A Call to Devotion | Psalm 19
Brad O’Dell | July 17, 2022

Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Psalm 19; that’s where we’re going to be today. Make sure to have it open in your Bible or on your phone. I’m going to put the Scripture on the screen right at the beginning, but it’s only going to be at the beginning, and we’re going to be looking back at the Scripture a lot, so try to follow along as we go through this morning.

As we get started this morning and as you turn there, I want to start with an illustration that maybe some of you have heard of, but it’s a good reminder, and I think the themes connect well to what we’re talking about today. The author Stephen Covey writes a story in one of his books about a professor who stands in front of his classroom, and he brings a large glass jar up on the table. He has a bunch of large rocks on the table as well, so he starts kind of taking those rocks and fitting them into this glass jar. He fills it all the way up to the brim, and he looks at his class and he says to the class, “Class, is this jar full?”

They kind of look at the glass and they look at the other rocks he has on the table and they say, “Yes, looks full to me.”

Then he kind of reaches under the desk and pulls out a bucket of a lot of smaller rocks, and he starts dumping those in there, and then he gives the whole thing a shake and all those smaller rocks fall into the gaps that the big rocks had left.

He said to the class, “Class, is this jar full now?”

Being smart students and not wanting to say the wrong thing twice, they were like, “Uh, no?” Kind of that questioning answer that students give. “No?”

He said, “Correct.” He gets out some sand and he pours sand in there and he shakes that down, and then he pulls out a big gallon of water and he fills it all the way to the top. Now, the glass jar is completely full; nothing else can go in there.

He says to the class, “Class, what’s the point of this illustration that I’ve just given you?”

One student, maybe tongue-in-cheek, but maybe seriously, said, “Well, the point is, no matter how full your schedule is, you can always fit more things into it if you try really hard.” Maybe that’s the lesson some of you are taking; that’s not the right answer.

That’s what the professor said. He said, “No, no, no. That’s not the right answer.” He said, “The truth this illustration teaches us is this: if you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all.”

I think that’s a truth that we can take into our spiritual lives. I wonder at this point, mid-year, midsummer, where we have a lot of things on our plates that are good but probably kind of exhausting as well—a lot of travel, a lot of schedule change—we’re trying to get in our relaxation and we’re trying really hard and exhausting ourselves trying to do it, right? Or maybe this is the busy time of year for you in work. I wonder if the jar of your life is full and you’ve forgotten to put some of the big rocks in that God calls us to for us to have life and joy in the spiritual walk that we have.

I think this psalm today calls us to some of the big rocks. What we’re going to look at in Psalm 19 today is:

1. A Call to Worship
2. A Call to Meditate on Scripture
3. A Call to Purity of Devotion

Let’s read the psalm together, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to just work through these three main sections of the text and we’re just going to work through the text trying to catch some of the language of the psalmist and follow along with his thoughts with him, and then we’re going to try to get the big ideas he’s bringing across and see how we’re doing with these big rocks in our lives.

In Psalm 19 the psalmist says,

“The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,
and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
and its circuit to the end of them,
and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

“The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the Lord are true,
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward.

“Who can discern his errors?
Declare me innocent from hidden faults.
Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins;
let them not have dominion over me!
Then I shall be blameless,
and innocent of great transgression.

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”

It’s a beautiful psalm. You might have seen as we read through it that there are kind of three sections that almost abruptly transition, and we’re going to try to follow the psalmist’s thoughts and see what’s connecting his thoughts as he works through these big chunks. So let’s take it chunk by chunk.

1. A Call to Worship

First you see a call to worship, and that’s in verses 1-6. The psalmist starts with this big declaration: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork!” Maybe you’ve been able to go out at night in the summer and get to see—we don’t do that in the winter; it’s too cold; you run inside, right, park in the garage. But in the summer we get out and we sometimes get to see the stars at night, and we get to have the eyes of our kind of drawn outside of ourselves and see the expanse of God’s handiwork.

Maybe you saw some of the pictures from the James Webb telescope this week, and it just blew your mind affresh with the wonder of God’s creation and all he’s built into the solar system and into the cosmos. It just makes us stand in awe.

The psalmist is doing the same thing. He says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and [they] proclaim his handiwork.” Essentially he’s saying, “The heavens—God’s creation—proclaims both his nature and his ways.” We see a bit of who he is—his greatness, his sovereignty, his beauty, his power, his immensity. We also see his ways, his order, his goodness, his beauty, his kindness to give us the beauty he’s given us in creation. “The heavens declare the glory of God.”

