Sermon Transcript
Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Therefore, let anyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found. Surely in the rush of great waters they shall not reach him. You are a hiding place for me.
You preserve me from trouble. You surround me with shouts of deliverance.
Thank you. Yeah, it’s good. Thank you. Morning, everybody. Trying a new different setup today.
If you hadn’t heard, I’ve been dealing with some back issues and knee issues and leg issues the last 2 and a half weeks, but I’m happy to be here today. I had an MRI this last Thursday and a referral to a spine specialist this Tuesday, so that’s enough about that. But I’m grateful to be here with you all, and I’m grateful that I’m doing this today. Last week if we had done this, I thought we might have to reenact that scene in the Gospels where they— the deacons open up the hole in the roof and they kind of drop you down a little bit. So progress is being made, seriously, and I’m super grateful for that.
Just wanted to pray for you all. Wanted to pray for us. Wanted to— before I share the text today, I wanted to share just a time of prayer. As Laura alluded to earlier, just so many heavy things on people’s hearts. Haven’t gotten a chance to talk to all of you, but most of our staff was away at a retreat at Hume Lake this last week, and we were— even though the internet is pretty spotty there, some of us were getting word of some of the things that were happening.
It seems like it’s never a wrong time to pray, but we just felt as pastors it would be good for us to just acknowledge the range of emotions in this room that many of you may be feeling, and the fact that we’re going through a series in the book of Psalms which is about the different emotions that we feel and what can we do with those things. I was thinking of James 1 where it tells us to be slow to speak and slow to become angry and quick to listen. And yet in these kinds of moments like we’ve had this last week where there is senseless violence and there is upheaval and there’s great outrage and anger and frustration and pain and hurt and loss, and we don’t have explanations for all of these things, I think we do what James 1 often tells us not to do. We become quick to speak, right? We become slow to listen.
We become quick to anger. And I just felt like it’d be good for us to be still and know that the Lord is God and that He rules over all things. We can do more than just simply pray, but our prayers do avail to much. So, I would just love to pray and pray for you all and for the hurting in our world today. We trust that, again, God hears our prayers.
He sees. He knows. And we want to be led by His Spirit in terms of any steps that He would have us to take. If you’re frustrated today, we understand. We see you.
If you’re angry today, we understand. We see you. If you’re worried, if you’re anxious, we get that. Let’s just bring all these cares and concerns to the Lord. Father, we say this is our Father’s world.
And everything, Lord, that is good and pleasing and right, Lord, comes from You. And we recognize, God, that there are things that in our world right now are happening, Lord, where we just long to see You take that which is wrong and to make it right, that which is unjust to make it just, that which is unrighteous to bring righteousness, to bring light where there is darkness, to bring healing where there is pain. Oh God, our hearts grieve, Lord, with people who are grieving over the loss of life.
Lord, we don’t have any explanation other than, Lord, the depravity in our world, the depravity of our hearts. And we’re asking, God, for you to come and to bring justice, Lord, for you to also bring comfort for family members and loved ones. Lord, help us to in these moments fix our eyes, our hearts, our thoughts on you, and to not look at the waves and the storms around us, Father, but to trust you, to be ready to take steps of action and faith where you call us to do that, but also to be willing, Lord, to be still and know that you are God, and to trust. Lord, may we as believers model for this watching world, the hope of the gospel, the hope of eternal life, the hope of relationship with you, forgiveness of sins, and all that, Lord, that you can do. But in the meantime, Lord, while we wait for the return of your Son Jesus, Lord, while we wait for heaven for those who are placing their faith and trust in Jesus, Lord, we know that there will be aching and groaning as the book of Romans talks about, Lord.
We Ask that we would take all of those aches and groans and pains and cast them on You because You care for us. You say to be anxious for nothing, but in everything, with prayer and petition and thanksgiving, we present our requests to You. And, Lord, we trust that as we do that, that the peace that passes all understanding, Lord, will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. Lord, we pray all these things in the name of Your Son, Jesus. May He increase and may we decrease.
