Live the Word

The scripture reading this morning comes from Psalm 119

Psalms 119:25–32

verses 25 through 32, Psalm 119 verses 25 through 32, and most

Psalms 119:25–32

of the Bibles on your seat. I think it's in 480.

On page 480. I have a Bible.

We invite you to take one of those as our gift to You.

Psalm 119, verse 25 says my soul clings to the dust.

Psalms 119:25

Give me life according to Your word.

When I told of my ways, you answered me.

Teach me Your statutes, make me understand the way of Your

precepts, and I will meditate on Your wondrous works.

My soul melts away for sorrow. Strengthen me according to Your

word, Put false ways far from me, and graciously teach me Your

law. I have chosen the way of

faithfulness. I set Your rules before me.

I cling to Your testimonies. O Lord, let me not be put to

shame. I will run in the way of Your

commandments when you enlarge my heart.

It's the word of the Lord. Good morning, Port City Church

family and friends. How's everybody doing this cold,

rainy, wonderful Sunday? Thank you all for coming out of

your houses and joining us. I appreciate it.

My name is Will, and I am one of the pastors here, and I am so

excited every time that I get to open God's Word with all of you.

And I recognize that the Bible talks about not having

favorites, not playing favoritism, but I have a

favorite, OK? And before I jump in too far, I

just want to talk to my kids for a minute.

You guys are better than everybody else in the room.

I just want you to know that. OK?

So if you are a kid, can you look at me for just a second?

All right? I love having you guys in this

room. You are amazing, OK?

And I know that a lot of times when you are in this room, it

feels like us adults are telling you to be more like us, right?

We want you to sit still, to be quiet, to listen, not to move.

OK. But can I just tell you guys a

secret? So, yeah, if you want me to tell

you a secret. Do you guys like secrets?

I appreciate it. Kevin.

Kevin is. Kevin is also a big kid.

Yeah. There he goes.

He's repping the kids. Jesus, in his word tells us

adults that we need to be more like you guys.

Did you know that? You guys are incredible.

And you have so much to offer the church.

And I want you to hear that. OK.

So I want you guys to listen today, though, OK?

I want you to know that you're in here because we care about

you and I want you to hear what we have to say.

But I'm going to sweeten the deal, all right?

Because I know that you guys want to move around, OK?

If you can come to me at the end of my sermon, the usual deal

with you guys that have been here, right?

If you come to me at the end of my sermon with my four points,

everybody say 44, go ahead and write down 1234 parents.

You can help your kids cheat if you need to.

It's OK if you come to me at the end with those four points, I

got a piece of candy because I love you guys.

All right, everybody good? Give me a thumbs up if you're

good. All right, wonderful adults.

I have nothing extra for you guys, but God's Word is all that

we need. Amen.

All right, before I jump in, let me just take a moment to pray.

And kids, you can wrestle around and find a piece of paper.

Lord, I just thank you. God, I thank you for your word.

I thank you that every time I open your word, you encourage

me, Lord, when I just sit down and I seek to study your word,

you, you, you show me something in your word.

God, I'm so encouraged by this text this morning, Lord, You

have used it in many ways to encourage me, God.

And I just pray that you would take these these words that I've

tried to string together God, and that you would remove the

ones that don't communicate what it is that you want

communicated. God, I pray that you would add

ones or we need to add some. God, I pray that you would just

move this morning, God, and encourage others in the way that

I have been encouraged as I have looked at your word, Father,

Lord, we just we thank you for your word.

We thank you for the God that you are, Lord.

And I just pray that you would help me to communicate that this

morning. I love you, Father.

And your name, I pray, Amen. All right, so as I was starting

to just prep this sermon this the past few weeks as I've began

to study, I just have realized like every time that I have the

opportunity to preach a few times a year, God just uses

those texts in my life. And it doesn't matter what it

is. Any text, every time I sit down

and I just take some intent time to just sit and study it,

there's something that God uses to just grip my heart and change

me. Any text, right?

You see, something happens when we really take God seriously and

we study and meditate on His word.

It shouldn't be a surprise when we just take that time like He.

He begins to show me something and this week has been no

different and it shouldn't be surprising, right?

Hebrews 412 says for the word of God is living and active.

It's sharper than any 2 edged sword, piercing to the division

of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow and discerning the

thoughts and intentions of the heart.

