Meditate & Memorize God's Word - Psalm 119:9-11

Welcome to God's Word for You, from Ministry of Sharon Arby Church in Southeast Iowa. We want to thank you for listening today, and we pray that you'll be blessed by both hearing God's Word as well as having it applied to your life and your heart. Please open in your Bibles with me to the book of Psalms, Psalm chapter 119. And this morning we'll be looking at verses 9 to 11. Psalm 119 verses 9 through 11 can be found on page 545 of your Pew Bibles. Psalm 119 beginning at verse 9. How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to your word. With my whole heart I have sought after you. Oh, let me not wander from your commandments. Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against you.

Prayer for Illumination

The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you so much for your word, and we pray now that your Holy Spirit would indeed open our ears, enlighten our minds, and open our eyes, that we would hear the things you have for us from your word. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Sermon

Well, historically, there are two books, if you look back, that are the two top bestsellers of all time. The first is, surprise, the Bible. The second is a book that people have loved for hundreds of years. It was written by an English Puritan named John Bunyan. It's called Pilgrim's Progress. Many of you are familiar with the book of Pilgrim's Progress, and it's an allegory.

It's a story where this man, whose name is Christian, goes on a journey, and another man, evangelist, comes to him, and he tells him the good news of the gospel. And he says, you need to get to the celestial city. And here's the path to get to the Celestial City. And the whole story is about Christian and his walk along that path and how he goes through the narrow gate and where he goes and how he gets to the Celestial City. And the book is an amazing allegory.

If you've never read it, I would encourage you, even if you just pick up the kids' version of it, it's worth your time. Because it talks about real issues in our lives, about how Christian can get bogged down because of the cares of this world, and of whether he knows he's doing the right things, or how Mr. Legality comes next to him and tries to get him to go down an easier path that in all reality is an impossible hill he can't climb. Or how Christian, while he's walking along this path to the celestial city, he gets in war with the giant of despair. And there's a reason this story has been the number two best-selling book of all time, and it's because it gets down to the very reality of our hearts, of our lives.

That Christian, you're on a journey. You're on a path in this life. You're headed towards the celestial city. You're headed towards God. Let me ask, do you know the path? Do you know where to go for directions? Do you know how to seek God's face? Well, this morning, that's what we're going to be looking at, is to seek God, to find the path to Him in His Word. Go to God's Word to find and to seek Him. So first on that is, you need to stay on the path. Look with me at verse 9.

How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to your words. Stay on the path. This idea of how can a young man cleanse his way would be better translated, how can a young man continue to keep his path clean? How are you in your life to walk keeping your path clean, keeping the way of your life pure? Well, the answer is right there. By taking heed according to your word. See, all of us, again, are on a path. And most of the world is following the book of Proverbs that every man has a way in his own heart that seems right.

But in reality, its path leads to death. But that's not the Christian path. The Christian path is the path that leads to life and to life abundantly. And as we walk the path that we find in the Gospels and we find in the Epistles, we find the path of righteousness through Jesus Christ and His shed blood.

When we walk along that crimson road, shed blood of Jesus Christ, we know that that's the right way because we follow His Word. And when you step off that road to the right or to the left, you know what it's like for your conscience and the Holy Spirit to speak behind you and say, no, no, no, this is the way. Follow in the way that His Word gives you to Himself. Have you guys ever realized you live in a really dark area?

I mean, I'm not sure... I come from Southern California where there are lights all the time everywhere. And we came from a small town in Pennsylvania after that where I thought, well, it's a small town. And when it got dark, well, we could see more stars than I saw in Southern California. And then I realized when we moved here within the first week that you all live in the dark.

And I found this out the hard way when something happened and I woke up early in the middle of the night and I tried to walk out of our room and I ended up walking straight into a wall. And then I realized, oh, nightlights aren't just for little kids. And I needed a light that would show me where the dangers in life were, where the walls were, where the Legos would be on the floor, how I was going to maneuver, and what the path was to get to the destination safely.

Psalm 119 later, verse 105, clearly tells you that His Word is a light unto your path. We live in a dark world. We live in a dark culture. You need His Word to light your path. You need to know where you're going. Go to His Word for that light. But there's a reality here too. that this word isn't just for you individually. We like to think that a lot. We're Americans, right? I can do it. I'm a self-made person. But that's not really the way God made the world.

