SPEAKER_00: Psalm chapter fifty-one.
SPEAKER_01: A few weeks ago, a couple months ago, before it got too hot, um at Green Acre's parking lot, there was a fundraiser.
SPEAKER_01: I don't remember who it was for, uh, but we went, it was called it's called Touch a Truck, where uh all these organizations and companies and whatnot, they bring all their the trucks, all the cool trucks that are just really cool.
SPEAKER_01: And you get to go and you could touch them.
SPEAKER_01: And so we got pictures of all of our kids touching every single truck that was out there.
SPEAKER_01: And for decade upon decade upon decade, through the advancement of technology and all the cool things that have come out, even you know, some of you may have seen driving around town this like the Smith County SWAT truck.
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's super cool.
SPEAKER_01: There is one truck that is the champion of them all that stands decade after decade.
SPEAKER_01: Every kid wants to see and touch this truck, and you all know what it is.
SPEAKER_01: It's the fire truck.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Stands the test of time.
SPEAKER_01: Every kid wants to see the fire truck.
SPEAKER_01: We went and saw the fire truck, and it had some firemen out there.
SPEAKER_01: And uh the firemen were super nice, super great.
SPEAKER_01: My kids all touched the truck, they all sat in the truck.
SPEAKER_01: Courtney wanted to sit in the truck.
SPEAKER_01: Firemen were nice enough to let Courtney sit in the truck.
SPEAKER_01: Great experience.
SPEAKER_01: And then we went on about our day.
SPEAKER_00: We went to the next truck.
SPEAKER_00: That was our view of the firemen.
SPEAKER_00: They were nice.
SPEAKER_00: They let us sit in their truck.
SPEAKER_01: You may have a different view of a fireman if you're in a second or third story of a building and everything under you is on fire.
SPEAKER_01: If you're in the second story of a house and the whole first level is on fire, and you have no way out.
SPEAKER_01: And next thing you know, you see a truck, a ladder truck, and a ladder's coming to you, and a fireman's coming to you, risking his life to save you from the fire.
SPEAKER_00: You have a much different view of that same fireman.
SPEAKER_00: It's all about perspective.
SPEAKER_00: What Psalm 51 does is it gives us some perspective.
SPEAKER_01: We don't know who Jesus is and what he saves us from if we don't continuously remind ourselves of the reality of our sin.
SPEAKER_01: In 2005, a sociologist named Christian Smith published the results of the largest study of the religious lives of American teenagers that had ever been conducted.
SPEAKER_01: And he gathered all this information from thousands of interviews, and he found that the functional religion of American young people, and now these young people are now adults, so this would be kind of my generation.
SPEAKER_01: So the functional religion of what you could essentially say is now typical American Christianity, um, or even people who are unchurched but say that they believe in Jesus or the churched and unchurched alike.
SPEAKER_01: So I would even take this to say your typical American view of Christianity can be summarized in five beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: Number one, God exists and watches over us.
SPEAKER_01: Number two, God wants us to be nice.
SPEAKER_01: Number three, the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about yourself.
SPEAKER_01: Number four, God does not need to be particularly involved in your life except for when you have a problem.
SPEAKER_01: And number five, good people go to heaven when they die.
SPEAKER_01: This religion has a name.
SPEAKER_01: It's called moralistic therapeutic deism.
SPEAKER_01: And notice what is missing from this religion.
SPEAKER_01: There is no cross, there is no atonement, there is no repentance, and there is no sin, at least no sin serious enough to require the death of the Son of God.
SPEAKER_01: And the Jesus of moralistic therapeutic deism is a therapist.
SPEAKER_01: He's a life coach, he's a cosmic encourager.
SPEAKER_01: Some instances he's even a hopeful genie.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe he can accomplish things for us, you know, that that we can't accomplish on our own.
SPEAKER_01: This Jesus of moralistic therapeutic deism, he exists to help you improve your self-esteem, to soothe your anxieties, and to affirm your life choices.
SPEAKER_01: He is a Jesus who helps.
SPEAKER_01: He's not a Jesus who saves.