It's living like it's active. It's not just words on a paper,

right? Like do we believe that this

morning because it's true. That's what we've been talking

about in the series through Psalm 119 the past three weeks.

We covered read the word Pastor Ron.

It was a huge encouragement to me store the Word.

Last week, Pastor Tanner preached on meditating the word

and I've just been processing that.

I've heard other people that have been processing what what

he talked about last week. And I hope that if you didn't

listen, you go back and listen to it this week.

My sermon is entitled Live the Word.

Can somebody say live the Word? I don't know about you, but many

times if I hear a sermon that's called something like Live the

Word, it makes me think of a checklist like I I've been given

the rules, I've been given the things, I meditated on it, I

read it and now I've got the list of things that I need to

do. And now it's up to me to go and

do it. But what I hope that you find

this morning is that we serve a God unlike any other, unlike any

other. He's the only God.

And I have a feeling that many in here, whether you realize it

or not, might have an image of God standing on top of a

mountain. He's given us his word.

He's given us this, this word that's a map of instruction, a

manual. And he said, the rest is up to

you. You've got what you need to do,

You've got the directions, you've got the instructions.

Now come up here and meet me if you can make it like it's all up

to us now. Time to use all of our grit, all

of our discipline. And if we make it to the top of

the mountain without falling off, then we found him.

I don't know about you, but sometimes when it's like, hey,

live God's word, that's kind of what it feels like.

And that image can invoke a couple of different responses.

Some respond in shame because rightly we realize that hey, I

can't make it to the top of that mountain.

I can't be perfect. I can't live his word out

perfectly. There's no way I've tried it.

I can't not screw this up. Some of us respond by moving the

goal posts. We're like, hey God.

Surely God didn't say. I know he wrote it down, but

surely he didn't mean it because he knew that I couldn't do it.

So there's no way that he would do that.

It's like playing a game with like a six year old who's really

competitive. Like if you ever played

basketball with like a six year old, by the end of the game, the

person that misses the most shots is the one that's winning.

Like they just changed the rules.

The problem is that we all know the real rules, right?

No matter how much the goal poster move, you know who won

that game? The last group can sometimes be

just after we kind of go through the process of realizing these

things. Eventually you're like, man, I'm

just going to give up trying. I can't do it.

The goal post thing doesn't work.

I know it's not really really what he's demanding.

I'm just going to stop trying. Like like me the during my

CrossFit phase. I don't know if anybody's ever

had a CrossFit phase or maybe you're still you're you're still

doing it. Some of y'all look like you

might still be doing it. And I man props.

I, I did it for about 6 months three years ago and I was doing

pretty good. Like I started out no weights on

the bar because I couldn't do it.

I got some more weights and I was like, OK, I got some weights

on the bar. It came time to climb the rope

and I climbed the rope. I made it up the rope with some

rope burn, but I made it. And then I came in one morning

and they were like, hey, we're doing hand stands today.

And I was like what? And they said, we're doing hand

stands today. And I was like, OK, you think I

can do it? They're like, you got this.

I said, OK, what do I need to do?

And they said, OK, you need to look at the wall.

You need to run as fast as you can, throw your hands down, flip

your feet up and then start doing doing handstand push ups.

And I said, y'all think I can do it?

And they said yeah. And I said OK.

And I looked at the wall. I ran, I committed, I threw my

hands down, I flipped my feet up, I slammed into the wall,

fell on top of my head, got up, looked at everybody that was

looking at me. I turned around and never tried

it again. Maybe that's what God's word,

living God's word feels like to you.

You're like, I've messed this thing up so many times, so many

times. I'm just done trying.

But this morning I want to encourage you because you don't

need to respond in any of those ways because we don't serve the

God in that picture. He's not standing up on the

mountain. He's not waiting for us to

climb. To him, He is a deeply personal

God who came down to us. We just celebrated that at

Christmas, right? Emmanuel, God with us, He came

down to us. Do you realize that?

He could have stood on the mountain.

He would have been right to do so.

He is perfect, but He didn't. He came down to us.

He made a way for us. He gave us His word.

And this morning as we jump in, we are going to explore what

this Psalm teaches us about living God's Word.

And I want to warn you because it may sound a little different

than what you thought. The first thing that I want us

to see in this text, kids, that number one is that the psalmist

portrays living God's Word as being revived by God's word.

My first point this morning is be revived by God's word.

From the very beginning of this text we find that the psalmist

is not in a great place, is he? Multiple times throughout the

text he clues us into the state of his soul.

