Who Could Stand?

If You, Lord, should mark our iniquities,

O Lord, who could stand?

But there is forgiveness with You,

That You may be feared.

Psalm 130: 3-4

I don't want to be a bandwagon Christian, someone who has hopped on the glory train, blowing my whistle, singing my songs, brushing aside my weakness and taking for granted all the grace and mercy that has been extended my way.

There is a story I read many years ago about a man who went over to some country in Europe to pray for revival. He got himself a hotel room and then spent days in constant prayer for the group or country he was interceding for. The stories author came to visit, found out the guy's room, knocked on the door and the voice inside told him to come in. When he entered the room the presence of the Lord was so heavy that he was forced to the floor, where he found the man he was looking for. After talking with the guy for awhile the author had to crawl out of the room before he was able to stand again.

That is the picture I got when reading the verse from Psalm 130. God is not only loving and merciful and forgiving but His forgiveness reminds us that He is holy. We are made in His image so it must be possible to come into His presence but that also means that His desire for us, His pure and loving desire, is that sin is not part of our lives. We are not to hold onto it, to entertain it or to ignore it.

We are made body, soul and spirit and at salvation our spirit is reborn. Because of the grace of God our spirit is then free from sin and remains free from sin allowing the Holy Spirit to come in and reside there. But after salvation and throughout our lives the body retains many of it's carnal desires and the soul, our will and our personality is still is in the process of being transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Thus it says in scripture:

Therefore I urge you brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12: 1-2

Psalm 130 is part of a series of Psalms which pilgrims would sing on their travels up to the temple in Jerusalem to observe one of the major Jewish feasts. Once there they would have the priests offer sacrifices for their sins. But as it says other places in Psalms, God Himself takes no pleasure in the blood of those sacrifices.

The verse in Psalm 130 acknowledges that we in ourselves are powerless to stand before a holy God. And God's desire, then as now, is not for us to try and justify ourselves by religious acts, even those required. Instead He looks to the desire of the heart, the feeling that we have sinned against God and man and want to, need to be forgiven.

It is the same desire that our Father wants from us today. We are in a sense still like those pilgrims heading up to Jerusalem. Our bodies are weak and our souls struggle to respond clearly to the moving of The Holy Spirit and we fall short. Our daily struggle is to not be conformed to this world. Our sacrifice is to continually seek Him, to trust Him, to live our lives full of the fear of the Lord but free from the fear of man.

One day, in one sense or another, we will all stand before an Awesome and Holy God. Blessed is he that is forgiven.