For preaching this morning, we'll take the whole of Psalm 118, which may be biting off more than we can chew. And matter of fact, it surely is biting off more than we can chew. But for reading, let's read three sections. Let's begin with verse 18. It's obviously organized according to the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, He, the letters of the alphabet. Let's read section Gimel to begin with, beginning to read in verse 17. Deal bountifully with your servant, that I may live and keep your word. Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. I am a sojourner on the earth. Hide not your commandments from me. My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times. You rebuke the insolent, accursed ones who wander from your commandments. Take away from me scorn and contempt, for I have kept your testimonies. Even though princes sit plotting against me, your servant will meditate on your statutes. Your testimonies are my delight. They are my counselors. Let's next read from verse 81. Verse 81, section of Kaaf. My soul longs for your salvation. I hope in your word. My eyes long for your promise, I ask, when will you comfort me? For I have become like a wineskin in the smoke, yet I have not forgotten your statutes. How long must your servant endure? When will you judge those who persecute me? The insolent have dug pitfalls for me. They do not live according to your law. All your commandments are sure. They persecute me with falsehood. Help me. They have almost made an end of me on earth, but I have not forsaken your precepts. In your steadfast love, give me life that I may keep the testimonies of your mouth." And last, let's read from verse 161. That's the sheen, which is also the letter seen. 161. Princes persecute me without cause, but my heart stands in awe of your words. I rejoice at your word like one who finds great spoil. I hate and abhor falsehood, but I love your law. Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous rules. Great peace have those who love your law. Nothing can make them stumble. I hope for your salvation, O Lord, and I do your commandments. My soul keeps your testimonies. I love them exceedingly. I keep your precepts and testimonies, for all my ways are before you. Turning then to the New Testament, our gospel reading in John chapter 11. You'll find that on page 1,144 in the Pew Bible. beginning to read John 12, kind of beginning in the middle of the dialogue here in verse 32. Our Lord Jesus says, and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die. So the crowd answered him, We have heard from the Law that the Christ remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man? So Jesus said to them, The Light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the Light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the Light, believe in the Light, that you may become sons of Light. When Jesus had said these things, he departed and hid himself from them. Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him, so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled. Lord, who has believed what he heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? Therefore they could not believe, for again, Isaiah said, he has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them. Isaiah said these things because he saw His glory and spoke of Him. Nevertheless, many, even of the authorities, believed in Him. But for fear of the Pharisees, they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue. For they love the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. And Jesus cried out and said, Whoever believes in Me believes not in Me, but in Him who sent Me. And whoever sees me, sees him who sent me. I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If anyone hears my word and does not keep them, I do not judge him, for I did not come into the world to judge the world, but to save the world. The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge. The word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the father who sent me has himself given me a commandment what to say and what to speak. And I know that His commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me thus far in the reading of God's Word. This is the Word of the Lord. Would you bow your hearts with me in prayer? Let's pray together. Almighty Father, incarnate Word, Holy Comforter, triune God, we do ask, as we have prayed, that you would come to us. We join and use the words of the psalmist, and we pray that you would open our eyes, that we might behold wonderful things from your law. Show us the beauties of your word, show us the delights of scripture, and show us Jesus in his beauty, we pray. For we pray in his name, amen. Dear congregation, well loved by our Lord Jesus Christ. The Psalms are a gift to you from your loving Lord, who is revealed in their pages. The Lord Jesus, after his resurrection, In speaking to his followers, Luke 24, 44, he said, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and in the Psalms must be fulfilled. Our Lord Jesus uses those three sections of scripture what the Jews call the Tanakh, that is the Torah. Tanakh is an acronym. The Torah, the books of Moses, the Nevi'im, the prophets, and the Ketuvim, the writings of which the most prominent book is the Psalms. That book, the Tanakh, points to me, our