All God’s people said amen.
Well, we’re continuing our sermon series today. We’ve been in now for a few weeks, and which we’re taking a look at various Psalms to help us to know when to pray, to help us to know how to pray. And maybe you found yourself in a situation like, oh, I don’t know, this last week where you know you should pray and maybe you’re not sure how to pray. We don’t have the words. What do I say?
Most people think that prayer is this just— it’s just instinctive, you know, it’s just something you know how to do. But then you come to moments like we have this last week where you discover that sometimes our minds can wander, that our hearts can feel distant and cold, and often we don’t know what words to use. So that’s why the Psalms are so important, because they’re not simply ancient poetry, right? You all know this. They’re God’s gift to teach us how to pray when we don’t know how to pray.
The Psalms are the prayer book of the Bible. Notice what that means. God doesn’t just tell us that we should pray. He shows us how we should pray. He actually gives us the very words that we can use, stooping down to meet us in our weakness, giving us language when we feel, I don’t have any to give.
The Psalms also show us when to pray because they’re filled with prayers, prayers for every season of life: joy, times of thanksgiving, times of grief, times of doubt, anger, despair, and lament. In other words, the Psalms are reminding us, friends, that there is no circumstance, no season of life, no emotion, no situation in which it is inappropriate to pray. God invites us always, at all times, to bring our hearts, our whole selves to him, trusting him. The particular psalm that Carrie read just a moment ago, we read a snippet of, the particular moment or the situation of life that we see in Psalm 32 that it’s concerned with is something all of us are very, very familiar with, which is when you know you’ve messed up, when you know you’ve failed, when you know that you’ve fallen, when you know that you’ve sinned against God or against someone else, when you, when you know it’s your fault, how do you get up? How do you approach God and how do you pray in those moments?
And what Psalm 32, which is about the absolute blessing of confessing our sins before God and coming clean before him and then having our sins forgiven by God, shows us is that not only Is it possible to get up again after you’ve fallen and after you’ve sinned against God? But it is possible that, friends, we can get up in such a way that you somehow actually have more joy, more power, more life. You feel more closely connected to God. You’re in better shape, not worse shape than you were before. That, that is possible.
How is that possible? Psalm 32 tells us. Let’s take a closer look at it. I want you to notice first here in Psalm 32 the priority of confession. The priority of confession.
Why does it matter? What does it do for us? Why do we need it? Well, one of the reasons why confession matters and why the Scriptures point us to it is because it is a doorway to God’s blessing. It’s not the only doorway, but it is a doorway to God’s blessing in our lives.
Look again. At verse 1, just the very, very first word there in verse 1 of chapter 32. Blessed, blessed is the one whose transgressions is forgiven. We bring this up now just about every time this word blessed comes up in any one of our sermons. We talk about how that the specific word for blessed in Hebrew and in Greek essentially describes not just wellness of being, but completeness.
Complete wellness of being, and not just fulfillment, but profound fulfillment. Being blessed in the biblical language is a deep, joy-filled contentment that cannot be touched or shaken or threatened by the circumstances of the world. And when we understand that, that makes that word blessed a much, much richer, much deeper meaning than the way that we tend to use it in English, where in English we usually use the word blessed to describe an external situation, an external situation or circumstance like having good health, things are going well financially, I’ve got some stability, career success, family happiness. And we often then overlap that idea of blessed with being lucky or being fortunate, but that is not what the Bible talks about when it talks about being blessed. The biblical idea of being blessed, like it’s talking about here, it may not necessarily look outwardly to the rest of the world like success, but the biblical idea of blessed points us to a deeper spiritual state, an enviable state that others would look upon and say, I want that.
