David – Confession (Psalm 51)
Jamie Yohanis · Real Prayers for Real Life
19 July 2026
https://media.glenabbey.church/talks/david-confession-psalm-51

[0:04] Good morning.
[0:06] OK.
[0:08] Out of respect for you all, I've worn shorts or not shorts, trousers and socks and shoes.
[0:15] First time I've had these on me, so if you see the sweat flowing down my face, you'll understand why.
[0:21] And that I could probably steamed shellfish down the back of my t-shirt.
[0:26] But that's too gross for a Sunday morning, so we'll move on.
[0:30] Psalms 51 is the prayer that we're focusing on today.
[0:34] It made me think when I was reading it, have you ever tried to cover something up only later to be found out?
[0:42] Hope I'm not the only one who's done that.
[0:44] You do something bad, you know it's bad, you know it's wrong, and instead of just busting out and telling the truth, that would be kind of shameful and you'd probably be judged.
[0:55] There may be relational fallout.
[0:57] In fact, it's just easier to cover it up, but you're never quite sure if it's actually covered up and a glance here, a question there, and you're kind of nervous.
[1:07] Is the truth going to come out?
[1:09] And eventually, if you're exposed, it can be devastating, not just because of the thing that you did, but because you were found out and you experienced stress the entire time whilst you were trying to cover it up.
[1:21] Psalms 51 is a Psalms about an exposed cover-up.
[1:25] It's a prayer in the aftermath of a cover-up that was exposed.
[1:30] Many of you know David, in a shameful and devious and ruthless act, what he did was he took another man's wife, and when she fell pregnant he tried to cover it up by getting that guy to sleep with his wife, but he couldn't quite arrange that.
[1:46] So when that didn't work out, he arranged to have the guy killed.
[1:51] And he thought, if he's out of the way, I can go on with my life, I can go on with things.
[1:56] No one will see it's effectively covered up.
[1:59] But even the best cover-ups don't escape the sight of God.
[2:04] In 2 Samuel 11, the writer says, God saw what David did and he was displeased with him, which is, you know, maybe the understatement of the century.
[2:15] If you read the opening lines, the superscription of Psalms 51, it says, to the choirmaster, a Psalms of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after David had gone into Bathsheba.
[2:26] And it sets up the context.
[2:28] What David is saying in this Psalms is a direct response to that confrontation.
[2:34] What Nathan said to him in that climactic moment.
[2:37] God sends Nathan to David.
[2:39] You think you've covered it up?
[2:41] I want to show you exactly what I know and what I'm going to do.
[2:45] So just for a bit of context, we'll read through 2 Samuel 12.
[2:50] And the Lord sent Nathan to David, and he came and said to him, There were two men in a certain city, one rich and the other poor.
[3:01] The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought.
[3:08] And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children.
[3:12] It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms.
[3:16] And it was like a daughter to him.
[3:19] Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who'd come to him.
[3:27] But he took the poor man's lamb and prepared it for the man who'd come to him.
[3:32] Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man.
[3:36] And he said to Nathan, As the Lord lives, the man who's done this deserves to die, and he shall restore the lamb fourfold because he did this thing and because he had no pity.
[3:47] Nathan said to David, You're the man.
[3:51] Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul.
[3:57] I gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your arms, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah.
[4:05] And if this were too little, I would add to you is much more.
[4:08] Why have you despised the word of the Lord to do what is evil in his sight?
[4:13] You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.
[4:23] Find out.
[4:25] Confronted by Nathan's words, you're the man, condemned by his own words, the man who's done this deserves to die.
[4:33] David is exposed.
[4:35] The truth is unavoidable, undeniable, inescapable.
[4:40] The question is, of course, How's he going to respond now that he's been found out?
[4:44] What's he going to do?
[4:46] Psalms 51 is a prayerful reflection in the weeks and months after this confrontation of what was going on in David's soul and in his mind and in his spirit.
[4:56] It reflects the turmoil and the transformation that took place after this confrontation.
