SPEAKER_01 0:00

Uh okay, so we're gonna continue our Lenten series in the penitential Psalms. Uh today uh we're gonna start in Psalm 32, and I like Psalm 32 so much that we're gonna do it twice. We're gonna do the first seven verses this week and the and the remaining verses eight through eleven uh next because there is just so much here I didn't feel like I could really do it justice in a single sermon. Uh all the people rejoice. Um so if you don't have a Bible with you, we do have the text on the screen for you. And let's let's just hear the word of God. Let's just get the whole let's get the whole thing on the table before we dive in. Hear the word of God from Psalm 32. A maskell of David. Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent my bones wasted away, through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up by the heat, as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found. Surely in the rush of great waters they shall not reach him. You are a hiding place for me. You preserve me from trouble, you surround me with shouts of deliverance. I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will counsel you with my eye upon you. Be not like a horse or a mule without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you. Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord. Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy all you upright in heart. Please pray with me. God, as we approach your word, as we hear the lyrics of this psalm of repentance, I pray that our hearts would be moved, that we would not approach it merely as information to be understood, but as but as a movement of the heart to be lived. In Jesus' name. Amen. Mark Twain once wrote a story, a short story in which he kills his own conscience. I don't know if you guys have ever read it. It's really funny. But uh he tells the story as he he he opens up the paper and lights a cigar one morning, and and you know, of course, all of his family members have been bothering him for years and years to quit smoking, and he keeps on doing it. And uh at that point, into the room walks a two-foot-high, misshapen, mold-covered dwarf that somehow resembles him. It picks up one of his pipes, lights it up, and uh, and sits down and just kind of kind of looks at him arrogantly. And and it says to him, you know, you turned away a beggar this morning and and uh you lied to him. He's like, no, no, I I didn't. I we were out of food. He's like, no, you weren't out of food. And you told him that the cook had gone into town. The cook was just behind the door, I know. And he's like, wait a second, and and then he says, and also it was pretty petty the way you wouldn't read that young lady's book that she brought to you last week. You could have just read it, but you know, you you turned her down. And he starts going into kind of all these things he knew about what he had done, and he finally figures out that this is his conscience. And and he's asking him, are you are our consciences trying to make us better men? He's like, no, we just enjoy making you feel terrible about everything. And he's like, so so when I'm in church and there's a sermon on charity, and you make me feel terrible so that I give money, but then I feel terrible that I gave the money, that's you. He's like, that's me. And he says, he says, why do you do it? He says, that's just our work. That's just what we do. He says, Well, may I ask, why are you so small and misshapen? He says, Well, you should have seen me when you were a boy. I was seven feet tall and pretty as a picture. But over time, as you ignored me, I get smaller and smaller. Especially, you see this weird misshapen part over here. This is the part of your conscience that's sensitive to smoking. And so every time you've not listened to your aunt about quitting smoking, this has gotten worse and I've gotten smaller. And at that moment, his aunt comes in and starts and sees him smoking and starts bothering him about smoking, which, of course, he completely ignores and it has no effect on him. And he notices his conscience goes all woozy as he's ignoring him. And so he springs past his aunt and he kills his conscience, just rips it to pieces, throws it in the fire, and then he like gleefully says, he's he says, I was a free man. I turned upon my poor aunt who was almost petrified with terror and shouted, Out of this with your paupers, your charities, your reforms, your pestilent morals. You behold before you a man whose life conflict is done, whose soul is at peace, a man whose heart is dead to sorrow, dead to suffering, dead to remorse, a man without a conscience. In my joy I spare you, though I could throttle you and never feel a pang. Fly! Right? And he's joking, kinda. The idea here is that is that guilt and repentance, the the conscience moving us to feel remorse and turn away from evil is not beneficial, but harmful to a person. Now, other writings of Mark Twain, that that kind of was his view. He saw the conscience and guilt and all these things as harmful. And this this he's he's mostly joking, but we're very serious about this as a culture. You know, telling someone that they are a sinner in the sight of God, so uncouth. Telling someone they need to repent can be thought of as damaging. Saying, you know, that you bear guilt that you need to turn away from is offensive in a lot of ways. We kind of have uh, we think of ourselves as a little more evolved, enlightened. You know, people only do bad things because they don't know any better. And if they had more education, then they would do the right thing. Right? We've all heard that. Some of us may think it. I want to point out Pol Pot went to the Sorbonne. It's worth a Google, guys. Or, you know, everyone is good if you're just