The readings are not those as cited because I didn't complete the sermon that I was going to preach this morning. So I'm going to read the three passages that I'm going to base the three points on this evening. The first is Acts chapter 17. Acts chapter 17. There'll be three brief readings of the Word of God. Two of them are from the New Testament and one from the Old. The first is Acts chapter 17. We're breaking in here to Paul's missionary journey with Silas. This is following his separation from Barnabas. He is joined with Timothy and they are traveled through this region of Galatia and Perga. They have been to Philippi. They have just been driven out of Thessalonica by those who have hated the hearing of the word. And now they come to a little community known as Berea. And we're reading from the 10th verse of the 70th chapter of the book of Acts. This is the living and active word of our God. The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea. And when they arrived, they went into the Jewish synagogue. Now, these Jews were more noble than those in the Thessalonica. They received the word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures, daily to see if these things were so. Many of them therefore believed, and not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men. But when the Jews from Thessalonica learned that the word of God was proclaimed by Paul at Berea also, they came there too, agitating, stirring up the crowds. Then the brothers immediately sent Paul off on his way to the sea, but Silas and Timothy remained there. Those who conducted Paul brought him as far as Athens, and after receiving a command from Silas and Timothy to come to him as soon as possible, they departed." We turn then to the book of Romans, the next book in the New Testament, over a few pages, to the seventh chapter of the book of Romans. The seventh chapter of the book of Romans. And our reading in this portion is slightly longer. We read from the verse 15 to the verse 25. So the Romans chapter 7, Paul has been dealing here with the themes that thread through the gospel. He has dealt with the matter of God's judgment and the fact that no one is righteous, no not one, and because of that is because of sin. Then he speaks of the faith that justifies, the faith that we receive by Christ that declares us by the work of Christ right in God's sight. And then he speaks to us of our relationship to sin, that we are no longer slaves to sin, that we've been set free from sin and that we're to live to the glory of God. And now he comes in the seventh chapter and he speaks about his personal relationship with sin. And he says in the 15th verse, I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing dwells in me that is in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but the ability, not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God and my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself draw the law of, serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. And our final reading is taken from Psalm 39. Psalm 39, the book of Psalms, in the middle of God's Word. And here we read in this portion concerning the meditation of the Word of God and its effect on our lives. Psalm 39, the first three verses. I said I will guard my ways that I may not sin with my tongue. I will guard my mouth with a muzzle so long as the wicked are in my presence. I was mute and silent. I held my peace to no avail and my distress grew worse. My heart became hot within me. As I mused, the fire burned. Then I spoke with my mouth." And he goes on to speak of the greatness of God. There we end our reading of God's Word. The Word of God is to be heard for a reason. The Word of God goes out for a purpose. That purpose is to realize the four ordained plans of God. Before the foundation of the world, God chose a certain number in Christ. Those people were to come by faith to believe in Jesus Christ, but that wasn't to be the end of their involvement with God. That was just the beginning of that involvement with God. They were then to go on and to become holy and blameless. Now we realize that that in this life cannot be attained to the completeness and the fullness whereby we will be fully holy and blameless. But that doesn't mean that there is not to be a pursuance after that holiness and that blamelessness. The hearing of the Word of God goes out for a purpose. It goes out for a reason. That reason is that those who before the foundation of the world were to be conformed to the image of Christ might through their life then be conformed to Christ. That requires change in the life of the professing Christian. We cannot escape that simple fact. We cannot ignore it. We cannot say that I am just making my way through life as an ordinary Christian. What we have to do, Paul writes, is pursue with relentless and persistent and deliberate intention, this putting off of the old and the putting on of the new. We are not to be lazy about this. We're not to feel as if that's something for those who are more interested in the church, more energetic. We're not to think that there's a special class of people in the church who they're the ones who pursue after these things, but I'm