Summer of Psalms: Part 6 - A Repentant Heart
PSALM 51
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
Well, we are on week—I forget—of our Summer of Psalms series. I lost track of how many weeks we have been on this, but it has been a journey, and it has been delightful. I have loved being in the Psalms this summer with you all, and I hope you've enjoyed it too. I hope you've gathered something, you've gleaned something, maybe the Lord has spoken to you about something. So we have this weekend next week, and we'll be wrapping up this series, but today we are going to be in Psalm 51. And I'm going to be real honest with you.
I did not want to preach on Psalm 51. The Lord kind of showed me this psalm several weeks ago, and I was like, "Oh, yeah, that would be a good one. Let me see what else is in there. Let me see what else I can find." So, you know, I started looking, reading some other psalms. And guess what? There are some really great psalms, and there are some other options I probably could have chosen. But the Lord was like, "Nope, you're going to do Psalm 51." And the reason I didn't really want to do Psalm 51 is because it's on sin and repentance. And I am a full believer that churches should be preaching on sin and repentance. I think that a lot of churches, like in the Big C church, like the church global, a lot of times they don't preach on sin and repentance, or they tone it down too much. I just didn't want to preach on sin and repentance this morning. But here we are, and so we're going to talk about sin and repentance today. Aren't you glad you came to Spring Valley this morning? Amen. You know, the thing though, it can be hard to preach, and it can be even harder to hear sometimes. But when we have some context of where we are in scripture and what God is teaching us through this, it can actually be really encouraging. It can build us up. It can edify the body. And that's what my prayer is for us today.
So let's get some context here. Psalm 51 is a psalm written by David. And if you look at the little subheader in Psalm 51, I think we have it on the screen. It says, "For the director of music, a psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba." Sorry, I guess we don't have that one on the screen, but that's in your subtitle, that's in your heading of Psalm 51. You might be wondering, is this the same David that was the king of Israel? Is this the same David who killed Goliath with a stone? Is this the same David who had faith that could kill giants and move mountains? Is this the David that the Bible says was a man after God's own heart? Yep, same David. Same one. And not only did he commit adultery, but he also committed murder. 1 Kings 15:5 says, "For David had done what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and had not failed to keep any of the Lord's commands all the days of his life, except in the case of Uriah the Hittite." So David was known, and it is written in scripture, that he had his eyes on the Lord. He kept the Lord's commands, except in the case of Uriah the Hittite. Now, what is the story of Uriah the Hittite? Well, in 2 Samuel, we hear this story where there was a man named Uriah who was out in the king's army serving, fighting for his king, David, for the Lord, for Israel. And David was back home in his palace, and he looked out the window. And lo and behold, there was a woman bathing on her rooftop. Now, that was not weird at the time. They used the roof as like another room. Okay, so that part isn't weird. But David noticed her and wanted to know more about her. So he inquired about who this beautiful woman was. Her name was Bathsheba, and he had her brought to the palace. David slept with her and sent her on her merry way. Lo and behold, several weeks later, they find out she is pregnant, and we know it is not by her husband because her husband is off fighting at war. And David thinks, "It's fine. I got this." So he brings Uriah back from fighting. He tells him, "I'm going to give you a break, go home, have some rest, and then we'll send you back out later." Well, Uriah, being the upstanding man that he is, ended up going and sleeping outside of the palace and not going home. And David inquired. He said, "What are you doing? I gave you a break. Go home. Go see your wife. Go sleep in your bed." And Uriah said, "How can I do that when my men are out fighting? I will not go eat the choice food. I will not go sleep at my home and see my wife and rest while my men are out still fighting." So David thought, "Okay, this is still fixable." So he brings him into the palace and he serves him this ornate meal, this feast. He tries to get him drunk in order to send him home, but Uriah still doesn't go home. He continues to sleep outside and wait for orders to go back to fighting. So finally David says, "Okay, last resort, but this is still fixable." He sends Uriah back out to fight, but with him he sends a letter to the commander of the army. The letter to the commander tells him to put Uriah on the front line where the fighting is the fiercest so that he will surely die. And being a good commander that he is, David's commander listens to his king and puts Uriah on the front line, and Uriah dies. David gets word, Bathsheba goes into mourning, and after that time David brings Bathsheba into the palace as his wife. Not typically the side of David we focus on. Well, some time later, the prophet Nathan came and gave a word from the Lord to David. Again, you can find this in 2 Samuel 12, but Nathan really just kind of flipped the script on David. It's kind of an epic story; you should go read it for yourself. But essentially, he got David to admit that he was wrong, and Nathan told David that because of his sins, his son would die. The son that Bathsheba was going to bear him would die. And he did. And out of this, David was broken and repentant. And he realized the sins he had committed. And out of that came Psalm 51.
