“Your statutes are my delight; they are my counselors.”
“This has been my practice: I obey your precepts.”
A statute is a law passed by a legislative body, while a precept is a general rule intended to regulate behavior or thought. If you were born in this country, you are used to following the statutes and precepts of our culture. Traffic laws, banking laws, ID laws, etc., the list goes on and on. All of these statutes and precepts we live under control our lives every day. They are intended to help people get where they are going safer and faster while keeping bad people punished.
A quick example is a picture of a small town back in the early 1900s, where everyone is driving on the streets, and it is clear that no traffic laws were guiding any drivers. The cars are all over the place, and it looks like chaos on the streets. Without these statutes and precepts, much of what we call life would bend quickly toward chaos and lawlessness.
God wants us to follow His statutes and precepts for the same reasons. These guiding principles are not like traffic laws; they aim at a much higher and spiritual place. Choose not to follow the laws handed to us by the Lord, and things will begin to unravel, as they say. You may not see it at first, but after a while, your spiritual road that defines your life becomes congested, and wrecks become commonplace. Relationships are compromised, habits are unchecked, and disregard for others and their property starts to become a regular pattern.
You do not get broken overnight; it is a slow fade. Your life will not crumble in a day, but it will surely move in that direction, and one day you will wake up, and the Lord will reveal the mess you are in. Like a frog boiling in a pot, your life is getting cooked, and you do not even know it. David noticed all of this, and in verse 24, he states that he lets the Lord’s statutes, the Bible, be his counselor. In verse 56, he says it has become his practice to obey the Lord’s precepts.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Get in the Bible and spend time reading and getting to know the precepts and statutes of the Lord. If you want to know Jesus, read John. If you want to know what walking out life as a follower of Christ looks like, read Acts. What is your counselor? What do you practice? Whose precepts do you follow? The answer you are looking for is Christ, and He is waiting for you to stop looking for things to replace Him and start getting to know Him.
Prayer:
Jesus, I pray that we would spend real time getting to know You and Your ways. I pray that we would not only read Your Word, but that we would follow it, learn from it, and walk it out in our lives by faith. I pray that we would walk by faith and not by sight. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Let It Go 
Leave a comment