Starting Young

Guest (Male): The world would have us believe that youth is the time we sow our wild oats and experience the pleasures of this world before we settle into a more disciplined lifestyle. But God's word has a very different message. Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. The habits of our youth determine the outcome of our lives. If we begin to obey God in small ways when we're young, we'll avoid the consequences of poor choices and we'll begin to obey in larger ways as we go along. Join Dr. Boice as he explores God's plan from Psalm 119 for that fleeting period of life we call youth, and the importance God places on our hiding His word in our hearts to recall as we grow older.
Dr. James Boice: Last Sunday, when we began to study Psalm 119, I pointed out as part of the introduction to this long chapter of the Bible that it's an acrostic poem. An acrostic is a word in which the letters of the word stand for various things. In this case, this acrostic is made up of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. There are 22 of them, and the Psalm is divided into 22 sections. Each section has each of its eight verses beginning with a word that itself begins with one of those letters, all in sequence. So, the first eight verses have words that start them each of which begins with the letter Aleph. The second stanza, the next eight verses that we're going to study today, each of those verses begins with a word, the first letter of which is Beth. Now, the interesting thing about this second letter is that Beth also means a house, and the underlying idea of the stanza, as some of the commentators have pointed out, is making our heart a home or a house for the word of God. So let's just start with that idea and let me ask the question: is your heart a home for God's word? Apart from the grace of God in your life, it never will be. Our hearts are filled with all kinds of unruly impulses and, to use the language of the Bible, with filthy demons of pride and lust and self-fulfillment and self-love and all of those things that keep us not only from loving God but from loving and serving each other. If we try to cleanse our hearts by driving the demons out, our last state is going to be worse than the first because Jesus told a story about that. He said you can't do it. You drive the demon out and he'll come back with a lot of other demons even worse than himself. The only way we can ever cleanse our heart is by turning to God, who alone has the power to do it. The way He does it, and that's what this stanza, indeed, the whole Psalm is about, is by His word, that is, the Bible. Now notice how this stanza begins: "How can a young man keep his way pure?" And young women too, and old men, and old women, and children. Everybody. How can you keep your way pure? The answer is by living according to your word. Now here's the way it starts. Look at the first verses. "How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word. I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands. I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you." So what this stanza is telling us is that in order to live a holy life and in order to be pleasing to God, we have to study the Bible. We have to conform our lives according to its teaching. Now I want to ask a number of questions about that. The first question I want to ask is this: granted that to be true, when should we begin? Now the world has its answers to that. If you ask people in the world, non-Christian people, they'll say, "Well, youth is a time for pleasure. Youth is a time for getting ahead. Youth is a time for serving yourself. If you're going to become religious at all, the time to do it is in old age when you're not worth much of anything else." That's the way the world thinks about it. And God's response is quite different. God says if you're going to live for me, the time to begin is at the earliest possible moment. If you're young, begin when you're young. If you've already passed youth and you're in middle age, you have no time to lose. You have less time than you did when you were young, so start right now. That's the idea. That's what He's saying. If you do not learn to live for me starting right now, the pattern of your life from this point on is going to be downhill and the end will be ruinous. That's what He's saying. Now, it doesn't require a great deal of wisdom to understand why that's true and why it's necessary. It's because the habits that we form in youth determine the course and the outcome of our lives. If you form bad habits, then you're going to do worse and worse things as you go on except for perhaps some miraculous intervention of the grace of God. But on the other hand, if you begin to establish good habits, habits like reading the Bible and spending time in prayer, enjoying the company of God's people, going to church, rejecting sin, practicing to be honest and to do good things—well, if you form those habits, those habits will go on with you through life and will form your character. This point is so important that the Bible gives numerous examples. I don't want to take the whole of the message to explore the examples. You can think of some of them on your own. You've got Joseph, the young man in Egypt who determined to go in God's way. Jesus Himself, who at an early age grew in favor with God and man. But let me give you as one example the example of Daniel and his three friends who were carried away from their home in Jerusalem to an ungodly, secular, pagan culture known as Babylon. They did very well there, but the reason they did well there is from the beginning