Active Desire
I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.
Psalm 119:15–162
A friend and I have recently started reading through Psalm 119 together to wrap up the year and strive to actively set our minds on the value of God’s word. Just this past week, reading verses 9-16, I was captivated by this beautiful depiction of an active pursuit of delighting in and desiring God’s way over our own. The writer starts with a question, “How can a young man keep his way pure?” Then, in the following verses, he shares an answer that is simple yet impossible to do on our own.
We can keep our way pure by guarding it according to God’s word and submitting ourselves to God’s way over our opinions or ideas. However, the writer understands that, left alone, this thought is incomplete. It has to go deeper than just what we do. So, in the rest of this section, he expands on it.
Our guarding must be an active, whole-hearted seeking, rule declaring, word storing, testimony treasuring, precept meditating, law delighting, and word remembering guarding. I have seen it in my life and others when we have a sorrowful response to the impurity in our lives, yet we do not rise up with an active desire to guard our way according to God’s word. This spiritual lethargy will destin us to return to the same pain we lamented over months, weeks, days, or even hours ago. We can be like the person who wants to be healthier yet continues with the same habits and routines in their life, then has another surge of recommitment after the next doctor’s appointment. We cannot keep doing the same things, crossing our fingers and hoping for a different response. We have to get up, make a change, and get engaged in the fight to guard our way. We have to want it, not just want the idea of it, but to want it so that we will chase after it!
Our guarding must also display humility. Humility that leads us to depend on God’s strength and his way rather than our own. Right in the middle of these verses, in verse 12, the psalmist says, “Blessed are you, O Lord; teach me your statutes!” He confesses this beautiful reality that God alone is the word worthy to be praised by blessing him. He acknowledges God's supremacy as our creator and the one who knows how life works best. God, in his very nature, cannot be anything other than holy, and he is the definition of what is pure. The psalmist praises him, then humbly requests, “Teach me your statues!” How better to learn how to keep our way pure than to be taught the way of purity by the one who defines purity by his nature?
When we want to come up with our own path to follow in our own strength, we will never find the life God created us to experience. We need to give up wasting our effort on things that will never satisfy us and put every active desire we can into guarding our way with Christ. We rise up and walk with him as the light to our path. He is the provider of guidance, direction, and companionship. This way, we can be like the tree in Psalm 1, fed by the streams of living water through the word and the Holy Spirit, bearing fruit in our season, leaves that do not wither, and prospering in advancing God’s kingdom and glorifying him in all we do.
