Sermon Discussion Questions
1. What is similar between a Christian and the examples of the soldier, the abused child, and the lying man from the beginning of the sermon? What is different?
2. Which of the alternative responses presented (self-improvement, self-defense, self-hatred) have you personally struggled with? How did it impact your relationship with God and others?
3. Of all the practical steps David takes in Psalm 51 to feel forgiven, which was most helpful to you?
4. Share an image that comes to your mind when you think of God's cleansing and renewal. How can sanctified imagination help us grasp the transformative power of God's forgiveness?
A man who has spent months at the frontline of battle must be vigilant. Turning your attention at a snap’s notice, sleeping lightly, and drawing your gun quickly may save your life.
A child who is raised in a violently abusive home must be vigilant. Remaining constantly aware of what may set mom or dad or step-dad off may save your life.
A man living a double-life must be vigilant. If he misspeaks, leaves his phone out in the open, or let’s the mask slip, people will find out about the affair, the addiction, the other life.
But what happens if the soldier comes home and isn’t in battle anymore? What happens if the child grows up and leaves the abusive home? What happens if the duplicitous man leaves the hidden life and lives honestly? Do they suddenly find that all of the anxiety, fear, and habits they learned while under pressure, drop away? Likely not. The veteran may be sleeping safely in bed, but wake in a panic, certain that someone is approaching to kill him. The grown-child may find themselves paralyzed in fear because a co-worker who looks like their step-parent has walked into the elevator with them. And the newly-honest man may feel a need to continue to keep secrets, not because they have anything to hide, but because they have become so habituated to never being fully forthright.
There is often a lag-time in the subjective experience of a person who has transitioned from danger to safety, from fear to relief, from lying to honesty. The hyper vigilance and defensiveness and tactics that served them so well are hard to quit. Now, what happens when a person has lived their life distant from God, out in the cold of their sin, but they have accepted the invitation to come into the warmth of the mercy offered in the person of Jesus Christ? If a person has lived their whole life out in the cold and they are invited in to warm themselves by the fire, their jacket—which was so crucial out in the biting wind—might be clung onto for a long time. If they take it off and are thrust back outside without it, what will they do?
Here is what we are going to consider today: how can a Christian come to the belief that sin is awful, Jesus died in their place, God loves them and has given them eternal life…yet, feel like none of that is true? We can know that sin makes us miserable, yet we come back to it as if it won’t. We can know that God has forgiven our sins, yet live as if we need to pay Him back. Why can we know intellectually that we are not at the front lines anymore, yet live like an enemy might step out behind a corner at any minute? And the strange thing is that you may have become a Christian very early in life, and yet still struggle with feeling forgiven. Why is that? This is because the flesh in you is still very old, very stubborn, and very familiar. So, while God’s truth repeatedly comes and tells us: Come warm yourself by the fire of God’s mercy, God’s truth, the old man inside of us mutters: Don’t let your guard down, He’ll turn you out before you know 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!
…
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.
- Ps 51:1-2, 6-10
Defiled
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! – Ps 51:2
Shakespeare so perfectly captures this sense of a defiled conscience with Lady Macbeth compulsively washing her hands to try and wash away her sense of guilt. There is no blood on her hands, literally speaking, but there is blood on her hands spiritually—she knows she is responsible for the murder, so she scrubs and scrubs and cries out: Hell is murky! (i.e. dirty, like her hands)...Will these hands never be clean? David feels dirty from his sin, and who of us cannot relate? Who of us hasn’t done something that has left us feeling defiled, that we look back on and shudder at? Maybe you take a shower, maybe you are extra nice to the next person you meet, or maybe you just collapse into the acid of self-hatred. You did something that felt reasonable, justifiable, even pleasurable in the moment, and later, when the consequence comes or when your head clears, you then have to realize who you really are. We all know what it is like to be repulsed at ourselves and to seek out something that will leave us feeling clean.
