YouTube video sermon
Psalm 51:1-19
Let me invite you to take your copy of God’s Word and turn with me to Psalm 51. In Eugene Peterson’s excellent book, Run with Horses, he tells the following story of his frustration trying to remove the blade from his lawnmower.
To be told we are wrong is sometimes an embarrassment, even a humiliation. We want to run and hide our heads in shame. But there are times when finding out we are wrong is sudden and immediate relief, and we can lift up our heads in hope. No longer do we have to keep doggedly trying to do something that isn’t working.
A few years ago, I was in my backyard with my lawnmower tipped on its side. I was trying to get the blade off so I could sharpen it. I had my biggest wrench attached to the nut but couldn’t budge it. I got a four-foot length of pipe and slipped it over the wrench handle to give me leverage, and I leaned on that – still unsuccessfully.
Next, I took a large rock and banged on the pipe. By this time, I was beginning to get emotionally involved with my lawnmower. Then my neighbor walked over and said that he had a lawnmower like mine once and that, if he remembered correctly, the threads on the bolt went the other way. I reversed my exertions and, sure enough, the nut turned easily.
I was glad to find out I was wrong. I was saved from frustration and failure. I would never have gotten the job done, no matter how hard I tried, doing it my way.
What a great analogy and metaphor of repentance. Psalm 51 is one of the few psalms that we are able to pinpoint its historical origin. The heading of the psalm goes like this: “To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” Most of us (if not all) know what happened with David and Bathsheba, but just for review or in case you’re a bit fuzzy, here’s the situation (in a nutshell).
King David was supposed to be out fighting with his men, but instead, he had chosen to stay back at the palace. As he’s walking on the rooftop one evening, he spots Bathsheba taking bath. He sends for her and when she answers his call he sleeps with her. He sends her home, only to discover later that she’s pregnant with his child. In order to keep this under wraps, David sends for Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, to come in from the fighting. But Uriah is more noble than the king and he refuses to leave his men. So, David instructs his military commanders to place Uriah at the front where he will be killed. And, indeed, that’s what happened. David, then, takes Bathsheba to be his wife.
In one of the most understated sentences of the Bible, 2 Samuel 11:27 reads: “The thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” So, God sent the prophet Nathan to David with a parable that entices David to pronounce his own condemnation. Then Nathan says, “You are the man!” and asks, “Why have you despised the word of the Lord?” David breaks and confesses, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Then Nathan says, astonishingly, “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child who is born to you shall die” (2 Samuel 12:7–15). And Psalm 51 is David’s response to this entire ordeal. Let’s read it:
1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your steadfast love; according to Your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin!
3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. 4 Against You, You only, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight, so that You may be justified in Your words and blameless in Your judgment. 5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. 6 Behold, You delight in truth in the inward being, and You teach me wisdom in the secret heart.
7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that You have broken rejoice. 9 Hide Your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. 10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. 11 Cast me not away from Your presence and take not Your Holy Spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit.
13 Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, and sinners will return to You. 14 Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of Your righteousness. 15 O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare Your praise. 16 For You will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. 17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.
18 Do good to Zion in Your good pleasure; build up the walls of Jerusalem; 19 then will You delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then bulls will be offered on Your altar.
“Our Father and our God, with our Bibles open before us, will You come to our help; will You remove from us every distraction and enable us to think on these things that the entrance of Your Word may bring light into our darkness. We seek this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Psalm 51 is the way God’s people think and feel about the horrors of their own sin. It’s a psalm about how to be crushed for our sin (in a good manner). I’m going to try and guide us through four of David’s responses to his sin.
David Turns To God
First, he turns to his only hope, the mercy and love of God. Verse 1 says, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your steadfast love; according to Your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.” Three times, David calls upon the mercy of God. This is what God had promised in Exodus 34:6–7: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty.”
David knew that there were two kinds of guilty people: those who would not be forgiven, and those, who by some mysterious work of redemption, would be forgiven. Psalm 51 is his way of laying hold on that mystery of mercy. Today, we know more of the mystery of this redemption than David did. We know Jesus. But we lay hold of the mercy in the same way he did. The first thing he does is turn helplessly to the mercy and love of God. The same is true for you and me. We turn helplessly to Christ.
David Prays For Cleansing
Second, he prays for cleansing from his sin. Verse 2 continues, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.” Verse 7 says, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” Hyssop was the branch used by the priests to sprinkle blood on a house that had a disease in it to declare it clean (Leviticus 14:51). David is crying out to God as his ultimate priest that He would forgive him and count him clean from his sin.
It’s right and good that Christians ask God to do this. 1 John 1:8–9 says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Christ has purchased our forgiveness. He’s paid the price (in full). That doesn’t replace our asking. Rather, it’s the basis for our asking. It’s the reason we’re confident that the answer will be yes. So, first David looks helplessly to the mercy of God. And second, he prays that, in this mercy, God would forgive him and make him clean.
David Confesses The Seriousness Of His Sin
David confesses at least five ways that his sin is extremely serious.
First, he says that he can’t get the sin out of his mind. It’s blazoned on his conscience. Verse 3: “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.” Ever before him. The tape keeps playing. And he can’t stop it.
Second, he says that the exceeding sinfulness of his sin is that it is only against God. Nathan had said David despised God and scorned His Word. So, David says in verse 4: “Against You, You only, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight.” Of course, this doesn’t mean Bathsheba and Uriah and the baby weren’t hurt. It means that what makes sin sin is that it’s against God. Hurting man is bad. It’s horribly bad. But that’s not the horror of sin. Sin is an attack on God – a belittling of God. And David admits this.