Lord Jesus was saying. So we know from our Lord's teaching that the Psalms point us to him. They point us to him, at times very directly in prophecy, but most regularly they point us to him because they set up patterns and expectations that he, and ultimately he alone, can fulfill. These Psalms point us to Jesus, and because of that, it's through these Psalms that you can have a meaningful life. It's through these Psalms that you can find some stability in the topsy-turvy experience that you go through these days. is through these psalms that you can find some comfort in the middle of the challenges and the problems that you're facing at this point in your life. This Psalm 119 is an invitation to you. It's an invitation to you to enter into the experience of the psalmist and to feel and to get to know what he knew, the comforts, the satisfactions and delights the stability that he found in his crazy world. There's an invitation for you to find joy if you'll listen carefully and if you'll believe what he teaches you here. This Psalm 119 is in the middle of our Bible. You kind of open it up, you almost open to it. It's very structured, obviously, as are all the Psalms, but probably the most obviously structured. It's organized according to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph, Bet, Gimel, et cetera, et cetera. It's an acrostic. And it might surprise you, but there are many acrostics in the Psalms. We have acrostics in Psalms 9 and 10, 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 145. A large section of the Book of Lamentations is an acrostic. You may not have known, but Proverbs 31.10 and following, about the virtuous woman, that is an acrostic as well. This acrostic has eight lines per section of the Hebrew alphabet. And those eight lines correspond to the eight descriptions that the psalmist uses of one thing. His descriptions are the laws, commandments, the testimonies, the precepts, the statutes, the rules, the judgments, the words. Is he talking about different things? He's talking about one thing. He's talking about what we call the Old Testament, and what the Jews call the Tanakh. He's delighting in the Old Testament. Now, if you'll stay for the Sunday school, and I hope you would take that invitation seriously, we'll learn that there's a billion and a half people in this world that don't have access to this book that we call the Old Testament. There are thousands of congregations, there's whole denominations of Christians that long for this book that we call the Old Testament. This is the book that the psalmist is delighting in. So if this delight is true of him with the Old Testament alone, how much more true is it of us who have the clarity of the New Testament to add to our joy? Now, poetry like this, this very structured poetry, poetry, I dare say, has fallen on hard times in our culture. I won't ask for a raising of hands, but I wonder how many of us have read poems in the last three weeks? It's gone downhill in the last 50 years particularly. But in ancient cultures, and in many cultures throughout the world even today, if it's worth saying, if it's worth remembering, it's worth putting into poetry. So in our Anglo-Saxon culture, think of some of our earliest works like Beowulf, that's poetry. Roman culture, the Aeneid, that's poetry. You think of Homer's works, the Iliad, the Odyssey. Those are in poetry. Think of Mesopotamian culture, the Epic of Gilgamesh. That's poetry. About half of the Old Testament, at least a third, let's say, is poetry. The prophets are poetry, and all the Psalms are poetry. Now we might think, well, if poetry sounds so restricted, How can you have deep emotion? But it's quite the opposite, isn't it? It's like a garden hose. The more you clamp down on it, the farther it goes. So there's a lot of passion, there's a lot of feeling here in this Psalm 119, even though it's very structured. If you kind of wonder why his thoughts are moving in this direction and that direction, well, it's because he's using the same letter of the alphabet, and that forces things to move around a little bit. stitched together as the Apostle Paul does in his very logical epistles. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to follow a few of the threads that go through this tapestry, or to change the metaphor, I'd like for us to listen to a few of the chords here in this Psalm 119, both the minor and the major. Well, the minor chords are the suffering. If you just scratch the surface here, you can feel the troubles that the psalmist has gone through, which we can relate to. And then you'll see the delights are the major chord, his pleasure. in the Word of God. and his appreciation for the benefits that he finds in this word from Yahweh. I would encourage you to keep your Bibles open. Please, I'll be jumping around quite a bit. I won't even be quoting full verses. So please keep your Bible open. We'll be following some of these threads here. The first of five points from this, five chords from this psalm is that we find in the word of God, we find light for our darkness. We find light for our darkness. Probably the most famous of the verses here in this psalm is 105, which has been turned into a famous song. