Psalm 119:13

"With my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth. In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes. I will not forget your word." 

Psalm 119:13-16

I don't know about you, but I think that these are some pretty powerful verses, but then again the majority of Psalm 119 are powerful verses. I especially love the last part of verse 16, but we'll get to that soon. 

In verse 13 the psalmist says "with my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth." I see here the psalmist pointing out the rules are truly from the mouth of God. If we take a look back at the founding father, and no I don't mean George Washington, Abraham heard the laws for the people from the mouth of God and they were inscribed in stone. The psalmist here isn't afraid to declare them openly. He isn't just whispering them in his heart, he is declaring them aloud. As I like to do often lets look at the dictionary definition of declare. 

To declare something is to state firmly; announce publicly or officially; proclaim one's support, sympathy or opinion for or against; to state emphatically and authoritatively. In essence, when you make a declaration about something, you aren't doing so with meekness you are doing so with boldness and authority. We should openly declare what the Bible says with boldness, but not forgetting that we should also do so with gentleness, respect and patience. Look at 2 Timothy 2:23-26, Paul is writing to Timothy to let him know not to get caught up in controversies that lead to quarrels, he should teach with patient endurance and correct with gentleness so that God may lead them to repentance  and thus a knowledge of truth. To talk about the truth of God's Word with boldness but also with gentleness and patience can be difficult. We need to pray that the Lord gives us the wisdom to mesh the three together when we tell people about our faith and what we believe. 

I'm about to get on a soap box for a minute so bear with me because I think this has to go with the above verses. I think that we as Christians need to take this approach in our culture today. We know the truth, we know that homosexuality is a sin, that marriage is a sacred institution for one woman and one man. We know that premarital sex is wrong, that abortion is murder and that lying, stealing, cheating, murder etc. are all punishable sins. But I think we often forget that we are just as guilty as the world around us if not more so because we know the truth, yet some days we chose to live in sin and I do it too! I get angry and frustrated and develop and complaining spirit and a sinful attitude, when my attitude should be like that of Christ. Yet (and here comes my soap box) we chose to condemn sinners, judge them, and protest against what we know is sin. We stand on street corners with signs, we protest by putting pictures and banners on our blogs or Facebook's, we will yell at people and shove scripture in their face. But here's the thing, standing on a street corner with a sign, sharing our opinion even though it may be God's truth, or acting as though we are "holier than thou", isn't the way we should go about it. We live in a world where people get offended if you look at them the wrong way or speak out of line and it blows up into a media fire storm (Chik-fil-A anyone?). If we want to make a change we should do so like Paul tells Timothy, "patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness."  and you know why? Paul tells us so that "God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil...". I think the key thing in these verses is that after repentance comes knowledge. We can't shove scripture in the faces of those that don't believe because to them it doesn't make sense, they don't know it and won't be willing to accept it. They need to know the Author before they can know and accept the content. All in all, sharing the gospel should be our goal, only by doing this and fulfilling the great commission will we see change in our world. 

I am by no means perfect and I know that I need to work on this as well. And I pray that the Lord will work in my life and my heart daily and mold me and shape me into His image.

I guess I'll touch on the other verses next time since this got pretty long. 

Father, I pray that you help me to focus on sharing the Gospel and sharing You with others instead of focusing on their sin. I pray that you show me sin and areas in my life that need improvement and that I look at the log in my own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else's. Grant me patience and gentleness when sharing my beliefs and sharing your truth, but also give me a spirit of boldness to declare with my lips all your wondrous Words. Amen!