Good evening, dear saints.
Bless you for coming.
Thanks for providing a privileged environment for the
Word of God.
And I'm holding my breath in expectation.
I think the Lord wants to pull out
all the stops and to touch a subject
that has suffered chronic and historic neglect, which
is the cross of Christ Jesus, which will
be central, I believe, to all that I'll
be sharing from this first speaking and right
through Sunday.
The cross, the crucifixion of Jesus, death and
atonement, sin and righteousness.
I'm doing this for my sake.
You're invited to listen in because I don't
believe that the church, even in its best
forms, has understood or appropriated this deepest of
all realities, the single most pivotal and epical,
E-P-O-C-H-A-L, event
in history.
And to allow that to suffer neglect or
to be swept under the rug or to
become, as I so often say, a non
-event is tragic beyond all speaking.
The cross, the event of God in the
earth in time and history, the Son of
God submitting to the abuse and devastation, violence
of men in order to shed blood, to
perform a propitiation for sin to affect salvation,
atonement.
What does all that mean?
And we need to probe and open ourselves
and be permeated and affected.
We need an existential appropriation of the cross
or else it will degenerate into merely an
article of the faith.
We'll give it a kind of a scant,
polite acknowledgement, but we will have missed it.
And you cannot believe how disastrous that will
be.
It will trivialize God.
It will rob us of significance and meaning.
It will void the power that's intrinsic to
the most holy faith.
It will rob our souls.
The cross is everything.
So Lord, remember the prayers that have already
gone up even today.
Insane prayers, extravagant prayers that if you'll answer
them even so much as in part, who
will be able to stand the reply that
you will give?
Who can bear it, Lord?
So we're asking that you would look upon
this time and this occasion and these days
as something ordained in your wisdom and will
whose time has come, that you have been
chafed.
You have pursed your lips.
You have gripped your teeth, observing the conspiracy
of silence against you, the trivialization of the
cross.
You've watched the American athletes wear it around
their necks on gold chains who can well
afford such opulence and the movie stars between
their breasts studded with diamonds.
The whole thing, my God, is a terrible
farce and a fraud.
And we're asking that you would be jealous
over the meaning of what you have performed
through your son, whose suffering you shared and
that his soul might be gratified and the
church, my God, brought to its apostolic foundations
and so that you'll redeem these times together.
Devastate us, Lord.
Lay us out, do us in.
Take, as I prayed this afternoon, this evening,
take your sword out of your sheath, your
sharp two-edged sword, and just cut, strip,
penetrate, pierce.
Do what you will, my God, for all
of the subterfuge that has grown up, all
of the deceit, all of the religious nonsense
and phraseology and talking and cheap, easy, glib
things, my God, that shroud the truth and
rob us of its reality, which is to
rob us of all reality.
For if we lose the cross, we lose
all.
So, Lord, come, redeem and restore and speak
in such a way.
We're asking an event, my God.
Whatever the cost to ourselves, we're willing and
we desire to be poured out like water
before you.
And we confess the best of us, myself,
including that we don't know as we ought
to know.
And we must know, Lord.
We must esteem, we must appreciate.
Gratitude is love.
Love is worship.
Worship is service.
Everything is intricately bound up, inextricably joined, put
it on the screen, inextricably, inseparably joined with
the cross.
There's no true worship.
There's no true service.
If the cross has suffered loss, so come,
my God, strip it of sentimentality, all of
the ways in which it has been abused
by men, and give us the pristine, original,
pure, holy intention of God by setting in
time and history that event.
As I prayed this evening, Lord, that there
would be shockwaves and tremors going through this
room and out from this church into Asia
because of the speaking of these days, that
as the earth shook and there was an
earthquake, when your cross was put into its
socket in that hole in the earth, something,
the thud, was heard and reverberated unto eternity.
And we're asking, my God, that you'll insert
the cross again and that the thud, the
effect, the ripples, the sound, the weight will
pierce our very souls.
Save us, my God, from shallowness.
Save us, my God, from religious play-acting,
from false piety, from celebration that is just
something that we can perform but does not
have a right auspices, a right cause.
So we thank you, Lord.
Precious God, I am willing to be your
fool again to topple off this platform because
I will be beside myself for their sake
and for your sake.
Possess this mouth as your own, this body,
this frame that you birthed in 1929 and
gave it its particular cast for the very
purposes that are now coming to be.
So we thank you, Lord.
Come and delight your own soul and ventilate
your soul and express the deeps of it,
my God.
Your servants are hearing.
This is a choice, people and environment.
They have borne this servant and have established
a relationship of welcome and trust, my God,
that is rare.
So we enjoy and we're privileged and don't
want in any way to offend against it
and yet willing to risk all if it
should please you that for some reason, Lord,
there's a collapse and a failure and a
disappointment.
I'm more willing for that, Lord, than we
should enjoy a shallow success and a nice
pat on the back and an enjoyment.
So come, my God, and give us your
heart, we pray, and receive even now our
gratitude for the possibility of it as we
thank you and give you praise in Jesus'
name, God's people said.
Amen.
So now that I've come respectively, tie and
jacket, removed the jacket, loosed the tie, purchased
in Moscow.
Simon has arranged my 17 flights, took two
to get here, two days of travel, 12
-hour layover in Frankfurt, and that's only the
beginning of 17 flights to seven nations in
seven weeks.
So appreciate your prayer.
This is the beginning.
And what the Lord will hatch here will
not remain.
I'll take it with me.
And the saints in New Zealand and Australia
and Uganda and Kenya and Cameroon and Burkino
Faso will receive the benefit of what has
passed through the furnace of the earth here
for a first time.
