Psalm 51
What if? What if the answer is no? What if, when you ask for something, you’ll be denied? What if your greatest hope and your greatest fear center on the same thing? You hope to hear, “Yes”. You’re afraid to hear, “No.” We have moments like this throughout our lives. Will the test come back negative? Will we be approved for the mortgage? Will I get the job? Will I get into the school I want? Will she say “Yes” to go out with me? Will she say “Yes” to the marriage proposal? Hoping to hear the good answer, fearing to hear the bad makes even asking the question a fearful thing. The uncertainty keeps us from trying. The unknown makes us hold back. If we don’t know, then we don’t want to try. If we’re not sure, then we don’t dare ask.
And nothing seems more frightening, nothing seems more risky, nothing has more at stake than when we ask the Lord for His forgiveness. Think to that moment, that awful moment, when the guilt and the shame of the sin you committed comes rushing back. Every believer in Jesus knows this moment. Every believer in Jesus knows many of these moments. Our heart feels heavy, our stomach kind of feels tight. Our minds can’t believe we did what we did. Our brains try to figure out a way to undo what we did, and we just can’t find a way out.
There’s only one way out, and that is to confess the sin to God. And that’s where we run into problems. We hope, we hope that He will respond kindly. We hope He will forgive. We hope He won’t be so exasperated with us that He’s finished with us. We fear, sometimes, that maybe we stepped over the line, that we sinned one too many times, that we sinned in such a horrible way, that God can’t stomach us anymore, and we’re out, He’s finished, He’s done. We hope for forgiveness, we fear His wrath.
And then, almost beyond belief…then, and it doesn’t really sink in first…then we read and pray and believe and finally life Psalm 51. Verse 1:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out
my transgressions.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been learning a little Hebrew, well, one particular Hebrew word, chesed. And knowing Hebrew isn’t really that important, but knowing what that word means sure does. In Isaiah 54, it meant unfailing love. In Psalm 5, it meant great mercy. And now here, in Psalm 51, we hear it again: mercy, compassion, unfailing love.
And this unfailing love, this great compassion is security, the guarantee we need to confess our sin and ask for forgiveness. God has worked to convince us, through His word, that His love won’t be removed. He’s not going to tell us that He loves us, and then turn around and hate us. He’s not going to promise to not grow angry with us, and then suddenly lose His temper. He’s been working, through His Holy Spirit, to calm us down enough to ask for forgiveness from Him.
And so finally, trusting in that unfailing love, finally we grow confident enough to confess.
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love;
Verse 2:
Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my
transgressions, and my sin is always before me.
This is not a matter of ignorance. We didn’t sin because we didn’t know any better. It’s not because no one told us. We knew full well that what we said to our wife or our husband, how we spoke to our son or daughter, the tone we used with a co-worker was out of line, and certainly not how God wanted us to talk. We know that what we did, or what we avoided doing, was not according to God’s laws. We knew that the thought in our head, the thought of revenge, the thought of greed, the thought of lust should have been dropped as soon as it entered into our brain. But we liked the thought, we liked it a lot, and we let that thought linger too long. And somewhere, the temptation turned into sin. And we knew it.
And we know something else, too. Verse 4:
Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your
sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you
judge.
The words may have been against someone else, the deed may have caused pain to a loved one, but the sin offended the Creator King. And God’s majesty, His holiness, His grandeur is so big that the offense against Him overshadows everyone else. This is between us and God here. We have to face our Lord and Master, first, and then we can turn and try to repair things with the people we’ve hurt. We know what we did, and we know who we offended, God.
And we know that this is not just a little problem we have. I mean, what we did wasn’t just an accident. What we did isn’t the same as losing our keys, or tripping over something. We can’t just say, “Excuse me” for what we did. Our sin goes deep. Our sin is critical. Our sin goes way back. Verse 5:
Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived
me.
We’ve been sinning a long time. We’ve sinned in more ways, and more often, then we could possibly count. From conception, from the very moment life began, we have offended God. We were not cute babies. We were sinful creatures. We know this.
And we know what God wants. Verse 6:
Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the
inmost place.
From the insight out, every part, not just looking good, but actually being good, this is the goal, the desire of the Lord. Every nook and cranny needs to be scrubbed. Every room in the house opened up and aired out. Every motivation cleansed, every hope and dream purified. Every everything restored.
And that, let’s face it, can be awful. We like what we like. We want what we want. We want what we want when we want it. Our motivations make sense to us, even if they’re wrong. Our expectations seem normal, seem natural, seem right, even when they are soaked with sin. And to have everything in our lives pulled out and examined, turned around, scrubbed and sanitized can be an awfully painful experience. We can lose our job in the process. We can lose our life savings. Dreams can die, relationships might be broken. Our whole lives can be turned upside down.