It is ultimately, being blessed, about being in right relationship with God. It’s ultimately about being in alignment with His purposes and receiving His favor. So, confession is a doorway to this type of blessing, as we’ll see in just a moment. Notice also confession is also essential because look for who the blessing comes to. Who does this blessedness come to?
The scripture says it comes to the one whose transgression is forgiven. And that’s no small thing because that word transgression basically means we are rebels, we are debtors. Transgression describes rebellious self-assertion. It means that we willfully and continually step over known boundaries, knowing full well that what we’re doing is displeasing to God, and yet we do it anyway. So transgression is open defiance.
It’s open rebellion against God. It’s disloyalty. And we’re all transgressors. We’re all guilty. Scripture tells us at the core of every one of our beings— we know this— is this impulse that says, nobody’s going to tell me how I can live my life.
And it’s that self-assertiveness, right? That self-centeredness That hatred of having anyone put any limitations on me, telling me what I can and cannot do, that is central then to what it means to be a transgressor, to sin. If you want to know what is sin, that’s what sin is. In other words, sin is not just something that we do. Sin is something that defines us and distorts our thinking.
It distorts our desires, our relationships, if left unconfessed. If left unaddressed. Now, a quick aside. Some of you know how much I love trivia. I learned a new trivia fact this last week that kind of helped me understand this idea of transgressing and crookedness in a new way.
In the sport of lawn bowling— yes, lawn bowling, I’ve never played lawn bowling— I learned that the ball that they use in lawn bowling is a bit different than the ball that they kind of use in, say, 10-pin bowling, which I’ve played a lot of times. Or the ball that you might use for bocce, which I’ve also played many times. The uniqueness of the ball used in lawn bowling that we see here is not just the difference in size, but mainly because with the standard lawn bowling ball, it is impossible to roll it in a straight line. It was built in such a way that you can roll it so that it curves outward, you can roll it in such a way so that it bends inward, but the one thing you cannot do apparently, is roll it straight. Why?
Because apparently there’s this inbuilt bias in the ball. It is designed that way. It is round in only one direction and it’s elliptical in the other, giving it a bias and causing it to curve. And I ask you, doesn’t that sound an awful lot like us? We are all by nature transgressors.
We have this internal bias, a moral perversity. A crookedness that corrupts and distorts our nature and keeps us from being able to walk straight down the path that God has set out for us. Nope, we need to venture off to the right or left, and God rescues us again and again to bring us back onto the path. And unless we have that crookedness, that internal bias dealt with, our transgressions dealt with properly by God through honest confession before Him and through the gracious granting of forgiveness for our sins, We will, according to this Psalm, never know true blessedness. The most fulfilled life, this Psalm is telling us, is for people who have been deeply forgiven by God.
That’s who receives the blessing. David goes on, though. Not only blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, but the second part of verse 1 tells us, blessed is the one whose sin is covered. Now, this seems to be a pretty intentional reference back to the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3 without it really referencing it. But when the man and woman in the garden— we know this— sinned against God, they disobeyed God, they broke fellowship with him, what happened?
It says their eyes were opened and they realized that they were naked, that they were exposed, that they were uncovered. And so they then became ashamed. So what did they try to do? They made fig leaves in order to try to deal with this. I need to cover myself up.
The point in Genesis 3 and the point here in this verse is that we desperately need to be covered. We do. We know it also. We can’t stand the thought of being uncovered before others. That’s why we all have at least certain parts of our frailty and our weakness that I’m going to hide from you all, and you all are going to hide from me.
We try to control how people see us, right? We try to control what people think. We’re reluctant to give full and complete access to our lives and what we’re thinking, what we do, what we struggle with to anybody. We have this innate and urgent need to be covered that goes all the way back to the garden. That’s why we’re always putting up some kind of a front.
It’s why so many of us struggle to receive criticism. Hello? It’s why so many of us pour ourselves into our work. It’s why so many of us pour ourselves into exercise or something, anything that will gain us favor with others and distract people from the fact that, boy, are we messed up. These are all false coverings.
