To God, on your knees, that thought.
When did you say, God, I've learned an
awful lot about you over the years, but
Lord, I haven't changed very much myself.
I want you not only to restore that
capacity that I once seemed to have to
praise you, not only with the fruit of
my lips, but with my life as well.
But Lord, I don't not only want that
to be restored, but I want to grow,
to go on and on, further and further,
deeper and deeper into the heart of God.
Well, that's the longing that's expressed in this
beautiful hymn that I'm so delighted that Alan
and Jack and whoever else have been responsible
for picking the hymns here have gone out
of their way to choose hymns that express
the concepts in this marvelous psalm we're looking
at together.
But I hope that the Lord will, before
the night is out, not only make us
conscious that we know a little more about
what something means, which is the terrible tragedy
of evangelical Christianity today, but rather that my
heart will be so touched that even though
I can't explain what it's meant, my life
will be changed and God will be there
in a new way, which will mean that
I'll be more conscious of my life before
him, more conscious of his holiness, more conscious
of what it meant to Jesus to suffer
and die, more conscious of any little thought
of sin, even in my life.
That's surely, that's surely the evidence that God
is close and that I am close to
him is my own consciousness of sin.
So with that in mind, I want us
now to turn to that wonderful psalm again
together that we started this morning, Psalm 51.
Let me read it from the New International.
Again, let me remind you that it says
in the superscription that not only is it
a Psalm of David, but he wrote it
when the prophet Nathan came to him after
David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.
And as I said this morning, the story
is told in 2 Samuel 11 and 12.
And indeed the sequel to writing this is
probably Psalm 32 when he says, wow, I
should have written Psalm 51 12 months before
I did.
If only I had, I wouldn't have gone
through this terrible, terrible pressure, the weight, the
burden of the guilt of my sin upon
me.
Can you relate to this tonight?
Is there something you're holding in?
Something that you know should have been dealt
with?
Oh, may God open our hearts, open my
heart.
I often get very convicted for my own
words.
Isn't that terrible?
No, it's not at all.
It's very right because hopefully it's God through
this word by his spirit is taking ahold
of me to say something that may be
primarily for Keith Price.
So I'm not only standing four square on
this word, but I'm also underneath its authority
like you are.
So let's read.
Have mercy on me, says David.
Have mercy on me, oh God, according to
your unfailing love, according to your great compassion,
blot out my transgressions, wash away all my
iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions and my sin
is always before me.
Against you, you only have I sinned and
done what is evil in your sight so
that you are proved right when you speak
and justified when you judge.
Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from
the time my mother conceived me.
Surely you desire truth in the inner parts.
You teach me wisdom in the inmost place.
Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be
clean.
Wash me and I will be whiter than
snow.
Let me hear joy and gladness.
Let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins and blot
out all my iniquity.
Create in me a pure heart, oh God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence or
take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit to sustain
me.
The better translation, preferred, I believe, over the
King James in that line.
Then I will teach transgressors your ways and
sinners will turn back to you.
Save me from blood guilt, oh God, the
God who saves me, and my tongue will
sing of your righteousness.
Oh Lord, open my lips and my mouth
will declare your praise.
You do not delight in sacrifice or I
would bring it.
You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,
a broken and contrite heart, oh God, you
will not despise.
Again, as I said this morning, either written
by David before the walls of Jerusalem were
built or more likely added by another inspired
writer, perhaps after they were broken down as
the nation took this psalm for its corporate
prayer.
In your good pleasure, make Zion prosper.
Build up the walls of Jerusalem.
Then there will be righteous sacrifices, whole burnt
offerings to delight you.
Then bulls will be offered on your altar.
Now then, this morning we had a look
at the first two verses and indeed it's
the first of various sections that the psalm
is broken down into.
I suppose whoever's spoken on this psalm down
through the centuries really could hardly stray from
a pretty normal, straightforward flow through the psalm.
You've only got to look at the way
the river of this psalm makes its way
through the terrain of life and you can't
really go far off.
And whatever headings you come up with, it's
quite likely that hundreds of other people have
come up with those same headings before because
it's quite straightforward, isn't it?
So let's put them in the participle form.
The first paragraph, one and two is petitioning.
We saw that this morning.
The second paragraph, three, four, five and six
that we'll deal with tonight, confessing.
The third paragraph, seven, eight and nine, cleansing.
The fourth paragraph, ten, eleven and twelve, renewing
or restoring.
And then thirteen, perhaps right to the end
but certainly to seventeen, serving or telling or
worshipping or whatever it is, that outflow from
what has happened in my life.
God has got to do something in me
before he can ever do anything with any
real effectiveness through me.
God has got to touch my inner being
and that's what this psalm is about.
We're used today to being touched in our
outer being.
We're used to having someone say something, it
bounces off this ear, scrapes just on the
surface of my mind.
I sort of respond superficially to it and
wonder why I'm not changed.
But God wants us to be changed in
the very depths of our being.
And so we're going to have a look
at the second section tonight.
The first section, then, petitioning.