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. We hear something similar in 160. The sum of your word is truth. For the psalmist, the word of God defines what is true. It is the touchstone, the lodestone of what is true. Perhaps during this, thanks, maybe you had a focus on the solas of the Reformation. You may have been considering the doctrine of sola scriptura. This brings us close to that understanding, that we have this, in this book, we have a, a way of knowing what is true and what is false. Here's a philosophy. Here's a system of values. Is it in accordance with what God has said in his word? Then we know it's true. If it's not in accordance with what God has said in his word, then we know it's false. We have in this word a way of becoming wise. We read in 99, I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts. You can understand more than your secularized university professors, than the pundits on the media, if you understand what God is saying through his word. If you want to be a knowledgeable person, if you want to be wise, you need this word. The psalmist says in 98, he says, your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me. In 104, through your precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate every false way. 169, let my cry come before you, O Lord, give me understanding according to your word. This is where he's finding light for his darkness. This is where he's looking for instruction. He understands that by nature, all of us live in darkness. We were born in a spiritual ignorance and we need to be illuminated. We need to be enlightened. Now, our culture has been working on this enlightenment project with what we call modernism for the last 250 years. We think that if we start with ourselves and our human abilities to reason, If I think, therefore I am. If we start with ourselves, we can kind of come to the universal truth and universal values. But in the last 70, 80 years or so, we've given up modernism and gone to post-modernism. Because everyone has seen this doesn't work when you start with yourself. You can't get to something universal. So now you have your truth and I have mine. You have your values and I have my values. We've given up. We live in a cynical age. And it's understandable that we've given up. If you start with humans, you can't end up with universal. You can only end up with universal by starting with God and what he has said in his word. So we are ignorant and we need a reorientation, and that's what we find here in this book. This book is for all of us, not just for those with advanced degrees. We read that the unfolding of your word gives light. It imparts understanding to the simple, we read in 180. This is for all of us. It reorients what we love and how we love it, and it gives us a balanced life. As I prayed at the beginning of our time together, verse 18, a wonderful prayer. Let me encourage you to pray something along these lines every time you come to this place on a Sunday, to hear the word of God. Open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. That word wondrous in English, I dare say, has lost some of its punch. We find cool things in the word of God, sure. Nice things, yes, okay. But the word here is pele. The Hebrew word is pele. I think of that word because, I don't know if you've been watching the World Cup soccer games, but pele is one of the greatest of the persons who ever played that game, the Brazilian soccer player. He was just a miracle player. And that's what this word means. It's something that is a miracle. Something that causes your jaw to drop and your mouth to hang open. That's what we have in scripture. Something that astounds and stupefies. Something that makes you amazed. If you want to be amazed, then you need to attend to this book. You need to draw your attention to this book because it shows us this child who Isaiah describes as the Pele. His name shall be called Pele. Wonderful. Counselor. Mighty God. That's this one. That's this one. He's the one who says of himself, as we read in John 12, he says, to look at me is to look at God. What? What human being can make that kind of a claim? This one can. He's the magic man. He was the magic baby. He's the magic man. And this is a magic book, if I can put it that way. This is an amazing, astounding book. This is a book for you. But it's not only light for us in our darkness, it's rescue for us in our weakness. Secondly, it's rescue for us in our weakness. There's all kinds of threats against the psalmist. We can read in 25 that he's close to death. He says, my soul clings to the dust. Give me life according to your word. He's always asking for life again and again here, because there's this dust of death over his whole life. Everything that we touch seems to fall apart at one level or another. Even if we paint our house, ten years later we have to paint it again. We invest in a relationship, and that relationship goes south. We trust in people, and they fail us. There's this desire for something that gives meaning, true meaning, and gives a sense of wholeness. You can hear him cry out again and again. 