SPEAKER_01: And this religion has crept into the pulpits all across America.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, crept is a bad word to use.
SPEAKER_01: It has come full force into the church across America.
SPEAKER_01: It has barreled into American Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: And Psalm 51 stands like a strong eight-foot thick stone castle wall in defense against it.
SPEAKER_01: This psalm will not let us have a therapeutic Jesus, because this psalm does not allow us to have a shallow view of sin.
SPEAKER_01: Here, the greatest king of Israel, a man after God's own heart, lies in the dust, and he does not say, Lord, help me to feel better about myself.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, he says, Have mercy on me, O God, blot out my transgressions.
SPEAKER_01: So with that mindset, let's read Psalm 51 together this morning from the lips of David.
SPEAKER_01: And I'll read the subscript to the choir master, a psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba.
SPEAKER_01: Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin, for I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.
SPEAKER_01: Against you and 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.
SPEAKER_01: Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.
SPEAKER_01: Behold, you delight in truth and the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.
SPEAKER_01: Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean, wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
SPEAKER_01: Let me hear joy and gladness, let the bones that you have broken rejoice, hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities.
SPEAKER_01: Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
SPEAKER_01: Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
SPEAKER_01: Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with the willing spirit.
SPEAKER_01: Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.
SPEAKER_01: Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise, for you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it.
SPEAKER_01: You will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
SPEAKER_01: The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
SPEAKER_01: Do good to Zion in your good pleasure, build up the walls of Jerusalem, then will you delight in right sacrifices and burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings, then bulls will be offered on your altar.
SPEAKER_01: When we view sin rightly, we can then view Christ rightly.
SPEAKER_01: The point of this message this morning from Psalm 51 is not to make you feel worse about your sin than it makes you feel helpless.
SPEAKER_01: That's not the point.
SPEAKER_01: The point of the message this morning taken from Psalm 51 is for you to see your sin for what it really is, so that you can see your Savior for who he it really is.
SPEAKER_01: And then through that, we magnify the name of Christ because of what he's done for us.
SPEAKER_01: As preachers, we always try to thread a needle between two audiences.
SPEAKER_01: Preach a message that shares the gospel with the lost person for the first time and that simultaneously sanctifies the saint who's been walking with Christ for decades.
SPEAKER_01: That needle is not hard to thread in Psalm 51.
SPEAKER_01: It's the same message.
SPEAKER_01: If you have never trusted in Christ as your Lord and Savior, my prayer for you this morning is this: see your sin, see how horrible it is, how you've offended the holy God, and there is nothing that you can do to rectify the situation, but someone has done it for you.
SPEAKER_01: And if you repent of your sin and follow Christ, you will be saved and you will enter into his joy.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, sinner, run to Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: If you have trusted in Christ for decades, my prayer for you this morning is this see your sin and how horrible it is, how you have offended the holy God, and Christ has saved you from your sins.
SPEAKER_01: So continue to mortify sin in your life by following Christ and enter into his joy.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, saint, run to Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: That's the message this morning for all of you.
SPEAKER_01: Wherever you are, look at your sin and run to Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: If you don't think your sin is that great, then you have no need of a great Savior.
SPEAKER_01: But if you look at your sin and you see how horrible it is, then you look at Christ rightly.
SPEAKER_01: For all of us this morning, my goal is that an illumination onto our sin is what causes us to run to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Now we have a very helpful habit of looking at the Psalms in three different ways, three different horizons.
SPEAKER_01: First, I like to look at it from the historical horizon.
SPEAKER_01: What did it mean for, in this sense, David and the original audience?
SPEAKER_01: Secondly, how is the Psalm fulfilled in Christ?
SPEAKER_01: And then thirdly, what does it mean for us as the church today?
SPEAKER_01: We're going to follow that same pattern as we walk through Psalm 51 and as we're applying this idea of seeing our sin and using that to magnify how great Christ is.
SPEAKER_01: My prayer is that by the end you will see your sin more clearly than you did when you walked in.
SPEAKER_01: And as a result of that, see Christ as more precious.
SPEAKER_01: So firstly, this morning, the historical horizon, we see a king in the dust.
