Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. What a picture of love for God’s word that leads to meditation on it all day long.
– Psalm 119:97
Forgive me if you have heard me share this illustration before. But I remember when Heather, my wife, and I first started dating, really just first started flirting with each other, and this was before cell phones. This was before texting, before email. We would write letters to each other, and I’d never written a letter to a girl. I’d never dated a girl before. She started writing letters to me, and I would receive one of those letters. And you want to talk about meditation all day? I was so thrilled to be getting a letter from a girl who seemed to like me, and so I would devour that thing.
I would think through every word she said and what it meant, like, “Dear David.” “‘Dear’, well, that’s a good sign. She thinks I’m dear.” Then she would write a sentence like, “I’m praying for you“, and I’d think, “Huh, I wonder what she means by that? She’s praying for me. Does she pray for all kinds of people, or when she prays for a future husband, I come to her mind?” and she’d put a smiley face at this point, I’d be like, “Why a smiley face right there?”
Psalm 119:97 challenges us toward a deeper love of God’s Word.
And so I realize that in sharing this, you might think, “Wow, you were obsessed”, and actually I was, and that’s kind of the point. I loved those letters. I loved her words and I thought about them all the time. All the time. How much more so should we be like this with the Word of God? Like God, the Creator of the Universe, the Sovereign Ruler of the stars and all nations, loves you and has written to you, has revealed himself to you, has revealed his love for you.
Like what a gift we have in the Word of God. Help us, oh God, to love your Law, to meditate on it all the day. I want to encourage you to view God’s Word this way in your life. Maybe you’re a new Christian. Picture the Bible as an expression of God’s love for you, and live each day to soak in different parts of it. Others of you have been a follower of Jesus for years, maybe decades, and I wonder if maybe you’ve lost sight of how much of a gift you have in God’s Word, to love it and delight in it as a teenage boy over a letter from a teenage girl would delight to actually infinitely more so than that.
Oh God, we pray that you would help us to love your law and to meditate on it all the day, to rise in the morning as Psalm 1 talks about and meditate on it at the very beginning of our day, and to just soak it in as an expression of your love for us, revealing who you are and asking questions about it, really soaking it in, not just reading it.
Psalm 119:97 encourages us to study God’s Word deeply.
God, help us to think why this there and how does this relate to that, and what is God saying to me through this. God help us to meditate on it in the morning, in the evening, and all day in between. Lord, as people who spend hours on devices we carry around in our pockets, looking at screens, help us to meditate on your Word more, and to love it more than any other words in this world.
I think about the delight I experienced in those letters from Heather and God, I pray for immeasurably more delight than that in each of our lives, through your Word and through the relationship we have with you through it. In such a way that leads us to share it with others, that they might experience your love in your Word. Oh God, please help us to faithfully share your Word today with somebody else, to tell somebody else today about how much you love them based on your Word to them.
Prayer for the Garre People
And God, we pray for the Garre people of Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, for almost a million of them who don’t know your love for them and your Word. God, we pray that the Garre people of Kenya and Somalia and Ethiopia would be reached with your love for them, that they would experience for the first time, oh God, the delight of knowing that you love them enough to send your son Jesus to die on a cross for them so they could have eternal life with you through faith in him.
God, we pray that you draw them into a love relationship with you through your Word. We pray that for the Garre people, even as we pray that in our own lives, we would experience the beauty, the joy of walking in love relationship with you through your Word. In Jesus’ name, we pray all this according to your Word, Amen.
David Platt serves as a Lead Pastor for McLean Bible Church. He is also the Founder of Radical, an organization that makes Jesus known among the 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, Don’t Hold Back, and How to Read the Bible.
He lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area with his wife and children.
