The television show The Amazing Race tells the stories of several teams as they race around the world for a one-million-dollar prize. The pressures of the race reveal the character of the participants. Some lie or cheat while others show integrity.
Years ago, a couple named Uchenna and his wife, Joyce were contestants in the final leg of the race. Almost being eliminated the day before because they were the last team to arrive at a pit stop, they had to forfeit all their possessions and money. They threw themselves at the mercy of strangers asking for money or rides in order to complete the tasks for the final leg of the race. They managed to hire a cab, but while they were on the way, the fare exceeded the amount of money they had collected. Uchenna warned the cab driver that they didn’t have enough money to cover the fare if they went any further but promised he would make up the difference and take care of the cab driver once they arrived. The driver agreed, and Uchenna and Joyce arrived first just yards from the finish line. All that was needed to win one million dollars was to enter a gate and cross the line. They handed the cabbie all the money they had and even offered him Uchenna’s wedding ring, hoping it would be enough, but the driver refused, saying, ‘I don’t need rings. I need money.’
Uchenna and Joyce hopped out of the cab, staring at the gate knowing the prize was theirs if only they would walk through it. But Uchenna had made a promise, and his integrity with this stranger was more important than winning. His wife suggested they run through the gate, collect the prize, and then come back and pay the driver, but he said, ‘No. I’ve got to take care of this man.’
They again relied on the kindness of strangers and then thanked the people that gave them anything. Others said, ‘Begging isn’t the way to go’. They said, ‘I understand. Thank you anyway.’ Meanwhile, Rob and Amber, <SPAN class=citation>“Survivor”</SPAN> winners notorious for underhanded game playing, were getting so close that they could see Uchenna and Joyce just outside the gate. It looked as though after all they’d been though, Uchenna and Joyce would lose because they had too much integrity to break a promise. Finally, someone gave them the last $10, and the cab driver told them, ‘Enough! You’re free to go.’
Uchenna and Joyce made a run through the gate. They not only won first prize, but they did so with integrity. Integrity’s reward does not often result in a cash prize. The real rewards are in purity of character, a clean conscience before God, right relationships, and the untainted joy of doing the right thing.[i]
Living a life of integrity, or as the Scripture describes it as walking blamelessly, means we can live free from true accusations and regrets. There are a number of texts in the Scriptures that talk about the blameless life that challenges and guides us as to how we can live it. The blameless life is the exceptional life, where God can work mightily through our lives.
But what does it mean to be blameless? It means to live without fault; it speaks of innocent behavior. Another way to describe a blameless life is a person who lives with moral ethics. It is reflected in their good behavior. We are speaking of someone with moral integrity. A blameless person is the one who takes the high road. It doesn’t mean that blameless people never sin. But what it means is that sin is not the essence of their lives. A self-centered, sin-filled life is not what the blameless person is about. They are living to please an audience of One: God.
We are going to explore the first sixteen verses of the longest chapter in the Bible. Psalm 119 gives us four keys to the blameless life. As we shall see, there is a vital connection between living a blameless life and God’s Word, the Bible.
THE FIRST KEY TO A BLAMELESS LIFE IS THE PERFORMANCE OF GOD’S WORD
A. Blameless people live a life in obedience to God’s Word.
Simply put, it means doing what God is saying. It means applying the truths of Scripture to our everyday living.
Blessed are they whose ways are blameless, who walk according to the law of the LORD.
[The blameless person is described as a doer of God’s word.]
Blessed are they who keep [another word for fulfil or do] his statutes
You have laid down precepts that are to be fully obeyed.[ii]
Our obedience to God’s word is really a reflection of what we think of Him. It is one way to honor God. Or, as John shows us, that our obedience is really an expression of our love toward God.
Jesus replied, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.’[iii]
John Newton the slave-trader who became a pastor utilized a powerful illustration of that honor and love demonstrated to God by angels.
If two angels were to receive at the same moment a commission from God, one to go down and rule earth’s greatest empire, the other to go and sweep the streets of the smallest village, it would be a matter of entire indifference to each which service fell to his lot, the post of ruler or the post of scavenger; for the joy of angels lies only in obedience to God’s will.[iv]
Listen to what the Psalmist writes and later the writer to the book of Hebrews quotes regarding the heart of Jesus and everyone who really loves God. “I delight to do Your will, O my God and Your law is within my heart (Psalm 40:8 NKJV).”
