I’ve stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.
– Psalm 119:11
What great imagery to picture God’s words stored up in your heart. Some translations say I’ve hidden your Word in my heart specifically so that I might not sin against you.
Psalm 119:11 teaches us how to fight sin with God’s Word.
A critical to your battle and my battle with temptation in this world is having God’s words stored up and hidden in our hearts. So I just want to ask you, would you describe your heart as full of God’s Word like it’s stored up there? It’s hidden deep within your heart in such a way that when you face temptation to sin, you have this reservoir in you, overflowing from you that helps you fight sin and temptation. Just like Jesus in Matthew 4 quotes the Scripture three times when he’s tempted. And this is where I simply want to encourage you today in your memorization of God’s Word.
I don’t know if you have an intentional plan for memorizing God’s Word, an intentional way you go about storing God’s Word in your heart, hiding God’s Word there. But if you don’t have some kind of intentional plan for memorizing God’s Word, storing it, and hiding it in your heart, I want to encourage you today to do that. Hear God’s Word encouraging you to do that. For many reasons. I mean, there are so many benefits to Bible memorization.
This is what Psalm 1 is talking about when it says, blessed is the man who meditates on God’s Word day and night. Blessed is the man or woman who doesn’t just read God’s Word, but who meditates on it, who lets it soak into who they are, who hides God’s Word in their hearts, that you can live like with God’s promises just to anchor a foundation to hold you fast, that you can live with God’s Word as a guide to direct you.
Psalm 119:11 encourages us to prepare to fight specific sins in our lives.
Later on, Psalm 119 says, your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. Already in Psalm 119, before verse 11, we read about the blessing of walking in the law of the Lord. But you can’t walk in a law you don’t know. You can’t obey commands that are not hidden and stored in your heart. There is no way to measure the fruit, the blessing that comes with hiding, storing God’s Word in your heart. So memorize verses when you’re struggling with sin.
Find verses that deal with that particular sin and memorize them. When you’re struggling with worry find verses, Matthew 6, Philippians 4. Hide them in your heart when you’re struggling with lust, memorize Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 5:27–30. When you’re struggling with your tongue and how you’re using it in ways that are not helpful, memorize James 3. When you are walking through trials, memorize the first parts of James 1 or 1 Peter 1. Hide and store God’s Word in your heart. And not just when you’re struggling with this or that, just memorize promises from God’s Word.
Hide them in your heart. Memorize Psalms that will lead you to pray out of just the overflow of the heart filled with God’s Word. Let me just pray this over you as you hear God saying to you and me in a fresh way today. Hide your Word in my heart. God, help us to do this. I pray for every single person listening right now who doesn’t have an intentional plan that they’re carrying out for hiding your Word in their hearts.
This verse challenges us to commit to memorizing God’s Word.
God, I pray that the overflow of just these couple of minutes today would be a commitment to doing that. And I pray for every person listening and in myself, God help us to faithfully hide your words in our hearts, to meditate on them in such a way that they become a part of us. That they’re secondhand to us. They just flow from us. We can quote them not for any other reason, but so that we might know you and walk with you and enjoy you and have victory over sin and walk according to your Word and stand on your promises.
Oh God, we praise you for your Word to stand on, for the privilege of having your Word to hide In our hearts, we pray for those who don’t know your Word around us, help us to be faithful to share your Word. We pray that your Word would be stored in our hearts, that we might speak it to others. God, we pray for people who’ve never even heard it.
Prayer for the Madurese Bawean People
We pray specifically today for all the language groups that still need your Word over a thousand specific language groups that don’t have a single verse of your Word in their language.
God, we pray, please bless all those who are working on Bible translation and help us as your church to do all you call us to do to get your Word to people who don’t have it… Including specifically today, the Madurese Bawean people of Indonesia and Singapore for 196,000 men, women, and children who need to hear your Word for salvation and for eternal life. God, we pray that the Madurese Bawean people would be reached with it. We pray all this according to your Word in Psalm 119:11. Help us to hide this verse in our hearts that we might walk with you and not sin against you. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
David Platt serves as a Lead Pastor for McLean Bible Church. He is also the Founder and Chairman of Radical, an organization that helps people follow Jesus and make him known in their neighborhood and all nations.
David received his B.A. from the University of Georgia and M.Div., Th.M., and Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Some of his published works include Radical, Radical Together, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, and Don’t Hold Back.
He lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area with his wife and children.
