Well, this morning we are returning now to our study of the one-hundred-and-nineteenth psalm. You will remember we broke off our study of Psalm 119 at the end of last year to give our attention to the Advent season, and then we did an intensive study of the book of Romans in the month of January, and now we are back in Psalm 119 which is, as you will recall, is almost like reading the psalmist’s spiritual diary. It is an intimate record of his own engagement with God by His holy Word. We’ve come today to the fourteenth stanza in verses 105 through 112. The section opens with a verse that I hope will be familiar to you all by now since we have been using it for our teaching theme throughout 2023 and 2024. “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” That opening line tells us right away that this is a stanza about practical living under the governance of the Word of God. Practical Christian living under the governance of the Word of God.
Now if you’ll look at it with me for a moment, it will help us get its message clear if we see its structure, how it’s put together. The first two verses, 105 and 106, and the last two verses, 111 and 112, they are parallel to each other. One-hundred-five, you will notice, is about guidance from the Word of God, whereas 111 is about gladness from the Word of God. And both guidance and gladness in 105 and 111 are wedded in 106 and 112 to the psalmist’s profound commitment to life according to the Word of God. You see, if we are to receive the guidance the Scriptures give us and enjoy the gladness the Scriptures generate in our hearts, there must be a deep, immoveable commitment and resolve to live God’s way according to the Scriptures.
And then sandwiched right in the middle in 107 through 110, the psalmist tells us about the real world in which this committed life, under the Word, guided by the Word, given gladness of heart by the Word, in which this life should be lived – a world where affliction, 107, and risk, 109, and opposition, 110 are just some of the challenges that the believer must contend with. And yet surrounded by all of those challenges – do you see this in verse 108 – there still sounds a note of surprising praise. Despite the challenges, the psalmist is engaged in the praise and adoration of Almighty God. And taken together, all of that gives us a very realistic picture of the ordinary Christian life, doesn’t it? Guidance and gladness from the Word of God, yes, praise the Lord that we enjoy those wonderful blessings, but they are enjoyed and lived out in the context of profound, sometimes very difficult daily challenges. And yet despite them all, for all who trust in the Lord, challenges notwithstanding, we will find reason to praise Him from the holy Scriptures if we are children of God by faith in Jesus Christ. That’s the teaching of this part of the psalm. Guidance – 105 and 106. Gladness – 111 and 112. With surprising praise in the middle – 107 through 110. Guidance, gladness and surprising praise. That is “The Way of the Word,” not as the bulletin has it, “The Way of the World.” That’s a typo. “The Way of the Word” – that’s the subject of the stanza before us.
Before we look at each of those sections of the stanza, let’s pray and ask for the Lord to help us and then we’ll read His Word together. Let us all pray.
Lord our God, we ask You now that the same Spirit who inspired these words might give light to our understanding and grace to our often cold, unreceptive hearts, meekly to receive the ingrafted Word, to feed by faith on the pure spiritual milk of the Word that we may grow thereby, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Psalm 119 at the one-hundred-fifth verse. This is the Word of God:
“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. I have sworn an oath and confirmed it, to keep your righteous rules. I am severely afflicted; give me life, O Lord, according to your word! Accept my freewill offerings of praise, O Lord, and teach me your rules. I hold my life in my hand continually, but I do not forget your law. The wicked have laid a snare for me, but I do not stray from your precepts. Your testimonies are my heritage forever, for they are the joy of my heart. I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever, to the end.”
Amen.
Let’s look at verses 105 and 106 first of all and the theme of guidance. Guidance, first of all. Ironically, when it comes to the subject of guidance, a great many people are sadly misguided. In one of the commentaries I read this week I came across a quote from Oprah Winfrey’s 2008 commencement address at Stanford University. She said, “How do you know when you’re doing something right? How do you know that? It feels so. What I know is that feelings are really your GPS system for life,” says Oprah. “When you’re supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know. So lesson one,” she told the graduates, “follow your feelings. If it feels right, move forward. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it.”
That’s pretty typical Oprah and it’s pretty terrible advice. How do you know when you’re doing something right? Follow your feelings. That’s terrible advice. My feelings are a mess, aren’t yours? Sometimes I feel pretty good about some pretty terrible decisions, don’t you? But my feelings mislead me all the time. We need guidance, but don’t look to your feelings to find it. We need guidance outside of ourselves; guidance not shaped by the subjectivity and the bias of our own wicked hearts that will lead us in the right way. Praise the Lord that He has spoken to us. He offers us the direction that we need in His holy Word, the Bible. So verse 105, “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”
Now we need to be careful here with what may be the most famous verse in Psalm 119. It’s often pressed into service when Christians talk about guidance, and quite rightly so. The Word of God in holy Scripture is our only infallible rule of faith and life. It is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy God. But remember, verse 105 isn’t saying that in the Bible God offers us specific, detailed, step by step direction for life’s decisions. When the text says that the Word of God is “a lamp to our feet and a light to our path,” it isn’t saying if you’ll just search the Scriptures and read your Bible enough then God will tell you from one text to another what to do about that new job or whether to move to that new home. We don’t really think about it because all of our streets, or at least most of our streets are supposed to be illuminated by street lamps. But the image in our text is of somebody – I want you to picture somebody traveling at night and there are no street lights. It is pitch black; you can’t see your hand in front of your face. And the road this traveler is walking down is treacherous. So imagine yourself driving in Jackson under those conditions – no street lights, you can’t see your hand in front of your face, no headlamps on your car. You won’t get very far. You’ll hit one of those car-killer potholes and you’ll be done!