The very beginning of this section, My soul clings to the

dust. My soul clings to the dust.

One thing that I love about the Psalms is the imagery that they

provide. I'm not a very good poet.

I'm not very good with with words.

I have no imagery. The only poems I've ever written

my wife started with Roses are red, violets are blue.

This is my poem and I wrote it to you.

That was a freestyle. Just so that y'all know, I don't

know about you, but have you ever, just you look at this

picture of clinging to the dust? Have you ever resonated with

that? You're like, man, I, I just, I

feel like no matter how hard I try, I'm just clinging.

I can't make myself feel alive again.

Have you ever felt like that before?

Like your soul was dead and sorrowful?

Maybe when we were singing that song.

It is well with my soul. There are mornings when you come

in and you're like, man, it's really hard for me to sing that.

Maybe it doesn't feel like it's well with your soul.

And then in verse 28, he gives us another picture to describe

his soul. It says my soul melts away for

sorrow. It melts away for sorrow.

He gives us this image of melting.

Another thing that I find helpful when I'm studying

scripture and especially when I'm reading the Psalms, is it's

just meditating on the images that they provide and asking the

question, why this image, like out of all the images that he

could have provided us, what was it about this one that, that he

wanted to, to show us something that he wanted to communicate to

us? And so I, I begin to think, what

are some of the other ways that he could have described his

soul, but he chose not to And why?

Right? Like he could have said, Hey, my

soul is broken and shattered like a, a glass that just right.

He could have used that imagery, but he didn't.

He used the image of being put under consistent heat and

pressure that just causes something to change form, right?

It's not a shattering, it just changes form.

It's slow and steady. Some of us in this room have

probably had events that were more like the shattering, right?

Like maybe, maybe you got a phone call out of the blue and

it just completely turned your world upside down.

Maybe somebody that you knew was no longer alive or, or something

that you that you thought was no longer true or, or just

something happened that just blew your your world out of the

water. I don't think that's what he's

talking about here. That's, that's not the only kind

of thing that brings grief, is it?

Maybe, maybe some of you have never had that just life

altering phone call. Maybe that's not your story.

One commentator pointed out that the the grief here is not just a

flood of tears or a fierce torrent that soon passes.

He describes it as a constant wearing a slow attrition that's

caused by inward grief that secretly but certainly wears

away the soul. So maybe you didn't get that one

big phone call, but maybe you've gone through a season where

you've just gotten like 5 medium phone calls.

Like just one blow after the other.

Things keep coming and it's like you just can't catch a break.

Maybe it's not like you took a haymaker to the head, but you're

just getting body shots and you are exhausted and you're like,

how am I going to make it right? Sometimes living God's word

looks a lot more like clinging and begging than it does taking

the hill. And if you've never found

yourself in one of those seasons, I can imagine that at

some point you will. And your walk with God, It's not

all going to be mountain tops, but living God's word is just as

important in the valley as it is when you're on top of the

mountain. And so I think this Psalm has

something to offer us as we see the psalmist in this state and

asking the question, how did you respond?

What were you asking God for in these moments?

So that when we find ourselves again in seasons like that, or

maybe right now you're in that season, we can say, God, how

should I respond? Another thing that I that I like

to consider when I study God's word is what would I, how would

I have responded in this moment compared to how they responded?

Like what would I have done here?

And I don't know about you, but in, in times of struggle, my

first request to God is God, change the external.

I'm not the problem, it's the problem.

Take the pressure away, make the phone call go away.

Make the things that are true right now that are causing this

to happen to me, make them untrue.

I want God to change the pressures around me.

And while that's not always a bad thing, and I'm not asking

you not to pray for those things, what we see in this

example is the psalmist prays something very different.

He requests God to change the things internally in himself

rather than focusing externally on the situation.

Instead of asking for a change of circumstance, he requests for

God to give him life. In verse 25, it says my soul

clings to the dust, give me life, right?

Then again in verse 28, he requests for God to strengthen

him. My soul melts away for sorrow.

Strengthen me. He didn't say take some weights

off the bar. Did he make the bar a little bit

lighter? He said, make me stronger.

Another thing that we find here is that he doesn't ask God for

some new word. He didn't say, God, I need a

new, fresh word from you. God, I need you to, I need you

to add a verse to the Bible that applies specifically to me.

I need you to have somebody to come and give me a, a fresh new

word specific to me. That's not a bad thing.

