Psalms 57:7; 26:1–2, 11
My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed.
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Judge me, O Lord; for I have walked in mine integrity. . . .
Examine me, O Lord, and prove me; try my reins and my heart. . . .
I will walk in mine integrity.
When difficulties are upon us and when trouble seems everywhere, part of the endurance spoken of so often in the psalms is characterized here as being “fixed.” When we have done all else we can do, we can take our stand, plant our feet, stiffen our resolve, and fix our heart. As a great religious reformer once said, so we can say: “I stand here and can say no more. God help me.”137
We can’t always control external experiences. We can’t always control the forces of nature or mortality. Things swirl around us coming from the complexity of telestial life that won’t always yield to our wishes. But we can fix our heart. We can remain true, we can keep our integrity, we can hold to that which we believe. No matter what happens, we can refuse to be dissuaded in our faith or altered in our loyalty to God and true principles.
Job, the archetype for the tried and troubled man, said even as his woes mounted and his ills increased: “All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils; my lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit. God forbid that I should justify you: till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me. . . . Let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know mine integrity.”138
But what do we do if we are not always as strong as Job? Where do we turn for greater integrity than our own, for determination to be true when we are stumbling? One of the wonderful hymns that we sing about the Atonement reminds us how we can fix our heart—or, more properly, who can fix our heart—when we are not as firm as we ought to be:
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, as a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart; O, take and seal it;
Seal it for thy courts above.139
However weak or tried or tempted we may feel, Christ can seal us, fix us, fasten us “as a nail in a sure place.”140 His gift to us was fixed with just such certainty on the cross at Calvary.
Notes
^137. Martin Luther, “Before the Diet of Worms.”
^139. “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” Hymns (1948), no. 70.