MORAL BENCHMARK

Psalm 119: 129 – 136


129 ¶ Pe Your statutes are wonderful; therefore I obey them.
130 ¶ The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.

I found this story on ODB;

Dan Ariely, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducted some tests on human behavior. In one experiment, the participants took an examination in which they would receive money for each correct answer. The participants didn’t know, however, that Ariely was not testing their knowledge but whether they would cheat. He set up the test so that the groups thought it would be easy to get away with cheating.
Prior to taking the exam, one group was asked to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember. To Ariely’s astonishment, none from this group cheated! But all the other groups did have those who cheated. Recalling a moral benchmark made the difference.
It is amazing what the word of God can do to our hearts.
There is a story written by Frank Perreti about a playground.
Once upon a time, there was a fence around the playground and a few easy to follow rules. Kids followed the rules and played every day on every inch of the fenced in park. Then one day, the people in charge of the playground felt that the fence around it and the rules were too constricting for the development of the children, so they had both removed.
When this was done, the kids still came to the park, but instead of playing, they just gathered in the middle of what was now an open piece of ground. Kids began acting out, fighting and finding other ways to get into trouble. Because there was no rules, then there were no rules to break, and everything seemed to be okay.
Like those kids, we all need a set of boundaries to free us to enjoy life. A moral benchmark, gives us the ability to live well with one another.
God gave us his word to be a “lamp unto our feet” to direct us in our moral choices. Otherwise, we would be like the groups of students that asked to remember the 10 commandments. As in our past, our lives would be out of control.