Psalms 5:8

Lead me, O Lord, in Thy righteousness.

A resolve and a prayer

God is addressed as a friend. Three things in David’s prayer.

1. What is the rule according to which he looks for this Divine guidance? “Lead me in Thy righteousness.” The righteousness here is God’s faithfulness. All God’s dealings with His people have been faithful.

2. Why he wishes this leading. It is that he may be divinely instructed in the right path. The Christian may sometimes be in a state of great perplexity as to the way he should go. He desires Divine guidance in the path of Christian experience, in the path of practice, and in the path of precept.

3. The motive he pleads to enforce it with God. The margin reads--“Because of my observers. Who are our observers? The world, fellow Christians, ministers, angels, and God. (William Jay.)

Make Thy way straight before my face.--

Practical paths

Two men aspire to be inventors of first-rate rank. The one spends all his life in study and experiment, and lights upon nothing new; but the other has some surprising discovery to put before the public every year or two. How do we explain the difference? Is it luck and nothing more? The unsuccessful inventor, with perhaps equal ingenuity, is following impracticable and unremunerative paths for a lifetime. The successful inventor knows in what direction others have toiled without profit, and scarcely ever spends a week on a misleading scent. His shrewd despair of finding anything new or remunerative in certain directions shuts him up to one golden path of fruitful research. (Thomas G. Selby.)