All right, I brought too much stuff with me. I got to get rid of all my stuff up here. Wasn't thinking ahead. And I have to empty my pockets. I can't stand stuff in my pockets anymore. That goes back to seminary and our preaching labs. And we had to preach in front of a small group of students several times with a professor, and they all have forms, and they're grading you. And they took off points off of me all the time because I played with my keys in my pocket and my coins that were in my pocket. And I didn't know I did that, but I did it several times. So ever since seminary, I've got to make sure I empty my pockets because I still like to put my hand in my pocket sometimes, play with imaginary keys. Well, tonight we do come to the very last stanza, the last eight verses of Psalm 119, the longest chapter, if you will, in the Bible. It's verses 169 to 176. I'm entitling this, A Closing Prayer, Closing Prayer. And as you know, Psalm 119 is unique. We've said this many times. We'll say it one last time, that every eight stanzas Every eight verses, a stanza is celebrating a particular letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In succession, the ABCs of the Hebrew alphabet. And I know you've memorized all these and you've learned them all along the way. And so sure enough, we've come to the final one. It's the one on the bottom there, not the one on the right. That looks like a W. It's not. It's an S. Either S or SH. It can be either one in Hebrew. But the one next to it to our left. is the final Hebrew letter, tav, makes the T sound, usually at the beginning of a word, and usually at the end of a word too, although sometimes it'll make a TH sound at the end. But tav, that would be the beginning letter of the word Torah, for example. It's actually, interestingly, it's made up of two letters, and I'm looking at what you're looking at here. There's the little part on the right side of that, that little arm that goes straight up and then hooks to the left and gets a little bigger there. That little letter, if you take off the other leg, that's a letter all by itself, and it's the one at the top there, the daleth, which I think is the second one from the left up there, the daleth. So it's that letter, and they put it together with a nun, which is further down. It doesn't matter. They put them together and formed a new letter called Tav. And so every verse of this last stanza in the Hebrew begins with that letter, our letter T, if you will. And it's a wonderful stanza. I'm so glad we've had this time to journey through this great psalm together. Every stanza has been unique. And yet the same in some ways, the whole psalm celebrates the glories and majesty of God's Word. But each stanza had its own little unique flavor to it. And this one does tonight. Here's a quote about this stanza from John Phillips. The singer, that's another word for the author, because it's a psalm and they would sing these sometimes. The singer has now come to his last stanza. Letter by letter, he has alternately sung and sobbed his way through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet again and again. He found that his tears turned into rainbows when he looked through them at the Word of God. His triumphs turned into hymns. And now he is about to conclude his rhapsody on the wonders of the Word, a Word that has met him in every need of his life." Well, before we dive into the stanza and sort of dissect it as we normally do, I want to draw your attention to something. that we need to remember, it's something that honors the Lord. I don't think there's anything that honors the Lord more than this. I mean, other things honor the Lord, but one of the things that honors the Lord a lot is our dependence on him. Our dependence on him. There is just something about one of his sheep, recognizing our weakness, recognizing our need, recognizing our utter helplessness, and then admitting all those realities, confessing all those realities to the Lord in prayer, there's something about all of that, that kind of humble confession that especially exalts the Lord. In our hearts, in a special way, it pleases the Lord for us to be utterly dependent on him. And the fact is, we are all those things I mentioned, like weak, we are weak, we are needy, we are utterly helpless on our own, spiritually. And so when we humbly go to the Lord in prayer to acknowledge that, our total dependency on him, again, I'm just saying he's honored with that, he's pleased with that. It should be a part of every prayer, should be a part of our mindset as we live during the day. And we know the opposite of that, Displeases the Lord. What's the opposite of what I'm talking about? The opposite would be pride. That pride and sort of hyper-thinking of self that results in the opposite of dependency. It results in a sense of self-sufficiency. That's at the other end of the spectrum. That's especially grievous to the Lord. After all, He has said Himself what He thinks about pride, that He hates pride. Proverbs 6, there are six things which the Lord hates, yes, seven, which are an abomination to Him. And then it lists the seven, and the first one on the list, haughty eyes. That's just a poetic way of saying pride. Self-sufficiency. My point is, in this last stanza, Psalm 119, which I think really is an appropriate ending to this magnificent celebrating of the glory of God that we see in His Word. the Scriptures, in this last stanza we find this author, this psalmist displaying this great humility that I'm talking about because he is going to present to the Lord his many needs that he recognizes. And he's going to state in doing that in this stanza his total dependency on the Lord. I just want to point out a couple of interesting characteristics about this particular stanza. One is in two of the verses, verses 169 and verse 174, you see the capital letters there, O LORD. And in our English translations, anytime you see a capital O LORD, that really is Yahweh in the Hebrew. And so there are these two occurrences of directly addressing Yahweh that do help make this last stanza unique. You don't find it exactly like that, two like that in another stanza. Something else about this particular stanza, and this is in comparison to last week's study, the stanza before this one. That previous stanza, if you look at it again, the previous eight verses, they were all statements. They were all affirmations, things that the author was stating clearly about his own following of the Lord, his own obedience to the Lord, his own rejoicing in that obedience and in the Word. That was the last eight verses. This one's totally different. This one is all petition. Very little statements of confidence. There is instead just humble recognition of