SPEAKER_01: Now, the little subscription, the superscription tells us everything we need to know.
SPEAKER_01: The Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone to Bathsheba.
SPEAKER_01: We've talked about this over the summer as we've studied the Psalms.
SPEAKER_01: We know the history from 2 Samuel chapter 11, chapter 12.
SPEAKER_01: It was springtime, the time when kings go out to battle, but David stayed home.
SPEAKER_01: And from his rooftop, he saw a woman bathing.
SPEAKER_01: He inquired about her.
SPEAKER_01: He was told she was Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of his faithful soldiers, a married woman, and he took her anyway.
SPEAKER_01: And then when she sent word that she was pregnant, David did not repent.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, he schemed.
SPEAKER_01: He summoned Uriah home from deployment, came home from the front.
SPEAKER_01: He tried twice to get him to go home to his wife so that he may cover up the pregnancy.
SPEAKER_01: And when the faithful soldier Uriah refused the comforts of home while his brethren were continuing battling, David sent him back out into battle, carrying his own death warrant.
SPEAKER_01: Uriah died on the field of battle because of David.
SPEAKER_01: And then David took Bathsheba as his wife.
SPEAKER_01: And 2 Samuel 11 closes with one of the most chilling sentences that we can hear in Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Now, for perhaps a year, David lived in silence.
SPEAKER_01: And Psalm 32, one of the Psalms that we've studied over the summer, tells us what that year was like.
SPEAKER_01: David said, When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through groaning all day long.
SPEAKER_01: And then God sent Nathan, Nathan the prophet.
SPEAKER_01: And Nathan told the story.
SPEAKER_01: You remember we went over this about a rich man who stole a poor man's little ewam.
SPEAKER_01: And David got angry over this story.
SPEAKER_01: And he said, The man who has done this deserves to die.
SPEAKER_01: And Nathan the prophet turned it around on David and said, You are the man.
SPEAKER_01: Here's the sword.
SPEAKER_01: You are that man, David.
SPEAKER_00: And Psalm 51 is what comes out of David when that sword pierces his soul.
SPEAKER_01: After Nathan says, You are the man, this is what it leads us to.
SPEAKER_01: David writes Psalm 51.
SPEAKER_01: And notice four things about David's confession.
SPEAKER_01: First, David throws himself entirely onto God's character.
SPEAKER_01: Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, your Hesed love, your covenant love.
SPEAKER_01: You made a covenant with Abraham.
SPEAKER_01: You have steadfast love.
SPEAKER_01: Have mercy on me according to your character, O God.
SPEAKER_01: According to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.
SPEAKER_01: David pleads no merit.
SPEAKER_01: He does not say, Remember my years of faithfulness.
SPEAKER_01: Remember Goliath.
SPEAKER_01: Remember all the psalms that I've written.
SPEAKER_01: Remember all the good that I've done as the king of your people.
SPEAKER_01: David doesn't say any of that.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, he appeals to God's character and to God's abundant compassion.
SPEAKER_01: And when you have sinned as David has sinned, your track refuge or your track record is not a refuge.
SPEAKER_01: There's no good that we have done that can serve as a shelter for the sin that we've committed.
SPEAKER_01: The only shelter against our sin is God Himself.
SPEAKER_01: Only His character, his steadfast love for His people.
SPEAKER_01: So we have to learn to rely completely on God and not on ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: We often think I'm not as bad as so-and-so.
SPEAKER_01: And so we think falsely think more highly of ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: And remember, nobody else on earth is your standard by which you're measured.
SPEAKER_01: The only one that's the standard by which you're measured is Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't meet that standard, you failed.
SPEAKER_00: And so rely on the compassionate love of God.
SPEAKER_01: Second, David names his sin without cosmetics.
SPEAKER_01: In verses 1 to 3, he piles up three different Hebrew words for sin.
SPEAKER_01: We see transgression, a willful rebellion, crossing a line that you knew was there, that David did over and over.
SPEAKER_01: Iniquity, a crookedness, a heart that is twisted and bent.
