is actually a big part of what we're looking at this morning because of the fear of the Lord being the beginning of wisdom. We fear God not just because He's bigger and stronger than us. We fear Him because He is fundamentally different than us. He is always other. He is always holy. He's one of a kind. And so we're considering His word this morning. We're considering Psalm 119. And so I invite you to find it in your Bible. or on your phone, I'm gonna be probably using a lot of the New American Standard this morning because it's a psalm that you have to go hunting and searching to find a verse for. And if it occurs to me, I only know it by the look on the page through the Bible I use at home. And so, it's not much different than English Standard, and so I will read beginning, In verse 97, I'm going to read through 104. It starts with love. This stanza starts with love and it ends with a mention of hate. It starts with meditation and it ends in understanding. Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever mine. I have more insight than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, because I have observed your precepts. I have restrained my feet from every evil way that I may keep your word. I have not turned aside from your ordinances, for you yourself have taught me how sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth. From your precepts, I get understanding. Therefore, I hate every false way. Let's pray. Father in heaven, Lord, as we draw near to you, we know that we are incapable of offering the worship that you are worthy of. We are not even qualified to be in your presence. apart from the sacrifice of your son and his ongoing intercession at your right hand. But we thank you that you have enabled us not just to have access through Jesus, but to have empowerment through the spirit. And so we pray that you will then empower us to seek you this morning, to hear from you as Bob Thompson prayed. And that we, Lord, as a result, would not leave here the same as when we came. Overcome the natural inertia in our heart to not move. We pray, Lord, that you will soften our hearts, that you would open our eyes. And so we commit ourselves in this time to you. In the name of Jesus, your son, amen. Well, I know it's on the heart of many of you, the weight of our current situation in this land. I will not be speaking about current events or what's going on at the current moment, but I am going to be speaking about what has led to where we're at. And I'm going to introduce by looking at some changes in law that we have experienced that have brought us to a place of lawlessness. Psalm 119 speaks a lot about your law. That very first verse I read, oh, how I love your law. Law is not something that we as Christians tend to talk about in the positive form. We tend to treat about it as something negative that led us to Christ. And once now that we're in Christ, it kind of has gone by the wayside. And we tend to focus on the relational aspects. But it is part of that relationship. It is your law. It is part of knowing God. And for the Christian, it is written on our heart as it was on Jesus' heart. The love of the law of God disappeared in our land. over a century ago, really, in popular culture and in high places. I was reminded of this by a particular individual named Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who was on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932 for 30 years. He was one of the leading justices in our nation. He was from Boston, and you might think of him kind of as a Brahmin. He's one of those old New England families that had a right of privilege at the time. But he was a survivor of the Civil War. He was wounded three times in the Civil War. And it appears like it jaundiced him to the savagery of life and the fact that we must face it with open eyes. And he had no time for the social reformers with their human sentimentality as if some kind of redistribution of wealth could make a paradise on earth. He believed the only way to really get change is to take life in hand. Things are gonna have to come to warfare. Things are gonna have to come to cleaning up the weak and the imbeciles of this world. and to there forge a stronger and a better humanity. It's chilling actually to read some of the things that he said in his letters when he's kind of talking with friends. All that talk about social uplift and onward and upward made him want to puke is his language. He was truly a social Darwinist in his day and he believed that might made right That really, there are no morals that are intrinsic to the human condition, to human nature. Nothing common that all humanity has in place. That really, the only morals are those that the public are willing to fight for. And you either submit to them, or you die. Public force is the name of law. Experience, not logic, is what causes laws to be made. This is one of the chief thoughtful instigators behind the 20th century development in American jurisprudence and legal thought. He was a very strong dissenter and he was very gifted with words and creating proverbs with his thoughts. Now, how do we answer that? How do we answer the idea that there are no absolutes, there are no laws, there are no You know, common humanity that's based, that kind of grounds what is right. Well, one of the things to answer, and it's done by a political philosopher, Robert George spoke of, he's actually self-refuting himself. He