The Sojourner and Humility

Psalm 119, beginning in verse 33.

Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes, and I will keep it to the end.

Give me understanding that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart.

Lead me in the path of your commandments, for I delight in it.

Incline my heart to your testimonies and not to selfish gain.

Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things and give me life in your ways.

Confirm to your servants your promise that you may be feared.

Turn away the reproach that I dread, for your rules are good.

Behold, I long for your precepts.

In your righteousness, give me life.

Here ends the reading of God's word.

Well, we have been, this summer we have been in a study of the book of Psalms.

And the Psalms in general are incredibly helpful at giving us a realistic glimpse of what a genuine faith and trust in God looks like from the inside out.

And of all of these psalms, I think I would say that there is one in particular.

There is one in particular that is like the Mount Everest of the book of Psalms.

One that really goes deep and gives us a massive view of the inner dynamics and conversations, the feelings, the thoughts, the desires of the heart of the child of God.

You could think of Psalm 119 like the painting of the Last Supper.

There are other great works of art.

The Mona Lisa is a great work of art, but it's small and it's concise and it's compact.

But the Last Supper is massive and it gives great detail.

And Psalm 119 is like that.

And I hope you can appreciate why these Psalms are really here because I think in our lives we are going to be, as the children of God, we're going to be assaulted in different directions.

Sometimes we'll be assaulted with doubt.

By the spirit of assumption and a feeling of entitlement, and we'll just feel like, hey, we don't need to worry at all about the Lord or his ways.

And we can just put all that on the back burner.

But the Psalms give us a look deep inside at what the yearnings and the desires and the stirrings and the conversations really are underneath all of the profession on the outside.

It lets us get into from God.

It lets us get into what it means to trust and to believe God in a fallen, broken world.

Well, for a couple of weeks now we've been looking at this great psalm.

And we've been looking at some of the core themes of it and what it has to teach us about our relating with God.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw that deep down God's people are sojourners.

We are resident aliens in our hearts.

We're citizens of another world whose loyalty to Christ puts us at odds in very significant ways with the culture around us.

We are sojourners whose journey in this life is really a journey to our heavenly home.

That is our core posture.

Last week we saw that as sojourners, our faith in God will express itself in zeal, in warm fervor and passion to see the word of God lived out both in our own hearts and in the culture around us.

Today we're going to look at a third theme in this psalm, which touches every one of our lives.

And I've summed it up with this question: Is it normal for a Christian to have a robust disloyalty to God in his heart?

And if so, what does it look like in our sojourning experience and what are we to do about it?

So we'll begin by we'll begin by looking at the shocking reality of disloyalty in the believer's heart.

Now I've said that the Psalms, and particularly this Psalm, is given to us to show us the inner workings of a true believer, and we would expect any portrait like that, that it would be rich in broad strokes of faith and fierce loyalty, right?

We would expect to see many expressions and desires of trust and confidence in the Lord.

And in fact, we have that in this psalm.

Listen to the way the psalmist writes these things.

He says, He says to the Lord, he says, In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches.

He says, My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times.

When I think on my ways, I turn my feet to your testimonies.

I hasten and I don't delay to keep your commandments.

He says, I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever to the end, Lord.

He says, Oh, how I love your law.

It is the meditation of my heart all day.

I hold back my feet from every evil way in order to keep your word.

I don't turn aside from your rules, for you have taught me.

How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.

Through your precepts I get understanding.

Therefore I hate every false way.

I wonder as you heard this, what feelings were arising in you?

As you heard these hard cries from the psalmist.

Wow.

I mean, this is over the top.

I mean, granted, this is poetry, and in poetry you have to have some latitude for exuberant expression and overstatement, but wow, this is really over the top.

This is really not who I am at one important level.

Even though I resonate deeply with it, I see something very different in my own heart.

But I have to say there is something very attractive and very alluring about this unalloyed sentiment, right?

I hope there is, because we were meant, we were meant to have this.

We were made by a creator to be in fellowship with him.

We're relational beings who are meant to live in full, wholehearted loyalty to him.

