God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. That's what you just heard in Arabic from our friend Sharif. Sharif is bringing Desiring God's Resources to the ancient lands of Egypt. It's a remarkable work and you'll want to hear about it, and you will, in just a minute.

But 2023 arrives on Sunday and there's a New Year's sermon from 2000. It's one of my all-time favorites. I try to listen to it annually. It's a John Piper sermon and a great one for the start of any new year. In this case, the calendar had just turned from 1999 to 2000.

And I remember that transition really well, a big turn in the future to the 2000s. And it was a little scary too with Y2K rumors in the air. If you don't know what Y2K was, find someone who is in their 40s or older to explain. It was crazy times.

And in that craziness, as the calendar changed from 1999 to 2000, Pastor John turned his church's focus to Psalm 77, a great text about the importance of God's Word in our daily lives as we endure the ever-changing tumult of a life in this fallen world. We're going to enter 2023 soaking in Psalm 77 for a few weeks on our Wednesdays together.

So feel free to study that text and get that Psalm deep into you. It's very rich. Psalm 77 makes the case that we need daily Bible reading. And in this sermon, we're about to hear Pastor John is going to remind us that our daily Bible reading is about habit, head, heart, happening.

Four things. The conviction to do it, number one. The discipline of getting truth into your head, number two. Then the work of getting that truth from your head into your heart, number three. And then number four, finally, sticking to realistic practices that will make daily Bible reading possible for you.

All four points are important, and we'll see all four of them in the coming Wednesdays. Today we look at number one, the conviction about why we need this habit in our lives. Here's Pastor John. I think most of us know that when you look at the New Testament and how it uses the Old Testament, how it handles the Psalms, you can see that the Psalms are the worship book, the song book, the meditation book of the early church.

In other words, the early church did not say, "Well, the Messiah has come, and the Spirit has arrived, and so we don't need those old books anymore. We've got the Christ. We've got the Spirit. We don't need that letter anymore." Because they knew, they remembered what Jesus said, "I did not come to abolish.

I came to fulfill." So when they read the Old Testament, they didn't read it as abolished. They read it as fulfilled. For example, when they read in the Psalms, "Meditate on the law of the Lord day and night," they didn't say, "Oh, that's abolished. We don't need to do that anymore." Rather, they filled up law of the Lord and meditation with the richer bounty of apostolic teaching and the history of the great deeds of God in Jesus that the early saints before Christ only had with regard to Moses and the prophets.

So they didn't change the strategy of the way you live a life in God, though the content and much of the knowledge and the arsenal of truth enlarges and changes. So we know that the Psalms, like the one we just read, is not an old book to the early church, and it shouldn't be to us.

We shouldn't read Psalm 77, "Good night." That thing's 3,000 years old, so what use does that have? And besides we've got the Christ, and besides we've got the Spirit, we don't need those old Hebrew ponderings anymore. It's not the way to read the Bible or to neglect the Bible.

What we have in that Psalm and what we have in all the Bible is a strategy of fighting the fight of faith in the midst of the kind of thing this psalmist was experiencing. And you heard it, didn't you? This psalmist is very discouraged. The main thing I want to say this morning is that Christian living is a living on the Word of God.

That's my main point. Christian living means living on the Word of God. That is, the Word is the substance of my communion with God. If I need God, if I want to fellowship with God, I commune with Him and I fellowship with Him through the medium of the Word of God.

If I want to know Him, I know Him in His Word. If I want Him to speak to me, He speaks to me through His Word. The Word is the material, the fuel of the relationship. You take the Word out of the way, God becomes just a blank zero out there.

You might fill Him up with your own dreams about what He's like, but as far as communing with Him in the truth that He is, you can't do it without the Word. The Word is the substance of the relationship that goes back and forth, carried and enlivened by the Holy Spirit who makes the Word live and causes God to stand forth from the Word and us to come alive under the Word and in the Word.

Christian living is a living on the Word of God. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. We live by it, we live on it. We feed on it, we rest on it, we stand on it, we walk on it.

It is the material of the communion and the fellowship. The vital living communion that we can have today with the risen Christ is a vital union sustained by and shaped by and guided by the Word of that Christ as He once spoke it and as it's recorded now in a book called the Bible.

Therefore, if you don't read the Bible daily and don't memorize the Bible in part and don't linger over the Bible and to use the words that were just read, meditate on it and remember it and muse on it. If you don't steep your mind in it, the best you can hope for is a weak Christian life.

Weak Christians are vulnerable to false teachings and to all kinds of trendiness. They blow this way, they blow that way. Weak Christians are especially vulnerable to trouble so that when trouble comes, your car gets stolen. I'm looking, but he was in the first service. One of our brothers called me on New Year's Eve and said, "I came out to my house," how did he put it?

