Rejoice in the LORD and be glad, you righteous;
sing, all you who are upright in heart! (Psalm 32:11, NIV)
Most of us have at one time or another played with a very good golfer. Nearly ever week on the professional tours, men and women pay big money for this privilege. They put up sponsor-level dollars to be paired with one the game’s finest players—which, if you haven’t already figured this out, is every player on tour.
Now whether you’ve played with a top local collegiate player or your city’s amateur champion or one of those tour professionals, imagine what your friends want to know when you join them for dinner that night. Let me help you: They want to know how stellar the great player was and how far you were from that player’s level.
So imagine if you spend the evening regaling them about your every shot. They keep asking about the great player’s performance—distance off the tee, precision with the mid-irons, sharpness around the greens—and you yammer on about the hole where you laced it out there 228 and hit a not-so-gentle draw into the left greenside bunker, from which you needed two to get out before stroking home a six-footer for your second putt to save double bogey.
Um, no. Just no.
And yet this is how we live much of our lives. Talking about ourselves and what we’re busy doing, forgetting that the richest conversations we can ever have are about the work of our Savior in the hearts of men and women.
David confessed that he was a man of sin, but his blessedness, his health, his protection, and his deliverance all came from the Lord.In Psalm 32, David took up two parallel themes: his transgressions and God’s forgiveness. He could have emphasized the first. Many throughout history and right into our time have done so. They put their sins on display, be it religiously or irreligiously, during the titillating testimonies of the church or the bawdy yarn-weaving of the locker room.
David confessed that he was a man of sin, but his blessedness, his health, his protection, and his deliverance all came from the Lord. This is where his praise was pointed.
Finally, in the closing verse of the psalm, David’s crescendo called on “the righteous” to rejoice in the Lord. In our transgressions, none of us are righteous. In that pro-am, our transgressions are lifted from us when the score of our professional partner is all that’s counted on the card. In the same way (though with eternal worth!), we are deemed righteous in our Savior’s covering. And we are “the righteous” in David’s reckoning when we do one thing right: praise God for what he has done in our hearts.
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Jeff Hopper
July 8, 2019
Copyright 2019 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
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