So you could turn with me to Psalm
51, one of the most eloquent, profound, classic,
I don't have enough adjectives to describe the
choices of statements on repentance to be found
in all scripture.
That is the genius of David, of what
is Davidic, why he's beloved by the Father,
the depth of this, the cry of this,
that such a man, a sweet singer of
Israel, the one who faced Goliath single-handedly
with a sling and stones, who brought the
ark of God to Jerusalem with sacrifice and
with worship and dancing, the greatest of Israel's
kings, and the one whose name the Father
is not ashamed to ascribe even to Jesus
as the greater David, that this one, this
giant, this holy man, this lover of God
who stood for the honor of God would
not allow the armies of God to be
defamed by a pagan, by a Philistine and
mocked, that this man should fall and fall
shamefully in adultery and murder, sin of sins,
the most horrible conjunction, and the one hand
in hand with the other, it's staggering to
contemplate.
How could David have succumbed to temptation of
that kind and allow its logic to be
enacted in his life in such a way
as to imperil his kingdom and to traffic
in and abuse the very name of God
which he has celebrated in psalm and in
song?
How could that be?
Nevertheless, it is.
And he has left for us a statement
of the deepest contrition and brokenheartedness and authentic
repentance that is to be found in all
the holy writ, that leaves us without excuse,
that if we don't know what repentance means
or how it's to be expressed and what
it is for which God waits, that is
actually a key to the kingdom.
For if there's no repentance, there's no forgiveness,
there's no reception, there's no restoration.
So we want to examine this remarkable heart's
cry and its implications for us over the
issue of sin and judgment, atonement and forgiveness
that is caught up and expressed in this
most remarkable statement.
Psalm 51, and in this edition of my
seminary Bible, Falling Apart, it says in italics,
prayer for cleansing and pardon, a Psalm of
David.
When the prophet Nathan came to him after
he had gone into Bathsheba, that begins, 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.
Against you, you alone have I sinned and
done what is evil in your sight, so
that you are justified in your sentence and
blameless when you pass judgment.
Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when
my mother conceived me.
You desire truth in the inward parts, therefore
teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
Purge me with hyssop and I shall be
clean.
Wash me and I shall be whiter than
snow.
Let me hear joy and gladness.
Let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins and blot
out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within
me.
Do not cast me away from your presence.
Do not take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and sustain me with a willing spirit.
For then I will teach transgressors your ways
and sinners will return to you.
Deliver me from bloodshed, O God, O God
of my salvation.
My tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.
O Lord, open my lips and my mouth
will declare your praise for you have no
delight in sacrifice.
And if I were to give a burnt
offering, you would not be pleased.
But the sacrifice acceptable to God is a
broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart,
O God, you'll not despise.
Do good to Zion in your pleasure.
Rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
Then you will delight in right sacrifices and
burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings.
Then bowls will be offered on your altar.
Amen.
How do you like that?
Can you empathize, can you sympathize, can you
relate?
Does your corresponding chord in your own heart
that reverberates to this?
Can you pick up from the beginning the
cry, have mercy?
Have you ever cried like that?
Have you ever needed to cry like that?
Have you ever needed mercy as desperately as
David?
How then shall you have obtained it?
And if you don't obtain it, how shall
you extend it?
Because the issue tonight is far more than
yourself.
If you can understand it, the issue tonight
is the redemption of Israel.
The restoration of Israel in the last days,
in their final extremity, when they shall be
uprooted and dispersed through all nations, cast off,
hated, despised, victimized, marred more than any man,
they shall have no beauty, any shall desire
them.
That if they don't find mercy at that
time, an entire people will perish.
Because the hatred, the vehement, venomous hatred expressed
through Islamic sources will hound them unto death.
No nation will be able to protect them.
If they don't find mercy, they're finished.
And that's why Paul in Romans 11 says,
that by your mercy, they may obtain mercy.
But do you have a mercy to extend?
You're too nice.
You're much too polite.
You're nice guys.
I mean, you're, after all, you're Chinese.
You're respectable and moral and ethical, basically.
So what need have you for mercy?
Unless you can see yourself in David's predicament,
you can vicariously identify with David in his
cry.
And it doesn't wait for you to commit
adultery.
It only waits for you to acknowledge that
if so great a giant as the sweet
singer of Israel was capable of a falling
of this kind, who are you?
And what are you made of better stuff
than he?
You understand that?
He fell in shame for your sake, that
none of us can flee the requirement of
God for the deepest contrition and brokenness and
repentance for which he waits.
We're found out, we're convicted, we're guilty.
It doesn't wait on being proved by the
actual event of our fallenness.
His fall is our fall.
Got the picture?
You know, have mercy, the cry, because there's
only one thing that will suffice when a
man comes to a condition of this kind
where he finds himself inadvertently through one circumstance
after another that began only by gazing upon
the beauty of that woman, that he's now
not only an adulterer and a liar, but
a murderer.
The King of Israel is a murderer and
his sin haunts him.
It's rotting his bones, his guts.
It's with him day and night.
He can't shake it.
He can't drink something down or shoot something
in or find distraction in some way that
would lessen the enormous anguish that sin is
morally when one knows it and has performed
it and knows that there's no rectification, there's
nothing that one can do for oneself in
that condition.
You can't lie down on a bed of
nails.
You can't go to a school of discipline.
Sin is pervasive, it's deep.
We're caught, we're found out, and we have
sinned against God in his sight.
Against thee and thee only have I sinned
in your sight.
Think on that, that everything is naked and
transparent to him with whom we have to
do.