not really like that. If you believe in Jesus Christ, if you profess faith in Jesus Christ, if you sit at the table of the Lord, you're saying that you're a born-again believer in Jesus Christ. You are within that community that is to be conformed to the image of Christ. You are to be holy and blameless. You are to put off and you are to put on. And it's really important that you personally take that to your own life. Because one of the things that the devil keeps telling us is that we are doing all right. We're fulfilling certain outward activities. The fulfillment of the outward activity is not of interest to God. God is not interested in the sacrifice of bulls and goats. God wants to see the response of the heart. He wants to see a fully committed desire to walk in righteousness and blamelessness before God. And in hearing the word of God, and in preparing for the hearing of the word of God, and in hearing the word of God on the Lord's day as it's preached, you must have this in the back of your mind all the time. This should be changing me. This should be changing the way I think. This should be changing the way I speak. This should be changing the way I act. This should be changing the way I behave. This should be changing me. And that is a wonderful, glorious privilege in the life of the Christian. Because the non-Christian never can realize any change in their lives. The change that they experience is degeneration. They experience a decline, not only in their physical capacity, not only in their mental faculties, but also in their spiritual desires, because as they go on in their lives, their hearts become even more hardened to God, their consciences become more seared to God, they grow in their enmity to God as they get older and older, but by the grace of God they are brought out of that, they will continue in that decline. Whereas for the believer in Jesus Christ, although our physical capacities may decline, and sometimes our mental capacities decline as well, there is still within us by the work of the Spirit, that potential, that opportunity to become more like Jesus Christ, to become more holy and blameless in the things of God. And we need to be thankful for that. We need to delight in that. But there are three things that we need to do if we are going to take that knowledge of change and the necessity of change There are three pillars, foundational, I believe, if we are going to having that knowledge in our minds, then translate it into reality in our lives. And the first thing we have to do is create a mindset of examining the Word to see if what is preached is so. Create a mindset of examining the Word to see if what is preached is so. Secondly, we have to cultivate and maintain for ourselves a delight for and a delight in the Word of God. We've got to cultivate and maintain for ourselves a delight for and a delight in the Word of God. And thirdly, we've got to establish a habit of meditating upon the Word preached. We've got to establish a habit of meditating on the Word preached. We've got to create a mindset of examining the Word to see if what is preached is so. You must not assume that what proceeds out of my lips on every Lord's Day is exactly what's in the Word of God. I am infallible. I make mistakes. It is incumbent upon you, if this word is God's instrument to your life for the change that he has ordained in your life, it is incumbent upon you to seek out and search out if what is preached is so. Now it is a personal joy of mine that when I ask you to turn to a passage of God's Word, you turn to that passage and you read it. One of the greatest and fondest memories that I have here was when Rich Gantz, the pastor of the Ottawa RP Church, Dr. Rich Gantz, to give him his full title, was preaching here one Lord's Day, and he said, I'm going to take you through the book of Acts, a number of passages, and I don't need you to turn them all up because we're going to be working through many passages. And he began to preach or speak and he turned to this passage and everybody was flicking through and the next turned it on and flicking through and flicking through and flicking through and Rich in his style says you don't need to you don't need to do that but you just kept on doing it you just kept on doing it and why that was good was because it showed to me that you understood the principle that you may be a gifted preacher and teacher but we're and we're not questioning you but we're make sure that this is in the Word of God and we read together from Acts chapter 17. In Acts chapter 17, there we read about how Paul goes to this community in Berea, having been in Thessalonica, and this community of the people of God, these are Jews, are marked out, and they're marked out as being more noble than those in Thessalonica. And why they're marked out as being noble is not because financially they have greater material wealth, It's not that because there is a standard or a status pertaining to this particular synagogue in Berea that wasn't pertinent to all the other Jewish synagogues in that region of the world. The reason why we are told that they are regarded as being more noble is because of how they received the word of God and how they