Psalm 119 for Life

Living Today in the Light of the Word

Jonathan Edwards, the well-known preacher of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening’, wrote, I know of no part of the Holy Scriptures where the nature and evidences of true and sincere godliness are so fully and largely insisted on and delineated as in the 119th Psalm.’

The sufficiency of the Word of God for the whole life of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ and of the individual Christian believer is a vital matter, and never more so than today. In many strands of contemporary Christianity the wide gap between God’s revealed truth and man’s religions is being rapidly closed. This convergence is traceable in no small measure to the way in which the church (unlike the psalmist) has moved Holy Scripture to the margins of its own confession and proclamation, worship and witness.

The message of this psalm is therefore one of pressing relevance and every Christian should give it serious and regular attention. The truths and convictions which formed the mind-set of the psalmist, as he looked upward to the Lord and forward to the coming of the Messiah, should characterize every Christian as he or she looks back to the first coming of Jesus Christ and forward to his return.