your Bibles. We are opening to Psalm 119. Psalm 119. We continue a tradition that we've been doing now for these four years. By year by year, taking a couple of weeks to return to Psalm 119 and all that it shows us about God's Word, helping us to get our feet on the ground again as we face a new year to come. So we're in Psalm 119. We're picking up in verse 49. We're reading through verse 56. This is the reading of God's Word. Remember your word to your servant, in which you have made me hope. This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life. The insolent utterly deride me, but I do not turn away from your law. When I think of your rules from of old, I take comfort, O Lord. Hot indignation seizes me because of the wicked who forsake your law. Your statutes have been my songs in the house of my sojourning. I remember your name in the night, O Lord, and keep your law. This blessing has fallen to me, that I have kept your precepts." The word of the Lord. The Apostle Paul has this line. beginning of Galatians, he describes that we're living in this evil age. And I thought how that might rub different people in the world. Because there are going to be people that think that is just over the top. There's a lot of good going on out here. Good friends, good jobs, good accomplishments. Let's call it an evil age. Maybe that's just Paul being cynical. But as I think about it, I think so many of us don't need a whole lot of persuading for understanding that we do, in fact, live in an evil age. And it's not to say it's as evil as it could be. It clearly is not. Thank you, Lord. There is love. There is common ground in certain things. Things do happen in a good way. We're not just at each other's throats. And so we praise God for the good that he is clearly still doing. And yet it's not hard at all to look around and say there are signs of living in an evil world. obvious signs of living in an evil age. And you can call them whatever you will. You can call them things like injustice, whether experienced or just witnessed and read about. Or you could call it abuse. Again, whether personal or out further into the world. You could call it violence. You could call it ingratitude. You could call it simply a contagious spirit of rebellion in which the world says, I don't really care what God thinks, I'm going to do my own thing. Whatever it is you may have noticed, whatever it is God has tuned your heart most to notice, we can all actually notice. that evil is at work in our world. How many of us, then, in that evil world, are enduring all these evils, yet without any comfort from the Lord? We know the evil's there. We experience the evil. The evil hurts us and people we care about, and yet all we can seem to muster is endurance. Perhaps there is no comfort to compensate. We bear these burdens. They're everywhere in our lives. You don't just live in these waters without soaking up some of the harm of them, some of the grief of them. Without the comfort of the Lord, it's no wonder we are so fearful. Without the comfort of the Lord, it's no wonder that anxiety seems to reign in our hearts. Without the comfort of the Lord, no wonder the depression seems so dark and so frequent. So many of us know the evil of this world, and yet we long desperately for the comfort of the Lord to offset it, to cause us to endure, not just by mere willpower, but with hope. And what we are longing for, that comfort we are longing for, for our souls and for our lives, that is exactly what God wants to give us. God didn't just say, here, I'm gonna set you loose in the wilderness, it's gonna be rough, I hope you make it, see you on the other side. We have a God who said, I know it will be hard and I am going to help you. to get to the other side. He did not set Israel loose in the wilderness after Egypt and just say, hope you make it. He rained down manna on them day by day to ensure that they made it. And the Lord has given us his help. And we remember year by year in these sermons in Psalm 119, that he has given us such amazing help in his word. Again, that's why we do this series. Psalm 119 is an enormous psalm. At this rate, it'll take us 11 years to get through it. But what Psalm 119 just excels at is it is a heartfelt, real-world prayer of this psalmist who just loves God's Word. Loves God's Word and depends on God's Word. So you're not going to find this incredibly technical teaching on all the facets of scripture you're going to find a human being like yourself trying to make it in the world. And you're going to see the way that he practically depends on God through his word and he finds help. And today we see how much he finds comfort in the word of God. And we go to this psalm because you have to face real life. You have to face the evils of the world, the difficulties of this world. And as your brother and as your pastor, one of the things I most need to do before God is I want to offer you the help that God has given us. I want to ground you once more in the help that God has given us. I cannot make your year easy. But I can give you God's word. And as you depend on that word, you will find a God who was faithful to help you in this wilderness as he has been in every wilderness across all of time. God's word is not just some subject that we study. God's word is a lifeline of comfort. for the hardship of this world. Some of you, you maybe never heard that before, and I can't wait to talk about it. Others of you say, yes, I know that. And for you then, the blessing of today is just to remember the good things that you've heard before. So come with me to the text. We pick up in Psalm 119, and we're in those opening verses of the Zion paragraph. Now, the reason it has those labels above the paragraph is because this is a poem, an acrostic poem, ordered by the Hebrew alphabet. And so