then examined that word. Their character, the nobility of their character is directly linked to their willing reception of the Word of God, we read, with all eagerness, and because of the fact that they examined the Word of God each day to see if these things were so. They listened as Paul preached. They didn't reject it. There was no reaction against it. These people didn't have the jealousy that others had in other synagogues, they weren't succumbing to necessity to drive out Paul and Silas with violence. No, they listened to what Paul and Silas had to say. With all eagerness, they were on the front of their seats. They were keen to hear it. It's obvious that their study of the Old Testament scriptures had brought them to the point in their hearts where they were willing to listen to the Word of God. There must have been teachers in Berea who had taught with a degree, not simply of authority, but with a degree of understanding and knowledge that had led these people to actually examine the things that they were being taught in the Old Testament Scriptures and that they were engaged mentally and in their heart in that process And when Paul comes along and he preaches to them concerning Christ, and if you want an example of what the type of preaching he would have given, not that I'm going to turn to it now, but you can turn to Acts chapter 13, and you'll see the sort of message that Paul preached to the church and the various places where he brought Christ to them. And when Paul comes and he preaches to them from the Old Testament Scriptures pertaining to the Messiah that's going to come, these people do not just take it at face value. There's not a superficial hearing of it. They actually listen to what Paul is saying. And then they take note of the passages in the Old Testament Scriptures that Paul uses to bring to them the person and work of Christ from the Old Testament into the New Testament period. They go away to their respective homes and they take out, or they sit there and they discuss, they discuss, is what he said is true. is that passage of Scripture in the Old Testament actually speaking about a becoming Messiah in this way. And as they worked through the Scriptures, and as they were confirmed in what Paul was saying, then the Spirit of God worked in their lives. Now that is no small thing to do. They were obviously serious people. They were determined. to see whether this man and this new teaching that had come to their community, whether it was biblically based, whether it was based on the Scriptures, there was a desire in them to actually test and examine and explore. They spent time, they were thorough, they studied, they discussed. They were devoted to establishing that this, whether this was what he was saying was true or not. Why had they that level of devotion to examine it to that degree? Because they had come to the point in their lives where they realized, this is about my life. This is about my life. This is not just about something I do on the Sabbath. This is not just for me coming into the synagogue and listening as I'm taught the scriptures and then going home and getting on with my life. What I hear, I believe to be from the lips of God through His Word, and I'm going to receive this, and then I'm going to test this, and I'm going to examine this, because of what this man is saying, then this will and must change my life. It actually has to change my life. And we read that it did change their lives because many of them believed, not a few Greek, women of high standing as well as men. There's that necessity, you see, for us to test and examine and explore to see if what is being said is true. And I would ask you and invite you that each Lord's day as I open up the Word of God that you continue in that practice that you have of following along and actually thinking to yourself, is what he is saying is true? Is what he's speaking about from the Word of God? Is that what we are to hear? Paul writes to the church of Thessalonica, he says, test everything, hold fast what is good. Test everything and hold fast what is good. So you need to cultivate or you need to establish a habit, a mindset of examining the word to see if what is preached is so. And you need to do that because it is your life. It is your life. And if I ever get into this pulpit and I preach something that's an error or mistake, and you see that that's an error or mistake, please come and say to me, is that what that teaches? Is what you preach this morning actually there in that passage? Because my desire is not on any occasion to bring to you anything but that's in the Word of God. I do not want you to lay the foundation of your life on anything except what God has written in His Word. For me to call you to do anything else is totally unacceptable. And you must do me, you must do me the kindness of saying, Andrew, you said this, is that clearly found in the scriptures, you made that point, you applied that to our lives. I don't see it. And give me the opportunity either to say, this is what I meant, possibly you didn't take out of it what I meant, or for me to say, you know, you are right. You're right. I didn't, I didn't get that right. This is our life. You