What's More Valuable Than Gold?

A. Opening illustration: Have you noticed that every time you go into the convenient store lately there are twice as many people in there as usual. Lottery fever, billions of dollars. You have something more valuable. Investment commercials about the

B. Background to passage: The revelation of God in various ways. The highest and best being through Christ, but we only know Christ through the word and the Spirit. The fear that I have is that the sufficiency of scripture is being assaulted in so many different ways, the church has fallen victim not only to a low view of scripture theologically but lost the true belief and understanding of the power of the Word of God. We undercut the sufficiency of scripture by trusting in money (believing that it will bring us joy), trusting in doctors/medicine (that they will fix our bodies and emotions), trusting in the government (to bring lasting change to meet our needs), trusting entertainment and feel-good preaching (to bring happiness and return guests), trusting our family/spouse (to provide all the support that we need), trusting in our job (to provide sustenance), trusting in self-help books and seminars (to make you a better person), trusting in evangelistic presentation or polished rhetoric (to convert sinners).

C. Main thought: Aspects of the power of the word of God

1) Turns our souls toward God (v. 7a)

a. Doctrinal point: bible is perfection, without fault or error. We must embrace this! His “instruction” points our heart toward the direction of God. This includes the connotation of returning or turning around, but also includes the meaning of steering or correction upon the soul when it starts to go awry.

b. Isa 30:18-21

c. Illustration: It’s kinda like Siri giving me directions home on Saturday. It tried to reroute (because I am stubborn and didn’t go the way I wanted it to originally), but it stayed the same, and I relented and went back to the right course home.

d. Do you want to live a Godward life? Live by the word. You will hear me say it over and over today, immerse yourself in the bible. Memorize his promises. Pray its prayers not to stray to the right or to the left. And when we do, stay in it, and it will bring you back home. If we neglect the word our lives will lose direction and blow with the changing winds away from or in circles of the stormy night.

2) Brings Us the Wisdom of God (v. 7b)

a. The testimony as it relates to covenant. It is reliable, faithful, and permanent. It makes one wise and skill in judgment of spiritual matters. It is instruction for not wasting your life. Develops those who formerly had little resistance against sin and unbelief and lack of spiritual discernment into those who operate their lives with skill and godly acumen.

b. The spiritual person judges all things but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ. -1 Cor 2:15-16, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, -Col 3:16

c. Illustration: the last score before the halftime and the lining up, calling timeout, consultation with coach, lining up, calling an audible based on what’s there, using the coach’s skill written in the playbook

d. Do we desire to make wise decisions? Of course! We have been given the mind of Christ. We are commanded to let the word of Christ dwell within us richly. We have been given a entire book within the bible that just deals with wisdom. Do you want to get down to the end of your life and be disappointed when you as the question if you’ve wasted your life? Have you had victory over sin.

3) Deep-Seated Joy (v. 8a)

a. Rules for personal conduct. The word is straight in conjunction with justice or morality. The heart is heart (internal feature) n. — the locus of a person’s thoughts (mind), volition, emotions, and knowledge of right from wrong (conscience) understood as the heart. And it says that it will make us at our very core glad.

b. Argumentation

c. Illustration: We must put the evidence before us that reading, pondering, memorizing, and studying the Bible will yield more joy in this life and the next than all the things that lure us from it. -Piper, read the stories of the martyrs, one common them is they wrote the scriptures on any little piece of scrap paper and hid them, so that in darkness or secrecy they might read and find the deep-seated joy to carry on

d. When the world comes at you with the full force of its crushing blows, don’t expect to exhibit joy and have joy if you have been sparse in your abiding in the word. If we live in the word, nothing can take away our joy. Lots of heartbreak, pain, and suffering may come, but if the word is flowing through your blood and in your mind, even though tears may flow and endure for the night, joy comes in the morning.