Hot Poker

Okay, we aren’t talking about a game of cards, gang.  [I bet I just lost half my audience!]

We’re talking about fireplace pokers, and how you turn a cold one into a hot one. So how do you? You start messing around in the fire with it. You put it next to burning logs. The hotter they burn, the hotter the poker gets.

Now, wasn’t that just an amazing piece of wisdom? Worth every penny you paid for it, wasn’t it? Step right up, folks, there’s plenty more where that came from!

Cynical self-deprecation aside, there is a point to this: hang around people with a passion for something, and it’s catching. This is what mentoring is all about: hanging around people who love Jesus more than you do, in the hopes that it will rub off. Just like the fire makes a cold poker hot.

So, if we take this hot poker motif just a little further we can ask this question: if my love for the Word of God is growing cold, how can I reverse the decline? How can I renew and refresh my love for God’s Word?

You might start by hanging around people who really love the Word. May I recommend someone in particular? Try the writer of Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is a paean, a song of praise for the Word of God. You want to love the Word more? Hang around Psalm 119.

According to Derek Kidner [Kidner, Psalms 73-150, 453-454], the psalmist uses 8 primary expressions in Psalm 119 to refer to the Scripture:

• Law
• Testimonies
• Precepts
• Statutes
• Commandments
• Ordinances (also translated ‘judgments’)
• Word
• Promise (sometimes translated ‘word’)

Less common but also used: ways, name (loving God’s name here is equivalent to loving what He has said), and faithfulness (in verse 90 faithfulness stands in a place in the colon that matches it with ‘word’ in its parallel colon in verse 89).

One or more of these expressions occur in 173 of the 176 verses of Psalm 119. Here’s my favorite sample: Psalm 119:97 (NASB) O how I love Thy law! It is my meditation all the day.

Psalm 119 is a highly structured poem, being written in 22 eight-verse sections. It is an acrostic, meaning that the first word in each verse (in Hebrew) in each section begins with consecutive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In other words, verses 1-8 all begin with aleph, verses 9-16 all begin with beth, 17-24 with gimel, and so on. Some have said that it expresses the psalmist's love for Scripture from A to Z.

C. S. Lewis correctly identifies the passion behind such complex and beautiful verbal choreography:

“This poem is not, and does not pretend to be a sudden outpouring of the heart like, say, Psalm 18. It is a pattern, a thing done like embroidery, stitch by stitch, through long quiet hours, for love of the subject and for the delight in leisurely, disciplined craftsmanship” [Lewis, cited by C. Hassell Bullock, Encountering the Book of Psalms, 221].

In other words, the psalmist’s love for God’s Word is not only reflected in the propositional content of the words, but also in the beautifully crafted poetic structure of the psalm.

Here's a 46-day summer project for you. Get yourself a notebook, or journal on your computer, thusly:

• Day 1: read the entire psalm.
• Days 2-23: read an eight-verse section
  • write down what the psalmist says about God’s Word. Expand a little in your own words.
• Day 24: read the entire psalm.
• Days 25-46: read an eight-verse section
  • write down what the psalmist says about himself regarding his own commitments or responses to God's Word. Pick out a response in each section that you need in your life, and ask God to develop that response in you.

 Want to refresh your love for the Word of God? Hang around Psalm 119. It’s really hot!