Paths of Righteousness (Psalm 23:3)

I heard a sermon on Psalm 23 a couple of weeks ago. This most famous Chapter in the Bible is so amazingly focused on God and on God's action. In a Chapter with only 6 verses there are 9 things, I can count, that God does. He is my shepherd, He leads, He restores etc. It is the comfort of what God does in the life of a believer and the beauty of how it is expressed that has made this Psalm so beloved.

I've also been thinking about the relationship between what God does, and what God calls his people to do. And in reading the Psalm again this sentence in Vs. 3 stuck out to me: "He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake."
If we see this rightly I believe it can be both a comfort and a motivation for Christians as we seek to obey our Lord.

First of all God initiates; he leads us in the path. Christian obedience is always a response. God has saved us. Christ died for us. The Spirit has given us new life. Even the 10 Commandments are to be followed in response to God's salvation, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery."(Exodus 20:2) .
We obey in response to God and we also obey in dependence on God. It is he who restores our soul. We must acknowledge the reality and live the experience that our obedience is a work of God. The good works we do are him working in us. Our righteousness in day in day out sanctification is a righteousness by Faith. As Paul puts it we have, "the righteousness from God that depends on faith." (Phil 3:9)

This dependence on God doesn't make us slack in obedience. We don't disobey God because we trust that it is him doing all the work anyway. "Are we to sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means!" (Rom 6:15) Rather we are empowered to obey God by this dependence. Apart from God's grace we are powerless to obey his commands. Seeking to obey from our own strength does not honor the law or the law giver. Rather we depend on the power of the Spirit of God and are lead in paths of righteousness. Trying on our own (apart from the grace of God) with the goal of obeying God's commands is like pushing a car on foot with the goal of taking a trip to Seattle. It is foolish, it is useless, it is frustrating, and it will never get us there. Trusting God doesn't deter us from obedience it gives us the ability to obey.

And further more we are motivated to obey by knowing the purpose of our obedience: "for his names sake." There should be nothing more precious in the heart of a born again believer than the glory and honor of the name of our God. God's glory is ultimately the purpose of all things. Glorifying God is what we will be doing forever in the house of the Lord. When we obey God, in small things or great, we should have this in mind. We put our families before our selves for the sake of God's name. We pray for our enemies for his glory. We are kind and honest with our coworkers that Jesus' name may be great in all the earth.

Our obedience begins and ends with God. He initiates. He calls us. He saves us. He restores our souls. But our obedience also results in his Glory. So he is the source of our obedience and he is the destination of our obedience. The concept of God being both the beginning and the end is one that we see repeatedly in Scripture. As you walk day by day facing temptation and frustration depend on your source and look to your goal. They are one and the same.

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Revelation 22:13