Obedience then is not drudgery but rather a delight or a desire, as the NIV translates it. This is not seeking approval, because we already are approved and accepted through Christ. Our obedience comes from our heart’s desire to please God.
B. How many know that obeying is easier said than done?
How many good intentions are simply that, good intentions? We hear sermons, or attend seminars, read books or hear someone’s testimony challenging us to do more with our lives, but intentions are not actions.
We need God’s help. Listen to the honesty of the psalmist. He appeals to God for help. We need God’s help to do what is right. The greatest thing that will help us obey God is to ask God for the empowerment, the ability, the strength and the passion to do it.
Oh, that my ways were steadfast in obeying your decrees!
Then I would not be put to shame when I consider all your commands.[v]
C. The result of doing what God reveals to us in His Word is that it brings purity and blamelessness into our lives.
Often in our youth, we not only bring great enthusiasm but also recklessness and poor decisions. How can a younger person who lacks understanding and experience be kept from making major mistakes that could be very destructive to their lives? The answer is given by the Psalmist as a love for God’s word.
How can a young person stay on the path of purity? By living according to your word.
I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.
They do no wrong but follow his ways.[vi]
We need to take God’s word into our hearts. We take God’s word as a map that will guide us through the journey of life, then we will not get lost. We can walk through life knowing where we are at and where we are going by daily referring to God’s map and God’s direction for our lives, found in His Word.
THE SECOND KEY TO A BLAMELESS LIFE IS THE PURSUIT OF GOD
When we put God first, and that can only be said when He truly is the One we are seeking, we will live differently. We make decisions with the kingdom of God as being the priority which affects our choices. “Blessed are they who keep his statutes and seek him with all their heart—(Psalm 119:2).” This is not just an external conformity to God’s word; it’s a heart changing desire to really know God. There will be a restlessness in our lives until we ultimately find our rest in God, Himself. That’s what Augustine, a Christian leader in the 4th Century, discovered and wrote in his book ‘Confessions.’
John Piper in this book ‘Desiring God’ shares how his whole thinking was transformed by understanding that we need to find our greatest happiness in God, Himself.
‘While reading Blaise Pascal, I realized the truth, that all men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they use, they all move toward this end.
Pascal later wrote that all the monetary [momentary] pleasures cannot fulfill the longing of our souls. But now it started to dawn that this persistent and undeniable yearning for happiness was not to be suppressed but was to be glutted on God.’
The final straw that helped Piper realize that seeking pleasure was okay, and that this pleasure was really only truly found in God, came as he clearly saw the nature of worship and praise. Piper points out, ‘Praising God, the highest calling of humanity and our eternal vocation, did not involve renunciation but rather the consummation of the joy I so desired. My old effort to achieve worship with no self-interest in it proved to be a contradiction in terms. Worship is basically adoration, and we adore only what delights us. There is no such thing as sad adoration or unhappy praise.’[vii]
The real pleasure or happiness that we seek is actually God, Himself. Jesus challenges us in the Sermon on the Mount to make God and His kingdom our first priority in life.
For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.[viii]
The apostle Paul understood this basic element of life and challenged the church at Colossae to make God the first priority in our lives. “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things (Colossians 3:2).”
This is what worship is all about. Our focus is on God and not upon ourselves. How often do we make worship about us and our preferences? We judge church services by how it impacts us. Worship is about God, not us. Roger Palms in his remarks about worship stated:
Worship is not just personal introspection, or we would worship our feelings. Worship is not even a warm glow, or we would worship that. We worship One outside ourselves. We concentrate on him, we praise him, we adore him, we hear his Word for he is announcing it to us. We listen in holy awe to the word of God, for it is a part of that “all” of Scripture which is given by the out breathing of God and is personally necessary for “my” correction and “my” instruction in righteousness.[ix]
A. The end result of obeying God’s word and pursuing God is that He becomes our joy!
We enjoy His Word, because we hear His voice speaking into our lives.
I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches.
I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word.[x]
How can we say we really love God and neglect what He wants to say to us?
B. Once again the Psalmist realizes the need for God’s help to have a heart that will really pursue God and not be distracted by the things of this life.
Psalm 119:10 – I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands.
The best way to keep from doing what is wrong is to do what is right.
THE THIRD KEY TO A BLAMELESS LIFE IS A PASSION FOR PRAYER
Love desires to share with the beloved. The art of communication is so critical. To share our thoughts and our fears without being judged or criticized but to be understood, and when necessary, corrected. To be accepted and supported is what makes a healthy loving relationship.