There's nothing hidden and concealed that he does
not see.
I'm always astonished, not only at the sins
of men and the sins of Christians and
the sins of ministers, but that it can
be performed before the face of God with
impunity.
Get that on the screen.
I-M-P-U-N-I-T-Y,
impunity, as if to say God is not
seeing.
He doesn't see, he doesn't care, he's indifferent.
He's not that absolute and all-seeing.
We can play hanky-panky, we can get
away with this.
Sin, in the last analysis, is extravagant human
presumption against God.
The adultery is not the issue so much
in itself.
As the remarkable hubris, H-U-B-R
-I-S, the Greek word for human pride,
the extravagance of ego and self-assertion that
thinks it can pull something before the face
of God and get away with it as
if it was not done, as if it
was not seen, or to put it bluntly,
as if God is not God, that is
the nature of sin.
And who is exempt from it?
Who has not taken his liberty and gotten
away with it before men, but don't know
that there's an accounting in the day of
judgment in which God will bring before them
in full remembrance, everything that they thought was
hid and concealed.
"'I know my transgressions,' David says."
To know your transgressions like that is already
to be on the way to a salvation
to the uttermost.
How saved are you?
Are you nominally saved, shallowly saved, technically saved?
You've made a right decision, you've called on
the name of the Lord, you've performed something,
it's all sweet and hokey-dokey now?
There's a salvation to the uttermost that has
escaped most of us and will continue to
do so until we are acutely aware of
our transgressions, not because we have performed them,
but because we are human, all too human,
and are capable of its performance.
The fact that it has not taken place,
it means that we've not yet met the
Bathsheba who's calculated to do us in, but
that doesn't save you from your propensity.
"'I was born in iniquity,' David says.
"'I came into the world like this, "'it's
in my bones, it's in my guts, "'it's
the way I'm constituted humanly.
"'My sin is ever before me, not just
the event of it, "'but the condition of
it.
"'And who's going to save me from that?'
"'Follow me in a prayer, brother.
"'Say after me, his cry is not to
man, "'his cry is to God, have mercy
upon me.'" I wish I had a gift
of persuasion.
I wish I had the ability to articulate
in fine words to say what mercy means
and why it is the deep-souled cry
of David who is as much aware as
the depth of his transgression as he is
that the only entity in the world that
can relieve the pang of his sin is
God in his mercy.
To know God that way is to know
God and not to know God that way
is not to know God, however much lauded
over you are with end-time understandings.
The knowledge of God begins with what God
is in himself, which is to say his
mercy.
So Moses said, "'Show me now thy glory.'
And God said, "'Okay, I'll hide you in
the cleft of the rock "'and I'll let
my hind parts pass before you.' And he
said, "'Having done that, "'I've exhibited my tender
kindness.
"'I've exhibited my Rahmanis, my pity.'" That's Jewish.
"'I've shown you my mercy.
"'You asked to see my glory, I showed
you my mercy "'because to see my mercy
is to see me.
"'This is what I am.
"'This is my nature as God is mercy.
"'And if it wasn't for that, we would
all be dead.
"'We would have no eternity.
"'There'd be no prospect, this life would be
grim "'as it is in fact for the
countless minions "'who do not know God "'and
are living in absolute independence of him.
"'It's a grim existence "'and a more far
than grim eternity "'if they remain in that
condition.
"'It's his mercy that saves us "'out of
death, out of ourselves, "'out of our pitiful
egotism.
"'There are things that we can pull stunts
and do things "'and get away with it
"'because who is God that he can see?'
You need to sense David's ache and his
cry that the only thing that can relieve
this continual perpetual crush upon his heart, the
weight of it is the mercy of God.
And if it comes, it will come as
a blotting out of my transgressions.
Blotted out, Lord.
Don't patch it up.
Don't put a band-aid or a strip
of something.
Blotted out.
This has got to be extricated.
This has got to be taken out, branch
and root and branch.
The whole works, it's into me.
It's my condition.
And unless you blot it out and create
in me a new heart, I'm a dead
duck.
So you have to be God for me,
a God who will extend mercy even though
against you and you alone have I sinned.
You have every right to be insulted that
the David whom you have chosen as Israel's
king and have anointed can perform this in
your sight with impunity, which means as if
he could get away with it.
And if it were not for Nathan, the
faithful prophet, to tell him a little parable
in a story about a wicked man who
used someone else's sheep and then said, thou
art the man, David would have gone on
in his deception because sin by its nature
deceives, does not reveal itself as sin, gives
justification.
You had it coming.
Listen, you fought all those battles.
Here's a little compensation.
Here's this beautiful woman.
It's only just a fluke that she's married
to this guy.
He doesn't deserve her.
She's appropriate for a king of Israel, not
just an ordinary warrior who's not even himself
Jewish.
So you have a full right to appropriate
that woman and you need it.
You need the compensation.
I'm giving it to you.
It's a grace.
How many ministers of our generation have fallen
exactly on that basis and for that kind
of reasoning that they had it coming?
And when they're found out, not only are
they defensive and self-justifying, they refuse to
submit to judgment, even so mild the judgment
as a three month cessation of their ministries.
But of course, how can they cease for
three months when the world depends on their
ministry?
And so they balk and they refuse even
that correction and then fall into a yet
more disgraceful and shameful expression of that sin.
Are you following me?
Should I tell you who I'm talking about?
You know.
Jamie, what's his name?
But David is not like that.
He does not conceal his sin, but blessed
is that man whose sin is not concealed.
That is openly acknowledged, bears the shame of
it and cries out to the God alone
who can blot it out.
