Vindicate me, O Lord,
for I have walked in my integrity,
and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.
2 Prove me, O Lord, and try me;
test my heart and my mind.
3 For your steadfast love is before my eyes,
and I walk in your faithfulness.
4 I do not sit with men of falsehood,
nor do I consort with hypocrites.
5 I hate the assembly of evildoers,
and I will not sit with the wicked.
6 I wash my hands in innocence
and go around your altar, O Lord,
7 proclaiming thanksgiving aloud,
and telling all your wondrous deeds.
8 O Lord, I love the habitation of your house
and the place where your glory dwells.
9 Do not sweep my soul away with sinners,
nor my life with bloodthirsty men,
10 in whose hands are evil devices,
and whose right hands are full of bribes.
11 But as for me, I shall walk in my integrity;
redeem me, and be gracious to me.
12 My foot stands on level ground;
in the great assembly I will bless the Lord.
This Psalm seems to have David saying things that we would not think to say. But it is David in the right and we who are misunderstanding. Although he has proclaimed that he has trusted the Lord without wavering, yet we find him asking the Lord to redeem him and to be gracious to him. This is not a man who is depending upon himself, or who is speaking of his life in tones of proud self-accomplishment, David knows far better than that. This is a man who is living in God’s mercy and grace…this is a man who has given himself fully to walking with the Lord.
Is he still sinful? Yes, of course. But at the same time, faithful! David is saying and you can say this, “I am loyal to my Savior…He is my life. I am making the choice every day to take my stand with the Lord and with His people.” And he finds his strength, his resolve, his hope, in the same place you must find it: in the laver, the grace of God in forgiveness demonstrated in the worship of God where God has promised to feed and nourish you. And so, like David, we rejoice in the house of God and in the hundreds of ways we get to show the Lord that we love Him.
Brothers and sisters, when the day ends…and maybe the day has not been particularly successful. Your head hits the pillow and you can say: Lord…I love you…you know…I am trying with everything in me. You must never forget; that you, in the language of Holy Scripture, you belong to God. Your sin, real as it is, is not characteristic of your truest self…you know me, I am not asking you or me to make light of our sin, nonetheless, it is your loyalty to God’s covenant, your being a child of God that is your defining characteristic, not your sin.
When the Lord tests you, like David asks him to do, you can be confident that the Lord will find what he ought to find when he tests his people, and sinlessness is not what the Lord expects to find!!! But he does expect to find a true desire for holiness, a hatred for sin, real obedience no matter how imperfect and he expects to find you drawn to the house of God where He has promised to give you what you most need…Himself.
I am going to use a lengthy illustration I read to conclude this morning. The illustration as I read it is far too long so I will try and set the table briefly so as to get to the main idea. It comes from a book called, The Talent Code and it talks about how to learn a new skill, playing a piano, dribbling a basketball, that kind of thinking. I know, it hasn’t grabbed you yet, give me a minute.
The author wants to explain what circumstances or even places cause talent to grow so quickly, more quickly than most people experience. To illustrate he uses a video produced by two Australian researchers, of a thirteen-year-old clarinet student who has amazed these music psychologists with the speed at which she learns. Here is the author:
On screen, Clarissa does not look particularly talented. She even has an expression of sleepy indifference. At first, Clarissa had been classified as mediocre. According to…aptitude tests and the testimony of her teacher, her parents, and herself, Clarissa possessed no musical gifts. She lacked a good ear; her sense of rhythm was average, her motivation subpar. (In the study’s written section, she marked ‘because I’m supposed to’ as her strongest reason for practicing.) Nonetheless, Clarissa had become famous in music-science circles. Because on an average morning the camera captured her doing something distinctly un-average.
In five minutes and fifty-four seconds, she accelerated her learning speed by ten times, according to calculations. What was more, she didn’t even notice. Here is what we see: It’s morning, Clarissa’s customary time for practice, a day after her weekly lesson. She is working on a new song entitled ‘Golden Wedding,’ a 1941 tune by jazz clarinetist Woody Herman. She’s listened to the song a few times. She likes it. Now she’s going to try to play it. Clarissa draws a breath and plays two notes. Then she stops. She pulls the clarinet from her lips and stares at the paper. Her eyes narrow. She plays seven notes, the song’s opening phrase. She misses the last note and immediately stops, fairly jerking the clarinet from her lips. She squints again at the music and sings the phrase softly. She starts over and plays the riff from the beginning, making it a few notes farther into the song this time, missing the last note, backtracking, and fixing the mistake.
