Psalm 119:97 O how love I thy law! It is my meditation all the day.
Meditate on the Bible
I started reading Psalm 119 yesterday, and I have been working on it for two days. It is a long psalm. There are 176 verses in Psalm 119, which makes it longer than any chapter in the Bible. Almost all of it is about the Word of God and our relationship to it.
How many people of the psalmist’s day could read the Bible every day? Well, they had very little of the Bible by comparison to what we have, and they had very few copies of it. So, it wasn’t possible for the average person to read God’s Word every day.
Yet, how many people of the psalmist’s day could have meditated on the Word every day? Any of them could have. Psalm 119:97 says, “O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” It is not just a matter of reading the Bible every day; it is a matter of thinking on the Bible all day.
There are so many things that we do with the Bible that are good, but they are merely the means to an end. Many times we miss the main point. We often praise the Bible, and the Bible is praiseworthy. We often invoke the Bible, and the Bible is our authority. We “chapter” the Bible; we read it every day and report how many chapters we read.
The bottom line is that we are to think on the Bible. Meditation is the Bible’s ethic for the Bible. Reading, memorizing, and quoting the Bible are all good, but these are all means for my mind to be saturated with the Word of God.
Now there is something even more important, and that is living the Word of God. But I can’t live beyond my thinking. My living will never rise above the way I am thinking.
We often facilitate reading the Bible. We have a plan or method by which we do this. How many people have the same when it comes to thinking on the Bible?
If I were to say, “What have you read today?” You might say, “I read John 5.” Well, that is fine, but that isn’t what you read. That is merely the reference. It is like asking someone, “Did you meet anyone new today?” They answer, “Yes, I did. I met 1020 Bill Rice Ranch Rd.” They haven’t given me a person, but an address at which he resides. John 5 is a wonderful address, but what makes it powerful is the truth in it.
Psalm 119 speaks often of a reviving that comes from thinking on the Word of God. Thinking is where it is at. We need to read the Bible, but the reason to read the Bible is to meditate on the Bible. And the reason to meditate on the Bible is to live in submission to it.