Not just the incident, but the root that
made the incident possible, his human sinful nature
that he shares with Adam as do all
of us being man.
David anticipated that God had made already provision
of a lamb that was slain from before
the foundations of the world.
Put that into your pipe and smoke it.
Chew on that, choke on that, splutter on
that.
Mystery, he was the lamb of God slain
from before the foundations of the world.
And David, poet, prophet, giant saint, intuited and
knew that the father had already made provision
that was not to be acted out until
seven centuries later, but the reality of which
was already to be obtained through faith.
Blot out my transgression with hyssop, that rude
plant, common shrub, and dip it into the
blood and wash my transgressions away.
Blot them out.
Then I will tell transgressors of their way.
Then I will teach men about your salvation,
but first deal with me.
First be merciful to me who deserves the
greater judgment because of the greater knowledge and
the greater privilege of relationship for me to
sin against you and you alone is most
grievous.
I ache from it, I can't sleep, I
can't eat a decent meal with every bite
that I chew and masticate, I'm thinking of
my condition and it's without relief.
No one can comfort me.
There's no solace that can be given, no
advice, no counsel, no patting on the back,
no one justifying me and say, well, God
understands, you had it coming, you made a
little mistake.
I wish you could see my newspaper clippings.
Right now, I would say in the last
almost three years, they're about a foot and
a half high from the New York Times.
I'm preparing an indictment against the world and
American civilization, particularly the world of finance and
the world of so-called culture, whose ballets
are now being performed nakedly and the stage
is now exhibiting open fornication and the most
lewd, vile conduct.
The rap artists are being celebrated as if
it is a form of art that talks
about miscegenation, the abuse of women and mothers,
the most foul language and selling by the
billions.
What's his name, 50 Cents?
You guys know about this?
I've never heard a rap thing in my
life.
I've never even heard the Beatles.
But this guy, this black character, there's so
many of them black coming out of that
environment that the white middle-class people are
buying up by the millions within a week
of the availability of this CD that he
produced.
It was already top off the list in
the charts.
It was already being sold by the 50
millions.
Would these guys hold their tours?
It's nothing for them to gross 50 to
100 to 150 to 200 million for a
tour.
It's big dough.
And how do you differ from these other
guys if you don't bring a little something
more extraordinary, more bizarre, more daring, more risque?
So there's something, there's an evolution, there's a
logic that requires the culture to become every
day more decadent.
We're moving towards Sodom and every day in
the financial section of the Times, another CEO,
another head of a corporation indicted and charged
with fraud, with charge with misuse of funds,
charge with criminal corruption in obtaining millions as
if there's no God to see.
And seem to it that even if they're
caught, that somehow they'll buy their way out
or they'll make a transaction with the Attorney
General and where they'll pay something like 30
or $40 million in penalty, but what is
that next to the billions that they've already
acquired in false profits?
And they will not acknowledge either that they
have violated or have been exonerated.
They will not allow the moral issue to
be factored into the settlement.
They'll pay their way, but they don't want
to have to acknowledge that they have been
at fault.
And if there's any concession, they used language,
they made a mistake.
It was an error.
It's never a sin.
It's always just a little trifle.
It's a boo-boo.
It's a failure of judgment in a moment
that allowed a transaction to take place by
which 50 to 100 million fell into a
man's pockets through manipulation of the vilest kind.
Every day, there's not a day that the
papers are not full of these exposés, but
there's no sense of shame.
Hey, listen, you guys, we're living in a
world that has forgotten how to blush.
There's no remorse.
It was just a mistake.
Anybody can make a mistake, but no one
is crying out, my God, have mercy upon
me.
I'm greedy.
It's not enough that I have a salary
of 50 million a year.
But I've seen to it that I would
leave with an additional 150 million as a
retirement fund and a honorary settlement for my
years of service.
What do you do with 150 million that
you could not have done with your first
10 million or 20 million or yearly or
annual salary?
It's greed, greed.
It's lust for money, for power, for avarice,
for sensual delights, for $6,000 shower curtains.
While on the same newspaper, little further down
on the same page, there are the people
starving to death in Africa.
There are the women that are being raped
helplessly in the Sudan.
And on the same page are these guys
swallowing an unbelievable wealth acquired through corruption, criminal
offense.
Without regret, they made an error, maybe, but
they'll not acknowledge it even if they pay
the fine.
One lady went to jail, what's her name?
Martha Stewart, and she had a ball.
I don't know if it was a jail
or it was a vacation resort.
I think she had art and craft classes
and I don't know what else she did.
But she came out smelling like a rose.
Enjoyed her time and the publicity was already
prepared and her company and its stock has
risen by virtue of the shameful indictment by
which she's had to go to jail has
been turned to celebration.
Have mercy on me, oh God.
According to your steadfast love, according to your
abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.
If I'm sure of my sin, which is
ever before me, I'm equally as sure of
your ability to forgive, to purge, and to
cleanse.
And if that were not so, I would
be a man entirely without hope.
I would carry into eternity without relief the
things that now presently haunt me, the image
of my fornicating with another man's wife and
seeing to the arrangement of his murder.
It would haunt me.
There would be no relief.
It would be a hell of a tortured
conscience that could never be pacified.
Save me.
I'm glad you're that kind of a God.
Your steadfast love.
What is the word for that in Hebrew,
Simon?
Your chesed, C-H-E-S-E-D.
Your merciful nature is my only hope.
And the remarkable thing is you give it
without qualification.
You don't require some course of rehabilitation where
I show myself to act differently.
The only requirement that you make is that
I acknowledge my transgressions that are ever before
me.