Let me remind you that we picked out
three triplets, didn't we?
We saw the nature of God.
We saw it was described by his, he's
merciful.
He's filled with unfailing love and he's a
God of great compassion.
Then having seen the heart of God, we
saw something of the heart of man, which
was the opposite and we couldn't understand how
man would respond this way.
He was filled with three things in the
last three lines of that first paragraph.
Transgressions going across the line, iniquity, that deep
root of moral perverseness and corruption within me,
and then sin, failing to reach the line.
I suppose if you take those three things
again and you say transgressions and sin and
iniquity, they would be summed up in the
words of the prayer book, wouldn't they?
We have done those things that we ought
not to have done, transgression.
And we have left undone those things that
we ought to have done, sin.
And there is no health in us.
And then it says, because that great gulf
was between what God was, merciful, loving and
compassionate.
And what I had within me, transgression, iniquity
and sin, Jesus bridged the gulf.
And now I can come to him like
David and I can use those three expressions
in my plea for mercy.
Blot out, wash away and cleanse.
Blot it out like wiping the slate clean.
Wash away like a filthy, dirty garment, like
the miners in Wales used to come up
from the mines.
Goodness me, not only all over their faces
and hands, you can hardly see anything except
the light in the eyes sometimes, but the
filthy, dirty sort of garments.
Or I suppose like being sprayed with a
skunk, which you couldn't be in Vancouver Island
because there aren't any there, only skunk cabbage.
And I don't know if you sprayed with
a skunk, I guess it wouldn't do too
much good just to kind of wash it
in this way.
You'd have to bury it, wouldn't you, for
some days or weeks or years or whatever
it is.
But it's, Lord, I want you to do
business.
Wash me thoroughly in such a thorough way
and then cleanse me, Lord.
Cleanse me, anything else that's left you have
to do by burning, by whatever else you
have to burn up within me.
Then Lord, I want to be pronounced guiltless
before you and God, I will do anything
for this.
This is David's plea.
He's really summing up the whole of this
marvelous psalm in those first two verses.
There, if he didn't come this morning, that
will encourage you not to come next Sunday
morning because you get a synopsis of it
at night.
All right, now let's go ahead to the
next section.
The next section, then, is the one we'll
deal with tonight.
Not petitioning now, but confessing.
I want you to notice that there are
four verses there and I'm going to give
you, very simply, one heading for each of
the verses as we come to it.
These four things are involved in my confessing.
You see, you can't go on keeping it
in.
You're going to learn it just doesn't pay.
It won't pay ultimately when you'll have to
face God as judge.
But frankly, it won't even pay now because
you're going to see that your life is
going to be absolutely threatened with failure and
paralyzed for real action for God because your
whole being is consumed with the thought of
this thing that you haven't confessed.
So that brings us to our first verse,
which is verse three.
For I know, or acknowledge, I know my
transgressions and my sin is always before me.
So the first little heading I call a
condemning conscience.
A condemning conscience.
Just last Thursday, I was speaking at a
morning session in a senior citizen's home in
Victoria, which are the things I love to
do when I'm home, just do those local
things and get to meet local people.
But I had a lunch appointment with a
pastor, or who was it, I think it
was a pastor, I'm forgetting who it was.
I had a lunch appointment at 12 and
I'd finished this thing at about a quarter
past 11.
And I knew that my wife had to
go down to visit my daughter and incidentally,
some of you that know my daughter, Julia,
we have two little graves in the cemetery
in Victoria there where she's lost the two
little ones that she had before.
She didn't have any children.
Well, last Thursday, I think it was, or
the way she gave birth, Thursday week, I'm
sorry, that's 10 days now, gave birth to
a wonderful little baby boy.
So at last that has happened.
And so my wife, I knew had to
go down last Thursday.
And so I thought, well, I don't know
whether she needs the car cause I'm going
to be away at lunch a long while.
So I called her to see whether she
needed me to bring the car home and
then she could drive me back to the
place I had to have lunch and then
this other person could take me home.
So I thought, well, where's my phone?
I really need a phone.
Couldn't find one anywhere.
I couldn't find one of these nice big
British telephone.
See anything that looked like a telephone.
Didn't even see a duck there.
You have a duck in my room for
a telephone.
Isn't that something?
Anyway, here I didn't know what to do.
So I saw a store here and I
thought, well, I'm sure a store has a
phone.
So I didn't know what kind of a
store it was.
It turned out to be kind of a
store for old people.
So it was quite suitable.
And it was kind of paramedical equipment and
chairs and levers and things we could sit
down and go back and get in the
bath with and sit on all kinds of
things in the bathroom with.
And all kinds of different little gadgets for
people that couldn't move their fingers with arthritis,
little clippers to clip and little big magnifying
things to make the page become huge.
Everything like that.
Never been in a store like that before.
Maybe I wasn't old enough.
But anyway, I valued it last week looking
around.
But anyway, I just went in and make
the phone call.
But when I went in there, I went
to the store, I said, excuse me, do
you know whether there's a phone booth anywhere?
