I think it was two or three weeks we started a study on Psalm 119. Meditations for the Pilgrim on the Way. If you remember a few, well, three weeks back in the introduction, I submitted to you somewhat, you know, half confidently, we can't know for sure, that the author was more than likely Daniel. Not a very common position. Most commentators say that it was David, but I think that there are reasons in the text to believe that it was some type of exile, somebody who was taken away. in captivity and was not in his own native land and found himself in a foreign land and had to throw himself on the foundation and confidence of God's Word. And in the following week, what I did is I said that when we look at this text, we see happiness. What I'm going to do is I'm going to read the text, Psalm 119, verses 1-8, and then we'll consider this concept of happiness tonight. So, Psalm 119, verses 1-8. Listen carefully. This is the Word of the living God. The psalmist says, Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with all their heart, who also do no wrong, but walk in His ways. You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. Oh, that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes. Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments. I will praise you with an upright heart when I learn your righteous rules. I will keep your statutes. Do not forsake me utterly." Do not utterly forsake me. That's far the reading of God's word. So I said a few weeks back that the idea of happiness in our culture seems to be all pervasive. Everybody wants to be happy. And what I submitted to you a few weeks ago is there's nothing wrong with wanting to be happy. In fact, these two first verses start with blessed, and in the Hebrew, and then later when it gets translated into the Greek, this means happy. I mean, literally. Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, is Jesus saying, blessed are those who, X, Y, and Z. He's saying, happy, happy are those. And really, Psalm 119 is laying out a prescription for happiness that basically suggests, or commands, I should say, lifelong obedience. Lifestyle obedience, not occasional obedience, not obedience when we want to, not obedience when it's our preference. Lifestyle obedience, obedience in the long direction, okay? And what I said a few weeks ago also is that what we see in this passage is at least five kind of contours of happiness. Now, one of them I gave you a few weeks ago, and it is this. As I already said, happiness is marked by obedience in the same direction. But tonight, I wanna very briefly give you four more, okay? And before we go any further and we get into these, I just wanna exhort all of us We would be lying if we said that we don't struggle to obtain happiness from time to time. In fact, some of you struggle to obtain it more than others. You can call it happiness, you can call it contentment. What I want to say is this, don't be deceived by the notion in our culture, really kind of the Facebook culture, that puts these kind of lives out there that at the end of the day are fake. I'm not saying they're not real, but I am saying they're only showing you the good side, they're only showing you the happy side, they're only showing you all the accomplishments and rewards and all the things that are good. And, you know, it's a stilted view of what reality is. The fact of the matter is, when we get into real life, there's a combination of the good, the bad, and the ugly. And the fact of the matter is, if you're like me, and I trust that you are, you have to constantly fight for happiness. Do you ever have to fight for happiness? Do you ever have to fight for contentment? Do you ever have to fight for joy? And sometimes as a Christian, we get frustrated, right? Because we're like, well, in my fight for joy, and in my fight for happiness, and in my fight for contentment, I feel like I should already know these things, right? I should already know these things as a Christian. I've been walking with Jesus for five, 10, 15, 20, 25 years. I should always know these things. But I wanna remind you, once again, what Peter has said two times in his second epistle, that the Christian life is about reminder, right? It's about reminder. I wanna stir up your sincere mind by way of reminder. And I've said this before, I'll say it again, I'll keep saying it ad nauseum, I don't care because it's my job as a preacher and it's my witness as a Christian, you have to preach to yourself. You have to preach to yourself. If you ever, sometimes I leave my windows open in my office, especially when it's a beautiful day. And if you ever were to walk by my office, sometimes if I'm in prayer, or sometimes if I'm in a passage trying to meditate on it in order to feed my soul so that I can in turn feed your soul, I'm crying out to the Lord, Lord, show me what you want me to see. And Lord, my soul's not there. How can I feed your people when my soul itself is not even fed? Lord, help me. My faith is weak. And I then start preaching to myself. Believe what Jesus has done. Believe that Jesus is real. Because I don't care how strong you think your faith is, the fact of the matter is, sometimes in our deepest, darkest moments, we don't believe that Jesus is real. We don't. we become practical atheists. So I think this is really important. I think happiness is really important. And I'm not taking the definition from culture. I'm taking the definition from the Bible. The Bible here holds out happiness for us and says, follow this path. And at the end of the day here in Psalm 119, it's about obedience. And again, we can qualify this, but I'm not gonna qualify it too