Whether we're talking about humans or animals, people live in communities and we learn from communities. One of the amazing things about this world that I find are migratory animals. Animals who somehow find a path from way up north all the way down south. Animals who figure out it's getting cold and I'm going somewhere warm. And one of the things that's amazing about this is some of these animals, yes they're born with instinct, But they're also born into a culture, into a community of other animals that show them, well, hold on, we always stop at this tree, and then we go down to this state, and we stop in this canyon, and then we go further south over here, and they follow every year along that same path, because previous generations of animals have always followed that path.

And one of the things that you don't really see that much here in the English, but a Hebrew reader would have picked it up, is how do you keep your way pure, is the word shamar. Which is really similar to another word in Hebrew, shamah. which is Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 4, and that allusion comes out even more clearly in verse 10. But to keep and to hear are two very similar words that often are used as a play in Hebrew. And in Deuteronomy chapter 6, do you remember that great verse that the Jews would recite to themselves every morning and every evening? Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.

And then what's it go on to say after that? Is it just about you individually? No. It's that you're to teach this to your children. When you rise up and when you sit down, when you walk along the way, you're to tell these things to your children. You're to write them on the doorpost of your house. When we follow the path, you're not just following the path that leads to the celestial city for yourself. You're showing the younger generations the path they should be walking as well.

How many of you are in this church today, in your Christian life today, because your parents or your grandparents modeled that walk for you? It's amazing. There's a statistic that I found shocking, and I'm going to challenge men specifically here. If you're a man and you have children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, whatever, you need to listen up to this. This is a statistic that came out of Europe a few years ago.

If both mom and dad go to church regularly, 33% of their children will become regular churchgoers. So a third of their children will become regular churchgoers. If both mom and dad go to church regularly, 41% of their children will, at least irregularly, still come to church. So right there, you're talking about over a 74% chance of your kids still being in the church if both mom and dad are active. and one quarter of those children will not. But if the father is irregular in his church attendance, in his devotion to the Lord, but the mother is regular, only 3% of their children will become, statistically, regular churchgoers.

That's a 30% decline. 59% of their children will be irregular churchgoers, and 38% will become non-regular. churchgoers, non-religious. If the father doesn't come to church at all, but the mother is faithful, the statistic can't get too much lower, but it goes from 3% to 2% that their children, only 2% of their children will be churchgoers. 37% will irregularly practice religion, and a full 60% will walk away from the faith.

But if the father is regular in his devotion to the church and in his keeping of its religion, and the mother is a non-regular, 33% of the children will be churchgoers. 38 will be irregular, and 44 will be none. Think about that. If the father stops going, the number goes to 2%. But if the father goes and the mother doesn't, It jumps up to 40%. Because God is, and I'm speaking, this is totally politically incorrect here.

But God, men, the Lord has placed upon you in his created order as the head of the homes to be those who lovingly and graciously practice your religion in front of your wives and your children. And he blesses that faithfulness. now this is just statistics this is a principle this isn't a promise But how many of us have seen this in families and our friends' families?

Our children don't grow up in a vacuum. You teach your children that path. Your children and your grandchildren need you. Your nieces and your nephews need to see you practicing your religion. They need to hear you praying. They need to see you reading your Bible. They need you to teach them the path.

How else are they going to know it? Think about it. Is the gospel a path that is natural to man? No. No, the natural way of man leads to death. They need to see you teach it to them, model it for them. They need you, younger generations, need you to show them the path to God.

Second Point

Will you seek Him with all your heart? That's your second point. Seek Him with all your heart. Look with me at verse 10. With my whole heart I have sought after you. Oh, let me not wander from your commandments. Do you hear again Deuteronomy, the echoes of Deuteronomy chapter 6 there? Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength." That's how Jesus phrases it. But here in verse 10, the psalmist says, "...with my whole heart I have sought after you." Are you seeking the Lord with all your heart? The word here is derosh. It's not just a warm fuzzy. It's you're literally walking the path. You're literally searching Him out. Are you searching God out in your life? We spent all last week looking at where we seek the Lord.

