Don't Be Distracted

This week I want to study the sixth stanza of Psalm 119. In verses 41-48 we find these words,

“Let your steadfast love come to me, O LORD,

your salvation according to your promise;

then shall I have an answer for him who taunts me,

for I trust in your word.

And take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth,

for my hope is in your rules.

I will keep your law continually,

forever and ever,

and I shall walk in a wide place,

for I have sought your precepts.

I will also speak of your testimonies before kings

and shall not be put to shame,

for I find my delight in your commandments,

which I love.

I will lift up my hands toward your commandments, which I love,

and I will meditate on your statutes.”

It is interesting to me to see how many times the Psalmist speaks of delighting in God and in God’s Word and of loving God and God’s Word.

Vs 14, “In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches.”
Vs 16, “I will delight in your statutes.”
Vs 20, “My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times.”
Vs 24, “Your testimonies are my delight.”
Vs 40, “Behold, I long for your precepts.”
Vs 47, “For I find my delight in your commandments, which I love.”
That’s just the stanzas that we have covered…you find it all the way through this Psalm.

We don’t often think about Christianity in those terms, but the Bible does. How do we get to that place? George Muller said,

“But in what shall we attain to this settled happiness of soul? How shall we learn to enjoy God? How obtain such an all-sufficient soul-satisfying portion in Him as shall enable us to let go of the things of the world as vain and worthless in comparison? I answer, this happiness is to be obtained through the study of the Holy Scriptures. God has therein revealed Himself unto us in the face of Jesus Christ.”

He also said, “The more we know of God, the happier we are.” The secret for Muller was time in His Word and time alone with God. He said, “I saw the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to reading of the Word of God, and to meditation on it…What is the food of the inner man? Not prayer, but the Word of God; and…not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts.”

I say these things knowing that in our busy, media driven culture, I might as well be speaking Greek when I talk about spending that amount of time in the Word of God, but I know this to be true and if we can’t learn to turn off the world, open up the Word, and pour it into our lives we are running a race weighted down by the cares of this world and we will never grow in Christ.

I was talking to a former Missionary Kid who is now stateside and we were talking about the difference between the 3rd World spirituality and spirituality here in the West. In Africa, Asia, and other places, you often see clear evidence of demonic activity and you find witch doctors and such, but here it doesn’t seem as evident as you might see it there, or at least we don’t pay attention to it. He said something that struck me…the more I think about it the more I am convinced he is right…the demonic tactic of our culture is distraction. We can’t eat a meal, have a conversation, listen to a sermon, or read our Bibles and pray without stopping to see what someone has texted or posted on our phones.

My great grandfather would read his Bible early in the morning, leave his homes, hitch his ox or mule to a plow, and spend the entire day hearing nothing but the sounds of nature…he could actually think, reason, and meditate. I know we’ve evolved in terms of technology, and I don’t want to go back to those days, but spiritually we have dissolved. We don’t read, we don’t study, we don’t memorize, we don’t meditate, and we wonder why the church is so spiritually shallow.

What we find in Psalm 119 is a man who pondered upon God, the things of God, the character of God and the beauty of God and he did so by pouring into the Word of God. He was a sequoia in the forest of God’s people and this psalm is a sequoia amongst the forest of God’s Word. I want to walk through this stanza—once again the eight verses all start with the same Hebrew letter and the first four are concerned with God’s salvation and promises while the next four serve as a promise to testify and celebrate God’s Word. We will start tomorrow, but consider how much distraction plays in your spiritual life.