While marriage is the earthly picture of God’s love, one element we need to be reminded of in our time is the misunderstanding of this idea of love. Walter Kaiser Jr. points out regarding God’s love:
In the same way God’s way is the most generous in offering us pardon and acceptance while it still maintains a high and holy standard of his righteousness to which he calls us. Rather than giving up on and tending to condone our sins and failures to meet his high standards, he faithfully continues to love us without making excuses for our failures or deciding that he must lower the standard to meet us where we are. It is precisely in this tension of forgiving the most and condoning the least that we can understand the uniqueness of God’s love.[xi]
He doesn’t just put up with our sins; He loves us too much for that. He addresses them.
As I have already pointed out, each area of concern is then prayed about. It seems that nothing that we do can be done without God’s enabling grace and power to accomplish it. We need to pray. “I will obey your decrees; do not utterly forsake me (Psalm 119:8).”
Prayer not only addresses our perceived needs, but our deepest longings and most challenging moments. In his book ‘God Is Closer Than You Think’, John Ortberg tells the incredible testimony of his friend Kim.
When my friend Kim was a young girl, her dad pulled the car off the road one day to help a woman change a flat tire. While he was lying under her car, another vehicle accidentally swerved to the shoulder, and in the collision the car was shoved onto his chest. His right thumb was torn off at the joint, five of his ribs were broken, and his left lung was pierced and began filling with blood. His wife, who is barely five-feet-tall, placed her hands on the bumper of the car and prayed, In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and lifted the car off his chest so he could be dragged out. (Some weeks later she found out that she broke a vertebra in the effort).
Kim’s father was in a state of shock as he was taken to the hospital. Doctors prepared him for emergency surgery. His thumb won’t do him any good if he’s dead, one of them said. His survival was iffy.
Suddenly, spontaneously, the man’s skin changed from ashen to pink. He experienced a miraculous healing. He invited a surprised surgical team to join him in singing Fairest Lord Jesus. They did not bother to hook him up to oxygen. He did not find out until later that this was the precise moment his father-in-law, who was a pastor, had his congregation start to pray for him.
Kim’s father was James Loder, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. His life was not only saved but changed. Until then, although he taught at a seminary, God had been mostly an abstract idea to him. Now Jesus became a living Presence. Kim writes that her father’s heart grew so tender that he became known at Princeton as “the weeping professor.” He began to live from one moment to the next in a God-bathed, God-soaked, God-intoxicated world.[xii]
Prayer, by its very nature, is designed to draw us into God’s very presence. The essence of prayer is to know God, not just meet our needs, though He does do that. The real purpose of prayer is to commune with Him, to get to know Him better. Notice that the greatest need we have is for Him, and that’s what Jesus promised.
So I say to you: ‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead?
Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?
If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’[xiii]
Our greatest need is for God. Dr. David Osborn correctly points out:
Too often we try to use God to change our circumstances, while he is using our circumstances to change us.[xiv]
Here we discover one of the most incredible ways to really pray. As we read the promises and challenges of the blameless life from the Bible itself, something within cries out for God’s grace and help to do it. What are some ways to stimulate a better prayer life? Making a conscious effort to pray collectively…prayer meetings, pastor’s mighty men, finding a prayer partner, and setting time aside in our daily life as we pray while reading the Bible.
THE FINAL KEY TO A BLAMELESS LIFE IS PERSISTENCE TO CONTINUE TO MATURITY
The blameless life is one where we keep learning, growing, applying the truths into our lives. It is a life where we continue to rejoice and pray that God will continue to teach us from His word.
Praise be to you, O Lord; teach me your decrees.
I will praise you with an upright heart as I learn your righteous laws.[xv]
A. “Teach me your decrees”- hear the hunger to keep learning about the ways of God as found in His word.
This learning is really an internalizing of God’s word. It’s not just mental information. It’s not just an external conformity to God’s word; it’s a heart changing desire to really know God.
B. The writer meditates on the Word.
“I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways (Psalm 119:15).”
J. I. Packer explains the nature of biblical meditation:
Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, thinking over, dwelling on, and applying to oneself the various things one knows about the works and ways and purpose and promises of God. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communication with God.
Its purpose is to clear one’s mental and spiritual vision of God, and to let his truth make its full and proper impact on one’s mind and heart.