If you hear that confession, you bring this
deliverance.
What a God.
But at what cost?
Not some cheapie wiping the sin off the
book.
Righteousness requires judgment, not just a blinking, looking,
okay, you missed it this time, you're forgiven,
go on.
No.
If there's a blood into which that hyssop
can be dipped, that can be applied, what
blood is it?
Not the blood of bulls and of sacrifices.
Something more perfect, more enduring, and more eternal,
and more righteous is required than that given
by an animal.
It's going to require the righteous blood of
God himself.
But how shall he supply it?
By sending his son to die on a
cross and bleed.
Not just on the cross, but as I
said this morning with the little group that
assembled for prayer, Calvary began in Gethsemane.
He sweated drops of blood.
One version says clots of blood oozed out
of the pores of his skin with his
agonizing cry before God because he knew what
he was required to perform for the father
and asked if it were possible this cup
should pass, but it was not possible.
He would have to drink it.
He would have to suffer, not just the
physical pain and torment, but to be made
sin that we who knew no righteousness would
become righteous because he who did not know
sin became sin and he became sin in
so graphic and real a way that the
holy father had to turn his face away
from him.
He could not look upon his own son
who had become sin.
And so he had to cry out, my
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Well, maybe you can stand to be a
little God forsaken, but the son of God
cannot because he's had a longstanding relationship with
the father even before he came down to
earth.
Proverbs chapter eight says, before the foundations of
the earth was laid, I was with you
in a loving relationship that for me is
my food and my drink to know you,
to know the father and the love of
God and to be in that environment and
relationship was for me very life and I
can bear everything else, but to bear the
sense of your absence that you would have
to forsake me, that I would not be
conscious of your presence at a time when
I most desperately needed it is part of
the suffering that I have to bear and
the cup that I have to drink so
that the Davids that follow me can have
a blood to blot out their transgressions.
Got the idea?
Listen, dear saints, to turn this into a
few little snappy choruses on the blood, it
would be better if we were silent.
To reduce this to a little formula for
salvation, step one, step two, is travesty against
God.
This is too holy, this is too costly,
this is tragic and there was no shortcut
for the expression of God's mercy was more
than just a condescension and an okay, I'll
let you go this time.
Mercy required sacrifice, sin required judgment, the penalty
had to be paid, there was a chastisement
that came upon him so that Isaiah 53
says, for our transgressions, he was stricken, he
bore our iniquity.
Of course, what has that to do with
you, your nice Chinese congregation?
Iniquity?
You've never talked back to your mother.
You've always been superficially polite to your father.
What iniquity are you talking about?
Cats, I'm talking about the iniquity of David,
which is yours, whether you're Chinese, Jewish, white,
yellow, black, red or green.
Because you were conceived in iniquity from your
mother's womb.
Are you trying to say that my mother
was not a moral woman?
No, she could have been the choicest of
the handmaidens of the Lord and you still
would have been conceived in iniquity.
It wasn't what was her moral condition at
the time in which you were birthed or
generated.
It's a statement of the intrinsic condition that
belongs to every man that breathes.
It's in us, we're from Adam.
It's an iniquity, we're born in it and
with it.
Pity that we'd have to wait to agree
with God about the truth of that by
having to fall.
Because if you're not agree with the truth
of it on the basis of the word
and on the basis of the sacrifice of
Jesus, you'll have to experience it.
And that will be a mercy that he
allows you to sin that you can cry
out when you have to bear the terrible
shame and stigma and pain of the moral
unresolved thing that's a lump in your gut.
And in fact, if it's not resolved, it'll
be a physical lump.
It'll go from being a moral blight into
a cancer or a tumor.
The body is not made for unrighteousness.
And if you conceal it, it will break
out in varicose veins or ungainly lumps that
will eat your flesh.
Sin is a terrible thing, it's evil, it's
death.
It's going to require an answer from God
of an ultimate kind that only he can
give and has given in the crucifixion of
his son.
For this reason, have I come.
No man takes my life, I lay it
down.
You dear saints, if you can only say
tonight on the basis of the preached word
and this text, innocent though you are, young
though you are, you're hardly out of puberty
and into adolescence.
You've hardly yet even begun to experience the
sexual thing that will have its expression increasingly
as you grow up.
And yet even before the possibility of giving
expression to that in a sinful way, you
can say that my transgressions are ever before
me.
Not on the basis of what you have
subjectively experienced, but on the basis of what
the word of God says is the condition
of all men.
Because if it's David's condition, how shall we
be exempt?
We have to repent with him, with a
contrite and broken heart, not waiting first to
fall to prove the truth of God's word,
but to accept it on its face value
that there's not a righteous man upon the
face of the earth that doeth good and
sinneth not.
That if God were to mark iniquity, who
can stand?
So that you're justified in your sentence and
blameless when you pass judgment.
Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when
my mother conceived me.
Well, the last thing that I typed as
the clock was ticking away in New York
prior to my departure to come here was
from Spurgeon's commentary on the Psalms.
Don't fail to get all three volumes of
the treasury of David.
It's cheap and it's gorgeous.
It is a sublime commentary on the entire
book of Psalms as only Spurgeon could comment.
I'll give you some examples.
He says, in David's cry for mercy, what
he is really asking is act, oh Lord,
like yourself, be yourself, express the mercy that
is intrinsic to your very nature.
The cry, wash me, is in view of
one great pollution, polluting his entire nature.
It's not just a boo-boo.
It's not just the act of adultery.
It's not the conspiracy for the murder.
Those are only the acts that reveal the
truth of the condition and it's the condition
that's pervasive and it will not express itself
through adultery or murder.