they determined to live in God's way and according to the standards that they had been raised with when they were young men back in their own homes. Now we read in the very first chapter of that book, and it's certainly there in a significant place of emphasis, that Daniel resolved early in his experience in Babylon not to defile himself with the royal food and wine. Now that was the first of many tests that came into his life and his decision there to go in the right way is something that formed character that kept him later on when his enemies were trying to attack him in a variety of ways. Now we read that and we say, "Yeah, but that's just a very little thing. He decided not to defile himself with the king's food." In other words, to eat what they ate rather than to follow the kosher laws of his culture. And we say, "Kosher laws? I mean, not even all Jews keep kosher. Why should that be important?" Or we say, "What's wrong with diet anyway? Goodness, that just seems to be a very small thing." And of course, that's exactly the point. It is a very small thing and because it was a small thing it was important because it's the small things that provide the pattern for bigger things. If you begin to obey God in small ways and little things when you're young, you'll find that you'll be able to do it in larger ways and bigger ways as you go on. I wrote about Daniel years ago when we were studying that book together and I pointed out how important that message is for young people. Are you a young person? Do you have dreams of doing something significant in life, perhaps for God? That's a wonderful thing. You should dream. You should dream big. But the problem with youth is that youth is undisciplined. And so although we have big dreams when we're young, we often and in many cases fail to realize them simply because the discipline isn't there that will carry us forward to the realization of the goal. So I say to you, if you're young, you have to begin now. You have to commit your life to God now. You have to feed on the word of God now. And as I said before, if you're not, don't put it off. It's important that you do it at the earliest possible moment. In his last will and testament, Theodore Beza, who was one of the great Protestant Reformers, thanked God for the mercy of having been called to the knowledge of the truth when he was a youth of 16, and thus he said during a course of more than 70 years' walk with God, of having escaped the pollutions of the world through lust. A great testimony, and one that we should have as well. So that was the first question: when should we begin? The second question I want to ask is, what should we do if we begin young? Well, this stanza is telling us about that and what it's telling us is this: we should hide God's word in our hearts, which means not just to study it or even hear somebody preaching about it or teaching it, but actually even to memorize it so that it's down in our very inmost being and will be there and be available to us when we really need it and need to profit by it. This point is so closely tied to the idea of starting young that it needs to be emphasized because the best of all possible times to memorize is when you're young. Anybody in education knows that. It's easier to memorize when you're young. Children have a far easier time doing it than we do as we get older. But one of the great tragedies of the contemporary church is that it's forgotten this. Instead of trying to instruct the children in the churches in the way of God so that these very words of God that we have in the Bible get into their hearts and minds and actually form their character and guide them throughout life, we have had in the church the same thing we have in the secular culture, which is a dumbing down of education. And so instead of teaching worthwhile things to the children, we give them trivial stories and pointless games and banal songs. Now years ago, we determined to resist this trend at Tenth Church, and I suppose it would be helpful just to share a little bit of what we've tried to do over the past decades. Shortly after I came to Philadelphia in the late '60s, a group that were involved with the Sunday School got together and said, "We're not really satisfied with the curriculums that are available. What will we do? Suppose we were going to write a curriculum." We said, "Well, let's see if we can do that." And so we did. We produced a curriculum that repeats over a three-year cycle in various ways the great doctrines or teachings of the Bible. We have a first year in the cycle where we teach the doctrines themselves: sin, what it is, how it operates; Christ, who He is, what He does; salvation, how that is accomplished by the work of Christ; what the church is; how you live the Christian life; and so on. Then we go at it in the second year, teaching the same doctrines but from the perspective of relationships. So now we talk about the church and how one becomes a member of it and what makes a difference between the true church and those who are outside of the church. And we talk about the sacraments and those things that illustrate the atonement provided by Jesus Christ and our incorporation with Him. And then the third year of that cycle, we look at it historically. We say something like this: we say, "What is God doing? And how does that impact us and how do we fit in?" It's the same thing over and over again and then every three years we repeat that. We want to teach the doctrines. And then secondly, we have encouraged memorization. Early on, we began a careful program of Bible memorization and it builds in exactly the