Getting Right With God

Sermon Transcript

Psalm 51 is one of what is called the penitential psalms. “Penitential” meaning that it is a psalm of sorrow, it is a psalm of remorse, it’s a psalm of repentance. In fact, that’s what the word “penance” means. It comes from the Latin which is translated “repenting.” In this psalm, what we find is that the author, who happens to be King David, is very sorrowful over the choices in his life that he had recently made. He is remorseful. He is grieving the life that he had been living, and he is choosing in this moment to get right with God.

It’s interesting about choices, and we’re going to be looking at David’s choices here in this psalm, that we all are faced with choices on a daily basis. You cannot go through a day of your life without making a good handful of choices; and some of those choices are good, some not so good. Some of those choices are just downright awful, and oftentimes we suffer the consequences of those bad choices that we make. We suffer for them.

In that respect, we can relate to David because David has made a series of choices, both prior to this psalm and within this psalm. Some of these choices he made were terrible, but then he’s going to have a series of choices that were just the right choices to make. That’s what’s such a blessing I think about looking at this psalm is because it’s not how we start, it’s how we finish that really matters.

Many of us started as a train wreck in life, but that wasn’t the end of your story. There was a time in your life where the Lord entered in, changed you from the inside out, and you’re not the same person that you were when you were that train wreck. But even we as saints, followers of Christ, does not mean that we are exempt from making some very foolish decisions, even within our walk with the Lord. There are many, many times over the course of a believer’s walk that we may need to get right with God.

In looking at this psalm, I think it’s both for the saint as well as the sinner; both for the person that needs for the very first time in their life to get right with God or for the believer who finds themself in a situation where they have made some pretty bad choices of late and they need to make some better choices and choose to get right with God.

Now, here in this psalm there are three very good choices that David is going to make that we will see here in a few minutes, but that’s really not where the story begins. These good choices came only after some pretty bad choices—maybe the worst choices that David made in his entire life. The bad choices are really the backdrop of this story, so we need to begin with those. I’m going to spend the time that we have together tonight taking a look at five choices that David made. The first two were the bad ones followed by the three good choices that we’re going to find here in Psalm 51.

I need to begin by setting the backdrop by looking at the bad choices that David made. That first bad choice was that he chose to sin. You might notice that before even verse 1 begins in Psalm 51, there in your Bible, there will be an introductory statement we often call the title before the psalm where it says, “To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” We are first needing to consider this bad choice that David made in his life where he chose sin rather than righteousness, where he made a bad decision and in doing so didn’t just make one bad choice, he made a series of bad decisions that culminated in maybe the greatest fall of his life.

We’re familiar with the story. Bathsheba’s name is mentioned there in the heading, and very few of us probably are not familiar with that story, but I want to reiterate at least some of the highlights of it because there was a day while David was reigning as king that he was out on his balcony one evening, apparently, and looking down he saw a beautiful woman bathing. In that moment, he had a choice to make. He did not make a good choice, he made a poor choice. Now, it would’ve been better if he had decided that he was going to make an about face, go back into the palace and make himself a sandwich or have a cold shower or do anything than what he did do. Instead, what he decided to do was pursue this woman that he had gazed upon. It was a bad choice because David was already a married man, yet he began to pursue this woman. He inquired as to who she was and had her invited over. In that inquiry, it led to his second bad decision, he found out that she was a married woman, yet that did not stop his pursuit.

He now has pursued her through the fact that he was married, he’s pursued her through the fact that she was married and now has invited her over, and that night ended in adultery. When the night was over, he wanted to send her home quietly, maybe through the back door of the palace thinking, Okay, this was a one and done situation. It won’t happen again. And, I’ll make sure that nobody finds out about it.

Shortly thereafter, word comes back to David from Bathsheba saying, “I’m pregnant.” Now, he is in danger of his whole sin being exposed to the entire country, and he does not want to see that happen, so he comes up with a plan—a plan to get rid of Bathsheba’s husband. He happened to be one of the warriors in David’s army, so he calls him back from the battle. Plan A was to get Uriah, her husband, to go back and spend some time with his wife before he returned to the battle, but plan A did not work. David had to resort to plan B, which was to end Uriah’s life, which he arranged a situation in which that would happen. Uriah was dead, and so David took Bathsheba as his wife, and in his eyes, he had covered all of his basis. He has made sure that his sin was not found out.

