Who Are You Trying to Please?
A Meditation on Psalm 119:78-80
Last week, I was reading the Psalms reading from the lectionary I use and came across these verses:
Let the proud be ashamed, For they treated me wrongfully with falsehood; [But] I will meditate on Your precepts. Let those who fear You turn to me, Those who know Your testimonies. Let my heart be blameless regarding Your statutes, That I may not be ashamed.1
This got me thinking about a couple of things I thought I’d share.
Avoiding Shame
That last verse, in particular, stood out to me. The key to not being ashamed, the psalmist states, is for his heart to be blameless regarding God’s statutes. So often, when I’m tempted to sin, the lie rattling around in my head is that to obey would bring shame. I’m afraid that, should I obey God’s word, I will be ashamed of the result or what people think of me.
How backward that thinking is! Two things are going on here: first, the fear of man, and second, the aforementioned lie that obeying God will humiliate us. The fear of man here is that we so often fear others’ opinion of us more than we fear God’s estimation of us. This is easy to see as ridiculous when we’re in a situation like we’re in now; for you, reading about this hypothetical circumstance and me, writing about it. How could we possibly esteem the opinion of a finite, fallible creature over the true judgment of a holy, eternal, and omniscient God? But when we are in the thick of it and a real, flesh and blood person is looking us in the face, things look a lot murkier, though the truth is no less clear cut.
Secondly and as a consequence of this fear of man, we are tempted to believe that, should we obey God, we will end up ashamed. This is a lie. The psalmist gives us the right frame of mind for this situation: obedience is the path to being unashamed. Are we truly afraid of being ashamed of our actions? Then we should obey God. His judgment is the only one that ultimately matters. If we want to be unashamed in the end, then the only option is to obey.
This principle sounds basic; however, it’s something I realized pops up frequently. When we’re faced with the choice between strict obedience to God’s standard or fudging things a bit, whether it’s at work, a project on our home, or in our relations with other Christians, we could be facing this temptation. Perhaps it’s going to extraordinary lengths to reimburse someone down to the penny. Or maybe you don’t laugh at the complaints veiled as jokes people at work make about their kids. Whatever it is, we are sometimes afraid to be different or to stand out. We must be willing to do or say something an unbeliever might view as shameful because we know that those without Christ often call evil good and good evil. Having a conflict-averse or introverted personality is no excuse; we cannot lower our standards for the sake of avoiding social discomfort. And the best way to fight that inclination is to remember the truth; it is not the obedient who should be ashamed but the ungodly.
Who Should Be Ashamed?
Notice verse 78 of Psalm 119: “Let the proud be ashamed…”2 It is the evildoers, the psalmist says, who should be ashamed. They are proud, so they will be brought low. In the interactions mentioned above, we should also keep in mind that we must not be prideful. Then we’re doing the very thing we think we’re avoiding. The evildoers originally dealt wrongfully with the psalmist, and, if we raise ourselves up in pride at not being like those sinners over there, then we should expect to be ashamed ourselves, for we’ve joined the ranks of the proud. But we can comfort ourselves, in times of distress or social discomfort as a result of obedience to God, that everyone will stand before God. For those who obeyed Him, who believed on His Son and obeyed His voice, there will be no shame before His face. For the proud and the evildoer, there will only be shame.
In Light of This
As a short aside on this discussion of shame, it is good to remember that our basis for being unashamed is Christ’s completed work on the cross. He took our shame so that we could be unashamed before the face of God; not because of our works but because of His work. In the above, I am not saying that we, in ourselves, could gain that unashamed standing on our own. I am saying that, as children of God, we should want to please our Father more than we want to please others. When we disobey Him, we feel ashamed of our sin, and rightly so. This shame, like the sorrow Paul writes of in 2 Corinthians 7:9-11, should lead us to confession, repentance, and restoration of fellowship, with God and with others. When we act in a way that we know is pleasing to Him, we grow in our love for Him and His word. We also grow in our depth of fellowship with and love for His people, as Psalm 119:79 indicates: “Let those who fear You turn to me, Those who know Your testimonies.”3
So, consider this an exhortation to remember that it is not the crowd, the world, or the angry individual in front of you whose opinion should matter most to you. It’s not even the men and women you respect in the church whose opinions should matter most to you; it is God’s estimation as revealed in His word. Your Father has promised to care for you and to be your Good Shepherd. Do not worry, and do not be ashamed. Trust Him, and live to love Him by obeying Him in all you do.
Great word, Daniel!