Explain to me the way of your preceptsand I will tell of your wonderful acts. We tend to think of particular rules or principles for living as fairly boring, somewhat annoying, and often unreasonably restrictive. We seem to live in a debate between what we ought to do and what we actually do. Even the…
I tell you my stuff and you answer me.Teach me your statutes. I frequently comment that “always and everywhere there is stuff.” There is stuff to do, stuff not to do, stuff that I did, and stuff that I didn’t do. Not to mention the physical stuff to keep, stuff to get rid of, and…
My soul is down in the dust.Give me life according to your word. Psalm 119 is an interesting–and biblical–combination of human action and dependence on Divine action. Verse 25, the first verse of the third section, is on the dependence side of the scale. If you’re trying to formulate theology, the variety here might be…
Your testimonies are also my delight,My counselors [the men of my counsel]. I like to say that we tend to go to the Bible for information, while God is there for conversation. I don’t mean that there is no information there. We tend to think in binary terms: Either the Bible is a source of…
Prince sit around and plot against me,Your servant meditates on your statutes. To be honest, my first reaction to this verse was a laugh. Yeah, right, I thought. He really can sit meditating on God’s statutes while he knows people are plotting against him. That thought isn’t entirely wrong. This really is a high-minded, and…
Remove from me reproach and contemptfor I have guarded your testimonies. Meditating on a single verse each day means I often get somewhat out of context. But while context is important, literature can easily suggest other lines of thinking. Folks in various classes I’ve taught have called me the king of the rabbit trail because…
You rebuke the proud, accursed ones,Who stagger away from your commands. As with each verses, there are lots of directions my mind goes with this, for example, what it means to be “accursed” and what, in particular, one might be proud of. But the direction my mind went was simply this: Pride goes before destruction…
I [my soul] languish for longingfor your judgments. What do you really want? What is your deepest desire? What is missing that makes you weary? As I write this, I’m very tired. I’ve been busy with many things and am only writing because I committed myself to write as a spiritual discipline. This is the…
An alien am I on the earth.Don’t hide your commands from me. I frequently teach that there are two elements to the Christian life: Identity and Mission. It’s easy to go off the rails on the side of identity, trying to separate ourselves from the crowd. On the other hand, we can become so much…
Open my eyes and I will seeWonderful things from your Torah. In my infographic on Seven Barriers to Hearing the Word the third barrier is making your Bible study a scholarly, rather than a spiritual pursuit. Now let me be clear that I’m not against scholarship. Reading biblical languages and understanding various scholarly areas of…
