Scripture: Psalm 51[1]
Sermon: Jesus — Our Rescuer when we are Lost
Topics: sin, repentance, rescue, lament, confession, parenthood
Preached: March 4, 2007
Rev. Mike Abma
Psalm 51
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
4 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 judgement.
5 Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me.
6 You desire truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
8 Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
9 Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.
10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.
13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will return to you.
14 Deliver me from bloodshed, O God,
O God of my salvation,
and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.
15 O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
16 For you have no delight in sacrifice;
if I were to give a burnt-offering, you would not be pleased.
17 The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
18 Do good to Zion in your good pleasure;
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,
19 then you will delight in right sacrifices,
in burnt-offerings and whole burnt-offerings;
then bulls will be offered on your altar.
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
4 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 judgement.
5 Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me.
6 You desire truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
8 Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
9 Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.
10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.
13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will return to you.
14 Deliver me from bloodshed, O God,
O God of my salvation,
and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.
15 O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
16 For you have no delight in sacrifice;
if I were to give a burnt-offering, you would not be pleased.
17 The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
18 Do good to Zion in your good pleasure;
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,
19 then you will delight in right sacrifices,
in burnt-offerings and whole burnt-offerings;
then bulls will be offered on your altar.
This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God
INTRODUCTION
One of the harder moments in the life of a parent, is that time when they clearly witness, for the first time, their child doing something clearly wrong,
clearly spiteful or even cruel.
It may be taking away a toy from a playmate.
It may be clubbing a sibling over the head with a Tonka truck.
It may be taking something they know they are not supposed to touch.
Whatever it is, a parent knows that they have their work cut out for them. They know that parenting will not only be coddling and comforting – it will also involve confronting. It will involve teaching their children to take responsibility for the wrong they do — to admit to it and work at not doing it again.
This is actually quite a large and quite a long job for parents. Children have this human tendency of not wanting to admit they’ve done anything wrong.
Often, the first line of defense is denial – “It wasn’t me!”
Often the second line of defense is deflection – “It was them!”
or a variation on that theme – “they made me do it.”
Parents know that denying or deflecting the blame is not very healthy.
Parents have the role of convincing their children that their love will not diminish if their children admit fault. In fact, parents try to tell their children that the opposite is true. The ability to admit fault, the ability to accept responsibility for their actions, is a key part of becoming a mature and responsible adult. It strengthens rather than threatens who they are.[2]
Parents know that if their children never learn to admit their mistakes,
never learn to take responsibility for their actions,
never learn to apologize,
then they will, in many ways, never grow up.
They will remain children.
And in our world, it has become too easy to remain children:
In our advertising world, the most important person in the world is
you;
News is the news that matters to you;
and truth is whatever you say it is.
So, it has become too easy to go through life convinced that you are never wrong,
and convinced that someone else is always to blame,
convinced that any misery you experience is someone else’s fault.
C.S. Lewis once observed that people who never think about their own sins
make up for it by thinking incessantly about everyone else’s.[3]
Church in a culture of people who have never grown up,
in a culture where people are never really wrong,
and someone else is always to blame,
Church in such a culture would be a place people go to in order to get
sympathy.
It would be a place to hear sermons that allowed people to feel sorry for
themselves,
and that specialized in giving people big hugs.[4]
But when Jesus came, he didn’t preach sermons that allowed us to feel sorry for ourselves.
He said, “Repent of your sins!”
When Jesus came, he didn’t stretch out his hands in order to give everyone a hug.
He stretched out his hands so they could be nailed to a cross.
UNDERTONE OF REPENTANCE
Repentance, real repentance, is absolutely necessary in the church.
Without repentance, all the notes of the Christian faith are off-key.[5]
If repentance falls away, the amazement and joy of God’s grace falls away too.
That is why the church has never considered repentance a passing mood or a fleeting feeling.
Repentance is the abiding undertone of the Christian life.
The overtone is grace and the righteousness of Christ.
But the undertone is repentance.
That is why we sound these two tones over and over again in our liturgy here at Woodlawn:
first a confession of sin – the undertone;
then the assurance of forgiveness – the overtone.
It is Paul first saying, “wretched man that I am”
and then immediately adding,
“But thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.”
(Rom 7: 24-25)
This is the song we sing.
But we need to keep singing that undertone of repentance.
There are few better places to learn this song than in the words of Psalm 51.
PSALM 51
Psalm 51 is a prayer that gets to the heart of things right from the get go.
There is no beating around the bush.
It begins with words describing God:
mercy, steadfast love, abounding in mercy.
It begins with words describing the one praying:
transgressions, sin, iniquity.
That is the great gulf or chasm that begins this prayer –
the glory of God and our guilt.
John Calvin once observed that we are never really sufficiently moved to confess our sins until we have begun to comprehend the full majesty of God.[6]
Comprehending the majesty of God is a problem for us.