The first choice that David made was not just one choice, it was a series of choices to sin by blowing through every roadblock that was in his way. That led to the second choice that he made, that was to conceal his sin by getting rid of Uriah the husband so that people would begin to suppose that the child was Uriah’s and not David’s.

The problem with what was happening is that David was a man who knew God. In spite of the fact of his ability to hide it from society, David knew what he had done, and God knew what David had done, and David knew that God knew what David had done. This story that I’m describing to you is found in 2 Samuel 11. What we find in the very last verse of that chapter, when it seems that David had made sure that nobody would find out about it, a statement is made, the very last sentence of that chapter. It says, “But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD.”

One of the perplexing things for many of us in this story is we know that the Scripture calls David a man after God’s own heart. In fact, those were the words that God spoke when He had a conversation with the prophet Samuel indicating that He was going to reject Saul, the current king, in order to find a man to become the new king, a man after God’s own heart. So, that became David’s label. He was known as a man after God’s own heart. Then, we look at the situation that I had described to us, and that is such a far cry from having a heart after God, that it is very difficult for many of us to mesh those two things together.

I think it’s important for us to understand that yes, unbelievers can do pretty drastic, gross, extensive sins, but believers also have the capacity to do some pretty terrible things. There is one difference though between the sin of a believer and the sin of an unbeliever; that is, the unbeliever can sin and maybe have his conscience pricked just a little bit, maybe he feels a little bit bad about some of the choices that he’s made in life, but it’s not going to bring about any real change in the behavior. Where, when the believer sins, they are going to be miserable.

Those of you that are followers of the Lord and maybe have lapsed back into old lifestyles and done some things that you later regretted probably remember how you felt at the time—the guilt, the remorse, the dark cloud that just seemed to follow you at that time—that’s exactly what David would begin to experience. How do we know that? Because there was another psalm, it’s kind of a sister psalm to Psalm 51. It’s Psalm 32. Psalm 32 was a psalm that David wrote also in relation to the sins that he had committed with Bathsheba and against Uriah. Although Psalm 32 was written after the fact and after David had turned his life back over to the Lord, he had repented from his sins and gotten right with God, still in Psalm 32 he actually shares with us the experience that he was going through at the time that he had hidden that sin. In fact, if you want to turn a few pages to the left, keep your thumb there in Psalm 51 because we’ll be getting back there very soon.

In Psalm 32 there is much rejoicing in the psalm because, like I said, David was writing this psalm in celebration of the fact that he has experienced now God’s forgiveness and the restoration of his relationship with the Lord. But he tells us in verses 3-4 what he was going through at the time that he was hiding that sin. Notice what it says, “When I kept silent, my bones grew old through my groaning all the day long. 4 For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; My vitality was turned into the drought of summer.” This is a description of what David was going through at the time that he was hiding that sin.

By the way, if I haven’t mentioned it already, I need to, that is, David went through a year-long period of time between his sin with Bathsheba and the time that he actually confessed that sin to the Lord. A whole year where he was putting a cap on that sin, hoping that nobody is going to find out, making sure that he had everything in its place so that it wouldn’t become a public knowledge situation; yet in the middle of all of that, he could not get away from the fact that he was dying inside. Look at the statements that he makes there in verse 3. He says, “ . . . my bones grew old,”—that he’s—“groaning all the day long,” that his strength was dried up. These are all poetic ways of describing his misery. On the outside everything seemed to be fine, but on the inside of his life he was wasting away.

When a believer sins, that is exactly what happens. We may be able to hide it from others, but there is an internal destruction that is going on where we feel the weight of what we have done. In fact, in verse 4, he goes on and says, “ . . . Your hand”—of God—“was heavy upon me.” You know, it’s a sad place when you find yourself at odds with the Lord. We can have a relationship with God yet find ourselves in a place where we have lost the peace of God. You see, the believer has the peace with God because of their relationship with Christ, but you can lose the peace of God within your life because you are harboring sin that has not been confessed, that has not been repented of. David, here, is describing exactly what that experience was for him, and maybe we can relate to that.

