August 22: Thoughts on Psalm 119:9-16

"How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word. I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands. I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Praise be to you, O LORD; teach me your decrees. With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth. I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches. I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways. I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word."
~ Psalm 119:9-16

"How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word."

As young adults, we struggle with purity. There's disgusting, filthy sin all around us, and it's readily available to us everywhere we turn. It is not as though we have to seek out sin to be tempted; it seeks us out!

For instance, the Ignite MySpace originally listed its gender as male. Within days of being created, messages started showing up in its inbox and friend requests started pouring in. Why? Well, these were fake profiles created by women who appeared to be peddling porn. The messages would say things like "If you like my pictures, there are more where these came from, but they were too racy for MySpace" - and they would link to what was essentially a porn site! It's not as though the Ignite MySpace did anything to make anyone think we were pro-pornography. Rather, our presence as a presumed young male on MySpace was enough to send temptation our way. (Apparently this is just the way things work, because while Farris does get these messages on his own MySpace, Lori doesn't get them on hers - and this is presumably because Lori is female and Farris is male.) This is the main reason we changed the gender of the Ignite MySpace, by the way - the messages and friend requests were just time-consuming and frustrating.
Anyway, this is just one example of how Satan targets temptation to exploit our vulnerabilities and undermine our purity. Sin seeks us out (heck, sometimes it even does market research), and we have to resist temptation to maintain purity. How can we do this? By living according to God's Word.

"I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands. I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Praise be to you, O LORD; teach me your decrees. With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth. I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches."

Sometimes we don't really think about what a great gift the Bible is to us, but it really is. When we think about Bible study or spending time in the Word, it often feels like a chore, something we have to slog through to be a good Christian. But if you look at what the Word of God truly is - which is, come on, the Word of God, the actual words that come out of God's mouth. It's a way for the God of the universe to communicate with us.

And when you think about it that way, even having the Word of God available to us - the idea that the great God of all creation would stop for a moment and reveal Himself to us in written form - well, studying that is a privilege, not a chore! The Word of God itself is great riches. Keeping the Word of God, following God's laws and statutes, is an even greater privilege.

"I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word."

Because He's given us His Word, we should not neglect to study it. It's one of the amazing ways He's given us to learn about Him. We should rejoice that we have a God who loves us enough to draw boundaries for us, and who cares about us enough to reveal Himself to us through His Word.