Opening illustration: I expect that if I were to ask you, ‘Why do you come to ‘The Well’ every week?’, many of you would answer, “I come to worship God and be fed with His Word … I want to hear the good news and grow in fellowship with other folks in the body of Christ.” ‘Well some might even say, I come for refreshment, I come for renewal, I come to try and get my life together again because I wanted God to renew and restore and refresh my life.’ That same desire for life is a very prominent longing of this psalmist. In fact, it was the first thing that struck me when I was reading this psalm again and again, deciding how to divide it for today’s Bible Reading. I discovered that at least fourteen times he prays this prayer: ‘Renew … restore … preserve my life … give me life … let me live’, or similar expressions.
Just as the Psalmist, this should motivate us to pursue personal revival before we can go corporate. Therefore let us turn to Psalm 119 in God’s Word and delve into the passage for this morning.
Introduction: In fact, all those English phrases are translations trying to capture one single Hebrew word that the English language translates in different ways. It is hayah, which means ‘to make alive, to cause to live’. ‘The psalmist uses the emphatic, causative form of the verb: ‘to live, to have life’. He prays again and again, ‘Lord, make me live, get me life, let me live’.
How to desperately pursue God for personal revival?
1. Revive me according to Your Justice (v. 149-153)
Notice this prayer for revival is “according to Your Justice,” a synonym for biblical truth, especially its judgments. This word has been explained as emphasizing God’s ‘binding judicial decisions that establish a precedent and binding law … in effect, “God, I want you to hear me based upon your truth, your decisions, your will.” [He] does not “Give me what I want …” rather give me what meets your will … our will conforms to God’s will. There is the serious error today about prayer that says we can ask anything regardless of God’s will [and Word]. There are even those who say we can “demand things from God” and that there are things God “must” do. Today’s “healing movement,” for example, says we can demand good health when we are Spirit filled. The “prosperity movement” says we can demand financial prosperity when we are good stewards of our money and ask God for more [like a genie?!]. Others just say that God will give us anything we want and even define prayer as “asking and receiving.” How shameless all that is! In such schemes, God is lowered to the position of a butler who comes to serve us when we ring the bell. God has now become the servant instead of us.’ That is irreverent blasphemy, friends!
Biblical prayer is not twisting God’s arm to get what we want, prayer is the turning of our will to submit to what GOD wants and will do. Twice in this verse he says “according to,” and he doesn’t say “according to my character or my desires,” but according to God’s; a prayer not based on his own merit, but on God’s mercy.
Prayer is not a means for man to get his will done in heaven as man wants it on earth, for the sake of man’s comfort and kingdom. Jesus taught us to pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Even Jesus prayed in the garden, “not my will, but Thine” -- how arrogant if that’s not how we mortals pray? Praying biblically is so important because it is only in God’s Word that we can know God’s will, and it is prayer in accord with God’s will that God answers and always answers in His perfect will.
1 John 5:14-15 “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked.”
John 15:7 (NASB) “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”
Balancing the Word and prayer is crucial also because all Bible and little or no prayer can result in light without heat, but all prayer and little to no Bible could result in zeal without knowledge. Both extremes are seen in modern churches and individual Christians. The early church in Acts, however, did not have such a dichotomy.
Acts 2:42 “They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”
Acts 6:4 “We will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” We need both instruction and intercession to be balanced believers.
150 Those who follow after wickedness draw near; they are far from your law. “Draw near” and “far from” remind of the imbalanced Pharisees who “draw near with their lips while their heart is far from God.”
2. Revive me according to Your Word (v. 154-155)
I wish I could have asked him what the ‘Word of God’ meant to him. I would love to hear an Old Testament believer expounding ‘the word of the Lord’, because they loved it. They could say that all lift in the universe comes from the word of God, so how much more does my little life? Psalm 33:4–7 says, ‘For the word of the Lord is right and true ... By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth. He gathers the waters of the sea into jars’; verse 9: ‘For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm’. Wow! Why don’t we say those words? We read them in Genesis 1:3: ‘and God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light’. It’s great – and we just pass over it.
We’ve got a wonderful picture on the wall of our library at All Nations. At the top is written, ‘And God said …’ below that, are all the equations of electro-magnetism, very complicated equations of wave energy and particle energy and so on, which is what light is. And then at the bottom it says, ‘and there was light’. But actually the key to the picture is not the equations but the words ‘God said’. It’s taken the human race a few thousand years to discover the workings of light and we think we are wonderfully clever. But God didn’t say, ‘It did occur to me some time ago that that’s what I needed to get light going’. He said it, and it was there. By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made. All the galaxies, stars, light, energy, matter, anti-matter, everything that’s there, is there because God put into it all the information, all the parameters, all the equations, all that was needed for it to happen in the first place, and for it to expand to the point where it is now.
We have eyes to see it and lips to talk about it. God said it, it is his word that did it. There is only life because God speaks the word of life. There is only the energy of the universe, there is only the biological life of this planet, there is only animal life, there is only human life, and there is only spiritual life – because of the word of God. So when this psalmist says, renew my life according to your word, he is saying something pretty big. So can you, if you say it: ‘according to your word.’ The Word of God that created the world out of nothing and you and I out of the dust, can do anything that God desires … revive me!