For a whole year, David kept it hidden on the outside, but inside David was wasting away. At the end of that year, though, and we find this in 2 Samuel 12, God goes to the prophet Nathan and says, “Nathan, I need you to go to David and confront him on what he has done. I’ve given him a year to make it right. He has not chosen to do so, so I want you to bring out what he has done in the darkness, I want you to bring it out into the light.” Now, imagine Nathan being put in that situation. He’s now gotta go to the king of Israel and confront him with the sins he has committed, which David has gone so far as to murder a man in order to keep this sin hidden. So, what would David do to Nathan if Nathan just simply came to him and said, “David, God knows, and I know, what you have done. You need to bring it out.”

Nathan came up with a brilliant way of addressing this situation with David. You may know the story. He came to David and said, “David, I want to tell you about a situation that’s happened in your kingdom. You see, there’s two men that are in your kingdom: one man is a very wealthy man, the other is a very poor man. The wealthy man has lots of flocks and herds. He’s got tons to live on. The poor man is so poor that he only has one little lamb. Because it is his only lamb, his family treats it as if it is part of the family. The lamb literally sleeps with the family inside the house. Well, there was a day that a visitor came to the rich man, and the rich man wanted to serve his visitor a meal. But rather than take one of his lambs from the many that he had in his flocks and herds, he went to the poor man and forcibly took his one lamb away and had it slaughtered so that he could serve it to his visiting friend.”

As David is hearing this story, his blood is beginning to boil. You remember David’s background, he was a shepherd boy himself. Sheep were very special to David, and now he is hearing about a man who only had one, and that one was taken from him. So, David, in his rage in that moment, says to Nathan, “Nathan, tell me who that man was because that man is going to die.” Nathan looked David in the eyeballs and said, “David, you’re the man.”

It’s funny how ugly our sins can look when they’re committed by somebody else. When we do it, it doesn’t seem so bad, but when somebody else is wearing our sins, they look terrible. That’s the situation that David is finding himself in. He hated the sin when it was committed by another man, but he hid it when it was committed by himself. He was willing to keep it under wraps when he was the offender, but when somebody else was the offender, he wanted full judgment unleashed. In that moment, David’s sin was brought out to light, and these horrible choices that he had made, the choice to sin rather than to run, the choice to hide his sin rather than to confess, it’s now all coming to a head.

That’s where Psalm 51 comes to us. David wrote this psalm as his confession. Psalm 51 is David confessing to what he has done so that he could get right with God again. Let’s go ahead and read the whole psalm and then we’ll take a look at the choices that he made. Verse 1:
Have mercy upon me, O God,
According to Your lovingkindness;
According to the multitude of your tender mercies,
Blot out my transgressions.

2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
And cleanse me from my sin.

3 For I acknowledge my transgressions,
And my sin is always before me.

4 Against You, You only, have I sinned,
And done this evil in Your sight—
That You may be found just when You speak,
And blameless when You judge.

5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
And in sin my mother conceived me.

6 Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts,
And in the hidden part You will make me to know wisdom.

7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

8 Make me hear joy and gladness,
That the bones You have broken may rejoice.

9 Hide Your face from my sins,
And blot out all my iniquities.

10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,
And renew a steadfast 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 uphold me by Your generous Spirit.

13 Then I will teach transgressors Your ways,
And sinners shall be converted to You.

14 Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God,
The God of my salvation,
And my tongue shall sing aloud of Your righteousness.

15 O Lord, open my lips,
And my mouth shall show forth Your praise.

16 For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it;
You do not delight in burnt offering.

17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,
A broken and contrite heart—
These, O God, You will not despise.

18 Do good in Your good pleasure to Zion;
Build the walls of Jerusalem.

19 Then You shall be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness,
With burnt offering and whole burnt offering;
Then they shall offer bulls on Your altar.

This is really where the good part starts because David starts to make some good choices. He made the choice to sin, he made the choice to conceal, but now he makes the choice to confess. From verses 1-9, is David’s confession of the sin that he has committed. I want you to notice how often he makes reference to this sin. In verse 1 he says, “ . . . my transgressions;” verse 2, “ . . . my iniquity . . . my sin;” verse 3, “ . . . my transgressions;” verse 4, “ . . . have I sinned;” verse 9, “ . . . my sins . . . my iniquities.”

