Psalm 119:7 I will praise thee with uprightness of heart, when I shall have learned thy righteous judgments.

I was saved in a Christian culture that acted as if everything was within God’s control. I understand their point of view now, but why didn’t they place at least a little importance of the process of participation? In today’s verse I would like to point to the phrase when I have learned. The mind has to take an active role in understanding. Knowledge does not come from slothfulness. That is not God’s desire for us.

Psalms 32:9 Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle,

Change comes from experience, active participation in those things the Father asks of us. Sure He has given us free will, but He has also given us His Word. To do His Word is to grow in character, in knowledge, and in relationship. The cake doesn’t just suddenly appear because you bought a cook book.

The second condition of today’s verse is uprightness of heart. Doing the right thing means nothing if the condition of the heart has not changed. It is more than begrudging willingness. To do because it is who you are in character is the goal. That takes a change of heart.

Jeremiah 17:9-11 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings. As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not;

Merely doing is insufficient, the end result is what counts. That brings me to the third point. I praise God by the life I live if I take an active role of cooperative participation. This is the life that pleases God.

James 1:2-4 My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

Dick van Dyke was famous for his Pratt falls. He would trip, slip, stumble and sometimes flip over the tiniest of objects, often as small as a hair or piece of string. It is silly to think that we are so easily tripped up by little sins. If we have been walking with the Lord fo any length of time at all, we know where temptation comes from, our old nature.

1 John 2:16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.

John 15:19 If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.

He who walks in the spirit does not stumble nor fall. To walk by faith requires a purpose, a direction, a mindset, an unction. When we have this the temptations of the old life are suppressed. It is not that temptation still does not exist, it is ignored, passed over, like a hair on the floor that will not trip us up.

Our problem is that we do not always walk in the spirit. We are human and as such not yet perfected. We walk through the world, even though our lives are in Christ. We perceive the world, we see. smell and taste the world yet these are not temptations. They are the world.

Romans 6:2 How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?

Temptation is the old dead man we were knocking on the coffin. Don’t answer.