[5:02] Let's dig into the Psalms.
[5:03] There are a couple of things that we notice In the Psalms, the opening words say, Have mercy on me.
[5:10] This is David speaking to God.
[5:12] Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love.
[5:16] According to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.
[5:20] Now this isn't just the opening of the Psalms, although it is the opening of the Psalms, it's also the foundation of the whole thing.
[5:26] Why would David come to God?
[5:29] What could he expect from God?
[5:31] How could he even approach and speak to God?
[5:33] What is it about God that would even allow David to say anything to him?
[5:37] What should he expect from the righteous drugs of heaven and earth for this wicked thing that he's done except righteous judgment?
[5:45] But David knows this God.
[5:47] He knows his Bible.
[5:48] He knows the stories of the way God has provided for his people in the past, the way he has again and again and again shown mercy and compassion, has been slow to anger.
[5:58] He knows that this God is full of mercy.
[6:01] He knows that he's full of steadfast love.
[6:04] He's full of grace towards his people.
[6:06] He knows that he can approach this God on this basis, because this is who this God is.
[6:12] And it's kind of startling to realize that despite the fact that he did probably one of the most wicked things that we can imagine, that God, when he sees him in his lostness, drowning in the seas, the waters of his own making, whenever he's struggling and lost and completely adrift, he sees him and he has compassion.
[6:32] He loves him.
[6:33] He feels for him.
[6:35] His heart goes out to him.
[6:36] He's willing to show mercy and grace towards him.
[6:40] Now, we see this as rightly scandalous.
[6:44] It's hard for sinners to believe that God would do this.
[6:48] It's hard for self-righteous people to stomach the fact that God would show mercy and love to a person like that.
[6:54] You feel compassion for a person like that, but that's exactly who this God is.
[6:58] And we see that fully and finally realized in the gospel itself.
[7:02] Whenever we read in Ephesians 2, Paul writes to the Ephesians and he says, and you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the ruler that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.
[7:17] He says, you were completely lost, you were completely dead, you were completely adrift from me.
[7:22] And in that moment when you were as far away from me as you could possibly be, I have mercy for you.
[7:29] I have compassion for you.
[7:31] But God, because of his great mercy, because of his great love, he made unbelievers, he made rebels, he made transgressors alive in Christ.
[7:42] Why?
[7:44] Because of grace.
[7:46] Because that's the way he feels.
[7:47] That's what he thinks about people who've rebelled against him.
[7:52] It's hard to take, but it's the basis of the whole Psalms that we would say, God, when He sees us at our worst, for the worst things that we've ever done, at the darkest periods of our lives, with the greatest amount of evil and wickedness, God looks at people and is willing to have mercy and love towards them.
[8:12] Now, mercy's available.
[8:14] It's available for anybody at any point.
[8:16] It's there for the worst of the worst.
[8:19] But it's not automatic.
[8:20] It's something that needs to be requested, something that needs to be sought.
[8:24] And part of how it's sought is by addressing the actual thing that has needed us to have mercy in the 1st place, about being honest and forthright about the thing that we have done or the things that we've done or the lives that we have led.
[8:37] And what you see in David here is right throughout the Psalms, a forthright confession of what he's done.
[8:44] He uses a variety of terms to describe what we might just call sin.
[8:49] And it seems a little bit like wallowing, a little bit like pushing the point or dragging it out, but it's a very specific purpose.
[8:56] It's not just a literary device that he uses so many words to describe his behavior.
[9:01] What he's trying to do is to get the spirit of the totality of the scope of his sin.
[9:06] This is not a passing acknowledgement.
[9:07] Yeah, man, I did something wrong.
[9:09] We all do something wrong.
[9:10] This is a detailed laying out an account of what it is that he needs mercy for.
[9:17] And in doing that, he shows that he genuinely wants the mercy that God has to offer.
[9:23] We'll go through these with a reasonable degree of speed.
[9:26] Here are the things that David says that he needs mercy for.
[9:30] He says, blot out my transgressions.
