2 Samuel 11:1-16, 26; 12:1-13; Psalm 51:1 (Create in Me a Clean Heart #1) Have Mercy
Just so that I don’t have to ignore the elephant in the room… Today we have an odd combination to put before you: Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day. A day full of bitterness and ashes meets a day full of hearts and roses. It just seems strange… until you look deeper.
If Valentine’s Day is really about love, then nothing could be more appropriate. Jesus said:
Slide: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13 NIV)
Many lovers over the years have made great claims to their beloveds and even declared: “I would die for you!” Jesus actually did it. In response, the Church has for over a thousand years observed a 40 day season of repentance called “Lent”, leading up to the remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross on Good Friday and the mighty victory of His resurrection. So if you can believe it, I actually found a cartoon to combine Valentine’s day and Lent
Slide: ‘toon “Valentines are red, Wednesdays ashes are gray, you can’t spell “Valentine” without “Lent” on this day.
Did you know that? That you can’t spell “valentine” without “Lent”.
Slide: circle “Lent” in “valentine”
Just an interesting side-note. Along with the fact that “God IS Love” and if you want to learn how to love another human being perfectly, you must tap into the love of God. Folks, our loving God didn’t send us a card and a box of chocolates, “God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
I can think of no better response to the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus than for us to come before Him in true repentance and pray: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” (Ps. 51:10) So this year we’re going to be working through the Lenten season using David’s great Psalm of repentance, Psalm 51. Almost every year on Ash Wednesday, we have recited Psalm 51 as a desperate cry for mercy for those who desperately need God’s mercy and grace. But I was quite surprised to realize that I had never thought to use this incredible Psalm for a Lenten series. Well, we’re going to fix that this year. But before we get into the verses themselves, we have to tackle the introduction to this Psalm. It goes like this:
Slide: “For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.” (Psalms 51:0 NIV)
“For the Director of music” simply shows that many of these Psalms were meant to be used in worship, just as we still use them today. There is a meter that you can hear in the Hebrew but that doesn’t translate for us. It would be like our rhyming hymns. There are 55 Psalms with these kinds of instructions. Historian Philip Schaff says, “The Psalter is the first hymn-book of the church, and will outlive all other hymn-books. Its treasury of pious experience will never will be exhausted.” Of course the experience listed here is far from “pious”. It is in fact the exact opposite – which is one of the reasons it is so incredibly helpful for God’s people. The words of Psalm 51 are not some poetic, idealistic, antiseptic, theoretic advice from somebody who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. They were words ripped from the heart of somebody who had absolutely no other choice then to throw himself on the mercy of Almighty God.
We don’t know a lot about the other Psalm writers, but we certainly do about this one right? What do we know about King David? Let’s take the good stuff first.
Slide: Good side first
Shepherd
Youngest of the eight sons of Jesse
Goliath killer
Lion and Bear killer
Warrior King
Natural leader
Poet
Musician Hot tempered
Polygamist
Lustful
Adulterer / Rapist?
Liar / Manipulator
Murderer
Bad father
King David was certainly considered to be the greatest king of Israel. He extended their borders and ushered in the golden age of Israel, the golden standard that they would be trying to get back to for a thousand years. He was, on top of that, one of the bravest and best warriors who ever lived. We know what he did to Goliath. Before that he laid out a lion and a bear with a club when he was just a boy. He was a poet, a statesmen a musician, a natural born leader…
But David also had a dark side, didn’t he?
Slide: Dark side
For instance at times he was hot-tempered. If you were listening, you might have caught that in David’s response to the prophet Nathan’s story with the little lamb. I’m not gonna walk through that because Nathan did a better job then I ever could and he certainly got a response from David:
Slide: “David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, ‘As surely as the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.’” (2 Samuel 12:5–6 NIV)
We’re gonna get that guy!! That hot temper turned up earlier when David was leading his group of rebels and King Saul was after him. He had been in the region of a guy named Nabal (whose name means “fool”), and sent his men to get some support from Nabal – you know, some food and supplies for his men. And like a fool, Nabal insulted the men and refused to give them anything. And when they reported this to David, he said, “Strap on your swords.”
Slide: “It’s been useless—all my watching over this fellow’s property in the desert so that nothing of his was missing. He has paid me back evil for good. May God deal with David, be it ever so severely, if by morning I leave alive one male of all who belong to him!” (1 Samuel 25:21–22 NIV)
Fortunately Nabal’s wife Abigail got to David before that could happen and she had a whole mass of bread and wine and sheep and raison cakes and so on, and David spared Nabal for Abigail’s sake.