compassionate towards them. That maybe the reason that someone is doing wicked things or things that we call wicked is because just no one's shown them love, and that might be be true as well, but you know, we even have this, we even have this idea that, you know, my right might not be their right. And who's to say? You can't judge people. We've all, I mean, these are things we've heard our whole lives, and and and even within the church, there's kind of um there's kind of like a common wisdom among pastors, preachers. It's like don't tell people they're sinners that need to repent. Like that's a bummer. They want to come in and feel good, so just tell them God thinks they're awesome and wants to hang out. And I hear that. And I realize some of you don't like this sermon at all so far. But I actually think it's really important that we hang on to the ideas both of sin and the need for repentance. Why? Why is it so important that so important that we repent? When we look at Psalm 32, this is what is one of the penitential psalms. That is, it's a psalm whose theme is repentance, turning away from sin and turning toward God. And we remember that psalms, they're inspired by God, but they're not an inspired word from God. They are an inspired word to God. That's right. So it's leading us in how we approach God. Oh, and I forgot. Someone asked me this week, why does the Bible have a book of songs in it? I can't remember. Does anybody know? Because songs shape the desires of our heart. He's a teacher. He knows. Right? And so this is a way our hearts are supposed to be shaped into repentance. What reasons do we see in this psalm to repent? Well, the first thing we see is that repentance leads to blessing. Repentance leads to blessing. Look at the first two verses with me. The first word, blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered, blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. Now that word blessed is very, very important. You may, some of you who who know your New Testament realize that this is the way that Jesus starts the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, all that. The reason is, is this is a format for answering the question, what is best in life? Okay? It's saying, what does it mean to be winning at life? This is a form of rabbinic discussion that goes throughout throughout world history. You know, how do you live your best life? That sort of thing. And what this is saying is that the blessed life, the one who's lucky, the one who's winning at life is what? Forgiven. That the best thing in life is to repent and experience the forgiveness of God. That doesn't seem very intuitive, does it? Because we have a very different vision of what it means to have a blessed life. I one of my uh best friends since high school, he's uh he's been in New York City since college, and he somehow he was an acting major, but he somehow got very New York City jobs, like he was the photo editor for Men's Vogue. I was like, How'd you get that job? He's like, I told him I went to college. That was it. And so he he worked for a while for a magazine called Best Life. It was a men's magazine. Anyone remember Best Life? Well, when he got a job there, I went to their website. I was like, what does Best Life say about how I have my best life? And the the issue, they had like a photo carousel that shows you what was in this issue, right? And the first thing they had was Hugh Jackman in a leather coat looking fantastic, it must be said. It's like, okay, I can get down with that. Hugh Jackman's part of my best life. And then the next one they had, it was uh it was it was a picture of a guy uh you know with his head in the refrigerator, but out of the refrigerator were paw were falling those like bound stacks of cash. Once in my life I want to have enough cash to need a rubber band for it. That'd be awesome. But that was just falling out, and it said, how to make your first million before 30. And I was like, too late for that. Missed out on that part of the best life. And then the next one, it was like, how to how to reignite the passion in your marriage. I'm like, that's not bad. And the next one was how to seduce every woman. I'm like, I don't think you can do both. Right? But but it was this, and then and then and then believe it or not, the last one it was Hugh Jackman again. It was like, he's bookending the best life. Um and so it was it was presenting this vision of this is what it looks like to win at life. The money, you know, women, sports cars, Hugh Jackman. And if you were to ask different people throughout time, they have a very different, they have a different set of answers to how do I achieve the best life? How do I win at life, right? So so maybe you ask some of the ancient philosophers, and they say, you know, a life of living and and self-examination, uh, of learning and self-examination is gonna lead to the best possible life. Or if you ask the Mongols, like Genghis Khan, he was asked this question. Anyone ever heard this? It was actually made its way into the movie Conan the Barbarian, but when asked what is best in life to Genghis Khan, the great bloodthirsty Mongol warlord, he said, the greatest happiness in life is to crush your enemies, to drive them before you, to rob their wealth, to hear the lamentations of their women, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters. Very different vision. Now that sounds wrong to us, but maybe to a future, you know, uh uh uh culture seeing best life, they'd be like, what were these people thinking? That doesn't lead to the best life. Here's the thing. You can be very learned. You can have you can be rich, you can be famous, you can have success and everything that you want, and be completely miserable. It happens all the