[9:33] Transgressions, literally my rebellion or my revolt against your leadership, against your kingship.
[9:40] This is David saying, whenever I saw Bathsheba, whenever I slept with her, whenever I killed her husband, whenever I did these things and tried to cover it up, this was not an accident.
[9:51] This was not a heat of the moment thing.
[9:53] We all make mistakes.
[9:54] We all say things we shouldn't say.
[9:56] This was a deliberate defiance of your rule.
[10:01] This was a deliberate rebellion against your leadership.
[10:05] I saw you.
[10:06] I saw what you wanted me to do.
[10:08] I saw what the right thing was, and I said, no, I'm not going to do that.
[10:14] He says, my sin is ever before me.
[10:16] Literally, The thing that you said that I was meant to do, I didn't do that.
[10:21] The standard that you set, I missed the mark.
[10:24] I missed God's standard.
[10:26] I knew what it is that you wanted of me and I wasn't able or I didn't achieve it.
[10:30] God set standards.
[10:32] David says, and it's kind of hard to read, he says, against you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.
[10:37] And you read it and you think, It wasn't just against God, I mean Uriah's dead and Bathsheba was mistreated and so on, and lots of other people suffered in the process.
[10:47] But what David is saying is, you set the standard as the author and creator of the universe.
[10:51] You set that and I didn't mean it.
[10:54] You own all these people, you created all these people, you set all of this up and I didn't do it.
[10:59] And more than that he says, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me.
[11:05] And he's saying, from my birth, from before my birth, I was sinful, I was unable to meet your standard.
[11:11] And he's not saying, I couldn't do it, it's not my fault.
[11:15] What he's saying is, at a fundamental level, I am unable to keep your standard.
[11:19] It's not just I behave badly, therefore I'm a sinner.
[11:22] He says, because I'm a sinner, because I'm unable to meet your standard, I don't.
[11:27] And he's taking responsibility for that.
[11:30] Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity.
[11:33] This is literally perversion.
[11:36] I've perverted what was pure.
[11:38] I've taken something that was meant to be.
[11:40] Marriage is meant to be kept pure.
[11:41] I perverted it.
[11:42] I was meant to be loyal to Uriah, my faithful soldier and bodyguard.
[11:47] I perverted that.
[11:48] I was disloyal to him.
[11:49] I'm meant to set a standard for the nation.
[11:51] I perverted that.
[11:52] I'm meant to set a standard for the military.
[11:56] I'm meant to keep that right and make sure that their violence is only ever done in a righteous cause, and I perverted that.
[12:02] At every stage where God said, here's a responsibility for you to do.
[12:06] Here's something for you to keep pure and to steward and to do right, I perverted that.
[12:12] I am literally a pervert, is what David is saying.
[12:17] I have done what is evil in your sight.
[12:20] This is a summarizing term.
[12:22] If you read through the Psalms, it'll only be by the time you get to Psalms 32 that you'll hear the author explicitly say about himself that he's done anything wrong.
[12:33] And Psalms 32 is, of course, for anybody who's listening, the companion Psalms to Psalms 51.
[12:39] They should be read together.
[12:41] All the other Psalms, right up until Psalms 31, are basically like the wicked.
[12:46] They're right there.
[12:47] They're those people who do the wicked things.
[12:49] They stalk the innocent.
[12:52] They take the sword against the weak.
[12:55] They speak truth and peace, but really, secretly, they're harboring evil.
[12:59] The wicked have this whole way of life.
[13:01] It's not that they do things wrong and repent and grow and move on.
[13:04] It's that the totality of their lives is evil and wicked and set against the things of God.
[13:09] It's they're totally and utterly and thoroughly evil.
[13:13] You get to Psalms 32 where David is talking about this Bathsheba affair, and that's whenever you get the first sign of him saying, I'm the wicked person.
[13:23] In Psalms 51 when he says what I have done is evil in your sight, he's not saying I made a mistake, he's saying I I now really belong in the wicked camp.
[13:34] It's not just that I did something wrong.