his sinfulness, humble recognition of his constant need for God's grace. That helps us conclude something about this author. I mean, along the way, we've seen that he's a brilliant student of the Word of God. He knows the Word of God. He's claimed more than once that he spends his life seeking to obey God's Word. And yet, you don't find a man having become self-righteous because of that. He wasn't patting himself on the back because he was so devoted to the Lord and His Word. He's not that. Tonight makes it very clear he's not that. He's fully aware of his weakness, of his frailties, of his helplessness, and therefore he is more than willing to express that to the Lord, to express his dependence on Yahweh. Another wonderful quote from a well-known commentator of the Psalms, Derek Kidner, the note of urgent need on which the Psalm ends is proof that the love of Scripture need not harden into academic pride. I think that's so important. Those in seminary struggle with that sometimes. We know that that's a danger to build up a lot of knowledge and learn more about the scripture and to just see it as all academics. You don't find that here. He's not hardened into academic pride. This man would have taken his stance, I love the way he says this, not with a self-congratulating Pharisee of the parable. We know the parable. Parable of the Pharisee, you know, saying, hey, look at me and look at all the money I'm giving and all that. But with the publican, the one who stood afar off and said, God, be merciful to me, a sinner, but yet that's the one that went home justified, saved. He would take a stand with that man, not the Pharisee. So as I said, this is the last lap of the journey through the alphabet of God's word. I am excited about this next session, you know, a week from now where we're going to, Kyle's going to lead us through several songs that we've learned along the way that fit. We're going to read through the psalm, sing the song, all that to celebrate the ending of it. But this is the last stanza of it. And as the author begins it, he knows that challenges and difficulties in his life are still to come. His life circumstances haven't changed. We've seen that all through the psalm, that he's dealing with trials. He knows they're still there, but he decides to conclude this celebration of God's Word in prayer. So we're going to note together tonight what this author in this last section of the psalm lists as his greatest needs and what he was seeking Yahweh for in prayer. Here's number one. He needed divine insight, divine insight. This is verse 169. Let my cry come before you, O Lord. Give me understanding according to your word. That little phrase, come before, actually means the idea of coming very close. He's saying, let me get very close to you now, Lord. Very bold to say that. And I want my cry to happen there. And the term for cry is practically a technical term in Hebrew for an offering to God. So I'm thinking of my prayer that way is what he's saying. It's an offering to you, Yahweh. And so I want to come close to the throne of God. That's very bold to think and speak like that. But at the same time, By using that word cry, we know that he's coming to the throne with an attitude of worship here, an attitude of offering. And what he asks for is understanding, or you could call it insight. Now we've made this point along the way before because this term has come up, this idea has come up, and we've said that understanding is different than knowledge. Anyone can Get knowledge, acquire knowledge, acquire facts. All you need is an encyclopedia. Let me change that. All you need is Wikipedia. Some of you don't know what an encyclopedia is. You get facts there. Knowledge is just that, it's the accumulation of facts. Understanding is something different. It's insight that produces the ability to comprehend and assimilate all the facts and then to relate those facts to other situations in life. So no doubt one reason this author desired this insight, this understanding was his circumstances that he was in. Like I said, all along the way we've noted that he has had some difficult times primarily due to people who opposed him and who were persecuting him harshly. So he concludes this psalm and as he looked ahead he's basically realizing that The situation hasn't changed, and the challenges are going to remain as harsh as ever. They're there. The point now is that he knew he had plenty of knowledge, but he wanted something beyond that. He needed insight. He needed understanding. He needed the insight that would allow him to look at all that was going on in his life more deeply, look at the principles in God's word, the promises more deeply of how God was dealing with him, to begin to understand that, really to understand not just the what that was going on, but perhaps even the divine why of what was behind it. Practical insight. The kind of practical insight that's desperately needed for life in the real world of suffering. The practical insight he needed to face his difficulties that were sure to come. That's what this singer needed. And as we would expect, he knew where it's found. He said, it's only in God's Word. It's understanding and insight that is according to The Word. There and there alone are you going to find insight into life's most difficult and perplexing questions. That has not changed. The world does not have insight, answers into the greatest issues of life. There's a lot of things we can learn in the world, but the world's learning doesn't help us much when you talk about the issues of suffering or you even talk about Death, its philosophies are not helpful there. They're just sort of poetic and high-sounding nonsense, really. When it comes to the deeper issues of man's soul, what we need is true insight for that. And just like he says, it comes one way according to the Word. And we've seen that this author, he knew a lot about the Word. I would imagine he had much of the Word memorized. He could recite the many promises in the Word of God. But what does that mean, ultimately? It could mean that he only has knowledge. That's not the same thing as insight. So what's interesting is the author knew that. We could also put it in terms of what Moses knew, by the way. There's an illustration there in the life of Moses. There's this interesting statement in Psalm 103 verse 7. God, He, God made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the sons of Israel. There's a little nuance of difference there between acts and ways. In fact, not so much grammatically, but just conceptually, there's a huge difference. people were able to see God's acts and recite what he was doing, Moses had received insight into God's ways. He had an understanding of what God