I welcome that. I welcome something in

accordance with God's word that somebody says.

But what we see here is that he says, he says he asked for life

according to God's word. He has to be strengthened

according to God's word. He doesn't want a new word.

He doesn't want a new sign. He just wants God to deliver on

the promise that he's already given.

He knows that God's word is sufficient, even though his

understanding of God's word might not be yet.

This brings me to my next point. Kids #2 to live God's Word, we

must understand God's Word. Can somebody say understand?

This can be intimidating. Can it?

The Bible is a big a big book. And I don't know about you all,

but I'm not a great reader. My daughter can blow through

books. I I get distracted.

So how can you understand God's Word?

How can you understand all of it?

Many of you in here probably haven't even read through the

whole Bible right now, while I would recommend that you all

read the whole Bible, that's not the goal here.

That's not what we're talking about.

The goal isn't just understanding God's Word, it's

obedience to God's Word. We're going to talk about that

in a minute. God is calling you to obey what

you understand and He is calling you to continue to grow in your

understanding. Let me tell you a secret, OK?

Those of us that have read through the whole Bible, those

of us that have gone and and had theological courses, like we

still don't understand all of God's word.

We still need greater understanding.

This isn't a one year plan. This is a lifelong journey.

Let's look at what the psalmist says here, verse 26.

When I told of my ways, you answered me.

Teach me your statutes. Now I'm just going to take a

quick aside. This is not actually the point

that I'm on, so forgive me, but I just couldn't help but stop

here. The psalmist says when I told of

my ways. We have this picture here of the

psalmist just talking to God like God.

When I told you of my ways, I told you of how I was.

I was clinging to the dust. I told you of how I was melting.

He's in this season and he's just talking to God.

Did you know that you can talk to God?

Did you know that you can approach him, You can have

conversations with him? You can just tell him what is

going on in your life? He already knows, but you can

share it with him, right? What a deeply and personable God

we serve, one who cares about us.

All right, let me jump back to actually what I wanted to say

with that verse. Forgive me.

Verse 26 again, when I told of my ways, you answered me.

Teach me your statutes. Teach me your statutes.

And then verse 27, make me understand the way of your

precepts, and I will meditate on your wondrous works.

And then in verse 29, put false ways far from me and graciously

teach me your law. When was the last time you felt

like somebody was gracious for for teaching you law, right?

That doesn't happen very often. Like my teachers in here do the

kids like when you get in the beginning of the year and you

say, kids, this is my rules for the classroom.

Are they like, thank you, thank you for these rules?

That doesn't happen, right. What do we see in all three of

these verses? The psalmist ask God, asks God

to teach him. Did you know that you can ask

God to reveal his word to you? Did you know that you can say

God? Like, I don't understand this.

I'm in Leviticus right now. I did great through Genesis and

Exodus. I'm in Leviticus and I have no

idea what skin conditions have to do with what I'm going

through today. Did you know that you can do

that? You can say, God, I need you to

explain your word to me. Have you ever just sat down with

your Bible and you read it and you're like, I have no idea what

is going on right now? I just said, God, I need you to

show me something like I'm walking through something.

I need you. I need your word right now.

Now, I don't want to give you the wrong idea here, OK?

Our walk with God is not just us.

Social media, a cup of coffee and our Bibles.

There are many different ways that God can speak to us, but

all of them should be evaluated against His Word in the proper

context. One thing that helps us keep

that in check is community. That's why for our members in

our prayer groups every week, one of the questions that we ask

is what is God teaching you this week?

What is God using to teach you? What did He teach you?

As God is teaching you things in His Word, I encourage you to vet

those things with other brothers and sisters in Christ.

Now, that doesn't mean you need to tell everybody, but you might

want to tell somebody, right? If God's teaching you something,

why would you not? That might look something like

saying this, hey, I was reading the Bible this morning and I

came across this passage and I really felt like God was using

it to tell me X, right? Do you think that that's in line

with Scripture? Is that, is that consistent with

what the rest of Scripture says? This is just an aside.

It's not specifically in this text, but I do feel like it was

worth calling out. The most important thing here

though is that He didn't just give us a book and say, figure

it out, figure this life thing out.

He teaches us His word. And if you're sitting here this

morning and you don't know Jesus yet, I dare you to ask Him to

teach you His word. Tell one of our members say,

hey, I want to read through this Bible.