[13:36] I'm with those guys.
[13:38] The totality of my life is evil.
[13:41] I stalked the innocent person.
[13:43] I drew the sword against my neighbor.
[13:46] I spoke peace, but I harbored evil.
[13:50] Lastly, he says, deliver me from blood guiltiness.
[13:53] This is an interesting one.
[13:54] If you read through Numbers 35, it sets the framework for how a person is to be treated under the law whenever they commit murder or they're involved and conspire to murder someone like David did with Uriah.
[14:07] The only sentence is death.
[14:10] That's the only way a crime and a sin like this can be absolved.
[14:15] So David is literally saying to God, I'm guilty.
[14:19] I deserve to die.
[14:21] The only thing that really should be done under the law is that I die, but I'm asking you to deliver me from blood guiltiness.
[14:26] In essence, I'm asking you to go against your own law, which is an interesting thing, considering readers of the Old Testament will know how carefully and importantly God views his own law.
[14:39] And it's interesting that God does do that.
[14:42] God spares David's life.
[14:44] There are lots of other consequences for this, but God does spare David's life.
[14:48] And you see written in this story and in this psalm echoes of what we will see fully and finally realized in the gospel itself, where Paul says to the Romans, Romans 3.21, and following he says, God, he looked over, he stepped over sins of the past, but what he's done now in Jesus by making him a propitiation for sins,
[15:10] by making him a worthy and acceptable sacrifice for all people is that he's taking the sins of the current people and the future people, but the past as well, and he's laying that on Christ himself.
[15:23] So God is able to deliver David from blood guiltiness, the penalty of death.
[15:28] He's able to deliver him because what Jesus would ultimately do 1000 years later.
[15:35] and it shows the way in which the mercy that God has for his people is enacted ultimately through the gospel.
[15:43] Now, it is possible, and some people are prone to it, those of a melancholic nature are prone to, you know, wallow in your sin.
[15:50] You know, I've done something wrong and I'm going to think about it and I'm going to ruminate about it and I'm so bad and I'm such a bad person and, you know, you write a folk song about the things that you did and all the rest of it.
[15:59] And I don't think that's what David is doing here.
[16:02] It's just not wallowing.
[16:04] What he's doing is Accurately articulating the scope of his sin, because it's an important part of taking in account it's an important part of his.
[16:15] restoration to God, that it's not a passing mention, but it's an honest, like David said with the hands, it's an honest, open accounting.
[16:23] I'm not hiding anything from you.
[16:26] And in order to receive God's mercy, we need to have that kind of approach with our sin where we tell it all and show it all and attempt not to hide.
[16:37] Now, there is mercy for sin, but mercy does a lot more than cover our sin.
[16:42] It is a powerful force in the life of the recipient.
[16:46] And you see it work out in a variety of different ways, some of which we'll talk about here.
[16:51] So here are some of the effects of mercy and love in the life of the person who has it.
[16:56] enables them to not just tell the truth, but to live truthfully.
[17:01] And it eradicates their desire for or their willingness to engage in hypocrisy.
[17:08] David says, For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it.
[17:13] You will not be pleased with the burnt offering.
[17:16] The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
[17:24] Well, that's interesting, because if you read the Old Testament, you'll see there's quite a lot of sacrifices and apparently they're given by God and he would only give them if he delighted in them.
[17:34] God says you need to do a lot of sacrificing.
[17:36] Under the old covenant that kind of ritual and sacrifice was standard.
[17:42] David's saying you don't delight in it.
[17:44] It's not that God doesn't want his people to do the things that they're meant to do or that he's instructed them to do.
[17:50] It's that In the Old Testament, under the old covenant, this kind of sacrifice was an indication of your love and loyalty to God.
[17:59] An indication that you yourself have been a recipient of the mercy and the love that God has shown you.
[18:04] To do that whilst harbouring evil, whilst covering up sin, it makes a mockery of the whole thing.
[18:11] And we can have that under the new covenant God wants from us communion with Him, communion with the saints in service of His purposes and His kingdom in the world.