was doing in bringing the various experiences into their lives. So back to our psalm tonight, I mean, we think of this man as a very gifted man. This was a godly man in many ways. He was blessed. He was inspired by the Holy Spirit to even write all this. He's familiar with God, we would think. Surely he's familiar with God and God's ways, and yet he is saying how conscious he was himself of how little he knew about that. And that if he's to understand anything at all about God and God's ways, God is the one that must open his spiritual eyes, the eyes of his soul, and give him that insight that he needed as he studied truth. That's humility. That's dependency, that's not self-sufficiency. You get an illustration of the very opposite of that from the church at Corinth. Just jumping over the New Testament for a moment. The mindset that they had versus the mindset of this author, they're contrasting. One of the problems in Corinth that Paul had to address was they thought they were so wise because they were imbibing the wisdom of the world and trying to incorporate that into the ministry of the church. It was dividing the church. So Paul had to address that problem and many other problems. Sorry for the small font, but when it's a large quote, you've got to make it fit. It's either that or put it on more slides, but just get out your glasses and binoculars and listen. Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world, its wisdom did not come to know God, it can't It might get some facts, but it won't know God in his ways. God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached, the truth, to save those who believe. For indeed, Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness. But to those who are the called, save people, Jews and Greeks, it doesn't matter. Christ, the message is about Christ, who's the very power of God and the wisdom of God. In this great summary statement, the foolishness of God is smarter, wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. Now, this is a New Testament passage and it's focusing on the ultimate wisdom of God that's found in Jesus, of course, and Psalm 119 was written long before that. He didn't know all we knew about the birth and death and resurrection of Christ and so forth. trusted in the coming of a Messiah someday, but nevertheless, he still knew a very basic principle that all genuine insight and wisdom and understanding comes from God. It doesn't come from anywhere else. And from his word, he knew he needed to ask God for this. So that's what he did. He was burdened over this, his great need for more spiritual insight. After all these stanzas, he's burdened about that. Lord help me here, give me insight. Second, he needed divine rescue. Verse 170, there's not many chapters of the Bible you can say that. Verse 170, let my supplication come before you, deliver me according to your word. That term deliver is a very rich word with many sort of meanings. There's a root concept there that means to be drawn out or pulled out of something. They would use it to talk about plucking someone out of the hands of the enemy. So yes, it's our idea of rescue. Rescue from any kind of precarious situation. It doesn't matter whether it's an earthly situation and an enemy, an earthly enemy, or some sort of spiritual danger that has eternal consequences. It can be used for either one of those. So yes, this prayer is prompted by the fact that this man knew that his earthly challenges were still out there. He was being attacked and persecuted by those who opposed him. And he had prayed and prayed more than once about those difficulties that he faced because of his enemies. And God, at this point in the Psalm, God had not chosen to change those circumstances. He was aware of that. I would imagine he still desired to be delivered from those enemies. But he also is thinking about something else here. It's what makes this more profound. He knew that God's will in the circumstance and any other circumstance is what is best, no matter what it is. So he adds a qualification. According to your word, he says that again. This is a different term for word than in the previous verse. This is a word that can be translated promises. which relates to God's eternal decrees. What God has sovereignly decreed to do. What he promises is what he has sovereignly decreed to do. That's this word. So he says, I'm asking for rescue, but according to that, if I memorize the word dabar, to that. There's a lot of promises that this man was familiar with. Promises he could claim as an Old Testament saint under the Old Covenant. Promises that dealt with God's blessings on his people and help for righteous people. He knew all that. And he knew that though he wasn't perfect, that he was a man who truly loved the Lord. He was trying to follow the Lord and seeking to serve the Lord. Yet God had not intervened to deliver him from his enemies. So he had to embrace the fact that temporal deliverance might not be in God's sovereign decrees for him. So he is thinking here of more than just temporal rescue, because he's still praying for it. He still needed it, even if his earthly circumstances stayed the same. So this is what we could call complete rescue. This is deliverance from anything that would bring him down. He needed rescue from things like doubt that was gonna come at times. He needed rescue from his own times of temptation and sin. He needed rescue from the evil influences of the world around him that was gonna continue. He needed deliverance from the power of the evil one, the devil. All that's included here. According to your sovereign decreed promises, God. And we need the same thing. We need this kind of rescue. We need that insight. We need this rescue because we're like this author. We can do nothing to pluck ourselves out, to rescue ourselves. These first two petitions are so important. He needed divine insight. He needed divine rescue. Just think about that. These are the two great needs of fallen people already at the very beginning of the stanza. People need spiritual insight to know God's ways, and they need to be rescued from anything that's going to negatively impact them spiritually. But he moves on to express a third need, number three. He needed divine enablement. And primarily here, he's talking about enablement to properly worship God. Verse 171, let my lips utter praise. For you teach me your statutes." You know these stanzas, the lines of the stanzas are always going to go back to the Word in some way. All the different terms we've seen along the way for the Word, many of them. Let my lips utter praise for, because you teach me your statutes. This man had learned God's statutes along the way. And I'm sure at times his learning came the