Then he starts to personify creation. He says, “Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” He says there’s no speech or there are no words whose voice is not heard. It says, “His voice goes out through all the earth.”

He’s talking about creation having this voice, and he almost says it’s like a preacher, right? He’s heralding the truths of who God is, creation is; it’s proclaiming his might and his power and his wonder. He says it goes out to all the world. There’s no one in the world who can say that they have not seen the majesty of God and they don’t know, at least at some level, who he is and what he’s like.

Then he transitions to the sun. He says that God sent a tent for the sun, and he’s talking about the night there, where the sun kind of goes away into a tent. But every morning the sun comes up, and it’s like a bridegroom going to his wedding, decked out in full array—the beauty of the dress there that we see in the sunrise in the morning. It says it runs its course with joy. It presents the sun as this worshiper rejoicing in God as it goes across the sky.

Then he talks about how dominant the sun is in the physical creation. It goes from end to end; its rising is from the end of the heavens and it goes to the end of them. It’s all-encompassing, and there's nothing hidden from its light and its heat.

What we see here is the psalmist starting to do at the beginning of the psalm what the psalmists do in lots of parts of the Psalter, and they’re just looking at creation. This is something that happens in wisdom literature as well. They look at creation and they start to magnify God and worship God from what they see in creation. They see the hand of the Lord and the God who has put his thumbprint on creation in all these ways. They start magnifying the Lord and praising him for his glory.

I think what we see here innately in the psalmist’s heart is something that it calls us to, and that’s a call to worship. This is one of the big rocks of our lives: a call to worship God.

I wonder, here in the middle of the year, if a lot of you look at where you’re spending your time, where you’re spending your energy, and maybe you’re giving a lot of your time to the church, maybe you’re giving a lot of it to your family, maybe you’re giving a lot of it to your small group or to serving others in other ways. Maybe you’re giving it to some good time of rest for yourself. But you’ve forgotten to consider, now that you’re kind of full of a lot of things, if you would really ever have time where you’re giving your heart to God and just pouring out praise and worship to him, and delighting yourself in the Lord.

You see, a lot of us can go through these seasons of life where we give and give and give of all of our talents and gifts, and we even do it knowing that the Lord has given these to us and we want to serve others with them, but we actually never take time to give our affections to God and just pour out praise to him. What it does is it leads to these seasons of life where, though we’re giving ourselves to the means of grace God’s given us for our life and our joy and our rest, this life that we’ve been talking about in Christ, we find ourselves just smote, exhausted, drained, and disillusioned. We’re confused, right? “What happened? I’m doing all the things that God called me to do, and I feel like I’m at the end of myself and burned out.”

What God’s calling us to at the beginning of this psalm is just, Hey, remember the first things. It could be that you just need to spend some time and find some refreshing and rejoicing in the Lord.

You see, a lot of our lives we’re like one of those drink pitchers with the spigot at the bottom, right? It’s never quite at the bottom; it’s always above the bottom, so you can never quite get the rest out, even though you tip it, right? But a lot of our lives are like those drink pitchers, and the thing is, the spigot’s always open to some degree. We’re always having to pour out. It’s usually a lot of good things. Maybe it’s stuff that we don’t enjoy that much but we have to pour out. Sometimes it’s fully open, sometimes it’s only half-open, but it’s always open. A lot of you in this season of life, I wonder if you’re kind of at the end and you’re running around the bottom of that pitcher trying to throw water up at the spigot to keep it pouring out, and you have nothing left to give.

You see, guys, that’s the way life is, and it demands that of us, and the Lord’s calling us to, if you need it in this season, remember that you can only keep pouring out if you’re being constantly filled up from above.

I wonder if some of you here today, you’re at a season where you need to kind of look at the next few weeks of your life, the next season of your life, and just say, “I need to mix up some priorities, I need to shift some stuff around. I need to start finding the discipline of spending time with the Lord, praising him, delighting in him, rejoicing in him, and being filled up, so that then I can pour out from being filled up myself in the Lord.”