Slide: Good and bad chart
By the way, while we’re looking at the negative side of David’s ledger, a short time later the Lord struck Nabal dead, and after a mourning period, David took Abigail to be his own wife. – kind of an interesting romance, until you realize that she was number 3, David already had two wives before this, and ended up accumulating a total of 8 not counting concubines after he became king. So add Polygamy to the list of negatives. And no, the Bible never condoned that. Jesus, testifying to the truth of Genesis, said,
Slide: “At the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’” (Mark 10:6–8 NIV)
The point here is when David started lusting after Bathsheba and he sent somebody to find out about her, what did he want to know? If she was married? What difference did it make? He was already married. And it didn’t bother him anyway. He was the king and he was going to get what he wanted. When his assistant told David, “Isn’t this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the WIFE of Uriah the Hittite?” it didn’t stop him. And it should have, not only for Bathsheba’s sake and his own, and the nation’s, but for Uriah. If you read 1 & 2 Samuel, you’ll find a list of David’s mighty men, the great and famous warriors that helped him defeat the Philistines and finally conquer all the “Promised Land.” And at the very end of the list, almost to make sure he stands out, you’ll find this little detail:
Slide: “and Uriah the Hittite.” (2 Samuel 23:39 NIV)
This was not some no-name soldier. This was one of David’s closest friends and mightiest warriors. It was an incredible betrayal – of Uriah, of Bathsheba, of God’s people and of God. So if you’re keeping the list:
Slide: Good and bad chart
David was Hot tempered; a Polygamist; Lustful; an Adulterer - might as well call him a Rapist – because what choice did Bathsheba possibly have in all this? Was she really going to say “no” to the king? By the way I want to clear something up here. People wonder why Bathsheba was bathing on her roof. Was she showing off? Was she asking for it? Well, if you look carefully at the whole account in 2 Samuel 11, you will not find her on the roof. It only says that David was on the roof. When he should have been off with the army, he was on the roof, checking people out. He might have just caught a glimpse of Bathsheba through her window. You can’t give the fault to her. And later, when he comes to his senses, unlike Adam with Eve, David doesn’t.
Coming back to his list of sins, after the adultery, then comes the cover up and the manipulation and the murder of Uriah the Hittite. It’s safe to say that the great King David was in a very dark place. A place so dark and deluded that he didn’t even make the connection with the little lamb story told by Nathan until Nathan took his finger, pointed it right at him and said: “You’re the man.”
But folks, at that point in time is where we see the true greatness of King David, not in any of the good stuff we listed before, not in his great courage, not because he was handsome or popular or rich, but because he had the capacity to admit that he was wrong and he had the desire to change. The church word for that is to repent. He started that process right away, when he did what very few leaders in his position have ever been able to do, he simply admitted it:
Slide: “Then David said to Nathan, ‘I have sinned against the LORD.’” (2 Samuel 12:12–13 NIV)
Folks, this is huge. Unlike Adam and countless others, politicians and pastors and any number of people who should know better, he didn’t try to shift the blame or explain away his behavior or deny it in any way. He just admitted it. And then, far from trying to cover it up, David wrote a very public Psalm about the whole thing to be shared in worship by his people. Who does that? Only somebody who knows deep in his heart that he has no other choice but to throw himself on the mercy of Almighty God. David had already passed judgment on himself and his actions. “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die!” (2 Sam. 12:5) He knew it. And he knew there was nothing he could do about it. But he also knew that there was something God could do about it. And so he prayed the prayer every one of us needs to pray:
Slide: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.” (Psalms 51:1 NIV)
Folks, you will never grow out of your need to pray that prayer. Because each of us, like King David, is capable of doing despicable things. If we haven’t done them we’ve thought them. For instance, you may think that viewing pornography is a relatively harmless sin that hurts no one. But every web-site you click is another link in the chain that traps women (and men) in that life-style where they are paid to reduce the precious gift of God to an act that has been made “dirty” and exposes them to all manner of disease. It harms their body, mind and soul – and it does the same thing to you. If you’ve been trapped by this, Psalm 51 is the prayer for you – as it is for all of us who have gotten trapped by any sin. It is incredibly hard to be this honest with God, but it is so much harder to continue to bear the burden of unrepented and unforgiven sin.
You know, the season of Lent – and these extra opportunities to worship - can be such a blessing for us. It’s a time when you can examine your life in honesty and see that you have allowed the ways of this world to start influencing your ways. And this Psalm can give you the words to bring an honest confession before your God, to tell Him how devastated you are to see how far away from Him you’ve walked and that you are ready to do what David did, change your mind, change your heart and change your ways, as you throw yourself upon the mercy of Almighty God.
Valentine’s day and Ash Wednesday. A day full of bitterness and ashes meets a day full of hearts and roses. It just seems strange… until you look deeper.
Slide: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13 NIV)
“For God so loved the world and you in it that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” Believe it, and walk away from this place forgiven and free to live the life you were meant to live, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