time. And by the way, who's writing this song? It's David. Think of what David, how David was rolling as an ancient Near Eastern monarch. Life is good for an ancient Near Eastern monarch most of the time. Wealth, like you couldn't believe, you know, uh a victory in battle, band of brothers, a whole city singing his praises. You know? He was a hit songwriter to boot. He he experienced a lot of the things that we would say, oh yeah, if I could, if I could do that, then I'm surely I'm gonna be happy in life, right? He says, No, blessed is the one who is forgiven. Repentance leads to blessing. God's word shows us a completely different path, which few of us are, you know, it's funny, the degree to which we we try not to repent. I work much harder at trying to prove I was right all along than I do at repenting. But nowhere in the Bible does it say blessed is the one who was right all along. You know? Blessed is the one who doesn't have to apologize for something they did that is clearly wrong. It doesn't say that. What does it say? It says, Blessed is the one who is forgiven. That repentance is the path to great blessing. So many of you, who are, especially you guys who are on the younger side, you have a path in mind for your life of what's going to lead to satisfaction, of what's going to lead to winning at life, and you want to win. No one sets out to lose. And it it and probably very few of us had repentance on our bingo card of the good life, of how I live the good life. Right? So repentance leads to great blessing. That's the first reason why it's so important here. But also, the response of repentance says a lot about what's going on inside the heart. It says a lot about you as a person, what you're made of inside. There's a movie that I felt like didn't get enough credit for being awesome, but it's called Funny People. It's a Judd Apatow movie. Anybody see this? Don't tell. I didn't say go see it. It's really good. But uh Adam Sandler plays a character, Adam Sandler-like character named George Simmons. He's like this comedy legend, but unlike the real Adam Sandler, this guy is isolated, he's alone, he's very he has everything and he's completely miserable. And so he he's, you know, just empty inside, and he goes searching, and he he finds out that this woman he used to date, who got married, her marriage isn't doing so good, so he he starts pursuing her. And at a certain at a certain point, she shows like a home video of one of her daughters, who's actually Judd Appetau, it's actually really Judd Apatow's daughter singing a recital. Um, but they play it, and this young girl, she's like 11 years old, she's singing a song in front of her school, and she hits this point in this song where it's like, whoa! You know, this huge voice comes out and she's singing from the heart, and everyone who's watching this in the in the movie, they're so moved by it. And then, you know, George Simmons, the Adam Sandler character, just says, What's the big deal? Right? And his response to that tells you everything about why this guy is so miserable. Our responses to things tell us a ton about what's going on inside, and and repentance is the only right response to Jesus. It's the only right response to Jesus. Now, obviously, David doesn't mention Jesus in this because he lived before Jesus, but if he knew, then, you know, that you guys get it. So what we see here is that God initiates with grace. When we look at verses 1 and 2, where does he start? Does he talk about repentance first? No, what does he talk about? He says, Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity. So the emphasis is on God's forgiveness, not our repentance, right? Because repentance is the response. It's the faithful response. When we look down at verse 6, it says, therefore. So whenever you hit a therefore, it means I'm pointing back at everything that was just said, and this is the right response. Therefore, what? Let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time where you may be found. That is, you know, repent, turn to God, turn away from sin, turn towards God. Now, this, it's very interesting. This word for let everyone who is godly, it is our old friend that I've talked about in our devotionals during the week, again and again, and I've mentioned it in sermons. Does anybody want to guess what the Hebrew word is behind that? If anybody said chesed, that's right. It is chesed means covenant faithfulness. It means that God initiates and we respond faithfully. It's saying that the faithful response, the hes, the response of the chesed is repentance. When God initiates towards us with forgiveness, our response, the faithful response is repentance. This is important because sometimes when we say faith, I have faith, I'm a person of faith, what we mean is I give intellectual assent. I intellectually agree that there is a God. It's not what the Bible means by faith. It's faithful response, it's heart commitment. Okay? So the only right response to Jesus, when God initiates with grace, is that we respond with repentance. When we hear about God's forgiveness, we need to pay attention to how our heart responds to that. That Jesus died for our sin. I love this. In this, the the words that are used for for uh for forgiven, the transgression is forgiven, the Hebrew word is literally picked up and taken away. And for those of us who know about what Jesus did on the cross, we realize that that's what it's referring to is that Jesus took it on himself. When we hear that, if the response is, that's cool, right? That's telling us a lot about what's going on inside. If we say, that's nice for people who need it, maybe I'll need that one day. Maybe I'll need forgiveness someday, and then I'll repent. That's telling you a lot about what's