They cover up who we really are, but they’re really insufficient. They’re just ways of us hiding. They don’t really cover us. And when we do get exposed, and we do get exposed, we become filled with guilt and shame, no matter who you are. And so, do you see, friends, from this verse, how wonderful it would be then to have your sins, your transgressions, my sins, transgressions actually covered by God?
What a blessing to know that. You mean I don’t have to try to cover myself anymore? I don’t have to try to pretend I’m something that I’m not because God and His forgiveness have covered me? They’ve covered up my transgressions. I don’t have to try to defend myself.
I don’t have to be afraid of criticism. I don’t have to work so hard to try to convince people that I’m something that I’m not. That would be a truly blessed life, would it not? And look again at verse 2. Blessed is the man or woman, verse 2 says, against whom the Lord counts no iniquity.
And in whose spirit is no deceit. That word for accounts comes from the world of bookkeeping. And so, it’s a picture of having an unpayable debt. We sang a couple songs in worship today that were speaking about this unpayable debt, the fact that we are debtors. And so, this is a picture here in verse 2 of having an unpayable debt like, oh, I don’t know, our sin miraculously wiped off the books.
Or imagine doing poorly on an exam, And then the teacher says, you know, I’m not going to count that grade against you. I know that you got a bad grade. I’m going to act as if it’s not there. I’m not going to look at it. I’m not going to take it into account.
That would feel pretty relieving, would it not? Imagine the weight off of your shoulders that that would be. That would be a truly blessed life, would it not? So confession, this psalm is teaching us, is a doorway to receiving that blessing in your life. And confession reminds us that we desperately need to have our transgressions covered and that God is able to provide that covering.
And notice also David’s own testimony in verses 3 and 4 of what happened when he tried to hide or cover up his sins on his own. Verses 3 and 4, David says, for when I kept silent— when I refused to confess— my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand— whose hand? God’s hand. Your hand, God, was heavy upon me.
My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Here’s what we need to hear today, friends. There is a spiritual law. It’s a basic spiritual law about sin, and I don’t want you to miss this, that we see all throughout the Bible. We see it at play here in Psalm 32.
Here’s the basic spiritual law, okay? Confess your sin. And you will be blessed. Conceal it like David did, and you will be miserable. Let me repeat that because it’s a basic spiritual law.
It’s an important— confess your sin, come clean before God, and you will be blessed. Conceal it, hide it, put up a front, try to cover it yourself, and you will be miserable. Now, David doesn’t share his specific sin with us. Some people think it might have been right after with his sin with Bathsheba. Psalm 51, we know, came after his sin with Bathsheba.
We’re not really sure. He doesn’t really tell us. He doesn’t tell us how long his silence lasted here in Psalm 32. But what we do know is that he came to understand this spiritual law personally, because prior to confessing his sins, something was eating him up inside, and he knew it. It was keeping him up at night.
He was drained physically. It was— he was at the end of himself emotionally, at the end of himself spiritually. But notice that he says here that his pain and his anguish were not just accidental. His pain and his anguish that he was feeling were actually providential, not accidental. They were providential because God is the faithful Father who doesn’t let His children go.
God, as our Father, disciplines those that He loves. And God was the one who was weighing or allowed David to feel this weight feeling weighed down. God’s hand was heavy on David, not to simply remind him of, hey, you’re guilty, but rather to try to draw David back and to cause David to recognize how dry he was without confession and forgiveness. He needed to have his transgressions covered. So David’s dryness, his misery, his experience of God’s heavy hand were actually a good thing.
They demonstrated that God still loved David. They demonstrated that David was, in fact, a child of God. They demonstrated that the covenant God would not allow him, and friends, it will not allow you or me to remain comfortable in habitual or unconfessed sin. Okay? This is the priority of confession.
Let’s look, too, at, from Psalm 32, the way of confession. Okay? The way of confession. What does this psalm teach us about what confession should look like? What does it entail?
