January 3, 2022: Day 1 – Psalm 119

Welcome to the read through the Bible for 2022.  As we begin this journey together I can’t encourage you enough to stick to it in a way that you will be disciplined to reach Scripture each and every day.  Six chapters a day is not a small feat, but one that is doable and one that will be extremely gratifying once we are finished.  But even more important than the gratification we will feel when we are finished, are the lessons that we will be learning from Scripture along the way.  This will surely deepen our relationship with our Savior.  Let’s look at Psalm 119.

What a way to start the reading with Psalm 119.  The key to this Psalm is found in vs.105 where we hear the familiar words: “They word is a lamp unto my feet, and light unto my path.”  Throughout the entire psalm you have the writer, we think it is David, referring to his love for the laws of the Lord and asking for protection against those who would mock him because he is so in love with God’s laws.

A couple things there.  I have not found a time in my life where following God’s commands have created a scenario where people mock me.  When I was in college I joined a fraternity and I was the only one who did not drink alcohol in the fraternity and I never sensed a spirit of mocking me for that decision, but rather over time there was more of a spirit of my fraternity brothers trying to understand my decision and contemplating if that decision might also be a good one for them as well.  Have you ever found yourself where the decisions that you have made to follow God have been met with mocking?

But that is a consistent theme throughout this psalm and in Scripture in general.  A sense that those who follow God’s commands will be mocked, or to us New Testament terminology, will be persecuted.  It is no wonder that Jesus says blessed are you if you are persecuted and reviled for my sake.  As we make our way through this reading I hope that the theme of this psalm will come true.  That we will find ourselves longing and desire more and more of God’s word to play itself out in our lives and we would see the things of this world that used to have a hold on us gradually slip away.  

I want to leave you with this song that was important to me when I first came to know Jesus on January 14, 1986.