every paragraph has this really cool feature that every line starts with a letter of that letter in the alphabet. And so just picture doing that, by the way. An A to Z poem going in order, all talking about God's word. Like, that's impressive. That's impressive. And so what we've done is Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, Hey, Vav. Now we're at Zion. And so picking up in verse 49 and 50, what we're going to see is how God's word comforts the longing. God's word comforts the longing. Just so you can hear it again, the first two verses. Remember your word to your servant in which you have made me hope. This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life. And so the psalmist begins by asking God to remember his word. And that word remember is going to keep coming up in this part of the psalm. And when the Bible asks God to remember something, it's not because The author thought that God had forgotten, like me and you forget, right? You forgot you had a dentist appointment. You forgot it wasn't anywhere in your brain. God doesn't do that. God doesn't forget things. So to pray to a God who never forgets, that you want Him to remember something, that in the Bible is a prayer for the fulfillment of God's word, for the fulfillment of God's promise. You have told me this, remember, keep your word, Lord, fulfill your word. God has actually taught the people of God to put their hope in his promises. That's what the psalmist means. Remember your word to your servant in which you have made me hope. In other words, all the Bible is this constant lesson of God saying, you can believe me. You can trust me. You can bet your whole life on what I have told you. Trust me. That's the prayer of the psalmist. He's coming back. And this is this posture of faith to say, God, you taught me to trust you. You taught me to put my hope in what you have promised me. And if God, you gave me that hope, I know that you mean to fulfill that hope. You're not a liar. You're not a deceiver. You are as faithful as can be. And so this is what the psalmist is doing. He says, I know your promises. You gave me those promises. You told me to trust those promises. Oh Lord, remember your promises. Remember your promises and fulfill your promises to me. That's what you taught me to hope for. And the reason this is also personal to the psalmist is we learn that the psalmist is afflicted. That's his words. This is my comfort in my affliction. So we're beginning to come into the personal parts of this man's life. He's afflicted. That is to say he is in misery, oppressed. Picture a friend calls you up. You say, how are you doing? And they say, I am in misery. Oh, okay, this is serious. This is serious. This is not a bad day. My friend is miserable. That's how the psalmist is, miserable, afflicted. But he describes that in his affliction, it is the promises of God that give him comfort. is the promises of God that give him encouragement. He describes the promises as coming to him and reviving him. So there he is in his affliction, his misery, his oppression, and you can just picture things as dark as can be and you begin to live this existence in which you just think everything is bad, everything is dark. And just coming to the promise, it's like light from another world breaking into the darkness and reminding you that this is not all that there is. Light comes in, and even if it's saying fulfillment is ahead, it's not yet here, it's ahead, just that light breaks in and tells you, no, the darkness is not all there is. The misery is not all there is. And in that remembrance of the promises of God, the psalmist says, this revives me. This gives me life again, just thinking about your promises. The psalmist is living, actually, an experience that all of us can relate to. All the people of God can relate to the way that the promises of God are both a challenge and a help. The reason they're a challenge is because the promises of God have this way of reminding us that things are not the way that God said they would be, at least not yet. So someone who's suffering, who knows that God has promised something different, is going to say, why hasn't God kept his promise yet? Why hasn't he done this? Why am I suffering? It's actually quite a challenge for a suffering person to be told that there's a promise of something better. And you see then how that would stir up such a sense of longing. I'm suffering and you have told me that there is a promise of this suffering being relieved, of the suffering being done away with. Oh God, when are you going to keep that promise? How long, oh Lord? But to his great credit, the psalmist shows us that as he met that challenge, he didn't walk away. He held on. And as he holds on, he finds the help of the promises of God, because he knows by faith that fulfillment is still coming. See this, when you meet the challenge of the promise, if you don't respond in faith, you'll say things or believe things like this, my God has failed. My God has let me down. My God has not kept his word. These are the temptations of unbelief when we're suffering, but we have a promise held out to us. That's not what the psalmist does. He doesn't think God has lied. He doesn't think God has failed. He is actually encouraged because he still knows, he knows that the fulfillment is yet coming. God will absolutely fulfill his promise. So there's still the challenge of the waiting. But never in his mind, in his heart, is he saying God's not going to keep his word. He knows he'll keep his word. It's just a matter of when is he going to keep his word. Knowing that God will fulfill His promise, He revives us. It's that light meant for you and me in our darkness to say, something better is coming, not might be coming. is coming. Knowing that God will fulfill His promise revives us and we