This thing that y'all been talking about, I want to read

through this. Give it a month.

Say hey, will you read the Bible with me?

Begin asking God to teach you his word and see what happens.

He might just take you up on that request and turn your whole

world around. There are people in this room

who have said God teach me your word, and their whole life was

messed up in the best way possible.

But understanding alone is not enough to live God's word.

We can't just understand His word.

We must commit to God's Word. Third Point, kids, commit to

God's Word. Matthew 7 verse 24 says this.

Matthew 7:24

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will

be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

You see, there's hearing the word of God and then there's

committing to do it. Not the same thing.

Here's the crazy thing about commitment.

We often want to approach commitment one line at a time.

My God, you tell me what you want me to do.

I will evaluate if I want to do it, if I'm brave enough to do

it, if I, if I think that it aligns with my definition of

good, and then I will. I'll either do that or I won't

do it. And then you'll take the next

thing. God.

OK, tell me the next thing that you want me to do, I'll evaluate

it. If I want to do it, then I'll do

it. If not, then maybe I won't write

one line at a time. But that's not what we see the

psalmist doing here. His commitment to live God's

Word comes before he has full understanding of what God's Word

is going to mean. Verse 30 says I've chosen the

way of faithfulness set. I set your rules before me.

The psalmist makes a choice even when he still needs to be

taught. We often want to commit after we

understand it all. We want to commit line by line,

like a contract negotiation. OK God, I'll give you that, but

I'm going to hold on to this. I'll do that, but I'm going to,

I'm going to keep this. I don't know how I feel about

that yet, but God calls us to commit to Him and trust that His

word is good. The psalmist is saying, God, I

don't yet understand all that you're going to ask of me in

your word, but as soon as you ask it, the the answer is yes.

I don't know what that's going to mean, but it's yes.

And that doesn't make a lot of sense to us a lot of times.

But I want you to think about a marriage commitment.

It's crazy because after being married to Lauren for 14 years,

I realized that I did not know her when we got married.

I don't know about y'all, but I thought I did.

I thought I knew her, but I didn't.

Just so you know, she's better than I thought.

I'm just going to say that that's why marriage is so

beautiful, right? You're committing in sickness

and in health. When you say your marriage vows,

you have no real idea what that is going to cost you, but you do

it anyway. You're saying whatever you

become, whatever you look like, whatever weird habits you've

been hiding from me, I still say yes, right?

You don't commit to what you know now, you commit to whatever

it ends up being. Lauren had no idea that I

habitually leave the microwave door open every single morning.

She had no idea that I'm so extremely, frustratingly literal

that I do exactly what she asks and not an inch more.

She had no idea that I get up 15 times at night to check and make

sure the doors are locked in our house because I can't remember

if I actually did it the right way last time.

No idea. But you know what?

14 years ago she went ahead and committed to all of those things

even before she knew them. Our walk with God is not a

negotiation on every line of the contract.

The psalmist here has put his yes on the table.

Living God's Word means committing to God's Word, no

matter what God's Word ends up revealing.

I'm going to say that again. Living God's word means

committing to God's word no matter what God's Word ends up

revealing. Let me tell you something.

If you ask God to teach you His Word, if you ask Him to remove

false ways from you, I believe He's going to take you up on

that request. I do, in the moment.

It's not going to be easy. Some of you in here can attest

to seasons in your life when God is revealing something to you.

A lot of times we make it feel like it's this, this just this

wonderful mountaintop experience.

Sometimes it doesn't feel like that because he's making you

new. He's saying, hey, that thing in

your life right there, that's not good.

You may think it's good. It's not good.

I'm going to change your tastes. I'm going to make you different.

I'm going to make you alive. I'm going to show you what good

is. You think you know good, but I'm

going to show you good. Give me your definition.

I'm going to change it. Sometimes it doesn't feel great

when you're walking through that season, but I promise you it's

so worth it. I promise you, you get to the

other side and you're like, man, what was last year at this time

was way different. There are times when living

God's Word feels like you were just hanging on because he's

changing you. He's making you new.

Verse 31, it says, I cling to your testimonies.

O Lord, let me not be put to shame.

If you remember in verse 25 the psalmist was clinging to the

dust, but now he uses that same word translated cling here to

say that he's clinging to God's Word.

Sometimes when our soul is clinging to the dust, we have to

start clinging to God's word. But let me tell you something

again, He said, let me not be put to shame.

