Psalm 51:3 2/21/18 (Create in Me a Clean Heart #3) MY SIN IS ALWAYS BEFORE ME
Edgar Allen Poe was kind of a morbid American author in the mid 1800s. He had a short and troubled life and wrote a number of troubling short stories and poems. One of those is called “The Tell-Tale heart”. I was going to give you a partial dramatic reading tonight but I decided not to. It’s just too creepy. It’s a story narrated by a murderer describing how he killed an old man and how carefully he worked it all out and covered it up – literally - by stuffing the old man’s dismembered body under the floorboards of the man’s own bedroom. Only later, when the police come and he invites them to search the house and he is sitting over the very spot, he begins to hear the dead man’s beating heart, louder and louder and louder and he can’t get away from it and finally he confesses everything to the police.
It’s a story similar to what happened to king David, except that before the prophet Nathan confronted him with his sin, he had covered up it all up with the burial of his friend Uriah the Hittite and apparently had developed such a calloused heart himself, that he did not hearing the beating heart of his friend. He was not troubled by his murder, let alone his adultery with Bathsheba. And God let him sit on all that for a while to see if it would begin to trouble him - all through Bathsheba’s pregnancy and the birth of their child before he sent the Prophet Nathan to tell him exactly what he had done and remind him that nothing is covered up with God who knows everything. And he realized that the real slavery was in trying to keep his sin a secret instead of bringing it to God in the first place.
And that’s what the Holy Spirit does when he starts to work in your life. He won’t let you bury your sin and stuff it, because that’s not what you need. What you need, and what we’ve been seeing in this series, is a clean heart before God. And that’s never going to happen when you’re holding on to sin instead of bringing it to Jesus Christ for cleansing.
And so he wrote this Psalm and made his repentance public to his people and to us, that we might learn from his mistakes instead of having to repeat them all ourselves. And today he says:
Slide: “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.” (Psalms 51:3 NIV)
It was before him with Bathsheba, and it was before him in the grave of his betrayed friend Uriah and in the grave of his son. Because as a consequence of his sin the Bible says
Slide: “After Nathan had gone home, the LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became ill.” (2 Samuel 12:15 NIV)
And the Bible says that David fasted and prayed for the child. He desperately desired that his own sin wouldn’t hurt others. But sadly, that’s too often what happens. And sometimes God does not say “yes” to those prayers, but allows judgment against sin to play out, and the child died. And David would have to deal with that all his life. But he learned, so in this prayer of repentance he brings that to God as well, letting God know that he sees it all and he admits it all, no more covering up, no more excuses. He uses for instance in this prayer of repentance, multiple words for his wrong-doing.
Slide: Transgressions.
The origin of that word is similar to the word we use in the Lord’s Prayer: “Trespass”. It means there was a clear line of law which you knew you shouldn’t cross, but you did anyway. It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a mistake, it was a deliberate rebellion against God’s law and an attempt to write your own laws for your behavior. Doesn’t that sound familiar today?
Earlier, David used the word
Slide: Iniquity
That means doing what is not just, not right. And doesn’t that fit when you think of what David did to Uriah, and Bathsheba, and to his country and to God?
Then he used the more generic word
Slide: Sin
Which has the connotation of “guilt” and basically covers all wrong-doing. In other words, David was covering all the bases and making sure that everybody knew that he knew he was without excuse, and falling completely on the mercy of Almighty God… which is exactly where all of us need to be – and which is exactly where our world is not.
There are some interesting tools out there today, and one of them is an online dictionary that actually tracks the usage of words from the 1800s to today. Let me show you those words we just looked at:
Slide: Sin chart
Slide: Transgression chart
Slide: Iniquity chart
Folks, people don’t want to think about sin today or talk about it, and they don’t want to think about themselves as sinners. They don’t want their sin always before them, and so they just try to pretend it doesn’t exist or try to bury it or cover it up. And it just won’t work. It will come out. If it’s not forgiven it will come out in depression, in anger, in rebellion against God… I’ve seen it over and over in people’s lives. You just cannot bury it. And by the way, you need to understand, this is not just a battle played out on neutral ground. Satan is actively involved first to try to lure you into sin, and then to lead you either into open rebellion against God or into despair that you could ever be forgiven. You’re not just battling your own desires, you are fighting a spiritual battle, and you’d better learn to fight it that way.
I had another God-appointment at the gym this week. So yes, this is a locker room story. It just seems like an odd place for deep conversations, but for whatever reason, I’ve had quite a few of them. It went like this. When I’m doing a series like this, I typically carry around a journal so that I can write down my thoughts whenever I have a little down time. I had it along with me ‘cause sometimes you have to wait in between basketball games. And on the front I have a sticker that has the theme of our current series: “Create in me a Clean Heart O God.” So after I was done playing, I sat down by my locker next to a young man who happened to see the sticker and said: “That’s a great verse.” I of course agreed. And added “That’s a great Psalm.” And off we went. I talked about David and his devastating fall and his past that led up to the writing of this Psalm. And his face immediately got red and his eyes teared up and he began to tell me about his past – and his sexual past – not “locker-room” talk, not boasting, but repenting, wishing he had made better choices and had not treated sex like a game, because now he had found a girl he wanted to marry, and his past haunted him (his sin was always before him). Folks, it was such a dramatic example of the fact that what we’re doing in this series together is so very real for all of us. These are not just academic exercises. This is an opportunity to do some series business with God so that He can redeem our broken past. And so we talked about repentance – and forgiveness. In fact, we basically had a confession of sins and absolution there in the locker room. And I happened to have an extra heart that we’re giving out for this series, so I gave it him to give to his girl and we talked about having this same conversation with her – ‘cause she also has a past that was troubling her. And I invited him to read and pray Psalm 51 with her, simply confess their sins before God and receive the forgiveness Jesus won for them on the cross. And then he did cry. And having gotten that far we talked about the future. And somehow I was bold enough to talk about treating her differently than he had treated other girls, that in fact he could treasure her enough to wait and not take advantage of what she was willing to give – until they actually did get married and could look at that blessing of God in purity together. And he looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m up for it. That’s what I want.” And the angels were singing. And God did something pretty cool in that moment. And I hope that’s happening again tonight, right now.
And I want you to know above all else tonight, that it’s true that our sin is always before us, but not in a way that has to haunt us. As we look up to the cross before us, we know that it’s there. Our sin is all there on the cross, of Jesus Christ, no longer accusing us, but reminding us that it has been paid for in full. Through faith in Jesus, it’s no longer on us. We no longer have to carry it’s burden, it’s guilt, it’s shame. We are forgiven. And I just want to close with another Psalm of David. Because he learned all that too as he looked forward to the promised Messiah and declared:
Slide: “Praise the LORD, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits— who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion. As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him…
Slide: The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities.
Slide: For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” (Psalms 103:1–12 NIV)
Believe it, and live in the peace of being God’s forgiven children. Amen.