see how God comforts His longing people with His promises. As you move along in the text we see in verses 51 through 53 that God comforts, God's word comforts the afflicted. God word comforts the afflicted. We continue now into why does this psalmist say he's afflicted? Hear the word of God again, 51 through 53. The insulin utterly deride me, but I do not turn away from your law. When I think of your rules from of old, I take comfort, O Lord. Hot indignation seizes me because of the wicked who forsake your law." We see now then how God's Word comforts the afflicted. We are learning more about what's going wrong in the life of the psalmist. He says, proud and arrogant men are mocking him. They're scorning him. And the implication is that the world is mocking him because he is following the Lord. The world is mocking him because of his life of faith. Anyone who's followed the Lord for really much time at all knows that, frankly, following the Lord on its own is hard enough. You put me in total peace and happy times and I will have a hard enough time following the Lord. You pile up people mocking you while you're trying to follow the Lord, deriding you, scorning you. You see how hard this could be. You're already struggling in that walk of faith and everyone's going to mock you. What are you going to be tempted to do? Stop following. This is hard enough as it is. I don't need all the mockery, I don't need all the derision. He could be tempted to fall away, and yet the psalmist holds on to God's law. That's what he says, right? I do not turn away from your law. And then he remembers this long history of God's judgment. Now, verse 52 in the ESV, it says, when I think of your rules, it's actually just the exact same word about remember. And I point that out because it's the theme word, kind of. When I remember your rules from of old would be better. When I remember your rules from of old, I take comfort, O Lord. And so here you have this picture, then rules, that's like judgments. The ways, the judgments that God has rendered across history. Now put this in context. I'm being mocked by proud and arrogant men for following you. Oh, but I find comfort when I remember your judgments across history. In other words, I find comfort in remembering the way that my holy God has answered people who have been proud and arrogant and have been mocking his people. I find comfort in knowing that there is a holy judge. See, across the Bible you will find stories of a God who was very much on the side of the oppressed and the afflicted. You find a God who is pleased to overthrow kings and kingdoms, because in their pride they oppose him, and they instead oppress his people. The Bible is filled with stories of a God who intervenes for the oppressed and the afflicted, and the psalmist remembers these things and finds comfort. And we can even say how much greater comfort when we think about how heaven responds to the mockery of men. There they are mocking him, and it feels like a big deal. They mock God and all his might and his power. Psalm 2 says, he who sits in heaven laughs. The Lord holds them in derision. So the mockers can deride God's people all they want, but the holy judge derides them in return. When people are oppressed, they deeply want to know that there is justice out there. When people are suffering at the hands of proud and arrogant men, oh, it is an incredible comfort that there is a holy judge in heaven who has not missed a single thing and will not fail in a single judgment. A holy judge is a comfort to the oppressed. And then the psalmist goes on and describes something that may feel sort of unexpected. When I think of your rules, excuse me, next verse, hot indignation seizes me because of the wicked who forsake your law. He's describing that he feels outrage as people forsake God's law. And here we're seeing his heart. We're seeing his heart as he's faced this temptation. to be split away from the Lord, to stop following because it's just too hard. No, instead of falling away, we see this psalmist not compromising, not undermining, not departing from the Word of God, and actually he is so passionate for the Word of God that the outrage he describes is an outrage not over his own mistreatment, it's an outrage over how they are treating God's law. What a passion that is, what a faith that is. Yes, he's suffering, but his point is not about himself. His point is, look at how they are mistreating your law, Lord. And then with that purity of heart, he's outraged. It's because God's will is his passion. God's word is his passion. And in all those things, that is a bigger truth than what's going on in his individual life. He is outraged because they're mistreating his God, breaking his God's law. And it's then in the last section of the psalm that we see that God's word is the path that we walk. We see how God's word has been a comfort to the longing and a comfort to the afflicted. And now God's word is the path that we walk. Those last verses for you one more time. Your statutes have been my songs in the house of my sojourning. I remember your name in the night, oh Lord, and keep your law. This blessing has fallen to me that I have kept your precepts. God's word then is held out as the path that we walk. The psalmist even sings the Word of God. That's what God actually intends to do, make us singers of his glory, of his goodness, of his word. The psalmist sings the word of God in the house of his sojourning. That picture of sojourning, that's the picture of a, of a pilgrim. That's a picture of a traveler, someone who's a stranger where they are. They're just passing through. And here you see the Bible doing a theme like this is all throughout the Bible. The psalmist does not think that this is his home. Everywhere the psalmist goes, that's the house of my sojourning. Wherever