And we seek him here in his word. And it's in his word that he reveals himself to us. It's when you seek the Lord in his word that he shows you his love, that he shows you his mercy, that he displays his righteousness, that he comforts you, that he will give you a joy that is incorruptible. It is in the scriptures that he gives us the very words of life. It's in the Scriptures that He gives us His peace, satisfaction, rest, and an eternal hope. Love the Lord. Seek after Him with all your heart. Go to Him in His Word and store up His Word in your heart.

When Jesus was speaking to a crowd of disciples and he told them about how they would need to drink his blood and eat his flesh, this was a long time before his death, and John chapter 6, it says, many disciples walked away from him that day. And Jesus turned and he looked at the twelve and he said, you won't also go, will you? And Peter responded to him in a great statement, to whom will we go? You have the very words of life. Are you going to God in His Word because there you find the very words of life? Are you coming to Him and seeking His face in His Word? It's amazing.

I was reading a book recently. on the New Testament and in the Gospels, and this author, Craig Blomberg, was talking about how we learn way differently in the 20th and 21st century than people learned in past centuries. In past centuries, what would happen is if you were teaching, it was mainly memorization.

And memorization came a lot easier to people because they memorized a whole lot of stuff all the time. One of the easiest examples to this is we have a hard time, I have a hard time, memorizing the Westminster Shorter Catechism. And yet, when the catechism was written in the 1600s, the shorter one was for the little kids. and the larger one is for the adults. If you want to see what the larger one is like, just look underneath in your bulletin and try to memorize that.

But when the disciples were alive, the standard method of teaching is you would go and you would sit at someone's feet and you would learn from them and you would soak up everything they told you and you would memorize it. You would try to get it into your brain and you would try to chew it over and you would talk to each other back and forth about, here's what Jesus said to me, here's what the rabbi said, do you remember it like this? And they would go back and forth until they knew that they had it memorized. And if you open up the Scriptures, especially the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, you're going to find that Jesus didn't say things just one time. But Jesus said things again and again to his disciples to get the point across that they would remember it because they needed to hear it again and again and chew over it and get it in their minds. Because it was when they got it into their minds that then it would get into their souls and it would start changing them.

And that's your last point today is to hide his word in your heart that same way. Hide God's word in your heart. Look with me at verse 11. your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against you." Originally, when we had scheduled out what this preaching series on God's Word was going to be, we were going to do meditation last week and memorization this week, and instead we switched that up and just combined it together.

And so today you're getting the M&Ms of the Christian life. This is the meditation and memorization. Meditation and memorization. If you want to continue to grow in your Christian walk, I encourage you to meditate and memorize God's Word. Meditate and memorize God's Word. This isn't something new or just in Psalm 119, verse 1. You sang about it in Psalm chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. How does the Psalter open? Psalm chapter 1, verses 1 and 2.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night." Blessed is the one who meditates on his word day and night.

When the children of Israel were just about to cross over into the promised land, This is what Joshua was told by God. Joshua chapter 1 verse 8 is clear about this. This law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will have good success, and then you will make your way prosperous.

Are you meditating on his word? Now, there's a bad idea of what meditation is. We're not talking about transcendental meditation. Those guys are somewhere else in the state. That's not what we're talking about. This isn't emptying your mind of everything. This isn't yoga thoughtfulness. This isn't mindfulness. This isn't coming in tune with yourself. The idea of biblical meditation is whispering. muttering, chewing it over, saying it again and again to yourself, getting it in your soul.

One of my favorite Jewish authors, one of my favorite fictional writers of all times is a Jewish man named Chaim Potok. And one of my favorite books of his is a novel about a little boy named Asher Lev. And Asher is a devout Hasidic Jew and one night his father is kept over in Boston and there's a snowfall coming down and he can't get out. And Asher is talking about how he walks into the living room and all the lights are out.

And he sees his mother standing by the window as the snow is heavily coming down outside and only the street lamps illuminate her face. And as he sits there in the dark watching his mother, he hears her muttering slowly under her breath. And as he listens carefully, he realizes she's chanting the Psalms to her.