going on inside. If you're sitting there saying, boy, I hope my spouse hears it and they repent, they really need to repent. That is not how we're to respond to Jesus. It's it's it's that we're cut to the heart and we respond in faith. Now, there is a there's a strand of theology, and while I don't like to, well, I'm not even gonna say that. I don't like this brand of theology. It's a theory of what Jesus did on the cross. And the idea is they they say, well, Jesus didn't die for sin on the cross. He did not suffer our punishment on the cross. Why? Because that would mean that God is mean, because God requires payment for sin. And God just forgives sin because he's nice. Right? That the cross is just a demonstration of God's love, and it like spurs us on to be merciful. It's called the moral influence theory of the atonement of the cross, that what Jesus did on the cross is show us how to be selfless. Now, he did do that on the cross, but that's not all he did. In fact, if you take away Jesus dying for sin on the cross, it doesn't make any sense to say that he he did something, like he showed us how to be self-sacrificial. Right? If I'm just out walking with my kids and a bus is coming and I say, watch this, and I jump in front of the bus and die. I'm trying to show you how to be selfless. Did I? No. But what if there was a toddler in front of the bus? And I jumped in front of the bus to get the toddler out of the way and died myself. Now I have shown them how to be self-sacrificial, right? If you take away, like this theology is the wrong response to Jesus. To look at what Jesus did to forgive our sin and then say, you know, he didn't do that. That is not responding with repentance. So repentance is crucial. It's important, first of all, because it leads to blessing, also because it's the only right response to Jesus. And there's an essential, just in terms of how we live life and how we experience life, repentance is also essential for this. Because sin, evil, has it has many effects, but the thing it always does is it causes alienation. It causes division. It takes things that are supposed to be together and it breaks them apart. There's a great depiction of this. I realize I refer to this book all the time, and I don't know why you guys haven't all read it yet. It's called The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. Take you an hour and a half. And he describes hell in The Great Divorce. And he describes it as a gray city with empty streets. And the reason the streets are empty is because the citizens of hell, once they get there, they'll move into one of these streets, and as soon as another person moves in next door, they'll fall out with them, they'll have a quarrel, and they'll move further and further out. And so everyone keeps moving further and further away from everyone until you know people who have been there the longest are millions of miles away. It's this vision of what sin does. It's absolutely accurate. It splits apart things that should be together. When we even think of the story in Genesis, when our first parents fall into sin, what's the first thing that happens? Well, they hide from God, so that relationship is broken. They're supposed to be with God. They go away from God. They start bickering with each other, they start blaming one another. So their relationship is broken apart. And also, there's a sense of internal breaking because what do they do? They realize they're naked and they cover themselves. We're all supposed to be naked, guys. We were made. Don't get no, hang on. Don't take that too far. I just realized. People could take me too literally there. The fall is still in effect, guys. We are not totally redeemed yet. But you see, all these things that are supposed to be whole are broken apart. What the Bible calls peace, it's the word shalom in Hebrew, and it doesn't just mean absence of violence, it means right relationship together. And what sin always does is it breaks shalom. It breaks right relationship. Things that should be together are broken apart. And so he one thing I want you to notice is that in this psalm, this is written from within relationship with God. The person who has sinned, and in the words of verse 3, when I kept silent, this person went on in unrepentant sin. David went on in unrepentant sin. He was still in relationship with God. But he he describes it as being miserable. He says, My bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. So even from within relationship with God, if we are living in unrepentant sin, we aren't going to experience. You see? That when we have sin that we don't repent of, and you guys have seen this all over the place, it shatters things. It shatters families, it shatters marriages, it shatters friendships. Think about it. How many people do you know won't speak to each other anymore? Or that you won't speak to? Is it because everybody did the right thing, or is it because there was wrong done? You see? It shatters churches. It also shatters us inside. Because, you know, we're from the youngest age. I remember at school, we were told, you know, think think great about it. Think that you're awesome. You're so awesome. And so it's like the only way that we could really think we're awesome is by ignoring the worst things we've done. Our positive self-regard depends on self-delusion. That's a shattering inside. Yes, I could look inside, see that I'm so awesome if you discount the worst things I've done. Imagine Joseph Stalin. Well, if you just ignore all that stuff, I'm a really great guy. One of the reasons repentance is so essential is because repentance lets us experience peace. It lets us get a taste of shalom. Peace inside. Peace inside, first of all. When we look at verse 2, it says, and I wrote a devotional about this, I think it came out this week, right? Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit. When we confess, when we repent and are forgiven by God, it brings a wholeness inside. Because our positive self-regard doesn't have to be based on delusion. We could say, yes, I did those things and they were terrible, and yet Jesus died on the cross for me because God loves me so much, because I'm so valuable. It allows us to be whole inside, to experience some wholeness inside. It also puts us at peace with God. Reading on, we just looked at verse 3, but when we look at verses 4 and 5, it says, For day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you. I did not cover my iniquity. He repents, you see. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. It allows us to experience peace with God. He's in relationship with God the whole time. The covenant does not end because he's in unrepentant sin. You got it? But he's not experiencing peace with God. Why? Because he had not repented of his sin, and when he does, he experiences peace with God. And this is not directly in Psalm 32, but it's the safest conjecture I've ever made. That repentance, repentance allows us to experience peace with others. One of the things that I um for school, I read a book about parenting, and uh it said the best parents get it right 30% of the time. Which means what's the most important thing about parenting? Learning how to repair. And I think that that's not just true with parenting. I think that's true in almost all of our interactions. We get it right a fraction of the time. And some of you guys are like, well, I'm just so awesome that it's easy. Like, I don't need to repent because I don't do any wrong to anybody. Ask the people around you about that. The only way, the only way that sinners can have a church, can have a marriage, can have a family, can have a friendship, can build a community, can build a society is if there is repair built in. Yeah? What does that mean? It means that when we wrong someone else, we go to them, we repent to them, we ask for forgiveness, and they extend forgiveness. There's not another way, guys. Perfect ain't an option for any of us. It doesn't work. All of your relationships are gonna explode if they are predicated on the perfection of the people in them. But that doesn't mean we can't experience peace. Because God gives us another way: repentance. So we need to repent because it leads to blessing, it's the only right response to Jesus, and it lets us experience peace. One of my very favorite books, um, and considered, you know, maybe the greatest novel of all time, is The Brothers Karamatsov by Dostoevsky. And uh in it, you have this guy who's uh he's he's kind of a secondary character, but he's really, really important. He's the moral heart of the book. His name is Father Zosima, and he's a monk. And uh and in it he's he's telling a story about when he was a young monk. And uh and when he was a young monk, there was this you know big deal in the town. This guy who was a pillar of the community came to see him, and he would never talk about himself. He would just make Father Zosima talk about himself, just asking him question after question. This went on for some weeks, and he didn't know why this guy was coming to him. He was he was involved in a lot of philanthropy, and and then one time, when this guy is in mid-sentence, he said that he he his face became chalk white and his mouth started convulsing. And he stammers out, you know, I murdered someone. And he starts to confess to Father Zossima what he had done, that years ago he had murdered someone and quote, gotten away with it, that suspicion never fell on him. He he tried to make up for it with good works. He got married, he raised children, but he felt like there was always a barrier between himself and his family. And he says, you know, I think that what I'd like to do is confess what I did to everyone I know. And I've wanted to do this for years, and Father Zosima says, Yes, I think that's exactly what you should do. And the guy keeps coming back and he hadn't done it yet, and this goes on for some weeks, and then finally, the guy stands up at his own birthday party and reads a confession of his own guilt. And nobody believed him. And and he he fell sick right after that, and Father Zosima goes to see him, and he says, I know I'm on my deathbed, but for the first time in 14 years, I feel true joy and peace. Repentance leads to blessing. It's the only right response to Jesus, and it lets us experience peace. I want to invite Aptara to lead us in a in a prayer of confession.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

Please join with me in a confession of sin. Blessed is the one whose sins are forgiven. Yet, Lord, so often I believe that only the perfect, not the forgiven, are blessed. And I seek to earn your favor by the excellence of my performance. I even think that if I convince others of my goodness, they will give you glory. Really, my righteousness is only skin deep. I commit the sin of the decent, embedded in my righteous deeds are wicked motivations. I do the right thing for the wrong reason. I want my goodness seen, I want the praise of others. It is not to glorify my Savior or comfort the afflicted. I frequently look down on those who are less righteous than myself, and puff up my sense of self-righteousness by comparison to them. I am like a whitewashed tomb, clean outside and inwardly corrupt. God, I pray that you break through my manicured surface and root out the corruption hidden underneath, that I would find again the grace of Jesus sufficient even for the sin of my decency, that I would take off my righteous facade and run as a sinner to the great Savior. Amen.