Calvary Road Baptist Church

“TAKE HEED”

Psalm 119.9 

I hold in my hand a Bible. So that we may be synchronized and looking at the same page of the playbook, let me make some comments about the book I hold in my hand and either the book that you hold in your hand or the app you have installed on your smartphone.

I will not attempt to be technical but practical and try to address some issues and perhaps put to rest some fears and hesitations you have concerning the Bible.

Three items: 

First, CONCERNING THE WORD “BIBLE” 

The word “Bible” is never found in the Bible, so why do we refer to this book as “the Bible”?

The word “Bible” refers to the collection of sacred writings of the Christian religion, comprising the Old and New Testaments. What we refer to as the Old Testament is a collection of 39 books written primarily in Hebrew, consisting of historical books such as Genesis and Exodus, poetical books such as the Psalms and Proverbs, and prophetical books such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. Of course, there are poetical and prophetical portions in the historical books, just as there are historical and prophetical portions in the poetical books and historical and poetical portions in the prophetical books. But historical books are generally history, just as poetical books are generally poetry, and prophetical books are generally prophecy. What we refer to as the New Testament is a collection of 27 works written in Greek, consisting of

As with the Old Testament, there is a mixture in the New Testament, with a frequent intermingling of history and prophecy, including direct quotations from the Old Testament and allusions to Old Testament passages.

But where did we get the word “Bible” from if “Bible” is found nowhere in the Bible? Let’s work backward in history and the development of the word. Our English word “Bible” translates the Greek word “biblá½·on.” But the Greek word “biblá½·on” actually refers to a strip or sheet made of papyrus, which was the ancient material written on long before paper was known to the middle east. Such a sheet was made from papyrus reeds and processed into strips written on and rolled into a scroll. But it doesn’t stop there. The word “biblá½·on” is derived from another word, the word “Bá½·bloV,” which was the name of an ancient Phoenician port city on the Mediterranean Sea that my wife and I visited some years ago during a trip to Lebanon.

So, why was the name of the city given to this material made from papyrus into scrolls for writing? Because that city was the place where the stuff was initially commercially fabricated and then shipped to the rest of the world. So, just as Xerox gave its name to photocopying because they invented the process, the city where the forerunner of paper was made lent its name to the product, which started as a scroll and was developed over time into what we know as a book, and now “Bible” refers to the Book of books. 

Next, CONCERNING THE SUBSTANCE OF THE “BIBLE” 

If you read the Bible, you should rather quickly become aware of two things:

First, the Bible is a record of statements God has made and a catalog of things God has done in the past and will do in the future. 

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” 

That is the first sentence in the Bible. Read on, and you will come to the descriptions of the creation of the time-space-matter continuum we call the universe, the origin of the human race, the fall of the human race into sin, and the judgment of God for man’s sin. Continue reading the Bible, and you will see explanations given for every aspect of man’s current condition and conduct, as well as predictions about future things, even including eternity.

But that’s not all. In addition to these descriptions found throughout the Bible, we also find certain kinds of declarations about the Bible. I call your attention to Romans 1.2, where this book is first referred to by the Apostle Paul as 

“the holy scriptures.” 

But I want you to read for yourself Second Timothy 3.16: 

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” 

Many, many sermons and long and involved Bible studies can be devoted to this single verse, but I want you to see the one, overriding, truth that Paul here conveys. The Bible is a beneficial book, “profitable” to use Paul’s word, that comes from God. This is God’s Book I hold in my hand. Being God’s Book, we must recognize that this Book, the Bible, being given to us by God for our benefit, is our only legitimate rule of faith and practice, telling us what ought to be believed and informing us how we ought to behave. 

Finally, THE BIBLE’S COMMENTARY ON THE BIBLE 

There are many sources of information within the Bible that teach us concerning the nature of this Book, the giving of this Book to us, the application of this Book to our lives, and so on. But there is one particular portion of the Bible that seems to stand tall as a unique monument to the Bible, God’s Word. I speak of the 119th Psalm. A couple of comments about the 119th Psalm, the longest of the so-called chapters in the Bible, comprising 176 verses.