same way. The youngest children memorize short verses or parts of verses. Next time around, they add to those verses, learning the whole verse if they've only learned part of the verse before. Then they learn the context from which the verse is come and somewhere toward the end of the Bible school program, they're at the point of being able to recite whole chapters of the Bible like Romans 8 and other major portions of the word of God. We drill them on that Sunday by Sunday. We also do a simplified version of the Westminster Catechism Sunday by Sunday. And when it comes to singing, instead of singing the silly little choruses that so many fill their heads with, we teach them the great hymns of the church. Why not? It's got the great theology of the word of God in it. Somebody will say, "Does it work?" Well, it depends what you mean by that. If you mean, "Will they learn it?" Of course they'll learn it. They do. Do you mean, "Do they get converted as a result?" Well, conversion is not something that's in our hands to accomplish by any human means. That's the work of God. But I do know this: you find God through His word. That's what this Psalm is going to tell us again and again, and if it's going to happen, it's going to happen through that kind of teaching. Remember what it says here: it links the pursuit of God's word to the pursuit of God Himself. Verse 10 says, "I seek you with all my heart." And if you say, "Where do you find God?" the answer's in verse 9: "It is according to your word." Now, so far in our study, we've seen two things: that we have to begin to study the Bible when we're young, at the earliest possible moment, and secondly, we ought to be memorizing the word so that we might hide it in our hearts and have it actually available to us when we need it. Now the third question I want to ask is: why should we do it? What's the purpose of all of that? Well, I've just suggested one answer: that we might find God, that we might get to know God. If we're creatures made in the image of God, that's the most important of all discoveries we can make in all of life: to know God. It's through His word. That's where He reveals Himself. Now we're going to find that developed at greater length as we go on in the Psalm. What the Psalmist is saying here in this stanza is something else. It's related to finding God and knowing God, but specifically what he says in these verses is that we are to do this in order that we might live holy lives. In other words, that we might not sin against God. Verse 11. Now just think about that. You and I live in a corrupt and sinful world, and we say in the midst of this world, "How are we ever going to get any help in actually learning to live for God, living a holy life?" Are we going to get it from the world? The answer, of course, is no. There's nothing out there in that world that's going to help you live for God. Nothing that you read of a secular nature, nothing that you see on television on secular programs is going to help you live for God. On the contrary, it's going to do exactly the opposite. It's going to encourage you to live in godless ways because the whole industry is geared to appealing to godless desires. The industry knows how sinful the human heart is, and so by appealing to base motives, it gets us to buy things that we perhaps don't even need and do a lot of other things besides. You're not going to get any help living for God from the world. So where are you going to get it? There's only one place you're going to get it and that's from God's word, the Bible. Jesus said to His disciples, "You are clean because of the word I have spoken to you," because He taught them. And we have that word in the Bible as well. He also prayed for His disciples in that great prayer that we have in John 17. He wanted them to be holy. Sanctified is the word He uses. And here's the way He put it: "Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth." Now if you don't remember anything else from this study today, remember verse 11: "I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you." I want to give you a little outline for it. If you don't remember anything else, remember the little outline. It has three parts: the best thing, your word; in the best place, hidden in my heart; for the best possible reason, that I might not sin against you. Remember that the Bible is God's cleansing agent for sin and that without it, you and I will never live a holy life. Now there's a fourth important teaching in this stanza: not only one, that we must begin to live for God when we're young, or two, that we must hide God's word in our hearts, that is, we must memorize it, or three, that knowing the Bible is the only way to avoid sin and live a pure life. The Psalmist also teaches us a fourth truth: that we cannot understand God's word by ourselves and therefore we need God for our teacher. That's what he's saying in the fourth verse of the stanza, that is, verse 12 of the Psalm. It couples a line of praise with a line of petition. Notice what he says: "Praise be to you, O Lord," and then he adds, "Teach me your decrees." Now this is something the Protestant Reformers knew and stressed, and the way they talked about it was always to combine the ministry of the word and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. They trusted the Bible. They knew that God had spoken in the Bible. They knew it was authoritative, inerrant, powerful, all of that, and so their whole ministry was based upon expounding or teaching or communicating the Bible to their generation. That's the kind of thing we do here at Tenth Church. We believe in