It will express itself through cheating, through lying,
through any and every form that is vile,
that is sinful.
It's a condition.
Wash me is in view of that great
pollution that pollutes one's entire nature.
The one sin against Bathsheba served to show
the psalmist the whole mountain of his iniquity
of which the foul deed was but one
stone.
Did you follow that?
The foul deed was one stone to show
David the mountain of his iniquity.
And if that's true for David in having
committed the act, what is it possible for
you in reviewing the act?
Can it be a stone that shows you
your mountain?
God said he would send his spirit to
convict us of unrighteousness and that's what I'm
trusting is working now through the word.
I wanna see you writhe.
Not because I'm malicious or I have a
little something against the Chinese, but for your
sake, for the church's sake, for Israel's sake
through you, I desire to see deep conviction,
discomfort, a sense something growing up as you're
hearing the word that it's me being described.
I'm capable.
If that was true for David, it's true
for me.
I don't have to wait to prove it
by falling.
This is my truth and I need to
anguish before God and cry out for his
mercy to blot out the transgressions that I'll
inevitably perform because my nature will compel it.
It's a new nature that I need.
I'm creating me a clean heart and renew
a right spirit within me.
Merely saying yes Lord and calling on the
name of the Lord as a little step
one, step two salvation has not done it.
And when the time comes that God brings
Israel through Singapore and Asia and they need
your mercy and you have not ever obtained
it because your transgressions have never been blotted
out by the mercy of God, what shall
you be able to extend to them?
What an embarrassing failure in that moment to
which all history is now tending for the
issue of the church is the issue of
Israel's redemption.
But the church that is the church of
redeemed souls who have acknowledged their transgression that
was ever before them and believe for the
mercy of God and the crucifixion of Jesus
and have had their sins blotted out and
a new heart created within them and live
with a renewed spirit by which to serve
him.
My sin is ever before me, David said,
sin that is never out of mind.
The pain on account of it is not
transient and occasional but intense and permanent.
Can I give you the other side of
that coin?
Have you ever enjoyed righteousness?
Have you ever come to a place in
your condition before God in relationship with him
and with men where you enjoy the sense
of what it means to be righteous in
God?
Have you ever tasted that?
It's better than the rarest wine.
The taste it wants is to be spoiled
forever.
And you know what?
God intended that as the normative condition and
experience of mankind that we should live in
righteousness and breathe freely and have minds that
are not corrupted and polluted and whose conduct
and actions is in keeping with God's nature
and is pleasing in his sight that you
don't scheme and plan.
You don't curse and shout.
You don't look for your own way.
You don't, you're living in the righteousness of
God.
It's a Mechaya, it's life, it's joy unspeakable.
What's the alternative?
My sin is ever before me.
I'm haunted day and night.
I can't shake it off.
I can't spit it out.
I hate myself.
I have no self-esteem and therefore I'm
a candidate for yet more degrading acts.
So against thee and thee only have I
sinned in your sight to commit treason in
the court of the king and before his
eye is impudence indeed.
You got that word?
To be impudent.
It's the arrogance of man to think that
he can perform something in God's own sight
and get away with it.
It's detrimental to God.
It denigrates God.
It nullifies God as God.
It makes him less than man that he's
not capable of seeing or that he's indifferent,
that he's not himself the supreme moral agent
in all creation and very righteousness himself.
And how does Paul conduct himself?
The judge is ever present.
He's at the door.
Saul, the apostle Paul, always aware that God
observes.
God sees him.
He says, you know what manner of man
I was before you and God is my
witness.
He lived always in the consciousness of God
as a brooding judge who is one day
will come and judge.
And he can say to the Athenians that
this Jesus whom God has raised from the
dead will one day judge all men.
And he's winked in times past but he
commands all men everywhere now to repent.
The apostle Paul knew the judge.
He knew judgment.
He said, we'll be held accountable for everything
that we do in our bodies, both bad
and good.
He lived always in the consciousness of God
as judge.
And it's not a complex.
He didn't have a hangover.
He didn't need a psychiatrist.
That was not a formula for mental derangement.
That's a formula for sanity to understand God
as God as all seeing judge and who
will chase him and require judgment and will
express it in wrath is to have your
head screwed on right and have your feet
grounded in reality that you can move and
live and have your being in the truth
of God.
Anything less or other than that is fraudulent.
It's a play acting.
It's a religious hype.
It's false piety.
And therefore it doesn't impress the world or
touch it.
I was shaped in iniquity.
My mother was a chaste handmaiden.
I was born in wedlock.
I was not illegitimate.
So the cry is the acknowledgement of inborn
sin.
I am in my very nature a sinner.
The fountain of my life is polluted.
Mine is a constitutional disease.
It's with me and only you can blot
it out and create in me a clean
heart and renew in me a right spirit.
For redemption is creation and only the God
who creates the heaven and the earth can
create us anew.
It waits only on our cry that we
need to be made new, that we can't,
what's the word, swallow down our condition and
try to live ethically and morally despite it
and try to get by in the best
way that we know minimally.
God wants exuberant, chaste, virtuous souls testifying of
his reality and living with remarkable freedom and
the power of the new life because they've
acknowledged that in the old life there's no
man good, no, not one.
Men will, Kavil will hedge at this doctrine
about the total depravity of man because it's
unbecoming in our modern generation to speak so
of man as a universal condition.
After all, we're all individuals and I'm different
and I'm not like that.
And if I did a boo-boo, it
was circumstantial.
I couldn't help it.