same way ours does, the same way we're learning tonight. We study together. We're taught. He had learned from teachers along the way, mentors, godly men, rabbis. We're taught Scripture that way. We're taught principles of how to interpret the Bible correctly so that we interpret Scriptures in their context. We're taught to have a consistent hermeneutic. We learn the importance of things like language and grammar and history and geography and culture and all those things so that we can put the verses of scriptures into their proper perspectives. He had all that in some way. But what brings the most joy is what he mentions here, to be taught by the Lord. You teach me your statutes. That is a function of the Holy Spirit, the very one who inspires the Word of God. The Spirit of God is the ultimate interpreter of Scripture. It takes the Holy Spirit to enable our hearts. We could have called this point he needed divine illumination even. That kind of enablement. The Holy Spirit enables our hearts to truly understand what the Word says and to truly embrace it, whatever it says. So the psalmist prayed for that. for divine enablement, and he knew that the result would be that what he learned would prompt something, and that is worship of God. So here's what he's essentially saying in this verse. My lips will utter praise when you, Lord, have taught me your statutes. The result will be I'll praise you, Lord. I like the way he says it, utter praise. there is a modifying term there in Hebrew, it actually means to bubble over or to bubble up like a spring, to pour forth. It would even be used to talk about to belch forth. So the point is that there would be such of fullness in his heart and joy of being taught by God and learning the depths of God's ways in his words that the natural result would be praise, adoration, thanksgiving to God just pouring out, bubbling up from his lips. And that would end up making his worship and his praise biblical in nature. Because the Word is what would prompt his praise and that means Because the Lord taught him the statues, he would know then what is it about worship that pleases the Lord, what kind of worship pleases the Lord. The very elements of worship that God himself has determined pleases him that are found in his Word. That's the worship that he would give the Lord, and that worship would include the exaltation of the Word of God. Verse 172, let my tongue sing of your word, for all your commandments are righteous." I believe he used the word tongue there not just to add to the poetry of it, but he had an understanding of something that's been true throughout human history, that the tongue is the most unruly member of our bodies. James talks about that, that no man can tame the tongue. But there's a Psalm, Psalm 141 verse 3, this author would have known this. Set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth. Keep watch over the door of my lips. I think I said this one time, back in the dark ages, way back in the Middle Ages of our lives, back when we had flip phones, okay, long time ago, okay. I think they're coming back. But I figured out how to program a little saying on the screen, which I was not a techie at all, but I figured that out accidentally. And so when you flip it up, I wanted to say something and I chose to put those words on there, set a guard, oh Lord, over my mouth. I just figured I needed to remember that every time I spoke on the phone. Because the tongue's a danger and the author knew this danger. So he says that he desired to harness his tongue. for a particular reason, that his praise of the Lord would include proclaiming the glories of the Word of God in his praise. And that's what sing of your Word means here. So with the Lord's enablement, the Lord's divine illumination here, the author's knowledge of the Word would move from praise that was just bubbling up to actually singing out the majesty of God and the majesty of his truth. But he needed help with that. Number four, he needed divine power. Verse 173, let your hand, excuse me, let me just say that this is power for obedience. Let your hand be ready to help me for I've chosen your precepts. The whole psalm has made it abundantly clear that this author has chosen the word of God as the ruling law of his life. He said it multiple ways. Here he says it in these words, I have chosen your precepts. That's a definite statement. It's settled for him. No turning back, no turning back. But that wasn't the issue. That was almost the easy part. He needed help living in light of that choice he had made. But not just any help would do. Notice he says he needed the hand of the Lord involved. No lesser hand helping me with this. He's not praying to an angel. I mean, angels are great and mighty, but they still have limitations. If he lived today, he wouldn't pray to Mary or to some saint. No, he took his case, I read this somewhere, he took his case to the Supreme Court of the universe. I need the hand of God in this one. He appealed directly to the throne and he knew that God would be pleased to give his hand in helping him with this. Because God is pleased and glorified when his people obey him. And we must pray for that same kind of help to obey. We cannot live an upright life without His help. It's not enough to affirm the precepts, to choose the precepts. It doesn't stop there. We must live our lives in light of what the Word says, and we can't do that just by determination. The Apostle Paul understood that dilemma. Romans 7, 15, for what I'm doing I do not understand what I'm practicing, for I'm not practicing what I would like to do, I'm doing the very thing I hate. I know nothing good dwells in me and my flesh. There's this tension here, the willing is present but the doing of good is not. We understand that tension, we can say the same thing. So clearly if we really believe like this author did. We humbly believe that we are unable to live for God by ourselves. And yet we have a genuine desire to do that. We will come to God for his help, just like this man did. We'll pray this. We'll say, Lord, let your hand be ready to help me to live an upright life. Now, back to our author. He loved knowing the truth. He loved obeying the truth. So he goes on to say in verse 174, I long for your salvation, O Lord, and your law is my delight. So all the challenges in his life had not dimmed his delight in the scriptures all along the way. It's not like that for everybody. People that face trials like this, people that are being persecuted or have enemies or going through all kinds of difficult challenges of life, when they're faced with especially a long period of difficulty, or distress or doubt, they take their frustrations out on God, angry at God. Very foolish thing to do, but it's very common. And likewise, many, because of trials in life and challenges, have abandoned the Bible altogether. It just doesn't work for me. But frankly, there's no other source of comfort and stability and hope than in the Lord and His Word. So that had not changed, the challenges had not changed this man's desire to know and obey the scriptures, to live his life delighting in them and obeying them. I like the way Jesus put it to his disciples in John 6, 68. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? We have nowhere else to go. You have the words. of eternal life. We sing that in one of our songs sometimes on Sunday. You have the words of eternal life. So that's pretty much it. There's nowhere else to go. But we need to be on guard against this, the trials of life robbing our joy and delight in the Scriptures and our desire to want to actually live our lives in light of it. That's Satan's oldest trick to get us to that point. He's been doing that a very long time. That's the approach he took in Genesis chapter three with Adam and Eve. He began to get them to doubt the word and to question God and to doubt God. That's his trick, old trick. But if we do that, then where are we gonna go? Where do people go? I mean, to the political theories of Marxism or to the supposed insight of Eastern religions and Buddha or to humanism or to libertinism or to philosophies of the world, there is no place to go. If we abandon the Bible and living our lives in light of it, we are abandoning all hope It doesn't matter whether it's scientific theories or the philosophies of the age or religious ideologies of the world, none of them have answers. God has provided the answers we need in His Word, and this ancient writer was absolutely and totally okay with that. And he was a happy man, delighting in the Scriptures. So, Lord, help me with that. Give me the power I need. Help me to live my life in light of that." He certainly wanted to be delivered from his circumstances. But even if he wasn't, he had the Lord and he had the Lord's Word and he trusted in that, he delighted in it. It rewarded him with joy in his soul, a joy that the world can never understand. We saw the same sentiment earlier in the psalm. You can find it in verse 77 and verse 92, your law is my delight. Verse 92, if your law had not been my delight, then I would have perished in my affliction. Couldn't help but think of Psalm 1 verses 1 to 3, how blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, the world. It doesn't live and stand in the path of sinners. He doesn't take a seat with the scoffers of the world. His delight is in the law of the Lord. In his law, he meditates, and that means to meditate with a view in mind of obeying it. And then he's like this. This man was like this, a tree firmly planted by streams of water. So here he was, still drawing refreshment from the well of the Word of God, no matter what happened in his life. His delight in God's Word never changed and he desired divine help to obey it. But that prompted the recognition of another need, number five, he needed divine revival. He was a man of joy, a man of delight in the Word. But he needed a certain kind of touch of the Lord, revival from the Lord in his soul that would help him persevere in this. So this is help. for revival with a view of perseverance in mind. Verse 175, let my soul live and keep living that it may praise you. Let this thing I get joy in doing of praising you for you who you are and your ways and your word, let that continue. Don't allow anything to stop it. But he says, let my soul live because he was aware of something. especially dealing with problems in life, any moment in our lives a deadness can enter in, a dryness can happen, spiritual dryness. And he knew that. And if it happened, he was concerned that he would start to falter and he would not be able to go on. So what was the only solution? He knew that the only one who could take away dryness and deadness in the soul was the Lord. It had to be a work of God or else it's possible to spend weeks and months, maybe even years, studying God's Word and never change. And he didn't want that. He wanted to persevere in living his life with praise bubbling out of him without his soul running dry. We have an expression, running on fumes. And we know what that means. I think it probably started with in the automotive world is probably where we got that, you know, getting the gas down so low that we're running on fumes. Maybe you've been in that very horrible situation at night on a dark road before cell phones existed. I remember some of those times. That's what life can feel like. We're just going through the motions. We're just kind of barely making it. He didn't want that. I don't want a dead soul. I'll falter. I won't keep this up. I need divine revival. I need a touch in my soul. I need the work of God in my soul that will linger and continue, and we need to pray just like this verse 175. We need to pray that God will continually revive our souls so that we persevere in praising Him and that we don't come to these points of just barely getting by, running on spiritual fumes, so to speak. And once again, this author didn't look at this mystically. He knew exactly how the Lord would do this. This is how the Lord brings this needed help for the soul so that his people can persevere being alive in their soul, living to spiritual things, alive to spiritual things, delighting in spiritual things. Verse 175, let your ordinances help me. So the stanza goes right back once again to the overall theme of the psalm, the glory and power of God's word. That's what God does use to revive the soul. So those people persevere in pleasing Him. And something else is true about this help. Let your ordinances help me. The help that Scripture gives to help us continue a life of worship and praise unto the Lord, if we're properly going to worship God and praise Him, then it's the Word that gives expression to that praise. Just to put it differently, the highest form of praise is that which employs God's own Word, His statutes, His ordinances as a vehicle to word back to Him in praise. So as He fills our heart with Scripture, as we meditate with the truth, as the Holy Spirit gives us insight into divine truth, we end up using then Just naturally, the very words of Scripture in our praise to God. And as well, we use the very words of Scripture in our prayers for our family, prayers for our friends, for our nations, for our own souls. So he prayed for that. He needed divine revival. All these needs. He needed divine insight. He needed divine rescue. He needed divine enablement, divine power, divine revival. And the final verse adds another thought to the idea of