I just want to make a local phone
call.
And of course I was already feeling badly
because what I was really saying was, would
you mind me using your phone?
Oh, he said, you can use ours.
Come in here.
So I went in and as I was
on the phone call, my wife went in
and took a second or two.
But boy, did I ever feel guilty.
I felt that I had said, you know
where a phone is?
And I wasn't expecting him to say, well,
come and use ours.
And all the time, that was my purpose.
I felt so guilty that I walked out
of that store quarter of an hour late.
It was $25 worth of little gadgets.
Conscience is something terrible, isn't it?
It gets at us.
This man knew what conscience was.
He says, the thing I've done, this sin
with Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite, my sin
is always before me.
I'm preoccupied with it.
I can't stand it.
It's there in front of me.
Whatever I try to do, my mind keeps
going to it.
Every time anybody preaches, my mind goes to
that.
Your mind's on it right now.
And he says, that's the problem.
Like the tribal woman who said that conscience
was that three-cornered piece of tin inside
of her, that every time there was danger
around, it started to spin.
And the three corners really hurt her inside.
And if she didn't do anything about it,
it would spin faster.
And then if she still didn't do anything
about it, it would spin so fast that
she said, eventually it spun so fast that
the corners got worn off and I didn't
feel it anymore.
Isn't that what conscience is?
The seared conscience that no longer is a
guide for us.
Indeed, somebody has said that conscience is like
a watchdog, a watchdog.
And it will bark when there's danger around,
but if you don't do anything about it,
it turns into a bloodhound and chases you
at night.
If you've got a conscience tonight that's heavily
laden with something or other, don't you find
it's the nighttime, when you're alone, before you
go to sleep, when you wake up in
the morning, you have to face the day.
Conscience is like Big Ben, I used to
think.
Goodness me, I've been 10 miles away from
Big Ben, sleeping in London and England at
night.
And if the wind's in the right direction,
I could hear it.
But I passed Big Ben underneath it at
12 o'clock midday to watch it strike
as if you could see anything.
And I thought, well, it's about time it
struck.
And I look up and it's two minutes
past 12.
Well, I never heard it.
All the noise and the hustle and the
bustle of the traffic around, that's what happens
in the daytime.
And at nighttime, our conscience gets us.
This man says, I know my transgressions and
my sin is forever before me.
And my conscience needs to be my guide.
But a couple of weeks ago, we'd gone
20 years without buying a decent bathroom scales.
And we thought somehow the thing, one of
the top came off or something.
At least I see it out there by
the garbage.
I haven't carried it out yet.
But my wife decided it was about time
to buy a decent bathroom scales and she
did.
Well, I went and incidentally, she put it
in the wrong bathroom.
She's not utilitarian.
It depends on the color, which bathroom it
goes in.
So I had to go all the way
to the other bathroom now just to sort
of weigh, you know.
So I stood on this thing and I
said, dear, this one's no good.
It's 10 pounds too heavy.
Terrible one.
She said, well, you've got to set the
thing first.
And I looked at it.
It was already set on 10 pounds before
I got on there.
So I moved it back.
I had to set it like you have
to set a compass and conscience is like
that.
We have to set our conscience.
It must be geared to the word of
God for conscience that's not conditioned in that
way is a totally unreliable conscience and will
take on that sense of values and those
priorities and presuppositions and all other kinds of
things, which are a reflection of the world
around us.
We have got to train the conscience, condition
the conscience.
It needs to be conditioned by the word
of God.
In fact, the word conscience is just in
itself.
Again, like the prefix that we had this
morning, con is the together with again, wasn't
it?
Like compassion, same word, con together with science.
Knowledge, con science, knowledge held together with another.
Who's the other?
It's God.
And the knowledge that I have in my
conscience that dictates to me must be held
in conjunction with another person.
That person is God and God has told
me how to set the scales of my
conscience.
And I'm to make sure it's set to
this standard.
Then and only then it will be a
good guide for me.
I wonder if you think conscience is a
reliable guide when it's really not.
You know, one time in our lives, adult
lives, we had a lovely couple living next
door to us.
Oh my, they were a wonderful couple and
we enjoyed them so much.
Very happily married couple, you know, and just
youngsters.
They hadn't got any children, but very pleasant
people.
And after we'd been living next door to
them for two years, the fellow came to
me one night, picked up the phone.
And he said, he said, I wonder if
I'd come and see you.
I said, sure, by all means.
I said, would around seven be all right?
He said, fine.
So came in our house about seven.
He sat down and he said, we're wondering
if you'll marry us.
My eyes on, I mean, I didn't know
what to do.
I couldn't believe it.
Here was this happily married couple and they
weren't married.
And they've been living together there for a
couple of years.
Well, when I agreed to marry in the
house on condition that we could have three
counseling sessions first, because neither of them, as
far as I knew, were committed Christians and
there wouldn't have been an unequal yoke.
I won't do that.
So I went into there, I went in
and I had the first counseling session.