Verse 5. Verse 5 is going to answer this question for you and me, friends. How can I receive the blessing of verse 1? I want that. How can I receive it?
Here’s verse 5 again. I acknowledged my sin to you, God, and I did not cover up my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. So David shows us at least 2 responses here to his sin. First, I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover up my iniquity.
So First step, the way of confession: acknowledge your sin. Sounds simple enough. Why don’t we do it? Means you and I have to come to the place, like David, where you are no longer trying to hide. You’re not trying to cover up.
You’re not trying to conceal your sin. You’re bringing it out into the open. You’re taking full responsibility, not making any excuses. You’re not trying to shift blame to something or someone else. What we often do, and I’ve often done this, is Something like, yeah, I sinned.
I know it’s not good. But if you were in my situation, you would have done the same thing. You ever said that? If you were married to this person, you would understand. If you had to work for this person, believe me, you would understand the pressure that I’m under.
We say those things all the time, meaning we tend to focus on the extenuating circumstances of our sin. And those circumstances might be true as indicators of descriptions and occasions for your sin. But they are not the cause of your sin. What is the cause of your sin? What is the cause of my sin?
You know the cause of your sin? It’s you. The cause of my sin is me. And unless you and I are willing to take full responsibility for our sin, acknowledging it before God without trying to cover it up, without denying it or explaining it away or rationalizing it, you and I are not going to have the blessed life that this psalm is describing. And notice that David didn’t just acknowledge his sin.
He said, I acknowledge my sin to who? To you, meaning to God. David says something similar in Psalm 51, again, that psalm that was written after his sin with Bathsheba. In Psalm 51, David wrote, against you, God, you only have I sinned. What does that tell us?
It’s telling us that our guilt, that our debt is ultimately measured not against the standards of the people around us or the culture around us, But it’s against God’s standard. This is why we need God’s standard. How does what I did or didn’t do compare to God’s standard? That’s what is being compared to, and against what God thinks and wants for us. Sadly, there are many times— we know this— when our sins do cause harm to others.
We’ve seen this this last week, where people’s sins, people’s rush to do whatever is right in their own eyes, harmed people. Irreparably harmed a number of people. Our sin often does that. There are often victims because of our own choices. That was the case with David’s sin with Bathsheba, in which Bathsheba, her husband Uriah, and even the little boy born to David and Bathsheba as a result of their adultery— those were all victims of David’s lusts and his impulsivity.
But David came to recognize something, that his sin was ultimately, you Yes, it hurt other people, but ultimately it was against God. It was ultimately against God. One of my favorite authors, Jerry Bridges, he wrote a great little book called The Pursuit of Holiness, and I’ve been reading that book about once a year for the past 30 years or so. This is what he says about this. It stayed with me for a long time.
It’s a quote we have up here from Jerry Bridges. Because God is holy, He hates sin. Now, hate is such a strong word, we dislike using it. Yet when it comes to God’s attitude about sin, only a strong word such as hate actually conveys an adequate depth of meaning. Therefore, every time we sin, we are doing something God hates.
He hates our lustful thoughts, hates our pride, our jealousy, our outbursts of temper, our rationalization that the end justifies the means. We need to be gripped by the fact that God hates all of these things. We become so accustomed to our sins that we sometimes lapse into a state of peaceful coexistence with our sins, but God never ceases to hate them. So, friends, the way to forgiveness, the way to freedom and blessedness, has to start with us being honest and acknowledging in prayer that our sin is a direct affront and offense against God. David’s second response to his sin was to, after acknowledging it, confess it.
It’s a little bit different. It sounds like it’s being redundant, but it’s a little bit different because in verse 5, again, he says, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. That biblical definition of that word confess, why it’s a little bit different than acknowledging, that word confess basically means to say the same thing. So this is describing a process of coming to see your sin from the perspective of the person that you have wronged. You’re putting yourself in their shoes and seeing it from their perspective and saying the same thing about it that they say about it.