This Psalm, the 119th Psalm, has several peculiarities. It is divided into twenty-two parts or stanzas, denoted by the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph, Beth, and so on. Incidentally, Aleph and Beth are the two letters combined from which our word alphabet was derived. Each stanza of this psalm contains eight verses, and the first letter of each verse is that which gives a name to the stanza. So, the first word of verse one begins with the letter Aleph. The first word of verse 9 begins with the letter Beth. And so on for all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Its contents are mainly praises of God’s Word, exhortations to study God’s Word, expressions of reverence for God’s Word, prayers for the Bible’s proper influence, and criticism of the wicked for despising Scripture. Thus, in this psalm, the Bible is called His word, as that which He has spoken to us; His law, given as the rule of our life; His commandments and precepts, laid upon us to be kept; His statutes, established as the laws of His kingdom; His judgments, as His decisions concerning our duty and destiny; His testimonies, as to His authoritative declaration of truth; and His way, in which we are to walk.

I conclude with the 119th Psalm’s particular use. The 119th Psalm does not appear to relate to any special occasion or interest of the Jewish nation. In other words, it is unlike other psalms that were written to commemorate a critical time in David’s life or to be used for a particular type of Temple worship. Instead, the 119th Psalm stands as a monument to the Word of God. It may very well be that the alphabetized stanzas were designed to aid in memorizing the psalm. And this should be no surprise, since there was once a time a man could not be ordained to the Gospel ministry who did not have all the Psalms committed to memory, according to Charles Spurgeon. So we see how important the Psalms, generally, have been thought to be down through history. More than any other Psalm, the 119th Psalm was written to exalt God’s Word and was intended to be a manual for spiritual meditation and instructing the young. For instruction, we will use a portion of this Psalm in this message. 

SERMON: 

I have rehearsed for you some basic information and foundational truths concerning the Bible for two reasons: First, I want to remind each of you what a great treasure from heaven you hold in your hand. James 1.17 declares to us that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above,” and how true that statement is of the Bible, God’s holy Word. But more than simply treasuring the Bible, we need to pay attention to the Bible. We need to read it, study it, rightly divide it, meditate upon it, search it, obey it, do it, hide it in our hearts, and heed it.

Your relationship to the Bible will, in great measure, set the tone for your relationship with God. For it is in God’s Word, the Bible, that we find the truths about God we could never discover for ourselves, that we find truths about ourselves that we would never otherwise admit to ourselves, and that we find in words the portrait of the glorious Savior of sinful men’s souls Who must be looked to with the eyes of faith for salvation from sins and reconciliation to this God with Whom we have to do.[1] Consider just what it is you hold in your hand, how important it is, where it came from, Who it came from, and how best to use it to prepare for eternity.

Please turn now in your Bible to Psalm 119.9 and read along with me: 

“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word.” 

By way of introduction, let me comment about the “young man” this verse is addressed to, so you will not make the mistake of thinking this verse does not apply most particularly to you. When this portion of God’s Word was written, some 3000 years ago, and until about 100 to 150 years ago, mankind lived in what we could safely call the pre-technological age, before science and technology had made an appreciable impact on a person’s longevity and life span.

In those days, every child knew what death was, growing up with the experiences of losing several brothers and sisters to plagues, or influenza, whooping cough, or smallpox epidemics. It was also not uncommon for a woman to die in childbirth or deliver several children in her life who would die in infancy. And because of wars and diseases, those boys who made it to adulthood and found themselves surviving to the age of 40 considered themselves wonderfully blessed.

There was no such thing as silly little boys who thought of nothing but playing in those days. There is no such thing as spoiled little girls who were pampered and shielded from hard work in those days. Not unless you were nobility. Almost no such thing as old men and old women in those days. There were only two kinds of fever back then, the kind you might live through and the kind that would definitely kill you.

Being a young man, then, was considered the very pinnacle of existence. The young man had survived childhood diseases and the sword point of any marauding invaders and raiders. And he was on the verge of facing the dangers that accompanied adulthood. Yet with all of his physical strength and endurance, he was saddled with the inexperience and lack of wisdom that most characterizes young men.

