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

It is supposed that this psalm of David was composed more or less as a formal declaration of conduct from the King.  The king declares both how he himself will live, but also how he will enjoin his subjects to live within the city and land.  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.  All of this is modeled, of course, on the love and justice of the Lord, under whom the King serves—the 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!  But the psalm actually digs a bit deeper than that.  This isn’t about a list of wrongs or a rule of law and order by some legal or legalistic standard.  No: what the King is entrusted with is something more—a cultivation of his own character and the character of the people in his kingdom. 

The word “heart” shows up multiple times in this psalm.  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.  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.  This is reminiscent of Jesus’ words in Matthew that “out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person” (Mt. 15:19-20). 

The drum beat of “law and order” has grown louder these past years in the political arena.  Morality codes are also increasingly popular in the church too.  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.  But the faith of the bible always seeks to drive us deeper than that—to attend not just to the surface infractions against an abstract legal code, but to drive down to the matters of the heart—and firstly our own, as it is here with the king.  This is where character and maturity are cultivated.  It goes beyond the law and rests instead on the heart. 

Does that make the law unimportant?  No, but it is also not sufficient.  Reading through this list of wrongs in Psalm 101, I’m convicted that I fall short of the legal code.  I too am in danger of being cut off from the land.  According to the law: we’re all toast.  Thanks be to God it’s 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.  We all need God to “come to us” in order to live this psalm—thanks 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.  Which was the point of the King offering his own example to the people in this psalm.  Queen Elizabeth might be a good example of such a ruler today.  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’s leaders and rulers who had gathered for it.  He said: “people of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer. But in all cases those who serve will be loved and remembered when those who cling to power and privileges are long forgotten.”  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—ultimately after the pattern of our Lord who did not come to be served, but to serve and to offer his life sacrificially for many.