Psalm 119:25-32
“My soul clings to the dust; give me life according to your word! When I told of my ways, you answered me; teach me your statutes! Make me understand the way of your precepts, and I will meditate on your wondrous works. My soul melts away for sorrow; strengthen me according to your word! Put false ways far from me and graciously teach me your law! I have chosen the way of faithfulness; I set your rules before me. I cling to your testimonies, O Lord; let me not be put to shame! I will run in the way of your commandments when you enlarge my heart!”
A famous man once said, “I have a dream” and if I were a dreamer this would be my dream, that people who go by the title of Christian would ask the Holy Spirit to open their eyes to the giver of life, joy, and peace. The Psalmist had insights that most do not have, first, only God can give life, not hospitals, doctors, or medication, only God. It is my belief that God uses, hospitals, doctors, and medication to help in times of sickness. The Psalmist knew God’s word and had insight to find real life in Christ Jesus, and that it only had God’s teaching and statutes.
I have shared how I use to do a religious thing of reading each day a Psalm and Proverb, well most days, unless an early schedule took that time. However, I did not ask the Holy Spirit to open my mind to the wondrous works of our great God, I did not ponder on what I had read, but I checked it off in my mind as an act of worship. I am not fond of the phrase “just begin by giving God five minutes each morning” no He is a jealous God, and He wants nothing to have priority over Him in your life, not husband/wife, not children, nor parents, He alone is to be our worship.
The Bible is impossible for a non-believer to understand, they will always miss the meaning of what God has said through His prophets, disciples, and especially His only Son, Jesus Christ. This is what the Bible has to share with you and me, in the apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 2:14, “But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.” When Paul uses the term natural man, he is referring to the person who has not by faith ask Jesus into their life as their authority. Maybe you would like to see what Jesus has to say about such a person; in Matthew 13:13, “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.”
Jesus makes it clear in John 5:39-40, that the Scriptures will guide us into His precepts and statutes but only in Him is their eternal life. “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” In John 14:6, Jesus leaves no doubt that He is the giver of life. “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
C.S. Lewis had this to say about that Scripture and others of Jesus. “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
From the Back Porch,
Bob Rice
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