And when I shared with them, you know,
how good it was that they wanted to
get married because how wrong this thing was.
I shall never forget the look on his
face.
He's on his wife, is it?
Is it wrong to live together like this?
Is it wrong?
I mean, he never thought, it never crossed
his mind that there was anything wrong with
it.
What happened?
He was sucked in.
And he had just imbibed the very standards
of the society in which he grew up
where it's all right to do that.
And that's what happens with us.
And your conscience may not be a reliable
guide.
It'll only be reliable as your mind is
transformed and transfixed by God and transformed by
the Word of God and as the principles
of the Scripture are then programmed into your
mind and you deprogram the standards of this
world and you get an up-to-date
proper program that's properly approved.
Then it is, your conscience can be a
good guide.
Well, that's what it says here.
Then this man says, now, my sin is
always before me because he was conscious all
the time of this wrong that he'd done
because he knew that this was wrong because
he knew in God's eyes he shouldn't have
done this.
He knew the Word of God and the
laws of God.
I think conscience would be four statements put
together.
They would be this.
Number one, I have sinned.
Number two, I know I have sinned.
Number three, God knows I know I have
sinned.
Number four, I know God knows I know
I've sinned.
That's what conscience really is.
So this man really is a man who
knows that he has sinned for I know
my transgressions and my sin is always before
me.
Can I ask you, if your conscience is
troubling you, is it primarily because of the
nature of that sin within you, what you've
done, or is it a conscience that's bothering
you lest you get caught, lest you get
caught?
Not only that, but are you absolutely serious
about knowing what this thing is, the terrible
heinousness of this sin which has gripped you
and taken hold of you or maybe something
that you fell into?
Do you realize the seriousness of that so
much so that God knows your heart and
you only have to get down by your
bed and you hardly have to say anything
and you know you got through to God
and God knows?
Or do you work it the other way,
as some people do?
They don't take seriously this sin except that
they want to be sure that the books
are clear before they depart from this earth.
So they keep short accounts, but their short
accounts aren't based upon a deep recognition of
what sin is.
So instead of coming to God with that
deep sense of sin when God would understand,
they try to make up for it on
the other end and they work up that
terrible fervor and say, oh God, with that
great intensity and beat them, smite their breasts
and they have that pious look about them
and oh God, I'm really a penitent person.
You see, that is not good enough.
No matter how much you act like that,
it does not make up for the seriousness
of the sin that we have committed.
Not only that, but when you sin and
when you're forgiven, are you a superficial person
that as soon as you're forgiven, goodness me,
you can get up and forget about it
within two minutes.
Imagine committing a murder and having it weighing
heavily upon you, forgiven by God and man
and the whole thing is finished for, goodness
me, in five minutes would you be jumping
with joy and dancing with song?
I would say there's something very wrong, you
see, but why should there be?
God has forgiven you, it should be.
I know, but you know and I know
when there's something weighing heavily upon us, we
can't do that.
It's something that we're almost reluctant to accept
this forgiveness.
I know that's bordering on heresy by saying
that, but I know you understand what I'm
saying.
I tell you, I can understand if any
of you saw that film, The Mission, which
had some very wonderful scenes and good things
in it, as well as two or three
things that warped biblical theology.
But I can imagine, I can see that
man now carrying that tremendous burden up those
steep cliffs at the side of that waterfall
there in South America.
No, he struggled with this burden, I don't
know how long, for days or weeks until
he eventually got to this monastery and then
had to give himself as an act of
penance.
He'd done his penance walking up and down
with this thing and struggling along with this
burden.
I tell you, you can understand a man
that feels so burdened.
He just doesn't want to accept this free
forgiveness.
And in fact, that often is the problem
when we try to explain this to people
who've grown up as nominal Christians.
They don't want to accept this, they've worked
hard for this, and they're not about to
let anybody who just believes to have it.
For goodness me, look at this thief.
Just, you mean he could just say, I'm
sorry like that and today you'll be with
me in paradise?
No, no, no.
That's why the elder brother couldn't stand the
younger prodigal son, for the simple reason that
you just can't be forgiven like that.
But you see, nevertheless, there's something within all
of us that shows us that if we're
superficial in just bouncing back like that, there
wasn't a true understanding of the reality and
seriousness of sin.
Yet at the same time, we want to
do penance.
But penance has already been done.
Jesus paid the price.
He took the wrath for me.
He paid it all.
The debt is cancelled.
I can be free.
I can rejoice, but because I'm human and
because I realized how serious it was, it's
going to take some time before I gradually
enter into that.
I've never quite explained it in this way
before, but I've been thinking a lot about
that in the last couple of weeks.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
You do, don't you?
How many would be human here tonight?
Nobody, all right.
Well, all right, I think most of you
understand what that is, and that's, of course,
the meaning of the whole thing.
And here it is, we just don't want
to confess for that reason.
You know, we do have an aversion to
confession.
David, in Psalm 32, you'll remember the psalm
that he wrote after Psalm 51, saying, I
wish I had confessed before because wow, did
I ever go through it.
