Let Me Not Eat of Their Delicacies

“Rescue me, O Lord, from evil men;

Preserve me from violent men

Who devise evil things in their hearts;

They continually stir up wars.

They sharpen their tongues as a serpent;

Poison of a viper is under their lips. Selah.” (Psalms 140:1-3 ESV)

“Set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth;

Keep watch over the door of my lips.

Do not incline my heart to any evil thing,

To practice deeds of wickedness

With men who do iniquity;

And do not let me eat of their delicacies.” (Psalms 141:3-4 ESV)

Since we all live on planet earth, we are all going to come in contact with people who practice what is sinful (evil, wicked). Even within the gatherings of what are called “churches,” there are many people who make sin their practice and who do not make obedience to the Lord their practice, including many pastors of said “churches.” And then some people have paying jobs (not living on retirement income) where they come into contact with people who are workers of evil, some of whom profess faith in Jesus Christ.

So, even if we are not unequally yoked (bonded, in partnership with) those who make a practice of what is sinful, i.e. the ungodly, as long as we live on this earth and we go out in public where there are other people or we are where we are around other people, it is very likely that we are going to come up against the influences of those whose lives are not surrendered to Jesus Christ but who are worldly and who have goals and values and beliefs that are not the same as ours. So we have to have on our spiritual armor.

And the Lord is not always going to deliver us physically from such people, but he will deliver us spiritually from their influence and from the fear of them if we rely on the Lord for our support and counsel and guidance, and if we listen to him and do not ignore his words to us and his warnings. And the Holy Spirit will caution us if we are headed the wrong direction, and even if there is a chance that we might head the wrong direction, because the Lord knows the end from the beginning, so he knows what is coming next.

Now, as followers of Jesus Christ we are also all called to go out into the world to share the true message of the gospel of our salvation with the people of the world. And so we are going to be faced with many ungodly people, and some who will try to trip us up with our words, or who will try to tempt us to sin against the Lord or to return to worldly ways and to not be so serious about our walks of faith in Jesus Christ. Or they might challenge us in our beliefs and try to get us to make compromises.

So, we need to have on that spiritual armor all the time and have our faces set like flint (Isaiah 50:7), i.e. firmly standing on the word of the Lord and refusing to bend on anything that has to do with the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of his NT apostles which are for the church, and which are taught in their appropriate biblical context. We can compromise on non-essentials, but we are never to compromise on truth and righteousness and moral purity and honesty and faithfulness and obedience to our Lord.

But we may not be able to accomplish this by ourselves, for our Christian walks of faith depend on us operating in the power and working of God’s Holy Spirit in and through our lives. And so we need to pray for the Lord to help us and to give us all that we need to remain faithful to him and to his service and to remain steadfast in faith and practice in unwavering determination to remain faithful to our Lord and to not compromise our faith and convictions to appease human flesh and to conform to the world.

And we need to pray that the Lord will guard us against all evil, but then we must resist the devil and flee from him and his temptations, in the strength of the Lord. And we must listen to the Spirit’s promptings in our spirits and not ignore them in order to go our own way, instead. So when we pray the kind of prayer prayed by the psalmist in Psalms 141, we must realize that this involves us cooperating with the Lord in doing what he shows us we need to do, but in his power and strength and wisdom.

And the very last line of verse 4 is what really stood out to me today, “And let me not eat of their delicacies.” And this doesn’t have to refer to food, but anything that the people of the world enjoy doing that the Lord may not want us to do because it steals time away from him and his calling upon our lives, or he knows it is a path back to worldly living and away from living the kind of lives that he has called his followers to live, in practice. So, when we get that nudging in our spirits from the Lord, we need to listen to him.

The Spirit Calling

An Original Work / November 12, 2019

Hear the Spirit calling.

He’ll keep you from falling.

Tenderly He’s calling,

“Come and follow Him.”

Walk with Jesus daily.

Don’t give in to lazy.

Folks may call you crazy.

Fellowship with Him.

Follow where He leads you.

Eat what Jesus feeds you.

His love will renew you

If you follow Him.

Do what Jesus tells you.

Don’t let your faith fail you.

His love will avail you

If you walk with Him.

Jesus, Lord and Savior,

Reigneth now forever.

He gave us His favor

So we’d live with Him.

Turning now from our sin,

Holy Spirit live-in.

Holiness we walk in,

Purified by Him.

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