says, he actually believes there are some things that are absolute and are universal to the human experience, and it is those things of might makes right and the law of warfare. And so if there are such things that are absolute, then George says, well, then there must be some things that are absolute and some things that are just preference. Even though Oliver Wendell Holmes was a skeptic and said, our tastes are the final things. At the end of the day, it's just what I want. Our desires determine what we establish as what is right. Yet he said, this is common to all, that kind of law. And so George says, well, he must not think everything is mere taste. There are some absolutes. And so it pitches the question, can we find them? Can we find those absolutes that would be true of every person in this room? The person sitting next to you or the person you talked to yesterday, the person that you see on the television who gets you so angry, Are there absolutes out there that you can ground all human behavior in in society and say we'll hold everybody to this standard? One of the chief ways this is trying to be done to push back against those progressives of a hundred years ago and those that adopt that mindset of moral relativity is through natural law theory. So if you have the progressives and relativity and there's no absolute, natural law theory is now being touted as like the big thing to answer those claims. It's very popular. Basically, natural law theory says that what is right must conform to what is true, and what is true must correspond to reality. And there's a lot to be said for this view, that if something is right, it must be fitting for the way things are. The question is, if the way things are are not the way things ought to be, how do you discover What is really reality? And who's the one, at the end of the day, whose perception of reality is the final say over this is reality, therefore this is truth, therefore this is right? How do you get to that point? It's a big question. C.S. Lewis claimed in a little book that's often used at Hillsdale College, The Abolition of Man, I use it at Spring Branch Academy as well, At the end of that little book, he has what's called a listing of the Tao. Here are things that all nations agree upon, or at least are common to mankind. Things that William Blackstone also mentioned. He was, William Blackstone's commentaries on English common law was what our revolutionary lawyers and early American lawyers gained their sense of law from. He was the king of law. in about 1800, and he basically said it goes down to do what is, speak honestly, treat your neighbors honestly, do them no harm, and give to them, render to them what is due. Truth, goodness, and justice are really the essence of just law in general. Okay. What about Don Richardson? in his book Peace Child, who went to New Guinea and discovered what we would call a primitive tribe that had not been exposed yet to the outside world, in which the highest pitch of virtue was to fatten the pig, to make someone from another village trust you. It may take two, three years until finally you could turn on him, see the wide-eyed eyes of wonder that this is actually happening, you kill him and you eat him. The Saui people had that virtue so high that when the gospel was given to them, they actually interpreted Judas Iscariot as the hero of the story. Apparently, human nature can degrade and be corrupted to a great, great, great degree. And they had their work of the law, as Paul says, the work of the law is involved in every heart. It's not the law, but it is a work of the law. They have a conscience, and they had their own standards. But how different are those standards that Don Richardson found than the standards that you and I are accustomed to, especially traditional Western standards? And so the question comes down, like, who's going to ascertain for us and be the arbiter for us? Like, this is the absolute law. Well, a couple of things stare us in the face that are quite difficult. One is blindness. Every single one of you in this room is like me. You're colorblind. I had to ask my wife if my shirt matched my pants. And she said it passed. She determined early in our marriage that she would be nice to me and tell me the truth. Because I am aesthetically challenged. And you are aesthetically challenged when it comes to moral beauty. You have an idea of what is beautiful when it comes to morality and Whatever aspect of ethics, you have a concept of what is beautiful. That beauty, that sense of beauty can be warped the same way that tastes can be warped to desire nicotine and things that can do harm to our bodies, things that we cough and gag at at first and after a while we crave and desire and want. Our sense of desire and our actual judging of these things, the Bible says we are blind. we cannot look at them rightly. Even William Blackstone said regarding natural law versus revealed law, such as we find here in Psalm 119, he said that the precepts of the revealed law are found upon comparison to be really a part of the original law of nature. It actually fits with the way things are and who you are and how you've been made. What we're reading this morning, Psalm 119, fits with who you are and how the world is that God made it. But we are not from that truth to conclude that the knowledge of these truths was attainable by reason in its present corrupted state. The revealed law, as a