much because I don't want it to die of a thousand qualifications. I'll simply say this, your obedience comes from the leading of the spirit. Your obedience comes from grace and it's by God and it's for his glory and he gets all the honor and praise. But at the same time, you've got to decide to obey, don't you? You've got to decide. Every single day you have to make a decision. Am I going to listen to the whisperings of Satan in my ear? Or am I going to follow the leading of the Spirit? Am I going to grieve the Spirit? Am I going to quench the Spirit? Am I going to give glory to God? Am I going to put this phone down and pay attention to the children in front of me? The husband in front of me? The customer in front of me? Okay. What am I going to do? You've got to make a decision. That's you. You have to decide to obey or disobey. So let me give you Four more contours of what happiness looks like. Here's the first one, and we see this in verse one. Happiness is cultivated by blamelessness. Look at verse one. Blessed are those whose way is blameless who walk in the law of the Lord. Now, this word blameless, it's an interesting word. It comes from a Hebrew word that basically means complete or unscathed, unmarked, unblemished. Okay, blameless is typically the word that was used to describe the lamb that would be taken to the priest for a sacrifice. Now, James, because he thinks in such a Hebrew mind, will use language like this, and he uses equivalence like, you know, you can arrive at perfection, not in a Wesleyan sense, but in a biblical sense. You can become a complete and whole and mature man or woman. It doesn't mean that you're perfect, but it does mean that you've struck something of a balance in life. You've got the right priorities. You're gonna fall, you're gonna slip, you're gonna get back up, but you've kind of got your bearings. You know where things are at. That's maturity. And God calls us to maturity. Abraham was commanded to be blameless. Job is described as blameless. The Proverbs say, in Proverbs 11, 20, the perverse in heart are an abomination to the Lord, but the blameless in their walk are his delight. Isn't that interesting? Next time you think that God doesn't care about you, read Proverbs 11.20. Those who are blameless, again, not perfect, but whose prevailing disposition is toward holiness and obedience and wholehearted love and devotion to the Lord. Proverbs says that we are the delight of the Lord and all the more, more importantly, because we're in Christ through faith, right? So blameless means mature. It describes one, listen, who is not double-minded. He's not double-minded, one who can make a decision. This is what I need to do. I know I'm gonna fall and I have fallen, but this is what I need to do, what I want to do, and I'm going to put plans in motion to get there. Now, when we think about the law here, who walk in the law of the Lord, obviously for the psalmist, obviously for Daniel, this was the Mosaic law with all the dietary laws and the ceremonial laws and the civic laws and all kinds of stuff like that. But for us, it's just the moral law refracted through the person and work of Christ. But blamelessness kind of still has this kind of cultic feel to it, and in the New Testament, because we don't have the dietary laws, we don't have the cleanliness laws, even though you should be clean and I commend cleanliness to you, it's a good thing. Okay, but we've kind of lost this idea of cleanliness. I remember when I was in high school, this is in the 90s, right? So this is the alternative, you know, phase, right? You listen to Nirvana and stuff like that, and it was grunge rock and roll. And I remember there was all these cliques, you know, all over the place. There was this one really, he was a really grunge guy. I mean, you could tell by how he dressed and how he smelled and everything else. And he had a conversation and he's like, well, you're a preppy, Josh. And I'm like, what does that even mean? And we were talking and he's like, well, here's the thing. Like, you guys care too much about cleanliness. You just need to be comfortable with being a little dirty. I'm like, okay. I guess I'm not going to be the grunge guy then. I'm okay with being the preppy guy. But, you know, I think coming back to the concept of morality, even though we're not under those laws anymore, this idea of staying away from even moral contamination is still a category in the Bible. Listen to Paul, 1 Thessalonians 5.22, abstain from every form of evil. Every form of evil. I think when I was a young Christian, when it came to certain things, I still wanted to flirt with things. I still wanted to dance on the line, right? Maybe some of us still do that with certain things. How close can I get without getting burned? And God would say through his prophets and apostles and teachers and his own son, that's the wrong question. The question is how far away can I get from sin and closer to God? That's the question that we should be asking. But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among the saints." Ephesians 5.3. Notice that, you know, if you're not careful, you can almost hear him reading or giving these commands as a Pharisee, like, we've got to make laws around laws around laws. No, that's not necessarily what he's saying. He's going for the heart. He wants your heart to be so devoted to the Lord that even the width of of impropriety, even the whiff of foolishness, even the whiff of sexual immorality. You don't even want to be near it. You walk down the magazine aisle, and maybe you as a man have a propensity or proclivity toward pornography. You just shouldn't even walk down