Third, David vindicates God, not himself. There’s no self-justification. No defense. No escape. Verse 4: “so that You may be justified in Your words and blameless in Your judgment.” God is justified. God is blameless. If God casts David into hell, it’s completely justified and right. This is radical God-centered repentance. This is the way saved people think and feel. God would be just to damn me. And that I am still breathing is sheer mercy. And that I am forgiven is sheer blood-bought mercy. So, David vindicates the righteousness of God, not himself.
Fourth, David intensifies his guilt by drawing attention to his inborn corruption. Verse 5: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Some people use their inborn corruption to diminish their personal guilt. David does the opposite. For him the fact that he committed adultery and murder and lied are expressions of something worse: He is by nature that way. If God doesn’t rescue him, he’s only going to do more and more evil.
Fifth, David admits he sinned, not just against the external law but against God’s mercy in his heart. Verse 6: “Behold, You delight in truth in the inward being, and You teach me wisdom in the secret heart.” God had been his teacher. God had made him wise. God had given him strength and power. David had done so many wise things. But sin had gotten the upper hand. And, for David, this made it all the worse. It’s as if David is saying, “I’ve been blessed with so much knowledge and so much wisdom. How deep is my corruption that I could sin against the God who loves me so much.”
So, in those five ways, (at least) David joins the prophet Nathan and God in condemning his sin and confessing the depths of his corruption. He turns to God. He prays for cleansing. He confesses the seriousness of his sin. And finally…
David Pleads For Renewal
After turning helplessly to God for mercy, and praying for forgiveness and cleansing, and then confessing the depth and seriousness of his sin and corruption, David pleads for renewal. He’s passionately committed to being changed by God. He pours out his heart for this change in at least six ways. And I only have time to draw your attention to them.
The main point is: Forgiven people are committed to being changed by God. The adulterer, the murderer, the liar, the child molester, the idolater, however you consider yourself before coming to know Jesus – all of them hate what they were and set their faces like flint to be changed by God.
First, he prays that God would reassure him of his election. Verse 11 says, “Cast me not away from Your presence, and take not Your Holy Spirit from me.” I know some say that Christians who are elect and secure in the sovereign grace of God shouldn’t pray like that because it implies you can lose your salvation. I don’t think so. Rather, when we pray this way, what we mean is, “Don’t treat me as one who is not chosen. Don’t let me prove to be like one of those in Hebrews 6 who have only tasted the Holy Spirit. Don’t let me fall away and show that I was only drawn by the Spirit and not held by the Spirit. Confirm to me, O God, that I am Your child and will never fall away.”
Second, he prays for a heart and a spirit that are new and right and firm. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalms 51:10). The “right spirit” is the established, firm, unwavering spirit. He wants to be done with the kind of instability that he’s just experienced.
Third, he prays for the joy of God’s salvation and for a spirit that’s joyfully willing to follow God’s Word and be generous with people rather than exploiting people. Verse 8: “Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that You have broken rejoice.” Verse 12: “Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.”
I find it interesting that nowhere in this Psalm does he pray directly about sex? It all started with sex. That led to deceit, which led to murder. Why isn’t David crying out for sexual restraint? Why isn’t he praying for men to hold him accountable? Why isn’t he praying for protected eyes and sex-free thoughts? The reason is that he knows that sexual sin is a symptom, not the disease. People’s spirits, people’s hearts, people’s affections aren’t steadfast and firm and established on Christ as they should. Thus, we waver. We’re enticed, and we give in to sin because God doesn’t captivate our hearts and our minds in those moments as He should. David knew this about himself. And it’s true about us too (if we’re honest).
Fourth, he asked God to bring him to a place of joyful praise. Verse 15: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare Your praise.” As the choir sang this morning, “Troubled soul, the Savior can feel, Every heartache and tear. Burdens are lifted at Calvary, Jesus is very near” (John Moore). That’s what he’s praying for: O God, overcome everything in my life that keeps my heart dull and my mouth shut when they ought to be praising. Make my joy irrepressible.
Fifth, he asks that the upshot of all this will be a life of effective evangelism. “Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, and sinners will return to You.” David isn’t content to be forgiven. He’s not content to be clean. He’s not content to be among the elect. He not content to have a right spirit. He’s not content to be joyful in God by himself. He won’t be content until his broken life serves the healing of others. Which brings us to the last point.
Sixth, he discovered that God has crushed him in love, and that a broken and contrite heart is the mark of all God’s children. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.”
This is foundational to everything. Being a Christian means being broken and contrite. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you get beyond this in this life. This marks the life of God’s happy children until they die. We’re broken and contrite all the way home – that is, unless sin gets the proud upper hand. Being broken and contrite is not against joy and praise and witness. It’s the flavor of Christian joy and praise and witness.
Let me close, if I may, by briefly recounting the life of John Newton. Many of you recognize his name. He authored one of the most beloved hymns in the world (Amazing Grace), yet he spent his early life transporting African slaves to America.
He was born in 1725, went to sea with his father at the age of 11, and was pressed into the Royal Navy at the age of 18. Eventually, he would find his way onto slave ships, which he found to be “an easy and creditable way of life.” Even after his conversion to Christianity in 1748, he continued in the trade, seeing no conflict between his faith and occupation.
However, after poor health drove him back to land in 1754 and his ordination in the Church of England, his views on slavery were dramatically transformed. He authored an account of his life as a slave trader and publicly repented of his earlier life. In 1787, together with William Wilberforce, he founded the Anti-Slavery Society and campaigned until the end of his life to end the slave trade in Britain, which happened only nine months before his death. We’re going to close by singing a modern version of that hymn, but before we do, let’s pray:
“O God, each and every person in this room has sinned against You, and we’re in need of your forgiveness, but that only comes through repentance. Help us, in these moments to approach You with truly broken and contrite hearts. We offer this prayer in Jesus’ name. Amen.”