result, he says, is infinitely more, has infinite more authenticity than that moral system which is framed by ethical writers and denominated the natural law. Because one is the law of nature, expressly declared to be so by God himself. The other is only, by the assistance of human reason, what we imagine to be that law. If we could be as certain of the latter as we are of the former, we would have an equal authority. But till then, as the Bible would say, till we know as we are fully known, they can never be put in any competition together. The Bible is always superior to reason. Revealed law is always superior, he's saying, to natural law. Now these thoughts, well let me give you the other thing that's a problem. I got one more thing. So the one problem is sight. Blackstone agrees with that, sight is a problem, right? The other thing is, what are you studying when you go out to look at human nature and what nature is? You actually go out and find corrupted human beings. Not the way God designed them to be. Where will you find a subject? Here is one right here. I can study this one. And there is what humanity should be. Now, I hope you know an answer to that. But you'd have to cheat and go back to the book to find that individual. But you're not going to find it by looking at humans as they are by nature, we say. Because that nature, as Paul says, We are children of wrath. We deserve to be punished, and it is corrupted. So not only are the researchers blind, but the subjects they study, which is you in this room, are corrupted. And so we got a problem, for where in the world will we find, by natural reason, natural empiric investigation, a standard that we can hold true for everybody? I claim it's this book. It's right here in this law. It's been revealed to us. Psalm 119 came home to me several years ago. It was in the summer, and I was visiting churches, just going around Wednesday night. So I'd show up. Traditional churches have a Wednesday night service. And so one week, I went to this Baptist church north of here, Psalm 119. Then the next week, I went to a Baptist church that was south of here, Psalm 119. Then I was up late, just reading Martin Luther one night, his preface to his German writings, Psalm 119. You ever had those moments where you feel like, the Lord's talking to me here. Like, what are you saying? You know, the word is living. It's chasing after me. That's what Luther said. You know, it's got hands. It's got feet. It runs after me. It's got hands. It grabs hold of me. And so it was speaking to me in that season. And what I learned was, The very things that I had overlooked in this psalm, things like in verse 33, teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes. Verse 34, give me understanding that I may observe your law. Verse 35, make me walk in the path of your commandments. Verse 36, incline my heart. 37, take away from my eyes vanity. What I was missing was I'm as ignorant of the law of God qualitatively as I am ignorant of the gospel. I'm ignorant of both, and I don't want to compare quantitatively and such, but I have ignorance of both. I always knew, I had known for 20 years that I will not understand the good news of the Bible without the Holy Spirit opening my eyes. But I did not realize I would not understand the bad news of the Bible, as it were, or the law of God without God opening my eyes. And Psalm 119 said, I need God even to know the law of God. And that was revolutionary for me. Because I believe in a natural law framework. What is right conforms to what is true. What is true corresponds to reality. I believe that. But my ascertaining of reality needs something better than my eyes. And something better to look at than you all. I needed the Bible. And it came home to me in that season. To know the law of God, I needed the Bible. And so Psalm 119, verse 104, maybe summarizes for us this morning one of the things, big thing I'm getting at. It is from your precepts that I get understanding. Therefore I hate every false way. It may be true that the work of the law is in the heart of the Gentile nations. In fact, that is true. And God will hold them accountable. their thoughts accusing or else excusing them. Romans chapter two says their own standard will be used against them. What they have judged others will be used to judge them. By the measure you use, Jesus said, it will be used against you. But that does not mean that the Gentiles have understanding. The Gentiles, Paul says emphatically and often, have no understanding. They do not understand and they do not seek God. They are blind and hardened in their understanding, professing to be wise. They became fools. They do not have wisdom. And the Bible says that in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know God. And God was well pleased through the foolishness of a message preached to save those who believe. It's through the Word of God alone that we gave understanding. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of it, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. I think one of the best ways to understand that is to just look at how man-centered all that appendix on C.S. Lewis is. If you read through the list of the Tao, and you think through what do people think about what is right, it is so man-centered. Treat your neighbor well, be honest, deal with them justly. God is completely left out of the picture. Maybe mentioned here or there, whatever, for sanctions, adding some backing. But if the Bible is right, that that is the second commandment, that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, Then without having that core and center, the planets are not revolving around anything, but are spinning off into space in all directions. The heart of the law of God is God. Think about it this way. What if we could, and I know some in this room are desiring it, some are even working towards it. What if we could get rid of abortion as a legal thing? Even just, what if we could put it back to the states where there are state laws in place that says it's illegal? What if we could do that? Would that be sufficient? Now, finally, we're back on that place where it's illegal. And we all go, yes, finally. What about the 60 or so million? What about those that in the image of God, and if it's been committed here, which undoubtedly it has in this size of a room, you know where the forgiveness comes from. If you're a believer, you know the blood that was shed, the very image of God himself died to redeem those who took those made in the image of God. For the punishment deserved, right in the beginning chapters of the Bible says that, by man their blood shall be shed, who take the blood of man, who take man's life. Because in the image of God, he made man. It deserves death, and we know that the sacrifice of Jesus, the image of God, bears that guilt and fully atones and makes up for that guilt. But our nation, as a nation, will not get right, even if it put every law in the book right, even according to the Bible, unless it addresses God. It will need a Jonah moment, where from the cattle and the lowliest people to the king on his throne, everybody's in sackcloth and ashes and beseeching that God would forgive us. We have sinned. If a pagan nation can do that, and it did, surely a nation with a Christian heritage can repent nationally and actually start talking to God rather than ignoring him and just trying to establish morality without mentioning God on a natural law basis or any other basis. It may be better than a progressive moral relativism, but it's still insufficient. We need God, we need his word, and we need to address him. So what do we do? What does Psalm 119 say is the thing that we should do? By the way, before I mention this, I just want to pause. I want to give a personal note. There's been a lot of political talk. There's a lot of political philosophy there. I'm convinced every one of us has this problem, though. We all think we know what is right. Twice in the Proverbs it says, every man's way is right in his own eyes. It says that twice. We all think we know what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's evil. And we're always criticizing others and excusing ourselves to some degree. Now think about this. What if you're not correct? Please, think about this. What if you are not correct? What if your assumptions about how you've been a good person are actually founded on false standards. The Bible says it's through the knowledge of the law of God, it's through the law of God that comes the knowledge of sin. Paul says, until the commandment came, I was alive, but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died. It's the beginning of awakening that I have a problem when the law of God comes home and you personally are blind, not just to the good news, you are blind to the bad news. I want you at least this morning to ask the Lord, am I blind to what is right and wrong? Have I been deceiving myself into thinking I am a good person based on my own standard of morality? Because it would be a tragedy if you continue to go through this life assuming you're on this side of things when you're on that side of things. Let me give you a couple examples. Most of us take a Justinian kind of approach or a Hippocratic oath, do no harm. I don't hurt anybody. They do their thing, I do my thing. I'm not harming people. Jesus says in Matthew 25 that at the final day, it will not be what you did that will be brought forward at the judgment. He will say, when I was naked, did you clothe me? When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was sick or in prison, did you visit me? And in that day, the wicked will say, Lord, when were you sick in prison, naked or hungry? And he will say, to the extent you did not do it to the least of these, my brothers, you did not do it to me. That's amazing. He's not citing there, well, you did this, you cheated here, you lied here. Those things will all condemn us, don't get me wrong. But on that day, in that description of Jesus himself for the final judgment, it isn't what you did that's being brought forward, it's what you didn't do. How many of us have succeeded in that realm? Don't we all have a list of regrets? The cards we didn't send, the calls we didn't make, the visits that passed by, the missed opportunities are endless for a variety of reasons. Some good, some definitely not good. And if that's the standard that'll be brought up in that day, well, you say, well, I've done a lot. I have done a lot. Don't give me no. And then you pray it out, you know, well, did I not do this in your name? Did I not do that in your name, right? Now we're back to the beginning of Matthew. Did I not cast out demons even, prophesy, do miracles? It can even be big stuff. Let alone teach Sunday school. You know, all those kind of things we talked about. Raise my family, work hard, do my job well, be