So with that context, let's go ahead and read all of Psalm 51 together. "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love. According to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions, wash away all my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. So you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge. Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place. Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean. Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. Then I will teach transgressors your ways so that sinners will turn back to you. Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, you who are God, my Savior, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. May it please you to prosper Zion, to build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous, in burnt offerings offered whole; then bulls will be offered on your altar." Amen.
You can hear the remorse in David's voice in his writing in this psalm. He had a repentant heart. The word repent is just a biblical term that means to turn away, to do a 180 from your sin, so your sin is behind you and you are striving towards Jesus, away from your sin. He wanted to turn away. He wanted to be restored. Now, the reality is David was king. He could have just buried the truth. Heck, he could have done it out in full glory and still gotten away with it because he was king. He could have ignored it and gone on with business as usual. But he recognized his sin. Now, some scholars do believe that there was some time from his actions until Nathan's word that came to him from the Lord that there could have been even as much as a year, maybe the length of Bathsheba's pregnancy, but there was some time where David was living out of an unrepentant heart until the Lord got his attention. And eventually he realized that he messed up big time. He tried to fix a problem in his own power and in his own humanness and by his own ways, and he screwed it up worse than before. So he turned to God and he asked for his grace and his mercy. And there are several things that we can learn from David here and from this psalm about sin and repentance, about how we should respond when we sin, and about who God is to us, how he responds to us when we sin. So first, we see that we must acknowledge and confess sin. This is not always easy to confess it, to own up to it, to acknowledge it. David did this really clearly.
Verses three and four: "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. So you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge." David was so aware of his sin. And he knew that it was right before him. He says, it's before my eyes, always before me. And he meant this metaphorically, meaning he was just very aware of it in his mind. But it was also literally before him. The ramifications of his sin, of Bathsheba being a widow, of his new child now being before him, these things were literally before him. These reminders of the sin. Now, his son was a good thing that came out of a bad situation. However, it was still the ramifications of his sins. They were always before him. He was made to be very aware. Now, David knew, it says he, "Against you, you only, have I sinned." David knew that he didn't actually only sin against God. He sinned against Bathsheba, against Uriah, even you can make arguments against the unborn baby or other people that he hurt along the way to cover up what he did. He sinned against humans, but he also knew that God was the creator of the law. He was the creator of the moral right. And so he's acknowledging that God is the right and true judge, and he is the one that David had sinned against. Ultimately, God is the only one who can offer a fullness of forgiveness to David. So he acknowledged that he sinned, but he also confessed it. He was specific. He talks about bloodshed in this psalm. He named the sin. He didn't try to make excuses or lessen it or make it not as bad. He acknowledged the sin and he confessed it and he appealed to the unfailing love of God the Father. Right in verse one, it says, "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love, your compassion." He's saying, God, I know that I've messed up and I've sinned against you, but you have unfailing love towards me. God will not love us less because of our sin. He is love. So no matter how badly we messed up or how many times we go back to the same sin over and over again, he has unfailing love. We must confess our sins. We have to acknowledge it. We can't excuse it away. But God's love will always be there for us. There are consequences to our action, just like there are consequences to David's action. But one of those consequences is not God's love going away. That is not one of the consequences. He will always love us.
David then asked God to be cleansed and transformed. Verse 7: "Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean. Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me." There's a lot in these six verses. But David was asking first to be cleansed. He talks about the hyssop plant. He's asking God to cleanse him. And he alludes to the hyssop because the hyssop was used by Levitical priests to sprinkle purifying water, as well as to apply the blood of the Passover sacrifice. So he's calling back to those Levitical practices, those priestly practices of how they would cleanse someone when they had sinned, how a sacrifice would be offered and that person would have atonement made for them. He was appealing to God's cleansing of the sins that can only be done through the sacrificial death of a substitute. David knew he couldn't clean himself. He could acknowledge the sin. He could confess it and ask for forgiveness, but he could not actually do the atoning work. He could not cleanse himself. He knew that only God could do the work through the blood of the animal sacrifice. And in our case, we no longer have animal sacrifices because we have Jesus. He was the ultimate sacrifice. But we also can't cleanse ourselves any more than David could. It's by his blood that we are forgiven and made clean. I always thought it was weird, especially as a kid growing up, how can blood make us clean? You know, you scrape your knee and your mom's like, "Don't touch anything. Don't get blood on the couch. Let me get your back. Don't get blood on your closest thing." Right? It was always like, don't get blood on anything. But in the upside-down kingdom of God, the blood is what makes us clean. It's what makes us whiter than snow. See, we could have paid the price ourselves in all technicality we could have, but it would have meant our death and eternal separation from God. And because we serve a good and loving Father, he said, "I don't want that. I want to spend eternity with my children. I want them to be with me. So instead of them paying the price for their sin, I'm going to send my perfect Son to pay the price for their sin." And not only that, not only has the punishment been paid, not only has the sentence been served, but then he conquered death and rose from the grave so that we could have eternal life with him. So we could be with Jesus forever. That is, we couldn't do that. That is only by the power of God. That is only by his cleansing, the sacrificial blood. Not only did David ask God to cleanse him, but he knew that God could completely cleanse him. It wasn't just like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I forgive you." It was wiped away.