But the Word, the psalmist says, is a personal lamp; it’s a flashlight that shines on the path in front of your feet. It illuminates all the potholes. That’s the kind of guidance that Scripture offers us. It’s about giving you light to avoid the moral and spiritual potholes and pitfalls along the way. It isn’t designed to answer every conceivable question you might have for God. It is designed to help you not fall into paths of sin but to stay on the narrow path of righteousness. So for example, the Bible doesn’t tell you, will not tell you where to go on your next vacation. But it’s crystal clear about whether you should murder your teenager or merely take their cell phone away for a week. Right? The Bible is the light of God shining on the narrow path of righteousness saying, “Walk this way. Watch your step as you do. There are pitfalls and potholes all around.”
It seems to me that a great many Christians are desperately seeking specific guidance on life decisions from God while at the same time largely ignoring the crystal clarity that God has already given us in the far more important issues of basic holiness and everyday obedience and purity. So listen, if you neglect the detailed, moral guidance of God in holy Scripture, you will not likely ever follow accurately the life guidance that God gives us in holy providence. If you neglect the moral guidance of holy Scripture, you will not likely follow correctly the providence of God in your life. You’re waiting for God to show you what to do next while ignoring what He has said you must do and be and not do or be in His holy Word. The Word of the Lord is a light to our feet and a lamp to our path. It shows us the way to live within the bounds of righteousness for the glory of God. Without it, we are in the dark; we are in the dark.
That’s why the psalmist follows his statement about the light that Scripture gives us with a word of personal commitment. Look at verse 106. Do you see his commitment there? “I have sworn an oath and confirmed it, to keep your righteous rules.” Oprah said our feelings are our GPS system for life, our emotional guidance system. She’s quite wrong. The Bible is our GPS – a divinely inspired and therefore entirely reliable guidance system. But if we are going to stay on the path illuminated for our feet by the Scriptures, we are going to have to be determined. So the psalmist swears an oath. He binds himself to life according to the rule of the Word of God.
You may know that resolutions like this, personal covenanting to live for God’s glory, actually has a long evangelical tradition. In the 18th century, perhaps most famously, Jonathan Edwards made a series of 70 personal resolutions by which he sought to bind himself to godliness in all kinds of areas of his life. Let me quote a few of them to give you a flavor. “Resolved,” he said, “never to lose one moment of time but to improve it the most profitable way I possibly can. Resolved never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life. Resolved never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if I expected it would not be above an hour before I should hear the last trump. Resolved to study Scripture so steadily, constantly and frequently as that I may find and plainly perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of the saved.” He found resolutions like this to be a useful way to propel forward momentum in his obedience and growth as a follower of Jesus Christ.
Making resolutions like this, of course, is more than a matter of pragmatics and prudence. It is a deeply Biblical thing to do. Second Thessalonians 1:11, the apostle Paul prays that “our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill your every resolve and every work of faith by his power.” “That he may fulfill your every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power.” God will help you, he is saying, by His grace and by His power, to keep your resolutions for good. Are you resolved? Are you resolved? Are you determined? That’s what we see in the psalmist. That’s what we see in the example of our fathers and mothers in the faith over all these centuries – a determination, a resolution, a covenanted commitment to life God’s way. Are you resolved? What use is having the Word as a lamp to your feet if as it lights the way ahead of you, you turn off the path into the darkness at the slightest provocation? We need to be intentional, resolved, determined.
Maybe you’ve been sitting on the fence. You believe in Jesus, but you’re trying to live in both worlds. You’re trying to live as a Christian privately, maybe on Sunday, without letting anybody know that you are really Christ’s publicly the rest of the week. And it just can’t be done. It can’t be done. Jesus said, “Whoever is not with me is against Me. Whoever does not gather with me scatters.” It is a binary situation. You’re either Christ’s or you’re the worlds, but you can’t be both. You can’t be both. The Lord Jesus Christ calls you to come down off the fence and resolve, Make your oath and confirm it. Give yourself up now to that life for which Christ gave up His life that it might be yours. He died that you might walk in the light. Don’t you think it’s time you stepped out of the shadows and went public as a disciple of His? So the first thing to see here is guidance – guidance in the path of godliness, flowing from the Word and demanding our deep commitment and resolve.
