Beat a Path to the Word in 2023
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.000 | [Arabic]
00:00:11.000 | God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
00:00:15.000 | That's what you just heard in Arabic from our friend Sharif.
00:00:18.000 | Sharif is bringing Desiring God's Resources to the ancient lands of Egypt.
00:00:22.000 | It's a remarkable work and you'll want to hear about it, and you will, in just a minute.
00:00:26.000 | But 2023 arrives on Sunday and there's a New Year's sermon from 2000.
00:00:32.000 | It's one of my all-time favorites. I try to listen to it annually.
00:00:37.000 | It's a John Piper sermon and a great one for the start of any new year.
00:00:42.000 | In this case, the calendar had just turned from 1999 to 2000.
00:00:47.000 | And I remember that transition really well, a big turn in the future to the 2000s.
00:00:53.000 | And it was a little scary too with Y2K rumors in the air.
00:00:57.000 | If you don't know what Y2K was, find someone who is in their 40s or older to explain.
00:01:02.000 | It was crazy times.
00:01:04.000 | And in that craziness, as the calendar changed from 1999 to 2000,
00:01:09.000 | Pastor John turned his church's focus to Psalm 77,
00:01:12.000 | a great text about the importance of God's Word in our daily lives as we endure
00:01:17.000 | the ever-changing tumult of a life in this fallen world.
00:01:23.000 | We're going to enter 2023 soaking in Psalm 77 for a few weeks on our Wednesdays together.
00:01:30.000 | So feel free to study that text and get that Psalm deep into you.
00:01:35.000 | It's very rich. Psalm 77 makes the case that we need daily Bible reading.
00:01:40.000 | And in this sermon, we're about to hear Pastor John is going to remind us that
00:01:43.000 | our daily Bible reading is about habit, head, heart, happening.
00:01:48.000 | Four things. The conviction to do it, number one.
00:01:51.000 | The discipline of getting truth into your head, number two.
00:01:55.000 | Then the work of getting that truth from your head into your heart, number three.
00:01:59.000 | And then number four, finally, sticking to realistic practices
00:02:03.000 | that will make daily Bible reading possible for you.
00:02:06.000 | All four points are important, and we'll see all four of them in the coming Wednesdays.
00:02:11.000 | Today we look at number one, the conviction about why we need this habit in our lives.
00:02:16.000 | Here's Pastor John.
00:02:18.000 | I think most of us know that when you look at the New Testament
00:02:22.000 | and how it uses the Old Testament, how it handles the Psalms,
00:02:29.000 | you can see that the Psalms are the worship book, the song book,
00:02:35.000 | the meditation book of the early church.
00:02:38.000 | In other words, the early church did not say, "Well, the Messiah has come,
00:02:44.000 | and the Spirit has arrived, and so we don't need those old books anymore.
00:02:49.000 | We've got the Christ. We've got the Spirit. We don't need that letter anymore."
00:02:54.000 | Because they knew, they remembered what Jesus said,
00:02:58.000 | "I did not come to abolish. I came to fulfill."
00:03:02.000 | So when they read the Old Testament, they didn't read it as abolished.
00:03:06.000 | They read it as fulfilled.
00:03:08.000 | For example, when they read in the Psalms, "Meditate on the law of the Lord day and night,"
00:03:12.000 | they didn't say, "Oh, that's abolished. We don't need to do that anymore."
00:03:17.000 | Rather, they filled up law of the Lord and meditation
00:03:21.000 | with the richer bounty of apostolic teaching
00:03:25.000 | and the history of the great deeds of God in Jesus
00:03:29.000 | that the early saints before Christ only had with regard to Moses and the prophets.
00:03:35.000 | So they didn't change the strategy of the way you live a life in God,
00:03:42.000 | though the content and much of the knowledge and the arsenal of truth
00:03:47.000 | enlarges and changes.
00:03:50.000 | So we know that the Psalms, like the one we just read,
00:03:53.000 | is not an old book to the early church, and it shouldn't be to us.
00:03:57.000 | We shouldn't read Psalm 77, "Good night." That thing's 3,000 years old,
00:04:01.000 | so what use does that have?
00:04:03.000 | And besides we've got the Christ, and besides we've got the Spirit,
00:04:06.000 | we don't need those old Hebrew ponderings anymore.
00:04:10.000 | It's not the way to read the Bible or to neglect the Bible.
00:04:14.000 | What we have in that Psalm and what we have in all the Bible
00:04:17.000 | is a strategy of fighting the fight of faith
00:04:21.000 | in the midst of the kind of thing this psalmist was experiencing.
00:04:24.000 | And you heard it, didn't you? This psalmist is very discouraged.
00:04:27.000 | The main thing I want to say this morning
00:04:30.000 | is that Christian living is a living on the Word of God.
00:04:36.000 | That's my main point.
00:04:38.000 | Christian living means living on the Word of God.
00:04:43.000 | That is, the Word is the substance of my communion with God.
00:04:49.000 | If I need God, if I want to fellowship with God,
00:04:53.000 | I commune with Him and I fellowship with Him
00:04:55.000 | through the medium of the Word of God.