Preacher and theologian Charles Spurgeon wrote, "God can make him as if he had never sinned at all," referring to David. "Such is the power of the cleansing work of God upon the heart that he can restore innocence to us and make us as if we had never been stained with transgression at all. He makes it as if it had never happened." Only God can do that. The blood of Jesus covers over us. So that when we stand before God one day, he will not see our sin and our brokenness. He will see the blood of Jesus. He will see the sacrifice that was done on the cross. He will see the righteousness that Christ has put on us. David wanted his sins blotted out and wiped clean, but he also wanted a pure heart. He wanted to be made new. Ezekiel 36:26 says, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh." David asked God to create a new heart, a pure heart in him. He asked for a heart transformation. Now, referring here to the word "create" in verse 10, one Bible commentator wrote, the word that begins this section is the Hebrew verb *bara*. It's used in Genesis 1 for the creation of the heavens and the earth by God. So strictly used, this word describes what only God can do. Create *ex nihilo*, which means out of nothing. David was saying, "Create a pure heart in me out of nothing. Because I have no good thing to offer you. I just have sin and brokenness. So out of nothing, give me a new and pure heart." Again, only what God can do. Only God can create something out of nothing. David begged God to restore him, to make things right, to cleanse him, to transform his heart. He was calling upon only what God can do to create a pure heart, for his Holy Spirit to remain with him, for the restoration of the joy of salvation, and for God to sustain him. None of those things we can do on our own. He was done running. He was done trying to fix things or attempt to fix things on his own. He realized the error of his ways, that he kept messing it up, that he couldn't fix what was broken, and that he couldn't cleanse himself from the mistakes and the sins that he had made. See, when we sin, it is most often, maybe always, because we take God out of his rightful place. We take God off the throne of our life, of our heart, and we put ourselves there. We make ourselves a little God. And we say, "I know best. I got this covered. I can figure it out. I can fix it." And we just keep making it worse. We end up being shocked when it doesn't work out that way, when it doesn't work out well. But it's because we have taken God out of his rightful place in our heart and put ourselves on the throne. And when we ask for forgiveness and confess our sins and ask for a transformed heart, we are willingly taking ourselves off the throne and surrendering our lives to God and making him the king and Lord of our life instead. Now, we do that when we ask the Lord to save us. We do that when we originally give our heart to God, when we surrender to him. But we also sometimes have to do that over and over again. Especially if there is a sin in our life that won't quit. Especially if there's something that we struggle over and over with. We have to keep putting God on the throne. Asking for forgiveness. Asking for strength. Asking for freedom from that thing.