Then look down at the other end of the stanza at the parallel verses in 111 and 112. They sort of bracket this section of the psalm, do you see that, now talking to us not about guidance but about gladness, gladness that comes from the Word. The note of gladness sounds clearly in verse 111. “Your testimonies are my heritage forever, for they are the joy of my heart.” Alec Motyer translates that “the gladness of my heart.” Notice three things about that gladness – it’s source, it’s locus, and it’s results. The source, locus and results of the gladness the psalmist describes.
The source of gladness first. Where does it get this gladness from? Where does it come from? Not from everything working out okay in his life – we’re going to see in just a moment actually that life is very hard indeed for the psalmist. So why is he glad? “Your testimonies are the gladness of my heart.” Not my circumstances; your testimonies are the gladness of my heart. The Word of God makes him glad. When you become a Christian, you begin to love the Bible. That’s one of the evidences of new birth, new life in your heart. You love the Word of God. You want to understand it better. You want more of it in your life. It’s thrilling to you to make discoveries of who He is and who Jesus is and what He has done and what He promises and how He will keep you and of His great love to you from His holy Word. And so joy, joy, gladness – that’s part of the ordinary Christian experience but it’s authentic, spiritual joy that arises from the Word. You get it here in the Word. It’s not an abstraction; it’s an effect of knowing the truth, resting in the promises, beholding God’s glory, savoring the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Word.
Like a malnourished person, a joyless Christian isn’t getting the spiritual nutrients that they need and ought to get from the Word of God. Maybe he or she has a dysfunctional relationship with the Bible. He’s been neglecting it; he’s just not reading it, not working to understand it, not applying it to their heart, merely checking boxes, closing it and putting it aside. They’re reading it and ignoring it, preferring disobedience to submission to its plain teaching. Or they’re not eating a varied enough diet of Old and New Testament, of Gospels and History, Prophets and Psalms and Epistles. They stay just in the safe, comfortable, familiar ground of the handful of verses that they know well and they never wrestle with challenging texts and the result is spiritual malnutrition, demonstrated by a lack of gladness. If you’re a joyless Christian, one of my first questions for you is, “Tell me more about your relationship to the Word of God? Is there adequate Bible intake? Are you nourished by the Scriptures?” If you were, you would say with the psalmist, “Your testimonies are the joy of my heart.”
The second thing to notice is not just the source but the locus of this gladness. “Your testimonies,” he says, “are the joy of my heart, the gladness of my heart.” In the first verse, verse 105, the psalmist talked about the Word directing his feet. Here he talks about the Word gladdenning his heart. One-hundred-five is about outward guidance from the Word. One-hundred-eleven is about satisfaction from the Word. And these two verses, they always go together. Cheerfully following the lamp to our feet and the light to our path is a result of being deeply satisfied with the Word in our own hearts. You will cheerfully follow the direction of Scripture if you are satisfied with its glories and beauties, promises and precepts.
And satisfaction with the Word in the heart is actually a consequence of going in the direction the Word points you. The more you go the way of the Word, the more gladness you feel as God’s Word proves itself over and over to be a sure and safe guide. The more satisfied with the Word you are, the more you’ll be ready to walk in the path it gives you. Dissatisfaction with the Word goes right along with an unwillingness to go where the Word points you. Are you dissatisfied with the Word? What does that tell you about your commitment to living God’s way?
And then the third thing to see – so the source, then the locus, thirdly, the results of this gladness that the psalmist feels. What does it produce? Look at verse 112. “Your testimonies are my heritage forever, for they are the joy of my heart.” Notice that word “for.” It means “because.” Because your testimonies are the joy of my heart, because the Word makes my heart glad, I consider them my true inheritance. Your testimonies are my heritage forever. The word “heritage” is historically and almost as a technical term for the Israelites’ portion and allotted possession in the land, the Promised Land. That was their inheritance, their heritage. But the psalmist here is saying, “My real heritage, my real inheritance, my great portion with which I am truly content is the Word of God itself. The Word makes me glad.”
When you begin to experience the gladness that the Word can give you, you want it more than all the competitors and counterfeits the world has to offer. You want the Word. “Give me more of the Word. I’m satisfied with the Word.” It becomes treasure. Treasure. “Take everything else away – all my books, my reputation, all my friends, all my achievements, but leave me the Word and I’ll be satisfied.” That’s what he’s saying.