What’s that look like practically? I think it could look like a lot of things. You know your own spiritual walks; I would ask you to journal that for yourself in prayer. But here’s something that might help: take two times a day, maybe—something you can implement this week—take two times a day, and take your two times in the day, where you know that, “Coming up in the next handful of hours, or maybe in the middle of these few hours, this is a time where I know that I’m going to be pouring out a lot.” Set a reminder on your phone to just spend five minutes, maybe ten, just rejoicing in the Lord, praising him, dwelling on his goodness, dwelling on the grace that he’s given you in Christ, being thankful to him for all the good things he’s given you in life, dwelling on his glories—in creation, also in a lot of other ways. Just praise the Lord and spend some time being filled up, so that what you give is something that the Lord’s put into you, and you can start to bless others and also bless your own life in that way, and God gets the praise for it. Just a simple suggestion that might work for you.

2. A Call to Meditate on Scripture

Let’s move on to verses 7-11. I think the next thing we see here is this call to meditate on Scripture. I’m taking the word “meditate” from the first psalm of the Psalter, Psalm 1, where it says the blessed man meditates on God’s word day and night. So, a call to meditate on Scripture.

What I want to do is focus on—I’m not going to read all these verses again—but essentially, we see the nature of God’s word and then we see the effect God’s word has on believers and the effect God’s word has on those who meditate on it.

The first thing we see the psalmist doing is he shifts his language. At the beginning of the psalm he’s talking about God, and he uses the Hebrew word El, a generic word for God, just the sovereign, almighty God, right? The God you can see in creation. But now he shifts to this covenantal language, Yahweh, the God who has revealed himself to us in relationship and called us to life alongside him. It is Yahweh who gives us his word for our good.

As he’s dwelt on the sun, this dominant aspect of life in the physical creation, he now shifts to the word, the dominant aspect of spiritual life for the believer. As he’s dwelt on the words of creation being poured out in praise to God, he starts to naturally shift and say, “What about the specific words of God’s word that he’s given us, written down for our life and for our edification and for our instruction?”

He goes on, and what we see is the nature of God’s word. We see these parallelisms, where he talks about something about the nature or the aspects of God’s word, and then he says the effect of that on the believer’s life. So let’s handle the first one, the nature of God’s word.

I’m going to list through the words here. He says the word of God is:

• Perfect
• Sure, or firm, confirmed
• Right—that is, morally right or straight
• Pure and clean. In the words of David in Psalm 12, the words of God are like “silver refined in a furnace, purified seven times.”
• He says the word of God is true, it’s dependable, right?
• Then, in verse 9, he’s talking about the word of God, and he says it endures forever; it’s enduring. We hear this in the words of Jesus. He says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

I think C.S. Lewis has a really good analogy that will help us. He says, “The psalmist’s delight in the law is a delight in having touched firmness, like the pedestrian’s delight in feeling the hard road beneath his feet after a false shortcut has long entangled him in the muddy fields.”

Isn’t that a good image for us? Doesn’t that kind of seem like what the world and maybe even the church, other believers, put before you a lot of times? These seeming shortcuts to life and joy and fulfillment, and you’re like, “Oh, ok, that’s a shortcut. That gets me there a little faster.” You take off, and maybe some of you are in a season of life where you’ve kind of been battling through the brambles, you’ve been cut up by the thorns, you’ve sprained an ankle or two as you tried to take these shortcuts, and they were not what they panned out to be, right?

What does the word of God present it to us as? It’s given to us as something firm, something reliable, something perfect and sure. Why is that? It’s because it reflects the nature of the word’s author, the character of God himself. That is who is revealed in Scripture.

Also, we see the effect of God’s word on the believer, right? It preserves life; that’s the phrase “reviving the soul” there in verse 7. It restores and preserves life. It gives wisdom and insight. We see that it makes the simple wise in verse 7, and it enlightens the eyes there in verse 8.

We see that it brings joy to our hearts. I wonder how many of us are in a season where we haven’t had much joy in our hearts. The psalmist calls us to the word of God for that. It rejoices the heart.

Verse 9 says it produces a fear of the Lord. This is a kind of interesting grammatical tool that the psalmist uses, where he takes the effect of the word on the believer and he actually calls the word of God that. We know that because it’s synonymous with all the other words that are used for God’s law or God’s word throughout the verses here. It says produces fear of the Lord; that is, this kind of deep, reverent awe of the Lord; this loving awe of the Lord that we need in our lives. That leads us to the worship that the early part of the psalm calls us to.