See, this psalm is very much about David's repentant heart and how we can show repentance. But more importantly than that, it's about what God can and will do, what he has promised to do in our hearts and lives. The last section is David's response now to all the work that God has done up to this point. Verse 13: "Then I will teach transgressors your ways so that sinners will turn back to you. Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, referring back to Uriah. You who are God, my Savior, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, you, God, will not despise. May it please you to prosper Zion, to build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous, and burnt offerings offered whole. Then bulls will be offered on your altar." David's response here, and really the only proper response, is for us to testify and praise God. To testify to the things that he has done and to praise and give him glory for it. We have to tell others. If you are a Christian, if you have surrendered your life to Jesus, now you have to go tell other people about it. God calls all of us to be ministers of the gospel, and it's our job to testify to the goodness of God. I think a lot of times we overcomplicate evangelism or spreading the gospel, and really it's just telling other people what God's done for you. It's just telling people how God has worked in your life, how he saved you or helped you or cleansed you, and what he can do for them. It's telling your story. It is testifying to the goodness of God. We have to tell others. And David said he will tell others, the transgressors, about God's saving grace. I didn't come up with this, but I like to say it all the time: we want to make heaven crowded. Now, it's not actually going to be crowded. Don't worry. We all get our own mansion, okay? It's fine. But we want everyone to come. Everyone is invited. Even if they don't accept his gift of salvation, everyone is invited. And we want to do our part to make heaven crowded. And then we must praise. We worship. We worship at church on Sundays, yes, but also by telling others, by giving God the glory, by living our lives out of the transformation that he has done in us, we become the living sacrifice. They continued animal sacrifices that David's referring to here, but we are the sacrifice. Romans 12 says that we are a living sacrifice. We offer ourselves, we surrender ourselves, our whole lives to God. And by doing so, we bring him glory. We praise him. We worship him. David knew that offering a sacrifice out of obligation or some sort of rote obedience was not pleasing to the Lord. It did not matter. He knew that only a broken and contrite heart is what would honor God. We can have a broken and contrite heart, and then out of that, we offer ourselves and live sacrificially to bring him praise and honor and glory. That is the kind of sacrifice that he will accept. Because the reality is, we can clean up real good and come to church and sit in our seat and check the box and say, "Yep, I love Jesus." And then go out and completely live contrary to that. And I don't know that anyone's actually doing that in this room, but what I'm saying is we can put on a good front. The Pharisees did that and Jesus called them out. You can clean up and put that smile on your face and not have actually put God on the throne. The sacrifice that pleases God is the one from a broken and contrite heart, a repentant heart, one that is surrendered to the lordship of Jesus.
Pastor Phil last week mentioned that God is good on his promises, not because of the promise that is made, but of the one who makes the promise. And we know that God is a good promise maker and a good promise keeper. And he says in Romans 10:13, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." Not maybe, not just some people, not the ones who get nice enough and dress up enough for church on Sunday. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But you have to receive that gift. He's not going to force it on you. He's a good God who's already paid the price for your sins and he's just offering it as a free gift. He's made a way for us to live in freedom from our sins and spend eternity with him. Our job is to receive that gift, to acknowledge and confess when we do mess up, to repent of those sins, to turn away from them, to ask for restoration and transformation, and then to walk in that, to live in that freedom, to live in that restoration, and then to give him all the glory for it. Many in this room have surrendered their lives to God. They've made that decision. You all have made that and said, "Yes, I surrender to Jesus. I want freedom from my sin. I want him to be the Lord of my life." And we celebrate that. But I believe there's some in this room who haven't. Or maybe if everyone looked at you, they would have thought you had. Because you're really good at dressing up and looking like a smile on your face and like everything's okay. But you haven't actually surrendered your life to the Lord. I don't mean that as a guilt trip. I mean that as a reality check. That just because you can put on a good front doesn't mean you've actually surrendered to the Lord. I beg you, if you have not done that, would you make that choice today? There is an urgency. Not out of fear, but out of just the plain fact that we are not guaranteed tomorrow. We are not promised tomorrow. We don't know when the Lord's going to come back. So there is an urgency to surrender your life, to make this decision. I'm going to pray a prayer. We're all going to bow our heads. It'll be on the screen if you want to look up and read it along with me, or you can just listen to the sound of my voice. But if you are ready to truly make this decision and surrender your life to Jesus, would you pray this prayer in your heart along with me? And if you have already surrendered your heart, would you just recommit yourself to the Lord? Confess anything that needs to be confessed. Pray for any prayer requests that come up that the Lord brings to mind. But offer yourself once again as a living sacrifice.
Let's pray. "Father in heaven, I know that I have lived for myself instead of you. I have sinned against you. But I believe Jesus died for my sin. So I confess my sin and I ask you to forgive me. I bow to you as Lord and leader of my life. I put you on the throne. Help me to live for you from this day forward. In Jesus' name, amen." If you prayed that prayer, would you just check the box on the Connect card and drop it in the back? Because here's the thing. When someone, even one person, prays that prayer and surrenders their life to Jesus, it says that all of heaven celebrates. And we want to celebrate with you too. Okay, as your pastoral staff, as your prayer team, we want to celebrate that with you. And we want to disciple you. We want to help you along the way. So if you pray that prayer, please check that box so we can connect with you. Thanks for listening. And if you would, please take a moment to subscribe and leave an encouraging review to help others find our podcasts on whatever platform you are listening on. We hope you have a wonderful day. We'll catch you next week.