And so surely there is something in our hearts that resonates and that is attracted to this sentiment.

It's possible to read these verses and so want to be defined by them, by this level of success and by this applaudable loyalty, that we become unwilling or even unable to see the many times each day that we are more defined by the opposite.

Isn't there something in us that knows that there is power, there is authority, there is great respect that go with success.

And that if we can have success and loyalty to the Lord, those things can be ours, we think.

We could step up and pay some of our own way.

Isn't there a voice like that inside of us?

I think it's really where the Pharisees had their starting point in verses just like this.

But our author, he is no Pharisee, and sandwiched in, woven into these amazing statements of his loyalty, are many cries of personal disloyalty to God.

It's woven all through this psalm.

It actually comes across as a really odd mixture.

If you read this psalm in its entirety, and please let me encourage you to do that.

I hope, as we're spending many weeks on this psalm, that you will take time to read this from cover from verse 1 to verse 176 and just let it kind of soak in on your soul.

But one of the things you'll see when you do that is that there is an unmistakable tension in the heart of this psalmist that we are meant to feel and to learn from.

So that everything he's gonna say here in these verses, there is an ask.

There's an ask behind it.

And what I'd like us to do is I'd like us to just look at several of these verses, and I'd like us to ask ourselves the question is what does this psalmist know about himself?

What is he acknowledging about himself that is behind this ask?

That leads him to the place of asking the Lord this particular petition.

Let's begin in verse 33.

Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes, and I will keep it to the end.

Teach me the way of your statutes, and I will keep it to the end.

Now, in the Psalms, the way means the whole of one's life.

It means the pathway that you're walking on.

It means what you do and what you build and what you accomplish and what you sow and what you reap.

And the psalmist is is asking the Lord something here.

He's asking him to be taught.

He's asking him to be taught.

He doesn't want to be taught just individual commands, he wants to be taught the whole way of the Lord.

There's an acknowledgement here that he can't find the Lord's way on his own.

That he's directionally challenged, if you'll if you have it.

That he needs the Lord to show him the complexities of life and where the way of God goes, where the word of God will lead us.

It's far bigger than I can get to on my own.

In verse 34, he builds on this.

He says, Give me understanding that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart.

He's telling God here that the word of God is way more complex than what he knows.

Way more than he can do.

The Lord tells us to love our neighbor as ourself.

How do we do that?

The Lord tells us to forgive one another when we sin against each other.

How do we do that?

Do you find that easy?

The Lord tells us to love people who come across our path.

How do we do that in day-to-day life?

How do we love our, take care of ourselves and take care of our family, and take care of our priorities and rest and yet entertain this ceaseless stream of requests for help and of people who need our attention and who need our love.

How do we get along in a church?

The church is the body of Christ.

We can come to grips with these intellectual truths.

We can do that pretty easily, right?

But this request is way deeper than that.

The psalmist recognizes that it takes the divine understanding to know how to function in a family where there is family tension and family heat and where there is family unrest and ugliness and assaults, and to be able to live in that and to love that because it's Christ's bride.

The psalmist needs understanding.

For I delight in it.

Verse 36.

Incline my heart to your testimonies and not to selfish gain.

My heart is bent on selfish gain.

It's bent on it.

My heart is bent on taking care of my interests, in my reputation, in my happiness, in my comfort.

My heart is bent on that.

And Lord, if you don't incline it in another way, that is where my heart will be.

That is massive disloyalty.

It becomes loyalty to self, but it's disloyalty to our Creator who made us.

Verse 37.

Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things.

What are the worthless things in our lives?

What are they?

I love the language here from just looking at them.

Because it begins with a look.

It begins with innocent looks, which turn into gaze, which turn into sitting, which turn into longings.

What are the worthless things in your life?

I think I could make a list for you of worthless things.

I think you could make a list for me of worthless things in life that people shouldn't spend their time doing.

It's pretty interesting how we can do that.

I can't give you a list of what worthless things are.

But you know what they are.

And God can open your heart to what they are.

They're things that don't give you life.

They're things that lead you away from the loyalty of the Lord.