But one thing we should keep in mind as we read psalm 51 is that David lived at a time where there were literal clean/unclean laws. Here, David speaks like he has become “unclean,” even though he hasn’t technically violated any purity laws (that we know of). In verse 7, David asks the Lord, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean,” (Ps 51:7). Hyssop was a bushy plant (wild oregano) that was used to sprinkle water on lepers and those who had come into contact with a dead body to purify them (Lev 14:4; Num 19:18; cf. Ex 12:22). When David asks the Lord to purge him with hyssop, he is invoking these images because he feels defiled, even though he hasn’t come into contact with a dead body or a leper. When David turns his eyes inward and considers his heart, he feels like he is carrying around inside of him the domain of death and disease.
Think of Jesus criticizing the Pharisees in Matthew 23: “For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness,” (Matt 23:27). Jesus is showing this to the Pharisees; David is now seeing it for himself. Outwardly, David is still the king, still looks like a “man after God’s own heart,” but inside, in his heart? Rottenness, wretchedness, vileness, impurity.
And when you turn in and consider the state of your own heart, what do you see?
Wherever you go, there you are. And wherever you are, there is the sin-sickness lingering, the hacking cough of the old man, the foul decay of the body of death. Who doesn’t resonate with Tennyson’s “Ah, for a man to arise in me that the man I am may cease to be.” Who doesn’t see something in them that they would love to change? Not only that, who doesn’t see something in themselves that they feel ashamed of, maybe even disgusted with? Now, what do you do with that feeling? Before we look at what David did, let’s consider some popular alternatives.
Fix Yourself
If you see a problem inside of you, the most mature and responsible thing to do is to fix it, right? If you feel bad about who you are, then become a different version of who you are. But one problem with this is that it assumes that we have the capacity to fix the problem. If the problem is something relatively skin deep—I want to lose weight; I want to stop drinking—then with enough force, incentives, and discipline, you’ll be able to modify your behavior. But what if the problem is deeper? What if we follow the Bible’s demands that we love, trust, and obey from the heart? God’s Law expects more than just an alteration of habits, but of a heartfelt love of God and neighbor. And, most troubling of all, what if we are actually just using the sin of vanity and pride to scrub all our other more embarrassing sins clean? Getting drunk and slurring your words at the office Christmas party is pretty embarrassing, and you may use your even deeper love for your reputation and self-righteousness to change your life. But if you use sin to fix sin, sin wins.
Defend Yourself
If you see that God’s standards are more than skin-deep, but go to the heart, then you may be tempted to defend yourself. You feel a pang of conviction, but you have twenty lawyers pop up inside of you that quickly defend why you shouldn’t feel bad, why you are actually a great person, and why this feeling is really coming from people or traditions who are the wrong ones, not you. But if you do this, not only will your sense of inner peace be as fragile as your defenses are, but you will never know the joy of fully confessing your sin and embracing the forgiveness offered in Jesus Christ.
Hate Yourself
This may be the most tempting place to turn to. If you are a Christian who knows yourself to be a sinner, who follows God’s Law, not your heart, as your moral standard, and who knows how profoundly you fall short…then self-hatred can be an incredibly tempting alternative. It feels so right, it feels like it is what you deserve—it even feels like it is the Christian thing to do! We should hate our sin, we should feel sorrow and grief over it, we should be humbled. But Satan is incredibly talented at taking those good, healthy responses, and twisting them into something perverse, taking your hatred of sin and turning it into a hatred of yourself. Right now, take a moment and consider your own heart, your own sin.
If you find that deep down, you just hate yourself, then with all the authority I have as minister of the gospel, I want to tell you: that is not the voice of the Holy Spirit. That is your fleshly desires to remain control, that is the world telling you to deal with problems yourself, and that is Satan wanting to condemn you to death. The sinful allure of self-hatred is that it is actually a form of self-salvation; it keeps you from having to trust in Jesus to forgive you and cleanse you of your sins—you can atone by punishing yourself, and if you do that, you don’t have to trust Jesus.
