From
Psalm 15:1
H,
It
is the question of questions: how do we get on God’s good side? I think I have
put that badly. I do not mean to make it sound like we can manipulate our way
into His favours. That will be silly since we believe Him to be omniscient. He would
know we were faking it. The question should be: How do we please Him? What can
we do to live in right standing with Him?
This
question has haunted me all my life. I had a strong sense of theism before I even
had any idea of the riches of Christ and the depth of that call to Him. And,
well, once you know all the rules it is often the case that you start breaking
them. There are snakes in you that the light you choose has begun to show you. Things
you know will not please Him. So, what does please Him? We often think we know.
We try to keep the straight and narrow and our heads up and our hearts right. We
struggle to share grace and be polite and to not condemn so we are not condemned.
We know the dance and we do it well but is there something missing in our
steps?
When
we read through the 15th Psalm of that 6th chapter in
Micah and align those heavy thoughts with the gospels and what Christ said and
what the apostles explained in their letters we get a picture that it has a lot
to do with how we act. It seems to say that salvation is all well and good but
it has to change us. It has to produce new fruit and a new character. This might
lead us back to the error of thinking that this is a high stakes morality play
and we should all get in shape or ship out. This reduces grace and truth and
love and hope and faith to a behavior control experiment and us to tame rabbits
without passion, docile and obedient but lacking the full heft of personality.
I think
it all ties into that sermon we heard years ago. It is a radical way of looking
at the word but the preacher sums it up as: all these things tell us how far we
are from the full stature of Christ and through failure we learn our only hope
is constant dependence on God. Daily, daily we fall and we are never complete. Daily,
daily we are carried up in Omnipotent arms and made complete. Till kingdom come
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