They lead you away from fruitfulness.

They lead you away from love.

Those can be good things.

They can be good things that we turn into ultimate things.

They can be good things that we begin to build our identity around.

They don't have to be horrible, black, dark things.

Worthless things can be very legit things.

And that's how we justify them in our life.

And the psalmist knows the entrapping power because his heart has so much disloyalty still in it.

And it's inclined by nature.

I love what he says at the end of verse 37.

He says, Give me life in your ways.

All of the worthless things that we pursue, we're really Really looking for life.

In Scripture, life doesn't mean physically alive, it's it's more metaphorical than that.

It means peace, it means stability, it means satisfaction, it means happiness in good.

It means shalom.

And it's really what we're all looking for.

It's what all of us want.

We are just wired to want that and to have that.

But we're wired to have it in the ways of God.

And we won't find it anywhere else.

And the psalmist knows that.

He asked the Lord that God would let him taste life in the right ways.

We know from Psalm 1 that the Lord knows the ways of the righteous.

He knows the ways of the righteous.

He delights in them.

But the way of the wicked will perish.

The whole way, all that's been built, all that's been accumulated, all that's been pursued, we're told there that it will just be like chaff.

It will just be like at harvest time in the fields.

You've seen them.

The combines are cranking, and out of the top is blowing this chaff.

The fruit is going in the bin, but the chaff is just blowing everywhere.

It's coming in your house, in your nose.

And it's worthless.

It's just worthless.

And the psalmist knows that.

And he wants life in the ways of God.

He wants the Lord to confirm his promises.

He longs to fear the Lord.

He longs for the Lord to be feared.

He forgets God.

He forgets what God has said.

And he longs to see the Lord put into practice in his life so that he might be reminded of it.

Verse 39, he wants God to take away the reproach that he dreads.

He hates feeling shame.

Sometimes it's imposed on him from others, but sometimes it's brought on by his own disloyalty in his heart.

I don't know how this strikes you and whether you feel like, wow, this is exactly where I feel I am in my life and what the Christian life is about.

I'd like to read to you a letter, a portion of a letter, a small portion of a letter from a man that you all know.

He wrote in the 1700s.

And this is what he wrote.

He was writing this to another individual.

And he's speaking about Galatians 5, 17, where the apostle says that you cannot do the things that you desire.

Speaking of the indwelling sin that lives in Christians.

And he says, this is a humbling but a just account of a Christian's attainment in this present life.

And it's equally applicable to the strongest and to the weakest.

The Lord has given his people a desire and a will, aiming at great things.

Without this, they would be unworthy of the name of Christians.

But they cannot do as they would.

But in comparison with the great mark at which we aim, we miss it.

So that while they have great cause to be thankful for the desire he has given them and for the degree in which it is answered, they have equal reason to be ashamed and abased under a sense of their continual defects and the evil mixtures which taint and debase their best endeavors.

It would be easy to make out a long list of particulars, which a believer would do if he could, but in which from first to last he finds a shameful inability.

You know this author as John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, that we sang.

And the reason he wrote Amazing Grace is because John Newton was a student of his own heart.

And the Lord unveiled to him over time the depths of the depravity and disloyalty that was embedded there right alongside the loyalty and the desires for great things that the Spirit had planted there also.

Well, I'd like us to uh to move on here to the second question.

And wow, I'm gonna have to go, I'm gonna have to go from memory here.

I forgot to pull my last page off the printer.

So you're gonna get it straight from wherever it's coming from.

Darn.

The question though is what what what what do we do about this?

You know, how do we cope with this disloyalty?

How do we cope with it?

I was just gonna say, how do we cope for five minutes and say, oh, you'll have to wait till next week to find out how we really cope with it.

Oh yeah, that's what I was gonna say.

Well, I think as we look at scripture, the the scripture is really here to teach us.

I mean, this isn't, we're not something we have to come up with in our own.

How do we cope with this?

We don't have to come up with something that just makes sense to us.

The scriptures lead us in this direction.

And so when we're looking at this psalm, we should see something here about how to deal with this disloyalty.