I am, that is just the place I am in now as I journey to the place I am meant to be, as I sojourn to the place that I am meant to be. This is such an important theme for all of us. This is not where we belong. This is where we are passing through. Home lies ahead. And so he gives us community and he gives us friendship and he gives us places to be right now. But we never mistake. This is not where we stay. This is not where we end up. And this is not the end all and be all. We look ahead. to a new heavens and a new earth, to a new city descending out of heaven, where we will dwell with God forever. The psalmist knows he's not at home, but he sings the songs of home. He sings God's word. Those are the songs that remind him of where he is going, of who he is meant to dwell with. And he remembers the name of the Lord in the night. One more time, remember. He remembers the name of the Lord in the night. And here you have this picture, so ordinary and yet so intimate. Ordinary, yes, we all sleep. We all have nighttimes. Every day we have nighttimes, but intimate. Because we all have that sort of private space, our beds, where no one actually ever sees us in the middle of the night there. In that moment, it's really just you and the Lord. The psalmist describes that while others are sleeping in the quiet of the night, he is thinking about God. God, I remember your name in the night. When the Bible talks about God's name, it's more than the label we call him, right? When the Bible talks about the name of God, it's really talking about all of who God is. And so there the psalmist is in the quiet of the night thinking about his God, of all his God is. And that right there, isn't that just a profoundly faith-filled and different kind of moment? I wake up in the night all the time. Usually because Naomi kicks me. But what do I think about? What do you think about when you wake up in the night? It's usually just like stuff. I get thinking about the day, I get thinking about the emails, I get thinking about the people. The quiet of the night so quickly gets crowded with clutter. Life's clutter. It's probably what woke me up in the first place. Life's clutter. I can't get it out of my brain. I wake up, I'm thinking about it. And I just think how simple and profound and beautiful and nourishing to say, here I am in the middle of the night, whether I was woken up by God or maybe I chose, I wanted this moment of silence. Here I am, Lord, I'm gonna think about you. I don't know about you, but when I think about the clutter of my life, it doesn't make me feel encouraged, it doesn't make me feel restful, usually does not put me back to sleep. It's doing really nothing especially helpful for me. Oh, but just to take that time thinking about God, thinking about who He is, That will fill your soul and transform any hour of the night. What are you thinking about in the middle of the night? Take that home with you. When the psalmist meditates on who God is, look at that conclusion. And then I keep your law. That's interesting. I remember your name in the night, oh Lord, and keep your law. We find then that meditating on God is leading to obeying God. So his obedience is not just like, there's a tradition and I got to obey it. There's some rule and I got to obey it. So much bigger, so much truer, so much glorious is to say, I'm going to dwell on my God, and then I want to obey him. And then I feel driven even to obey Him. We are meant to be motivated by who He is, by what He has done. Consider the fullness of your God. Remember His name in the night. And in that way, you can consider a thousand different things about God, but just take a few. If I consider that my God is the Almighty, whose very word speaks creation into being, if I consider his power, that he upholds me, even in the middle of the night, that he upholds all of existence, when I consider that kind of power, then I am motivated to obey him. When I consider His holiness, when I consider that my God is absolutely pure, there is no shadow in Him, no evil in Him, and He is totally set apart from all of this creation, when I consider Him in His holiness, then I am motivated to obey Him. When I consider His love, when I consider the staggering love of a Savior who would take on flesh so that He could be rejected, tortured, crucified, and then bear the wrath of God. When I consider the staggering love behind the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, oh man, then I am motivated to obey Him. We consider who our God is, and then we want to keep his law. Then we have the resources to keep his law. Then we are motivated, spurred along to keep his law. We see then the blessing that has fallen to the psalmist is that God has helped him to keep his word. So many times in our lives, we wish we had kept his word, but we fell into something else, and then falling into something else came with consequences, and we're sitting there thinking, man, I wish I hadn't done this, man, I wish I wasn't suffering this. And yet there's those times when we walk in his ways, and we can say, oh God, that was so much better. Thank you for that path. That was so much better. That was so much more blessed. This is the conclusion of the psalm of this man who can say, you helped me. And because you helped me, I enjoyed the comfort of the Lord. I enjoyed the blessing of the Lord. Because you helped me walk the path of the word, I got the comfort. Glory be to God. God's word comforts us in an evil world. God's word comforts us in an evil world. So he comforts us with his promises. And it's worth pausing on that and just asking ourselves, what promises do I have ready to comfort me when the hardship comes? And you may have your greatest hits, and I'm glad you do. But you also may be here today and you're drawing a blank. And it may