Does that make sense? That’s what confession is doing. So, doing that, coming to that place of confession, is going to rule out any type of pseudo-apology which says, I’m sorry if I have offended you. When somebody says that to you, do you feel, well, gosh, thank you for that. I really, really appreciate that.
That’s not an apology. All that phrase tells you is that I don’t want to have to actually go to the trouble of actually admitting that I’ve offended you and hurt you, and then put myself in your shoes, and then imagining what it must be like to you. I don’t want to have to do that. It’s an admission that all I really want is for nobody to be able to come up to me and say, you never really apologized. Oh yes, I did.
True healing in any relationship whether with God or with somebody else, can only occur when the person who has wronged the other changes their perspective, and you see it from their perspective, and genuinely confesses, knowing that their sin hurt this other person. It’s an affront against God, but also, if it involves an interpersonal relationship, I need to put myself in your shoes instead of defending myself and confess. By seeing it from your perspective. So these 2 responses, acknowledging your sin and confessing your sin, are really both wrapped up in this idea of being authentic, right? You’re moving away from being silent, you’re moving away from hiding your sin, you’re acknowledging, you’re unmasking, you’re confessing.
And it is this change from silence to speaking, from hiding to owning, that brings about the last phrase in verse 5. Let’s put verse 5 up there again. I acknowledged, I confessed, and what happened? And You forgave the iniquity of my sin. Notice there is zero space between David’s confession and God’s forgiveness.
Zero space. Acknowledgement and confession was met with instant forgiveness. No hesitation, no delay, no long penance, no probation. Our sincere confession and God’s gracious pardon miraculously belong in the exact same verse together. That’s amazing.
That should fill you up with a sense of gratitude that our confession, coming honestly before the Lord, and His forgiveness are available to us without having to wait. We may not experience the blessing of that forgiveness and feel that right away, But it is available to us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So, we’ve looked at the priority of confession. We’ve looked at the way of confession.
I want us to consider, lastly, the basis of confession. On what basis can God actually forgive us when we confess? It is because, as we saw in verse 2, He doesn’t count our sin against us. Well, how can He do that? Verse 7 is really what helps answer that question.
Verse 7, You, God, are a hiding place for me. You preserve me from trouble. You surround me with shouts of deliverance. All of us, whether we realize it or not, look for hiding places, a place where we can feel safe, where we can feel covered, We’re not exposed, we’re protected from the troubles and the accusations that bear down on us. Childhood teaches us this instinctively.
2 weeks ago, getting to see my granddaughter, she is awful at playing hide-and-go-seek, but boy is she fun to play with. When kids play hide-and-seek, they know the thrill of finding a spot that they think that they’re going to be safe and no one can find them. And when, and when they’re scared or ashamed, what do kids do? They run to a closet or behind a couch or to their parent. Under a blanket.
They just want to be shielded from it all. You know, adulthood doesn’t erase that need for us to hide. We still hide. We just do it in more sophisticated ways than kids do it. Some of us hide in our work, burying ourselves in achievement.
Some of us hide in relationships, longing for acceptance and affirmation to cover up our insecurity. Some of us hide in distractions and entertainment, in addictions, hoping that they’ll drown out or at least numb their fears and failures. But David says here in verse 7 that there actually is a true hiding place— not a place that numbs you, not a place that deceives you, but a person who covers you. Going back to that idea of being covered, you know, we usually think of trying to hide from God because of our sin, but verse 7 suggests the complete opposite— that the basis of our confession is that we can hide not from God, but that we hide in God when we have sinned. In other words, God is the one who can cover us.
And the reason that He can do that is because we know of what Jesus did for us in His crucifixion. Think about it. One of the reasons why crucifixion was such an awful form of execution back then is because you were stripped naked. Your arms, your legs, they were tied open. So that you couldn’t cover yourself.