SPEAKER_01: And then thirdly, sin missing the mark, falling short of the glory of God.
SPEAKER_01: So David's not coming to God and saying, I made an oopsie, I made a mistake.
SPEAKER_01: He's not saying I had a moral failure.
SPEAKER_01: He's not saying I had an inappropriate relationship.
SPEAKER_01: These are all things that we hear regularly in our age.
SPEAKER_01: It's the language that our age prefers.
SPEAKER_01: David committed adultery, deception, murder.
SPEAKER_00: And what does he say?
SPEAKER_01: He says, My sin is ever before me.
SPEAKER_01: We must also learn to view our sin in the way that David did.
SPEAKER_01: Third, David sees that his sin is ultimately vertical.
SPEAKER_01: This is kind of confused because David says something in this psalm.
SPEAKER_01: He says, Against you and you only have I sinned and done what was evil in your sight in verse 4.
SPEAKER_01: But didn't David sin against Bathsheba?
SPEAKER_01: Didn't he sin against Uriah?
SPEAKER_00: Didn't he sin against his family?
SPEAKER_00: His army?
SPEAKER_00: His nation?
SPEAKER_00: Of course he did.
SPEAKER_01: But David grasped something that we often miss.
SPEAKER_01: Sin is not first a social problem or a psychological problem.
SPEAKER_00: Sin is a God problem.
SPEAKER_01: Every sin is cosmic treason against the king of the universe.
SPEAKER_01: That is why David says God is justified in his words and he's blameless in his judgment.
SPEAKER_01: If God had struck David dead, God would have been righteous to do it.
SPEAKER_01: So when we sin, first and foremost, we are committing offense against the holy God.
SPEAKER_01: We must learn to view sin as an offense against him.
SPEAKER_01: And fourth, David traces the stream back to the fountain.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 5, Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me.
SPEAKER_01: David is not, he's not blaming his mother.
SPEAKER_01: He's not calling his conception sinful.
SPEAKER_01: It runs deeper than that.
SPEAKER_01: He is confessing what we have put, what our uh our forefathers in Baptist history have put in the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, that we call original sin or original corruption.
SPEAKER_01: That David's admitting that he was a sinner before he ever sinned, that the adultery and the deception and the murder were not aberrations from an otherwise good heart.
SPEAKER_01: David's really a good guy.
SPEAKER_01: These were an off day.
SPEAKER_00: What he is admitting is that these were eruptions of what was already there.
SPEAKER_01: We have a sinful corruption in our hearts.
SPEAKER_01: And if we neglect to admit that or to realize that Satan has us exactly where he wants us.
SPEAKER_01: When I stand before God, it is not the old flesh standing, but it is Christ Jesus standing because I'm a new creation in him.
SPEAKER_01: And notice verses 16 and 17, David says, For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it.
SPEAKER_01: If I could go and take care of this with a sacrifice, I would do it.
SPEAKER_01: But he said, the sacrifices of God.
SPEAKER_01: Are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart.
SPEAKER_01: That's what God is after.
SPEAKER_01: And David knew the law.
SPEAKER_01: There was no prescription in Leviticus for deliberate adultery and murder.
SPEAKER_01: Those are capital crimes.
SPEAKER_01: The whole sacrificial systems running out of road for David to go on.
SPEAKER_01: But all David could do was bring a shattered heart before God and a plea for mercy that bulls and goats could not secure?
SPEAKER_01: Which raises the question that this psalm can present to us?
SPEAKER_01: On what basis can God justify a man like that?
SPEAKER_01: On what basis can God justify an adulterer, a deceiver, a schemer, and a murderer?
SPEAKER_01: On what basis can God do something with this and still be just?
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's where we get to the Christological horizon, the sacrifice that David could not offer.
SPEAKER_01: Now, you know, I tell you this every week.
SPEAKER_01: The Psalms are not about David.
SPEAKER_01: The Psalms ultimately all point us to Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And Psalm 51 points us to Christ in at least three ways.
SPEAKER_01: First, Psalm 51 points us to Christ by way of contrast.
SPEAKER_01: Here we have David, the anointed king, who we know, the son of David, referring to Christ, who is coming as going to be the better king.
