Wiser

Psalm 119:98. Thou through thy commandments hast made me wiser than mine enemies. 

The commands were his book, but God was his teacher. The letter can make us knowing, but only the divine Spirit can make us wise. Wisdom is knowledge put to practical use. Wisdom comes to us through obedience: "If any man will do his will he shall know of the doctrine." We learn not only from promise, and doctrine, and sacred history, but also from precept and command; in fact, from the commandments we gather the most practical wisdom and that which enables us best to cope with our adversaries. A holy life is the highest wisdom and the surest defence. Our enemies are renowned for subtlety, from the first father of them, the old serpent, down to the last cockatrice that has been hatched from the egg; and it would be vain for us to try to be a match with them in the craft and mystery of cunning, for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light. We must go to another school and learn of a different instructor, and then by uprightness we shall baffle fraud, by simple truth we shall vanquish deep laid scheming, and by open candour we shall defeat slander. A thoroughly straightforward man, devoid of all policy, is a terrible puzzle to diplomatists; they suspect him of a subtle duplicity through which they cannot see, while he, indifferent to their suspicions, holds on the even tenor of his way, and baffles all their arts. Yes, "honesty is the best policy." He who is taught of God has a practical wisdom such as malice cannot supply to the crafty; while harmless as a dove he also exhibits more than a serpent's wisdom.

 Charles Spurgeon, writing in The Treasury of David.

Laziness

I could almost say that I need two secretaries. I do hardly anything else all day long than write letters. I am monastery preacher; I am obliged to read at table; I am expected to preach daily in the parish church; I am head of the monastery school; I am vicar of the monastery Order which means a Prior eleven times over [because there were eleven cloisters in the district]; I am the officer responsible for the fish-pond; I act as substitute; I lecture on Paul and am studying the Psalms; and then all the correspondence which takes up the greater part of my time; I have scarcely any left for my private prayers, never to mention the special temptation of the flesh, the word, and the devil.  All this shows what sort of a lazy fellow I am. 

Martin Luther writing to a friend – quoted in D A Carson’s Love in Hard Places, pg 31/2

Warmed by the Word

Psalm 119: 93 I will never forget thy precepts: for with them thou hast quickened me.  
Leave not off reading the Bible till you find your hearts warmed. Read the word, not only as a history, but labour to be affected with it. Let it not only inform you, but inflame you. "Is not my word like a fire? saith the Lord" [Jeremiah 23:29]. Go not from the word till you can say as those disciples, "Did not our hearts burn within us?" [Luke 24:32]. — Thomas Watson

From the additional notes to Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David.  

Intellectual Christianity

There is a danger of thinking that we are obeying this first commandment if we live and work in the domain of Christian intellectual endeavour.  It is easy to understand how this comes about.  Anti-intellectualism still inhabits a wide swath of evangelicalism, and sometimes serious thought is mocked and dismissed by those who prefer sentiment and emotion. Both tendencies have called forth biting denunciations, and these certainly have their place. They have also called forth prophetic appeals to young Christians to devote themselves, for God’s sake and for God’s glory, to the life of the mind.

But we should not ignore a converse danger, the danger of intellectual arrogance. Biblical scholars, theologians, and other Christian academics are easily tempted to think that they are obeying this first command simply because they working the intellectual arena and happen to be Christians. After all, studying distinctively Christian themes can be all-absorbing, in precisely the way that studying almost anything can be all-absorbing, provided you have the right sort of temperament and education.  I know first-rate scholars who are absorbed in the study of the metal alloys in the blades of jet propulsion engines and others who devote themselves to the properties of recently discovered quarks with unbelievably short half-lives or to the finer points of Sahidic Coptic. The only difference between these scholars and theologians is that the latter may delude themselves into thinking that the effort they put into their disciplines demonstrates that they are fulfilling these words of Jesus, while those who study the sex life of sea turtles are unlikely to be similarly deluded.  We cannot ignore the brute fact that this first command of Jesus is not a command to think but a command to love, even if that command to love includes the modifiers, “with all your heart...with all your mind.”

D A Carson, discussing Mark 12:28-34 in his book, Love in Hard Places, pg 22. 

A pennyworth of oil

Unless thy law had been my delights, I should then have perished in mine affliction. Psalm 119: 92.

I happened to be standing in a grocer's shop one day in a large manufacturing town in the west of Scotland, when a poor, old, frail widow came in to make a few purchases. There never was, perhaps, in that town a more severe time of distress. Nearly every loom was stopped. Decent and respectable tradesmen, who had seen better days, were obliged to subsist on public charity. So much money per day (but a trifle at most) was allowed to the really poor and deserving. The poor widow had received her daily pittance, and she had now come into the shop of the grocer to lay it out to the best advantage. She had but a few coppers in her withered hands. Carefully did she expend her little stock— a pennyworth of this and the other necessary of life nearly exhausted all she had. She came to the last penny, and with a singular expression of heroic contentment and cheerful resignation on her wrinkled face, she said, "Now I must buy oil with this, that I may see to read my Bible during these long dark nights, for it is my only comfort now when every other comfort has gone away." — Alexander Wallace, in "The Bible and the Working Classes, " 1853.

Quoted in the additional notes to Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David.

Actions

We declare how we value God as much by our actions, by the way we treat other people, by the manner in which we do our work, as by anything we say. If my actions are wrong or wrongly motivated prayer cannot make them right. If however, despite my failures and inconsistencies, I do on the whole want to put God above all things then prayer will help to purify my motives and clarify my judgement.

Christopher Bryant, from The River Within