that aisle if that's your proclivity. You have to know yourself. You have to know yourself. Paul says in Romans 16, 19, I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil. And then Jude 1.23, save others by snatching them out of the fire, to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by flesh. You know, there's associations that come with sin, aren't there? I mean, I know, I have a family member who he, unfortunately, was divorced from his wife, and they had bought a house together, and they lived in that house, and they had many fights and spats in that house, and she's gone now, she's moved away. And, to this day, it's hard for him to even be in the house. He has to go out in the garage, and he eats his dinner in the garage, and he watches TV in the garage, and he pretty much stays in the garage as long as he can until night, and then he goes to bed, because even that house has associations of the heartbreak of his failed marriage. And I think the same thing when we sin. I mean, there can be associations with places where we sin, the clothes we were wearing when we sin, that type of thing. You don't want to go too far with that. But at the same time, there's something to that. There's just some places and venues and situations where Christians with certain proclivities simply shouldn't put themselves. And you have to know yourself to know what the answer to that is. So here's a third thing, second for tonight, third overall that happiness is. Happiness is cultivated by a symmetry of heart, head, and hands. Look at verse two. Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with their whole heart. This verse is really important because so much is said in this text about obedience that if you're not careful, you can slip into Pharisaism, you could slip into Legalism. But here the psalmist balances things out with a blessed symmetry. It's not simply about what my hands do and do not do. It's a symmetry of my hands and my heart and my head. They do it with a whole heart. Not a half-hearted obedience, not I'm doing it because I have to, although sometimes that's where we're at, we confess. But even in those moments, we're doing it because we have to, because we want to get to the point where I have to. I have to do this because this is who I am as a Christian. And when I stop listening to the whisperings of Satan and his hordes in my ear, and I'm reminded by the whisperings of Christ and his promises in this year of who I am, then I say I have to, not I have to. Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek them with all their heart. Obedience to the law of God is about being who you really are. We talked about that this morning, right? All of our works are gonna be exposed for what they are. So my goal here on this life, among many other things, is to glorify God through having the works Having the works that I put forward make it past the fire in the last day because those are the works that are genuine. Those are the works that represent who I really am as a new creation in Christ. So it's a matter of the heart. And as I said, sometimes you have to fight for joy. I was just sharing with the pastors, the other pastors this week. In our elders meeting, in my time of accountability, I said, brothers, pray for me, I'm fighting for joy right now. I'm not depressed, I'm not sliding into despondency, but I just, sometimes you kind of get into just kind of, I don't know, just a perfunctory mode spiritually, and I don't want to be there. I want warm, white, hot, not warm, white, hot, I want white, hot affections. I want white, hot affections for Christ. I want them all the time. Are you charismatic? You can call me whatever you want. I want white, hot affections for Christ all the time. In how I lead my children and how I love my wife and how I don't kick my dog, I want white, hot affections for Christ in everything that I do. So we have to fight for joy, and we don't often think about that. I think sometimes we think it's just gonna come. It's kinda like young people. Young people, when they look at older people, and they're like, that's never gonna happen to me, right? It's just, it's never. How did that guy get that way? I know, because I've thought that. Here's confessions, I have. I'm like, man, that's never gonna happen to me. It'll happen. It'll happen. You could put all the muscle implants you want in, it's not going to change the flab that inevitably is going to take place and the lack of energy and everything else that goes into it. But spiritually we think the same thing, like, I'm just always going to have white hot affections. No, you're not. And if you're not putting kindling in the fire, the kindling of word, sacrament, and prayer, what do you expect? What do you expect? I'm not trying to be cavalier here, I'm really asking a serious don't answer rhetorical question. What do you expect when you're not putting the kindling of word, sacrament, and prayer into your life? You have to pursue it, you have to fight for joy. And when you fall into sin, I say this reverently, so please don't hear what I'm not saying. God is less concerned that you fell into sin than why you fell into sin. Do you understand what I'm saying? You ever tell your kids that? I'm less concerned that you broke the lamp than why you broke the lamp. Why did you feel like it was the best thing to disobey me, my son, my daughter, whatever? And I think the Lord on a much more higher level is saying, why was it that you thought that what you did, which I told you not to do, would fulfill you in the way that I told you it wouldn't fulfill you, right? He's more concerned why you did it than that. He's