Psalms 1:2 - “Day And Night”

Psalms 1:2

“But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he mediates day and night”

A while back, I did a message on how many Christians have learned to use the clock in prayer, disciplining themselves to pray regularly throughout the day and night. It’s a great way to keep yourself in prayer. Meditating on scripture, however, is a little bit different.

Yesterday, I wrote about memorizing scripture. Memorization requires repetition and repetition has an amazing side benefit. Let me explain.

40 years ago, I challenged myself to memorize the book of James. That is a total of 108 verses. How do you tackle something like that? It’s like the old joke about “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is “One bite at a time.”

You have to take that first bite so I memorized James 1:1. That wasn’t hard. I recited the verse 5 or 6 times and got it done. Next, to memorize James 1:2, I had to start at the top again. After about a dozen tries I had the first two verses done together. I continued, verse after verse.

Then, suddenly, something fascinating happened that I didn’t see coming. As I worked my way through the first chapter, I found myself saying those first few verses over and over and over. I spoke those verses literally hundreds of times. One day, I got to verse 3 in my progression and stopped dead in my tracks.

All of a sudden, that verse made sense to me. I didn’t get it before but now I saw it in a whole new light. I suddenly understood what it was saying in a way that had completely escaped me before. A couple days later, it happened again with verse 5.

I found that the scripture was opening up to me right before my eyes. You see, when you meditate on something day and night, over and over, completely immersing yourself in it and committing yourself to it, God begins to show you more of Himself in His Word.

What an amazing discovery. The Bible began to come alive for me that day and I learned how to squeeze morsels of truth from its pages.  That’s what Psalms 1 is talking about.

People, hear me out. Don’t treat the Bible like it’s just another book. It’s not. It’s the Holy Word of God that is described as “living and active” “accomplishing what it was sent to do” and “performing its work in you who believe.”