[18:19] But rituals can be divorced and become perfunctory.
[18:24] Service can be totally separate from any realized or vital experience of the love and mercy of God.
[18:30] And that makes a mockery of it.
[18:32] And more than that, it can be used to cover up and conceal.
[18:35] If I work a little bit harder, if I do a bit more service to the church or to God or whatever it happens to be, other people won't see me and they won't know what I've done.
[18:45] Or maybe I'll work harder, I'll sacrifice more.
[18:48] I'll not address this because that's too difficult or shameful or whatever.
[18:52] But God might appreciate the effort.
[18:54] He might see my works and look on and say, that guy's a genuine guy regardless of what is going on.
[19:01] Almost entirely worthless.
[19:05] What does God want from his people?
[19:07] First and foremost, before they do any service of him, before they are concerned for his kingdom or anything else, what does he want from people?
[19:15] He wants a contrite heart.
[19:18] He wants a broken spirit, not because he likes people suffering and feeling really bad about themselves.
[19:23] He wants them to reckon with the weight of their sin.
[19:27] He wants them to genuinely confront the totality of what it is that they've done and bearing that to come to him and say, you must help me.
[19:36] You must take this from me.
[19:38] You must show me love.
[19:39] You must show me mercy because this is too difficult for me to bear.
[19:43] that kind of person with that kind of contrition, that kind of honesty about what has happened and what's going on in their lives, God will not despise that person.
[19:53] He welcomes them and he shows them grace and love and he takes that burden off them.
[20:02] The next effect is that the love and mercy of God empower internal transformation.
[20:10] If you're paying attention to history, you'll notice that Despots, tyrants, kings, people who lose the run of themselves, as we might say.
[20:20] Sexual promiscuity is nothing new.
[20:22] They tend to do that quite a bit.
[20:24] And being violent towards their own people, well, that's not new either.
[20:29] One of the most interesting things about this incident in David's life, as despicable as it is, that it only happened once.
[20:36] And surely once you cross the threshold of taking another man's wife and murdering your own citizens, It's easier to do the second time, the third time, and again and again and again.
[20:46] We would probably expect a pattern of this type of behavior, but we don't see it.
[20:52] And the question, of course, is why?
[20:54] didn't David do it again?
[20:56] What was it that stopped this from becoming a pattern in his life?
[21:00] And you can see this is an effect of the mercy and love in someone's life.
[21:04] This is the type of thing that they ask God for.
[21:07] He says, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
[21:13] Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
[21:17] Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with the willing spirit.
[21:22] Now it's interesting that he's praying for these things.
[21:25] He's praying to create and to renew and to restore and to uphold, precisely because David can't do those things for himself.
[21:34] Only God creates a new heart.
[21:37] Only God upholds a willing spirit.
[21:39] Only God makes this possible.
[21:40] If David is to go on with the rest of his life, having been delivered from blood guiltiness, if he's to go on the rest of his life and never do something like this again, God has to change him from the inside out.
[21:51] It's not something that he's able to control himself.
[21:54] And yet, and yet he has to ask for.
[21:59] Evidence of the mercy of God in someone's life is that they want it.
[22:03] David has learned the hard way.
[22:05] If I don't ask for this, if I don't get God to change me from the inside, this is the kind of thing that my life will end up being.
[22:13] I need God to create a new heart.
[22:16] I need him to renew my spirit.
[22:17] I need him to uphold me with the willing spirit.
[22:20] Or I'm lost and we should only expect this to happen again.
[22:24] You see a similar pattern in the New Testament.
[22:26] Paul says to the Philippians church in chapter 2, verse 12, he says, Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
[22:40] And so we see a dynamic of God is the one working in a person who's saying, I'm going to work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
[22:48] God has his role.
[22:50] But you need to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
[22:52] You need to be willing.
[22:53] So there is this almost like fried cheese sandwich of God's role in our lives transforming and our willingness.
[23:02] If you try to separate them, it all becomes a little bit messy.
[23:05] You need both things.
