Psalm 25:1-10 Commentary

Some years back I was a guest preacher at a local church and they told me that the service for that Sunday was going to be focused on education.  They were celebrating that spring’s graduates in the congregation as well as noting the importance of running Christian day schools as in my Reformed tradition we have long done.  Somehow all of that led me to decide to preach on Psalm 25 that day.

The psalm does fit the theme of education.  Most of it is all about learning God’s ways, asking God to instruct, to teach, to guide.  Along the way the psalmist freely admits and acknowledges that such instruction is needed precisely because like all people, the psalmist here is a sinner.  We are prone to leave God’s right pathways.  We tend to ignore the demands of God’s covenant and of the Law that God gave as part of that covenant.  Thus Psalm 25 (including in the dozen verses not included per se in this lection) also has a number of pleas for God’s forgiveness.  But the poet here knows that receiving forgiveness can be a hollow thing if it is not followed up by a desire to do things better next time.  And a key way that this happens is by willingly submitting to the tutelage of God and of God’s Spirit.

Although we sometimes mix this up in our thinking, we know that we are not saved by our own obedience.  God does not wait until we have achieved a certain level of right behavior before activating the grace that saves us.  In my Reformed tradition we have even made it very clear that God’s decision to elect some people to salvation was not based on God’s looking ahead in time and deciding to elect those whom God would see behaved well enough so as to deserve to be among the saved elect people.  No, for grace to be grace it has to be doled out with no regard to people’s obedience past, present, or future.  (Some may find the Reformed Confession of The Canons of Dort to be a bit difficult but if you read through it, you cannot miss the airtight logic of the whole document.  But although some think the Canons just make God out to be capricious with that whole election and reprobation thing, the clear goal of the Canons is to celebrate grace, grace, grace and to let nothing water down that grace.)

But even so—and here we could cue up the alleged conflict between Paul and James in the New Testament—although we know we are not saved by good works or obedient living, we cannot be truly saved without those things either.  Not because good works represent the root of our salvation—that root remains grace alone through faith alone—but because good works are the inevitable fruit of being truly saved.  God’s grace is meant not merely to cleanse our sins—think of the symbolism of baptismal waters—but God’s grace also transforms us.  Grace makes us want to be different people.  Grace alters our point of view on living and on sin.

Thus if people claim to have been saved by grace but show no desire to clean up their acts and live like disciples of Jesus, there could be good reason to wonder if God’s grace has actually penetrated the hearts of such folks.  This is the classic idea taught in places like Romans 6.  Once Paul got wind of the fact that some were taking his clarion message of salvation by grace alone and using it as an excuse to sin more since it will get forgiven anyway, Paul saw red.  Paul wants to make it crystal clear that it is impossible to die to sin and to the old sinful self in baptism—the waters don’t just clean us up but we also drown in those waters—and yet still desire to keep on sinning.

In many traditions the process of sanctification following on justification is chalked up to Gratitude.  Asking for God to instruct us as Psalm 25 does and requesting the help of God’s Spirit to then follow up on what we learn from God’s Law are part and parcel of wanting the entirety of our lives to look like a giant Thank You card to God for his grace in Christ Jesus the Lord.  Seeing it this way also resolves that alleged tension between Paul and James I alluded to above.  Paul makes it clear that you cannot consider your works as contributing in any way, shape, or form to your salvation.  But James makes it equally clear that the truly saved must grow the Fruit of the Spirit in their lives because if you claim to have faith but have zilch to show by way of transformed living, then your very faith is suspect.

And actually this is something the Apostle Paul knew as well as James and you can see it in his Letter to the Galatians.  Paul heard that false teachers had wooed the Galatians into thinking that Jesus did not quite seal the deal on salvation.  The Galatians had to chip in their own good works to get them across the salvation Finish Line.  So Paul spends most of Galatians screaming at them to knock off that kind of thinking as it represents a false gospel.  But then after four whole chapters of that kind of thing, we come to Galatians 5 and lo and behold Paul tells those same Galatians that they could no longer engage in a list of sinful behaviors he gives to them but instead they had to grow the Fruit of the Spirit.  “Keep step with the Spirit” Paul says at the end of the chapter.

“Show me your ways . . . teach me your paths . . . guide me . . . teach me.”  These are the sentiments of someone who knows about not only the wonderful saving power of God’s mercy but of also its transformative power.  Yes, the Christian life is a bit of a tightrope walk.  We are constantly seeking to balance our understanding of the root of our salvation as being grace alone and the fruit of our salvation as being moral living in imitation of Christ.  We cannot mix up root and fruit, though we too often do.  To evoke a classic C.S. Lewis example, if a little boy asks his father for $5 so he can buy Daddy a present, the father happily gives the child the money and then later gushes with enthusiasm over whatever bauble the child bought.  But, Lewis observed, only a fool would conclude the father came out $5 ahead on the deal!

Illustration Idea

Long about 1982 when the second Star Trek movie came out, moviegoers were introduced to the fictional “Project Genesis.”  The Genesis device was said to transform matter at a sub-atomic level, reorganizing matter into life-generating materials.  Early in the film in the scene you can see here Captain Kirk along with Spock and McCoy watch a video demonstration that shows Genesis transforming a dead, lifeless moon into a planet with breathable air, beautiful mountains and lakes, trees, and so forth.  In the video we can see first what looks like the burning off of the old and then very soon the coming to life of the new.

In a somewhat quirky way, that transformation is akin to what we have been pondering in this sermon commentary.  When grace overwhelms our lives, we are changed, transformed.  To riff on the Apostle Paul, the old is gone and the new springs to life.  The one simply must follow the other.