Who Shall Dwell on Your Holy Hill?

Do you, like me, sometimes feel like you take three steps forward and two steps back? What gauge do we use to determine whether we are truly pleasing God with our lives? It may surprise us to find that much of what we have been told about the list of behavioral “do’s and don’t’s” for “good Christian people” has little emphasis in the Bible.

In Psalm 15, we have a question and an answer: 

O Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent? 

Who shall dwell on your holy hill? 

He who walks blamelessly and does what is right 

and speaks truth in his heart; 

who does not slander with his tongue 

and does no evil to his neighbor, 

nor takes up a reproach against a friend; 

in whose eyes a vile person is despised, 

but who honors those who fear the Lord; 

who swears to his own hurt and does not change; 

who does not put out his money at interest 

and does not take a bribe against the innocent. 

He who does these things shall never be moved.

Although the process is lifelong, when we assess ourselves before God, what we look for are true, supernatural, inner character changes. We come to know God personally through the cross of Christ, and because of Jesus’s finished work, we through faith are fully accepted and forgiven in him. From that point on, as God does his work in us, we begin to see integrity, goodness for its own sake, truth in our words and thoughts, a disdain for evil, honoring the Lord, telling the truth even when it hurts us, and not taking advantage of people. 

Although these kinds of changes are not easy to observe in the short term, for those of us who have placed our trust in Christ, the real question is, are we more accurately described by Psalm 15 than we were five years ago? If so, take time to rejoice and thank God, as this is truly biblical evidence of God’s inevitable, consistent work in our lives, taking us toward God’s perfect goal. When we are in Christ, it only gets better from here.

In Christ, 

Chris Heinss