149, hear my voice according to your steadfast love, O Lord. According to your justice, give me life. 154, redeem, plead my cause, redeem me, give me life according to your promise. Great is your mercy, 156. Oh, Lord, give me life, 159. Consider how I love your precepts. Give me life according to your steadfast love. He's looking to God to renew him, to sustain him in life, and to give him a meaningful, transformed life. He says in verse 17, deal bountiful with your servant that I may live and keep your word. I am severely afflicted, give me life, O Lord, according to your word. Many threats face him. What's the Bible term for deliverance? The broadest term in the Bible for rescue, deliverance, being freed from something that's against you. What might you say is the most broad term to describe the liberation and the freedom that we get as we go through the various threats against us as human beings in this life. I dare say that word is salvation. That word is salvation. Salvation means all those things. What's the Hebrew word for salvation? Yeshua, right? Yeshua, and that's the name of our Savior. His name is His work. He is the liberator. He is the rescuer. He is the one who sets free, and He is the one who gives life. He's the one who gives life. He gives life not only in justifying us from our sins, but He gives us life in sanctifying us. The psalmist would never be content with just an external forgiveness of his guilt. He wants an internal transformation. Can you listen, look at the 32 with me, please? He says, I will run in the way of your commandments when you enlarge my heart. He wants to be transformed. He wants to be set free. And from the things that bind you, from the things that set you free, This is where you must turn. You must turn like the psalmist to the Lord your God through the mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is salvation, and find the liberation that you need. That's the way to find the liberation from the pornography. That's the way to find the liberation from the pills. That's the way to find the liberation from whatever it is that's got you by the throat. It's by turning to him through Christ, and we find that in his word. Look at Verse 29, put false ways far from me, graciously teach me your law. My soul melts away for sorrow, strengthen me according to your word. He wants an inner transformation, not just external help. This is where he's looking for his security. He says in verse 45, I shall walk in a wide place for I have sought your precepts. That brings us to our third point. We find not only light for our darkness and rescue for our weakness, but we find also, in the Word of God, reliability for our vulnerability. Reliability for our vulnerability. Vulnerability comes from that Latin expression, vulnere, which means to wound, or a vulnus is a blow, it is a wound, something that you suffer. And again and again and again, in every section, almost in every other verse, you can feel the blows of life that have been on the psalmist. He says in 23, even though princes sit plotting against me, your servant will meditate on your statutes. He says in 87, they have almost made an end of me on earth, but I have not forsaken your precepts. He says in 109, I hold my life in my hand continually, but I do not forget your law. People have surely, the older you are, the more you've experienced that people mistreat you as you go through this life. People abuse you. People threaten you in various ways. People oppress you. Where can you turn for relief? The psalmist is not turning for horizontal relief. He's not looking to other princes to deliver him from these particular princes. He's looking vertically. He's looking to God to help him, right? He says in 110, the wicked have laid a snare for me, but I do not stray from your precepts. He has his orientation in a vertical way. So what is it that stands against you at this point in your life? What's oppressing you? What's keeping you from flourishing? Maybe what person? What enemy? Perhaps it's someone that's even very close to you that you can't seem to get away from, right? The psalmist, we read in 42, is being taunted. The psalmist, we read in 51, is being derided. Very modern expression in 69. He's being smeared with lies. He's being persecuted falsely. You know something of that? he has all these social threats against him. And I dare say your worst social threat is one that we often don't think about and should think about more. There is a certain person, a certain intelligence, power, who wants nothing more than to alienate you from Christ and to drive you from his church. That's his sole goal. We call him the Shaitan. He's the devil, right? He's after your soul. and he's much more intelligent than you are. You have someone against you, and you need God's help to escape him. Where are you going to find something dependable amidst the shaking, topsy-turvy experience of this life? Here, in this word. That's what the psalmist is saying again and again. He says in 89, he says, Forever, O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens. You feel that? Reliability. 