Next, spend time in the Word. “The Bible will keep you from sin, or sinwill keep you from the Bible.”

“The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul;
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;
The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;
The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes;
The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever;
The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
Yea, than much fine gold;
Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

Moreover by them Your servant is warned,
And in keeping them there is great reward. 

“Who can understand his errors?
Cleanse me from secret faults.
Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins;
Let them not have dominion over me.
Then I shall be blameless,
And I shall be innocent of great transgression. 

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditationof my heart
Be acceptable in Your sight,
O Lord, mystrength and my Redeemer” (Psalm 19:7-14 NKJV).

The law of the Lord is perfect, and itconverts the soul. God’s revelation revives, awakens, and changes men. His Word makes us wise, it rejoices, it enlightens, it endures.

When you read the Word,do you have a sense that you are immersed in something that is perfect, right,sure, clean, and righteous altogether? Are you enraptured by it? The Psalmist was.“More to be desired are theythan gold, yea, than much fine gold” (v. 10). Hedesired God’s Word for wealth—perfect wealth, fine gold. “Sweeter also thanhoney and the honeycomb” (v. 10). He desired it for taste—a pleasure he genuinelyenjoyed.

Do you desire the Wordof God like you desire wealth? Do you desire it like you desire honey? Does ittaste sweet to you? We should have a great desire for the Word of God.

There have been timesin my life when I would read the Word, and it seemed rather dead—and othertimes when I just couldn’t get enough of it in quantity or in quality. I wouldbe so wrapped up in it that I wouldn’t know whether to go on to the next passageor go back and repeat. I wanted more, and I also didn’t want to lose what I’djust gotten, because it was so precious, so sweet, so wonderful. It reallyrevives the soul, it really makes wise the simple, it really rejoices theheart, it really enlightens the eyes.

What else does God’srevelation do? “Moreover by them Your servant is warned” (v. 11). It warns us. “And in keeping them thereis great reward” (v. 11). When we obey these testimonies from God, thereis great reward.

“Who can understand his errors? Cleanseme from secret faults” (v. 12). Formost of my life, I assumed that “secret faults” were sins that I wasn’t awareof, and that we are to use this as a prayer of general confession after we haveconfessed the sins we know. Then I was spending time in The Treasury ofDavid (Spurgeon’s commentary on the Psalms), and I found that very fewpeople thought that. They said it meant, “Keep me from hiding my sins,” the wayDavid tried to hide his. Of course, there is no sense in trying to hide thesins we do openly—everyone knows about them already. Certain sins we doprivately: things we think, things we say. Those are harder to confess—just thefact that we hid them in the first place means we don’t want to acknowledgethem, because that would require bringing them out into the open before God.The Psalmist asks God to expose the things he is hiding. That had happened tohim. When David thought he had hidden his sin of adultery and murder, it tookthe prophet Nathan to tell him a parable and bring it out into the open.

Hiding sin is deadly. We might think nobody knows about it, andnobody’s going to know. We end up deceiving ourselves. There was a poem writtenin the 1800s about a man who murdered someone and buried him in a deep, darkstream. He went back the next day and found that the stream bed had gone dry,and there lay the corpse out in the open. He covered the corpse with leaves,and the wind blew them away. He realized that even if he buried the body 10,000fathoms deep, he wasn’t going to get away with the murder.   

Down went the corse with hollow plunge   

  Andvanish’d in the pool;  

Anon I cleans’d my bloody hands,  

  Andwash’d my forehead cool,

And sat among the urchins young,  

  Thatevening in the school…

 

Heavily I rose up, as soon   

  Aslight was in the sky,     

And sought the black accursed pool

  Witha wild misgiving eye:           

And I saw the Dead in the river bed,           

  Forthe faithless stream was dry…

 

With breathless speed, like a soul in chase,

  Itook him up and ran;       

There was no time to dig a grave    

 Before the day began:       

In a lonesome wood, with heaps of leaves, 

  Ihid the murder’d man.

 

And all that day I read in school,    

  Butmy thought was other where; 

As soon as the mid-day task was done,       

  Insecret I was there;         

And a mighty wind had swept the leaves,           

  Andstill the corse was bare!         

         

Then down I cast me on my face,   

  Andfirst began to weep,   

For I knew my secret then was one 

  Thatearth refus’d to keep:

Or land or sea, though he should be

  Tenthousand fathoms deep.          

         

So wills the fierce avenging Sprite,

  Tillblood for blood atones!          

Aye, though he ’s buried in a cave,         

  Andtrodden down with stones,     

And years have rotted off his flesh,—        

  Theworld shall see his bones.   

Lord, cleanse Thou me from the things I am hiding.

“Who can understand his errors?” (v. 12). We may not understand our ownsin because of our remarkable ability to self-deceive. The Word of God revealsour errors.

“Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins” (v. 13). Apresumptuous sin is something that you have not deceived yourself about.You knew it was wrong, but you had the audacity to do it anyway. By man’svaluation, it may not be a very big sin, but it is deliberate—for instance, awhite lie. We dare to lie, and God tells us that He has prepared a lake of firefor all liars. We dare to lie, and the Word says God hates liars. We don’t hidepresumptuous sins; we pull them off because everyone else is doing them, too.David asks God to keep him away from such sin.

“Let them not have dominion over me” (v. 13). I do it, I know it iswrong, and I do it again, and again, and again. Pretty soon, this sin has me ina vice. It has power over me, and I cannot keep from doing it. It may be an“acceptable” sin because everyone else is presuming it, too. But unless I amkept back from it, I end up as its slave. Let them not have dominion over me.

“ThenI shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of great transgression” (v. 13).I counsel many people who have committed great transgressions. They confess thesin, and God forgives them—and they turn right around and do it again. Theyconfess it again, and they do it again. One man came to me for help with this.He would commit the sin, confess it, be forgiven, and immediately he would beright back in temptation. He would fall over the cliff again, confess, and findhimself tottering on the edge once more. He asked me, “Why do I keep doing thiswhen I have confessed it each time?”

Ifhe would take care of his other sins, he would be far away from the edge. Thereason people keep doing big sins over and over is that they have not beendelivered from the presumptuous sins and the secret sins that led up to them.The man who keeps falling is confessing his great sins, but he isn’t confessinghis little ones.

Whenpeople file for divorce, generally the situation is so bad and they hate eachother so much that it seems like there is no way to correct it. They did notanticipate this when they got married. If they had been kept from secret sinsand presumptuous sins, the divorce would never have happened.

Theway to stay away from big sins is to stay away from little ones. Don’t put upwith any sin in yourself. Keep your little sins confessed so that theycannot get dominion over you. I don’t have to worry about ever committing agreat transgression if I am kept from minor ones. If I am constantly confessingthe secret sins and the presumptuous sins, the devil can’t get close to me on abig one. He won’t even try.

Peoplehave often asked me why I never have any big sin problems and why my familyisn’t messed up like many other families. Simple. We take care of the secret sinsand the presumptuous ones. It’s not that we’re favored. We aren’t. The devilsimply knows that he can’t trip us up with great temptations, so he works on uswith little ones (or he keeps trying to, anyway). He knows he cannot get usinto the 8th grade in sin until we pass the 1st grade. Aslong as I keep flunking the devil’s 1st grade, I get held back, andI don’t make it to his advanced courses. Make sure you are flunking the devil’s1st grade.

(To be continued November 3...)

D.L. Moody

The Dream of Eugene Aram. Hood,Thomas. 1895. Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908).  AVictorian Anthology, 1837–1895.

How To Be Free From Bitterness and other essays on Christian relationships