cannot doze through it. You cannot sleep through it. You cannot. You cannot, you cannot. It's too important. The second thing that you must do is cultivate and maintain for yourself a delight for and in the Word of God. I want to turn you to the book of Psalms. And I want to do what I did last week. And I want to take you to a number of passages. We'll just flow through them. And my point in doing this is to show to you the accumulative wealth in Scripture concerning The fact that we are to delight in the Word of God. It's again a building of material upon material that will lead you without any room for maneuver. Psalm 1. Psalm 1, the second verse. The psalmist speaks in Psalm 1, the second verse. He says, His delight, this is speaking of the blessed man, His delight is in the law of the Lord. His delight is in the law of the Lord. Psalm 37, verse 23. Psalm 37, verse 23. This is one that the children sing. The steps of a man are established by the Lord when he delights in his way. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord when he delights in his way. Psalm 40, verse 8. I desire or I delight to do your will, O my God. Your law is written within my heart. Psalm 111, verse 2. Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them. Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them. Psalm 119, verse 14. In the way of your testimonies, I delight as much as in all riches. Psalm 119, verse 16, I will delight in your statutes. I will not forget your word. Verse 24, your testimonies are my delight. They are my counselors. Verse 35, lead me in the path of your commandments, for I delight in it. Verse 47, for I find my delight in your commandments, which I love." Verse 70. Their heart is on feeling like fat, but I delight in your law. Verse 77. Let your mercy come to me that I may live, for your law is my delight. Verse 143. Trouble and anguish have found me out, but your commandments are my delight." Verse 174, I long for your salvation, O Lord, and your law is my delight. I could go on and on and on. Psalmist here is speaking about his delight in the things of God, and we need to cultivate that delight. We need to maintain that delight. When you delight in something, You have a joy for it, whether it's a thing or a person. When you delight in something, there is within your heart a desire to do it. There's a longing to do it. Whatever it is, whether it's a hobby, whether it's an activity, whether it's a particular series of television programs that you may have, there may be a program that you particularly like watching and you know you wait once a week You sit there and you're getting excited as that evening comes up. There's a delight in it. There's a sense in which you can actually taste the anticipation in that activity. Or you delight just being with someone. There's an anticipation in being with that person. Delight is a good thing. Delight is a positive. Delight is something that brings us joy. When we exercise and realize the delights in our lives, then it is good for us. And we need to cultivate, we need to cultivate, because you see, that delight is already there in our lives. Our old regenerate hearts didn't have any delight in the things of God. But our new regenerate hearts have. How do we know? Because we read from Romans chapter 7, and in Romans chapter 7, there Paul, as it were, is battling and he opens up his own heart to us. He's battling with this internal struggle in his life with regard to sin. And he says to us that, he says, verse 15, I don't understand my own actions. There's a man being open and honest. There's a man opening up his own heart. And it's wonderful when a man opens up his own heart. Here this man has opened up his whole heart to the whole world. He says, I don't know what I, for I do not do what I want, but I do the thing, the very thing I hate. There he's saying, there's things that I don't want to do, and yet, what do I do? I do them. And there's things that I don't want to do, and I do them. The things that I hate, I find myself doing. Now this is the apostle Paul. This is a man who is walking thousands of miles, taking beatings, going through many experiences in order to bring the gospel of the good news of salvation to men and women. He hasn't lost his faith. He hasn't lost his desire for God. He hasn't lost his passion for the gospel. This man is determined to walk in the ways of righteousness. He's just being honest. And he says, there are times in my life, and it's frequent enough that it's there, and I'm conscious of it, that I want to be the man of God that I would love to be, but I find myself not being that man. Oh, wretched man that I am, he says in the 24th verse. It's how he describes himself. It's how he feels. And yet, in the midst of all this turmoil as it were in his life, this struggle with this law of sin, the reality of trying to deal with that which is seeking to take him away from God each and every day of his life, he lays this peg in the ground. Verse 22. I delight in the law of God in my inner being. Unshakable. I delight in it. When you hear the word of God, and you receive that word, and you understand that change is required, and you know that that change is a necessity, and