Of course just like the guidance the Word gives, the gladness the Word gives also requires commitment on our part if we are really going to enjoy it. And so he says in verse 112, “I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever, to the end.” Your Word makes my heart glad, so I incline my heart to do what it says forever, to the end. That is complete commitment, isn’t it? I want to live this way. I’m constantly working on my heart that is prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God that I love, so that I will obey the Word all the time, forever, all the way to the end. He isn’t passive. Notice he isn’t passive with himself, with his own heart. He takes himself in hand. He inclines his heart to perform God’s statutes.
If you’re sitting about waiting for your heart to suddenly change course, to feel differently, to respond spontaneously, you will wait forever. You must incline your heart. You must turn the wheel of your heart to direct the ship of your life till it aligns with the direction the Word of God says you should follow. So guidance and gladness from the Word – outward direction for our feet, inner satisfaction for our hearts.
And then don’t miss the central section of the psalm. Lest we begin to think the Word of God provides for all who follow it a sort of idyllic existence, the psalmist brings us back to the real world with something of a bump, doesn’t he? In verse 107, he is “severely afflicted,” and cries to God to give him life according to the Word. In 109, he holds his life continually in his hand, even if he never forgets God’s law. In 110, “the wicked have laid a snare” for him. The road he travels through is strewn with steel traps whose jaws are ready to slam shut on the ankles of all who step on them. There is affliction, 107, risk, 109, opposition, 110. That’s the context of the Christian life. This is what it looks like to follow Jesus.
And we ought not to be surprised about that, after all. This is virtually a penned portrait, isn’t it, of the life of Jesus Christ. “The servant is not greater than his master,” Jesus reminded us. “If they hated Me, they will hate you also.” So He endured terrible suffering, affliction, for us and for our salvation. He constantly took His life in His hand, speaking up to do what is the will of God, risking everything. He was surrounded by enemies who set snares for Him. Scribes and Pharisees plotting to kill Him, eventually succeeding in their schemes. Terrible opposition. The guidance we get from the Word and the gladness that it affords, they are ours because our Savior lived this life of suffering and affliction, risk and opposition, ahead of us and purchased our security under the direction of God by His Spirit through His Word. He bought and paid for guidance and gladness amidst all your sorrow. So do not be surprised when, like your Savior, affliction and risk and opposition make you their targets since they made Him who saved us by His grace their targets first. This is the normal Christian life.
But here’s the difference between the suffering Christian who suffers in fellowship with Jesus Christ and all other suffering and every other sufferer – here’s the difference – verse 108, “Accept my freewill offerings of praise, O Lord, and teach me your rules.” He’s asking for two things in the middle of all these trials. And did you notice how they correspond to the two points we’ve already made about guidance and gladness from the beginning and end of the stanza? He wants God to accept his freewill offerings of praise. He’s worshiping and he’s glad, even amidst all his sorrows, and he wants God to teach him His rules. He’s looking for guidance from the Word of God to stay on the right path. In the crucible of affliction, risk and opposition, our Savior gave glory to God, continued in the way of obedience before Him, and now the psalmist is teaching us here to mirror Christ in these same ways in our own Christian lives. Because there is gladness from the Word, the psalmist offers praise right there in the middle of suffering. Because there is guidance from the Word, the psalmist looks to God to teach him His rules, no matter what waves and breakers of opposition and risk and affliction may crash down upon him.
And don’t overlook the prayerful character of this central verse. He isn’t simply telling us that he offers praise or that he is committed to going God’s way according to God’s rules. He is crying out to the Lord to accept his praise and help him know and live out His rules. Part of the key to receiving the guidance God has for us in His Word and enjoying the gladness God wants us to enjoy from His Word, to living in commitment to that Word, is to water all our resolutions for good with prayer. You water the seed of your commitment by prayer. Isn’t that what James teaches us, James 1:5? “If anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask God who gives generously to all without reproach and it will be given him.” If you need guidance from the Word, you want more gladness in the Word, you’ve got to water the seed of the Word with your prayer until it bears fruit in your life. James 4:2, “You do not have because you do not ask.”
So with an open Bible and a teachable heart, ask the Lord to guide you, and He will shine the lamp of His Word before your feet, directing you in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. And the light of His Word will awaken in your heart new gladness, new gratitude, that though your way may be dark, though there may yet be great suffering and affliction, though there may be real opposition and terrible risk as you seek to be obedient to Him, still lying in your future, He will hold you fast and show you again and again that every word of His is sure, His promises are safe, and all who follow the direction His Word gives will walk on safe paths till they arrive safely home at last.
Guidance, gladness, and surprising praise. May the Lord give them to us all. Let us pray.
God our Father how we love You that You don’t leave us to grope around in the darkness but that You shine the light of Your Word before our feet. Give us now grace, we pray, to walk in the way, to follow our Savior’s steps. Yes, through affliction and risk and opposition that is the ordinary Christian life, but enable us as we trust Your promises and obey Your precepts to know the gladness of God’s hand guiding us, His Word directing us, and all His promises being kept toward us, in Jesus’ Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.