Lord, Turn Me Toward You, Not Idols

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Incline my heart unto thy testimonies,
And not to covetousness (Psa 119:36).

Whether you realize it or not, your heart is completely in God’s hands, so to speak, to do with as He pleases. This is true for everyone, whether they become objects of His mercy or His wrath, and yet this does not in the slightest destroy our moral responsibility.

This confession of God’s absolute sovereignty even over each person’s moral state and actions is implicit in the psalmist’s prayer. The recognition of God’s absolute sovereignty has the most practical implications for what we ask God for ourselves.

We should pray to be inclined toward God.
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Compelling Grace

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Make me to go in the path of thy commandments; For therein do I delight (Psa 119:35).

Immediately I would credit A. W. Pink for the striking title of our meditation1, which brings our attention to the fact that

Even true saints need compelling grace.

AN EVIDENCE OF SAINTHOOD

Let us consider the second line first, “For therein do I delight,” that is, not just “thy commandments,” but “the path of thy commandments,” that godly pattern of life which they recommend.
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Spiritual Pairs

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Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law;
Yea, I shall observe it with my whole heart (Psa 119:34).

We are making good progress in grasping the message of the Bible when we learn to recognize things that are always found together, and then cease trying to divide them. For example, God’s covenant and His faithfulness, type and fulfillment, are just a couple of instances of what could begin an inexhaustible list. In our text, the psalmist links three couples which we must never divorce in our own minds. Attempts at this have been the ruin of countless souls, and will ruin many more if the Lord prolongs exercising His patience toward sinners.
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How Saints Get Their Wings

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Teach me, O LORD, the way of thy statutes;
And I shall keep it unto the end (Psa 119.33).

The well-known maxim, “all’s well that ends well,” has a counterpart in Scripture. “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof” (Eccl 7.8). This truism will be most wonderfully seen in the spiritual realm when the end of God’s saving work in countless sinners will emerge for the public and everlasting praise of His grace and power.

Cheer up, then, poor Christian. “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof.” See that creeping worm, how contemptible its appearance! It is the beginning of a thing. Mark that insect with gorgeous wings, playing in the sunbeams, sipping at the flower bells, full of happiness and life; that is the end thereof. That caterpillar is yourself, until you are wrapped up in the chrysalis of death; but when Christ shall appear you shall be like Him, for you shall see Him as He is (1 John 3:2). Be content to be like him, a worm and no man, that like Him you may be satisfied when you wake up in His likeness.
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Grace to Obey with All My Heart

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I will run the way of thy commandments,
When thou shalt enlarge my heart (Psa 119.32).

Grace is God’s favor toward the undeserving through Christ. We need grace to be converted. Christians are those who have “believed through grace” (Acts 18.27).

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed!

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Humble Perseverance

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I have stuck unto thy testimonies: O Lord, put me not to shame (Psa 119.31).

The Christian life begins with a principled decision to believe and obey God’s Word, as the psalmist himself confessed in the previous verse, “I have chosen the way of truth: / Thy judgments have I laid before me” (119.30). Oh, magnify the grace that first changed your heart to make this holy choice, my brethren! Many still walk as enemies of Christ (Phil 3.18) and you are no more inherently worthy of God’s favor than they.
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Deliberate Discipleship

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I have chosen the way of truth: Thy judgments have I laid before me (Psa 119.30).

Thinking and living as a follower of Jesus Christ involves very deliberate decision and intentional perseverance, while these spiritual activities of the soul are fruits of a God-given faith. Believers know about themselves that “it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Phil 2.13). This truth does not cancel out the believer’s willing and doing, but rather establishes and enables it. God works in you to will (original: intend, desire) His good pleasure, and so you do indeed will it, when you had no desire whatsoever in this direction before His working in you to create it. God works in you to do (original: work, perform) His good pleasure, and so you do indeed do it, when you had no success whatsoever in these good works before His working in you to achieve them. John Newton remarked on the phrase “to will and to do”: “Not at the same time – first to will, then to do,”1 as our purpose precedes our act. God always takes the initiative, but we were always responsible to believe and obey Him, even before He worked in us, and afterward, we are the active agents believing and obeying while He is working in us. He does not believe instead of us—we believe. He does not obey instead of us—we obey. If we never believe and obey God, we are criminally blameworthy. If we receive faith and repentance and find ourselves believing and obeying, then God deserves the credit for it.
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Oh, to Lie No More!

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Remove from me the way of lying: And grant me thy law graciously (Psa 119.29).

Everyone lies, or so it seems. Surely we all suffer strong temptations to lie, and sometimes we cave. However, just as with all other sins, there are two kinds of people in this. Some are slaves to lying and never really repent. Both deliberately and without thinking much about it, they use lies in their daily lives because they believe it is easier and will bring them more happiness. They are at peace with deceit, even defending it as right and necessary under certain circumstances. The other kind of people are oriented toward truth. They hate lying even while struggling against this sin in their own lives. One of the main weapons in their arsenal against lying is prayer. By the way, the first group is lost (Rev 21.8) and only real Christians are in the second.
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Pray in the Dark (Psa 119.28)

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My soul melteth for heaviness: Strengthen thou me according unto thy word (Psa 119.28).

Real Christians are liable to the same kind of sorrows as unbelievers. The “happy-clappy religion” so popular today has denied this and fostered unrealistic expectations of Christian experience. What may surprise even sounder believers is that in some respects, real Christians are vulnerable to deeper griefs than the unconverted. Puritan Thomas Manton takes great pains to prove this in his sermon on our text:
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Intelligent Praise (Psa 119.27)

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Make me to understand the way of thy precepts: So shall I talk of thy wondrous works (Psa 119.27).

Our generation suffers a glut of information and a famine of thoughtfulness. Even amidst exploding technologies, and perhaps to some degree because of them, there runs a strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism. Without strenuous efforts to avoid the chronic and ubiquitous distractions of cell phones, email, iPods, notebooks PC’s in WiFi hotspots, along with the older media of cable TV, radio, and newspapers, we are apt to suffer from an information overload that pushes out any significant time and mental energy for meditation in the deep things of God, while our wide and shallow knowledge of countless trivial things has never been greater.
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