And if only I'd realized how that could
have been relieved and that forklift could have
come along and picked that heavy car that
was pinning me to the ground and picked
it up.
Oh, I could breathe again, relieved and released.
If only I'd done that before, he said.
And he says in Psalm 32, when I
kept silent, my bones wasted away through my
groaning all day long.
For day and night, your hand was heavy
upon me.
That's conscience.
My strength was sapped as in the heat
of summer.
That's what happens to your life.
It loses everything.
Then I acknowledge my sin to you and
did not cover up my iniquity.
I said I will confess my transgressions to
the Lord.
And you forgave the guilt of my sin.
You see, the heart is deceitful above all
things and desperately wicked.
And of course, when we think of that
verse, we think, oh yes, it's terribly deceitful,
desperately wicked, and we'll do all kinds of
things to other people, but we don't do
anything to ourselves.
Do you know the heart is so deceitful,
so desperately wicked that it will deceive you
yourself on the need to confess that sin.
And it'll find all kinds of reasoning.
It will rationalize and do everything it can
think of to make you say, well, it's
all right.
I don't have to confess that.
Conscience, a condemning conscience.
I know my transgressions and my sin is
always before me.
Look at the second thing that's involved in
confessing.
Verse four, not only a condemning conscience, but
now an offended God.
An offended God.
Against you, you only have I sinned and
done what is evil in your sight.
I can imagine some of you sitting there
and saying, hmm, the Bible didn't think very
much about the value of women, did they?
Look, he violated that woman and look what's
happened.
He said against thee and thee only have
I sinned.
What about that poor thing?
You know, we're sort of, that's the way
that we would think.
I don't think it means that.
I think God knows the value of a
human being more than any of us.
He knows that he made each one of
us in his image and although it's been
warped, that human being is precious and there
is no difference in that way between male
or female.
The preciousness is all the same.
Bruce Waltke, who had some part in the
translation of the NIV, happens to be a
good friend of mine.
And sometimes in years past, he and I
have traveled together preaching, doing conferences one day
at a time with groups of pastors and
then we'd travel for three or four hours
a night to the next city and then
we'd get ready to go on the next
day and do it all through the day
again.
But once we arrived at the other place
about two, eight or 8.30 at night,
we'd have eaten something along the way.
We'd go to the motel room.
He'd check into his room and I'd check
into mine.
He'd count the number of paces to the
fire escape because he'd been caught once in
a fire and then he'd walk all the
way back, check the number of paces, pick
up his bag.
As he'd go into his room, he said,
see you in the coffee shop in 10
minutes.
Why?
Well, because he knew that I had thousands
of questions on the Psalms and he was
the expert in Canada on the Psalms.
So I had all kinds of...
I would pump him with questions till midnight.
They'd throw us out of those cafeterias in
the motel there or they'd say, go sit
in the lobby or something, but we would
have so many questions.
Well, Bruce, actual fact, said to me once
that the reason he thinks this is here,
that against thee and thee only have I
sinned is that God sets the standard and
sin is a failure to reach that standard.
Therefore, all sin is against God.
Other people get hurt in the process.
We sometimes call that sinning against them, but
not in the same sense because they didn't
set the standard.
Sometimes crimes are committed against humanity or against
other people.
We call that sin too, but it's not
quite the same because the nation or the
standard is different.
It's been set horizontally rather than vertically.
And so he says in that sense, against
thee and thee only have I sinned.
That's one of the few things I'm not
too sure that I've yet have seen in
quite the same light because I feel that
the primary emphasis here, and I think he's
certainly right in God setting the standard and
the primary sin being against God, but I
suppose it would also say elsewhere that I've
sinned against heaven and against thee, although that
was a prodigal that said it.
Or Saul said about Samuel, didn't he, about
sinning against him and that, but not in
the same sense.
But what I believe it means here is
this, that my sin looms so large in
my mind and in my vision before you,
a holy God with whom I have to
do and with whom I am in union
and enjoy happy communion.
This sin has done something to me that
I realize above all, it's cut off fellowship
with you.
It's hurt you.
It's offended you.
Everything else, sin against everyone else, all the
hurt and all the crime pales into insignificance
in comparison.
You're the one that I've sinned against.
Against you and you only have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight.
Then it is that David says in the
same verse, so that God, you are proved
right when you speak and justified when you
judge.
He wasn't saying, well now God, you know,
I think I'll give you 10 out of
10 when you judge.
And then that means you're okay, you're in.
If I didn't give you 10 out of
10, you wouldn't be God.
It doesn't mean a thing like that.
If every man on earth were blind, the
sun would still continue to shine.
If every man on earth were an atheist,
God would still be God.
It wouldn't make one iota of difference.
But what he's saying is when you judge
me, however heavy that judgment is, however much
of a terrible blow and punishment that is
on me, I want you to know, God,
you're right and you're justified because the terribly
serious nature of this sin demands that you,
the one that set the standard and said,
the soul that sinneth, it shall die.
