Psalm 119:7

It is right that when we ask something of God, that we resolve to praise Him for it when we have received it. And it is good that we tell Him that we shall do so. This is what we find happening in our verse for today’s meditation.

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

I can think of three reasons why the psalmist would praise God when he had learned His righteous judgments. First, he will praise God because those righteous judgments would not be there to learn if God did not give them to us. Secondly, he will praise God for this because we would never learn God’s judgments if God did not incline our hearts to want to learn them. Thirdly, God is to be praised for this because we cannot learn His righteous judgments except He teach us. We can read them and hear them taught, but without the enabling of the Holy Spirit, we will not learn. The book we read and the teacher we hear are the instruments, but God the Holy Spirit is the teacher. No matter how good a Biblical scholar you may be, always recognize that you can only learn the Scriptures if God teaches you. Were God to withhold the enabling of His Spirit, your learning would cease. So you do well every time you seek to learn to ask God to teach you. And we shall find the psalmist doing just that repeatedly in this psalm.

Notice that when speaking of learning God’s righteous judgments, the psalmist speaks in the future perfect tense. This tense shows that learning God’s judgments is something that will occur in the future. Now to be sure, other verses in this psalm show that the psalmist already knew God’s righteous judgments. Yet the fact remains that so long as we live in this world no matter how much of God’s word we know, there is always more to learn. God’s righteous judgments are an inexhaustible treasure. This writer has been studying the Scriptures for 44 years, and preaching for 41 years. Yet he feels he is but skimming the surface of all there is to know about God’s righteous judgments. It is as though he is just beginning to grasp them. There is so much more to learn!

As for praising God with uprightness of heart, let’s begin by defining the word uprightness.

Uprightness - The state or condition of being sincere, honest, or just; equity or justness in respect of principle or practice; moral integrity or rectitude.

First, God must be praised “with…heart.” To worship with the lips but without the heart is an act of hypocrisy. It is pretence. It is not true worship.

Mark 7:6 He (Jesus) answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

Secondly, God must be praised “with uprightness of heart.” For God to accept our worship, it must proceed from a heart that is sincere, and true, and clean.

Joshua 24:14 Now therefore fear the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the LORD.

Well might we cry with the psalmist David:

Psalm 51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.

And lastly, if we would praise God with uprightness of heart, we need to learn His righteous judgments. God will not accept just anything that calls itself worship. His worship must be according to His righteous judgments, in the way and manner He has prescribed in His word.

God grant us to learn His righteous judgments that we may render to Him the praise that is His due in the way that pleases Him.