perseverance. He not only needed to persevere in praise, and for that he needed a soul that was alive, and only the Lord could help him with that through his word. But he desired to persevere in living a holy life before the Lord, and so he needed this, number six, he needed divine correction. Divine correction, final verse of the psalm. And for some, this final verse is a little bit perplexing. After reading the entire psalm, this is his last verse. I've gone astray like a lost sheep. I mean, you think after 175 verses devoted to the Word of God, you sort of think that he'd be a super saint by the end, but far from it. I think this reminds us of something, that the older we grow, the more we mature in this life of faith, the more we actually realize how entrenched fleshliness and wickedness is in our own hearts. So in this last verse, we have this final glimpse now of what I said at the beginning, the final glimpse of this unknown author. As I said at the beginning, a very humble man. Here is an honest confession from a very transparent soul. I have gone astray. This is the part of the verse that causes commentators, those who are not committed to the inspiration of Scripture, It causes those kind of commentators to just freak out. They get very puzzled. They get even critical of Psalm 119 and come up with reasons why it doesn't make any sense. Because to them, what's said here is just a contradiction to the rest of the Psalm. So look at the inconsistencies in the Bible, that kind of thing. I mean, after all, we'd have to say that too, time and time again, the author has pointed to his own love for the Word, his own some measure of integrity in his life, his love for the Lord, for Yahweh. But he's even said things like this, like back in verse 110. He said, I have not gone astray from your precepts. That's what he said back in verse 110. I have not gone astray from your precepts. Now we have, I've gone astray. But that doesn't cancel out something true about sheep. Sheep stray. It's the nature of sheep to stray. Real sheep. And that's why they're used as a picture for us, a symbol of us. It's our human nature to go astray. That is something we will never stop fighting. Our flesh, our unredeemed humanness is bent towards straying. Any kind of straying, whether it's laziness, or fear, or doubt, or neglect of study of the Word, or neglect of prayer, or straying toward selfishness, and straying toward pride. So when we stray, we're just doing what's natural to our flesh. And this psalmist understood that reality. So he's just being honest. and he prays what's appropriate, come find me. Seek me out. I keenly feel my strain and I can't get back to where I belong on my own. I need you, Lord. I need you, the good shepherd, to seek me out. I need you to correct me. I need you to get me standing back up on my feet again I need you to get me back on the right path. And then he adds this, and it's very important that we understand his intention with this statement, verse 176, for I do not forget your commandments. That's not said as a pat on the back. He's saying that as a self-indictment. He says, I know I stray because I know your commandments. I do not forget them. Even when I'm straying, I don't forget your statues and your commandments and your ordinances. I know what your word says. So what he's doing there is he's admitting, I know better. So just think about this, to have God's word stored up in your heart the way this man did, to be able to write a psalm like this and still stray, It's a serious matter. It's more serious than I'm straying because I don't know what the Word of God says in this area, you know, out of ignorance. He says, I know, and I find myself straying. And that's where the author decides to end the psalm, under the inspiration of God's on a somewhat sad and gloomy note. But I think it's a great ending because it's an honest note. It's the only right description of any of us apart from God's grace active in our lives to seek us out and by His grace and His love to correct us because we are poor, straying sheep. He's just speaking of himself as he really is, weak. But he's still God's servant, a poor, weak, sinful, maybe unprofitable servant at times, but still God's servant, going to the Lord for help. Couldn't help but think of the language of Isaiah 53.6. I know that's more in a context of even our need for salvation. All of us, like sheep, have gone astray, but there's that metaphor again. We turned our own way. I mean, the remnants of that remain in our flesh. Our flesh likes that, to stray and go our own way. You give the flesh an opportunity, it doesn't get you on the right path. It gets you off. But even though he has not been able to keep God's commandments perfectly, he hadn't forgotten them, and He still loves them, and He still wants to obey them, and He knows it by the grace and the power of Yahweh. Just a few quotes quickly. Charles Bridges, one of many writers out there, I cannot forbear to plead that although a rebellious prodigal, I am still thy servant. The great Charles Bridges, how he would articulate in a prayer to the Lord, same way, I'm still your servant, thy child. I still bear the child's mark of an interest in thy covenant. Let me then lie humbled and self-abased, but let me not forget my claim, what he has done for me. Same kind of prayer. Very humbling, isn't it? that our service to God is always, and our worship of God, our praise to God, is always coming from poor, weak, straying sinners like us that have been saved by grace. OT Alice, this may seem a feeble ending, an anticlimax, but should we not rather think of it as a most fitting conclusion for this great poem in praise of the law of God? For it shows us how deeply conscious the writer was of the perfection of the law and of his utter inability to fulfill his demands in his own strength. Only God, the giver of the law, can enable his servant to keep it." A man named Saul wrote an article on Psalm 119. He says, this psalm concludes on a note of humility and hope. The humility resides not in breastbeating, but in the knowledge that God's ways are not our ways, and that before Him we can make no pretense to greatness of any kind. The hope lies in the affirmation that God can and must take the initiative with His servants, not only in the beginning, but all along the way of Torah, all along the way of living our lives in light of the Word of God. God takes the initiative to save us, to pluck us out of the mire of the world, and God must be the one all along the way to take the initiative to keep working in our hearts to keep us saved. We can't do any of it on our own. You could call this verse a self-portrait, I guess, when he gets honest about his own vulnerability. And he sees