The Light

          I was in the sixth grade when I received my first New Testament. The Gideons came to our school and passed them out to all of the students. I don't even recall anyone refusing to take one. It was sometime later that I got my first copy of the whole Bible. It was a black zippered Bible with a mustard seed enclosed in a plastic ball on the end of the zipper. I had it, but can't say that I read more than a couple of random verses in all the time I owned it. I have always noticed that Bibles are available in many places and at reasonable prices. You can even get one in the “dollar tree” for a buck. There are several groups in the world that promote translating the Scriptures into languages that have not seen or ever heard of the Word of God. Psalm 119:105 says, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” 

         If you are reading this, then you probably have read some of the Bible yourself but there are thousands of people who have not read even one word of it. I know of one young man whose first encounter with anything Christian was the movie, “The Robe.” The young man was Jewish and no one wanted to speak to him about Christ. The Bible is readily available in the United States as there are groups such as the Gideons and Pocket Testament League that distribute Bibles everywhere they can do it. At the same time, there are those people whose desire is to extinguish the Word of God and make it illegal to own and even try to physically destroy as many copies as they can. For over seventy years, the Bible was illegal in the USSR. Now, many of the people are hungry for a copy of the Word of God. I have mentioned Psalm 119 many times before and how its 176 verses speak about the Word of God in one way or another with the exception of five verses. In today's passage, the Word of God is compared to a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. Most of us know how it feels to be stumbling around in the dark and that we wish we had a light at that time in order for us to see where we were going. Total darkness is frightening and I only experienced it once in my life while on the deck of a Navy destroyer with running lights off and a cloud covered sky. It was so frightening at that time, I never took my hand off of the handle of the hatch that would lead me back to the light of the interior of the ship. Without the Word of God, we would all be stumbling about with no direction, every person going their own way and probably bumping into each other in the process. The Word of God explains the condition of sin in the world and the remedy for that sin. The word of God shows us the standards by which we should live this life and to be prepared for the next. The Word of God lights our path to show us how to live the victorious Christian life each and every day. While men have tried to do away with the Bible, it has still existed mainly because God has preserved it, in tact, through all of time from Genesis to Revelation. How much of God's Word have you read this week? May we be like the Psalmist who wrote Psalm 119 and love the Word of God more than anything else. Praise God today for His Word.