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When I was early in my Christian walk, hungering for everything that would allow me to more fully embrace Jesus Christ, I heard a preacher say that one of the habits he lived by was to make certain that the last thing he read before he fell to sleep was the Bible, because he wanted the Word to be in his thoughts and dreams as he slept. That made sense to me and so for the last several years, I have made a habit of either playing a sermon (I favor Tony Evans, Chuck Swindoll, or Gardner Taylor) or an audio Bible (I really enjoy the Bible Experience or the audio bible narrated by Max McLean) as I drift off to sleep.
My love of stories and storytelling moves me to favor the narratives of the Old Testament, particularly those featuring Joshua, Samuel, Saul, David, and the prophets, but my wife prefers the Psalms. She says she doesn’t like all that violence before she sleeps and so, loving husband that I am, I comply. As is usual, the scripture had not gotten going good before I was fast asleep. I don’t know that I was conscious for more than a few words, let alone verses, but I did awaken in the middle of the night to words to this effect: “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes.” The words felt convicting and I woke up long enough to make a note of what psalm it was so that I could look at it later in the day.
It was the 101st Psalm, a psalm that is considered a royal psalm, for it is believed to have been written by a king. A king who is announcing to the world that he has determined to live his life actively engaged in the pursuit of a blameless life. He will do all that he can to keep himself from allowing evil to take up residence in his mind and in his heart. He pledges to live with integrity in his home, to ensure that those who serve him do not harbor or practice evil and that he will root out evil in the city of the Lord. This is striking to me, for though I am no king, his aspirations spoke to me and, in all truth, humbled me, because, if I am honest, I do not live with this kind of intentionality often enough. I wondered about the necessary level of faith needed to make this kind of public pronouncement.
I don’t think I am giving you new news when I say that the trajectory of our world and our current times, does not lend themselves to the easy pursuit of a blameless, godly, Christian lifestyle. Truth is, as rough as it may seem for us Christian folk, it wasn’t the fun times for the psalmist either, because the lifestyles of his neighbors included the worship of man-made gods, child sacrifices, and a violent antipathy towards Yahweh, and His followers.
No, walking the walk has never been easy, but this king, this brother, this fellow believer was enthusiastically embracing the walk, and we know this by looking at the very first verse of the psalm. He says, “I will sing of loving-kindness and justice, To You, O LORD, I will sing praises.” This is similar to a verse in an earlier psalm, Psalm 51 where the songwriter says: “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, the God of my salvation; Then my tongue will joyfully sing of Your righteousness.”
This king sings and pledges to live his life rightly because he remembers what it is that the Lord has done for him. He remembers who he was before the Lord and who he is now, and he is moved by the goodness, and the love of his Lord. He must sing; he must praise Him. Maybe, for those of us who may struggle with the concept of the pursuit of life along the straight and narrow across all aspects of our life, we have lost this sense, this intimacy of the experience of our salvation. We have forgotten the joy that we had when we first let Jesus into our hearts. The world, and all of its busyness and all of its nastiness and all of its conflict and struggle, need not take up residence within us. The king need not sing by himself. We, too, can sing of His loving-kindness, and His justice, for we remember what it is that he has done for us, what it is that he is doing for us and we can live our lives as He would have us live, in full embrace of His love.
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