View Cart

Psalm 119:105

The Light for a Darkened Path

In a dark and troubled world God speaks. He shares a word. He gives us the Bible.

Aug 30, 2016

I just moved with my family to Jacksonville to begin pastoral ministry for the very first time in Florida. Most of my ministry before now has been focused in Louisville, Kentucky where I pastored for 11 years, taught biblical counseling at Southern Seminary for ten years, and served as the executive director for a biblical counseling organization for the last four years (many of those terms of service were overlapping so I’m not as old as that list makes me sound!).

Whether I have served the Lord as a pastor, a professor, or an executive director the one consistent theme in my ministry has been helping troubled people. I learned my very first day in my very first ministry that people in our churches were more broken than I had previously understood, and my ministry since then has been focused on trying to help them and the larger church grow in wisdom to do ministry with them. Over the course of my ministry I have found that the very best resource in the universe for helping people who are hurting is the Bible. The Bible demonstrates its usefulness for ministering to broken people on every page, but let me show you the Bible’s richness by looking at just one passage, Psalm 119:105. The Psalmist declares in simple language, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

Do you see the fallen reality of a sinful world visible just underneath those words? The Psalmist exists in a dark world devoid of light. The Psalmist walked a road where every step was made dangerous and potentially fatal by darkness. Much has changed in the millennia between the Psalmist’s day and our own, but that darkness remains the same. We live in a dark and sinister world full of afflictions. Our sins, the sins of others, and the difficulties of life in a sinful world cluster around our feet threatening to make us stumble at every turn. We harbor bitterness and anger; we are abused by those closest to us; we grieve the death of loved ones; we are diagnosed with cancer and Parkinson’s Disease; we are enslaved to everything from alcohol to candy bars; we get overwhelmed by sorrow, trapped by anxiety, and hounded by difficulties from our past. This dark world is bustling with hazards to make us stumble and fall.

How are we to see our way along a dark path so full of difficulties? The answer to this question is where the bright hope of Psalm 119:105 shines through and illuminates all the dark trouble we confront. In a dark and troubled world God speaks. He shares a word. He gives us the Bible. It is this written Word, the Holy Bible, that lights up the darkness helping us to make sense of all the trouble in this fallen world.

Psalm 119 is a precious promise in a bitter world. It gives us hope when we are tempted to despair. And it beckons us to a specific action. Psalm 119 is a challenge to believers to study the Scriptures in the midst of this troubling world to find answers to the problems that confront us. That is what we will do in the pages of this column. We will examine the Scriptures to discover what they say about all the various problems we face. This is a journey we will take together, so send in your questions and concerns. I look forward to this journey as we look to Scripture to illumine our path as we live in this troubled world.


This column originally appeared in the print edition of the Florida Baptist Witness.