A few weeks ago, while spending hours waiting to meet with a pastor, I decided to fill the time with prayer and meditation on God’s Word. God immediately led me to Psalm 119, which just happens to be the longest chapter in the Bible (maybe God was trying to give me a hint that I needed to spend more time in Bible reading)!

Meditating on this chapter, verse by verse, one verse stood out as I read it, as if it had been highlighted and underlined:

If your law had not been my delight,
       I would have perished in my affliction.
(Psalm 119:92)

For many years, I have been told that focusing on God’s Law can be dangerous for Christians.  “What gets your attention, gets you,” I was warned.  I had been taught that if I try to make myself think about not committing a particular sin, I may instead be leading myself to commit the very sin I am trying to avoid.  “If I tell you not to think about a pink elephant,” this teacher suggested, “won’t you automatically think about a pink elephant?”

But Psalm 119:92 seems to suggest (along with the thrust of this entire chapter) that God will bless us if we not only think about God’s Law, but delight in it!  This was immediately contrasted in my mind with a verse I had meditated deeply on in December during a time of severe affliction:

Though grace is shown to the wicked,
  they do not learn righteousness;
  even in a land of uprightness they go on doing evil
  and regard not the majesty of the LORD.
(Isaiah 26:10)

People being shown grace, but continuing to live in unrighteousness. That scenario is, tragically, very familiar, because we see so many people entering the abortion chamber to have innocent children killed while they tell us, “God is a loving God and He will forgive me.”

While I meditated on the importance of delighting in God’s Law, I was waiting to meet with a pastor who had brought a young woman to the abortion chamber that week.  When I finally had the opportunity to meet with Him, he reacted angrily to anything which even hinted at God’s Law, shouting, “don’t you go to the Law, brother!  We’re under Grace!”  He even went on to say that the first four books of the New Testament do not apply today (since the events which were recorded happened before the cross, considered to be the transition point between Law and Grace)!  “Most people don’t realize that Jesus taught under the Law, so His teachings as recorded in the Gospels are part of the Law, not part of Grace,” the pastor told me.

Not wanting to get into a debate with him, I didn’t argue the point.  But the following day as I told my wife Terri about this, I thought of what Jesus commanded in the “Great Commission” (Matthew 28:18-20):

“…go and make disciples of all nations… teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

By making this command after the cross, Jesus built a bridge from Grace back to Law, reminding His followers that everything He taught before the cross not only still applies, He wants us to teach these commands to others (even in the midst of the age of Grace)!

Delighting in the Law is not just an Old Testament teaching.  For example, consider James 1:22-25:

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.  Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.  But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does.

Living the Spirit-filled life is supposed to mean not that we ignore God’s Law, but on the contrary, God’s Law is supposed to be written on our hearts (Jeremiah 31:33, Romans 2:15).  Though many erroneously think the Apostle Paul’s writings are at odds with James regarding the Law, Paul said that he delights in God’s Law in his inner being (Romans 7:22).  And Paul dauntlessly denounced those who intentionally sin while saying “God will forgive me” (Romans 6:1-2).

We are not saved so that we can break God’s Law without fear.  On the contrary, although we are saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8), not by works (Ephesians 2:9), we saved in order to do the good works God has planned for us (Ephesians 2:10).  The purpose of grace is to enable us to do good, not to do evil!

If we want to understand whether our plans fit in with the “good” God has planned for us, we should compare them with God’s Law, because God’s Law is good, not bad (Romans 7:12).  His statutes are not temporary, but they last forever (Psalm 119:152), even in this age of Grace.

If we, like the pastor I met with, recoil at any mention of God’s good Law, maybe our consciences are bearing witness against us.

The function of the Law during this age of Grace is to be our tutor, to lead us to Christ (Galatians 3:24).  Rather than recoiling at any mention of the Law, if we are truly in Christ we will listen carefully to His Law and consider how we have failed to measure up to His standards, honestly confessing our faults and asking Him for the strength to try again.  This is what it means to “walk in the light” (1 John 1:5-10), as I shared with the pastor that day.

And, by the way, God disagrees with the “pink elephant” theory.  He proved this when He phrased most of the Ten Commandments in the negative (“thou shalt not…”).  They could have been phrased in positive language (such as “thou shalt tell the truth” instead of “thou shalt not lie”), but laws are by nature boundaries, and the boundary is sometimes more clear if it is phrased in the negative.

In our ministry activities, we generally try to use positive language, saying things such as “God loves you and has a special plan for your life and God loves your baby and has a special plan for your baby’s life.”

But sometimes we have seen God use negative phrasing more effectively.  For example, on the same day that the pastor I met with had brought a woman to the abortion chamber, another woman entered the abortion chamber who happened to belong to the same type of sect as this pastor.

As she walked across the balcony to enter the waiting room, our friend Irene stood on the sidewalk below, calling out to the women in Spanish.  Following her usual practice, Irene was saying something along the lines of “abortion is killing, it’s breaking the fifth commandment, ‘thou shalt not kill’.”

As she opened the door to the killing center, the young woman who was about to have her baby killed realized that she was crossing a boundary, violating a law which her God planned for her to follow.  In that moment, her eyes were opened to see the sin she was about to commit, and her heart was changed.  Her baby now lives, because Irene was not afraid to speak God’s Law to her.

Listening to God’s Law resulted in life for a baby.  Refusing to consider God’s Law resulted in death for another baby.  Both babies were part of a church family.  This stands as a lesson for all of us to consider.

“You warned them to return to your law, but they became arrogant and disobeyed your commands. They sinned against your ordinances, by which a man will live if he obeys them. Stubbornly they turned their backs on you, became stiff-necked and refused to listen.”
– Nehemiah 9:29