Part 1: What do I do with Psalm 119? (What should I do in response to what I read in Psalm 119?)
As I spend more and more time in Psalm 119, I keep banging up against this question of what should I do with Psalm 119. How am I supposed to respond?
For the past 5 years, most of my time spent in the Scriptures has been spent in Psalm 119. My guess is that this will continue for the rest of my life—at least for the foreseeable future.
Yes, I do spend time in other parts of the Bible. For example, I am currently teaching an adult Sunday School series from the Epistle of James. To prepare for those lessons, I study James mostly from the Greek text and prepare all my notes from the insights I get from the Greek for that book. This occupies maybe about three hours per week of study and PowerPoint creation. That is a small fraction of the time I spend in Psalm 119 in that same week. Also, it seems I am constantly drawn to searching other books in the Bible as questions and concerns come up about this or that in my everyday life. But all in all, those other activities in Scripture are but a small fraction of the time and focus I spend throughout the week in the Hebrew texts of Psalm 119.
With all this time and focus on Psalm 119, how am I to respond to what I am learning there? (And I assure you, this Psalm seems to be a bottomless sea of treasures. And the deeper I go, the more splendid and valuable are the treasures I discover.)
Early on, I became aware that Psalm 119 was the daily devotional prayer of Jesus Christ; and I recognized that ONLY Jesus could, and ever would be able to, pray some of those verses. So, there are definitely parts of Psalm 119 that I can only watch my Lord pray to His Father; they are not for me to appropriate. They are for me to better understand the heart and mind of my Lord.
But the Holy Spirit has also been prompting me with Romans 6:4 where it says, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” (ESV) So, sooner or later (in this life or in the one to come) I will be walking as He walks, where He walks, and how He walks. The real question is, “How do I appropriate that, and how much of that is appropriate for now?” Specifically, how much of the passion and commitment that Christ displays in the verses of Psalm 119 are for me to be passionate about now and committed to perform in this life?
So, I have some thoughts on the answer to this (these) question(s). And I will share them next week in Part 2 of this blog post. So, stay tuned! Meanwhile, you might want to think about how you might answer this (these) question(s).