you've tested the word to see that what is being preached is true, Because if it is true, then it leaves you no wriggle room. You have to do it. Then you need to cultivate and maintain for yourself, for yourself, a delight for and in the Word preached. And a word of counsel to you. If you find that this delight in the Word of God is waning in your life, then you have to raise a red flag before your face. Because you know as well as I do, that if you do not delight in something, you're not going to do it. You know as well as I do, if you don't have that sense of joy in your life, and pursuing after a thing, then the littlest obstacle will give you an excuse for not doing it. And if that law of sin is diligently at work in your life, and you are not, as Paul says right here in the very middle of this warfare, if you are not cultivating and maintaining a delight in the word of God, actually talking to yourself and saying, this word is my life. Remember what Moses said to the people? Deuteronomy the end of that time and he's about to go and he says I'm giving you this law. I'm giving you these words I'm giving these words for a reason. I'm not just teaching you because that's my responsibility He says to them the chapter 32 he says Take heart take to heart all the words which I am warning you today that you may command them to your children That they may be careful to do all the words of this life For this, it is no empty word for you, but your very life. Your very life. And by this word you shall live. And so, if you find in your life that you're beginning to wane in your delight for the love of the word of God, then you have got to lay hold of your life. And you've got to say to yourself, this is not good enough. This is not good enough. You've got to give yourself a good talking to. You've got to take yourself aside and you've got to say, my life depends on my delight in the Word of God. My life depends on it. My joy depends on it. All that I have depends on it. And you've got to wrestle with God and ask God, God give me a delight again in your Word. Thirdly, You've got to establish and maintain a habit of meditating upon the word that's preached. You've got to establish and maintain a habit of meditating. You hear the word, you test the word, you have a delight for the word. What are you going to do with the word? Well, you've got to ingest it for yourself. In having ingested it, you've got to digest it. Psalm 39. We read together from that psalm. And there the psalmist speaks, and I could have read another 15 verses. Some of you may, as I read through the passages in Roman or Philippian or Psalm 119, saw that After saying, I delight in the Word of God, he went on to say, I meditate in the Word of God. It almost followed nearly every one, if you go back and look at those passages, although you're not going to remember them, because I couldn't remember them off the top of my head, to be honest with you. But in Psalm 39, here the psalmist is speaking, and he speaks about him being in a difficult place. He speaks about the fact that he is mute and silent. There was no peace in his heart. And then he says, my heart became hot within me. Not angry. but hot, hot with a passion for God. And the reason why his heart became hot, burning hot within him was because he said, as I am used, the fire burned. The man is in a difficult situation. The man is in a situation where he has sought to bring himself into the presence of God. He desires that sin wouldn't lay hold of him. But he finds that it's a struggle. He finds it's a wrestle. He says, I held my peace to no avail, and my distress grew worse. He said, I tried to handle it myself. I'm in a difficult place in my life. I'm in an awkward place. Something has happened. I've tried to deal with it myself. And he said, but it didn't work. It didn't work. I even kept my mouth shut. I didn't go there. I didn't take them on. I didn't get into an argument. I just withdrew. I left myself to myself. He said, but my distress grew worse. Left to ourselves, we cannot engage with the activities in our lives that need to be addressed. There is only one way, believer in Jesus Christ, that we can move, and that's towards conformity to Jesus Christ. That's towards holiness and blamelessness. There is no other road that we can trod that will give us the peace that passes all understanding. We can go down any tangent we want. We can go down the silent road. We can go down the angry road. We can go down the road of trying to talk to everybody. We can go down the road of trying to talk to nobody. We can say I'll keep my own counsel and I'll do nothing about it and not open up. None of it works. The only thing that works is when we take ourselves and our lives, wherever we are, at any given moment in time, and we go into the place of God. We go into the refuge of the holy place of God, and we draw aside under the shadow of His wing, and we muse on the things of God. We meditate on the things of God. We murmur over the things of God. We talk to ourselves about the things of God. And when we muse and meditate and murmur and go through what God would tell us, then that fire that's lying kindled in our lives, it's lying there with a few