a good citizen, serve my country. All those kind of things. Didn't I do that? And Jesus will say, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but him who does the will of my Father. And we're back to that same question. What exactly then is the will of God? If you just assume you did the will of God, and you assume this is what was it, did you do the will of God? That great sermon, Matthew 5, 6, and 7, starts with Jesus saying over and over again, you have heard it said, but I say to you. We need a lot more of that. You have thought this, but I say to you. Because it's not just I didn't commit murder. Jesus said, every time I'm angry with my brother and call him names, it's of the same essence. It's not just I didn't commit adultery, but every time I lust after a woman, desiring her in my heart, I've committed adultery and broken the seventh commandment. It's way more than just how I treat my neighbor, it's also how I treat my enemies. And if my life is not characterized by having been built on that foundation, where the power and the life of God through being born again is represented in that way, my foundation is sand and my house will flatten on the day of judgment. Regardless of all the things I might parade, again, we're back to if our lives are not based on this law and what it says, We are in trouble. So what is this about? I want to switch to some good news here, OK? I want to move in that direction. First of all, this is an interesting poem. It's an acrostic. You can go through the letters of the alphabet. That's all those funny little titles every eight verses. Because it's just the Hebrew alphabets. If you want to memorize the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Dalet, Hevah, Zayin, Chet, Teit. It's all there, 22 letters. You can go through them. They all start with the same letter. That form tells us there's an order to this world, and there's an order to God's law. When you read the poem, you're like, it didn't seem like it was orderly. If you've ever read through Psalm 119 in all 176 verses, it feels like it's scattered all over the place. It just kind of meanders all around. But the initial form tells us there is order to this. Don't be fooled. There's rhyme and there's a reason. A couple ways that the order starts appearing. Here's what happens with Psalm 119. David Paulson wrote a long article on it. He's now gone to be with the Lord, but he's a Christian counselor. And he said, if you read it over and over again, it starts taking on different layers and you start seeing into it. It starts getting three-dimensional rather than flat. Kind of like the way when you first step into a new country and all those foreigners look the same. But once you're there for a year, you go, well, of course they're all different. Oh, you're so-and-so and you're so-and-so. You begin to see the differences. You have to spend time with Psalm 119 to actually start seeing the differences among the verses. You gotta soak and meditate in it. One of the things that popped for me when I started doing that is that it's not just about God's law. What I thought it was, I hear statutes, precepts, law, which means direction. And I thought, oh, I get it. It's about God's law. That's part of it. There's also statements of promise. Verse 41, may your loving kindness also come to me, O Lord, your salvation according to your word. You could translate that davar in Hebrew as promise. God gave his word that such would happen in the future. Bring it Lord, I want that salvation. Verse 42, so I will have an answer for him who reproaches me, for I trust in your word. There's faith, there's promise, there's taking refuge, there's an In the name of God, there's asking him to be a shield and a salvation. There's much more of the fullness of a walk with God here than just merely here's his law, and I love it. Another thing that appeared was the middle of the psalm. There's talk these days about a hurricane. The exact middle is verse 89. This is the eye of the storm. Most of the psalm is personal, I, me, my, but then in verse 89, it drops the personal for three verses. Forever, O Lord, your word is settled in heaven. Your faithfulness continues through all generations. You have established the earth and it stands. Notice the merism, the heavens and the earth, meaning the universe is related to the word of God. Therefore, verse 39, they, the heavens and the earth, stand this day according to your ordinances, for all things are your servants. That groundhog that runs away from you when you try to get after it is the servant of God. That nuthatch with his head upside down is the servant of God. All things are your servants. They're all doing what God has called them to do and it can be all traced back to the word of God. This is so enlightening to me. This is why we know this is according to natural law. Because the same Word that created nature is the same Word that speaks here. It's the same God that speaks both into existence. There is no contradiction between what God says. His world and His Word are perfectly harmonized. And so, not only did His Word then cause all that is, but it is also the only thing that interprets all that is. So if you want to know, I can't get my life and I don't understand my wife, go to the Bible. My world, my nation, my times, my desires, myself, go to the Bible because the Bible is perfectly matched to reality. That's what Pastor Aaron in Psalm 119 had it, right? All