I’m going through the book of Psalms and today, we are on psalm 26. One of the things that stuck out to me in David’s words is his strong feeling towards the wicked. He said, “I do not sit with the deceitful, nor do I associate with hypocrites. I abhor the assembly of evildoers and refuse to sit with the wicked.” (Verses 4 and 5) There are a lot of different directions I could go with this, but one in particular stood out.

In the scriptures, God is frequently associated with light (John 8:12, Ezekiel 1). What this tells us is that there is no evil in him. He is loving, just, powerful and completely perfect in every way. Being a Christian or a Christ-follower means seeking to become more like Jesus every day. This means that Christians should be stepping more and more away from the darkness and therefore, more and more into the light. Light and darkness don’t have anything in common. In fact, darkness is the complete absence of light by it’s very definition. So while Christians are called to live in the world, they are not called to be of it.

This isn’t a call for Christians to be self-righteous. That being said, getting closer to God means that you will have less in common with the darkness. This truth has the potential to create enemies for you. If you shine a flashlight in a dark room, it exposes what’s in there. When people like being in the dark and don’t want anything to do with the light, the flashlight becomes the enemy. If your goal is to get closer to God, this will happen to you. People will be gossiping around you and you’ll choose to not participate or to shut it down because you know it’s not right. Co-workers will be joking about something and you won’t participate in it because you know it’s not funny. You’ll be asked to go to certain places or conduct your business in such a way that you know wouldn’t honor God. In those situations, hopefully you’ll choose to stay true to what you believe and it will create tension with those who don’t agree with you.

In our age of relativism and subjectivity, nobody likes to hear about ultimate right and wrong. People want to believe that they can define their own right and wrong. This couldn’t be more untrue. Being a Christian does not mean losing your backbone and just being a nice person. It means getting closer to the God of the universe, “who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.” (1 Timothy 6:16)

Admittedly, I don’t remember a lot from high school. My priority was partying and girls, so school didn’t really fit into that picture. There is however, a quote from one of my English classes that I remember to this day. It’s actually by William Penn and it says, “Right is right even if everyone is against it; and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.” The quote was actually on a poster and it showed a person standing alone, away from the crowd. The idea really stuck out to me. There will be times when following God means standing alone. It will mean keeping your mouth shut when everyone else is talking. It will mean staying home when everyone else is going out. It will mean walking the long way home when everyone around you is taking the shortcut. There is honor in this. You will know those defining moments when they come. My encouragement to you is to choose integrity. Choose righteousness. Choose love and honor. When this life is said and done and all the smoke settles, these will be the moments that will echo loudly in eternity.