Pleasing to God

¹ I will sing of your love and justice;
    to you, Lord, I will sing praise.
² I will be careful to lead a blameless life—
    when will you come to me?

I will conduct the affairs of my house
    with a blameless heart.
³ I will not look with approval
    on anything that is vile.

I hate what faithless people do;
    I will have no part in it.
⁴ The perverse of heart shall be far from me;
    I will have nothing to do with what is evil.

⁵ Whoever slanders their neighbor in secret,
    I will put to silence;
whoever has haughty eyes and a proud heart,
    I will not tolerate.

⁶ My eyes will be on the faithful in the land,
    that they may dwell with me;
the one whose walk is blameless
    will minister to me.

⁷ No one who practices deceit
    will dwell in my house;
no one who speaks falsely
    will stand in my presence.

⁸ Every morning I will put to silence
    all the wicked in the land;
I will cut off every evildoer
    from the city of the Lord.

Psalm 101 New International Version (NIV)

Last Sunday, when I was looking up verses to go with the thoughts I was writing about, one of the lines in chapter 101 of Psalms came up. As usual, I pulled up the entire chapter and thought it had some good things to say, good things that would be one more follow-up to the thoughts I’ve been sharing the past two Sundays.

Now, this morning, as I’m working on my Sunday inspirational blog, I can’t remember what I wanted to say about any of the above chapter. Yes, I agree with what it is saying, but what really jumps out at me and has anything at all to do with our society, our government, the sad state of affairs world-wide?

I guess words like “slanders”, “vile”, “haughty eyes and a proud heart” could all be used to describe our most recent political campaigns. When we witness those things, I think, that instead of jumping into the fray with our own come-backs and insults, we need to not stoop to their level. We need to turn off social media, turn off the news, and instead turn to Scripture and to God for guidance and reassurance.

Lord, God, Heavenly Father, guide our actions and our words. Let all we do be pleasing to You. Amen.