his own sin just being so exceedingly sinful. That's the way we should be, humble like this man. Well, it's time for you to give all the right answers to the questions and to correct anything that we have said all along the way these many weeks. This is your opportunity. We've already said that Psalmist was a very gifted man, right? Godly man. Here he was, though, ultimately claiming, no, if you really knew me, I'm just a weak man. That's humility, the opposite of pride. So the question is, what's so wrong with pride? I mean, the world thinks it's a good thing. And I forgot to think ahead and get microphones and all that. So you've shouted out, I'll repeat it, What's wrong with pride? Yes, sir? Okay, it's contrary to what the truth says. The truth says we're dependent on God whether we believe it or not or not. So pride is contrary to that. Yeah. I mean, one's true and one's not. So you got to pick because they're not the same. You know, you can't have them both. It's oil and water. It creates… Yeah. Yeah, you know, this whole thing of pride, honestly, is a form of self-worship. We are, in a sense, putting ourselves above God, which we were denying the true God and making ourselves into a God, which is self-idolatry. And that's the very heart of all wickedness and evil right there. Anybody else? What's wrong with pride? Yes, sir. Okay, so if we're prideful, we're like the man of lawlessness because Scripture says the man of lawlessness, that's who he is. Yeah, dethroning God, the man of lawlessness dethrones God, we put ourselves on the throne. That's the essence of pride, self-sufficiency, denial of God, denial of His Word. It's just a reminder that we should always be remembering what Paul wrote in Romans 12 verse 3. There's some great advice there, Romans 12 verse 3. Do not think more highly of yourself than you ought to think, okay? And the Greek is huperphronen, huper is hyper, the prefix hyper, hyper-thinking. Don't have hyper-thinking about yourself. And if we do, if we think ourselves wise when we're not, then we're actually foolish. So anybody who thinks themselves wise is actually displaying to the world that they're very, very foolish. But if we recognize our foolishness and we submit ourselves to the Lord and we come to Him for His instruction, then, and only then, we can start then to become wise. Okay? So it's sort of a paradox, I guess, the way of thinking about it. Second question. And I've stated, our desire should be the same as the psalmist. Our tongue would proclaim the truth. I mean, our very words of our prayers and our praise ought to be saturated with truth. So this is an easy question on the exam. What is the prerequisite for being able to do that? To think and proclaim and sing the truth. Yes, sir. What? You have to love it. And? You have to know it. You won't know it if you don't love it. And if you do love it, you'll really seek to know it. Just a simple reminder that if truth is what is to bubble out of me, then that is what I need to be putting in as much as possible. There's a great worth, we say this in many contexts for different reasons, but there's a great worth in sitting under the exposition of the word for years and to have your own time, a study of the word and meditating of the word for years. It impacts you more than you think. I mean, Christ even said that about our speech, right? It's out of the abundance of the heart that speaks, that the mouth speaks. If the mouth is going to speak truth, then there needs to be abundance of that in the heart. We can't proclaim the Word or sing the Word or pray the Word if we don't meditate on the Word. I mean, even thinking about it when we're driving and mowing the yard or cooking or whatever it is. middle of brain surgery, a brain surgeon. Now, he needs to really focus on what he's doing, but as soon as that surgery is over, he needs to be thinking about the truth, the Word. There's another question here. It's connected to one of our favorite hymns, Come Thou Fount. I was thinking of that hymn as I was studying tonight about straying. Remember some of the words? of Come Thou Fount, prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. We sing that a lot. There's another part of the song, Come Thou Fount, that says this, let thy goodness like a fetter, a trap, a belt, bind my wandering heart to thee. I mean, that's articulating what's in this psalm here. I need to tell Kyle I need to sing that next week as one of the songs, okay, because it fits this last verse. He's probably already thinking that. But we need the Lord to do that. I mean, this psalmist knew that hymn, evidently. So the question then, why is that such a problem? Why is it so easy to stray? We have the flesh in us. We have all of the flesh that we're born with remains with us. Again, I explain this different times like this. It's a hard concept to articulate. We are born spiritually dead in Adam, oriented toward Adam. What changes, what makes us a new creature when we come to Christ is we are made spiritually alive and oriented toward Christ. Our position before was spiritual deadness in Adam. Our position now is spiritual life in Christ. We have new resources now available to us in Christ. But what does not change is our unredeemed humanness. In our original state, our unredeemed humanness, called the flesh, and our orientation toward Adam, they're in agreement with one another. No problem. When we come to Christ and are regenerated and we have this new orientation in Christ, that's in conflict now with the flesh. And so there's a great battle. But the flesh itself does not change. You don't sanctify your flesh, it doesn't become more holy, it doesn't become less. The longer you live, the flesh is the flesh, it's just there. You give it an opportunity, it only knows one thing to do, to be fleshly, which is why Romans 13 says, make no provision for the flesh, make no plans for it, because don't be surprised when you're fleshly. So that's the ultimate answer of why it's so easy to stray. Anybody else? What about where we live? Any help there in straying? The world we live in? Do we get any help there at straying? We get a lot of help from the world. I mean, the world is there constantly enticing us to stray. It's all about straying. Commercials are about straying. The agendas that are in the commercials are about straying. You know, the agendas that are in almost every program now is about encouraging us and helping us stray, and they make it after a point, we're so saturated with it that it becomes the new norm. Well, what's wrong with that? Christians start questioning things, whether it's wrong or right, that they never would have questioned before. Just another reason it's easy to stray. The world is our enemy. always