concerned that you did it, don't get me wrong, but it's more a matter of the heart. Why? Why did you drink from the cisterns that were broken and had dirt and gunk and everything pouring into them when there's fresh water over here that I'm offering you?" That's what he wants to know. You know, some Christians have self-control to keep their nose clean for a while. Some Christians, this is usually the firstborn, maybe you can attest to this. Some Christians, they just naturally know how to keep the law. They can just keep the law, you know. And they know how to keep their nose clean, but sometimes and oftentimes they can do it for the wrong reason. If you want an example of that, ask yourself this question, do I come to church to worship the Lord with the people of God because I have to or because I have to? Ask yourself that question. And then there's other Christians who have the heart to serve the Lord with their whole life, but they either have no self-control to do it, or they have no intentionality to make it happen. They need other people to come along and draw them pictures and write them game plans and show them how to do it. And this is why the symmetry of heart, head, and hands is so important. Look at verse four. Where there's symmetry, there's diligence. Look at verse four. You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. It never, and I don't say this arrogantly, beloved, it never ceases to amaze me, because it happens in my life too sometimes. It never ceases to amaze me in my counseling, discipling, preaching, pastoring, when I come across brothers and sisters who approach God's law as if they were preferences. You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. They're not suggestions, they're commands. They're commands. But we are so good, and I really tried to emphasize this morning in the text in Peter, we're so good at unapplying it to ourselves, right? We're just so good, like, we talk about, oh, there's a bunch of scripture twisters out there, them Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons, but man, when it comes to something that we wanna do and we wanna do it, but we know there's a text that says don't do it or vice versa, we're just good at saying, well, that doesn't technically apply to me. We're just, we're good at it. And that's scary because the psalmist says, you have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. It's a life of long obedience in the same direction. It's not an afterthought. It's a forethought. It is intentional. It's not sloppy. It is planned. And whenever I think about that, the way I have to churn up my heart, as it were, is to think of David. For all his blemishes, he was, after all, a man after God's own heart. And remember when he said in 1 Chronicles 21-24, I will not offer burnt offerings that cost me nothing. I will not offer burnt offerings that cost me nothing. What does your life of worship and allegiance to the Father look like? Does it cost you something? You know, guys, you want to get your wife a present for your anniversary. You know, she's probably not gonna ask the question, how much did it cost, because that's just gauche in our culture to do that, right? But if she did, you wanna be able to say, it was pretty pricey. You don't wanna say, Fred at work gave it to me. Right? Fred? The guy that's divorced? Take it back, I don't want it, you know? No, you wanna, it cost me something. I had to work overtime, honey, because you're worth working overtime for. right? When it comes to the Lord, how much more? How much more are we willing to give up the social media for a second to get on our knees and pray? Give up the social media, give up the Facebook, give up the Consumption of news that really just depresses anyways and just open the word of God and read some good, inspiring, hope-filled promises that are gonna put wind in ourselves in a way that's gonna last and echo into eternity. I will not offer burnt offerings that cost me nothing. So much of my counseling, and I tell you guys this all the time, that I do, so much of the counseling that I do, and even that the other pastors do, is not so much a string of aha moments, like we walk in and we're just dropping these wisdom bombs. People are like, whoa, the shoe's just dropping all over the place. Like every once in a while that happens, right? But that's usually not what it is. You know what the majority of our council, which is, by the way, just discipling, what the majority of discipling is? It's John 13, 17, and you should memorize this. Don't tattoo it on your body, but memorize it, okay? Jesus says, if you know these things, disciples, what? Blessed are you if you do them. Blessed are you if you do them. You know what so much of counseling is and discipling is? It's like, okay, here's homework for next week, all right? I want you to work on this, I want you to get in the Word, I want you to pray, get on your knees, and then next week I'm gonna ask you about it. It's called accountability. That's really the majority of what we're doing. And that's a good thing, that's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. Can I just say something? Maybe I shouldn't say this. We'll cut it out of the recording if I need to later, but I think our church as a whole, as much as I love this church, I think we've got a long way to go when it comes to discipleship. I think many of us in this place think, I don't need to be a disciple. I've read Louis Burkhoff's systematic theology cover to cover, so I'm good. You're not. You need accountability. I need accountability. Every pastor here needs accountability. The deacons need accountability. You need