A Majestic Love Song

I. Introduction
 A. I’m preaching this series on God’s Holy Book this year because it seems to me that the church is drifting away from the Bible, growing increasingly dissatisfied with and bored with the Bible.
 B. The rest of the summer: Great Bible passages about the Bible
 C. Today
  1. In the Bible we find a lot of love language about the Bible. E.g.:
   a. Jer.15:16 “When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart's delight.”
   b. Job 23:12 “I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my portion of food.”
  2. But clearly the highest language expressing love for the Bible is in Psalm 119.
II. Psalm 119
 A. It is by far the longest of the 1189 chapters in the Bible – 176 verses. (Deut.28 is next at 68 verses.)
  1. The worst day in my Bible reading program?
 B. It is an acrostic: 22 stanzas for the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, 8 verses in each stanza, beginning with the same Hebrew letter
 C. But there’s something more special about Psalm 119 than its size or pattern. Psalm 119 is a love song about the word of God.
  1. 169 of the 176 verses mention the word of God, though it uses many different words used for Scripture: law, testimonies, precepts, statutes, commandments, rules, word,  promises.
  2. “How do I love thee, let me count the ways” – Elizabeth Browning
 D. Verbs used in conjunction with the word
  1. Sing – Psalm 119:172
  2. Speak – Psalm 119: 13, 46, 79
  3. Study – Psalm 119:15, 48, 97, 148
  4. Store up – Psalm 119:11, 93, 141
  5. Obey – Psalm 119:8, 44, 57, 129, 145, 146, 167, 168
  6. Praise God for – Psalm 119:7, 62, 164, 171
  7. Pray God will act according to – Psalm 119:58, 121-123, 147, 149-160
 E. When we come to the word of God, we tend to think about what we should believe or how we should think. But this psalm tells us how we should feel about the word of God.
  1. Delight – Psalm 119:14, 24, 47, 70, 77, 143, 174
  2. Sweet – Psalm 119:103
  3. Joy – Psalm 119:111
  4. Love them exceedingly – Psalm 119:167
 F. Some: I’m not intellectual. I could never love a book in this way. Some people love to read. Others don’t. But even if you don’t love to read, there are some things you love to read.
  1. Will
  2. Love letter
  3. A note of appreciation about something you did for someone or a gift you gave them
  4. Paid in full mortgage
  5. Happy headlines – War Over! When your loved one is fighting
 G. I love vegetables, even more than I love meat. But for some people vegetables are just a necessary evil. They eat them like medicine. How many here like that? That’s OK.
  1. But God doesn’t give us His word to be eaten like medicine, but like a feast, or a delicacy.
  2. God loves when He serves us a wonderful meal and we delight in it.
  3. He didn’t give us His word to endure or to tolerate or to be willing to listen to. He gave us His word to love, to delight in, to glory in.
  4. Peg Bolton choking up at 1st Saturday prayer thanking God for His word
  5. One characteristic of a person who is strong in the Lord is that he or she regularly encounters God in His word. Ps.1:2 says of the blessed man: “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law He meditates day and night.”
 H. The goal of this series is to improve our relationship with God’s word. And there’s no better place to go to see this than Psalm 119.
III. Psalm 119:129-131
 A. Psalm 119:129 Your testimonies are wonderful; therefore my soul keeps them.
  1. Psalm 119:103 How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!
  2. Psalm 119:72 The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces.
  3. Psalm 119:162 I rejoice at your word like one who finds great spoil.
 B. Psalm 119:130 The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple.
  1. It does so much for me.
 C. Psalm 119:131 I open my mouth and pant, because I long for your commandments.
  1. Psalm 119:20 My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times.
 D.  Psalm 119:71 “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.”
  1. For some people the important thing is avoiding pain.
  2. For others, pain is OK if it helps them know Jesus. The pain doesn’t matter because the word of God is so good that the pain doesn’t matter.
  3. Psalm 119:161 “Princes persecute me without cause, but my heart stands in awe of your words.”
   a. In awe of the unjust treatment? Or in awe of God’s words?
IV. Application
 A. Ps.119 tells us about what our relationship with God’s word should be like.
  1. This is one relationship where you always know who’s at fault if things aren’t going well.
  2. Do you love God’s word?
 B. Maybe you’ve never felt this way about the Bible.
 C. What if God appeared to you and told you that He had picked out a certain person for you to marry. But you had no special interest in or affection for that person.
  1. God made a mistake. That person is boring. I could never be happy with that person.
   a. You would be insulting God’s wisdom, His goodness, His love for you.
  2. Wait for the love to come?
  3. Get to know the person?
 D. Psalm 119:18 Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.
  1. Confident that they’re there.
 E. Psalm 119:36 Incline my heart to your testimonies, and not to selfish gain!
 F. Some people do feel this way, some people do have a close relationship with God’s word. Why?
  1. Just different?
  2. Ears to hear. Eyes to see.
  3. God made it pretty clear that He wants us to love His word. Even more than that, it’s pretty clear that if we saw God’s word for what it was, we would love it with all our hearts.
 G. Psalm 119 is full of prayers to know and follow God’s word.
  1. Prayer to know God’s word – Ps.119: 18, 19, 27, 29, 33, 34, 35, 64, 66, 73, 124, 125, 135, 169
  2. Prayer to keep God’s commandments – Ps.119:5, 10, 17, 20, 40, 131
  3. So, the question isn’t just, Do you love God’s word? but, Do you want to love God’s word?
 H. It’s really an issue of desire. As you get older and look back over your life, there are some things you regret. For instance, when my kids were young and we would go out and work together to rake the lawn or shovel the snow or dig a garden, I regret that I often cared more about getting the job done than I did about nurturing my relationship with my kids.
  1. I look back now and realize that my desires were wrong. And I know that some of my desires now are wrong and that one day I’ll look back and see it and regret it.
  2. Not having a desire for God in His word is something many people live to regret. Don’t foolishly wait till you’re old to realize how much you need God’s word and how wonderful it is.
 I. I’m not trying to get you to feel guilty about not spending enough time in God’s word. And I’m not trying to make you feel bad for not loving God’s word as much as you should. I’m trying to show you in the Bible what a treasure you have in God’s word!
 J. When people die, it has to be decided what to do with their stuff, their estate. Rich people generally have a large estate and poor people have very little. But every once in a while when a person dies, it is discovered that though they appeared very rich and lived like they were very rich, they were actually deeply in debt, and their estate amounts to nothing.
  1. And every so often the opposite occurs. A person who seemed poor, a person who lived like they were poor dies, and it is discovered that they were actually quite rich.
  2. Maybe they had stocks which hadn’t been touched for a half century. Maybe they owned some jewelry which was worth a million dollars. And yet all those years they lived off of a tiny social security payment — and we often grumbling about money.
  3. That’s what I don’t want to happen to us. I don’t want us to live lives of spiritual poverty because we don’t tap into the treasures contained in the Bible. I don’t want us to live wounded lives because we never dressed our wounds with the healing ointment of God’s word.
  4. The Bible is just what we need. Even though it was written thousands of years ago, the all-knowing God knew you and your needs when He was writing it.
  5. Don’t deceive yourself that you can have a close relationship with Jesus without having a close relationship with His word. He Himself said, “the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life” – John 6:63.