BROADCASTS.com

I will sing of your love and justice; to you, Lord, I will sing praise. I will be careful to lead a blameless life\u2014when will you come to me?\xa0 I will conduct the affairs of my house with a blameless heart. \u2026 The perverse of heart shall be far from me; I will have nothing to do with what is evil. (Psalm 101:1-2,4)

\xa0

It is supposed that this psalm of David was composed more or less as a formal declaration of conduct from the King.\xa0 The king declares both how he himself will live, but also how he will enjoin his subjects to live within the city and land.\xa0 The psalm spells out what is meant by a blameless heart and conduct, as well as what is meant by perverseness of heart and its conduct.\xa0 All of this is modeled, of course, on the love and justice of the Lord, under whom the King serves\u2014the Lord who many of the previous psalms have acknowledged loudly and repeatedly is the real ruler of the land.

It's easy on a first read through this psalm to think that it just ticks off a bunch of boxes of behavior: those who secretly slander, who are arrogant, or deceitful will be cut off from the land by the king!\xa0 But the psalm actually digs a bit deeper than that.\xa0 This isn\u2019t about a list of wrongs or a rule of law and order by some legal or legalistic standard.\xa0 No: what the King is entrusted with is something more\u2014a cultivation of his own character and the character of the people in his kingdom.\xa0

The word \u201cheart\u201d shows up multiple times in this psalm.\xa0 The king promises to conduct himself not by means of checking all the right boxes of all the right deeds, but by the cultivation of character and practice that arises from a blameless heart.\xa0 Similarly, what the king promises to root out of himself, his house, and his land is not merely a specific brand of law-breaker, but instead that which arises from a perverse heart.\xa0 This is reminiscent of Jesus\u2019 words in Matthew that \u201cout of the heart come evil thoughts\u2014murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person\u201d (Mt. 15:19-20).\xa0

The drum beat of \u201claw and order\u201d has grown louder these past years in the political arena.\xa0 Morality codes are also increasingly popular in the church too.\xa0 These trends can lead very quickly to a harsh, black-and-white, loveless orthodoxy with many dangers for leaders and majorities to control, coerce, and erode the space for real, fallen, foibled human people to live.\xa0 But the faith of the bible always seeks to drive us deeper than that\u2014to attend not just to the surface infractions against an abstract legal code, but to drive down to the matters of the heart\u2014and firstly our own, as it is here with the king.\xa0 This is where character and maturity are cultivated.\xa0 It goes beyond the law and rests instead on the heart.\xa0

Does that make the law unimportant?\xa0 No, but it is also not sufficient.\xa0 Reading through this list of wrongs in Psalm 101, I\u2019m convicted that I fall short of the legal code.\xa0 I too am in danger of being cut off from the land.\xa0 According to the law: we\u2019re all toast.\xa0 Thanks be to God it\u2019s about more than that then: the slow growing to maturity by the grace, mercy, and lovingkindness of God that transforms our hearts more and more to walk in his blameless ways.\xa0 We all need God to \u201ccome to us\u201d in order to live this psalm\u2014thanks be to God that in Jesus Christ, he has!

But we also need other, embodied examples in our lives to see what this can look like, lived.\xa0 Which was the point of the King offering his own example to the people in this psalm.\xa0 Queen Elizabeth might be a good example of such a ruler today.\xa0 No human example is perfect of course, but it is striking what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby said of her in his funeral message before hundreds of the world\u2019s leaders and rulers who had gathered for it.\xa0 He said: \u201cpeople of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer.\xa0But in all cases those who serve will be loved and remembered when those who cling to power\xa0and privileges are long forgotten.\u201d\xa0 That is just the sort of challenge to live with deeper integrity and character of heart that a good leader ought to give.

As we seek to walk a blameless life, we are called to follow and align our hearts in just such a humble, self-giving way\u2014ultimately after the pattern of our Lord who did not come to be served, but to serve and to offer his life sacrificially for many.

\xa0