You, the one that set that standard, are
the one that has every right to condemn
me to death.
So whatever you do, God, I want you
to know, I'm not gonna fight against that.
I'm more concerned about getting my sin forgiven
than about questioning you.
I know the seriousness of it and how
terrible it is.
Isn't it marvelous in the last part of
verse four that he says that to God
when in 2 Samuel 11 and 12, all
he'd been doing is trying to cover up
this sin.
Now, isn't that an amazing thing?
Here it was a year or maybe six
or eight or nine months before that, he'd
been trying to cover it up.
Here he has this terrible sin.
As I said this morning, when the spring
of the year, when kings go forth to
war, David sent Joab.
So he looks down from his bedroom and
he sees this beautiful lady and he commits
adultery with her.
So then he says, well now, some days
later, sometime later she sent to him and
said, I am with child.
And so he said, well, how can I
cover this thing up?
I don't want this to be known.
So I know what I'll do.
I'll send for Uriah the Hittite, her husband,
send for him from the battlefield.
So send for him, let him come.
I want him to bring a message.
I want to take a message back.
I want to find out how the war's
going on.
So he came to the king's palace and
David said, well, how are things going?
And the children back and forth a little
bit.
He said, okay, well, that's fine.
You come home and you pass the news
on to me now.
Just go and enjoy yourself and go down
and spend a night or so down with
your wife there and everything will be fine
for David that is because he'd have a
cover now.
But Uriah the Hittite was a loyal person.
And he said, should I go and do
that and go down into my house when
the ark of God and the people of
God are fighting in the field?
No, he slept at the door all night.
David thought his plan was foiled.
He tried again.
He got him drunk the next night, but
the same thing happened.
Even when he was drunk, he wouldn't give
up that loyalty.
So David sent a letter back to Job,
the commander in the field said, put him
in the front line and kill him off.
And he did.
But still David had that terrible conscience.
And then Job sent back and said, yes,
I've got a conscience now doing what you
told me to do.
David said, don't worry.
This is life.
This is the way things are.
But David's conscience couldn't be quietened.
Then he thought now I'll be quietened.
He went to marry Bathsheba, but it still
wasn't quietened.
His conscience was not quietened, even though he
then tried to forget about it.
He said, stick a band-aid on it
and cover it up.
Your conscience will never be quietened.
Once you know who God is and what
he is, it's only when you come in
confession to him as David did in response
to Nathan that then, I confess my sin
unto the Lord and he forgave the iniquity
of my sin.
You see, all sin is against God.
God is the one who's offended.
Against you and you only have I sinned.
We always sympathize with the sinner.
How good that is.
We've got to comfort people that are in
need and show them there's hope, which is
your theme I understand in these days.
How wonderful that there's hope.
But listen, we're living in a day when
we're much more interested on those horizontal relationships
and comforting people from all the lessons we've
learned and all the secular courses we've taken.
And we've forgotten completely that we've offended a
holy God and his honor is at stake.
My brother, my sister in Christ, or those
of you who are searching to become Christians
tonight, God wants us to keep these in
balance.
But the first and foremost thing is against
thee and thee only have I sinned.
I tell you because we don't recognize this
anymore, is it any wonder that people don't
go on to love the Lord?
They can't say so that you're proved right
when you speak and justified when you're judged.
Goodness me, they don't think that anymore.
They don't bother with that now because they
don't realize how serious their sin was.
They don't realize they've offended God.
But sin is an offense against a holy
God who created us, who is our Redeemer,
our Savior, and who one day is going
to be our judge and you and I
are going to have to stand before him
in one place or the other and God
is going to demand from us.
Either that we say Jesus paid the price
or that we will have to give an
account of our life.
We had better preach the gospel message so
that this offense against God is brought in
or else we're not going to get a
consciousness of sin and people will treat it
so lightly without any seriousness that we'll keep
on sinning, repenting, sinning, repenting.
As I often say, there's no worse sinner
than the one that spends half his life
sinning and the other half repenting.
Keeps on doing the same thing over and
over.
An offended God.
Look at the third thing.
Incidentally, I should say, if you want to
take something practical to do now tonight, I
would spend the next 12 months making a
goal for yourself and your goal will be
to try to understand the seriousness of sin.
And if you will do that and in
your quiet times have some little plan, even
if it's just 15 minutes or so a
day or whenever you can to understand why
this offends God, then it is our lives
will become much different from what they are
because we treat it so lightly because everything's
treated lightly in society today like that.
Look at the third thing.
A condemning conscience, an offended God.
And now thirdly, in verse five, a rotten
core, a rotten core.
Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from
the time my mother conceived me.
This verse is absolutely nothing to do with
the act of procreation.
And this verse, what's more, is certainly not
an excuse that David says, well, you know,
I sin, but so what, you know, I've
been like this all through life and that's
the way things are and I'm rotten from
the very core and that's it, you know,
it's an excuse.
No, no, that's not what he meant.
And C.S. Lewis rightly says, if you
have an excuse for your sin, don't even
bother to confess it because you obviously don't
think it's sin.