SPEAKER_01: Now, if in our time he's already come, but in David's time they're looking forward to his coming.
SPEAKER_01: And so David was the anointed king who stayed home from the battle, saw a woman, took what was not his.
SPEAKER_01: But the Lord Jesus is the anointed king who left the comforts of heaven for the battlefield, who committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth, was tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sin.
SPEAKER_01: Where David uses his power to take a wife and destroy her husband, Christ used his power to lay down his life to purchase his bride.
SPEAKER_01: David sent a faithful man to die to cover his sin.
SPEAKER_01: God sent his faithful son to die to cover ours.
SPEAKER_01: Every failure of David in this story is a signpost that tells us a better king is coming.
SPEAKER_01: Secondly, Psalm 51 points to Christ by way of its plea for cleansing.
SPEAKER_01: Notice what David said here, and some of you might have caught on to some of the things that we're going to see later in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.
SPEAKER_01: Now, hyssop, where have we seen that little shrub before?
SPEAKER_01: Well, we've seen it a couple of times.
SPEAKER_01: In Egypt on the Passover night, hyssop was dipped in the blood of the lamb and used to spread the blood on the doorpost so that judgment would pass over the house.
SPEAKER_01: In Leviticus 14, hyssop dipped in blood and sprinkled on the leper to pronounce what was unclean now clean.
SPEAKER_01: So when David prays, Purge me with hyssop, he is praying, whether he fully understood it or not, for a substitutionary sacrifice.
SPEAKER_01: And then the Gospel of John records with unmistakable deliberateness that at the cross they put a sponge full of sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to Jesus' mouth just before he cried, it is finished.
SPEAKER_00: So the hyssop that David reached for, God provided at Calvary.
SPEAKER_01: Hebrews chapter 9, 13 and 14.
SPEAKER_01: And the apostle John said in 1 John 1, 7, the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin.
SPEAKER_01: All sin.
SPEAKER_01: That's the power of the blood of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: For David, adultery, deception, scheming, lying, murder.
SPEAKER_01: Christ's blood cleansed him from that.
SPEAKER_01: For you, all of your sins that you've committed your entire life up until this point that you've committed this morning, that you're going to commit for the rest of your life?
SPEAKER_01: If you are in Christ, the blood of Christ has covered those sins.
SPEAKER_01: Thirdly, Psalm 51 points to Christ as the answer to its central question: how can God blot out David's transgression and remain justified in his words and blameless in his judgment?
SPEAKER_01: In other words, let me bring this down a little bit.
SPEAKER_01: What does this mean?
SPEAKER_01: How can God be God?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, is heaven heaven if we get there and there's like this giant rug, and you're like, this rug's a little uneven.
SPEAKER_01: It's a little, it's a little crunchy.
SPEAKER_01: What's under this rug?
SPEAKER_01: And God's just like, hey, don't lift it up.
SPEAKER_01: Like, leave that rug alone.
SPEAKER_01: That's where I swept all your sins.
SPEAKER_01: They're under a rug, they're just kind of out of the way.
SPEAKER_01: So for all eternity, we're in heaven, but there's this rug that all the sins have gotten swept under because God is kind of trying to overlook sins because he wants to be with his people, but he's also a just God.
SPEAKER_01: So he's got to figure that out.
SPEAKER_01: And he doesn't have it completely figured out.
SPEAKER_01: So he just brushes them under the rug.
SPEAKER_01: And that's not what happens.
SPEAKER_01: God is just, God is righteous, God is true, God is good, God is merciful.
SPEAKER_01: God is gracious.
SPEAKER_01: God is full of steadfast, compassionate love.
SPEAKER_01: All of these characteristics of God a hundred percent exist together.
SPEAKER_01: And his justice does not falter through his compassionate love for his people.
SPEAKER_00: That's where Christ comes in.
SPEAKER_01: How can God be just and the justifier of the ungodly?
SPEAKER_01: How can we be in heaven?
SPEAKER_01: How can we go to the presence of God?
SPEAKER_01: Paul answers in Romans 3.
