Psalm 119:172 Rigtheousness

May my tongue sing of your word,
 for all your commands are righteous.

Psalm 119:172

A few things I've learned about God's righteous commands during my travels on the one road:


All of God's commands are righteous because they all reflect the righteous heart of God. When I learned to focus my study and prayer on knowing the heart of God, rather than on dissecting the commands, obedience and faithfulness became much easier.


Time spent in the Word led me to God's commands about righteousness and purity, like II Timothy 2:22

Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.

Moral purity has always been a struggle for me. Oh the joy of realizing I should stop obsessing about those evil desires. I've learned instead to pursue purity by pursuing a pure obsession with God's heart of righteousness, faith, love and peace.


I spent years trying to prove I possessed all the right opinions about all the right things. After I learned to stop taking so much pride in my opinions, I then got off track by becoming obsessed with demonstrating how I had reconsidered those opinions and now was in possession of a better brand of right opinions about the right things. Our obsession with being right is so difficult to shake.


I still remember the day I actually understood II Timothy 2:15 for the first time, after having considered it one of my favorite verses for years.

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth. (II Timothy 2:15)

It shocked me when I realized how stupid I've been, only paying attention to the last part of the verse. Correctly handling the Word of truth is extremely important, but that's not the point. The goal isn't to prove my correct understanding of the Word of truth. It's to step up and present myself as a willing worker, approved by the blood of Christ. Only through doing the work given to me by God will I begin to correctly handle the word of truth.


It's not about carefully accumulating the right opinions. It's about training to be a workman after God's own heart.


The more I've allowed myself to walk alongside people whose beliefs and experiences are different than mine, God has proven this statement to be true:

The fruit of that righteousness will be peace; its effect will be quietness and confidence forever. (Isaiah 32:17)

I used to looked at those others as people to either avoid, tolerate, or correct. The fruit of my self-righteousness was arguing. I saw my job as letting them know I'm part of the "in" crowd and they're not, an attitude that only leads to belligerence and arrogance.

But once I learned to trust God and His righteous commands, I learned to see my interactions with the others on the one road as opportunities to bring out the God-flavors and God-colors of life.