And if you don't think it's sin, then
you can't repent.
And if you don't repent, then God isn't
gonna forgive it.
So he's not excusing himself.
He's saying, God, I'm so rotten that it's
not just a single sin that's right here
now, it's the whole thing within me.
I'm rotten to the core, absolutely rotten.
I've come from absolutely rotten putrid stock and
the seed that was inside the core, the
seed I came from was rotten when it
was conceived.
Here it is, absolutely rotten.
And not only that, God, but all the
way through, I've come from stock.
My parents are rotten and my grandparents, not
in the wrong sense, of course, but all
of them, all the way back, all the
way back to Adam again.
The whole thing is rotten and nothing else
can come.
And that's what's happened here.
Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from
the time my mother conceived me.
I mentioned this morning that when Adam sinned,
it was instead of me going through the
test because I would have done the same
thing and so would you, festive God.
And when Jesus, the second Adam came and
went to the cross, he too paid the
price for you there.
The more we realize how much we're vitally
linked in rottenness with the first Adam, the
more we're going to cling to the second
Adam because we realize this is our only
hope and here, indeed, we have salvation in
Jesus Christ.
How wonderful it is when we know that.
So don't think about some single offense.
You slept up.
Oh, I sinned, you know, two or three
days ago, I sinned.
Don't think of it, idiot baby, that you're
sinning all the time.
And the very thought of foolishness is sin.
I often ask myself the question, how long
do you think I could go without any
conscious sin?
Do you ever ask yourself that question?
Could I go one minute?
One minute, I say, I should be able
to go two.
If I go two, and if I can
go five minutes, I go an hour.
It's only 12 times that.
And if I can go an hour, why
can't I go a whole day?
And maybe I'm not conscious of, really, but
it's only they're pointed out objectively, but my
heart, which is deceitful and desperately wicked, refuses
to allow me to recognize it as sin.
I'm sinful to the core.
You see, I know that most of you
believe that.
I know I'm sinful to the core.
But I believe most of us believe it
is a doctrine, and we haven't experienced it
in the contrition of the experiences of life.
Sinful to the core.
When did we last weep on our knees
about our utter sinfulness?
These days, we don't preach doctrinal things.
We only scratch people where they're itching.
We give life situation preaching.
You're itching, you're lonely, you're depressed, you're friendless.
Oh, well, I'll scratch you there.
And that's all right.
That's in Scripture.
But what we're doing is being selective and
missing out the doctrinal parts that show us
the evil at the very base of the
problem.
No wonder we're truly interdenominational.
We can go to any denomination now, as
long as it's evangelical, they all preach the
same, because we don't go into detail anymore
on these things.
We don't want to disagree with our brothers
on these theological things.
In any case, people aren't interested in that
today.
Only give them modern stuff.
Only give them stuff to do with baseball
and hockey and cars and motorbikes and aeroplanes
and things that really don't have too much
to do with original sin, at least not
overtly.
Oh, may God save us from the error
of failing to understand that terrible, terrible thing
that we're in that root of Adam.
Sin has got a grip on me from
my very core.
To avoid that danger of not understanding that
and the other danger of saying, yes, sure,
I believe it.
I've grown up, you know, I'm in proper
evangelical circles.
I'm going to go to Thorn Valley Bible
Chapel.
How can you grow up here and not
understand?
Sure, I believe that.
But why aren't we different?
Because it's words have replaced works.
The lip has replaced the light.
The creed has replaced the character.
The seriousness of the last part in verse
six.
A condemning conscience, verse three.
Verse four, an offended God.
Verse five, a rotten core.
And verse six, an unchanging truth.
Unchanging truth.
Surely you, God, desire truth in the inner
parts.
You teach me wisdom in the inmost parts.
In the inmost place.
God, you desire truth at the very core
of my being where this iniquity is.
This root that makes me sin, that makes
me transgress.
This is where you want to bring your
truth and have a tremendous bathing effect upon
my life.
Absolutely cleaning me up and showing me your
standard.
Reprogram me the right way inside with your
truth, the right database.
It's interesting that the word that's translated here
in the second line, you teach me wisdom
in the inmost place, is the almost identical
word, the sister, in the same close family
as that word in Psalm 139, which you
needn't turn to, but where it says there
in verse 15, I think it is.
Let me read from verse 13.
For you created my inmost being.
You knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully
made.
Your works are wonderful.
I know that full well.
Now look at this, here's the verse.
My frame, my body, my unformed being, my
frame was not hidden from you when I
was made in the secret place.
That's our word, the twin sister to it.
When I was woven together in the depths
of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed
body.
Again, my dear friend, Bruce Waltke believes that
that expression, the inmost place, which is translated
the secret place in Psalm 139, is as
contextually Psalm 139 would lead us to believe,
the Jewish description for the uterus.
It's the womb.
It's the place where I was formed.
You saw me there so that this verse,
in verse six now in our Psalm 51,
would mean surely you desire truth in the
inner parts.