So here's a uh here are some important things the psalmist wants us to hear.

Number one is that this battle of sin is an issue of the hidden heart.

It's not merely an issue of the outward behavior.

See, it's the behavior that we begin in life to think about.

That's the way we normally want to think.

It's what we want to look at.

We're all just like moralists, and we want to try to manage that.

But throughout these verses, we hear him talking about the Lord inclining his heart.

Help me obey with my whole heart, not just in my actions.

It's way deeper than we think.

But secondly, the Lord shows us here that he wants us to own and acknowledge our heart-level sin before him.

Do you find that difficult to do?

If you're a parent, you know from raising children that children don't start off owning anything in life that they do wrong.

Some of you wives, I can see it in your eyes.

You're saying husbands don't either.

But children don't do that, they begin right where human nature began after the fall.

They blame shift.

Everything is someone else's fault.

It's not me.

And they have no ear and no capacity really to hear anything that addresses them.

And really, this is a long process.

And even after conversion, it's become something that is a long process.

We run from ignoring from owning and acknowledging before the Lord our sin and our shame.

And why do we do that?

Why do you do that?

Why do I do that?

Why do we hide from him?

Is it because we feel like we're not worthy to come before him?

One of the things you see in the psalmist is you see him expressing this disloyalty, but he's also confident of the Lord's love of him.

And that somehow he knows, he doesn't tell us because it's an Old Testament text that's pointing forward, but he knows that his acceptance with the Lord is built on something deeper than his performance to morality, whether it's in the heart or in the behavior.

Why run from it?

Christ is our righteousness if we're in him.

He obeyed the law perfectly.

He stood and took our shame and our guilt in our place.

And he invites us to come.

Let shame do its work.

Let it do its work by bringing us back to God and not driving us away from him.

That is the voice of hell that will lead you away from God.

But more than merely acknowledging, our psalmist is showing us that he wants us to ask.

He wants us to ask the Lord to be at work in us.

He wants us to bring prayers.

And I find this amazing because this is a divine strategy.

Where you have prayers in Scripture, there you have a God-given strategy that will be successful.

If God encourages us to pray for understanding, let us be encouraged that that is the way we're going to get it.

And that if we ask Him, if we ask Him, that we He will be faithful to give us understanding and to give us insight and to incline our heart and to lead us and to bless us and to mold us.

This tension of loyalty and disloyalty.

It's a sojourning heart that encompasses both fierce loyalty and yet disloyalty at the same time.

It's got both zeal and humility.

It has both the power of God at work in us and yet the brokenness of the flesh at work in us.

It's the tension of the already and the not yet.

And this tension is meant to do a great work in us.

Be encouraged, Christian.

This tension is meant to lead us away from trusting in ourselves and from boasting in our own flesh and to know that we need the Lord and to depend upon him.

And this tension will also grow our hope for the coming day.

It's meant to help us embrace death and to wean us from this world.

It's meant to help us long for the day when this flesh is going to be put off.

And no longer are we going to have this battle, but we're going to see him as he is and we're going to be like him.

We're going to have a body that can no longer be disloyal to the Lord.

We're going to get what we resonate with.

We're going to get what we have been made for.

We're going to get what Christ paid so dearly to buy for us.

But it's yet to come.

It's yet to come.

In the meantime, we're in the battle.

Stay in the battle.

Stay in the battle.

Draw near to God.

Own it and embrace this battle with great fierceness and with great authenticity.

And may the Lord bless us to find how He will hear and how He will grow us in this tension.

Will you join me as I lead us in a closing prayer?

Our Father.

Oh Lord, there is something in us.

It's one of the things that gives us assurance.

We recognize it as the first fruits of the Spirit that we're yours.

It's that distaste of sin and self-centeredness.

And it's a love of your ways.

Thank you for the taste you've given us.

Lord, open us up.

Open every one of us up this week.

Show us new ways.

Show us ways and places where we need to be taught.

Where there's deep disloyalty, where we've drifted and wandered from you.

Lord bless us to see, and may your power give us growth in those areas.

And we ask it in Christ's name.

Amen.