But Marc, you may say, I know that Jesus forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself. I know Jesus forgives me, but I let my wife down, my dad down, myself down. What we really mean we say that is that those things that we have disappointed are just more important than Jesus. If King Jesus walks up to your jail cell and says, You’re free to go, but then another person walks up and says No you’re not, who we obey at that moment reveals who we believe is really in control, who really matters the most. And it is not godly, it is not humble, it is not spiritual to treat someone else as more important than Jesus. It is not godly or humble to look at Jesus’ sacrifice for you and say: That isn’t enough for MY sin.
Maybe you have really blown it, maybe you’ve made a mess. But Jesus Christ is here to take dirty, defiled, and despairing sinners and offer them full forgiveness and a warm welcome by His side.
Clean
When David was confronted by the prophet Nathan, he immediately confesses his sin, admits to what he has done, and Nathan tells him that God has “put away” his sin (2 Sam 12:13). But despite being told that, David does not walk away feeling like he is cleansed from his sin. There is a lag-time behind the objective proclamation of his forgiveness and his subjective experience of feeling forgiven. But the fact that Psalm 51 is in the Bible shows us that this is something that God’s people typically experience. David wrote this not for his personal diary, but to be composed and sung in the worship assembly! (see the superscription, “To the choirmaster”)
So what does David do to bring his subjective experience into alignment with objective truth?
He prays
This may seem obvious, but David doesn’t remain congested with his feelings of guilt, but he releases them through prayer. The best way to lance the boil of guilt is to bring our feelings of guilt and shame to God and ask for mercy. There will be no help, no relief, no apprehension of the cleansing of Jesus Christ unless we come to Him in prayer.
He reminds himself of who God is
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. (Ps 51:1)
David here is likely thinking of the classic revelation of God given to Moses: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,” (Ex 34:6). The gift of the Bible is that it provides for us unambiguous declarations like this of who God is that correct our foggy minds and their inaccurate assumptions of what God is like. What is God like? He is a God who is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.
“The truth is, that we cannot properly pray for the pardon of sin until we have come to a persuasion that God will be reconciled to us. Who can venture to open his mouth in God's presence unless he be assured of his fatherly favor?” (Calvin)
When we preached through the book of Micah, one verse that just totally took me by surprise and has now become one of my favorites for meditating on who God is, is this one: “Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love,” (Mic 7:18).
He speaks honestly about his sin
As we examined last week, David has a keen and honest sense of his own sinfulness. His sin is ever before him, is against God, and has been present since he was born (Ps 51:3-5). He feels like a leper, like a dead man (Ps 51:7). There are no qualifications or defenses given. In verse 6, he explains what God desires from him: “Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart,” (Ps 51:6). David was manifestly dishonest in the affair with Bathsheba, and God desires truth that radiates out from our heart into our outward life. He does not want there to be a schism between what we know to be true and wise, and what we actually do.
He reminds himself that sin can be removed
“…blot out my transgressions,” (Ps 51:1)
“Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.” (Ps 51:9)
God, apparently, doesn’t record our sins with indelible ink. David’s request here, if we are honest, is pretty audacious. He is not merely asking for God to forgive his sin. He is asking God to now treat him as if that sin didn’t exist. I think we understand the idea of forgiving someone; someone hurts you or lets you down, and you don’t hold it against them, but you also can’t not remember what happened, right? But this? To be treated as if the sin never happened? We have no category for that. But this, as difficult as it is for us to understand, is who God is. In Isaiah, God declares:
“I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” (Isa 43:25)
This is why David, in verse 7, speaks about the result of God’s cleansing work as resulting in perfect purity: “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow,” (Ps 51:7). David, whose sins are red as scarlet, can be made whiter than snow if the Lord washes him (Isa 1:18). Even more than that, David asks God: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me,” (Ps 51:10). The word for “create” here is the word bara, a word only used for an activity that God does, and especially used in the first two chapters of Genesis to describe how God creates out of nothing. David isn’t asking for God to improve upon his heart, but to come to the chaotic void he feels inside and to speak into existence a new, clean, and upright heart.