So before we move on to verse 7, we have to go back to verse 1 and be reminded again.
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love;
If we’ve forgotten verse 1 by now, if we’ve forgotten His great mercy, His unfailing love, our confession will be filled with fear, maybe even some resistance. We won’t open our entire lives before God, because we’re a afraid of what He might say or do. We can’t bring ourselves to admit our own disgusting sin, because we fear He might turn His back on us.
Until we remember, until He reminds us, until He convinces us of His great, unfailing love. I love you, He says. I won’t stop loving you, He says. No matter what you’ve done, no matter how bad it is, tell Me, tell Me, He says. I’m not going to get angry. I already know, anyway. I’m not going smack you with a plague, I would have done that already. My love for you cannot, cannot stop. So, let’s talk.
So then, it’s His unfailing love, His great mercy that calms us down and assures us enough to say verse 7:
Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow…. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
God’s unfailing love leads us to confess and repent quicker. If we’re afraid of God, if we’re afraid of making Him angry with us, then we are more likely to rationalize our sinful actions. It’s fear of punishment that makes us come up with excuses for our behavior. It’s fear of what God might do to us that makes us compare ourselves with other people. As we celebrate Mother’s Day, we think of all the great things about mothering and mothers. We think of cuddling time with kids, we think of playing games and laughing. But mothering isn’t all that, is it? There are fears and regrets. Mothers, and dads, too, are aware of our own shortcomings. We know how we have failed, and it hurts us to know that our sin and failures can hurt our kids. If we are afraid of God, we don’t dare bring our regrets and shame to Him. But His unfailing love brings us into an open and honest relationship with God, where we can talk to Him about any and every part of our life, all of our fears, all of our regrets, all of our shame. His unfailing love makes us more likely to offer all of ourselves, failures and all, as living sacrifices.
His unfailing love leads us to examine our lives more closely, but without the burden. His unfailing love lets us go deeper in examining every action, every motivation. Again, as mothers, as parents in general, we want to be the best parents we can be. We don’t want to just be average mothers and fathers, we want to be great parents, Godly parents. We want our words to be encouraging and upbuilding. We want our actions to be pure examples for our kids. God’s love lets us look back over the day and confess and repent when our words and actions and examples haven’t been that pure.
And not just as parents, we all just want to be the best people we can be. The promise and guarantee of God’s unfailing love allows us to take a close, critical look at every part of our lives, noticing any and every sin that is trying to take root. And as a result, He cleans deeper, more completely, freeing us from the sin that drags us down. His unfailing love makes this examination a time of joy, not a time of fear. His great mercy lets us willingly allow Him to clean us up, rather than being afraid of what He might do. His unfailing love allows us to let go of the sin that makes our lives miserable. His unfailing love leads us to a life of freedom, a life of hope, a life of joy. Verse 12:
Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit,
to sustain me.
And you can hear that joy of His salvation, you can see the willing spirit that sustain us, His unfailing mercy is obvious in how we talk and how we live. Verse 13:
Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back
to you.
And it all flows out of His unfailing love. If we don’t start with verse 1, if we are not convinced of His unfailing love, first, we won’t truly confess for our deep, dark sins. We’ll stay shallow. We’ll view ourselves better than we deserve. And we’ll turn on others and point our fingers and accuse and condemn them of their sins. We’ll call it teaching transgressors God’s way. We’ll try to make it look holy, but what we’ll really be doing is accusing them of the speck in their eye, and ignoring the beam in our own eye. If we miss God’s unfailing love.
But if we start with verse 1, if we are convinced and assured of His unfailing love, then we will be truthful and honest about our entire selves. We will openly confess our deepest sins. And as a result, we will know the joy that comes from having those deepest, darkest sins forgiven. And then we’re ready to talk about it to others. Supported and surrounded by God’s unfailing love, we can be honest with other people. We can tell them about the sins that we struggled with, and not be afraid of their scorn or condemnation. It won’t matter, not with God loving us unfailingly. We can talk about our own struggles and temptations. We can tell them what God did in our own messed up lives. We can tell them how God didn’t blast us in His wrath, but welcomed us in His mercy. Verse 17:
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart,
O God, you will not despise.
God didn’t despise us, He welcomed us, in His mercy. We can assure them, because we’ve experienced it ourselves, and we can invite them to ask for God’s mercy in His unfailing love.
It all starts there. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love, so that I can show others your unfailing love. Have mercy on me, O God, and look deep, look closely. Have mercy on me, O God, and make me willing and eager to confess and repent and be washed clean. Have mercy on us, O God, a mercy that flows from a love that cannot end.