Loving Righteousness

Exploring man’s varying responses to righteousness:

1. an act of putting on righteousness as clothing
2. a love of righteousness
3. an act of walking the way of righteousness
4. a pursuit of righteousness
5. a casting of righteousness to the ground
6. turning the fruit of righteousness into bitterness
7. hunger and thirst for righteousness
8. fear

Psalm 45:

“You love righteousness and hate wickedness;
therefore God, your God,
has set you above your companions
by anointing you with the oil of joy.”

I was thinking yesterday about my life and how I love to indulge in certain “pleasures.”  But I was not always that way – some of the things that I try to love now are things that I abhorred when I was younger.  Why?  Because I had never tried them before or experienced those things.  The only reason that I enjoy them is because I have allowed myself to indulge in them.

I heard a great story about a guy after he had gotten married.  Before his wedding he mostly ate fast food burgers and even when he went to a nicer place to eat, he would eat some time of meat.  But shortly after he got married his wife decided that he was going to eat healthy and she made him eat salads.  He hated it.  Couldn’t stand it.  But he did it.  And after about six months of eating salads all the time [or at least healthy] he was out of town on a trip, away from his wife, and he thought, “Now is my chance to eat some fast food.”  So he went through the McDonald’s drive through and sure enough – it was the most disgusting thing he had ever eaten!  He couldn’t believe that he had ever eaten something like that on a regular basis.

He went through the process of learning to love something else – of forsaking his love of something unhealthy for something healthy.  It’s the same with righteousness and wickedness.  The king we find in Psalm 45 loves righteousness because he worked at applying it in his own life – and he worked at rejecting wickedness in his own life.