The Word of God is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path (Ps. 119:105). Today, R.C. Sproul tells a story illustrating our need for the guidance and direction of Scripture as we walk through a dark world.
“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Ps. 105:5).
You don’t remember DiStefano's Drugstore or Harold’s Market or Backey's Hardware. Those were little shops that made up the village square of the town where I grew up. This little group of stores sat on the main thoroughfare that split the city, but there was a back road behind these stores called McClellan Drive. It was the street where I grew up. And it was always my job to run to the store—this was before supermarkets—to get the loaf of bread, to pick up the order that my mother had called in, or to go up at night to the drugstore and get the prescriptions for the family.
I used to love to go to the drugstore at night, go to the soda counter, but it was never without fear and trepidation after the sun had gone down. Because to get from my house to the store, I had to go through the orchard, Green’s Orchard, one of the scariest places in western Pennsylvania. There was a little path, just a very narrow path through the orchard. There were all these trees, but at the end of the orchard, blocked entrance to the drugstore, the back of the drugstore and the hardware store, was the largest oak tree in America. And it was fine during the summer when its fearsome character was blunted by the foliage. But in the dead of winter, when its branches stuck out into the starry night like huge gargantuan arms that would come down and grab any little kid that ran through that woods, how I was terrified to go to the store after dark.
I did it a thousand times, but every time I approached that orchard, it was like going to a graveyard. And what I wanted was a full moon, a flashlight, a lamp unto my feet, a light for my path. The tree never hurt me, and it never grabbed me, but I’ve seen a million more just like it in this world. And I still need a lamp, and I still need a light. “Oh, oh, how I love thy law.”