You teach or you taught me, for it's
very hard to know what tense is being
used.
Some have future, some have present, some have
past.
It's not always easy.
You taught me wisdom in the secret place
when I was being formed in my mother's
womb so that you were already imparting that
information and my conscience was being formed even
then because there was something of you that
was in there.
You created me.
Now, just because we're pro-lifers, don't say,
ah, ammunition.
Ah, now I got it.
Boy, now am I gonna ever let them
have it.
I'm gonna load up my pea shooter and
I'm gonna really, hump it over to the
pro-choicers now and I'm gonna let them
have it and show them what the Bible
says.
Listen, not only do they don't care what
the Bible says in many cases or they
wouldn't be what they are, but in actual
fact, you don't win people by ammunition like
that.
You win people by love.
For you and I to know that God
has put us together and informed us and
taught us wisdom in the inmost place, maybe
right there, maybe it isn't there, but whatever
it is, I'm sure God did do it
there.
I'm sure God has already done that.
I go down sometimes to Long Island to
an assembly in Comack and there every single
mother of young children in that assembly trains
their own children at home.
And most of them train the children while
they're in the womb with songs of praise
to God, with talking and reading the Bible.
How on earth?
You say, well, they can't understand.
But they are convinced that this makes a
difference in the life of the child.
Anyway, I'm not gonna get into that.
I know nothing about it.
I'm not an authority on anything.
Leave alone that.
That's why I have to have this book
in my hand because God's the authority, isn't
he?
And all I'm doing is plagiarizing, borrowing God's
ideas.
So anyway, whatever it is, God does impart
wisdom and he wants it in the inmost
place, not just outwardly, not just going to
church.
Well, I go to the break and the
bread service so I must be really spiritual
as if, you know, we have got our
certain form.
I'm a Roman Catholic.
I go to the mass.
I can do it.
I like the rest of Sunday, but I
go to the mass.
You see, gotta be careful in all those
things.
Every denomination has its little areas that it
worships.
And of course we've all got our reasons
why one thing is more important than another.
But often it's very much outward and the
inward heart, as I'm speaking tonight, if you
push that thing, you're in for change now.
I haven't talked about this.
I'm listening to it.
You're out for change, I tell you.
Can I ask you, if you're going to
push some side or the other, look inside
your heart and say, God, am I pure?
Are my motives right?
Is there something in my conscience that needs
to be put right?
I haven't intended to say that and I
have none of my business, so let me
pass on to finish.
God wants us to have that wisdom in
the inner parts.
That is true integrity.
We're going to be reading about this a
little later as we come in our psalm,
I suppose, likely tomorrow.
Maybe I'm going to try and finish it
tomorrow.
I think I can.
Well, anyway, we'll see.
And I'm going to possibly deal with it
tomorrow or the next day or something anyway,
on the inner parts, because it tells us
in verse 15 and 16, or 16 and
17, that it's not the outward sacrifices, but
the inward ones of a broken spirit, verse
17, which is the key verse, surely, of
the whole psalm.
That's the crux of the matter.
That's where it is.
God wants to see truth there, inside, so
that what grows from that life will be
real.
What's on the outside won't just be stuck
on like an apple tied onto a dead
apple tree.
And you can look at it for two
or three days and swear it's growing there,
but you look at it after several weeks
and it's rotten and the birds have pecked
away and the thing may have dropped off.
It's rotten.
You can't keep up that.
It's got to come from the core.
So let me ask you, as I conclude,
what about conscience?
Is there something on it tonight, verse three,
that you need to put right with God?
You're never gonna find peace of mind and
you're never gonna satisfy God's demands until it's
covered by the blood of Jesus.
The second verse, verse four, that we looked
at, do you realize how serious our sin
is and that we have offended God?
And will you take on some course of
study at your level to try to understand
in a greater way the seriousness of sin?
And thirdly, that I am rotten through and
through and it's just not these little acts
that somebody points out or somebody notices.
Here and there I sin and I slipped
up, you know.
Slipped up, goodness me, you just did according
to what your nature was.
We're rotten through and through.
Oh, to realize that and then to realize
that God wants truth in the inward parts
and the way, the life, I am the
way, the truth and the life.
Jesus Christ Himself, who is the truth, came
to earth.
He was the word.
He was God speaking to me and He
came and brought me the truth and God
wants that truth in the inward part.
As Jesus Christ, the truth will come into
my life as I respond to Him in
repentance and faith and say, God, I'm rotten
through and through, but tonight there's forgiveness with
you.
You can cleanse me.
You can make me white as snow as
that song that we've been singing.
You can do it and Lord, according to
my personality, it may take me a while
to accept it, but Lord, I know from
Scripture and I know by Your Spirit speaking
in my heart, You can do it.
Lord, take me.
Make me one of Your own.
Set me free from that guilt of my
conscience and put that new spirit within me
that we're going to read about tomorrow.
Create in me a clean heart, God.
Then I'll be able to spend my life
usefully with a purpose which will please You.
May God teach us these things for His
namesake.