[23:06] God needs to fundamentally work in a person's life, but a person needs to fundamentally be willing.
[23:11] God will not force anybody to do anything that they don't want to do.
[23:15] And so what we could say is this, the person who's received mercy from God, the person who's experienced this love at the worst at the worst time in their life over the worst thing that they have done, they bring themselves to God and they say, create in me a clean heart, renew my spirit, uphold me with the willing spirit.
[23:36] You must do this because this is the life that I want to lead and I can't lead it on my own.
[23:42] Lastly, mercy and love enable a compelling witness.
[23:47] Now, I don't know if you'll have the same response that I had when I first read this.
[23:51] David says after doing all that he's done, He says, then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners will return to you.
[23:59] When I first read that, I was like, it's a bit much, David.
[24:05] You know, you've turned teacher very quickly.
[24:08] You know, I've got this, done this terrible thing and I've got all this different type of sin.
[24:12] I was evil and I have iniquity and I have sin and I have transgressions and now I'm going to turn around and teach people how they ought to do things.
[24:19] And I'm maybe not the only person who's come across someone who's done terrible things and then very quickly turned into the hollow, sanctimonious, I'm going to teach other people what to do.
[24:30] And it kind of makes you a little bit sick.
[24:33] Am I only the person not judgmental?
[24:35] No?
[24:36] Yes?
[24:36] OK.
[24:37] You may find people like that.
[24:40] Of course, that's not what David is saying.
[24:42] That's not what's happening here.
[24:43] What we need to ask is, well, what is he teaching?
[24:47] Who is he teaching?
[24:49] What is the effect of his teaching?
[24:51] And what gives him the moral authority to tell anybody to do anything?
[24:57] David is able to speak to transgressors because he's a transgressor.
[25:02] I am going specifically to transgressors and sinners, people who've done the same types of things as me and probably much less worse.
[25:09] I'm going to go to them and I'm going to tell them what's available to them.
[25:14] The mercy of God and the love of God are available to people like me, and if they're available to people like me, they're definitely available to people like you.
[25:22] The effect of his teaching is not judgmentalism.
[25:26] The effect of his teaching is that transgressors, people who are lost in their own sin, come back to God.
[25:33] What gives David the moral authority is that he himself is an object of God's mercy, and he has personal and lived experience to speak powerfully into somebody else's life.
[25:44] Now, of course, there is a framework for what evangelism should be.
[25:49] evangelism sometimes gets a hard rap.
[25:52] Christians, self-righteous Christians, telling people who they look down on that they need to stop their sinning ways.
[25:58] And of course, there is an element in many of these things where people can, it can be just judging the culture for the various ways in which it is going against God's will and desire.
[26:11] But at its heart, what we're really attempting to do when we talk to people about the Lord is we're saying, I'm a transgressor and God showed me mercy.
[26:21] It's available to you too if you want it.
[26:24] As one person put it, evangelism is just one beggar telling another beggar where to buy bread.
[26:31] This is not sanctimoniousness, this is not judgmentalism, this is not condemning other people.
[26:36] This is saying there's a way out.
[26:39] and God showed it to me.
[26:41] There's mercy available to you, and I know that because I have it.
[26:46] But I think that there is an application specifically to the body of believers more than just evangelism in general.
[26:55] Anybody can have a moral collapse.
[26:59] David was the hero of Israel.
[27:01] He defeated Goliath.
[27:03] He wrote songs in the wilderness when he was looking after his sheep, praising God's wonder.
[27:08] He trusted in God whenever he had to fight against lions and bears who were trying to attack his sheep.
[27:13] He was so concerned about what was right and what was proper that even whenever Saul was chasing him, trying to kill him, and David cut a little bit of the back of his shirt, David was like, oh, I'm racked with guilt.
[27:26] I shouldn't have done that.
[27:27] Who am I to touch the Lord's anointed?
[27:29] He was genuinely a spiritually minded, powerful, godly person.
[27:35] And that was all before Bathsheba and Uriah.
