Psalm 19: Declare Me Innocent from Hidden Faults

September 4, 2008

It is remarkable how easily we slip up in our firmest resolutions.

For example, I had recently included a daily meditation on this blog as a part of my spiritual exercises each morning–and here I am, four days from the last instance of such a meditation. Certainly, there are very many people who have more resolution, more grit in them than I, to whom a simple discipline like three or four paragraphs each morning would be as easy to remember as breakfast. But these more resolute and admirable individuals suffer from the same chronic human frailty, however much less than I–and the frailty is so significant, that it ultimately doesn’t matter how far you shore up the walls of your self-discipline in comparison to any other poor slob. You still fall all over yourself when it comes to life.

If we can’t even hang on to our own simple resolutions, how much less can we possibly hang on to the perfect purity and positive holiness required by the law God has set for us?

The most curious part of this lapse in my blogging is that I had no idea I missed more than one day. If you know me, you know that I am frequently absent-minded because I focus to narrowly on the present; but even so, it seems appalling that four days could pass without my noticing them. It’s a strange pattern, but one that repeats itself often in my life–and, I am sure, in yours in some way or other. The pattern is this: following a period of strong and rewarding pursuit of some area of holiness, one sort of comes up for air–and forgets to go back down. Usually it takes a certain amount of anguish to remember to go back down. Or perhaps I should slightly alter my metaphor and say that pausing in the pursuit of some area of holiness is like holding one’s breath under-water. Sometimes one gets so fascinated by how it looks down there, in the murky light, with the fish flashing by, that only the burning of one’s lungs reminds one to surface again and focus on the most important thing–breathing.

Today then, my prayer, with David, is to know my own lapses, and that I might honor the perfection of God’s law by trying with all my might to honor it:

Who can discern his errors?
Declare me innocent of hidden faults. Keep back your servant from presumptuous sins;
Let them not have dominion over me!
Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression.

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