DUNCAN/The resolutions of a Godly leader
If you have your Bibles, please open to Psalm 101. As you look at Psalm 101, it’s not difficult to see that this is a Psalm in which the king of Israel is making certain resolutions about what kind of a king he’s going to be, and what kind of people he’s going to surround himself with. It seems to me that the words of this Psalm are very appropriate for all of us in any position of authority, whether it’s in the nation, the community, the church, or the home.
Do you make resolutions at the turn of the year? And are you like me? You have all sorts of grand designs for what you’re going to accomplish in the year to come, and by March you’ve forgotten or failed at most of them? Well, I’m not talking about resolutions about weight loss and other things of that nature. I’m thinking about spiritual resolutions. Do you make spiritual resolutions? The Bible indicates that it is a good and a wise, and even a necessary thing for believers to make resolutions and vows to the Lord.
What we have before us in Psalm 101 is a series of resolutions by a Christian. And in fact, Jesus and Paul and many of the Old and New Testament saints on numerous occasions made resolutions and vows, and I want to suggest to you that if you do not plan and resolve to live a godly life, it’s unlikely that you will. In other words, resolutions are an appropriate and healthy part of the Christian life.
I. Resolutions are Biblical
Now let me draw your attention to two things as we study this passage, and the first is simply this: resolutions are biblical. Sometimes people, in seeing that Christians express intentions that they don’t follow through on and then feel guilty about them, say, “You know, the best way to live the Christian life is not to make resolutions at all, because we’ll fail.” In fact, they’ll say the best way to live the Christian life is to just stop trying to be good, because you can’t be good. Well, it’s fascinating to me that that’s not how the Bible depicts the Christian life for us. The Apostle Paul filled his writings with exhortations of things to do. He is filled by his own examples of vows that he has made, and here in Psalm 101 we have a godly Christian making resolutions and vows.
David vows six things in this passage. Let me highlight three for you. First of all, he says, “I will sing of steadfast love and justice to You, O Lord.” He’s saying that he’s going to sing, because we sing about what we really care about. Then he resolves to behave wisely: “I will ponder the way that is blameless.” What’s he going to think about? “I’m going to think about what it means to live in integrity before God, to walk wholeheartedly before God, to be holy because God is holy.” And then he says, “I will walk with integrity of heart within my house.” It’s interesting, isn’t it, that that’s exactly where Paul takes us when we’re thinking about elders. He says, “Look at their homes. See how he lives out the Christian life in his home and make your judgment about what kind of a man he is from that.”
David makes resolutions throughout this passage, and there is no criticism within the Psalm of the idea of David making these kinds of resolutions. Let me just say it again: If we do not plan and resolve to live the godly life, it is unlikely that we will. Our aspirations are important in the Christian life. The things that we purpose to do are important in the Christian life, and we manifest this all over the place in the Christian church. When people get married they make vows. They do it before God and the whole congregation. And as one of our wise and godly elders says, the vows that they make, they break by the time they’ve walked out of the door of the church! But does that mean that those vows are unimportant? Far from it. They reflect significant aspirations in the Christian life. So resolutions are an important part of the Christian life. That’s the first thing that I want you to see from this Psalm.
II. Resolutions are Insufficient for the Christian Life
But the second thing is this: Resolutions are, in and of themselves, insufficient for the living of the Christian life. Are you like me? As you read through these words of David vowing to God as to what kind of king he would be, do you hear echoes of his very failures of every single one of these resolutions? Do you realize that David failed these resolutions at some point or another in his life?
When I hear him say, “I’m not going to plan wickedness,” my mind immediately flashes back to that day when he was standing up on his roof, having slept very late in the morning, and he looked out across the rooftop, and he saw a beautiful woman taking a bath. And he started thinking about how he could take her for himself, even though she was not his wife and she was married to another. And he plotted and schemed and was involved in murder and every other manner of sin. In fact, he broke every single one of the Ten Commandments in the course of that.
My friends, this reminds us of why salvation must be by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. When David broke his resolutions and when he broke the law of God in the incident of Bathsheba, in Psalm 51 he doesn’t say, “Lord, have mercy on me because I made some really good resolutions.” He says, “Lord, forgive me because of Your lovingkindness and Your steadfast love.”
David, though he resolves to live a certain way, and though he fails to live a certain way, he does not plead that he tried to live a certain way. He pleads God’s grace and God’s mercy. That’s so important for us to understand because on the Last Day it will be an utterly inadequate answer to say before God, “I tried to live a good life.” That will be an utterly insufficient answer, because there’s only one king that has ever lived out these resolutions, and His name is the Lord Jesus Christ.
But the good news is that if you will trust Him, God in His mercy will receive you into His kingdom and forgive you and make you His child and keep you forever. It’s so important for us to understand that resolutions do have an important part in the Christian life, but our trust, our confidence, is not in our resolutions or in our keeping of them. It is in the grace of God shown to us in the gospel of His dear Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III is Chancellor & CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) in Jackson.