OK you car fanatics, I have a question for you. What are the basics of car maintenance? One website I read listed these items. Regularly change the oil and oil filter, replace dirty air filters, and keep your tires pumped to the right pressure. There is more that you need to do to keep your car running well of course, but those three things are a good place to start right?
Do you suppose there’s such a “basics” list for maintaining our faith in Jesus and therefore our hold on eternal life? Martin Luther came to that conclusion after studying Psalm 119. We’re going to look at a portion of that psalm to learn what it means that the Lutheran/Biblical mind knows the importance of praying, pondering, and persevering—the basics of maintaining faith in Jesus. Listen to our text.
Prayer has been called the believer’s life-breath. It’s what you do if you’re a Christian: you talk to God. But what do you talk to God about? How do your prayers compare to the one offered in Psalm 119? The unnamed author of the psalm wasn’t having an easy time of it. He said that his life was down in the dust (Psalm 119:25). But then look at what he asks for—not rescue him from his troubles, but that the Lord would give him better understanding of his Word! The psalmist prayed for spiritual strength rather than physical.
Is that what you ask for—that God would provide your spiritual needs—or do you primarily ask God to take away your aches and pains? Do you supposed that the best thing God could do for you is to make you rich, or give you a better paying job with a gold-plated retirement package? When you pray for family members, is it that God would keep them safe or that he would strengthen faith?
While we can and should pray for physical blessings, Jesus emphasized the importance of praying for the spiritual when he taught the Lord’s Prayer. Consider the First Petition: “Hallowed be your name.” The first thing that we ask for in the Lord’s Prayer is help in keeping God’s name holy. If we call ourselves Christians, then we will want to act like little Christs. We will shun temptation. We will willingly help and encourage others. But as we were reminded last Sunday, our sinful nature doesn’t want us to act like that. It’s running interference so we need God’s help in carrying out his will. And carrying out God’s will should be the most important thing to us—more important than acquiring fame and riches.
But does God really listen to our prayers? The psalmist was confident that he did. He said: “I told You about my life, and You listened to me” (Psalm 119:26a). I love that verse. I can just picture the psalmist plunking down next to God on a flight to Toronto and even before the plane has taxied away from the terminal, he begins telling God his whole life’s story and he doesn’t stop until the plane touches down four hours later. If you’ve ever had a seatmate like that, you probably wished they would be quiet after a while and leave you to your book. But God is not like that. He invites you to pour out your life’s story to him…even though he already knows it. He enjoys giving us his undivided attention because he really cares about what’s going on in our lives and in our minds. He wants you to pour out your life in prayer because by doing so you’re not giving him information, you’re giving him your heart. It’s when we fail to pour out our hearts like that in prayer that we became overly anxious and walk around with a short fuse ready to snap at the slightest provocation. Instead take all your cares and concerns and give them to the Lord. Do this often. It’s one of the basics of maintaining our faith in Jesus.
While prayer is an important part of a Christian’s life, there’s more to maintaining our faith in Jesus. Can you guess what that is from these verses in our text? “…teach me Your statutes. 27 Help me understand the meaning of Your precepts so that I can meditate on Your wonders. 28 I am weary from grief; strengthen me through Your word. 29 Keep me from the way of deceit and graciously give me Your instruction” (Psalm 119:25b-29).
In those few verses the author uses four different terms to describe God’s Word. Yes, it is the study of his Word which is also important, even crucial, for maintaining faith. It is the Lord’s instruction that keeps us from the way of deceit. Satan continues to tell lies meant to keep us from heaven. Lies like “It doesn’t really matter what you believe as long as you behave.” But it does matter what you believe. For it is only faith in Jesus as our savior that we have forgiveness. Doing your best to behave isn’t good enough in God’s eyes, you need to be perfect all the time. The other lie is that it doesn’t matter how you behave as long as you believe. Perhaps that lie is more dangerous for us Lutheran Christians. We take such pride in proclaiming that it is by grace that we are saved and not by works. But do we use that truth to excuse our sins? Do we not bother to reign in our tongue when it comes to gossiping about others because, well, nobody’s perfect and we can ask for forgiveness anyway? But God’s Word exposes those lies. As we learned last week when were reminded how we are sinner-saints, we will want to keep struggling against sin. If that struggle ends, then we’ve either gone to heaven where we are perfect or we’ve become unbelievers.
But God’s Word doesn’t just give us knowledge, it gives us strength says our text (Psalm 119:28). If you are struggling with a particular sin, you are not doomed to have to keep falling into that sin again and again—not if you keep turning to God’s Word for strength to fight off the temptation.
