Psalms 119:2 I. It must be at once apparent that seeking God is a right thing a thing fitting and becoming for man, as the creature and the child of God, to do. Whom or what should he seek if he seek not God? Is not God the Author of his being, the Supporter of his existence, the Source of all his... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:9 I. The Bible makes a great deal in its teaching about the ways of men. And nothing is plainer than that it contemplates as great a variety of ways as there are kinds of men. "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse _his_way? "Not any way, not somebody else's way, not the old man's way, n... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:15 I. The Hebrew word here translated "meditate" signifies properly to speak or converse with one's self. Hence it conveys the idea of seclusion, retirement, solitude, and, at the same time, of mental activity. In meditation the mind retreats within itself; but it retreats thither to thi... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:18 I. Consider the sense of wonder in man, and what generally excites it. That God has bestowed on man such a faculty we all know. It is one of the first and most constant emotions in our nature. The greatest minds and the truest hearts preserve this feeling fresh to the very last, and g... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:19 I. The stranger. The literal stranger is easily recognised, not so easily, perhaps, in a great city, where there are always thousands of strangers and foreigners, but easily in country towns and villages and on country roads. The life-spelling of the word "onward" sits in his look. His... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:25 These words express, with great intensity of humiliation, a consciousness which is universal among all sincere Christians I mean, the power of the world and of the body over the soul. Our slowness and sluggishness in spiritual obedience is a special proof of the power of the Fall stil... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:31 It is difficult to tell men what being confounded means, difficult and almost needless, for there are those who know what it means without being told, and those who do not know what it means without being told are not likely to know by any man's telling. I. The Psalmist who wrote Psal... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:32 There are two things especially remarkable in this Psalm: the variety of expressions used to describe the word of God and the corresponding variety of expressions used to describe the Son of man. In the text the Psalmist considers sin as a state of captivity and confinement. I. The wo... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:33 , PSALMS 119:94 I. There are too many people in the world who pray to God to help them when they are in difficulties, or in danger, or in fear of death and of hell, but never pray at any other time or for any other thing. They pray to be helped out of what is disagreeable, but they nev... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:33 There were two thoughts in the Psalmist's mind: I. That there was something in the world which he must learn and would learn, for everything in this life and the next depended on his learning it. And this thing which he wants to learn he calls God's statutes, God's law, God's testimo... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:38 There is a saying of Clough to which I take exception, and I quote it because it may represent the conclusion of more minds than the writer's: "The belief that religion is, or in any way requires, devotionality, is, if not the most noxious, at least the most obstinate, form of irrelig... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:45 I. At liberty! The very word has music in it. How full of suggestion of all that is bright and cheerful. To the captive Apostle it speaks of the bursting of chains, the angel deliverer, the restoration to friends, the recovered power of proclaiming to the people the glad tidings of the... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:46 A silent religion or a speaking religion which shall it be? David says, "I will speak." What do we say? Too often we resolve that we will keep silence. I. I hold that the difference between a silent religion and a speaking religion is the difference between a dead Church and a living... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:47 The love of God's laws is to be distinguished from the mere outward observance of them. As in the law of Moses, so far more in the Gospel of Christ, religion is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter, consisting not in the mere observance of certain rules, however goo... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:19 , PSALMS 119:54 Taken together, these words set forth our condition as strangers and pilgrims on the earth, and God's bountiful provision for meeting that condition in Christ. I. The fact that we are strangers is forced upon us by our ignorance. Apart from revelation, we know almost n... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:55 I. The keeping of God's law is promoted by the remembering of God's name. The name of God includes all the attributes of God. (1) If I remember the attributes of God, I must remember amongst them a power before which every created thing must do homage; and if I couple with the memory o... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:59 I. Hebrew scholars tell us that when they get to the root of these words, "I thought on my ways," they find a weaver there working at his loom. That is the figure that lies deep beneath this word the figure of a man working skilfully at his web, looking to his garment, that he may not... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:59 Such is the history of almost all solid conversion. The great destroyer of the souls of men, which throughout the whole world is so widely wasting, is not so much wilful, deliberate sin as thoughtlessness. At first sinners do not think; then they will not think; at last they cannot th... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:64 The Bible has been constructed in such a way that it is an armoury of mercy, a magazine of kindness. It is a great institution of mercifulness. I. Notice the mercifulness of its eminent secularity, united to tendencies towards eminent spirituality. The Bible is a book of business fro... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:67 I. The Psalmist was certainly of a different opinion from nine persons out of ten of every country, every age, and every religion. For he says, "Before I was troubled I went wrong: but now have I kept Thy word," whereas nine people out of ten would say to God, if they dared, "Before I... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:71 Times of political decadence are times of spiritual growth. It is out of the inner experience of hidden lives, in ages when statesmen saw little hope, that such priceless contributions have been made to the devotional treasury of humanity as the hymn of Cleanthes, the Meditations of Au... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:72 This is a very hard thing to believe. We are to prove that the Bible is a better thing than heaps of money taken by themselves. The Bible can give you better things than money can ever buy, and the Bible can give you some things that money will not buy at all. I. Money can buy fine c... