Bowing Down: A Surrendered Heart Series

Outline

1. Introduction

2. Transition

3. Major Exposition

a. Textual Movement

i. Heart-Commands, Love for God-Love for God’s Word.

b. The gift of purity. (v.9-13)

c. Rejoicing over God’s law as with great riches. (v.14)

d. Covet the things of God. (v.15-16)

4. Conclusion

a. Illustration

b. Application

Introduction

My two young sons love to go for walks in the dark. So long as we have our flashlights is. Now, this is great fun to walk at night with the kids and shine the light out into the field near the house and look for deer and other animals but there is always a great debate about who gets to use the big flashlight. We have several flashlights but the one that the boys really covet is the daddy’s big silver Maglight. That’s the one that they believe is worth arguing over. Who gets to hold the Maglight? Children somehow feel safer in the dark and perhaps we all feel safer in the dark if we have a powerful light that will cast away the unknown of the darkness. Sometimes this life can be frightening because we can only see so far onto the path of our lives. We can only see a little way.

I told Sebastian the other night on a walk around the house at night that he didn’t have to scared because even though he didn’t get the Maglight that night that the light that he had, if we kept following that light, it would take us all the way back to the house. God has not given us a light for daily living that lights up all of the darkness; but He has given us a lantern in the darkness which, if we take heed to it, will illumine our entire pathway – step by step. "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path" (Ps. 119:105). There is no darkness which cannot be pierced by that lamp. "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" (Rom. 8:32)..

Transition

That is what God is calling us to do. He has saved us, set us upon sure ground through faith in Christ and He is calling us to walk in the light of His word with a surrendered heart.

CIT: Love for God produces a love for His word.

CIS: God is calling us to the joy of a heart surrendered to His word.

Exposition

At the outset we do well to take careful note of some of the movement in the text. You’ll recall that last week we established the Psalmists intense desire to see the beauty of God’s worth that is displayed in God’s law, brought into the here and now of reality through righteous living.

The Psalmist has already made it clear that as God calls us to Himself and we are drawn into a love relationship with our creator and as we recognize His worth our hearts should naturally be inclined toward a desire not only to please God by living according to His ways but also to display God’s worth in our actions.

In the section of the Psalm –the second stanza of the poem – the writer continues on that theme, emphasizing the relationship with loving God and loving His ways.

In verse 9 the writer asks how a young man may keep his ways pure. The Psalmist can assume the desire for a young man to keep his ways pure because he has already established the blessedness of those who walk according to God’s ways.

It’s assumed in the text. Among the great tragedies of the lives of the youth of this present generation is that the blessed of living a chaste and upright life is no longer modeled or taught and as a result it is no longer assumed.

In our efforts to raise children and influent the lives of our grandchildren let us not grow slack in stating in plain terms the blessedness of living an upright life in relation to God. I can tell you from my own experience, having not grown up in Church but later having been introduced to the Gospel as a teenager.

I felt like I had been deceived to up to that point. I felt as though I had been the victim of a conspiracy to be withheld need to know information of the highest value! It was as though so many things that had not made sense up to that point in the world and in my life all of the sudden had a legitimate explanation.

Young person, it is a good question to ask “How can a young person stay on the path of purity?” (Psalms 119:9a NIV) But you’ve got to be willing, for yourself, to ask that question and to honestly evaluate the answer that God gives.