86 he says all your commandments are sure They persecute me with falsehood help me 152 long I have known from your testimonies that you have founded them Where are you going to find something reliable in this life? Even the people that you most trust they will fail you at some level and Your grandparents, your parents will die on you. Your spouse may die on you, may leave you. People you trust may turn their back on you, may betray you. People will fail us. People will fail us. But we, like the psalmist, can look upwards. He says in 160, the sum of your word is truth. Every one of your righteous rules endures forever. The psalmist describes himself as a sojourner, and he says in 19, I am a sojourner on the earth, hide not your commandments from me. He finds reliable help in the Lord. I am a sojourner. I've been traveling all over the place these past few months, and I am reliant on other people to, where am I gonna sleep? Where am I gonna eat? I just had an invitation for lunch. I appreciate the youngs having me come for lunch. So I'm dependent on others, and the same is true for you. You are a pilgrim. Know it or not, you do not have all the resources in yourself. Disney will fail you. Disney says you have everything, and it's just in you. You need help from outside, and ultimately it has to be this way. You need something that's reliable. The Lord says in 139, you have appointed your testimonies in righteousness and in all faithfulness. 90, your faithfulness endures to all generations. Against the threats, against the betrayals, against the people who leave you through death or through other means, you have something reliable and something that will defend you, and that is the Lord himself. He says in 114, you are my hiding place and my shield. I hope in your word. And that brings us to our fourth point, hope, hope. We find in the word of God, we find hope for our fear. He is our hope in the face of our fears. He says in 43, take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth, for my hope is in your rules. 49, remember your word to your servant in which you have made me hope. I rise before the dawn, he says in 147, and I cry for help. I hope in your words. Can you remember a time when you were anxious about something and someone in a position of authority, someone in a position of knowledge came to you and said, it's gonna be all right. Or have you seen that with a child, the child's worried about something and the parent says, it's gonna be okay and explains and what does the child do or what do we do? We just, we can let it go and we relax, right? So for many of us, anxiety is like a demon sitting on our shoulder. It's just right there. It's ready to pull us down. It's ready to make our life narrow. The Lord Jesus says he came that we might have life and that we might have it abundantly. Not that we might have a life that's choked out by anxiety and fear, which is many of our experiences, right? How to be free, how to be free. Hope, right? How to have hope. The Lord has given you hope and a ground for hope. He says in 147, I rise before dawn and I cry for help. I hope in your words. And in 50, this is my comfort in my affliction that your promise gives me life. He finds his help. in the promises of God. 52, when I think of your rules from of old, I take comfort. Which of our catechisms is focused on the theme of comfort? It's the Heidelberg Catechism, right? What is your comfort, your only comfort? That's the great theme of the Heidelberg Catechism. And that's what the psalmist is looking for. He says in 82, my eyes look long for your promise. I ask, when will you comfort me? Your comfort in a promise is connected with the reliability of the person who makes the promise. So let's say you're a college student and you get the, at the beginning of the year, you get this, this terrible piece of paper. It says, it's a promissory note. And now what? You must pay $60,000 for this one year of education, and you must sign your signature to this paper promising to pay it, and you're shaking. How am I going to pay that money, let alone another three on top of that? But let's imagine that you have Uncle Bob, and he has said to you, before you come to that time, he says, When you get to the end of your college experience, I will pay all your loans. I'll take care of all of them. And you know that Uncle Bob has plenty of resources, and you know that Uncle Bob, he fulfills what he promises, right? So to the extent you believe you're Uncle Bob, what will your experience be? you'll have comfort, right? The anxiety of signing that paper will go away and you can, okay, I'll sign that paper because I know I'm okay. I know Uncle Bob will take care of me. And that's what you find here in the scriptures. You find something that's secure, something that is trustworthy. The psalmist says, confirm to your servant your promise that you may be feared. What is the promise at the root level? The root level of the promise is the gospel itself. If you believe the gospel, the good news, you will have comfort through belief in the gospel. The psalmist says in 148, my eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promise. Now, perhaps we, in the reformed tradition, we may overreact to the health and wealth gospel. The health and wealth gospel says believe and receive. Believe and receive healing, a good marriage, perfect kids, whatever it is. But before we push that aside, there's something profoundly true to that. Believe and receive. And there's a warning there. If you don't believe, you will not receive. If you do not believe the promise, if you don't attend to the promise, understand the promise, and then embrace and believe it, you won't have the freedom from the fear. You'll be stuck in your fear. You must believe. Know what God says, believe His promises, that you may enter into that enjoyment of freedom from fear. by faith in Christ. Lastly, and briefly, the Lord promises us in this Psalm 119, he promises us happiness. He promises us happiness for our hardship, even in the midst of our difficulties. Look at verse one, please. Where does this Psalm begin? It begins on this note of happiness. Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with their whole heart. Now, I understand, blessing maybe focuses more on the objective ground for our satisfaction, and happiness more as the subjective, perhaps, experience of that, but they're tied together, right? They're tied together. Our happiness comes from the blessing. So this psalm starts in the same way as what other literature begins on this note of blessing. Blessed is the man who walks not in this way, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord. Very close tie between Psalm 119 and Psalm 1, the invitation to all the psalms. And whose most famous sermon begins with this same word, blessed, blessed. are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness that is not theirs. Blessed are those who are poor in spirit. Our Lord Jesus. Our Lord Jesus and the psalmists are inviting us to find our happiness through a connection to God in his word. The question is not whether you're looking for happiness. That's taken for granted in the Bible. That each one of us is looking for our own happiness. That's taken for granted. The question is, where are you looking for your happiness? That's the question. And the psalmist is saying, here it is. Here it is. It's in the vertical. If it's in the 401k, I dare say this has not been a good year. Maybe in recent few weeks, this has not been a good year. Your happiness is at threat. What if it's in your child? Have you set your happiness in your child? My child must turn out a certain way, have a certain success, even turn out spiritually a certain way, or I cannot be happy. Is that the case? That's an idolatry, brothers and sisters. If your happiness is in anything else other than here, that's an idolatry. Now, do we stop praying for our children? Of course we don't stop praying for our children. Do we stop hoping for them, longing for them, to walk in a right way, to have successes of various sorts, especially in the Lord? No, of course we don't. But our happiness must transcend the things that we have here. Do you remember the story of King Croesus of Sardis in Lydia, modern Turkey? The story is told of a visit to him from Solon, the Athenian philosopher and statesman. And Cretas thought he would, you know that expression, as rich as Cretas. Cretas had it all, he had it all. Powerful kingdom, do whatever he wanted, resources almost limitless at his disposal. And so Solon comes and Cretas says, Solon, who is the happiest man on earth? Who's the happiest man? And who is Cretas expecting that he'll say? Of course it's you, O king, you must be the happiest because you have it all. And Salad scratches his beard a bit and he says, oh, it was Demeter or whoever he was of such and such a place. He had an honorable life and many children and da, da, da, da, da, and he died an honorable death in battle and he was the happiest man. And so Croesus says, well, who's next? hopeful again. And he mentions another fellow from another place who had these blessings according to Greek values and who died an honorable death again according to Greek values. And he said, you can't. He wouldn't give him a name. He said, you can't tell. They're blessed until the end. And Croesus went away disappointed. And Croesus found out to his great disappointment that Solon was right, because Croesus lost it all. He lost his kingdom. He lost his everything, right? So the question is for you, for me, for Croesus, where are we looking? Where, where are we looking for happiness? The psalmist has told us, he has found the way to be happy. The way to be happy is to be connected to the one who is the source of all happiness. This section, if you look with me at verse 69, the section on Tet, Focuses on this theme particularly intensely maybe you've heard the expression mazel tov from watching filler on the roof Mazal tov or however you want to say it tov means good mazel is a star so literally it means a good star But the word tov this is the word here in 68 you are tov and Then it gives us the verb form you do tov you do good. I And he uses the same verb in 65. You have dealt well with your servant. You've done good to me. The psalmist has found out what Augustine knew. Our hearts are restless until they rest in God. in you. He is the source of all goodness. He himself is the source of all the happinesses possible, and every happiness and every kiss of joy that you've ever experienced in this life is just an expression of his deep and infinite goodness. That's who he is. He is goodness himself, the Lord our God, right? And that's why the psalmist, he's not just delighting in a book. He's not just delighting in words on a page. He's delighting in God himself. And that's why you can feel his emotion again and again. In the way of your testimonies, I delight as much as in all riches. 24, your testimonies are my delight. They're my counselors. 