witnessing on the floor of the presbytery, the presbytery that I was
in at the time.
And one of the questions that this young man was asked, and this young man was the son
of an elder, a ruling elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
He was asked, have you read through the Bible in its entirety?
And this young man almost looked proud and said, I just got done reading through it.
And I remember thinking to myself, you’re here, you’re going to have an ordinate, you’re
having your ordination exam, you’re the son of an elder in the church, and you’ve only
been through the entire Bible once.
Now, again, I’m not trying to be uncharitable.
I believe this gentleman did go on to be ordained, and I believe he’s an effective minister of
the gospel.
But friends, we need to hide God’s word in our hearts, and that means that it’s not just
enough to skim over the surface of Scripture.
It’s not just enough to read the parts that you enjoy and skip over those other parts
that you find less interesting.
It’s all breathed out by God.
It’s all divinely inspired.
So I would encourage you and urge you on a regular basis, ideally yearly, but maybe once
every two or even three years, read through the Scriptures in their entirety.
Follow a Bible reading plan.
We actually have a Bible reading plan in the foyer on the literature rack there.
We have a couple Bible reading plans.
If you don’t want to start with through the Bible in a year, there’s a plan that’ll take
you through the Bible in two years.
So devote yourself to reading the Scriptures.
Read broadly, but also read deeply.
Memorize Scripture, and as an aid to memorizing the sound truths of God’s word, devote yourself
to memorizing faithful catechisms like the shorter catechism.
These are ways that you can hide God’s word in your heart.
May the Lord grant us the grace to hide his word in our hearts, not only that we may not
sin against him, but that we may glorify him in our hearts and in our lives.
Amen.
Let us pray.
Our Lord and Father in heaven, your word is so deep and so rich and so broad.
We thank you that Christ is the center of the word.
The Old Testament prepares the world for Christ.
The New Testament reveals him.
We pray that you would grant us the grace to let the word of Christ dwell richly in
us and among us, that we might glory in you, and that we might bear faithful witness to
the glorious Savior.
We pray these things, Heavenly Father, in Jesus’ name and all of God’s people said amen.
Let’s rise, and as we close our time tonight, we’ll sing together Psalm 119B, How Shall
the Young Direct Their Way?
Psalm 119B.