that. But at the same time, they realized that unless the Holy Spirit is blessing that teaching, the Bible remains a closed book to people who hear it. They thought of verses like 1 John 5:6: "The Spirit testifies because the Spirit is the truth." Or 1 Corinthians 2, verses 12 through 14. Paul was writing there, he said, "We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God that we may understand what God has freely given us. That's what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. A man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God; they're foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned." Now the Reformers took those texts and held them together and did so rightly. They said that the word without the Spirit is a dead book. That's why the man without the Spirit can't understand it; it's foolishness to the unsaved mind. But on the other hand, they said the Spirit without the word leads to error and foolishness and excess. The two always have to go together. And that's why, when we study the Bible, we don't study it in a merely academic way. It's possible to do that, and people who know no Jesus Christ as their Savior at all can do it and can lecture on the Bible and can be quite accurate about what it teaches, but that isn't what we're talking about when we're talking about finding God and living a holy life. When we study the Bible, we have to pray, asking God to be our teacher because it's God we're seeking after all and God has to communicate Himself with us. And that's what he does; he does it through His word. Now we come to the latter half of this stanza, and we get to very practical matters. It would seem that the Psalmist is speaking primarily to young people here, and so we expect him to give some very practical advice, and that's what he does, expressing it in terms of his own experience. We might call these last four verses as four exercises designed to help us master scripture. So what are they? Number one: "With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth." One of the best ways to learn anything is to verbalize it, that is, to speak it after you've heard it, to teach it to others. Sometimes I find I have to do that with silly things. Occasionally, you know, for a minister, even one who's as serious as I am, it's helpful to have a joke, like at congregational meetings. I never remember those unless when I hear them I repeat them afterwards. If I ever hear a good one, then I'll tell it to half a dozen people right away, then I remember it. Now if that's true of humor, it's true of the word of God as well. I find that the way I learn best is by teaching what God is teaching me. If I read something and I have an insight and I say, "That's wonderful," and then I go away and don't teach it to anybody else, I forget it very quickly. On the other hand, if I teach it, then it sticks with me, and I want to commend the same thing to you. Not long ago I was at a board meeting of Bible Study Fellowship, a great organization which I am very pleased to be associated with, and we were getting a report from the classes in Africa. The classes in Africa are doing very well. They're packed out. Hundreds and hundreds of people coming to the Bible Study Fellowship classes in Africa. And one of them in Nairobi, a women's class, has hundreds of women and there is one woman there whose story we heard. She goes to the class during the week and then immediately afterwards she goes back to her own village. And there are about 40 women there that approach her saying, "Would you teach us the Bible?" She said initially, "I don't know anything about the Bible. That's why I'm going to the class in Nairobi to learn it." Well, they said, "When you come back, teach us what you've learned there." So she's taught in an English class in Nairobi, she comes back and she teaches in a tribal language what she's learned that very week to the women in the village. Now who do you think in all that class is learning the most? Certainly it's that woman because once she learns it, she teaches it to others. Somebody has said, I think it's a good analogy, that the life of a Christian should be something like the heart muscle in the body. It expands to take in a fresh supply of blood, which is the life, and then it contracts in order to push that blood on out to others and to give it out. And that's the way we should be with the word of God. Do you take it in on Sunday? You should be taking it in on Sunday. That's what we're here for: to learn the word of God. Tomorrow, give it out. Maybe you don't have to wait even that long to do it. Martin Luther had some interesting thoughts when he was reflecting on the heart and he said something like this: he said that some people speak God's truth but they don't have it in their hearts, and other people have it in their hearts but they're afraid to proclaim it vigorously because they're afraid of persecution or being made fun of by their enemies. He said it's not enough to believe with the heart unto righteousness unless confession unto salvation is also made with the mouth. He was quoting Romans 10 verse 10. So that's the first bit of practical advice. Here's the second: "I rejoice in following your statutes," verse 14. It's a natural tendency of the human mind, you know, to remember things that are pleasant and to forget things that are unpleasant and it's good that we're made that way. As a matter of fact, it's the sign of a natural and healthy mind that does that. We have a mind that does it the other way around, remembers all the unpleasant things and forgets the good things—well, then you've got a sick