It was only an era that I acquired
150 million by arranging for my retirement payoff
with guys who were in the same conspiracy
with me and getting their payoffs.
It was only an era and I'm not
even sure of it.
After all, I deserved 150 million.
What can men do on this earth that
will ever deserve remuneration of that kind?
I'm not experiencing it.
I may have to go in hot just
to pay for the expense of this trip.
So they will hedge that this doctrine is
too devastating and negative and my Jewish people
say that's Christianity.
They're so dumb.
They don't even know that that doctrine is
born out of the Old Testament statements of
God.
It's not a New Testament doctrine.
The New Testament only reiterates what the Old
Testament has already acknowledged, that there's not a
righteous man upon the earth that doeth good.
That David said, I was born to this
iniquity.
It's in my very frame and nature and
except you give me mercy, I'm stuck.
Those who will not cry it up, who
will not acknowledge this truth will suffer it
but he is most blessed who in his
own soul has learned to lament his lost
condition.
Wow.
Who will learn it without having to wait
for the proof that comes through sinful conduct.
You don't have to wait for the transgression.
It's already there.
If you'll acknowledge it, you'll be spared from
the humiliation shame of having to experience it.
You're a blessed soul when you learn to
lament your condition and your estate and cry
out to God for mercy and he'll be
quick to give it.
So he desires truth in the inward parts.
Purge me with hyssop, sprinkle the atoning blood
upon me.
Give me the reality.
Nothing but blood can take away my blood
guilt, my stains.
Nothing but the strongest purification can avail to
cleanse me.
Let this sin often purge my sin.
None can need it more than me.
Foul as I am, there is a power
in the blood.
There's a power in the divine propitiation.
You've made provision.
Your mercy is actual but it costs you
something and I bow before that sacrifice and
I will ever honor you for it and
it will be the basis for my gratitude,
for my love and be expressed in worship
and in service.
I'll not need worship teams to get me
to worship.
It's continually rising up within me.
It flows out of a gratitude for what
you have performed in me that was totally
undeserved, that I could not commend myself, that
I could not earn, I could not obtain.
You gave it.
You gave it expensively and you gave the
application to free me from my sin and
gave me a new heart only because you
heard my cry and you had mercy on
me.
If that's not a basis for gratitude and
undying love and worship that is more than
choruses that expresses itself in service and sacrifice,
then there is no basis.
And then the other kind of worship that
we perform, not having come to this condition
is just a cosmetic overlay.
It's a musicality.
There's something performed and I shall be whiter
than snow.
What a condition that is.
With a man like me, I don't even
wanna be autographical.
35 years old when I was saved but
what was my history before that time?
What kind of relationships of a sinful kind?
What was the debris and the clutter of
broken lives and cast off women that are
left behind me as a trail?
What was the price paid for my egotism
and vanity and self-assertion and pride?
I shudder to think of it.
Blessed is the child who comes to God
early and doesn't have to bring the baggage
of a misused life in before God and
even have to suffer the memory of it
to be whiter than snow, to have an
innocency in God.
But I'll tell you what, God's mercy is
so great in blotting out your transgressions that
he makes as if you had never acceded
to sin.
He takes away the haunting memory.
He makes you feel virginal and new and
chaste as if you had never been into
the mud, as if you have never had
an ugly history and spoken an ill word.
It's a remarkable innocency that is not born
because you have been saved from exposure, but
that he has performed as blessing and mercy
through your exposure.
Because the greatest innocency is the innocency that
knows the truth of man and man's condition
and the realities that are in the world
and evil and still shines transcendentally with a
purity and an innocence, not because he's ignorant
of evil, but because he has transcended it
through the blood of the lamb.
That's salvation.
That's deliverance.
You'll be whiter than snow.
Oh, that the reader may take heart even
now and obtain mercy.
That their sins need not be before them
morning and evening, day and night to be
haunted and experience the grief or to be
shallow and not yet experienced the grief.
Maybe that's worse.
And to be in a kind of superficial
Christianity, callow, C-A-L-L-O-W,
singing its choruses and yet not yet having
recognized the truth of its own condition or
its need or its remedy.
Speaking about Jesus as Savior because it's part
of the vocabulary that we acquire, but not
having experienced his Saviorhood, his mercy.
If we have not obtained that mercy, we
have nothing to say to Israel.
And I'm asking again and again to you
tonight, are we required to duplicate David's sin
in order to obtain mercy?
Does it have to wait until we ourselves
are transgressors and adulterers and murderers?
Or can we share vicariously of what is
the truth for every man and not needing
the shameful experience to prove it?
So David is here speaking in this psalm
in behalf of all saints and not his
own person only.
And is this not a proof that my
nature is more deeply infected and corrupted by
sin than I thought?
I, who yesterday was chaste, am today an
adulterer.
I yesterday had hands innocent of blood and
today I'm a man of blood guiltiness.
For any man to offend in the sight
of God and not to be moved by
it is in the deeps of sin.
What is sin?
It's to transgress in God's sight and not
be affected by it, not be pricked, not
be haunted, that you can do it with
impunity and in a casual way and swallow
it down and go on to the next,
as if God is not God, as if
God is not seeing, as if God is
not righteous, as if God will not judge.
That's an error against God, which is the
heart of sin is the failure to reckon
upon God for what he is in himself,
righteous as well as merciful, all knowing, all
seeing.
Every sin is an act of presumption against
God.
To fail to reckon David's sin as our
own is yet to be in our sins,
the worst of which, as I'm saying, is
presumption.
Are you made of better stuff than God's
beloved, the sweet singer of Israel, who could
compose psalms and fight against Goliath, lead a
nation?
