A Mixed Message
Tuesday (October 14)
A Mixed Message
Psalm 17:1-2
Hear a just cause, O LORD; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit! From your presence let my vindication come! Let your eyes behold the right!
Allow me to suggest both an encouragement and a warning from this Psalm today, friend, because I find both to be equally significant regarding the spiritual posture we should assume before the LORD in prayer.
As to the encouragement, notice again how transparent and vulnerable David remains in his pleading. Simply put, David is authentic. He’s got the heart of a lion in his armor-clad chest, but there’s a lamb in there, too. You can hear the helpless, lamblike bleating in his praying as distinctly as you can hear his lionlike roaring. And he doesn’t care if his zeal makes him appear a little weak or a little too sensitive or a little too undignified. Because communion with God isn’t formal. It’s personal. Even if David isn’t quite in the right in relation to God here, even if he isn’t as just or deceit-free before the perfect Holy One as he thinks, he knows that if there is some hidden, unseen motive lurking under all the self-justification, that God will confront him for it. After all, sanctification is God’s work—not ours. What we bring to the table is our earnest desire and earnest praise, without any pretense, without the fruit of Cain intermixed with lambs of Abel, and we let God evaluate the offering from there.
As to the warning, my dad often said to me growing up, “Seth, past victories don’t guarantee present victories,” and it makes me shudder a little to think that it’s possible for a man like David who is so near to God and so desirous of fellowship and so zealous in purity to loosen his grip down the line. What a challenge for us to continue to remain in an earnest place of seeking the LORD and coming before Him with clean hands and a pure heart. Lest we allow little lustful glances and prideful thoughts and unrepented indulgences to pull us away from authentic communion, compromise by comprise, and one day find ourselves full of deceit and full of adulteries and far from the fellowship that filled our prayer journals in former days.
So, let’s be authentic before the LORD today. But even more than that, let’s be holy.