God’s Word for You
Psalm 141:3-4 a guard over my mouth
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, August 7, 2025
3 O LORD, set a guard over my mouth;
keep watch over the door of my lips!
4 Do not let my heart lean toward any evil,
to take part in wicked deeds
in company with men who do wicked things.
Let me not eat any of their delicacies!
Verse 3, “Set a guard over my lips,” is a prayer for help in a man who struggles with the Second and Eighth Commandments. This is not just for children, but every Christian should be constantly urged and encouraged to honor and use God’s name and keep it constantly on our lips. Truly honoring God’s name means looking to the name of God for comfort and help in everything, and therefore calling on his name in prayer. The heart that honors God will also look to him and confess faith in him.
We also honor God’s name when we keep ourselves from lies, gossip, false doctrine, deception, and all the other sins against the Eighth Commandment. And here we should emphasize knowing right doctrine above all. When we don’t care about God’s will, we won’t know how to keep that will. People convince themselves that it’s no big deal to practice exaggeration, manipulating facts, a little playful deceit, and other crimes against the Eighth Commandment. But they talk themselves into a corner, and they end up trying to hold onto a double standard of corruption. Our Large Catechism explains human nature with precision: “Where judges, mayors, princes, or others in authority sit in judgment, we always find that, true to the usual course of the world, men are loath to offend anyone. Instead, they speak dishonestly with an eye to gaining favor, money, prospects, or friendship. Consequently, a poor man is inevitably oppressed, loses his case, and suffers punishment. It is the universal misfortune of the world that men of integrity seldom preside in courts of justice” (Large Catechism I:258). But David is not only a man who is often wronged by other people. He was also a captain or general in Saul’s army. He became the second King of Israel. He was himself a man in a position to say things that would bring misfortune and judgment to other men, and unjustly if he himself was not careful. And so he also prays, “Keep watch over the door of my lips!” He does not want to sin against God’s name, nor against the life or reputation of anyone who depended on him for justice and truth. “Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking lies” (Psalm 34:13).
In verse 4, he expands his prayer from sins of the tongue to sins of every kind. “Do not let my heart lean toward any evil.” I think David has in mind here the words of Moses, that “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5). The Lord repeated this judgment after the flood (Genesis 8:21). David knows that he is in a position for terrible sin. He committed terrible sins while king, with a woman, with a friend, with his whole army—but he repented and his heart remained always with the Lord.
David prays that God would not let him incline or lean toward anything evil, not “to take part in wicked deeds in the company of men who do wicked things.” This is very much like a prayer to keep Psalm 1:1, to avoid those wicked men who are sinners and mockers.
Sinful, unbelieving man has free choice, free will, in only one matter: to sin. The fallen sinner without faith can do nothing at all to please God. Therefore, even when he approaches a godly act, it is only as if he has stumbled onto something that overlaps the path of righteousness, but it is not righteous at all, because it is not done from faith. Jesus preaches: “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin. A slave has no permanent place in the family” (John 8:34-35). So the one who can only sin, who is a slave to sin, is not part of Christ’s family at all. Such a sinner can only make excuses for his sins. Or, worse, he will deny that he has sinned, or deny that sin is wrong. David doesn’t care how “good” such a sinful life might be, full of privileges, wealth, indulgence of every kind, whatever the eye craved the hand could reach out and take—such a life only digs a deeper pit in hell. “Let me not eat any of their delicacies!” For the person without faith, the one who thinks he can lie, cheat, swindle and bully his way through life, who changes the subject whenever his sins are shown to him, “free will” is a name without reality; a thing that only has a name and no substance at all. Such a person is a fool. “In the grave, where he is going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). Inside that man’s heart “there is only death” (Lamentations 1:20). He can’t say “But I knew nothing about any of this,” for God knows the heart (Proverbs 24:12). He will be caught in his sinful plans (Psalm 10:2). “Consider this, you who forget God, or I will tear you to pieces, with none to rescue you” (Psalm 50:22).
But Christ gives us his holiness, his obedient life, and his death that atoned for our sins. This is his teaching and his gift to us. “If you hold to my teaching,” he says, “you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32). What about our will? We conform ourselves to God’s will, “for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13). He will give relief to you who are troubled, and we trust that he will turn aside the schemes of the wicked that are always so far from God’s law. Those who hope in the Lord will be brought to heaven in the end (Psalm 37:9). The Lord will bring an end to the violence they suffer, and he will make everyone who trusts in him righteous and forever secure. We have a place with him in eternity, and we will be safe and happy there, without end.
Lord God heavenly Father, you take no pleasure in the death of poor sinners, and you would not willingly let them perish. But you desire that they would repent of their sins and return to your way from their ways, and live. We pray with all our heart that you would graciously remove the punishment we deserve for our sins, and that you would tenderly grant us your mercy, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.