Who complete exception?
Are we made of better stuff than David?
David?
It's defiant not to acknowledge the truth of
David's condition as our own and need to
be pricked in our hearts with the feeling
of this evil that we might enjoy the
benefit of God's provision, the blood that he
quickly employs to that one whose repentant cry
he hears, who recognizes and acknowledges, it's not
just a boo-boo that I'm asking you
to blot out, it's a nature, it's a
condition, it's Adamic, it's evil.
I need your work, the newness that only
you can give that corresponds to your own
righteous nature.
Take not thy Holy Spirit from me.
Don't withdraw the benefits of your comfort and
counsel and assistance or I'm a dead man.
Uphold me with your free spirit because I'm
conscious that if I could commit adultery and
murder, then I'm weak, I'm morally weak, I'm
susceptible, I'm capable of the worst transgressions.
You need to uphold me, not just save
me once then, but continue to uphold me
by your free spirit or I'll find myself
again in a comparable condition or worse and
build again the walls of Jerusalem because I
have done mischief against it.
I have harmed the church.
My sin is not just my own personal
thing, but it has had consequence for others
with whom I'm related in the church.
I have demeaned the church, I have reduced
its witness, I have negated the reality of
God.
So I'm crying out, Lord, build again the
walls of Jerusalem.
Not only forgive my transgression, but make up
for it in whatever loss the church suffered
by my failed conduct because I'm not in
this alone.
I'm affecting a whole people.
We're in something together.
There's a corporate reality of which I'm part
and my sin and my example has affected
others adversely.
The walls of Jerusalem have suffered loss and
I'm asking you to build it up in
your great mercy again, even more strongly than
before out of the repentance that I acknowledge.
Hasten it, O Lord, because I have dishonored
your name, dishonored your church.
And then I can tell sinners of their
transgression and lead others to salvation.
Even Israel itself that doesn't have the faintest
inkling that David's condition is its condition.
And so I end by reading a quotation
quoted by Spurgeon in his great commentary on
the Psalms where a man whose name we
would never know, his writings would have been
lost to us had not Spurgeon collected these
gems and added them to his own comments,
writes, I cannot doubt the prophetic bearing of
this Psalm upon the nation Israel.
In the latter days, they shall consider their
ways.
Repentance and self-loathing will be the result.
Blood guiltiness heavier than David's has to be
removed from that nation.
They will become teachers of the Gentiles when
first the iniquity of their own transgressions has
been purged away.
Lord, mercy, Lord.
Mercy for these precious young ones, Lord.
Mercy of a kind to understand something that's
over our heads and beyond our present experience
that we will acknowledge the truth of your
word and of our condition as transgressors and
cry out for your mercy and receive the
blood of the sacrifice of Jesus's death effectually,
experientially, existentially.
It will be real for us.
We'll feel lightened.
Something will go out from us.
Darkness will feel an inward change in a
quiet way.
You'll touch us in our deeps.
You'll create in us something new.
Thank you, my God, for that availability.
May there be some tonight, many tonight who
will appropriate it by faith, acknowledging the truth
that you have said is our condition with
David and giving us the mercy for which
he himself pleaded and we ourselves need.
Lord, I'm praying for this congregation, precious heads
and shoulders above many, but I'm praying that
its joy, its worship, its reality, its witness,
especially to the Jewish community as well as
to its own nation and Asia will be
birthed out of the deepest reality and appropriation
of the cross of Christ Jesus, which is
available even tonight for as many as will
cry out and call.
So I don't know how to give an
invitation.
Where you sit or you need to do
something physical, radical, a break with the past,
as I've asked my son, who has gone
back onto drugs, onto crack, and now is
giving it up momentarily until he shall be
depressed again and need a lift, who has
had long hair for most of his adult
life and cherishes this long ponytail as if
somehow it is sacrosanct and can't find employment
in Minnesota.
And I said, Ariel, cut your hair.
They have an abundance of candidates for employment
and they don't have to take a risk
on one who comes before them with a
physical statement that says it's tied to the
world.
Cut your hair because your father requests it.
Obey your father, honor your father.
It will go well with you and it
will break your stubborn pride, which is the
root of your sin, which if it's not
broken by this act of obedience to which
I'm calling you, you'll fall again into yet
more degrading sin.
Pray for Ariel.
Pray for the sons, the children of ministers
who are indifferent to the call of God,
who have their own superior observations and reflections
and don't need to go that way, that
they will acknowledge the truth of their condition
and their insubordination and their egoistic superiority and
humble themselves before God and break and say,
I'm not better than David.
Have mercy upon me, Lord, and blot out
my transgressions.
So avail yourself of the mercy of God,
even tonight, when you hear his voice, harden
not your heart.
Come out of your seat if you need
to.
Go down on your knees by your seat.
Talk to God.
He waits to hear from you.
He's a God of truth.
And it's difficult to persuade those that are
virtuous who have not had occasion for sin.
They're too young.
They've not yet come to the promptings of
their sexual things that will encourage fantasy and
conduct that is sinful.
And yet God says, you will come to
it and you'll not have the strength to
triumph over it unless you realize now that
you were birthed in iniquity.
From your mother's womb, you came with the
Adamic taint.
And if you'll not acknowledge and repent of
it and forsake it and ask my mercy,
it will have its own logic and its
fulfillment into shameful transgression for which he wants
to save you now while you're young.
So you come and avail yourself of the
mercy of God.
The blood that flowed from Emmanuel's veins is
potent to blot out all our transgression, all
our iniquity, all our false and sinful nature.
That he might create in us a clean
heart and renew in us a right spirit.