It is a matter of talking to oneself about God and oneself. It is, indeed, often a matter of arguing with oneself, reasoning oneself out of moods of doubt and unbelief into a clear apprehension of God’s power and grace.[xvi]
One of the great differences between Christian meditation and other forms of meditation is that in Christianity, the mind is to be filled with a thought, or a reflection upon Scripture, or God’s attributes as revealed in nature, event or within, whereas non-Christian meditation encourages the emptying of the mind completely. There are dangers in allowing intrusive thoughts to gain ascendency in our minds. We recognize from Scripture that the battle in the spiritual arena is a battle for the mind. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he entreats the believer to renew our minds (cf. Ro. 12:1-2). An even more penetrating insight into the nature of spiritual warfare as it relates to the battle over our minds is found in 2 Corinthians.
The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.[xvii]
What is Paul stating here? The real battle is the wrong attitudes that need to be destroyed by bringing those thoughts captive and becoming obedient to Christ and the truth of His word. R. C. Sproul explains the power of meditation as it relates to overcoming sin.
Conscience vacillates in power from day to day, but it can be strengthened or weakened. Again, the process begins with the mind. The more I increase my awareness of the Law, the more I am convicted of a matter. The greater my conviction, the stronger my conscience. The stronger my conscience, the greater the likelihood that I will obey.[xviii]
C. The results of learning and applying God’s word is that we discover how wonderful God truly is.
“I will praise you with an upright heart as I learn your righteous laws (Psalm 119:7).”
The result of really obeying God’s Word, pursing after God, and prayer leads a person to practice what God says, and when that happens your life is never the same again.
Blasio Kugosi was a schoolteacher in Rwanda, Central Africa, who was deeply discouraged by the lack of life in the church and the powerlessness of his own experience. He closed himself in for a week of prayer and fasting in his little cottage. He emerged a changed man. He confessed his sins to those he had wronged, including his wife and children. He proclaimed the gospel in the school where he taught, and revival broke out there, resulting in students and teachers being saved. They were called abaka , meaning people on fire.
Shortly after that, Blasio was invited to Uganda to share with the Anglican Church there. As he called the leaders to repentance, the fire of the Spirit descended again on the place, with similar results as in Rwanda. Several days later, Blasio died of fever. His ministry lasted only a few weeks, but the revival fires that were sparked by his life in 1935 swept throughout East Africa and continue to the present. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been transformed over the decades through this mighty East African revival. It all began with a discouraged Christian setting himself apart to seek the fullness of God’s Spirit.[xix]
As we considered our text, there are a number of challenges I want us to consider.
1. Where am I presently disobeying God?
2. What ways am I actively seeking God?
3. What are some ways I can develop a better prayer life?
4. What are some specific things that God wants me to apply in my life?
5. What am I currently doing to keep growing and learning in my understanding of God?
When we address these issues in our lives, we will be revived!
https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2022/03/25/23/47/bible-7092020_1280.jpg
[i] The Amazing Race, CBS television (5-10-05), produced by Mark Burnett.
[ii] Psalm 119:1-2a, 4, The New International Version of the Bible, Zondervan, 2011.
[iii] John 14:23.
[iv] John Newton, as quoted by E.M. Bounds, The Essentials of Prayer, (Grand Rapids, Mi: Baker Book House, 1979), 19 as found in Donald S. Whitney, Disciplines For The Christian Life, (Colorado Springs, Co.: NavPress, 1991), 112.
[v] Psalm 119:5-6.
[vi] Psalm 119:9, 11, 3.
[vii] John Piper (excerpts), Desiring God: Meditations Of A Christian Hedonist, (Portland, Or: Multnomah Press, 1986), 15-17.
[viii] Matthew 6:32-33.
[ix] Roger Palms, Living Under the Smile of God, Christianity Today, Vol. 34, no. 14.
[x] Psalm 119:14, 16.
[xi] Walter Kaiser Jr., Malachi: God’s Unchanging Love, (Grand Rapids, Mi: Baker Book House, 1984), 23.
[xii] John Ortberg, God Is Closer Than You Think (Zondervan, 2005), 24-25.
[xiii] Luke 11:9-13.
[xiv] Dr. David Osborn, director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Denver Seminary, quoted in Compass, a periodical of Quiet Waters.
[xv] Psalm 119:12, 7.
[xvi] J. I. Packer, Knowing God (InterVarsity Press, 1973), 18-19.
[xvii] 2 Corinthians 10:4-5.
[xviii] R. C. Sproul, The Soul’s Quest For God,144.
[xix] Ajith Fernando, Acts, The NIV Application Commentary: (Zondervan, 1998), 118.
