Senator John Edwards was the Democrats 2004 nominee for vice president. His political future is currently in doubt as he has admitted to an affair in 2008 with a campaign worker. He had won sympathy during the campaign as his wife had been campaigning next to him as she fought cancer. Calling it a “very serious mistake,” Edwards admitted cheating on his wife during her fight with cancer. His web of deceit is now only fully coming to light as he allegedly was planning a wedding with his mistress once he wife’s died of cancer. In addition to all of this treachery, the media is now wondering if Edwards is the father of a nineteen month old child. Still, former Sen. John Edwards isn’t the only politician to have an affair.
Nor are affairs the stuff of Democrats only. Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich was having an affair while he voted to impeach former President Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. And Republican Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina also concealed paternity of his child for a generation. Worse still, he breathed out racial segregationist rhetorical fire while he denied the very existence of his African-American daughter. Whether it is the teenage boy who skips town once his girlfriend sees two pink lines in her pregnancy test… Or it is the middle-aged man who offers $300 to his lover to “put it all behind us,” the lives of so many of us are deeply marred by the tragic consequences of sexual sin.
Psalm 51 is the story of the clean up after a train wreck – the train wreck of King’s David’s affair with Bathsheba.
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 right 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 blood guiltiness, 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” (Psalm 51:1-19).
This is David’s prayer of confession after falling into deep, dark, and dreadful sin. David never imagined that when he sinned, that God would put it in a book for the whole world to read. The account of David’s affair with Bathsheba is a sordid affair (2 Samuel 11:1- 12:25). Allow me to give you a very short account from the Bible’s pages on how the events unfolded.
It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. 3 And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” 4 So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness.) Then she returned to her house. 5 And the woman conceived, and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant” (2 Samuel 11:2-5).
It began with luxury, it continued with leisure, and it concluded with lust. The pattern is as old as the Garden of Eden and is as current as what is happening in our times. For some time, David tried to cover his sin. King David sent his troops off to battle (11:1). He saw Bathsheba from the roof of his palace (11:2). He took Bathsheba and slept with her (11:4). Bathsheba was conceived with child and sent word to David (11:5). David killed Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, to cover his sin (11:17). While trying to cover his sin, David was an absolutely miserable individual (Psalm 32).
There is a principle, which comes from the Word of God that makes it very clear that the sin we uncover, God will cover. When we confess our sin, God clears the record, He covers it with his blood, and casts it into the depths of the sea. Yet, the sins we cover, God will uncover: “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper,?but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy” (Proverbs 28:13). The Bible also states that God was displeased with what David had done (2 Samuel 11:27). This is another Biblical principle: Secret sin on earth is open scandal in heaven. So God sent Nathan the prophet with a four word message: “You are the man” (2 Samuel 12:7)! It was these four words that stripped the camouflage from David’s soul. Those four words melted the ice that was packed around his heart.
So Psalm 51 takes us to a very sacred place. It takes us to where a man confesses his enormous sin before his God.
1. The High Cost of Sin
The most expensive thing in all of the world is human sin. All of the mathematicians are not able to add it up. All of calculators are unable to compute it. The enormous high cost of sin. As we read these words of David’s confession, we learn something of the high cost of sin from David’s experience. Sin is a serious matter though our modern culture would have us believe otherwise.
Notice in verse 1: “blot out my transgressions” where the word ‘transgression’ means “to step over the line.” God had drawn a line — “Thou shall not commit adultery” and David crossed the line. God had drawn a line — “Thou shall not lie” and David stepped over the line. God had drawn a line — “Thou shall not murder” and David stepped over the line.
I was but a child when I first heard Johnny Cash had his first hit song “I Walk the Line.” My father drove a ‘72 yellow Buick station wagon with wood grain on the side as we would listen to Johnny Cash on the stereophonic eight track player sing these words:
“I keep a close watch on this heart of mine,
I keep my eyes wide open all the time,
I keep the ends out for the ties that bind.
Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”
If only David had walked the line. All sin is stepping over God’s line. David then defines sin with the word ‘iniquity’ (verse 2). Iniquity means a ‘deviation from a right course,” a perversion, or a distortion. David had taken God’s beautiful gift of sex and distorted it. The Bible has clearly stated that all sexual intercourse outside of marriage is a distortion of God’s original intent.
Sin has consequences. Sin also affects the mind. People believe that adultery is, at times, the will of God. But sin diminishes one’s IQ. When the prodigal was indulging himself in his sinful lifestyle, he came to the place where he realized where he had gone wrong which the Bible describes as “He came to himself.” Again, there is a high cost to sin. David had tried to cover his sin by bringing Bathsheba’s husband Uriah home from battle so Uriah could lie with her and think it was his baby. Uriah was too noble to go in to his wife while his comrades were in battle. So David arranged to have him killed so that he could quickly marry Bathsheba and cover the sin that way. In one of the most understated sentences of the Bible, 2 Samuel 11 ends with these words: “the thing that David had done displeased the Lord” (2 Samuel 11:27)
So God sent the prophet Nathan to David with a parable that entices David to pronounce his own condemnation. Then Nathan asks, “Why have you despised the word of the Lord?” David breaks and confesses, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Then Nathan says, astonishingly, “…because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child who is born to you shall die’” (2 Samuel 12:14).
We learn the high cost of committing sin from Proverbs as well.
“Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes;?26 for the price of a prostitute is only a loaf of bread, but a married woman hunts down a precious life.?27 Can a man carry fire next to his chest and his clothes not be burned??28 Or can one walk on hot coals and his feet not be scorched??29 So is he who goes in to his neighbor's wife; none who touches her will go unpunished” (Proverbs 6:25-29)
Listen to a Personalized List of Anticipated Consequences of Immorality. This is a list of things that would happen to me if I did what David did.
Grieving my Lord; displeasing the One whose opinion most matters; dragging into the mud Christ’s sacred reputation; loss of reward and commendation from God; Having to one day look Jesus in the face at the judgment seat and give an account of why I did it; forcing God to discipline me in various ways; following in the footsteps of men I know of whose immorality forfeited their ministry and caused me to shudder; suffering of innocent people around me who would get hit by my shrapnel; untold hurt to my wife, my best friend and loyal wife; loss of my wife’s respect and trust; hurt to and loss of credibility with my beloved children. (“Why listen to a man who betrayed Mom and us?”); if my blindness should continue or my family be unable to forgive, I could lose my wife and my children forever; shame to my family. (The cruel comments of others who would invariably find out.); shame to my church family; shame and hurt to my pastors; shame and hurt to my friends, and especially those I’ve led to Christ and disciple; guilt awfully hard to shake—even though God would forgive me, would I get over what I have done?; plaguing memories and flashbacks that could taint future intimacy with my wife; disqualifying myself after having preached to others; surrender of the things I am called to and love to do — teach and preach and write and minister to others; forfeiting forever certain opportunities to serve God; years of training and experience in ministry wasted for a long period of time, maybe permanently; being haunted by my sin as I look in the eyes of others, and having it all dredged up again wherever I go and whatever I do; undermining the hard work and prayers of others by saying to our community “this is a hypocrite—who can take seriously anything he and his church have said and done?”; laughter, rejoicing and blasphemous smugness by those who disrespect God and the church (2 Samuel 12:14); bringing great pleasure to Satan, the Enemy of God; heaping judgment and endless problems on the person I would have committed adultery with; possible diseases (pain, constant reminder to me and my wife, possible infection of my wife, or in the case of AIDS, even causing her death, as well as mine.); possible pregnancy, with its personal and financial implications; loss of self-respect, discrediting my own name, and invoking shame and lifelong embarrassment upon myself.
All of this is very much possible if I were sin in the way David sinned.