What cautions and warnings are found in the Bible for young men, then, most certainly apply to everyone else. If you are younger than a young man, you are even more foolish than a young man. If you are older than a young man, you are closer to death than a young man; and no one was far from death in those days. And if you are a woman, and no one has benefited from advances in science and technology and the universal application of legal protection more than women over the last few centuries, your life span used to be shorter, your susceptibility to the ravages of war and famine were greater. The dangers you were exposed to simply by being a woman of childbearing age made your existence even more precarious than a young man’s.

But, what’s my point? My point is that this verse applies to you if you are very young, and it applies to you if you are very old. It applies to you if you are a man, and it applies to you if you are a woman. And it is a wise person who receives instruction wherever it may be found.

These comments made, I have but three simple notions to get across to each of you today: 

First, THERE IS YOUR DEFILEMENT 

“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” 

By defilement, I mean that you are spiritually unclean, that you are morally filthy, that your soul is nasty and dirty. If you are a kid, you may be able to fool yourself into thinking that you are not defiled, but even you are defiled and unclean in God’s sight. According to God’s Word, you began your career of lying when you were born. And the reason you started to commit sins the moment you were born was that your soul was defiled before you were ever born. 

“... in sin did my mother conceive me,” 

David wrote in Psalm 51.5. So, you are sinful on the inside, young person. You have been defiled since before you were born.

“Pastor, what exactly do you mean when you say defiled?” I mean polluted. I mean rotten. I mean like the bottom of a dumpster behind a restaurant. That is physically what you are like to God spiritually. And just as no one gets into your mom’s house with shoes that are nasty and stinky and smelly and filthy, no one gets into God’s heaven with a soul that is defiled like yours.

Though kids sometimes think they are clean and pure, actually believing what mommy says about them being good boys and girls, those of us who are older know better. Look back on your life, and you will see years of wickedness, years of waste, years of profanity and swearing, years of vulgarity, years of ignoring God, years of speaking Christ’s name only when you were angry and couldn’t think of anything else to say, or years of religious pretense. And as you get closer and closer to the end of your life, you look back with regret, with sadness, and with a sense of loss. What a waste it was, wasn’t it? You didn’t really accomplish anything that’s lasting, did you? And you are getting more and more sorry, aren’t you?

“Pastor, I am not much concerned about this matter.” That’s too bad because God is profoundly concerned about this matter. So, you had better be concerned about this matter.

This word “cleansed” is somewhat rare in the Bible, so let me read three of the eight verses where it’s found so you can see that you are, indeed, defiled. 

Job 15.14:  

“What is man, that he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?” 

Job 25.4: 

“How then can man be justified with God? or how can he be clean that is born of a woman?” 

Proverbs 20.9:

“Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?” 

You see, these are essentially rhetorical questions, asked to show that you are not clean but rather defiled. So, the young man is, indeed, defiled. But so is the child, since before you were born. And so are you who are older, as you sadly recognize and acknowledge, I hope. 

Next, THERE IS YOUR DANGER 

When people could be stricken by polio and smallpox, and when whooping cough and influenza claimed millions of lives when women more frequently died in childbirth and when tuberculosis and typhus claimed people of all ages, it wasn’t so difficult to convince a person of his danger. People were intimately acquainted with death and the passage to eternity in days gone by, and few people scoffed at Hell and the lake of fire when death was so near.

Even children took note of death, with every youngster having known a friend who suddenly died or a brother or sister quickly taken. But now, we live in a sterile and antiseptic culture, where death and dying take place out of sight, and children live their lives without having to face their own mortality.

But whether you will die suddenly and soon or slowly and eventually, you will die. Therefore, you are in danger. You are in danger because when you die, you will go to Hell if you are not cleansed. You will go to Hell if you are still defiled when you die.

But few people these days are aware of their danger. Eternal damnation is scoffed at and ridiculed. Death and dying take place in hospitals and hospices and convalescent hospitals anymore, so that even most adults and the aged don’t face the terror of death like they used to. Or face it alone and without bothering those who are younger.

And that’s too bad. It enables people to deceive themselves. Children are able to ignore their own eternal destiny. The aged refuse to talk about it, as if refusing to talk about dying means you won’t die. But you will die, won’t you? And it won’t be too much longer before you die, will it? And as you face death, you are in danger, aren’t you? Because you’re not prepared to meet God when you die. You are defiled. And God is holy.

