Sermon Tone Analysis

*Praying Psalm 119 to Love the Lord and His Word More*

/Preached by Pastor Phil Layton at Gold Country Baptist Church on April 19, 2009/

www.goldcountrybaptist.org

Last week we celebrated the highlight of Christian life, the resurrection of our Living Lord Jesus, a celebration we continue today. 2 weeks ago we finished our verse-by-verse study through Psalm 119 which has been a personal highlight of my Christian life to study that Psalm right in the heart of the Bible, written by a man after God’s own heart, a study that should impact our own hearts to more love for God and His Word and a more living faith in our living Lord.

That is the right response to Christ’s resurrection; and your love for the Lord and His Word evidences that you have experienced /spiritual/ resurrection and have a true living faith.

As we’ve seen many times in our study of Psalm 119, those who delight in the Lord also seek to (or should) delight in the Law of the Lord.

As branches that abide in Christ, they abide in His Word.

Those who truly love Him love what He has to say.

And we can grow in both.

The fruitful believer, the blessed ~/ happy believer finds (as we’ve seen in Psalm 119) the key to abiding in the Word is delighting in the Word, applying God’s Word, loving and living it.

In contrast to the self-deceived fruitless professing religious person without this who James 1:26 says “his religion is worthless, James 1:25 says:

/ /

/But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer, but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does./

Ps 119:1 begins on the note that the blessed ones (i.e., the truly and supremely happy ones with the joy of the Lord, in relationship with the Lord) are those who walk in His law, in His Word, and v. 2 says /who practice it/.

Psalm 1 begins similarly with the blessedness and spiritual successfulness of the man who doesn’t walk with the way of the world (ungodly, sinners, scoffers) but with the Word:

 

/But his delight is in the law of the Lord, And in His law he meditates day and night.//

//He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, Which yields its fruit in its season And its leaf does not wither; And in whatever he does, he prospers./

Don’t we all want to be fruitful, firmly planted, falling in love with the Lord more, full of true happiness that lights up our face and our days as we delight in and abide in His Word with increasing love?

This should be the natural desire for every true believer, and I hope you will join me in that pursuit this morning in a message I’ve called /Praying Psalm 119 to Love the Lord and His Word More.

/ But there’s a hurdle we must acknowledge first and not assume everyone desires that or is even a true believer here.

J.C. Ryle writes:

‘Just as a child born into the world naturally desires the milk provided for its nourishment, so does a soul "born again" desire the sincere milk of the Word.

This is a common mark of all the children of God—they "delight in the law of the LORD" (Ps 1:2).

Show me a person who despises Bible reading, or thinks little of Bible preaching, and [Ryle says basically in the spirit of James “I think little of his profession to be …] "born again."

He may be zealous about forms and ceremonies.

He may be diligent in attending church and the taking of the Lord’s Supper.

But if [the Bible is not truly] precious to him … I cannot believe that he is a converted man.

Tell me what the Bible is to a man and I will generally tell you what he is.

This is the pulse to try—this is the barometer to look at—if we would know the state of the heart.

I have no notion of the Spirit dwelling in a man and not giving clear evidence of His presence.

And I believe it to be clear evidence of the Spirit’s presence when the Word is really precious to a man’s soul …

I am afraid that man cannot be a true servant of Christ, who has not something of his Master’s mind and feeling towards the Bible.

Love of the Word has been a prominent feature in the history of all the saints, of whom we know anything, since the days of the Apostles.

This is the lamp which Athanasius and Chrysostom and Augustine followed.

This is the compass which kept the Vallenses and Albigenses from making shipwreck of the faith.

This is the well which was reopened by Wycliffe and Luther, after it had been long stopped up.

This is the sword with which Latimer, and Jewell, and Knox won their victories.

This is the manna which fed Baxter and Owen, and the noble host of the Puritans, and made them strong in battle.

This is the armory from which Whitefield and Wesley drew their powerful weapons.

This is the mine from which [others] brought forth rich gold.

… Love of the Word is one of the first things that appears in the converted heathen, at the various Missionary stations throughout the world.

In hot climates and in cold—among savage people and among civilized—in New Zealand, in the South Sea Islands, in Africa …—it is always the same.

They enjoy hearing it read.

They long to be able to read it themselves.

They wonder why Christians did not send it to them before.

How striking is the picture which Moffat draws of Africaner, the fierce South African chieftain, when first brought under the power of the Gospel!

"Often have I seen him…under the shadow of a great rock nearly the whole day, eagerly [going through] the pages of the Bible."

… Love of the Bible is one of the grand points of agreement among all converted men and women in our own land.

People from many Evangelical denominations all unite in honoring the Bible, as soon as they are real Christians … This is the fountain around which all the various portions of Christ’s flock meet together, and from which no sheep goes away thirsty.

Oh, that believers in this country would learn to cleave more closely to the written Word!’[1]

If you’re not a true believer who loves the Lord and His Word, or if your life is not different and your loves are not different since professing Christ, this message will be of no benefit to you till you look to Jesus on the cross and to Him alone, love Him, long for Him, and commit to live for Him instead of yourself.

Loathe your sin and let it go, leave it at the cross, let Jesus be Lord.

What if your heart does love and seek your Lord, but it wanders?

Take heart.