well be that when hardship is hitting you, you have no promises that you're pulling out. You're just getting walloped by whatever the world has thrown at you. And for that purpose, I would just have you have some of my greatest hits. What are some of the promises of God that comfort me in my own walk through this world? I will never leave you nor forsake you. I can't tell you how much that one means. Because in the dark, the most natural thing is to feel alone, isn't it? It's to feel like the world is too big, my sin is too big, I can't face this, I can't do this. And I need to hear that word echoing in my heart, I will never leave you, will never forsake you. It's then when I hear that promise that I can actually re-understand everything I'm going through. It's then that I can say, it sure is dark, But because I believe his promise that he will never leave nor forsake me, I know I'm not alone. I may feel alone, but I know I'm not alone. Here's another good one for you. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. How about that? A God who says, I will always forgive you. You come back and you have guaranteed forgiveness. Turn from your sin, come to me again, guaranteed forgiveness. I've needed that more times than could be counted. In so many of our relationships, if we wrong one another and we have to come back and own that, there's not a guarantee that that person's gonna forgive us. It might be too difficult for them. They may just be unwilling. You go to them and you may be thinking, oh man, I still hope we've got a relationship. I sure hope you'll actually forgive me. Think how amazingly different it is that God just says, always, always come back and know that I will cleanse you from all unrighteousness. Confess your sins, bring them to me. You don't have to hide a thing. Bring it to me and I will cleanse you of all unrighteousness. Oh, thank you, Lord. The only hope of a people who just keep getting into sin. It's promises like these that he comforts me with and I can see your nodding heads and I know he comforts you with them too. He comforts us with his promises. He comforts us with the history of his faithfulness. We too are called to remember, remember what he has done. Remember how he has shown himself faithful in all of history. And then as you go, you're building your own story, aren't you? And you stop needing to remember someone else's story because you're remembering your story. You're remembering a God who has shown himself faithful to you. You can say, remember that time. Oh, and how he comforted me. Oh, how he healed me. Oh, how he helped me. Oh, how he delivered me. Oh, how he forgave me. Your story tells the story of his faithfulness. By the word of God and his work in our lives, we know that he is faithful. He proves it again and again. And that is our comfort in an evil world. He comforts us by his history of faithfulness. And above all, God comforts us in Jesus Christ. I want you to realize that all the promises of God find their fulfillment in Jesus Christ. His promises, right, fulfilled in Jesus Christ. How do I know that he will not leave me or forsake me? It's because I know that he gave his son. He gave his son. He gave his son for all his people. I take hold of that promise in my low times and I... Even more so, in Christ he gives us his Holy Spirit. And Paul's whole point with that is the Holy Spirit is the down payment of things to come. God is not going to walk away from the down payment of his Holy Spirit. God's Holy Spirit gives us that sense of a guarantee has been made. Guaranteed he is going to follow through on all his promises. I know it because he gave his son. I know it because he gave his spirit. Because of Jesus, I know God is going to keep his promise to never leave or forsake me. How do I know he's going to forgive me when I am like a thousand sins deep into the exact same sin? Those are the times you're feeling guilty. You're feeling like a wretch because you're just like, man, I always do the same thing. How do I know he's going to forgive me? It's because Jesus purchased my forgiveness. He canceled out the record of all those wrongs. He knew what he had to pay for and he paid it with his blood. He paid it with his broken body on that cross. And so there's no guarantee if it's just me that he's going to forgive me. Oh God, I'm so worthwhile. Won't you forgive me again? Won't work. Why do I know he's going to keep his promise to forgive me because Jesus died to pay for it all? I know he's going to keep his word. How faithful is our God that he would keep his word at the cost of the life of his son? How faithful of a God is that? So he makes all these promises. I'm going to defeat Satan. I'm going to overcome death. I'm going to take care of your sin. And we're saying, that sounds great, God. How are you going to do it? By the life of my son. By the life of my son, Satan will be conquered, death will be overcome, and your sin will be eternally dealt with. How faithful a God is that? And if our God is faithful like that, brothers and sisters, he will be faithful again, and again, and again. So today, we remember God's faithfulness. We don't need a new gospel. We just need to remember the gospel that we already have. Brothers and sisters, we live in an evil world. But remember God's word day by day, and he will comfort you. Let's pray. We bless you, Father, for your word. We're amazed by your word. And we confess the ways we fall away from it. We confess the ways that we disregard it. And yet we plead your promises to wash us clean once again. Forgive us once again. Turn our hearts toward you once again. And we pray, Lord, set our feet again on your word. May your comfort minister to every one of our hearts today. We need it so badly. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Brothers and sisters