getting us destroyed. So our flesh, the world, any third reason? And the devil. Yeah, there's three parts to the answer. The world, the flesh, the devil. There's our, there's our, hmm? There's our battlefield. There's our three enemies. The world, the flesh, and the devil. Satan himself is not omnipresent, but he works through his minions. in ways that we can't even hardly understand, but certainly through the false religions of the world and the false ideologies and philosophies that are being taught in the world. Campuses, school campuses are rife for him, great places for him to work. But entertainment industry, it's an easy vehicle. I mean, really, probably the question is, why is it so hard? you know, to not stray. It's easy to stray. I mean, we just give in, just coast. You're familiar with Luther's 95 Theses, you know, that he nailed on the castle church door in Wittenberg. The original door's not there anymore, but the doorway's there, and so they put a different door on it. I've seen the substitute door. And that was right at the commencement of what became then the Protestant Reformation, right? He was not posting up those theses because he had this great plan for a reformation. He was just asking some questions and making some statements about the errors of the Catholic Church. But he began those 95 theses with this. For some reason...here, there it is. Okay. When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said, repent, he meant that the entire life of believers should be one of repentance. That's how he began the whole thing. So think about that. That was shocking to the ones who read it, you know, the theological people in charge. But that's another way to capture even some of what the psalmist is saying that of what he understood that all of life is just continual repentance. You can sort of say that Our life with Christ begins with repentance, so there's repentance connected with our salvation. We must turn from trusting self to trusting Christ. We must turn from saying we love sin to saying now we know sin is evil against God and we want to battle sin. But that's just the first phase of repentance that lasts the rest of your life. It's a life of repenting. There's never a moment, even after we're saved, where we need to stop thinking of ourselves as straying sheep. We stray and we need correction, we need repentance constantly. Question four, if Christians are eternally forgiven, then why do they still need to confess and repent? Now, there's an expression there, I want to ask any of you, brush up on your Latin there, expression that Martin Luther used to speak of Christians. So what does it mean? Take a guess, somebody, come on. Yes, yes, you're very close. Justice and sin together, very close. But instead of nouns, justice and sin, it's adjectives. They are adjectives. justified and sinful, you know, you could put it in the noun form, sinners, all at the same time, simultaneously. So at one time, that's who we are. We are both justified, saved, and yet we still sin. Another quote from him. He wrote this about verse 176. This verse is extremely emotional and full of tears, for truly we're all thus going astray, so that we must pray to be visited, sought, and carried over by the most godly shepherd, the Lord Jesus Christ, whose God bless forever. Amen. But there's a theological tension here. We come to Christ and all of our sin, past, present, and future is forgiven. Yes or no? Yes. So do we still need to confess our sin? Yes. Why? It has to do with our fellowship with God. That's correct. It's not judicial forgiveness, we like to say sometimes in theological classes. There's judicial forgiveness. That's the forgiveness we need because we're We're in the darkness and we're rescued from the light and we don't have a relationship with God and now we have one because He forgives us. We're forgiven. But now He's our Father that we fellowship with. And so I like to put it in those terms, it's a fatherly forgiveness now. So yeah, we still need to confess our sin. Repentance still glorifies Him. Repentance still means a change of mind about something that ends up in change of behavior. Well, of course we need that. So we confess our sin even knowing that, yes, it is forgiven, but it's a sense now that, Lord, I have grieved you and that grieves my heart. Please forgive me. Like David prayed in Psalm 51, restore the joy of my salvation. That's what I want. All right, a couple more questions, quickly. What does God think of our continual going to Him in confession? Question number five. What does God think of our continually going to Him in confession? He what? He loves it. How do we know He loves it? He loves us, He wants us to stay in fellowship with Him, and He's also told us that He loves it. You might think of a verse real quick that just begs us and bids us to come, invites us to come to the throne of grace, to receive grace and mercy, to help in time of need. I'm sorry, what was that, ma'am? Hebrews 4 verse 16, "'Therefore, let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.'" Last question. He's examining himself. He's a sinner. He strays. You could call this introspection. Question number six, is introspection healthy? Yes? Did I hear a yes? Why? For what purpose? I think this is what makes the difference. We examine ourselves, like you said. Yeah, there's a purpose. It's not morbid introspection as we say. You would just want to figure out how bad we really are. It's for the purpose of change. Correction, course correction. Yes, that's always been true of my cars. All my cars pull either to the right or the left. We have to correct it. It's healthy when it's for the purpose of finding those things that are grievous to the Lord so we humble ourselves and confess them and in the process confess our dependency on Him. coming full circle, if the end result of your introspection is that you realize, I am so dependent on the Lord, then he's pleased. Last quote, Dr. Zemeck is with the Lord now. Self-examination is truly effectual when complacency has been rooted out and displaced by dependency. Let's ask the Lord to help us with that. Father, we want to be like this man, not that we put him on a pedestal. He doesn't put himself on a pedestal. He's an honest sheep, a sojourner, seeking to follow the Lord in a wicked world, facing many trials just like us. And so, Lord, we pray that you would help us to keep this humble mindset of dependency We confess that tonight, Lord, that we are nothing on our own. We need your help in every way. We need insight. We need rescue. We need enablement and illumination. We need power. We need revival. We need correction continually. And so we pray for these things for ourselves tonight in our Savior's name. Amen.