God's Word doesn't return void. You can bet on His Word.

His Word doesn't miss. There may be times when it feels

like it hurts and you feel silly.

There may be times when it leads you to decisions that don't

align with wisdom of everyone else, all of your friends.

They say that's a ridiculous financial decision.

Maybe at times it doesn't align with a career path that you

want. Maybe at times it doesn't align

with what your parents wanted for you or or what your kids

would want you to do as a parent.

But I promise you, in the end, you will not be put to shame.

My last point this morning, kids, we can't just rely on

God's Word to teach us His word. We must rely on Him to fulfill

His word, rely on God to fulfill His Word.

Part of God fulfilling His word is that He doesn't just teach it

to us, but He makes us a people who were actually capable of

living it. He didn't just give it to us and

say good luck. He is making us a people who are

actually capable of following through on what He's teaching to

us. Verse 32 I will run in the way

of your commandments when you enlarge my heart.

As I was studying for this this sermon, I, I read Psalm 1119,

all 176 verses. I just, that was my reading for

about a week or so. I was just reading it and

soaking it in. And every single time that I

read through Psalm 119, this verse just jumped out at me.

Every single time I needed that encouragement.

When you enlarge my heart, not just if you enlarge my heart,

but when you enlarge my heart, the confidence that He has that

God will fulfill what He started in him.

God's not just going to change us, He's going to make us

capable. He's making us new.

I don't know. I know that this probably

doesn't happen to you all, but it does happen to me.

If I wake up a lot in the middle of the night, I don't get a lot

of sleep. I can be grumpy happens quite

frequently. I wake up tired, you know, maybe

one of my kids, I'm not going to name which one wakes up and I

and I just wake up and I'm like, man, my day is not going the way

I had went to bed. I set my alarm for 5:30 knowing

it wasn't going to happen. And I woke up.

I plan to go to the gym or run or something.

And I'm like, that's not going to happen.

And I'm just grumpy And I, I just, I don't, this may sound

weird to y'all, so I, I hope that somebody can resonate with

this. But like there are times where

I'm interacting when I'm grumpy and I'm just like, and having an

out of body experience. And I'm like, why am I

responding to everybody like this?

Like why am I so short? Why am I nagging my kids?

That doesn't even matter. Why am I talking to them about

something on their floor? That's not a big deal.

Like why am I doing this? Why was I so short with Lauren?

But I can't stop. It's like I'm just, I'm just

doing it. I'm like, what is happening

right now? I was in one of those, one of

those moments last week or the week before, probably both times

to be honest with you. And, and I was just, I was being

short with my kids. I was just being like just

grumpy, grumpy. I was talking to my wife grumpy.

And I just, I remember this moment of just being like, stop,

like stop in the moment, being like God, I need you right now.

Like I need you to enlarge my heart.

I need you to make me the man that you call me to be because

right now I'm not doing it. I'm not being the dad that I

need to be. I'm not being the husband that I

need to be. I'm just responding in my flesh.

And I need your spirit right now to do what your word tells me to

do because I'm failing at it right now.

Sometimes God doesn't just want us to figure it out ourselves.

He wants us to want for us what he wants for us, and He wants to

empower us to do those things. It's saying, God, what you say

is good. I also say is good.

Reveal to me what good is and I will change my definition.

And then I need you to make me capable of walking in the good

that you have for me. As I start to close here, I want

to talk to a couple of individuals in the room and then

I want to talk about what this means for our church as a whole.

First, if you're in here this morning and you don't know

Jesus, maybe maybe you've been around the church, maybe you've

read the read the Bible before. It didn't make any sense to you

or you didn't agree with it. Maybe you're in that moment of

just kind of checking, all right, I'll do, I'll do this

thing, but I don't want that thing.

Maybe it's like a menu thing for you, You know, maybe it's a new

year. That's why you're here.

I just want to, I want to challenge you this morning to

really take God's word seriously.

Take a season, ask somebody that does love Jesus.

Ask somebody that you're like that, that person's different,

there's something different about them.

Ask that person and say, Hey, will you read the Bible with me

for like a month and just ask God every day.

God, would you teach me something like I'm coming at

this for real. God, would you teach me

something? Would you change me in this?

Because his word is living and it's active.

I dare you. I ask that you would do that.

Ask somebody in this room, somebody on the stage.

