Why should we, who are not saved by works, still strive daily to be blameless in our hearts and actions?
Psalm 15:1-2
This is a brief psalm, but it packs quite a powerful challenge. God places the yearning for himself and his sanctuary within the hearts of all his children. It’s one of the first indications of the irresistible drawing of the Holy Spirit in his regenerating work on the human heart. Thus, after this yearning has been sown in our tilled hearts, it bears the fruit of an exclamation when we read Psalm 15:1,“Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill?” We read it, and exclaim, “Oh, how much I want to dwell in your sanctuary, Lord! How much I long to live on your holy hill!” That heart desire in the human fuel for the engine of sanctification – it drives us toward holiness. Why toward holiness? Because God’s answer to this question in verse 2 is, “He whose walk is blameless and who does what is righteous.” And why is this heart desire the fuel that drives us? Because, as one preacher put it, “Ya gotta have the ‘want-to!’”
God has committed to us a portion of the work in sanctification. We have no work to be done in justification – our works in that matter are repugnant to him. But sanctification is a different matter – it is a partnership between God and the regenerate human. And the drive for the human side of the work comes first from the deep desire to live with God in the perfection of his holy dwelling place. Without the “want-to,” we get nowhere in our journey toward holiness.
“The glory we give to God when we resist temptation is in direct proportion to the cost we paid in doing so.”
Well, I always have the “want-to” (in varying degrees of intensity) – God put that in my heart at conversion, and we’ve both fed it daily since then. The question usually comes down to a matter of cost. Verse 4 refers to this when it says the heaven-bound man keeps his vow, “even when it hurts.” This is the language of cost. God is testing the strength of our heavenward yearning by the blamelessness of our daily life. Too often these days, I am (to paraphrase Daniel 5:27) tried and found NOT “wanting…” at least, not “wanting” it sufficiently enough to pay the price to be holy, to say “No!” to ungodliness. And yes, there is always a cost – it always hurts to resist temptation. However, the glory we give to God when we resist temptation is in direct proportion to the cost we paid in doing so. If I buckle under the strain of temptation because of the weakness of my “want-to” and the cost I’d have to pay to resist, I will cease to grow into godliness, and I will bring grief to my Heavenly Father. God wants my life to be “blameless,” not mottled on a daily basis by willful departures from the way marked out before us.
It seems to me the best weapon I have in all of this is to strengthen my “want-to” by meditating frequently on the beauty and the purity of my future heavenly home. Psalm 84 is just such a strengthening exercise, as the psalmist says, “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord” (Psalm 84:1-2). By this kind of meditation on the joys of heaven, we can increase our holy desire, and face the challenges of a blameless life as found listed in Psalm 15.