2. Confess Your Sin
Remember the sins we cover, God will uncover. Remember, secret sin on earth is open scandal in heaven. You see David’s frank confession in these verses. He refuses to blame-shift. He refuses to look for an excuse. He completely owns his sin and his sinfulness. Confession is a very personal matter. While everyone in our culture desires to blame others for their sin, David blamed himself for his sin. We blame our parents and blame our environment around us for we are just a victim. But when David came to do business with God, he didn’t blame anyone but himself, he didn’t blame society, he didn’t blame heredity, and he didn’t blame his parents He said “It is me, Lord.”
Confession is a deeply personal and essential matter. When David said he knew of his sins (Verse 3), he was agreeing with God’s definition of his sin. He was saying the same thing as God said concerning his sin. Notice the number of times that David uses a personal pronoun Read Ps 51:1-3. Five times in verses 1 through 3: “my sin,” ”my transgression,” “my iniquity,” “my transgression,” and “my sin.” Five times it’s “my sin.”
2.1 Sin Stays on Your Mind
Everywhere sin steps, it leaves its prints. David tells us that sin effects the eyes in verse three, “my sin is ever before me.” Eugene Peterson has paraphrased it, “My sins are staring me down.” When David got up in the morning, he saw his sin in the mirror. As he made his was to the palace, he saw the grave of Uriah and the baby that was stillborn. Everyone that looked at him in an unusual way in the palace that day, must have made David wonder, “Do they know about my sin?” And when David laid down in the bed at night, sin plagued his guilty conscience.
Sin has a way of every being before you. People deny the fact of sin today as it submerged into the subconscious. To speak of humans as sinners is almost like screaming profanity. Many deny the reality of sin, but they cannot deny the reality of guilt. The influence of Freud has defined guilt as an irrational feeling that one ought not to have. Sin affects the eyes.
2.2 My Sin is Against God
“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” (Psalm 51:4).
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 four: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” This doesn’t mean Bathsheba and Uriah and the baby weren’t hurt. It means that what makes sin to be sin is that it is against God. Hurting man is bad. It is horribly bad. But that’s not the horror of sin. Sin is an attack on God—a belittling of God. David admits this in striking terms: “Against you, you only, have I sinned.” He’s heightening his sin in his eyes. He can’t heighten it in God’s eyes.
2.3 God is Blameless in Judging Me
David vindicates God, not himself. There is no self-justification. No defense. No escape. Again verse four: “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” (Psalm 51:4).
God is justified. God is blameless. If God casts David into hell, God will be innocent. 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. David vindicates the righteousness of God, not himself.
2.4 My Guilt is from My Birth
David intensifies his guilt by drawing attention to his inborn corruption. Verse five: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Some people use their inborn or inbred corruption to diminish their personal guilt. David does the opposite. For him the fact that he committed adultery and murdered and lied are expressions of something worse: He is by nature that way. If God does not rescue him, he will do more and more evil. So in these four ways David join both the prophet Nathan and God in confessing his sins and acknowledging the depths of his corruption.
3. Pray to be Restored
David pleads for more than forgiveness. He pleads for renewal. He is passionately committed to being changed by God. David pours out his heart in at least five ways. I only have time to bring your attention to them.
3.1 God Confirm And Clean Me
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” here is the established, firm, unwavering spirit. He wants to be done with the kind of instability that he has just experienced: “Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me” (Psalm 51:11). When David or I pray, “Don’t cast me away, and don’t take your Spirit from me,” we mean: 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.
3.2 God Cause Joy to Return to Me
Self-explanatory: “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11)
3.3 God Cause Me to Applaud You
He asked God to bring his joy to the overflow of praise. Verse fifteen: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.” Praise is what joy in God does when obstacles are taken out of the way. That is what he is 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 for YOU irrepressible.
3.4 God Grant Me Influence
He asks that the upshot of all this will be a life of effective evangelism. Verse thirteen: “Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.” David is not content to be forgiven. He is not content to be clean. He will not be content until his broken life serves the healing of others. “Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.”
3.5 God Break Me
When we truly confess our sin, our mind will abhor our sin and our will will abandon our sin. Which brings us to the last point. Under all this, David has discovered that God has crushed him (verse 8) in love, and that a broken and contrite heart is the mark of all God’s children. Verse seventeen: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