00:04:59.000 | If I want to know Him, I know Him in His Word.
00:05:02.000 | If I want Him to speak to me, He speaks to me through His Word.
00:05:06.000 | The Word is the material, the fuel of the relationship.
00:05:10.000 | You take the Word out of the way, God becomes just a blank zero out there.
00:05:15.000 | You might fill Him up with your own dreams about what He's like,
00:05:18.000 | but as far as communing with Him in the truth that He is,
00:05:21.000 | you can't do it without the Word.
00:05:24.000 | The Word is the substance of the relationship
00:05:27.000 | that goes back and forth,
00:05:29.000 | carried and enlivened by the Holy Spirit who makes the Word live
00:05:33.000 | and causes God to stand forth from the Word
00:05:36.000 | and us to come alive under the Word and in the Word.
00:05:40.000 | Christian living is a living on the Word of God.
00:05:45.000 | Man shall not live by bread alone,
00:05:47.000 | but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.
00:05:49.000 | We live by it, we live on it.
00:05:51.000 | We feed on it, we rest on it, we stand on it, we walk on it.
00:05:54.000 | It is the material of the communion and the fellowship.
00:05:58.000 | The vital living communion that we can have today
00:06:02.000 | with the risen Christ
00:06:04.000 | is a vital union sustained by and shaped by
00:06:09.000 | and guided by the Word of that Christ
00:06:14.000 | as He once spoke it and as it's recorded now in a book called the Bible.
00:06:20.000 | Therefore, if you don't read the Bible daily
00:06:27.000 | and don't memorize the Bible in part
00:06:31.000 | and don't linger over the Bible and to use the words that were just read,
00:06:36.000 | meditate on it and remember it and muse on it.
00:06:40.000 | If you don't steep your mind in it,
00:06:42.000 | the best you can hope for is a weak Christian life.
00:06:47.000 | Weak Christians are vulnerable to false teachings
00:06:52.000 | and to all kinds of trendiness.
00:06:55.000 | They blow this way, they blow that way.
00:06:58.000 | Weak Christians are especially vulnerable to trouble
00:07:04.000 | so that when trouble comes, your car gets stolen.
00:07:08.000 | I'm looking, but he was in the first service.
00:07:10.000 | One of our brothers called me on New Year's Eve and said,
00:07:14.000 | "I came out to my house," how did he put it?
00:07:17.000 | Something like, "I came out to my driveway to drive to church to bring a check over
00:07:22.000 | and my car was stolen."
00:07:25.000 | Is that one colossal test or what?
00:07:28.000 | God in his hands money for the church
00:07:30.000 | and God ordains for his car to be stolen.
00:07:35.000 | And he brought it another way
00:07:38.000 | because he's strong. I know this man, he's strong.
00:07:41.000 | A weak Christian, that's the way you want to be to me God?
00:07:45.000 | I'll be this way to you?
00:07:47.000 | That's weakness.
00:07:49.000 | I don't want a church full of weak people.
00:07:51.000 | I don't want to be a weak person.
00:07:53.000 | I want you, and you want to be a tree planted by streams of water
00:07:57.000 | that bears fruit in season, its leaves don't wither in the drought,
00:08:01.000 | it doesn't blow over with all kinds of trendiness,
00:08:04.000 | it is there through thick and thin when the sun is shining,
00:08:07.000 | when the rain is pouring, it stands.
00:08:09.000 | That's the kind of saints you want to be.
00:08:13.000 | The Christian life is a life lived on the word of God.
00:08:19.000 | And it's intentional.
00:08:22.000 | It's intentional. I want to underline this purposefulness about it.
00:08:26.000 | So many Christians are passive in the way they live the Christian life.
00:08:31.000 | Coasting and drifting, treating the word of God like the weather.
00:08:36.000 | Nobody plans that the weather be a certain way.
00:08:40.000 | You may plan for it to be a certain way, but you don't plan the weather.
00:08:44.000 | God plans the weather.
00:08:46.000 | And it just kind of rolls over you and you take what you get.
00:08:49.000 | Don't treat the word of God that way.
00:08:52.000 | Be purposeful. Go to the weather. Go to the Bible.
00:08:56.000 | Beat a path.
00:08:58.000 | I wrote a letter on New Year's Day to our elders and pastors,
00:09:01.000 | exhorting them to get with me on this now.
00:09:03.000 | And I said, "Brothers, beat a path to the word. Beat a path to the word.
00:09:07.000 | Beat a path to the word. Beat that path so flat, so familiar,
00:09:12.000 | so that when you turn blind,
00:09:14.000 | and when the darkness comes into the life of this church on autopilot,
00:09:18.000 | we're on that path, you know how to get there.
00:09:21.000 | When the night comes, we have day now.
00:09:24.000 | Most of you in this room, you're here, you've got some day in your life.
00:09:27.000 | You're not so dark that you're out sinning somewhere right now.