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:73 , PSALMS 119:116 I. Consider the care of the Creator for the lower creatures of His hand. The lower creatures have instincts given to them by God for their preservation. These instincts are adapted to their wants, and they never mislead the creatures to which they are given. In man's... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:89 I. In the Bible usually the Word of the Lord means not only the message which God sends, but Him by whom God sends it. The Word of God, Word of the Lord, is spoken of again and again not as a thing, but as a Person, a living, rational Being, who comes to men, and speaks to them, and t... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:33 , PSALMS 119:94 I. There are too many people in the world who pray to God to help them when they are in difficulties, or in danger, or in fear of death and of hell, but never pray at any other time or for any other thing. They pray to be helped out of what is disagreeable, but they nev... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:96 It is not difficult, at least for an earnest and thoughtful person, to see "an end of all perfection" among men; and here below nothing comes to perfection. But we are reminded that there is something else that does not come to an end, something that cannot be exhausted, lost, depreci... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:99 By obeying the commands of Scripture we learn that these commands really come from God; by trying we make proof; by doing we come to know. Now how comes this to pass? It happens in several ways. I. Consider that the Bible tells us to be meek, humble, single-hearted, and teachable. No... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:105 The two parts of this verse are not two different ways of saying the same thing. The word of God is a lamp or lantern to the feet at night; it is a light like that of the sun by day. It makes provision in this way for the whole of life. It is the secret of life's true sunshine; it is... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:109 The character of Isaiah. I. The character of Isaiah is apparent through his writings, in all its clear and separate parts, as the pebbles of a beach seen at the bottom of translucent water or the objects of the wood and hill seen through the atmosphere which bathes and penetrates th... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:111 I. Consider, first, the claim asserted by David: that God's testimonies are his heritage for ever. The term "testimonies" denotes all those revelations of His own nature, attributes, and will which God has been pleased to make of Himself. They are facts which we know not by the light... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:113 I. First, what are vain thoughts? (1) There are the vain, worldly thoughts, which we must hate. Thoughts which in themselves are perfectly harmless and innocent may become vain through being welcomed and entertained at the wrong season. The same thoughts may become sinful and vain thr... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:73 , PSALMS 119:116 I. Consider the care of the Creator for the lower creatures of His hand. The lower creatures have instincts given to them by God for their preservation. These instincts are adapted to their wants, and they never mislead the creatures to which they are given. In man's... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:126 The text brings before us: I. A melancholy fact: "Men have made void Thy law." This might at first view seem impossible, as if it were the defeat of Omnipotence itself by the creature it has made; but there is a sphere in which even the function of Omnipotence itself becomes restrain... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:129 I. Consider, first, how the wonderfulness of God's word is calculated to produce the observance of it. The human mind is possessed of certain faculties, and subject to certain sensations. Amidst these sensations very prominent is that feeling of surprise which overtakes us at the sigh... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:130 I. There is no book by the perusal of which the mind is so much strengthened and so much enlarged as it is by the perusal of the Bible. There is nothing so likely to elevate and endow with new vigour our faculties as the bringing them into contact with stupendous truths and the settin... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:131 We shall consider the Psalmist as here drawing a contrast between the unsatisfying character of what is finite and the power which there is in Divine things of filling all the desires of the soul. I. David is speaking as a man who had made trial of created good, and had proved its in... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:132 What is this love of God's name which is so very precious, and how is it to be obtained? I. We know how it is with us when we love any person among men very dearly. It is a joy and satisfaction to us only to hear his name, or to see it anywhere written or printed. So it is with thos... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:133 I. This verse recognises and accepts the obligation of moral order: "Order my steps." II. It fixes the legitimate source and centre of that order: "In Thy word." The Bible centres, regulates, restrains, and establishes a man. III. It deprecates the consequences of moral lawlessness... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:141 I. Man, among all his other weaknesses, is so prone to vanity, conceit, and pride that in teaching the lesson of self-respect, in pressing on you the truth that we are greater than we know, some might fear that we were but putting one more stumbling-block in the path of that humility... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:158 Consider what there is in the breaking of God's law to justify such manifestation of grief as you read of in the writings of David. I. Look, first, at the dishonour done to God by the violation of His law. Every one who reflects at all on his relationship to his Maker and the accura... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:160 I. We cannot read the Old Testament without seeing that the whole of it rests on the basis of a history the history contained in what we call the books of Moses. Now, if you turn to the New Testament, you will find that it begins, in like manner, with a history: the history of the fou... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:165 In the margin of the Bible the latter words of this verse are rendered, "They shall have no stumbling-block." I. Consider the character of the parties whom the Psalmist describes: they "love the law of God." It is no ordinary degree of spiritual attainment which is indicated by the... [ Continue Reading ]
Psalms 119:176 I. Like all true prayer, the text begins with confession. It describes our condition as it is in God's sight; it penetrates to the heart, and shows us whence it is that sin flows, whatever be its visible and outward manifestations. "I have gone astray like a lost sheep." We know well... [ Continue Reading ]