What happens when you trust in Jesus Christ? Here is what Paul teaches us: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God,” (2 Cor 5:21). The great exchange of the cross: the sinless son of God takes on the sinful debt of sinners like David, you, and me, so that we might become righteous, clean, whiter than snow in the eyes of God. For us this means that sins that we can’t forget, God can’t remember.
He asks for renewed application of that cleansing
I think one of the most helpful aspects of Psalm 51, why it has become one of the most famous and prayed psalms in the whole Bible, is because it takes the objective work of God in forgiving sin in the past, and imaginatively apprehends it for today. Here is what I mean by that: for David, he knew that God had pronounced his forgiveness through the prophet, but he still felt unclean, felt like he needed more mercy to restore his joy and gladness. For us, we know that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, we know that we have trusted in Him, but we may still feel unforgiven, dirty, may still feel like God is merely tolerating us, putting us on a trial period to see if we are worth keeping around.
What we need, like David, is to pray, to remind ourselves of who God is, confess our sins, and remember that because of Jesus Christ our sins can be cast away from us as far as the east is from the west (Ps 103). But we need even more. We need not only to do all of that, but we also need help to actually believe it! We need, like David, to imaginatively lay hold of those truths afresh, each day. The cleansing of Jesus Christ is objectively accomplished, it is here—the problem is that our souls are so sleepy and nerve-deadened that we need to think about how to awaken them to the bright, fresh joy of the accomplished salvation achieved for us. And I think, following David, we should use sanctified imagination.
What do I mean by that? As David meditates on his sin, he speaks as if he is ceremonially unclean—when he technically isn’t. But he is more correct than he knows. Later, Jesus will explicitly teach that it is the sin that dwells inside of us that makes one unclean, not the kinds of food you eat or coming in contact with a death (Mark 7). But it is through this imaginative picture that David presents his request for God to bring about cleansing, healing, renewal. His request for being purged with hyssop brings to mind the leper being cleansed, the one coming into contact with a dead body being cleansed. David is saying: I am the leper, I am the corpse, I am unclean. Now, what comes to mind when you think of your sin? Lepers, decay are all rather grotesque images of what sin feels like in your soul, but they are images that also highlight the power of God to restore. God heals lepers! God raises the dead! So, whatever image comes to your mind when you think of your sin, load your mind with the Biblical truth that God is also the one who can overcome that deadness, that sickness, that perversity.
I love his request for God to “wash me thoroughly from my iniquity.” So, not only is he unclean and in need of cleansing, but he senses the bite of guilt so keenly that he cries out for the Lord to be extra thorough, to flush out all of gunk. What comes to your mind when you think of something be “washed thoroughly” or “purged” or “cleansed”? There is a video on the internet of a gate in a dam that has been closed for years being opened. As it opens, there is a thick wall of solid sludge just barely creeping out over the lip of the gate. But as that falls out, mud bubbles and sprays out, and then filthy water begins to shoot like a jet stream, and eventually the water clears into a white and blue beam. That’s what I think of when I think of wash thoroughly. I picture that and say, God, do that in my sin-sick heart, clear me out and bring renewal and purity.
If the Lord’s prayer teaches us that we need to daily ask God for our sins to be forgiven, then that means we daily need to be applying these truths to our heart, daily and imaginatively grabbing the objective truths of the finished work of Jesus on the cross, and bringing them down into our hearts.
He publicly confesses his sin
Another aspect to consider when thinking about how to subjectively apprehend the objective work of Christ is the role confession plays. David, because he was publicly confronted by Nathan, publicly confessed his sin. Then, publicly composed the penitential psalm we are studying right now.
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:7-9)
Walking in the light doesn’t refer to sinless perfection, but honesty, because John says “we have fellowship with one another.” And the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin. Confession brings a sharper, more felt reality of cleansing forgiveness of Jesus.