SPEAKER_01: God put Christ forward as a propitiation, as a substitute by his blood to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins, sins like David's, so that he may be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Verses 25 and 26.
SPEAKER_01: So for a thousand years, from David's sins to Christ, his forgiveness hung, as it were, on credit.
SPEAKER_01: And at the cross the bill came due.
SPEAKER_00: God said, David's sins have to be paid for, my son.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus paid it in full.
SPEAKER_01: For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
SPEAKER_01: So the clean heart that David begged for was purchased when the only true clean heart that ever beat was broken in his place on the cross.
SPEAKER_01: On the cross, the true son of David, in the words of Psalm 51, 11, cast away from God's presence, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
SPEAKER_01: So that sinners like David, sinners like you, sinners like me, would never suffer under what Christ suffered, the forsakenness of God.
SPEAKER_00: A therapeutic Jesus can sit across the couch and listen to Psalm fifty-one.
SPEAKER_00: A therapeutic Jesus can hear you talk about your sin.
SPEAKER_01: But a therapeutic Jesus has nothing to offer you for it.
SPEAKER_01: Only a crucified Jesus can answer us when we pray Psalm 51.
SPEAKER_01: Only a Jesus who shed his blood for his people and three days later rose from the grave can answer Psalm 51.
SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, he's just sitting there taking notes, biding his time for the hour to be over, and for you to feel better about yourself because you got something off of your chest that's not going to stand against a holy God when your time on this earth is done.
SPEAKER_01: So thirdly, this morning, the congregational horizon, what does it look like to be a forgiven church, a forgiven people?
SPEAKER_01: What does this psalm mean for us today, 2,000 years, 3,000 years later, from David as a congregation in this age?
SPEAKER_01: Let me press this home with four applications.
SPEAKER_01: First, we have to always recover a serious doctrine of sin, because a small view of sin makes for a small savior.
SPEAKER_01: Charles Spurgeon once observed that too many people have just enough religion to make them decent, but not enough to make them saved.
SPEAKER_01: Sin to them is a trifle.
SPEAKER_01: And so Christ is a trifle too.
SPEAKER_01: You pull him out on Sundays when you need them, and then he goes back away.
SPEAKER_01: Here's the fatal flaw of therapeutic Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: It is not that it says too much about God's love, it's that it says too little about our sin.
SPEAKER_01: And so it's love costs nothing and it heals nothing.
SPEAKER_01: Now think of it this way: if you go to the doctor for a persistent cough and he tells you it's a mild cold, you will thank him politely and go buy you some throat lozenges and begrudgingly pay your bill.
SPEAKER_00: Which won't make any sense when you get it in the mail.
SPEAKER_01: But if you have a scan and it reveals a tumor, and he sends you to a surgeon, the surgeon removes it and it saves your life, you will forever view that doctor as the one that saved your life, not one that gave you throat lozenges for a cold.
SPEAKER_01: The measure of your gratitude for things that are done for you is fixed by the measure of your diagnosis.
SPEAKER_01: If your deepest problem is low self-esteem, you just need some affirmation.
SPEAKER_01: If your deepest problem is anxiety, you just need some coping techniques.
SPEAKER_01: If your deepest problem is depression, then you just need to find more happiness.
SPEAKER_01: But if our deepest problem is that we're a rebel against a holy God conceived in iniquity with a heart that erupts sin and manufactures idols, then you need the blood of Jesus Christ to cover you.
SPEAKER_01: We need a substitute.
SPEAKER_01: We need to be made a new creation.
unknown: J.
SPEAKER_01: C.
SPEAKER_01: Ryle put it plainly over a century ago: wrong views of the disease will always produce wrong views of the cure.
SPEAKER_01: The men and women in church history who have sang God's grace the loudest were those who felt sin's weight the heaviest.
SPEAKER_01: John Newton, a former slave trader near the end of his life, said that although his memory was nearly gone, he remembered two things: that he was a great sinner and that Christ was a great savior.
SPEAKER_01: You cannot have the second half of that sentence without the first.