So does mine, and so did even the writer of Ps. 119:

10 With all my heart I have sought You; Do not let me wander …

29 Remove the false way from me …

36 Incline my heart to Your testimonies …

40 Behold, I long for Your precepts; Revive me …

 

He loved and longed for God’s Word, and yet in the same breath he has to pray for God to revive him from his dullness, to give him more life and love spiritually, even as he confesses there are false ways he needs removed from him, and he has a heart that needs to be inclined by God to His Word if he’ll ever remain true.

Like some said to Jesus, “I believe, help my unbelief.”

Believers are not marked by perfection, but there is a /progression/ of faith and love seen in their life that we also see in this Psalm.

I believe the key is how the writer of Psalm 119 prayed, and my goal for this message is that we would pray the prayers of Ps. 119 more and progress in our growth to love God and His Word more as well

 

This psalmist was a wandering sheep, as we saw even at the very end of the psalm, and he prays that God would not let his heart wander, which I confess is a great problem of mine, a wandering heart and mind (in general that’s a problem of mine, but it’s especially convicting and frustrating in prayer where I acutely am aware of my own weaknesses).

It is rarely a struggle for me to read God’s Word and study it, and even to talk about the things of God with other believers, but I confess to my shame that talking /to God for sustained periods of time/ is a frequent failing of mine, an area I pray that God will further convict and change me in this year, and for you as well if you struggle in this area.

I not only fail to pray as often as I should, but when I pray my focus fails so quickly.

My mind wanders as much or more than anybody in private prayer.

-         I may find myself praying for one of you and thank God for your happy attitude, and even think of a time I saw you at Safeway when you greeted me happily

-         and then my mind remembers, “oh, yes, that’s right, I need to pickup something at Safeway for dinner …”

-         and as I think of dinner I begin to think of meatloaf which is one my favorite dinners, even though we’re not having it that night, I find myself reminiscing about the way my mom used to make it, miscellaneous childhood memories…

-         What was I thinking about again?

Oh yes, back to the store; I think that while I’m there today maybe I’ll rent a DVD

-         I begin to think of DVDs that we actually would want to watch, and then I begin to think about what nights we have free that week, and what are the different things we have going on and when I’ll have time for something Jaime asked me to do, and on and on it goes … after who knows how long I /may/ remember I’m praying and get back to it!

Maybe there’s no one else out there like me, but just for the sake of argument in case there is someone like me out there, I want to try and give some help from this passage for those of us who embody the hymn lyric “prone to wander.”

I still have a long way to go but one thing that has helped me is praying with an open Bible, even the very words of the Bible, especially Psalm 119.

This may not be the first chapter you think of to study prayer, but there is no place I know of in Scripture with more concentrated prayers (addressing God directly over 250x) or with more types of prayer, more principles of prayer, more patterns of prayer.

This is a deep well that I have spent years drawing from and I certainly won’t be able to plumb all its depths here in one morning, but I hope if nothing else this message will cause you like me to return with our empty buckets again and again to draw from Psalm 119’s refreshing waters.

One of the first classes every Master’s Seminary student has to take, and a class that I am sure all would count as one of the most impactful in their spiritual life, is a class on prayer.

Dr. Jim Rosscup, who no longer teaches FT due to his health, is a godly prayer-warrior scholar-mentor example that we will never forget.

He poured into us his passion and priority for prayer, and convicted me of the shallowness of my understanding of prayer and my lack of commitment to prayer, not only in class but on some of my papers by his loving rebukes to me in his red ink.

Most classes require reading and papers, and this class did, too, but a major part of the requirements for that semester was for each student to pray for an hour each day, and turn in a paper each week reporting on if we had done so for accountability.

Praying with concentration for 5 minutes in a row was hard enough for me!

-         Helps: praying out loud instead of silently in my mind

-         Praying with something in front of me (ex: requests, prayer cards, especially praying with Scripture in front of me)

-         More than any other passage, praying the prayers of Psalm 119 helped me get through those prolonged prayer times

-         I chose Psalm 119 to be my research paper for the class

* *

*Principles of Prayer in Psalm 119*

 

Principle #1.

Prayer should permeate our day as well as be planned

Much of our failure to pray (I include myself in this “our”) is because we do not plan to pray, or set aside time to pray.

Many find that mornings and~/or evenings are the best times

 

147 I rise before dawn and cry for help; I wait for Your words.

148 My eyes anticipate the night watches, That I may meditate on Your word.

Others of you may find a lunch break or some other time is works well for prayer.

How about while you’re driving your car?

For me, when I used to commute and spend many hours a week in my car in SoCal freeways, that was my prime-time for spiritual talking or singing to God, or His talking to me through good sermons or even an audio Bible, memorizing God’s Word.

It’s far easier for me to listen to a sermon than to sustain concentration in prayer, so I have to discipline myself to shut off the radio or MP3 player at times to pray (I did that this week while jogging around Cameron Park Lake, thanking God for the beautiful bird I saw, praising Him for His beautiful creation, praying for individuals in the church who came to mind).

We should be able to do this naturally through the day, but most of us need to plan and make real effort as well.

164 Seven times a day I praise You, Because of Your righteous ordinances.

Should prayer be spontaneous or scheduled, at set times or at all times?

As I read this Psalm, his answer seems to be yes – all of the above!