Psalm 141:1-4
"Lord, I call upon You; hurry to me!
Listen to my voice when I call to You!
2 May my prayer be counted as incense before You;
The raising of my hands as the evening offering.
3 Set a guard, Lord, over my mouth;
Keep watch over the door of my lips.
4 Do not incline my heart to any evil thing,
To practice deeds of wickedness
With people who do wrong;
And may I not taste their delicacies."
Given today's date, I thought today that I would take a moment and speak about the Holy Incense of daily prayer.
In this psalm, the psalmist David asks God to accept his prayer as equal to the incense being burnt in the temple, and to accept the raising of his hands as the evening offering. When you take a moment to think about it, that is quite a bold request to make of the one true God who laid out the commandments of worship to His people.
Yet, we find that God accepted this Davidic psalm, and called David, "a man after my own heart." So what is it about this particular psalm that speaks to us today?
The answer is in the rest of the psalm where David goes on to pour out his heart to God in his desire to be holy and to live a life that is pleasing to God, and not to himself or his popularity with his fellow man. He asks God to keep him from the counsel of wickedness which comes from those who deliberately live lives of sinfulness. It is this heart, this desire for holiness, which equivocates with the incense of the temple, and the evening offerings. A desire to seek after holiness equates as similar to the temple offerings which covered our sinfulness and made us Holy before Him.
To David, the desire to live holy was equal to the act of being cleansed and made holy from our sinfulness. After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
So today, may we echo David's words and ask God to keep us holy so that we do not have to run to Him to be restored to a life of holiness. May we walk in the counsel of the righteous and not the wicked. May the incense of our prayer be pleasing to Him, and not the strange fire of the world.
Amen.
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