Throughout Psalm 119 the author urges us to do just that—to turn to the Word as we “meditate” on it. The Hebrew word to “meditate” means to “mumble to yourself.” God wants us to turn his Word this way and that, the way a wine connoisseur turns over a fine wine in his mouth to absorb all that it has to offer. Instead of treating God’s Word like a fine wine, however, we often zip through it as if it were fast food meant to be consumed quickly so we can get on to other, “more important” activities. But there is nothing more important than studying God’s Word because nothing else, not “Must-See TV,” not texting friends, not managing your financial investments can connect you to eternal life. So slow down when you read God’s Word. Take the time to discuss with your family what the evening devotion means. Ask “What sins does it cause me to confess?” “What cares does it release me from?” “And how does it motivate me to act in love tomorrow?”
Don’t think you have time for this kind of meditating? Consider how, at his commissioning as leader of the two million Israelites on the way to the Promised Land, God directed Joshua to meditate daily on his Word. Certainly none of us here has a job as important or demanding as Joshua’s. So if it was important for him to make time to meditate on God’s Word daily, then it must be important for us.
Yes praying and pondering God’s Word is crucial for maintaining our Christian faith. It’s one thing to know this but quite another thing to put it into practice though isn’t it? God knows this about us of course and so he helps us with our praying and pondering. He does this by giving us opportunities to persevere. Look again at the first verse of our text. What did the author say about his life? He said that it was in the dust. Now we don’t know what kind of trouble he was going through but it must have seemed quite serious to him. It was so challenging that in verse 28 he said that he was weary from grief. Do you know what that feels like? I bet you do. But why is that? Why do we have go through trouble at all if our Savior-God is all-powerful and all-loving? One Bible student observed that we are more often ready to learn in adversity than we are in prosperity, for troubles direct us to the Word for understanding and strength, they also drive us to our knees in prayer (John Brug). Martin Luther found that to be true. He wrote: “…as soon as God’s Word takes root and grows in you, the devil will harry you, and will make a real doctor [of theology out ] of you, and by his assaults will teach you to seek and love God’s Word. I myself…am deeply indebted to the papists that through the devil’s raging they have beaten, oppressed, and distressed me so much…they have made a fairly good theologian of me, which I would not have become otherwise” (“Preface to the Wittenberg Edition of Luther’s German Writings” quoted in Doing Theology in Today’s World, ed. Woodbridge, p. 25-27).
We should not be surprised when the difficulties come. Indeed, we should welcome them because God is inviting us to call out to him in prayer, and to find strength and comfort in his Word—or as Luther also said: “Where there is to be a true prayer, there must be seriousness. People must feel their distress, and such distress presses them and compels them to call and cry out. Then prayer will be made willingly, as it ought to be...Therefore, God also requires that you weep and ask for such needs and wants, not because He does not know about them (Matthew 6:8), but so that you may kindle your heart to stronger and greater desires and make wide and open your cloak to receive much (Psalm 10:17).” [LC III, 15-32, Concordia pp. 410-412]
That truth was also expressed in our text. The author began in the dust, but how does he end? He wrote: “I run in the path of your commands…” (Psalm 119:32a). He started in the dust, but he ends up running in happy pursuit of God’s Word. Why? “…for you have set my heart free” (Psalm 119:32b, NIV ’84). That’s what pondering God’s Word and praying does: it sets our hearts free from burdens and cares. It sets it free from the guilt of our sins. What a blessing!
Praying, pondering, and persevering. That’s the basics of Christianity. And no, don’t take this to mean that this what we have to do. It’s really what God pushes us to do so that we keep throwing ourselves on his mercy—kind of like how you hand your car over to a trusted mechanic because you know that on your own, you won’t keep the thing running very well. May God bless you as you keep praying, pondering, and persevering to the very end. Amen.
SERMON NOTES
Psalm 119 teaches us that our prayers should be ________________ in nature rather than ________________ . In other words, we should ask for the strengthening of ________________ rather than an increase of ____________________.
God wants us to pour out our life’s story to him. When we do so, we’re not really giving him ________________ but our __________.
(2 questions) Continually pondering God’s Word is important to combat Satan’s two basic lies. What are they? Which one do you most struggle with?
(2 questions) What does the word “meditate” mean in Hebrew? What are some practical ways that your family can meditate on God’s Word together?
How does God use troubles to help us maintain our faith in him?
