"Blessed are all who love the LORD, who walk in his ways."

Dear Lizzie Mae,

Why couldn't David have left the last half of his sentiment off? In including the last half, he has inadvertently given license to believers to think that legalism is somehow "walking in his ways." Nothing could be further from the truth -- or from the Truth.

Personally, I think David meant it in the way that nourishes intimacy with God, rather than formulizing (reduce to a formula) it.

For me, walking in the "ways of God," means closeness with him. It means friendship, not bondage to religious law. Besides, we must understand that no rule has meaning, or applicable value, unless it has the force of sanction. If there is no sanction, what is the point in following the rule, unless there benefit from doing so? Benefit in the law, in and of itself. Which, of course, with God's law, is exactly the case.

But legalism has little, or nothing to do with with God's values. Not his true values. Legalism is the formalization (to make formal) of faith, or the formulization. It makes faith a rule in itself. It gives faith structure and form, and faith does not have structure and form -- unless you can define structure and form as love for God and one's neighbor.

But how does one draw lines around love? Love, or the outpouring and sacrificing of one's selfhood, for the sake of another, for no other reason than it gives you joy to do so, cannot be confined or structured by lines, and form. As Solomon so wisely put it,

"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned (to regard with contempt)."

If it can't be quenched; if it can't be drowned; if a man would reject all there is for the sake of love, how can it even be defined, let alone regulated by religious law?

Blessed is the man who loves.

That's what the slingshot guy meant.

-- PDM