He says in verse 11 that “by them your servant is warned.” It warns us, it protects us, and leads us away from those things that would hurt us and hurt others.

It enriches and rewards, right? It’s like gold. He calls it a reward. These are things that lead us into goodness and blessings. Not only does it protect us from those things that will hurt us and lead us away from that, but it leads us into the things that will fulfill us and bring us goodness.

It delights and satisfies; that’s where we get the image of honey, sweet honey.

Then this last one. We see this in all the words that the psalmist used to refer to God’s word here: it instructs us in holiness. You see this in the words he uses, right? It’s talking about the rules of God, the laws, the precepts, the commandments. These are commands; these are rules of God that he’s calling us to obey.

Isn’t that interesting? All these other wonderful things, and doesn’t a bit of us kind of step back and we’re like, “Oh, I don’t like the rules,” right? “I’m more about relationship, not religion, preacher,” right? We kind of have this misunderstanding of grace, and it leads us to kind of be almost wary of these instructions in Scripture and these commands that God calls us to follow. But these things are calling us to this life of holiness and this life of goodness and this life of blessing and fear of the Lord that the psalmist is talking about.

I like this quote by Jonathan Edwards; I think it’s true. He says, “Holiness is a most beautiful and lovely thing.” This is what I was talking about a second ago. He says, “We drink in strange notions of holiness from our childhood, as if it were a melancholy, morose, sour, and unpleasant thing.”

I’ll just stop there. Isn’t that so true? When someone gives us rules, we’re like, “Aw, man, stop coming down on me.” We kind of feel like we’re being inhibited, that we’re actually being kept from goodness in life, and we don’t want that. I think that’s more the voice of our culture and more the voice of this individualism, this self-fulfillment that we’ve been about a lot in this last identity series, than it is the words of Scripture. God gives us commands and he calls us to holiness because it glorifies him, but also it’s because it’s for our great good.

Edwards goes on, “There is nothing in it but what is sweet and ravishingly lovely. ’Tis the highest beauty in amiableness, vastly above all other beauties.”

Why is that? It’s because it reflects our Creator, it reflects our God. Our God is holy; Jesus, our Savior, is holy; and we are called to be like Jesus. The New Testament says, “Be holy, for I am holy,” a repeat of what it says in the Old Testament, and that’s a good call for us. Scripture can lead us into holiness, lead us to become more like God, lead us into being more like Jesus and reflecting him more and more.

As we dwell on these effects of Scripture and its aspects, we see why the psalmist starts the psalm with this refrain about the blessed man or the most happy man. He says this in Psalm 1:2-3: “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. [This man] is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does he prospers.”

Isn’t that a sweet promise related to meditating on Scripture? I think the question before us in the psalm is, how are we doing? How are we doing in this season of life, right? Isn’t this one of those big rocks that somehow we figure out we didn’t have any time for, because our life got filled up with other things?

I wonder where we’re at in our lives right now. Guys, I’ll be honest, if I use “you” too many times instead of “us” . . . I picked this psalm because this is what I needed in my spiritual walk right now in this season. So I hope that the Lord’s using it to bring it before you as well, right? How are we doing? Are you giving the time you need to give to the word of God and to meditating on it? Not just reading it, “Okay, I kind of did that; check off; and I kind of mentally engaged with it.” No, no, no—meditating on it, letting it really penetrate our hearts and our souls and really do work there.

Are you doing it daily? We need wisdom daily, don’t we? We need strengthening daily. We need this warning and this restoration of life that the psalmist is talking about daily. We need that every day. So are you giving time to meditating on the word of God daily, so that it might do its work in your life as you trust God and seek to live it out in your life?

Maybe now is a season where you need to just step back, look at the next season of your life, and figure out, “What do I need to do to put that big rock in the bucket? Then we’ll fill in everything else from there.”

A couple of practical suggestions, use it if it’s helpful . . . . Some of you, instead of just jumping in this afternoon, taking out your year Bible-reading plan, and spending 15 hours in the next three days getting caught up—instead of doing that, or instead of being like, “Okay, I have to go the minor prophets and figure this out—” don’t do that, right?

