Thought for the day – Friday 17th July 2020
Bible reading : Psalm 119 verses 14 – 1
“I will call with all my heart, answer me, O Lord, and I will obey your decrees. I call out to you: save me and I will keep your statutes. I rise before dawn and cry for help; I have put my hope in your word. My eyes stay open through the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promises. Hear my voice in accordance with your love; preserve my life, O Lord, according to your laws. Those who devise wicked schemes are near, but they are far from your law. Yet you are near, O Lord, and all your commands are true, Long ago I learned from your statutes that you established them to last for ever.
Psalm 119 is unique among the psalms: it’s the longest psalm with 176 verses, and it’s divided into 8-verse sections, each headed with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Another interesting feature is that almost every verse contains a word referring to God’s Word: the law, commands, decrees, statutes, precepts, the word.
The Psalmist was referring to the first five books of the Old Testament, that was his Bible. We are fortunate in that we have so much more and that we live in the light of the fulfilment of all God’s Old Testament promises in Jesus, as revealed to us in the New Testament. But, for the Psalmist, those five books were of great value.
Psalm 119 – almost in the centre of the Bible – is the profound truth that the Word of God is all-sufficient. It is an expansion of Psalm 19:7–9: “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart.” Psalm 119 is a prayer of someone who loves God’s word, who delights in it and who lives by it.
There are many verses in Psalm 119 which say that keeping God’s commands, his precepts, his decrees is the way to prosper and to get the most out of life, because they will last for ever and because they are true. The Psalmist knows he can depend on God to preserve his life because he has God’s promises, and they are sure because he keeps God’s laws and statutes.
The Psalmist values God’s word so much, he stays awake at night and meditates on it. The challenge to us is, how much do we value God’s word? Do we read it, study it, meditate upon it, memorise it? The more we treasure scripture and allow it to fill our minds, the better we will love the Lord and learn to walk in His ways.