SPEAKER_01: Second, make confession the ongoing rhythm of your Christian life.
SPEAKER_01: When Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg, the first thesis read, When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said repent, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance, not one time at conversion.
SPEAKER_01: We are now committed to a life of ongoing repentance, not uh not on occasional crisis, a life.
SPEAKER_01: It is no accident that Luther loved Psalm 51 and also referred to it as one of the Pauline Psalms, as though it could have been written by Paul himself because it preaches grace to sinners.
SPEAKER_01: And it is no accident that St.
SPEAKER_01: Augustine of Hippo, when he lay dying in his bed, he had the penitent Psalms written out and fixed on the wall by his bed, and he read them and he wept.
SPEAKER_01: Here was one of the greatest theologians of the ancient church, a man who walked with God for decade after decade after decade, and he died the way that he lived as a repentant sinner, clinging on to the mercy of God through Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Brothers and sisters, the mark of spiritual maturity is not that you confess less, it's that you confess more honestly, more quickly, and with greater confidence in the blood of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: The question would be: is there a Nathan-shaped silence in your life right now?
SPEAKER_01: A sin that you have managed, that you have minimized, that you've renamed, that you've adopted as a pet, and you need a prophet like Nathan to come in your life and say, you are the man.
SPEAKER_01: David's restored joy in Psalm 51 is an invitation for us to that.
SPEAKER_01: Don't be the David of Psalm 32, where his bones are wasting away out of confession.
SPEAKER_01: But be the David of Psalm 51 that confesses and says, Restore my joy.
SPEAKER_01: For in you there is joy.
SPEAKER_01: That's the only place there is joy is in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And we know that God's word is true.
SPEAKER_01: And when he says in 1 John 1:9, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
SPEAKER_01: Take it to the bank.
SPEAKER_01: We know that it's true.
SPEAKER_01: Third, forgiven sinners become bold witnesses.
SPEAKER_01: Verses 12 and 13, restore to me the joy of your salvation.
SPEAKER_01: Guys, this is a message about joy.
SPEAKER_01: I know it doesn't sound like it.
SPEAKER_01: Look at your sin.
SPEAKER_01: The natural path is look at your sin, look at Christ, you have joy.
SPEAKER_01: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01: You have joy in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Restore to me joy in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: I don't have to stay here.
SPEAKER_01: I get to Jesus and I get the joy, and the natural pathway of that is now I'm going to tell everybody about it.
SPEAKER_01: Then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners return to you.
SPEAKER_01: Notice the order.
SPEAKER_01: David doesn't say, I will clean up myself and then serve God.
SPEAKER_01: Rather, mercy received becomes mercy proclaimed.
SPEAKER_01: The church's greatest evangelists have always been those who recognize the depth of the forgiveness of their sin, not polished performers.
SPEAKER_01: When John Bunyan wrote the story of his conversion, he titled it, by the way, John Bunyan was like the least educated Puritan and ended up being one of the powerhouses.
SPEAKER_01: Side note.
SPEAKER_01: When John Bunyan wrote the story of his conversion, he titled it Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.
SPEAKER_01: And from a Bedford jail cell, that chief of sinners, John Bunyan, wrote a book that has led thousands to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Your testimony, Christian, is not I was pretty good and Jesus made me better.
SPEAKER_01: Our testimony is I was dead in my sins and in my trespasses, and God made me alive in Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: He has made a new creation in me.
SPEAKER_01: A congregation that knows the depth of its forgiveness cannot keep quiet about their forgiver.
SPEAKER_01: And notice David even promises praise, O Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise.
SPEAKER_01: Guilt will shut your mouth.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 32.
SPEAKER_00: Grace will open it.
SPEAKER_00: And praise to God.
SPEAKER_01: And where does this Psalm end?
SPEAKER_01: Notice where it ends.
SPEAKER_01: Like a lot of the Psalms we've studied this summer, it weaves its way from personal to congregational.
SPEAKER_01: Have you noticed that?
SPEAKER_01: So many Psalms do that.
SPEAKER_01: It goes from the personal to the people.
SPEAKER_01: In verses 18 and 19, David's prayer widens from his own heart to the whole city of God.
