The Lord preserves all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy. (Psalm 145:20) From this Psalm, there are a few ideas that we should string together in faith and place into action for our lives. First, there is a correlation between loving God and being righteous (that is not wicked). Second, if you love God, He will perserve your life. Thirdly, if you don’t love God, you must be wicked and therefore will be destroyed. Conversely, the questions that are begged as a result of these conclusions are: how do you love God? Secondly, why is Good looking to destroy the wicked if being wicked is a matter of loving God? Why doesn’t He try to woo the wicked into loving Him? I will address all three conclusions and questions now. If loving God distinguishes you from the “wicked” that the Psalmist writes about, then we should do our best to love God. To love God is to make Him everything your heart, mind and soul focuses on. That is to say that a person who loves God always considers God, and thinks about God, and am mindful of Him. Therefore, a person who loves God is always looking to receive from God what God gives and does in his or her life. A person who loves God will reflect upon these things and appreciate God for loving them. A person who is wicked, on the other hand, will not. The reason God destroys the wicked is because in God’s objective judgment, He cannot stand the wicked. The only logical conclusion is that the wicked be judged and the judgment results in destruction. This gets deeper, but that is as far as I want to go for our study today. What I want to impress upon all of us is that we are acting wickedly when we fail to recognize God for His worth in our lives because by failing to recognize God, we are essentially making ourselves gods. No, we are not the masters of the universe, nor are we even remotely in control of life as we know it. So we should recognize God and not be as wicked to think that we are above Him. In conclusion, if and when we love God. Notice that the passage doesn’t say when we are perfect. Nor does the passage say when we keep all the commandments. It says, when we love God, that is when God preserves us. The key here is that the prerequisite for being sustained by God in our very unfair lives, is to love God. In loving God, He will make sure we are preserved. Let’s pray for our brothers and sisters suffering the tragedy at the Navy Yard in DC. Remember their families. Ask that God preserves them with His love.
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