We would love to do that with you and I pray that God would

use this to call you to himself. And if some of you take me up on

that challenge, I really believe that God is going to change some

things for you. I think he's going to reveal

himself to you. The Bible that maybe you thought

you knew is going to come alive and you're going to realize,

hey, this isn't this isn't what I thought it was.

It's going to be living and active.

It's going to begin to change you.

He's going to change your taste buds.

He's going to start to remove things from you.

I believe that He will do that. Believer, I want to talk to you

for a minute. As a believer, I want you to

know that you can stop trying to keep God's law on your own.

I'm not saying stop trying to obey God's word, but you should

stop trying to do it alone in your own power, in your flesh.

This week, start praying and asking God to teach you His

Word. Ask ask him to enlarge your

heart and make you capable of obeying it.

Ask Him to to change you. Say, God, I know that you've

promised you're going to finish this work in me.

I pray that you would continue to grow me, make me capable of

doing the things that you're calling me to do.

He promises he's going to finish that work in US one day.

It's not all up to us to figure it out alone.

He's given us his Holy Spirit. He's given us his church family,

our church family to help us walk it out.

Now I want to talk to the members of Port City this

morning. It's so easy for churches to

fall in one of two ditches and we're trying really hard not to

fall in either. The 1st is the learning ditch.

Their focus is on information. They stop at verse 30 when it

says I set your rules before me. Maybe there's a lot of time

studying rules and it just stops there.

Studying rules isn't bad. Studying the word is not bad.

It's good, it's necessary. But the problem is when you stop

there on the other side, that the other ditch that we're

trying not to fall in is the doing ditch, right?

The focus is on innovation. They jump straight to 32 and

they just start running. The problem is that they never

set the boundaries. They never set where they're

running to what they're running for, and they often end up

following their own version of good.

They stop redefining it to God's version of good.

They're not studying the Word, and the result is either burnout

or or worse, error and false teaching.

Now at Port City, we have a library kind of table with

books. We call it a library out there,

but we refuse to be a library, only gathering information, just

studying and and learning. That's not all that we do, but

we also refuse to be a treadmill right with just running without

any direction or purpose. We're just moving our legs,

trying to stay busy, trying to do good things.

We seek to be a church that clings to the Word so that God

can enlarge our hearts to run the path that He has set before

us. We study to obey and we obey by

His power. That's our goal.

Let's pray this morning, God. We just come to you this

morning, God. We thank you for your word, God.

We thank you for the book of Psalms, God.

We thank you for the encouragement that that we can.

We can run to you, God. We can talk to you, Lord, when

it feels like life is just beating us up, when we're in the

valley, we're not on the mountain top.

God, we can come to you, God, we can share with you what's going

on. We can ask you, Lord, to teach

us your word. God, would you help us to be a

people that commit to your word? God, that we say your definition

of good is the definition of good.

And we're going to we're going to commit to it as we continue

to learn it. God that that you would empower

us to do so. God, would you change us?

Lord, would you mold us into who you want us to be?

God, I pray that we would be a people that are reliant on your

spirit. God, would you do that in US?

I pray that some people in here, father, who, who just have not

taken your word seriously, who've never understood your

word. God, who, who maybe have never

even read your word. God, I pray that they would

would take the challenge and, and just say, OK, let me just,

let me just take some time and, and, and, and take God at his

word. Let me read it.

And God, I pray that you would teach it to them.

God, I pray that the words would leap off the page that it would

be like one of those 3D books you open up and they things just

start popping out. God, I pray that that would be

the experience. Lord, it's not always going to

be like that. There are days that we read and

it's not, it's just not hitting like it used to.

God, but but but your word is living and active.

God, you are working in US. And so God, I pray that you

would do that. I pray that you would continue

to do that in our church. God, I pray that when we open

your word, God, you would, you would shave some things off of

our lives. God that that you would, you

would add some things, Lord, you would, you would mold us and

make us into the people that you have called us to be Lord.

People that can walk through seasons where our soul is

melting and we can come out on the other side clinging to your

word in the truth of your word, the truth of your gospel.

God, we thank you, Lord, that you are a God who didn't just

stand on a mountain and demand for us to figure out a way to

get to you. God, but you sent your son down

to us knowing that we could never make it up there.

He lived the perfect life, died in our place.

God, thank you for that. Lord, I pray that you would make

that true for some people in here this morning, God, that

they would trust in you and they would obey.

Lord, we love you and your name we pray.

Amen.