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Learning

         I will praise you with an upright heart as I learn your righteous laws. (Psalm 119:7) 

Learn is the first key word in this passage, at least today. The book I’ve been reading with my Sunday School class for the past 13 weeks is Renovation of the Heart. It’s all about learning, which involves gaining information and putting it to use. It’s not enough to read God’s righteous laws. It’s not even enough to memorize them. The whole point is to build them into our lives.

And if we return to the ideas presented over the past few days, it makes perfect sense to praise God as we learn His righteous laws, because it is as we learn to live in the way we are designed to live, our lives must improve, even if our circumstances don’t.

One reason for this is that when we understand how things are supposed to work, we’re better able to understand that something is wrong, and possibly what is wrong.

The second key word in this passage is upright. How often do we praise with an upright heart? Put another way, how often do we praise as a means to an end? How often do we praise because we’ve gotten what we wanted? Do we praise because the music moves us to, because it makes us look good, or because everyone else is excited, too?

This is where my challenge fell last night. After I turned out the lights, I decided to praise God until I fell asleep. There was no music, no good news, no wonderful Bible passages running through my mind. Yet, this is a time in which we should also praise. If God is good all the time, then God is good when we can’t muster the “yippy skippy” feelings to say that God is good all the time

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