This is the third in a series of guest posts by my friend and co-worker Craig Altrock. Craig and his wife Leslee have been active with LST for 20 years now!
We are driven to act in accordance with the heartbeat of Scripture only in as much as we are led to THINK the right way about Scripture. This became convincingly clear to me as I huddled around Psalm 119 for 119 days recently. Like the luminous outline of a city at night, the importance of right thinking frames the psalm. And, like the soil nourishing a plant, it is a way of thinking about Scripture that energizes this psalmist’s great love for God.
As I noted in my last post, here are six beliefs about Scripture which fuel the psalmist’s passion for it:
- It is a PATH toward joyful living, not a roadblock to your desires.
- It is a LIGHT to illuminate your way.
- It is a DOOR to freedom, not a sentence of imprisonment.
- It is a COMPANION that guides us toward heart-felt passion for God.
- It is a REFLECTION of God’s character.
- It is NOURISHMENT to sustain the journey.
While it’s tempting to spend a post on each one of these, I’ll pick just two.
The Path— Scripture for this psalmist is not simply an instruction manual on how one is made right with God, as though that act were somehow unconnected to the rest of the way we live. For many people Scripture is the place we turn when we have “spiritual” questions. It’s the shelf on which we find the ingredients for knowing God better. It’s the pantry where we keep all things related to “my spiritual life.”
But, when you conjure up images connected to the word path you get a different idea altogether. When you are bombarded with daily advice on how you should live, Scripture silences those voices and provides the one true way of living. Scripture isn’t just a rest stop, it’s the road! It isn’t just a road sign, it’s the entire map! Scripture is meant to guide us into healthy, joyful, fruitful ways of engaging each other and God – the road-surface of life!
The Door— This image isn’t actually used in Psalm 119, but it comes closest to what I think is one of the most significant ways of thinking in the psalm –freedom. It is to the detriment of countless numbers of would-be disciples that they have somehow come to understand Scripture as something which confines us. For too many, the pages of Scripture morph all too quickly into the bars of a cell. Their belief is that all the fun is “out there” so why would I want to get trapped in the confines of God’s law?
But not so the psalmist. I love 119:32, 45; “I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free…I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts.”
Freedom is not something we discover the farther we remove ourselves from Scripture. Instead it is an experience we uncover as more and more of our life comes into alignment with God’s way.
Well, there’s so much more to say. However, better than my trying to capture the right words to communicate these critical thoughts is YOU planting these seeds in your mind and letting the Spirit nourish them through prayer and meditation.
Which image speaks most powerfully to you? Which one seems harder to connect with? Pick one this week to mediate on and let us know what God does in you through that exercise.
“The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.”
Psalm 119:130
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