How to Be a Strong Christian, Part 3: Reading the Word

Next, spend time in the Word. “The Bible will keep you from sin, or sin
will keep you from the Bible.”[1]

“The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul;
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;
The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;
The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes;
The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever;
The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
Yea, than much fine gold;
Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

Moreover by them Your servant is warned,
And in keeping them there is great reward. 

“Who can understand his errors?
Cleanse me from secret faults.
Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins;
Let them not have dominion over me.
Then I shall be blameless,
And I shall be innocent of great transgression. 

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation
of my heart
Be acceptable in Your sight,
O Lord, my
strength and my Redeemer” (Psalm 19:7-14 NKJV).

The law of the Lord is perfect, and it
converts the soul. God’s revelation revives, awakens, and changes men. His Word makes us wise, it rejoices, it enlightens, it endures.

When you read the Word,
do you have a sense that you are immersed in something that is perfect, right,
sure, clean, and righteous altogether? Are you enraptured by it? The Psalmist was.
“More to be desired are they
than gold, yea, than much fine gold” (v. 10). He
desired God’s Word for wealth—perfect wealth, fine gold. “Sweeter also than
honey and the honeycomb” (v. 10). He desired it for taste—a pleasure he genuinely
enjoyed.

Do you desire the Word
of God like you desire wealth? Do you desire it like you desire honey? Does it
taste sweet to you? We should have a great desire for the Word of God.

There have been times
in my life when I would read the Word, and it seemed rather dead—and other
times when I just couldn’t get enough of it in quantity or in quality. I would
be so wrapped up in it that I wouldn’t know whether to go on to the next passage
or go back and repeat. I wanted more, and I also didn’t want to lose what I’d
just gotten, because it was so precious, so sweet, so wonderful. It really
revives the soul, it really makes wise the simple, it really rejoices the
heart, it really enlightens the eyes.

What else does God’s
revelation do? “Moreover by them Your servant is warned” (v. 11). It warns us. “And in keeping them there
is great reward” (v. 11). When we obey these testimonies from God, there
is great reward.

“Who can understand his errors? Cleanse
me from secret faults” (v. 12). For
most of my life, I assumed that “secret faults” were sins that I wasn’t aware
of, and that we are to use this as a prayer of general confession after we have
confessed the sins we know. Then I was spending time in The Treasury of
David (Spurgeon’s commentary on the Psalms), and I found that very few
people thought that. They said it meant, “Keep me from hiding my sins,” the way
David tried to hide his. Of course, there is no sense in trying to hide the
sins we do openly—everyone knows about them already. Certain sins we do
privately: things we think, things we say. Those are harder to confess—just the
fact that we hid them in the first place means we don’t want to acknowledge
them, because that would require bringing them out into the open before God.
The Psalmist asks God to expose the things he is hiding. That had happened to
him. When David thought he had hidden his sin of adultery and murder, it took
the prophet Nathan to tell him a parable and bring it out into the open.

Hiding sin is deadly. We might think nobody knows about it, and
nobody’s going to know. We end up deceiving ourselves. There was a poem written
in the 1800s about a man who murdered someone and buried him in a deep, dark
stream. He went back the next day and found that the stream bed had gone dry,
and there lay the corpse out in the open. He covered the corpse with leaves,
and the wind blew them away. He realized that even if he buried the body 10,000
fathoms deep, he wasn’t going to get away with the murder.   

Down went the corse with hollow plunge   

  And
vanish’d in the pool;  

Anon I cleans’d my bloody hands,  

  And
wash’d my forehead cool,

And sat among the urchins young,  

  That
evening in the school…

 

Heavily I rose up, as soon   

  As
light was in the sky,     

And sought the black accursed pool

  With
a wild misgiving eye:           

And I saw the Dead in the river bed,           

  For
the faithless stream was dry…

 

With breathless speed, like a soul in chase,

  I
took him up and ran;       

There was no time to dig a grave    

 
Before the day began:       

In a lonesome wood, with heaps of leaves, 

  I
hid the murder’d man.

 

And all that day I read in school,    

  But
my thought was other where; 

As soon as the mid-day task was done,       

  In
secret I was there;         

And a mighty wind had swept the leaves,           

  And
still the corse was bare!         

         

Then down I cast me on my face,   

  And
first began to weep,   

For I knew my secret then was one 

  That
earth refus’d to keep:

Or land or sea, though he should be

  Ten
thousand fathoms deep.          

         

So wills the fierce avenging Sprite,

  Till
blood for blood atones!          

Aye, though he ’s buried in a cave,         

  And
trodden down with stones,     

And years have rotted off his flesh,—        

  The
world shall see his bones.[2]   

Lord, cleanse Thou me from the things I am hiding.

“Who can understand his errors?” (v. 12). We may not understand our own
sin because of our remarkable ability to self-deceive. The Word of God reveals
our errors.

“Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins” (v. 13). A
presumptuous sin is something that you have not deceived yourself about.
You knew it was wrong, but you had the audacity to do it anyway. By man’s
valuation, it may not be a very big sin, but it is deliberate—for instance, a
white lie. We dare to lie, and God tells us that He has prepared a lake of fire
for all liars. We dare to lie, and the Word says God hates liars. We don’t hide
presumptuous sins; we pull them off because everyone else is doing them, too.
David asks God to keep him away from such sin.

“Let them not have dominion over me” (v. 13). I do it, I know it is
wrong, and I do it again, and again, and again. Pretty soon, this sin has me in
a vice. It has power over me, and I cannot keep from doing it. It may be an
“acceptable” sin because everyone else is presuming it, too. But unless I am
kept back from it, I end up as its slave. Let them not have dominion over me.

“Then
I shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of great transgression” (v. 13).
I counsel many people who have committed great transgressions. They confess the
sin, and God forgives them—and they turn right around and do it again. They
confess it again, and they do it again. One man came to me for help with this.
He would commit the sin, confess it, be forgiven, and immediately he would be
right back in temptation. He would fall over the cliff again, confess, and find
himself tottering on the edge once more. He asked me, “Why do I keep doing this
when I have confessed it each time?”

If
he would take care of his other sins, he would be far away from the edge. The
reason people keep doing big sins over and over is that they have not been
delivered from the presumptuous sins and the secret sins that led up to them.
The man who keeps falling is confessing his great sins, but he isn’t confessing
his little ones.

When
people file for divorce, generally the situation is so bad and they hate each
other so much that it seems like there is no way to correct it. They did not
anticipate this when they got married. If they had been kept from secret sins
and presumptuous sins, the divorce would never have happened.

The
way to stay away from big sins is to stay away from little ones. Don’t put up
with any sin in yourself. Keep your little sins confessed so that they
cannot get dominion over you. I don’t have to worry about ever committing a
great transgression if I am kept from minor ones. If I am constantly confessing
the secret sins and the presumptuous sins, the devil can’t get close to me on a
big one. He won’t even try.

People
have often asked me why I never have any big sin problems and why my family
isn’t messed up like many other families. Simple. We take care of the secret sins
and the presumptuous ones. It’s not that we’re favored. We aren’t. The devil
simply knows that he can’t trip us up with great temptations, so he works on us
with little ones (or he keeps trying to, anyway). He knows he cannot get us
into the 8^th grade in sin until we pass the 1^st grade. As
long as I keep flunking the devil’s 1^st grade, I get held back, and
I don’t make it to his advanced courses. Make sure you are flunking the devil’s
1^st grade.

(To be continued November 3…)