# 12 I have treasured Your Word

12. Psalm 119:11

I have treasured Your word in my heart so that I may not sin against You.   —Psalm 119:11

My first pastorate was a little stone church in the Tennessee hills. One day in Sunday school, an old woman stood and quoted Psalm 119 from memory, word for word, all 176 verses. This is the longest chapter in the Bible. She had learned it in childhood, and it had enriched her throughout her life.

Psalm 119 is longer than some entire books of the Bible, yet remarkably it was written to be memorized. It’s divided into twenty-two stanzas of eight verses each, following the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. To put it simply, every verse in the first stanza begins with the Hebrew equivalent of the English letter A, and so on until we come to the last stanza (vv. 169-176), which ends with the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This served as a built-in memory device to enable Hebrew children to learn the whole passage by heart.

Furthermore, virtually every verse of Psalm 119 has to do with the Word of God.
Psalm 119:11 promises that if we hide God’s Word in our hearts, it will retard the development of sin in our lives. All of us are tempted in different ways, but there are verses in the Bible to equip us to fight whatever temptation we face.

• When lured by addictive tendencies, try memorizing portions of Romans 6.
• When tempted by greed, find help in 1 Timothy 6.
• When tempted to be anxious or depressed, Philippians 4 can rescue you.
• When you feel lazy, bored, or lonely, verses in Romans 12 are at your disposal.
• When facing anger and bitterness, memorize verses at the end of Ephesians 4.
• When facing sexual temptation, the first part of Ephesians 5 can be a big help.

When Jesus was tempted by the devil, He quoted memorized Scripture, giving us an example. If we’ll fill our minds with God’s Word, we’ll have the weapons needed to fend off the attacks of the evil one. God has put more than thirty-one thousand verses in this Book to help us withstand the temptations we face in life. It’s like having thirty-one thousand rounds of ammunition; and there’s no excuse for having your arsenal empty.

In olden England, when metrical psalms were sung instead of hymns, it took congregations quite a while to sing all the way through Psalm 119. According to one account, Rev. William Grimshaw of Haworth would sometimes announce the singing of Psalm 119 while he left the building and walked through the village looking for truant worshippers. He had plenty of time to round up the slackers and herd them into church before the psalm was over; then he would preach to them. It was said absentees were more frightened of Grimshaw than of the justice of the peace.

Sin will keep us from the Bible, or the Bible will keep us from sin.—attributed to D. L. Moody