A couple things: first, some of you need to just start with this to make the habit stick, and that’s take the next week and do this every day: try to make time. Right? I did a workout program one time, and it was a habits-based workout program, and the very first thing it said—for two weeks, all you had to do to check off your habit for the day was “make time.” I thought it was ridiculous. I was like, “Make time? What does this even mean? Of course I have time; that’s why I signed up for this program.” Then, three weeks into the program, after that, I realized I kept missing workouts and I kept missing the things I was supposed to do, and it was because I didn’t actually make time, right? I promised myself I would never forget that foundational habit for getting other good habits in my life. Make time.

Some of you need to just look at your schedule and start moving some things around. That’s going to take some energy, it’s going to take some effort, it’s going to take some communication with your work, with your family. Make time and carve out some time where you have time to be in the word and spend time there.

Also, connected to that, make space. Make sure you have a space where you’re free from distractions and free from things that might make you anxious or distract you. That means, “Hey, kids, if you come in this room in this time, it has to be an emergency. Someone better be dying.” Right? Make space. Give yourself time and space to really focus on the Lord. It’s core; it’s foundational, guys. This is where God is revealing himself to us and calling us to himself and giving us guidance and fuel for life. Make time.

Another one: instead of picking the hard things in Scripture, maybe you just need to get an early win. Get an easy win in the next couple weeks. Go to your bread and butter, right? If that’s the Psalms—if you always click and connect and they’re fulfilling, go to the Psalms. If that’s the Gospels, go there. If that’s a New Testament letter that’s really impactful in your life, go there. Whatever it is, go to your bread and butter, the place that’s always worked for you and brings your heart easily to the Lord. Start there. Get an early win and let that momentum shoot you forward to making this a daily habit.

Another one: commit to read with another. Make this commitment with your spouse. Before bed, “Hey, did you get your time in the word? If not, we’re staying up late. We’re going to spend at least a few minutes. Did you let things interrupt that time? How do we work together to do this?” Find a friend. Find somebody in your community group who can just check in with you. “How was your time in the word? How was your time in prayer?” Commit to do it with another person, and it helps you stay on the path and stay focused.

3. A Call to Devotion

But here also—let’s go into the rest of the psalm—we see this call to devotion. We see it in the heart disposition of the psalmist. He says, “O Lord, who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins [or intentional, high-handed sins]; let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression. O, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer!”

What we see here is one of the motifs that’s been going through this psalm, but it’s been a little more subtle. In verses 12-13 here we see the spiritual counterpart of the statement in verse 6 about the sun: “There is nothing hidden from its heat.” As the psalmist has reflected on the word of God and the light of the word of God that enlightens the heart, right, and enlightens the mind, it brings him to this point where he realizes, “Every part of me is open to the Lord and open to the word of God, and I see my sin clearly, and my heart is now connected with God’s heart and walks in line with it, and man, I abhor my sin. I’d love to be pure and clean. Man, I’d love the words of my mouth as a reflection of the words of creation to be pleasing and acceptable to God, to be glorifying to him, and I’d love the meditation of my heart, this right worship in my heart, to be sound. I’d love to be able to give this as a sacrifice to God.”

We see the psalmist come to this desire for a life of purity of devotion for God. What happens here, we actually shift psalm genres here, and there’s a lament. It’s a proper lament that comes into the middle of this psalm. What he’s lamenting is not a situation in his life that he’s asking for deliverance from, but he’s lamenting his own sin in his life—the sins that he doesn’t even know he commits and the sins that he absolutely knows he commits. He asks that God would clear him of them and protect him and guard him from them.

What we see here in the end of the psalm is what C.S. Lewis says is this theme of the sun. He says, “As the psalmist has felt the sun, perhaps in the desert, searching him out in every nook of shade where he attempted to hide from it, so he feels the law searching out all the hiding places of his soul.”

I wonder if we let the word of God do that. A lot of us are pretty good with our spiritual disciplines. We’re showing up at church, we’re sitting under the preaching, we spend some time in Scripture, we make sure to do our reading for small group. But I wonder how many of us actually let the sword of the Spirit pierce to the division between soul and spirit, we actually let the light of God’s word reach all the nooks and crannies of our hearts. See, a lot of us can be in seasons where we kind of have some of our desires, some of our loves, some of our yearnings, maybe some pet sins. We kind of let that remain in our heart and we keep that walled off. We don’t let God speak to us there.

I don’t know what that is. If you feel that the Lord’s putting your mind, your heart on something right now, let today be the day where you turn to the Lord like the psalmist, confess, repent anew, and ask God to change and redeem you, that your life would become this acceptable sacrifice to him.