[27:40] Anybody can have a moral collapse.
[27:43] How many godly men and women would we know in a group this size?
[27:46] And we say, I would never have expected a moral collapse.
[27:49] I would have never expected them to do this.
[27:51] But yet, what we see is their life is in ruins.
[27:54] And what we see is that there's an important element where we should have a category, a Galatians 6.1 category for restoring our brothers and sisters.
[28:04] If you see somebody fall into sin, we need to go to them, and again, not judge them, but we need to make an appeal.
[28:11] And the most compelling appeal is, I am a transgressor too, I am a sinner too, but God's mercy is available to you.
[28:18] Don't continue down this path, God's mercy is available.
[28:21] Don't continue down this path, God's mercy is available.
[28:25] And the most compelling witness is personal and lived experience of the person who has known God's mercy and grace.
[28:36] Let's
[28:39] finish here.
[28:40] I want to say, how do we apply all this, or what do we do with all of this?
[28:45] I think that there are three main people that I have in mind, three main things that come to mind, which is the person who doesn't know Christ, the person who's not a believer, but is considering for the first time what God is calling them to.
[28:59] and maybe God is putting them under conviction, saying, now is the time that I want you to deal with your rebellion against me.
[29:07] I'm calling you to come to me.
[29:11] Then I think there's believers who, we could call them complacent believers.
[29:15] They've trusted in God or they trusted in God in the past.
[29:19] through complacency, they have fallen into a lesser or a greater moral collapse.
[29:24] Maybe not anything like David did, but they've got some kind of moral collapse and some kind of small-scale cover-up, and they're removed and they're distant and they're disconnected from God.
[29:34] And then there's the idealistic believer.
[29:38] You're my favorite type of believer.
[29:39] Like, hey, I could never foresee a time when I would have a moral collapse.
[29:43] You know, who would be mad enough to do that?
[29:46] You know, God is so good and so gracious.
[29:49] I can never see a time in my life where I would have a moral collapse like the type of thing that David did.
[29:53] And God willing, they don't experience that.
[29:56] But for each of those people, what I'd like to say is, Psalms 51 is held up as a pattern that we can follow.
[30:03] If we want to be restored to God, if we want to encounter Him via his mercy and love.
[30:10] If we want to genuinely and honestly reckon with what we've done against him or anybody else, we can come and we have a pattern to do that.
[30:18] But most of all, it holds up.
[30:20] This is what you can have.
[30:23] You can be restored to God no matter who you are, no matter what you've done.
[30:27] And your life given to him will be created or recreated so that you can follow him in faithfulness and humility, and like David says at the end, in joy, that your joy would be restored.
[30:44] Okay.
[30:45] Here are a couple of points.
[30:48] Proverbs write, whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper.
[30:52] but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.
[30:56] There is a hard fact to all of this.
[30:59] Not everybody who hears this type of message will say, I want that for me.
[31:03] Some people will say, I choose to reject that.
[31:06] Other people will say, here is an opportunity, a point in time where I have been invited to accept the things of God, to repent for the first time or repent for the umpteenth time.
[31:16] If we conceal our transgressions or if we attempt to conceal, God sees everything.
[31:22] will not prosper, but he who confesses to the Lord and forsakes and will obtain mercy.
[31:28] Or as David says in Psalms 32, many are the sorrows of the wicked, but the steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.
[31:39] Let's pray.
[31:41] Lord, I thank you that you've given us patterns like Psalms 51.
[31:47] I must admit that I read the opening Psalms and I I relate more to the wicked than I do to the one who's writing it.
[31:56] But when I read Psalms 32 and Psalms 51, that resonates.
[32:00] Because I know that I'm a transgressor.
[32:02] I know that I've done evil, that I've done sin, that I've committed iniquity.
[32:07] And the fact that you would show mercy and love to people like David, to people like me, it gives me hope, it softens me, it fills me with joy.
[32:19] I thank you that you love us so much that you have compassion for us at our worst times and you call us back to you.
[32:25] Amen.