This is week 13 of our series on Psalm 119, and we’re looking at verses 97 through 104.
This portion of this acrostic Psalm based on the Hebrew alphabet, represents the 12th letter, known as Mem. In this passage, the psalmist again speaks of His love for God’s word, His desire to meditate seriously on it, and the wisdom and understanding it gives him, and he shares how his desire to keep God’s Word keeps him from evil, stepping outside of the instructions God provides, and from every false way.
According to this portion of Psalm 119, the more we’re in God’s Word, meditating, learning, memorizing, studying, contemplating, and considering what God has said to us as the sheep of His pasture, the more wisdom and understanding we will be graced with and the more we will both desire to stay away from evil, and in fact hate every false way and steer clear from it.
Bible Commentator Warren Wiersbe entitles this passage, “Beyond Bible Study”. He talks of the love we must have of God’s Word and how we must meditate on it, how a true student of God’s Word has an obedient heart, and knowing that honey would be the sweetest thing the psalmist could taste, talks of how we must enjoy God’s Word.
We would do well to take Wiersbe’s thoughts to heart. They are absolutely important for us to remember, to implement, to live as God’s under-shepherds.
I invite you to join me in choosing one word or phrase from that prayer to pray every day for the next week, diving into God’s Word more frequently, more fully, more robustly than ever before and let’s see what our Good, Great and Chief Shepherd does in our lives and the lives of those for which you care.
Thank you for joining me. I pray we both will live deeply into our calling this week.