SPEAKER_01: Do good to Zion, and your good pleasure build up the walls of Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: Private sin is never merely private.
SPEAKER_01: When the king fell, the kingdom bled.
SPEAKER_00: And when the king repented, he prayed for his people.
SPEAKER_00: It's no different for us.
SPEAKER_00: Our secret sins weaken this congregation.
SPEAKER_00: Your sin can weaken this local body of believers.
SPEAKER_00: But our honest repentance strengthens it.
SPEAKER_01: And when a church becomes a company, a group of open, repenting, blood-washed sinners, and we look more like verse 19, you will delight in right sacrifices.
SPEAKER_01: Our worship rises with clean hands, and God delights in it.
SPEAKER_01: Now, confession is not only the pathway to personal joy, it's also the pathway to a healthy church.
SPEAKER_01: Fourth, come to the God who does not despise the broken.
SPEAKER_01: I hope you hear the tenderness this morning.
SPEAKER_01: A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
SPEAKER_01: And even our churches can become a theater of pretended fine-findedness.
SPEAKER_01: I'm fine, I'm good.
SPEAKER_01: Surface level, everyone is doing great, and we don't need to be saved from anything.
SPEAKER_01: But God, the high and holy one, who inhabits all eternity, all eternal space, all eternal time, says through Isaiah that he dwells with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord Jesus Himself says, I've not called come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.
SPEAKER_01: It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
SPEAKER_00: And even if he did, he can't help you on the day of judgment when you're standing before the holy God.
SPEAKER_01: But if we will come to God as David came to God with no merit to plead, be like Paul, I don't know my works are about filthy rags.
SPEAKER_00: No excuse to offer.
SPEAKER_00: But God, it was this woman, this woman that you gave me.
SPEAKER_00: But if you come to God with nothing but your sin and his promise, that's all you need.
SPEAKER_00: I have great news for you.
SPEAKER_01: There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel's veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.
SPEAKER_01: The invitation of Psalm 51 is the invitation of the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: You do not have to get clean to come to God.
SPEAKER_01: You come to God to be made clean.
SPEAKER_01: David asked of God, create in me a clean heart.
SPEAKER_01: A thousand years later, God answered, not with therapy, but with a cruel cross.
SPEAKER_01: The greater son of David bore the wrath that David deserved and rose again so that every sinner who trusts in him receives what David begged for.
SPEAKER_01: Sins blotted out, a heart made new, the Holy Spirit who will never be taken away.
SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the joy of God's salvation restored to his people and only to his people.
SPEAKER_01: Don't settle for a Jesus who can merely make you feel better.
SPEAKER_01: Come to the Jesus who makes you clean.
SPEAKER_01: Confess your sins without cosmetics.
SPEAKER_01: Trust his blood without reservation, and then go from this place to each transgressor along the way and point them to Christ and speak as one who knows he's been forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: And speak as one who knows that Christ is a great Savior.
SPEAKER_01: He is bounding with steadfast love and his mercy has no limits for all who come to him.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_01: That through whatever shortcomings I may have in preaching this text, I pray that the text itself would communicate to us as your people that there is joy in the Lord and the one who has been forgiven in Christ, and that you expect nothing of us but to come to you.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we are so geared to think that we have to do things ourselves to cover up for our sin.
SPEAKER_00: And we forget that Christ has covered them all for us.
SPEAKER_01: And it's not anything that we have done, but just an outpouring of your steadfast love.
SPEAKER_01: I pray that as your people, we would celebrate in that, rejoice in that, rest in that today.
SPEAKER_01: And Father, my prayer, if there's any in this room that don't know you, that you would take their heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh, that the Holy Spirit would blow like the wind into their hearts, that you would create new birth this morning, that they would repent of their sins and follow Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And it's in his name we pray.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Well, brothers and sisters, let's stand and sing this song of response.
SPEAKER_01: Be thou my vision.
SPEAKER_01: We've got brothers here about to pray with you, pray for you.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but ultimately, let's uh pray this song now.
SPEAKER_01: Let's