Pastor Fredo Ramos: Psalm 101, a Psalm of David. I will sing of your love and justice, Lord. I will praise you with songs. I will be careful to live a blameless life. When will you come to help me?
I will lead a life of integrity in my own home. I will refuse to look at anything vile and vulgar. I hate all who deal crookedly, and I will have nothing to do with them. I will reject perverse ideas and stay away from every evil. I will not tolerate people who slander their neighbors.
I will not endure conceit and pride. I will search for faithful people to be my companions. Only those who are above reproach will be allowed to serve me. I will not allow deceivers to serve in my house and liars will not stay in my presence. My daily task will be to ferret out the wicked and free the city of the Lord from their grip.
Psalm one zero one by way of reflection is a Psalm of David in which he's speaking really from the place of his royal position as king. And in a sense taking this vow of integrity, a a vow of blamelessness, saying that today in his house, in his kingdom, in the city of David, and really this place, that God dwells in, it will be a pure land. Now it's one way to read this Psalm and think, wow, David sounds a bit like a Pharisee, but it's another thing to understand his position as king was one to real, I'm sorry, rule with justice and to, exercise his authority in a way that dealt with wickedness. And so in this prayer, David is making this vow. He will live with, a blameless kind of approach today.
And I think for us, it's easy to look out in the midst of our days and think about our own structures, our own societies, our own, governments, and imagine this ideal from Psalm one zero one and the mess of what we see today. And to fill in our own souls this significant gap between the ideal of what we would want to see and what we actually see and experience on everyday basis. Zoom a little closer, don't think about your own life. Because by way of reflection, I want us to just pray into our own lives today. Psalm, one zero one verse two.
I will be careful to live a blameless life and I will lead a life of integrity in my own home. You see this life of alignment, this life of blamelessness is not one that we just hope to see out there, but one that we actually hope to embody in here, in our own lives and in our own home. Lord Jesus, we hear you now inviting us to respond with a similar vow. God, we feel in our hearts deeply that the world, its structures, our governments are not living up to the ideal that we would hope for. Not living up to the words that we see David saying he will ex exercise as king.
And God, even in our own lives, we confess ways that we live with this gap between what we say we do and what we actually do. And so now in a moment of prayer, we ask that your Holy Spirit would help us to make this vow of commitment to you, that we won't entertain evil. We won't, flirt with what is wrong and we will not put up with slandering of people who are near us. But we will live a life today of integrity So that your commands, your words become our words and that your actions, Jesus, become our actions today. So would you bless the work of our hands?
Would you bless the words of our mouth so that we might live with the integrity of Jesus today? We pray in his name. Amen.