the heavens declare the glory of God, and then the law of the Lord is perfect, and the testimonies of the Lord are sure. One psalm celebrates both because the same word is behind both. That gives us confidence in looking at it. So what's in it? Well, I mentioned Martin Luther, and at the end of his life, he said, there's three things that make a theologian. Now there's somebody who knows God. Meditation, prayer, and trial. And he got those three from this book, this psalm. Now the first one I figured, like I always knew that, it's about the word of God. It's all over the place. Almost every verse mentions the word of God. So that's my assumption initially, just about the word of God. But it's more than about the word of God, it's also meditation. I'm not gonna take a show of hands, spouses. How many of your, how many of your spouses, how many of the other out there mutter and talk to themselves? No, don't show of hands here. But this is that word meditation, it mutters. In a day when you had to write on animal skins, it's not like everybody had a Bible. There's the Bible at the synagogue or the temple. You would hold the Bible as verse 111 says, Thy word have I hid in my heart, stored away, that I might not sin against you. You would hold it by memory and mutter, mumble it to yourself and repeat it. And go over and over again a phrase that caught your attention. That is what is spoken about, meditation. Not the emptying of the mind like Eastern religions, but the filling of the mind. Second is prayer. Every verse almost in this entire psalm is a word of one person, I speaking to the Lord. Prayer is absolutely necessary for knowing God. You know, sometimes I think Some people in this room, maybe even myself, would like to treat Christianity like it's a big philosophy. Can we just sit in a big armchair and talk about doctrine? It's so fun. You don't get that option. Because you are a part of God's world and you live in God's world, and the word that he gives is not something you can just study, research abstractly, and debate. You either obey it or you don't. You're not left with an objective observing stance. You're either going to talk to this one or you're not. You're going to interact or you're not. You're going to love him or you're not going to love him. And so you're forced by the nature of the book whenever you open up the Bible to come face to face with God. That's important. And this book, this Psalm, models for us what it means to talk to Him and to seek everything from Him. Teach me, incline me, protect me, deliver me. Everything's in here. It's a prayer. So it's the Word of God and prayer, which some people out there put down that. You know, that's just all that evangelical pious stuff. You know, spend time in the Bible and pray. That's Psalm 119, the longest chapter of the Bible. It's huge. But the third one is the one that really gets me as an educator. I could set up a whole curriculum of, let's read the Bible. I could even say, let's take time to pray. But you know what I can't do and do well? Is organize the trial in your life that you need right now. The pinch that forces you to look up, the perplexity that causes you to ask questions. Not the cause of growth, but the occasion of growth. According to Deuteronomy, God is a father. Dads take note. He purposely put his people through pain that they might learn that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from God's mouth. It's part of training. All you athletes in the room or those who used to be athletes that have now lost it, you know what it was like. It's not that your coach hated you. You appreciated the pain because you know it was developing you. God knows what pain you need and Psalm 119 has pain all over it. Some of my favorite verses are verse 67, before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I keep your word. Verse 71, it is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn your statutes. Verse 75, I know, oh Lord, that your judgments are righteous and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me. He doesn't hate us. He's faithful to develop us in love. That's why we experience pain if we're a believer. Until you and I get to the point where we can actually say it is good for me that I was afflicted, we will always struggle with thanksgiving for all things and in all things. But when we can get to the point where we can see the hand of God behind the pain and truly say with this model, it was good for me that I was afflicted, then we'll be able to pray with thanksgiving and experience the peace that guards our heart and guards our mind in Christ promised in Philippians 4. It's important. So these things, I think Luther was dead on. I think these things are right in this psalm. They need to go one step farther, though, and this is where I'm going to end. And may the Lord be gracious to me to apply this with some directness. I don't think they captured the essence of this psalm. Meditation, prayer, and trial are here. But the essence of this psalm is that the righteous man, the blameless man, we would say the man of integrity, that's being modeled right here is a lifetime of joyful obedience. The statements in this psalm about obedience are all over the place. He longs for God's commandments. He pants after them. His soul is crushed. He so desires that God would establish his feet in his ways so that when I look at your law, I'm not embarrassed. How many of us