When will you die? Whenever it is, it’s sooner than it was yesterday. Don’t you think, in light of the danger you are in, that you should face up to it and deal with it? The danger of dying and what comes after you die will not go away, will it?

An observation before my final main point. Do you find it as perversely curious, as I do, that people refuse to prepare for death, which will claim 100% of the population, while they will go to extreme measures to avoid being infected with the Covid virus, which is fatal to an incredibly small percentage of otherwise healthy individuals who are infected? Judy Woodruff said, on the PBS News Hour, “More than two years into this pandemic, the U.S. death toll is the highest in the world.”[2] I am no medical expert, but I do not believe that. I do not believe the USA has the highest Covid death toll in the world, regardless of the data. My conviction is that people are being propagandized into being more fearful of a virus that is less likely to be fatal than you being struck by lightning than they are of dying as lost and going to Hell, which is a 100% certainty. A relatively minor danger that is fatal to some few are blown all out of proportion to distract you from the great and eternal danger that is eternally fatal to all. 

Finally, THERE IS YOUR DELIVERANCE 

“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word.” 

We have read verses which show the impossibility of you cleansing your way, the futility of you attempting to clean up your soul’s defilement. But just because you have no remedy for your soul’s ills does not mean there is no remedy.

Our text, after all, asks how a young man is to cleanse his way, with the answer being to resort to the solution advanced in Scripture. To put it simply, “Do what the Bible directs you to do. Apply the Biblical remedy for sin and defilement.” Hey, kid. Do you want to cleanse your way? Then do what the Bible says you should do. You middle-aged fellow, do you want to cleanse your way? Then do what the Bible says you should do. What if you are old and infirm, not long for this world, and you want to cleanse your way? Then do what the Bible says you should do. That’s what “take heed” means. Do what the Bible says to do.

But what does the Bible say to do? Of course, the Bible is a very long book, and there is a great deal of information contained in it about all sorts of things. But what, particularly, does the Bible say to you who are unsaved about cleansing? Two essential details:

First, there is the Gospel, which the Apostle Paul summarized in First Corinthians 15.1-4: 

1 Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand;

2 By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.

3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;

4 And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, Gospel meaning good news, is the good news that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for our sins according to the Bible, was buried and that He rose from the dead in a glorified human body after three days and three nights according to the Bible. What Jesus did when He performed those supernatural feats was shed His precious blood for the cleansing of our sins so that “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin,” First John 1.7.

Second, the way a sinner benefits from the saving work of Jesus Christ is through faith. It is possible to believe in vain since Paul refers to it in First Corinthians 15.2. Real faith, genuine faith, God-given faith, soul-saving faith in Jesus Christ is how a sinner receives the salvation which Jesus secures, the soul-cleansing that His blood provides. In answer to the question, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved,” Paul and Silas told the Philippian jailor, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved,” Acts 16.31. Those two servants of God recognized the long-established pattern in the Bible, God’s Word, of a right relationship being established with a sinner by God based on Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, using the instrumentality of faith. Father Abraham’s faith was counted for righteousness by the LORD in Genesis 15.6. And that pattern of the sinner’s faith was declared by the Apostle Paul to apply to every sinner so that in Romans 5.1 he proclaims, 

“Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

The Bible is where all the answers God wants you to have are found. The Bible is where God explains to you everything He wants you to know about Himself, about yourself, about Jesus, about salvation, and many of the less important details of life.

Do you want to cleanse your way? Then you need the precious blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse you from all your sins. And you must cleanse your way to escape Hell and gain heaven, to be reconciled to God and enjoy Him forever.

I hope you will come to know Jesus as your Savior. But before that happens, you must commit yourself to do what God’s Word, the Bible, says to do. If you do not “take heed” according to God’s Word, your way will never be cleansed, and you will die in your sins.

__________

[1] Hebrews 4.13

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-the-covid-death-rate-in-the-u-s-is-so-much-higher-than-other-wealthy-nations

Would you like to contact Dr. Waldrip about this sermon? Please contact him by clicking on the link below. Please do not change the subject within your email message. Thank you.

Pastor@CalvaryRoadBaptist.Church