Psalm 119:33 – You Teach Me

Teach me, LORD, the path of your statutes,
and I will keep them to the end.

Once when I was scheduled to teach on prayer at a conference, I had prepared an hour long talk, but as the time approached, I kept hearing in my head, “Let the Holy Spirit do the teaching.” In my mental outline, pieces of my planned talk fell away. It got slimmer and slimmer. (Those who have heard me speak will doubtless regard that as a good result!)

In the end, everyone else that day (I was last) went overtime, so I was asked to try to keep it to a half hour. I actually spoke for just 20 minutes and went to a short time of prayer. Several of my best encounters with others on the topic happened after that short teaching, and I learned from many of those people.

I’m not saying that teaching is a bad thing and we should just tell people to listen to the Holy Spirit. But we should tell people to listen to the Holy Spirit. Biblical scholars, teachers, preachers, and people with years of experience in church get in the habit of telling everyone what to do. We often forget to tell people how we came to our conclusions so they can recheck our sources. We fail to encourage them to go to the source.

I’d like to make a commitment to suggest the teaching from this verse more often and suggest to people that they ask the Lord to teach them, because in the end, learning from the source is the only thing that will make it all the way to the end.

Teachers are important, but like all of scripture, we need to point people to the source.

Who is your ultimate teacher? If you teach, do you point people to the source?