The opening is beginning to snap together. When she’s finished with this phrase, she stops again for six long seconds, seeming to replay it in her mind, fingering the clarinet as she thinks. She leans forward, takes a breath, and starts again. It sounds pretty bad. It’s not music; it’s a broken-up, fitful slow-motion batch of notes riddled with stops and misses. Common sense would lead us to believe that Clarissa is failing. But in this case common sense would be dead wrong. ‘This is amazing stuff,’ the author says…. This is how a professional musician would practice on Wednesday for a Saturday performance. On screen Clarissa leans into the sheet music, puzzling out a G-sharp that she’s never played before.
She looks at her hand, then at the music, then at her hand again. She hums the riff. Clarissa’s posture is tilted forward; she looks as though she is walking into a chilly wind; her sweetly freckled face tightens into a squint. She plays the phrase again and again. Each time she adds a layer of spirit, rhythm, swing. ‘Look at that,’ the author says. ‘She’s got a blueprint in her mind she’s constantly comparing herself to. She’s working in phrases, complete thoughts. She’s not ignoring errors, she’s hearing them, fixing them. She’s fitting small parts into the whole, drawing the lens in and out all the time, scaffolding herself to a higher level.
This is not ordinary practice. This is something else: a highly targeted, error-focused process. Something is growing, being built. The song begins to emerge, and with it, a new quality within Clarissa. This is not a picture of talent produced by genes; it’s something far more interesting. It is six minutes of an average person entering a magically productive zone, one where more skill is created with each passing second.” [2-5]
The author argues that talent grows and grows rapidly by this “targeted, error-focused” practice, what he calls “deep practice.” It is how small schools around the world have become famous for turning out one world class performer after another, after another, after another. They teach this kind of practice. Each mistake is made an opportunity to learn, to correct, to improve. Concentration on errors and putting them right is the key.
I admit that musically, this is a bit beyond me. However, is this not a description of the Christian life? We don’t ignore the errors, and there are plenty of them, no…we stop, look at the error, why we made it, and because the Lord is with us and has not left us to ourselves…we fix it.
We know, because He has told us, that our life is to be beautiful…we are His workmanship, after all. And so, given what we have been given, the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, One Another, The Eucharist…we eek out a few notes, fix them, go back and do it again…and we get a little further.
And when we get stopped, yes by our sin, by our broken selves, when we get stopped…we read, think, squint, pray, and start again. And in our souls there is always this true desire to please our Lord…That is what it means to live in integrity. And here is where so many of us get stilted. We are stopped and we put our instrument down…we give up. And we ignore…don’t deal with the sin…we are ashamed, and so we hide it, mask it and then push it deep down.
What did Paul mean when he says, forgetting what lies behind? Paul would say, “Look, I know I am a screw-up. I know everything that I have broken, and I even know the mess I am as a Christian (read Romans 7)…I can’t change the past…I wish I could, but I can’t…But…I will press on, I will press on to make righteousness my own, and I will tell you why…I press on to make it my own…because Jesus has made me his own.”
Is that not what we have here in Psalm 26? David lives his life as a godly man. He stumbles, to be sure, and he tells us he stumbles all the time as we all do, but because he belongs to the Lord, he knows that those stumbles are errors to be repented of and fixed. He pauses, as it were, goes round the laver and the altar again to gain forgiveness and to clear his head, to weep with joy for mercy…and he starts again. That is how the Christian life is lived in this world and that is how it grows.
Psalm 26 is an important psalm to know. You can say what David said of himself here. You absolutely can. You want to live in faithfulness. You sin, you surely do and will, but He has provided for that. And nowhere…as here. Here is his provision so that you can say, I have walked in integrity and I have trusted the Lord without wavering. We are to take the same encouragement, the same confidence, and the same assurance away from this Psalm that David had when he wrote. And a false understanding of the gospel can take that confidence and that assurance away.
Of course, you are a screw-up. Whoever learned to play the piano or the clarinet without making mistakes by the thousands? But you are also a child of God, whose mistakes and whose trips around the altar and whose dips in the laver are forming Christ in you…all of this is taking me, it is taking you, step by step not to musical stardom, but to the heart of Christ!
Prayer: Father, while I am deeply aware of my sinfulness and I am thankful for Your grace that alarmed and continues to alarm me, I am also keenly aware of the forgiveness and mercy that is found only in Jesus Christ. Having been cleansed, I continue to seek cleansing: Having been made holy, I continue to ask You for the power to live in holiness. These are Your gifts and I give you thanks for them, In Jesus name, Amen.
Hymn: There is a Fountain Filled With Blood