3. Revive me according to Your Judgments (v. 156-158)
vs. 149 and 156 may seem paradoxical. Those who are in the unlikely situation of having been brought up solely on Paul’s theology in Romans, Galatians and elsewhere, may have thought that the only thing to know about the law is that it’s an agent of death. Of course in the context in which Paul was writing, and in the context of people seeking some kind of righteousness according to the obedience of the law, not based on a faithful and grateful response to God as their Savior, then yes, in that sense the law became an agent for the exposure of sin and the recognition of death that sin brings. Please don’t misunderstand me, I don’t want to have an argument with the apostle Paul at this point.
But here in the Scriptures that Paul knew and loved is a psalmist praying for life ‘according to God’s laws’ and we have to stop and think, ‘What does he mean by wanting life in, and according to, the laws of God?’
As so often in Hebrew poetry, vs. 149 and 156 use the device of parallel construction. Hebrew poetry is a kind of stereo it always gives you something through both ears, there’s a three-dimensional sound. In both of these verses something is put parallel to the law: in v. 149 it is love, and in v. 156 it is compassion.
We’ve had those words already. The psalmist has already told us that he wants God to revive his life out of love and compassion. But we have to ask again, ‘Where did he learn about God’s love and God’s compassion?’ The answer is, ‘In the law’. It was in the laws of God, back there – in those books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy including some bits of the Bible that we hardly ever read – that the Israelites were confronted with the compassion and love of God that they were to imitate and live out in their own social relationships; to give life and restore life to one another, through social compassion and social love in reality and in practice.
So this psalmist can say, ‘Lord, I want you to restore my life just as I have learned from your laws that that’s what you want to happen. You want life restored. I am poor, I am needy, I feel like an alien on the earth, but your law tells me that you are the God who cares for the alien and the needy and who wants to restore the poor and the suffering. So, Lord, will you please renew my life, just as you say in your law?’ That’s why he founded the law. It’s the Scriptures that teach the psalmist about the God he worships, and therefore enable him to cry out to him.
So I would ask us all: Where will your renewal of life come from? I trust that as you come to ‘The Well’ (and to other conventions, crusades, revival meetings or whatever it might be), as you look to leaders and speakers, and to the books that we read – please take from this psalm the knowledge that the renewal of life comes ultimately from the Lord himself. ‘Lord, it’s your righteousness, your compassion, your love, your word, your promise, your law. That’s where I will find my refreshment, in the Lord himself.’
4. Revive me according to Your Lovingkindness (v. 159-160)
Love is life-giving, as we know from our human relationships. When you know somebody loves you, it makes life better. People have been loved back to life and wholeness. Love supports people, gives life to people, lifts people up out of depression, out of illness, out of whatever it is; love lifts us and gives us life.
Ultimately it is the love of God that does it. Psalm 63:3: ‘Because your love’ – your loving kindness, it’s the same word – ‘is better than life, my lips will glorify you’. And it’s the very essence of the gospel: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16). Love gives life and God is love. His lovingkindness revives us!
So when the psalmist wants God to give him life, he doesn’t just say, ‘O Lord, pity me, isn’t it awful the way I am?’ He says, ‘I want you to give me life because of who you are. You are righteous and you are compassionate, and you are love. Therefore please renew and restore my life’. But he doesn’t only think of God’s character, he thinks of God’s words. At least eight times the psalmist links his cry for life with the phrase ‘according to your …’ Several times, ‘according to your word; twice, ‘according to your promise, and three times, ‘according to your law’. The Psalmist reminds God of His promises toward us.
If I had been this psalmist, how would I have expected the word of God, the promise of God and the law of God to be life-restoring to me? I know that as a Christian I can go to the cross, I can think of the resurrection, I can think of the Holy Spirit poured out at Pentecost, I can think of all chose wonderful New Testament promises. But this psalmist is living before all of that. What was it that he would have turned to? If the Psalmist was on fire and was seeking personal revival, how much more should we who already know and have Christ?
Application: ‘Awakening, Renewal and Revival’ are more or less mis-used words today. They are a bit twisted and distorted. People talk about ‘renewal meetings’, ‘revived churches’ about ‘getting renewed’ this way and that. They toss these terms loosely here and there. And sometimes, you know it means little more than spiritual narcissism: ‘Look at me, look at how I got blessed’.
People want blessings. They want renewal. But they are not often so willing to obey and to praise God who gives it to them. That’s why, sometimes, meetings that tell you how to be renewed and be filled in the Holy Spirit are packed to the doors, while meetings that tell you how to go out in mission, obedient to the word of God, to disciple the nations, get a handful attending. It’s a reality, isn’t it? We want the blessing, but we don’t want the obedience.
But renewal without obedience to God is a fake, no matter how spectacular it is. Remember Simon the sorcerer? He wanted all the spectacular signs of the Holy Spirit, but his heart was not committed to obedience. Renewal without obedience is a fake, and revival without praise – well, I would say it’s frankly impossible. But if it were to happen it would be nothing more than self-focused idolatry.
I expect, I hope, I trust, and that many of us will go out today and say, ‘Wasn’t that a wonderful time of renewal of life, of refreshments?’ But if that’s what it has been, then do make sure that it leads to obedience, to whatever it is that God has been saying to you that He wants you to be doing. And make sure that it leads also to a primary expression of praise, to the God who has brought you here.