00:09:30.000 | You've got some day in your life. While you have day,
00:09:33.000 | beat a path to the word of God so that when the night comes,
00:09:37.000 | you'll find it in the dark.
00:09:40.000 | You don't beat the path in the light, you won't find it in the dark.
00:09:44.000 | Amen. That's why we set our daily Bible routines in place
00:09:47.000 | and make sure that they are set firmly in place at the start of a new year.
00:09:51.000 | A good reminder from the early days of the year 2000.
00:09:54.000 | And as we close out 2022,
00:09:57.000 | it's a great time to remember there's a team at work bringing Desiring God resources to the world
00:10:04.000 | and to reach non-English speakers.
00:10:07.000 | That includes Sharif, laboring in Egypt.
00:10:10.000 | You heard his voice at the top of this episode, and we asked him for a ministry update.
00:10:14.000 | Here's what he said.
00:10:16.000 | My name is Sharif Fahim from Alexandria, Egypt.
00:10:18.000 | I'm the general director of Al-Surah Ministries in Egypt.
00:10:23.000 | Al-Surah is a teaching ministry,
00:10:26.000 | and we publish books, articles, trying to help the local church as much as we can.
00:10:32.000 | We have been translating different books from Desiring God,
00:10:38.000 | Coronavirus and Christ, Good News of Great Joy.
00:10:42.000 | We also did Don't Waste Your Cancer.
00:10:45.000 | The Legacy of Sovereign Joy is almost out, When I Don't Desire God.
00:10:50.000 | We are working currently on Providence, this great book.
00:10:55.000 | One of the main reasons that we value translating material from Desiring God
00:11:01.000 | is the nature of this material,
00:11:04.000 | the depth of theological richness in these books, in these articles, in these videos.
00:11:11.000 | At the same time, the practicality.
00:11:14.000 | It's very practical for the church.
00:11:16.000 | Every time I meet someone from Desiring God,
00:11:19.000 | I feel that I've met someone who's a brother,
00:11:21.000 | that we have been knowing each other for a long time.
00:11:25.000 | I didn't feel that it's a kind of a business relationship or a formal relationship.
00:11:29.000 | No, I feel I'm meeting my brothers very close to each other,
00:11:35.000 | caring for each other's families, asking about each other's lives.
00:11:39.000 | And it's a great blessing to have this feeling that people not only care of what you are doing for them,
00:11:44.000 | but they are caring for you personally, asking about you.
00:11:47.000 | We never felt that we are working for them.
00:11:50.000 | And we always felt that we are partners, we are doing this together.
00:11:53.000 | And this is a great, great blessing.
00:11:55.000 | Every project that we work with Desiring God on,
00:11:59.000 | they help with funding these projects.
00:12:01.000 | Not only funding it, but also directing what would be the best way from their views
00:12:07.000 | at the same time without kind of pushing us to do it according to the views.
00:12:13.000 | They're making suggestions, ideas, and they respect what we're going to do.
00:12:17.000 | Recently Desiring God invested in the audio recording
00:12:22.000 | and helped us to have this kind of training for audio recording and to have the right equipment.
00:12:29.000 | When you invest, when you give for such a ministry or for such projects,
00:12:36.000 | you are not just helping people here in the States.
00:12:41.000 | You are helping people in continents far, far from where you are.
00:12:45.000 | People you may never ever meet in this life or in this side of the life,
00:12:51.000 | but maybe you will meet them in eternity and they will say,
00:12:56.000 | "Well, we have been blessed by this ministry."
00:12:58.000 | And you know that you have been investing in this ministry.
00:13:01.000 | So you never know what you are doing, how it is influential,
00:13:06.000 | how it's impacting others that you never thought of.
00:13:10.000 | People far, far away would be listening to a devotion or reading an article or reading a book
00:13:15.000 | and their lives would change because of that.
00:13:19.000 | Change lives in Egypt.
00:13:21.000 | We'll meet these brothers and sisters one day.
00:13:24.000 | Until then, we celebrate this little glimpse into this amazing work.
00:13:27.000 | Thank you, Sharif, for your faithful labors and for sharing what's going on in your world with us.
00:13:33.000 | If you're listening right now and you've already been a ministry partner with Desiring God,
00:13:36.000 | you're in on this. You're making possible everything you just heard.
00:13:39.000 | Thank you for your partnership.
00:13:41.000 | And if you're listening right now and you say, "You know what?
00:13:43.000 | I want to join in in what's happening through Desiring God in the English-speaking world
00:13:48.000 | and then in its overflow to reach the spiritual needs in Egypt,"
00:13:52.000 | you can. Join us today.
00:13:54.000 | Much of our financial support comes from friends of ours who give on average $30 a month
00:13:58.000 | to support all of this work.
00:14:00.000 | To set up monthly giving, go to give.desiringgod.org.
00:14:04.000 | That's give.desiringgod.org.
00:14:08.000 | Hugely appreciated. Thank you.
00:14:10.000 | We will see you all back here on Friday.
00:14:12.000 | Thanks for listening.
00:14:14.000 | [ Silence ]
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