embers. And we're trying to live our lives on the basis of these few embers. And what happens when we go in to that place under the shadow of the Almighty and take refuge under His wing? We draw aside into His presence, we come to His Word, and we think upon who He is, and we think upon our sin, and we think upon our need of cleansing, and we repent of our sin, and we pursue after Him, and we say to Him, speak to my soul, God. Speak to my heart. Give me the joy of my salvation. What happens? Those embers begin to burn brighter. Should that surprise us? Why? Because we're engaging with our contact with the God who set those embers in place in the first place. And they begin to burn, and they begin to burn. And the heat begins to grow, and the heat begins to grow. And it burns and burns. It's like a log stove. Put the logs onto it. We know well, those of us who go to one of the Mets during the week, the logs are piled in that stove and it burns and it burns and it burns and the heat it gives out. That's it. You stoke it up. You stoke up the stove of your life. Why do you do it? By musing on the things of God. It causes that to burn. As Mary says, when the angel came to her and told her all of what happened to her, what does it say? She pondered in her heart all these things. She pondered them in her heart. Does meditation scare you? Does the idea of meditating frighten you? I don't know how you meditate. How do you go about meditating? Do you have to sit with your legs crossed? What do you do? I mean, there's no point in the Word of God coming to you and asking you to do something if you don't know how to do it. Do you know what you could do to meditate? You could take the Word preached on the Lord's Day, a few notes, and the passage And as well as reading in your lips, worship God, you could meditate on what you've heard. You could murmur it over. You could ruminate on it. You could allow it to burn within you. And as that burns within you, it burns within you. That then will lead to change in your thoughts, in your words, and your actions. Why stoke the stove if it doesn't give light and heat? You see, it brings change to the room in which it sits. And as you meditate on the word, just as you take in food into your system, and that food makes your body, what happens if you were to stop eating? your body would break down. The food you take in goes into your digestive system and it comes out as various parts of your body. How do your fingernails keep growing? Why does your hair keep growing? Well, for most of us, Why does other parts of you keep regenerating? Because you're putting fuel into your body. Well, if you're just receiving that fuel and then you're putting it back out, you're going to the bin and you're spitting it out again. You're not ingesting that food. You're only taking the taste of it. You're only experiencing it for the moment. If you're not taking that food and actually chewing it in your mouth and allowing it to get into your stomach and there allowing that digestive juices, which you have no control over, allowing that to break down the various components of the nutrients and the proteins in that food, and then that gives life to your body and regenerates you every day. Think of it as you take in the Word of God, that you don't take in the Word of God. How many times you take in the Word of God and it goes in and you just exhale it again, you spew it out because you never spend the time actually ingesting it and thinking about it. Think about the fact of how much the Word of God you actually get. Think of how you could take what you hear in the Lord's Day and you could go away and you could think, well, there's something for that from my heart immediately. There's something in there that I need to respond to immediately. I need to address this issue in my life immediately. But there are other things that I will go away and I will write down and I will consider and I will store up and I will think about during the week. Why would you not do that? Why would you not do that? Does that take a great deal of effort? Does that take a great deal of time? Would it not be true that the impact on your spiritual life would be exponentially impacted if you were to actually establish that habit of meditation in your own life? If you were actually to own what is being said in your own life? if you're actually to take hold of it in your own life. Just let me read you three more verses and just listen to these. Don't need to turn them up. What right have you to recite my statutes or take my covenant on your lips? Psalmist is writing to the people of God. For you hate discipline and you cast my words behind you. Talk good, but in reality, there's no impact of the word of God in life. Mark this then, you who forget God, lest I tear you apart and there be none to deliver. You cannot hear and lay aside without a consequence from God. Test what I preach. Seek to cultivate and maintain a delight in the Word of God. And then establish a simple but thoughtful habit of actually Allowing the word to burn within you. Burn within you. Burn within you. So that it may affect your whole life. Take and stoke the fire by what you hear and allow it to burn within you.