That's the idea of biblical meditation. that when you're by yourself, that you're talking to yourself God's Word back to you, that you're remembering His promises, that you're saying His Word, and that you're keeping it in your heart. There's another way that we memorize God's Word, and again, that's what we do every week when we come together. In Colossians 3, verse 16, God says, Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing each other with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. It is when you sing the psalms to yourself, the full Psalter, that those words, psalms, hymns and spiritual songs are in the Greek, they're all pointing back to the book, the whole book of psalms. And when we sing those psalms to ourselves and to each other, You're meditating on God's Word. One of the best things you can do is to memorize the Psalms by yourself, to get it into your heart, because these are the very words of Christ. And if you want them to dwell in you richly, get them in there. Let them seep deeply into your soul. Be careful.

Just like when we talked about Bible reading, just like when we looked at studying, This can easily become just a rote practice or legalism. I am not telling you today that this will make you a Christian. Will it build up your faith? You better believe it. But this memorizing and meditating is part of the Christian nature because we love God. It is not how we get to be saved. So be careful there. But if you're a Christian, it's going to be the very fabric of what you want to do is you want to be in His Word. You want to be memorizing. You want to be meditating on His Word.

And it's not, we don't just find this because it's a principle that we pluck out of scripture and make a doctrine out of or something. No. The best example for us for how this happened was Jesus Himself. Matthew chapter 4, Jesus is being tempted by the serpent. And when he's being tempted by the serpent and he's hungry, he's thirsty, and he's weak, and the devil comes to tempt him and to attack him, Jesus didn't have to say, oh, hold on, hold on, Satan, wait, wait, wait, let me go get my Torah scroll so I can figure out how to answer you. No, he was immediately able to respond back to Satan. that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." Jesus had the Word in Him. He was the Word incarnate. And if Jesus was memorizing the Word, I think that's enough principle for us to realize maybe we need it even more.

And this is something amazing that happens. Start with one verse. Give yourself one verse a month. Just one verse a month, find a verse that you need to work on and memorize that one verse. But this is a practice that will blossom and develop in your life.

One of our best friends with her group of friends, they memorized the entire book of Jonah in one semester. It's possible. People are still doing that type of memorization today. And other people who I talk to who memorize large chunks of scripture, one of the things that happens is when you're memorizing scripture, when you're bearing it in your heart, it's like you start connecting dots throughout the Bible. You'll be hearing preaching and you'll go, oh, that reminds me of this in my memory verses. Or when you're being tempted, you'll go, oh, hold on, I need this.

And this is not just something that's a good pious practice. This is how you do warfare with the devil. One of the first things I have to do with men who I disciple, who are dealing with pornography, is we need to get some fighter verses that you go to right away. Flee from sexual immorality. It's one of the commands they need to memorize. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. And I tell these men all the time, right away when that temptation comes, you've got to recite this verse, and you've got to get it in your head, and you've got to do it. Because this is how we wage warfare against our bodies. This is how we wage warfare.

If you struggle with gluttony, if you struggle with anger, if you struggle with despondency, if you struggle with anxiety, cast your cares upon Jesus, for He hears you. At Chalk and Talk, we're going to be talking about some of the ways and methods that I found helpful for people, and I'd encourage you to come and to hear about some of those ways and things that you can do.

But I promise you, as you continue to meditate on God's Word and memorize God's Word, you'll start seeing fruitfulness in your life. You'll see self-control, you'll see gentleness. We often think of the fruits of the Spirit as something that just pops up. something that just grows out of nowhere. But in reality, this idea of keeping is what God tells man to do in Genesis chapter 2, the same word that he used to keep the ground. You all know what it's like to have to keep the ground, to farm it, to till it, to make sure the soil actually brings up the fruit. You've got to do that in your own soul, and you do that by seeking Him in His Word.

Closing Prayer

Go to your M&Ms daily. Meditate. Memorize. Get it into your soul. Be enriched by God's Word. Walk the path. that God has set out for you in His Word. Let's pray. God, we thank You so much for Your Word. God, we thank You for giving us such an easy thing. Lord, it seems so simple. Thank You, Lord, for stooping down and talking to us. God, we pray that You would forgive us for how often we neglect Your Word. Lord, we pray that we would work diligently to seek your face, Lord, to hold your commandments, to love you with all of our hearts. We pray these things in Jesus's name. Amen.

Thank you for listening to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon Arpey Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. We pray that you would be blessed as you grow in your love for God, your love for his word, as well as your love for his people. Until next week, God bless you.