accountability. And the best people to do that is the people in this church. And you know what? If you talk about how bad the seeker-sensitive movement is, where they're just trying to get everybody in in one buck shot, just say a prayer, walk an aisle, and then, oh, we've got all these numbers. That's horrible, that's horrible. What's kind of the biblical way to do it? Well, it's called multiplication. Discipleship by multiplication, you know how that works? You get discipled and then you go disciple somebody else. So I mean, just a rhetorical question I have, who are you discipling right now? Now, there's formal discipleship and then there's informal, but is there somebody in this place into whose lives you're speaking? We have young ladies here who need wisdom in what kind of man to look for. We have young men here who need wisdom in what kind of lady to look for and control and self-control in the onslaught of pornography that's out there. I just read an article yesterday. I know I'm rambling, but I just read an article yesterday. No, it's a documentary on CBS. that is doing an expose on pornography. And they're giving certain professional opinion about pornography. And it said this, it said, experts have typically said that pornography is bad, it messes up your brain, like even young people who start to look at it too early, it will actually rewire your brain. And the answer is that we need to stay away from it. But now experts are just kind of taking a, if you can't beat them, join them mentality. Now they're saying, It's inevitable. Our kids are going to look at it. So kind of like we would watch a movie with him to train them how to think through it and process it, we just need to let them be exposed to pornography and then just teach them about it. That's horrible. But that's the world that young men live in now. They need help. If we took a poll, if we took a poll, of how many men in this place, in this room, in that room, and maybe the overflow room, take pornography, look at pornography, it would probably surprise you. And I wanna say as a pastor, together with my other pastors, kinda like what God says to us, young men, if that's you, and even women, if that's you, we care less that you're doing it and more about why, and we wanna help you. We wanna help you. We're not here to throw anybody under the bus. We wanna help you. We want to give you something better, something that will give you joy and free up your conscience. So we need to work at it. We need to remember, if you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. And we need to work toward habit. Fourthly, Happiness is cultivated by long obedience in the opposite direction of shame. Look at verse five and six. Oh, that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes. Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments. The word shame, the concept of shame is used in Psalm 119 alone six times. Shame. Now remember, this is an Eastern culture. It's an ancient Near Eastern culture, but it's an Eastern culture. Some of you, many of you know that in many Eastern cultures today, there is a culture of shame in those cultures. And many people look at that as a bad thing. And I just wanna say, that culture is in your Bible, okay? Shame is a bad thing in the sense that I don't want to be ashamed of what I'm doing, but shame is also something, listen to me, that the Lord uses to bring you back to your senses. Church discipline, as difficult as it is, is one of those things that the ministers or the church, if you will, exercises the keys of the kingdom and shames sin, in some cases publicly, for the sake of bringing that brother or sister back into the fold. And I've seen it. I've seen it in this church. I've seen it in other churches where doing something like that will actually bring somebody to repentance. It's a good thing. And instead of running away from it, we need to embrace it. Shame from wrongdoing was something that needed to be avoided like the plague in the Hebrew mindset. But today, the concept of shame has been redefined and reappropriated such that psychologists and psychiatrists, this is crazy, they get paid buku amounts of money to tell people, you don't need to feel ashamed of that. I mean, think about that for a second. Think about how much money they get paid to tell people lies. You were deprived of blankets as a child, it's not your fault, you don't need to be ashamed. No, you do need to be ashamed of your sin. You know, sometimes people come to me and they're working with a sensitive conscience and they're like, you know, I feel guilty about this, what do you think? And I go to the Bible, I don't give my own opinion, but nine times out of 10, I say, if you feel guilty, it's probably because you're guilty. I mean, I knew that before I went to Bible school, right? If you feel guilty, you're probably guilty. So it's not a bad thing if your motivation for not sinning is not wanting to be ashamed. There's nothing wrong with that. I think the problem today is that we've forgotten how to blush over sins like Jeremiah lambasted the Israelites for. Some of you remember Ted Haggard some years ago. Remember Ted Haggard? Anybody? He was a minister of a large church in Colorado. He was the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. And he was very influential, very much in the limelight. And it was found out that he was doing coke and with a male prostitute in a hotel room. And they were just sending it up. And of course, all this heat came on him, and he repented, and he stepped down. And after a year, he came back, and he said, you know, I've been praying, doing some word studies. It's always the