We tend to democratize everything, even God.
We tend to think of him as a friend, a chum, a pal.
We may even tend to think of God in the same way we think about own parents – sure, they were good, but they certainly weren’t perfect.
But this is exactly where we have to realize our God is much too small.
God knows everything – no only what we say and do,
but what we think, what our dreams are about, what our motives are,
what our hearts like to dwell on.
God knows us, inside and out.
Psalm 51 acknowledges this.
It also acknowledges that sin is a theological problem.
“Against you, you alone have I sinned.”
It’s not just that our sins have hurt someone else, or messed things up in our own life.
Our sins are first of all an affront to God.
They are a violation of the way God intends for things to be, intends for us to be.
In the language of the Old Testament, sins make us unclean.
In the Biblical world, whatever is unclean is by its nature slipping away from life and towards death.
That is why there is all this cleaning language in this Psalm:
Purge me with hyssop,
Wash me,
Blot our my iniquities,
Create in me a clean heart.
This is an urgent prayer to be made clean again
because cleanliness meant life.
Uncleanliness meant death.
Repentance, then, is a matter of life and death
The repentance in this prayer is also naked.
Notice that there are absolutely no excuses given in this psalm.
No extenuating circumstances.
No pointing the finger at someone else.
No apathetic shrug – “what did you expect from a red-blooded male?”
No blaming of God for setting such high standards.
None of that.
Instead the repentance is full-bodied, mature.
This prayer of repentance ends with a broken and contrite heart.
Contrite – there’s a word we don’t run into much anymore.
Contrite – the word actually comes from a Latin word (contero)
meaning crushed or pulverized.
What does this mean?
It means we have come to realize the full, crushing weight of our sin;
It means we are genuinely sorry for it;
It means we hate it and never want to repeat it.
It is the crushing, pulverizing process of dying to our old self.
That is why the Lord does not despise a broken and crushed heart.
That is also why repentance is so hard. It has never been easy.
Sometimes the more powerful we get, the more difficult repentance becomes.
REPENTANCE AS THE DOOR TO JOY
The thing about repentance is that it is asked of every single person – no exceptions.
When the church was still young,
when the memory of Christians being fed to lions
was still fresh in everyone’s mind,
the emperors of Rome made a dramatic change.
They became Christian. One of the first Christian emperors was named Theodosius. Theodosius was having a hard time keeping the eastern and western side of his empire together. In fact, the citizens of the Greek city of Thessalonica, assassinated their Roman governor. In a fit of rage and retaliation, Theodosius killed a large number of citizens of that city.
When Theodosius returned to Rome,
he also returned to his home church and his home pastor.
His home pastor was Bishop Ambrose.
Bishop Ambrose did a startling thing.
He would not serve Theodosius the Lord’s Supper.
Ambrose said it would not be right for him to take communion until he had
repented of what he had done.
Theodosius could have killed Ambrose on the spot.
He could have massacred the Christians,
and crushed the church,
as easily as he had massacred the people of Thessalonica.
But he didn’t.
Theodosius repented – not for a moment, but for almost a month.
For a month, the most powerful ruler of the world prayed ,
“Have mercy on me, a miserable sinner”
much the same way the king of Nineveh did in the book of Jonah.
Why did Ambrose risk the wrath of Theodosius in calling for his
repentance?
Why do we, in the church, put such a stress on repentance?
Why do we go through the rhythm of repentance every week here at
Woodlawn?
Why do we make repentance a daily posture, especially in this season of
Lent?
The answer is that, as we grow in Christ, and as mature in our faith,
we realize that the more we learn to sing and pray the undertone of
repentance,
the more sweetly the overtone of forgiveness rings in our ears;
the more we are willing to face the depth of our sin,
the more we are able to grasp the height of God’s redeeming love.
CONCLUSION
The height of God’s redeeming love, we know,
was manifest among us in flesh and blood;
The height of God’s love,
was hoisted on a cross to die for our sins;
The height of God’s love,
is now made real to us again in this meal of bread and wine,
so that all who come with broken and contrite hearts,
may be restored and refreshed in the joy of salvation.
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This sermon will not refer to David’s adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah. Although this may be the background of this psalm, dwelling on it causes us to dwell on someone else’s sin rather than our own. ↑
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For more on how admitting fault strengthens people, see Paul Tournier, Escape from Loneliness, ↑
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C.S. Lewis “Miserable Offender,” in God in the Dock, p. 124. ↑
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Noting the maturity it takes to repent and the immaturity evident in being unable to repent is found in Frederica Mathewes-Green “Whatever Happened to Repentance” Christianity Today, 2002 ↑
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This phrase is from Berkhof’s Christian Faith, p. 424. ↑
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Calvin, Institutes, I,i,2. ↑
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