struggle with actually reading the word of God because we often feel guilty when we read it? Because our ways so don't match what is here. And he longs that my ways, my habits would match what is here so that when I hear the word and I open it, I rejoice in it rather than feel ashamed. That was his desire in his heart. In fact, he even says, this is the reason why I want to live. I want to be alive so that I may walk in your precepts and keep your word and obey your statutes all throughout it. And if we're not wanting to obey, but we're wanting to live, that's like saying, I want to go to heaven, but I want to still act like the devil. What's the point of being alive if we don't want to obey God? For the sin that we commit is worthy of death. It's like going to a doctor and saying, I want you to get me better, but I still want to do my bad habits. So it's obedience, but it's even more. It's joyful obedience. It's how I love your law. Verse 103, they're sweeter to me than honey. They're more valuable to me than money. I take such great delight in this that verse 56 says, they have become mine. I've observed yours. It's like everybody can get everything else, but I get your law. I get your obedience and you have taught me to obey you. It's joyful obedience. That's actually Jesus. The Psalms prophesy, Psalm 40, that the Messiah would have the law on his heart and that he would take delight to do God's will. And Jesus said to his disciples, I have food you don't even know about. My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. It's a delight and an energizing thing to me to do God's will. And Christian, if the spirit of God lives in you, you also have that same delight in the law of God. Even in the perplexity of our disobedience where we do what we don't want to do and we don't do what we want to do, Paul says, yet in my inner man, I delight, I joyfully concur in the law of God. Those who are in the flesh don't and can't, the next chapter says. And right there it separates the room. You either right now don't care about the word of God or you're trying to do the word of God but you actually hate it and you're finding it very difficult to live an upright Christian life. Or you delight in the Word of God and you're frustrated with your imperfect walk and obedience because you so long to be more like Jesus. Nobody's perfect, but the division is in the heart. It's not just in the outward obedience, it's in the joy or the lack of it that tells us we're either on our way to heaven or on our way to hell. Which is it for you? The good news is if you lack the love that this psalm speaks of and the delight this psalm speaks of, if the word of God isn't honey to you and more delightful than money to you, the good news is you can pray, create in me a clean heart, renew a right spirit within me, sustain me with a willing spirit, give me what I lack. Remember that old saying of Augustine, command what you will, but give what you command. He didn't tell me to do anything, God, but give me the strength to do it. Through the blood of Jesus, your sins can be forgiven, and through the spirit of Jesus, you can be empowered with that delight. That is a gift you can walk out of this room this morning with. It's a powerful promise of the gospel. Perhaps you're thinking, I remember a time when I delighted and walked closely. I don't feel the same as I used to. Let me leave you with a warning. This psalm says there is such a thing as wandering from God's commandments. Of drifting and walking away slowly from his word. Where the delight used to be there, but you wander. The insight of this psalm is the wandering is due to arrogance. I justify my wandering based on how special I am. I'm an exception to the normal rule. Like I was at age 23, the Bible may say, rejoice in the Lord always, but you gotta understand, I'm a naturally moody person. It's just my natural personality. Or whatever it may be that we treat the enemy this way, but that's just business. We treat our neighbor this way, but you gotta understand who my neighbor is. And we excuse and excuse and we drift and we drift because of how special I am and how I'm the exception to the rule when it comes to the law of God. If you find that drifting and wandering in you, I pray that you would go this day back to your heart and say, I want the fear of God to be given to me fresh. That God would be big in my eyes and I would be small. I want the statement given to me in verses 161, princes persecute me without cause, but my heart stands in awe of your word. Where what God says makes me tremble, as verse 120 says, trembling. And what I hear in politics passes through my mind and heart as something small. That will reduce us back to the place where we start again and start fresh. And we begin to say, Lord, renew my heart. As this psalm says, revive my spirit. I want that delight back in me again. Whichever category you may find yourself in today, This is the longest Psalm in the entire, the longest chapter in the entire Bible. That statement alone is actually telling us something. The word of God is forever and the blameless man says, I have determined to do your word forever. The Psalm is long because the blameless man has a lifetime of joyful obedience. And it's pictured in the ups and downs, twists and turns of this psalm. So I pray, may the Lord make your life a Psalm 119 life. And may we rejoice together in how sweet and how precious his words are. Amen.