word studies, right? I've been praying, doing some word studies, and seeking the Lord's face, and I really feel like he wants me back in ministry, and I think I over-repented. That's what he said. I over-repented. Well first off, over-repentance is not even an English word, and it's certainly not a Hebrew or Greek word because it's not in the Bible. We've forgotten how to blush. But I want you to notice this direct correlation between not being put to shame and having our eyes fixed on all the commandments of God. The whole counsel of God means all the commandments of God. You know some of the people in my, as I've looked at my teachers and professors and people who write books, the people that get attacked the most in the evangelical world are the people who actually try to preach the whole counsel of God. Have you ever noticed that? John MacArthur came out with a book some years ago, The Lordship Salvation Debate, I think it was The Gospel According to Jesus, and you would have thought that guy was a Pharisee. He was getting thrown under the bus. They were calling him a Romanist and a Papist and all this, and he was just like, I'm just trying to go to the Bible and try to balance everything out. The people who teach the whole counsel of God are often the ones that get attacked the most. But the fact of the matter is, look at this direct correlation between I will not be put to shame having my eyes fixed on all your commandments. You notice that? There's a direct correlation to not being put to shame and having your eyes on all of God's commandments. Finally tonight, happiness is cultivated by a humble obedience. Look at verses seven and eight. I will praise you with an upright heart when I learn your righteous rules. I will keep your statutes, do not. utterly forsake me." And I think this last line in verse eight, I will keep your statutes. I know in verse seven, excuse me, I will praise you with an upright heart instead of when put as, as I learn your righteous rules. That's a better translation of the preposition. What he's saying is, I will praise you with an upright heart continually as I continue to learn about you and myself. And I think what that underscores is a disposition of humility. We don't have it all figured out yet. We're still learning. We're still growing. And oftentimes I learn things from people about life, people who have been walking with Jesus less years than I have, and that's okay. It's okay to be instructed and rebuked and encouraged and edified and prompted on by those who have been walking with Jesus less years than you. The humble heart will take it from whoever he can get it from, right? One wise man once said, and I'll never forget this, he was a man who's with the Lord right now, his name was Stan, I can't remember his last name, but he said, the easiest people to please are mature Christians. And I've thought a lot about that because especially in the context of the means of grace, I know early on when, especially when I was a seminary student and I'd sit under somebody's sermon, I'm like, well, I didn't like how he did this and I didn't like how he did that. And it was really, really unhealthy, whereas the mature Christians who were much older than me and had much more knowledge than me, you know what they were saying? Oh, wasn't it wonderful when this was said? I got just so much out of this. And as they were explaining it, I'm thinking to myself, wow, you explained it better than he did, but your whole disposition was one of receiving from God's Word rather than critiquing the messenger. And I just thought that's fascinating because, you know, preachers, teachers, ministers, they're just messengers. But they're trying to give you something that we all need to hear. And the easiest people to please are mature Christians who could take something from a horribly communicated message and say, the Lord spoke to me. Those are the easiest ones to please. They're ones that say thank you when you correct them. Have you ever had somebody say that? You rebuke them, okay, and that's a strong word. You correct them, you clarify something with them, you confront them, basically. And they may wrestle a little bit, but then they're like, thank you. Thank you, because I was straying. Thank you for coming after me. Those are the mature Christians. Charles Bridges says of this text, he says, the psalmist is firm in his purpose, but distrustful of his strength. I like that. Firm in his purpose. I will praise you with an upright heart. When I learn your righteous rules, verse eight, I will keep your statutes. Do not forsake me utterly. It's kind of like the, I believe, help my unbelief. And this is the attitude and disposition that we should have as Christians. So, though we strive to be undefiled, the fact of the matter is that we are defiled, but Christ took our defilement for us. Christ always exhibited a perfect symmetry of head, heart, and hands. Christ embraced the shame that you deserve so that you do not have to. And if anyone could be prideful and boastful, it was Christ. But he wasn't. He was meek and he was mild and he invites you to look upon him tonight and be satisfied by his goodness. Let's pray. Father God, thank you for your law. More importantly, Father, thank you for your Son who has kept it perfectly on our behalf. Father, keep us from shame as a people. Keep this congregation from shame as a people. May we, as the psalmist, experienced and articulated, see the direct correlation between avoiding shame and having our eyes on all your commandments. Because we love your law, it is our meditation day and night. We ask these things in Christ's name, amen. All right.