individual. He needs help to get that straightened out. So one way to rejoice in the word of God and learn it and profit from it is really to rejoice in the truths that we're learning. That's one thing that we do in church that really doesn't happen quite the same way anywhere else. The people of God come together and we hear these truths and then we respond. We respond above all in the singing of the hymns. I think that the time probably in my life when I'm most joyful on the average is when I'm in the company of God's people and the people of God are singing the great hymns of the faith. That's a way of getting it into your mind and remembering it and developing your character. Here's the third thing, verse 15: "I meditate on your precepts." Now what is meditation? Well, it's recalling what we have committed to memory and then turning it over and over and over again in our minds to see the fullest implications and the applications of the truth. We're going to be looking at that again and again as we move on throughout the Psalm because it's an idea that's developed more as we go along. But let me just say here's what the Virgin Mary did. We recall in that great Christmas story, the angels that appeared to the shepherds and the shepherds had come and they'd seen the infant lying in the crib and then they went out and told everybody, and what we're told about Mary is she kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. And that's what you and I need to do. When we hear a truth, it's not something that we just sort of let go in and then go out and forget about it. We ought to be thinking about it. We ought to say, "Yes, that is true, and how does it apply to me? And how does it apply in other situations?" We ought to mull it over all the time. And then finally, here's the last thing, verse 16: "I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word." Now that word "delight" is not the same as the word "rejoice" in verse 14. "Rejoice" has to do with exuberant joy, and "delight" has to do with a settled appreciation. But it's speaking roughly about the same thing, which means that the new idea in the last verse of this stanza has to do with not neglecting God's word. That's the point at which the stanza ends: "I will not neglect your word." It's easy to do, to neglect the Bible, but we mustn't allow that to happen if we really are to grow in grace. Have you noticed the tenses of these verbs? In some translations of the Bible, the first time the future tense appears is in that last stanza. Now some translations do it differently, but it's been talking in the present tense all along: I recount, I rejoice, I meditate, I delight. When you get to the last stanza, it turns to the future and it says, "I will, I will not neglect." At some point—the New International Version is at that point—a description of what is happening, what he is doing, turns into a determination of what he's going to do. He's saying in other words, "I'm reading the Bible, I'm rejoicing in the Bible, I'm meditating in the Bible, I'm delighting in the Bible, but I want you to know this: in the days to come, I will not neglect it. I'm going to keep on doing exactly what I'm doing." Some of you have been neglecting it. It's time to turn it around and get that all straightened out. Some of you bemoan the fact that your Christian life has been going downhill. It's not been as joyful or as effective as you want it to be. You could trace it right back to a neglect of God's word. A great pianist said some years ago, "If I neglect to practice one day, I know it. If I neglect to practice two days, the critics know it. If I neglect to practice three days, everybody knows it." Some of you have neglected Bible reading much longer than that. Make it your determination to hide the word in your heart right now and begin today. Our Father, we thank you that we've had time to study these verses. We thank you for their practical nature. We thank you for the pointed way they speak to us, the way they rebuke us, correct us, and lead us on in the way of righteousness as your word always does. Do bless the time that we spent studying, that it might prove fruitful not just for a moment, but for all this day, and all this week, and all our lives and for all eternity, for the word abides forever. Amen and amen.
Guest (Male): Thank you for listening to this message from the Bible Study Hour, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is a coalition of pastors, scholars, and churchmen who hold to the historic creeds and confessions of the Reformed faith and who proclaim biblical doctrine in order to foster a Reformed awakening in today's church. To learn more about the Alliance, visit Alliancenet.org. And while you're there, visit our online store, Reformed Resources, where you can find messages and books from Dr. Boice and other outstanding teachers and theologians. Or ask for a free Reformed Resources catalog by calling 1-800-488-1888. Please take the time to write to us and share how the Bible Study Hour has impacted you. We'd love to hear from you and pray for you. Our address is 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. Please consider giving financially to help keep the Bible Study Hour impacting people for decades to come. You can do so at our website, Alliancenet.org, over the phone at 1-800-488-1888, or send a check to 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. For Canadian gifts, mail those to 237 Rouge Hills Drive, Scarborough, Ontario, M1C 2Y9. Thanks for your continued prayer and support, and for listening to the Bible Study Hour, preparing you to think and act biblically.