70, their heart is unfeeling like fat, but I delight. I delight. Can you feel it? It's like finding a treasure. Again and again, he uses that expression. He says, I rejoice at your word like one who finds great spoil. Have you read the Count of Monte Cristo? Edmond Dantes goes down, down, down as deep as human misery and suffering can go. And then he finds something that transforms him. And he finds this escape and a treasure. And the treasure changes everything. And our Lord Jesus presents himself as a treasure. He says, I'm like a treasure in a field. If you know that it's there, you'll sell everything in order to get that field so you can have that treasure. He's the treasure. And this is the treasure box right here. That's why the psalmist is delighting in it. The Lord Jesus says, I am the pearl of great price. If you see how valuable he is, then you'll sell it all just to have him. He's that valuable. To have that one thing will make you happy. And he himself is that one thing. The Lord Jesus told us that wherever your treasure is, there your heart will be. And if He is your treasure, your heart will be with Him. That's why He moves us then from delighting, and the psalmist goes from delight into love. He says in 127, therefore I love your commandments above gold, above fine gold. The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of pieces of gold and silver, right? He's found in God, he's found a great inheritance. Now, if you knew you were gonna inherit $5 million next year, would you worry about the bills at the end of the month? No, because you have this hope, you have this, you know that you're secure. And that's where the psalmist takes us. He says, your testimonies are my heritage forever. They're my inheritance. They define me. They are the joy of my heart, he says, right? Brothers and sisters, the psalmist has found and you are invited to find. You are invited to find light for your darkness here. You're invited to find rescue for your weakness here. You're invited to find reliability amidst all your vulnerabilities here. hope amidst all your fears, and happiness amidst whatever kind of hardship that you may be facing at this point in time. That's what you have here in this word. So how do we respond then, briefly? As human beings, whatever we find to be lovely, we love. Whatever we find to be delectable, we delight in. It's our response. It's an unavoidable, natural response. So to the extent you see the beauties of the Lord Jesus as they're displayed for you here in the psalm and throughout the scriptures, then your heart is drawn to Him, to love Him, to want Him, to delight in Him. That's the response. to value him, the one we think is valuable. As you see how lovable he is, how worthy of being adored and of being praised and of being delighted in, then your heart will respond and your life will be more and more conformed to delighting in him. This is the gospel. The psalmist says in 57, the Lord is my portion. The gospel is not that we have worked in ourselves a love for God, but that we have seen the love of God for us. That's the gospel. The gospel is God's love for us, that God has come down to us. In Sunday school, we'll talk more about the work of Wycliffe Bible Translators, which is to bring the word of God down across cultural and language barriers. You have the word of God because somebody brought it into English so that we can talk about the word of God in English. And John Wycliffe was the first one that brought it into English, right? That's what that's about. But on a grand and cosmic scale, the Lord himself came down. He sent his son down, the very heart of his heart down to us and crossed all the barriers necessary to bring us his word that we could understand, to bring us this promise of the gospel so that if you believe it, that you could find joy in it. Praise God. Would you join me in prayer? Let's pray. Lord, you indeed are our portion. We thank you for giving us the Lord Jesus Christ and offering us eternal life through trust in him Lord, we who are believers, we say we believe, help us in our unbelief. Please strengthen our faith that we might have greater freedom from anxiety. Please strengthen our faith that we might have a greater experience of happiness in this world, that we might endure the hardships and not just grumble our way through this life, but rejoice our way through this life. Please give us a sense of stability, especially for those of us who are being rocked. Even as a congregation, Lord, we go through ups and downs and we've been rocked to the right and to the left. Lord, would you be our stability? Would you be our rock? Would you be our teacher? Would you be our help and our hope? Help us, Lord, we pray. We thank you that we have victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you that we have happiness and the kisses of grace in this life and the assurance of eternal and unending and super abundant life in the world to come around the corner. Oh Lord, we pray that you'd help us to live more and more in confidence and in joy. We thank you for the one who is beautiful beyond comparison and we ask that you would draw our hearts out to him. We thank you, Lord, for the prophets who spoke to us in the Old Testament in many ways, many times, but we thank you that you've spoken to us in these last days through your Son, the heir of all things. We pray and ask for your blessing on the congregation and on each of our hearts, from the youngest of the children to the oldest among us. Lord, bless us and keep us and make your face shine on us, we pray, for we ask in Jesus' name. Amen and amen.