To finish up here, it’s important that we ground all of this in Christ and the gospel, isn’t it? We can really go astray if we don’t. I think we have a couple helps in the psalm to turn our eyes to Jesus.

First, we see those last words of the psalm right there. He calls out to Yahweh, “O Yahweh, my rock and my redeemer!” We know that these are two images, two concepts that are clearly connected to Christ. The most clear imagery is the rock that was with the Jews in the Old Testament in their wilderness wandering, right? The rock that water came out of and gave them sustenance. So the idea there is “God, my source of life or my provider.”

In 1 Corinthians 10 Paul will directly connect this to Christ and say, “It was Christ who was the rock. He’s the true source of life; he is the true provider of spiritual satiety in your life.”

Then redeemer; of course, another word for that is just Savior, Jesus our Savior.

But I think the more primary way we see it in this theme of the words that go throughout this psalm, the words of creation proclaiming God’s holiness and his glory, the words of God’s Scriptures that lead us to goodness and life and that reveal God himself. We know in the New Testament this primary verse about how Jesus is the word of God made flesh. Guys, if you’ve had this desire, from the sermon or just a desire that’s on your heart, where you want life and you want joy and you want wisdom for life and you need it in so many areas, the Scripture here calls us. It’s found in Christ. He’s the word of God made flesh.

John 1:1-5; let’s read it again, as we have so many times. “In the beginning was the word, and [Jesus in] the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him [that is, he’s Creator], and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Don’t we see every theme of our psalm there? Jesus is the word, just as God’s word is what leads us to life and wisdom and salvation. Jesus is with God at creation; he’s Creator, so all of creation magnifies him. Then Jesus is the light. Just like the sun that shines in every nook and cranny in the Middle East, and just like the word is a light that lights up every part of our soul and brings our hearts into unity with God, so Jesus is the true light. And he’s the life that we’re looking for.

So I’d just remind us, right here at the end, church—in all of our worship, make sure you take time dwelling on what Jonathan Edwards calls “the diverse excellencies of Christ.” Think on Jesus, think on his grace, think on his love, think on his heart to serve the Father with pure devotion. Think on Jesus and delight in him, and seek to follow him faithfully as Lord and rejoice in that. In all your meditation on the word, make sure to always bring it back to Jesus and the gospel of your salvation. Remember the life that he has purchased for you; remember the grace that he gives you as a foundation for your life; and from that place go and seek to live in obedience to what he’s called you, knowing the great promises that we have before us in Scripture.

In all of your yearnings for purity of devotion to the Lord, stand secure. Stand secure in your identity in Christ. He’s the author and the perfecter of your faith; he has accomplished it, he will surely accomplish it. Rejoice in that. Rejoice in the fact that you can rest in his love, in his grace, and it’s sure. Because of that, you can live for him. In Jesus is the life, and the life is the light of men.

My hope today is that this word of God would shine into your life, bring you life and joy affresh, turn your hearts to Jesus affresh, but not just so that you can walk out of here satisfied, because you need to bring that light to others. It’s the light of men, and people in your life don’t need you running around trying to throw up joy and happiness and something for them as you try to pour out; they need the life that God gives you in Christ, and they need that light to come into their own life as well. I think that’s what God calls us to in this psalm. Let’s make this season the season where we step back, look at the big rocks of our life, sort them, and delight in the Lord, rejoice in him, be filled up to fullness, and then go out and serve others from that place. Let’s pray.

Lord, we thank you for your word. O God, we thank you for your grace and salvation. What a balm to our souls it is! We seek for life and we seek for happiness; we seek for peace in so many things. But it’s like this image that we got from Lewis; they’re false shortcuts, and man, they exhaust us.

God, I ask that you satisfy our hearts in you. I pray that you would incline our hearts to you this week, that you open wide the eyes of our hearts to see your glory, that we might delight in you fully as your glory is due. I ask that you would satisfy our hearts in you and you alone. I ask that you would expand and increase the capacity of our hearts to love you and know you. God, that’s our prayer. Would you be gracious and merciful to us this week? God, our heart is that we would walk into this building next week filled up with joy and worship and praise, and that the testament of that time together would be a magnification of your name. God, we look forward to seeing you doing it; we know that’s on your heart; we know you’re faithful. It’s in the name of Jesus we ask these things, amen.