Something like, "I came out to my driveway to drive to church to bring a check over and my car was stolen." Is that one colossal test or what? God in his hands money for the church and God ordains for his car to be stolen. And he brought it another way because he's strong.

I know this man, he's strong. A weak Christian, that's the way you want to be to me God? I'll be this way to you? That's weakness. I don't want a church full of weak people. I don't want to be a weak person. I want you, and you want to be a tree planted by streams of water that bears fruit in season, its leaves don't wither in the drought, it doesn't blow over with all kinds of trendiness, it is there through thick and thin when the sun is shining, when the rain is pouring, it stands.

That's the kind of saints you want to be. The Christian life is a life lived on the word of God. And it's intentional. It's intentional. I want to underline this purposefulness about it. So many Christians are passive in the way they live the Christian life. Coasting and drifting, treating the word of God like the weather.

Nobody plans that the weather be a certain way. You may plan for it to be a certain way, but you don't plan the weather. God plans the weather. And it just kind of rolls over you and you take what you get. Don't treat the word of God that way.

Be purposeful. Go to the weather. Go to the Bible. Beat a path. I wrote a letter on New Year's Day to our elders and pastors, exhorting them to get with me on this now. And I said, "Brothers, beat a path to the word. Beat a path to the word.

Beat a path to the word. Beat that path so flat, so familiar, so that when you turn blind, and when the darkness comes into the life of this church on autopilot, we're on that path, you know how to get there. When the night comes, we have day now. Most of you in this room, you're here, you've got some day in your life.

You're not so dark that you're out sinning somewhere right now. You've got some day in your life. While you have day, beat a path to the word of God so that when the night comes, you'll find it in the dark. You don't beat the path in the light, you won't find it in the dark.

Amen. That's why we set our daily Bible routines in place and make sure that they are set firmly in place at the start of a new year. A good reminder from the early days of the year 2000. And as we close out 2022, it's a great time to remember there's a team at work bringing Desiring God resources to the world and to reach non-English speakers.

That includes Sharif, laboring in Egypt. You heard his voice at the top of this episode, and we asked him for a ministry update. Here's what he said. My name is Sharif Fahim from Alexandria, Egypt. I'm the general director of Al-Surah Ministries in Egypt. Al-Surah is a teaching ministry, and we publish books, articles, trying to help the local church as much as we can.

We have been translating different books from Desiring God, Coronavirus and Christ, Good News of Great Joy. We also did Don't Waste Your Cancer. The Legacy of Sovereign Joy is almost out, When I Don't Desire God. We are working currently on Providence, this great book. One of the main reasons that we value translating material from Desiring God is the nature of this material, the depth of theological richness in these books, in these articles, in these videos.

At the same time, the practicality. It's very practical for the church. Every time I meet someone from Desiring God, I feel that I've met someone who's a brother, that we have been knowing each other for a long time. I didn't feel that it's a kind of a business relationship or a formal relationship.

No, I feel I'm meeting my brothers very close to each other, caring for each other's families, asking about each other's lives. And it's a great blessing to have this feeling that people not only care of what you are doing for them, but they are caring for you personally, asking about you.

We never felt that we are working for them. And we always felt that we are partners, we are doing this together. And this is a great, great blessing. Every project that we work with Desiring God on, they help with funding these projects. Not only funding it, but also directing what would be the best way from their views at the same time without kind of pushing us to do it according to the views.

They're making suggestions, ideas, and they respect what we're going to do. Recently Desiring God invested in the audio recording and helped us to have this kind of training for audio recording and to have the right equipment. When you invest, when you give for such a ministry or for such projects, you are not just helping people here in the States.

You are helping people in continents far, far from where you are. People you may never ever meet in this life or in this side of the life, but maybe you will meet them in eternity and they will say, "Well, we have been blessed by this ministry." And you know that you have been investing in this ministry.

So you never know what you are doing, how it is influential, how it's impacting others that you never thought of. People far, far away would be listening to a devotion or reading an article or reading a book and their lives would change because of that. Change lives in Egypt.

We'll meet these brothers and sisters one day. Until then, we celebrate this little glimpse into this amazing work. Thank you, Sharif, for your faithful labors and for sharing what's going on in your world with us. If you're listening right now and you've already been a ministry partner with Desiring God, you're in on this.

You're making possible everything you just heard. Thank you for your partnership. And if you're listening right now and you say, "You know what? I want to join in in what's happening through Desiring God in the English-speaking world and then in its overflow to reach the spiritual needs in Egypt," you can.

Join us today. Much of our financial support comes from friends of ours who give on average $30 a month to support all of this work. To set up monthly giving, go to give.desiringgod.org. That's give.desiringgod.org. Hugely appreciated. Thank you. We will see you all back here on Friday. Thanks for listening.