Psalm 119:6 – Overcoming Shame

Then I won’t be ashamed,
When I keep my eyes on all your commands.

I didn’t get the poetry in my translation. It’s hard to get everything into it at once.

This verse strikes at one of our most serious problems. Our identity. Our ability to live with ourselves.

You’ve surely heard stories of people going on various pilgrimages to find themselves. Others go through their lives with a continuous question of whether they are important, or contribute, or make a difference of some kind. Who are we?

Often this comes as shame. We are ashamed of things we have done. Let me confess that there are things I have done in my life of which I am not proud. Even more, I have rarely (almost never) done my work to what I consider a high level of quality. There are always things in what I do that I want to apologize for, even to myself.

But when we get our eyes on God, in this case the God revealed in the commands he gave, we can begin to find our identity. The God who did these things actually cares about us.

⁷ “It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples. ⁸ It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

Deuteronomy 7:7-8 (NRSVue)

For a New Testament quote,

¹ See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

1 John 3:1a (NRSVue)

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