You were fully exposed publicly before everyone. Well, why did Jesus go through that for us? Jesus went through that and was willing to be stripped and exposed so that you and I could be covered. He was counted as a sinner by God. 2 Corinthians 5:21, he who knew no sin was made sin for us, He was counted as a sinner by God so that God could not count our sins against us.
That is the only basis for our confession. That’s the only basis for our forgiveness. And if you don’t understand this, then you’re going to turn the act of confession and prayers of confession into a way of trying to warrant God’s mercy, like saying, God, look at how sorry I am. Look at how hard I’m trying here. Forgive me based upon these things.
But your feelings of contrition, my diligent efforts, they’re not enough to actually cover us. Only Jesus’ death on the cross, our profession of faith in Him as our sin substitute, can do that. And that is really the essence of what it means to be a Christian. What does it mean to be a Christian? To be a Christian is to understand that you are not capable of saving or covering yourself from your transgressions and sins.
Only Jesus can do that. And so, being a Christian is to say to God, God, would you accept me please and hide me in you? Not on the basis of anything I’ve done. I can’t even begin to cover up my sins, God, before you. But God, would you accept me on the basis that Jesus went to the cross?
He allowed himself to be uncovered so that my sins could be covered. God, would you do that? And when you come before the Lord, he will receive you and you become a follower of Jesus. It’s that simple. It’s a miracle, but God is— He longs for that for us.
If you’ve never done that today, maybe you’re thinking today, that’s great, Steve, but you don’t know what I’ve done. Maybe you doubt whether forgiveness from God is even possible. You might think your particular sin is beyond the pale of God’s ability to forgive. There’s no way He could do it. Let’s remind ourselves that David wasn’t some kind of minor league sinner, as if there was such a thing.
He was guilty of betrayal, and adultery, and murder, among other things. And yet even David could say, blessed is the one whose sins are forgiven, whose sins are covered. And if God’s forgiveness could cover David, it can cover you. And here’s why. Because forgiveness is not based on the size of your sin.
God’s forgiveness is based on the sufficiency of Jesus. Let me repeat that. God’s forgiveness is not based on the size of your sin. It is based on the sufficiency of Jesus and His sacrifice on the cross. Jesus bearing the full weight of sin, the shame, the guilt, the punishment, not just for some sins, not just for the manageable sins in our lives, all sins.
And the power of the good news of the Gospel is that no matter how far down you think you’ve gone, Jesus has gone deeper. Still. So if you’re telling yourself, God couldn’t possibly forgive me, understand what you’re really saying. You’re saying that your sin is greater than the cross. But that’s not humility.
It sounds humble, but it’s not really humility. That’s actually unbelief. The cross stands as the eternal reminder that your sin, no matter how great, is not the final word, and neither is my sin. What is the final word? God’s grace.
So don’t insult God’s mercy by holding on to your guilt trying to cover it up. Don’t cling to your shame as if it were stronger than His love. Come freely, confess, acknowledge, and discover what David discovered. Discover that the very place that you fear God’s rejection is the very place that you will experience His embrace and His forgiveness. Let’s pray.
God, I want to thank You for Your Word. And at how timely it is and how it reminds us that we need a Savior and that You have provided the Savior once for all, that Jesus came and gave His life. No more debt do we owe when we place our faith and trust in Jesus’ Atonement for us. Thank You that when we sin, we have an Advocate in Jesus. Who pleads our case and reminds us that we belong to You.
Father, for anyone here who has never received Your forgiveness, who has never placed their faith and trust fully, completely in Jesus’ atoning sacrifice for their sins, may today be the day that that changes. If that’s you today, friends, call on the name of the Lord. In prayer, you can just simply in your own words say, Jesus, come into my life. Forgive me of my sins. And just know that when you do that, friends, we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from unrighteousness.
It really is possible, and we thank God for that. Thank You, Lord. We pray all these things in Jesus’ name, amen.
