Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not appealed to what is false, and who has not sworn deceitfully. He will receive blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. Psalm 24:3-5 CSB
What Does God Require?
In Psalm 24, David talks about the sovereignty and greatness of our Holy God. He made the earth and everything in it, and it all belongs to Him. We can never fully grasp the greatness and holiness of our God with our human understanding. He is so much bigger than we can ever imagine.
David tells us in this Psalm what God requires of us to be able to come before Him. As His children we do have total access to Him, but He does have some requirements because He cares about our hearts and our relationship with Him. God doesn’t ask something of us that we can even do ourselves but He, in His infinite wisdom, sovereignty, and love for us, provides a way we can come to Him. What does God require of us?
The one who has clean hands… Clean hands is a reference to pure in actions. It is literally about the physical acts we commit with our hands. The things we do as a child of God matter. We cannot just go about doing sinful acts and think that it doesn’t matter because we are a Christian. It matters to God and although once we are saved we are in His family forever, confessing our sin and cleaning our hands before coming to a Holy God is not only what He says we are to do, but an act of respect for God on our part.
and a pure heart… Clean hands are connected to a pure heart. If our intentions and thoughts are pure, most likely our actions will be pure as well. Everything starts in the heart. (and mind) Wrong thoughts and motives lead to wrong actions so we need to take every thought captive. It is our thoughts and motives from our heart makes us unclean before Him.
who has not appealed to what is false… Here David is speaking of idolatry. Idolatry is a big heart issue. Idolatry is when we remove God from the throne of our lives and repolace Him with something or someone else that we love and adore more than Him. Idolatry not only begins in the heart, but it has to end there too. We can stop going through the motions of bowing down to the idols in our lives, but if we are still pining for them in our hearts, they are still on the throne. God alone deserves to be on the throne of our hearts. He is jealous for us and does not want to share that place with anyone or anything else.
who has not sworn deceitfully… God requires us to not use deceitful, lying speech. Just like our motives and actions, our words flow from our hearts as well.
Our hands are stained by our sins. Our hearts are stained. Our devotion is sometimes misguided and our lips are stained. We are insufficient to stand before our Holy God. God knows how insufficient we are and made a way for us to be reconciled to Him. The main thing we need is a new heart – one that will love pure thoughts, motives, devotion, and speech to honor and glorify Him. We will never be able to do this for ourselves but through the shed blood of Jesus Christ we are justified and made clean. Jesus gives us the clean hands, and a pure heart to stand before God. This is the only way.
He will receive blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. – God cares about our thoughts, motives, actions, speech, and devotion. We are His children once we are saved, but that doesn’t mean we get a pass for life on our behavior. When we live lives that are honoring to Him, we will be blessed. It won’t be easy, but we will be blessed.
When we surrender all to our King, we will receive righteousness – the greatest treasure of all. When we follow Him and walk The Jesus Way, we are honoring Him with our lives. We are a living testimony to His righteousness and salvation that He gives to all, but we also give Him all the glory and honor with our whole lives.
How often do you think about the world and the Holy, Soverign God who created it all? Do you realize that you and everything you own is actually His? Do you surrender it to Him?
We get so busy doing all the things that we take for granted what a gift it is that God created this world for us. We can put God on the back burner and when we don’t give God the honor that He deserves, we certainly won’t give Him the worship that He deserves in every circumstance of our lives.
Are you taking your life and your salvation for granted today?
Are you giving God the place and the honor and glory He deserves in your life?