Some people find it very difficult to take ownership of what they have done. They find alternative means of dealing with the wrongs in their life. Sometimes it’s just simply to downplay it, to make it sound not so bad, “It really wasn’t as bad as you’re making it out to be.” Sometimes it’s blameshifting, placing the blame on somebody else. We find that back in the Garden of Eden—Adam blamed it on his wife as to why he ate of the fruit, Eve blamed it on the devil. What we don’t find here with David is any type of blameshifting, we don’t find him downplaying it, we don’t even find him trying to justify the sin where, “It wasn’t totally my fault. If she hadn’t been walking around naked, I wouldn’t have stumbled.” He didn’t blame it on anybody else, he takes full ownership of it.

There’s three things that David recognized in verses 1-9 that I think we need to recognize as well. The first is the recognition of the gravity of his own sin. He didn’t blame Bathsheba. He didn’t blame God. He didn’t blame the devil. The only person that he blamed was himself. He took full ownership. Nearly every time that he mentions the words “transgression,” “iniquity,” and “sin,” he puts the word “my” before it because he was taking ownership of it. The first thing that he recognized is the gravity of his own sin.

It’s interesting the words that he uses to describe it. There were three words, and each of them were used multiple times. He uses the word “transgression.” The Hebrew word for “transgression” just simply meant to cross a forbidden barrier or boundary—to go a place that you were not supposed to go. Then, he uses also the word “iniquity.” “Transgression” he uses twice in verses 1 and 3; “iniquity” he uses twice in verses 2 and 9. That word “iniquity” meant perversion. Then, he uses the word “sin.” “Sin” he uses four times in verses 2, 3, 4, and 9. It was a Hebrew word which meant to fall short.

You put all of that together, and David is using different words because he realizes all of the ways in which he has been sinning. You see, God had established a boundary that he was not to cross, but he crossed that boundary. God had established rules in regards to sexual relationships, but David had perverted the sexual relationship for his own pleasure. God had established a rule of law of how His people were to live, and David fell short of God’s holy standard. So, in every respect, David is bringing out the different dynamics of the sins that he has committed. He recognized the gravity of his sin.

The second thing that he recognized was the character of God. I want you to notice that at the end of verse 4 makes mention of the fact that God is a just God. The last statement in verse 4 he says, “That You may be found just when You speak, And blameless when You judge.” You see, David knew God’s character, and he knew if God chose to judge David for what he had done, God was just in doing so, that God had full rights to punish and to judge David for the things that he had done because He is a just God.

There were other things that David knew about God as well, and he mentions those in verse 1, “Have mercy upon me, O God, According to Your lovingkindness; According to the multitude of Your tender mercies.” David knew that God was a just God, but he also knew that God is a very merciful, loving God. While he knows that God has the right to punish him, he is appealing to the character of God in which God loves and God is so willing to show mercy to those that come to God asking for the mercy. So, he sees the gravity of his own sin, he recognized the character of God, and the third thing that he recognized was the cost of forgiveness. In verse 7, he makes a statement that we might not understand exactly what David was referring to. He says, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.”

Hyssop was a plant that grew there in Israel, and looked very similar to lavender that oftentimes maybe grows in your own yard, or at least we see it around the neighborhood. It’s green, it’s low-lying, and it has these stalks that it sends out that then has a cluster of purple flowers that grow at the tip of those stalks. Hyssop is very similar to that, only the difference between lavender and hyssop is that the flower cluster at the top of the stalk in hyssop is more plentiful. They are larger. Back in biblical times, these hyssop stalks were used with a purpose in the Old Testament. We find them being used by the priests in different ceremonies and rituals as a means of purifying or of cleansing. They would take that hyssop stalk with the flowers on the end, dip it in the blood of a lamb, and then that lamb’s blood would then be sprinkled off of the hyssop branch onto what is being purified or what is being cleansed.

I don’t think that that’s what David exactly had in mind. There is maybe the most notable use of hyssop in the Old Testament found in Exodus 12 when Moses is in the land of Egypt seeking to deliver God’s people out of the hands of Pharaoh, and a series of plagues has been dished out upon the Egyptians, nine up to that point, and still Pharaoh is not allowing God’s people to go. So, God says, “I’m going to do one last plague against Pharaoh and the Egyptians. I am going to kill the firstborn in every household.” But He gave instructions for Moses in order to protect the people of God. He said, “In order for the people of God to be protected from this plague, lambs must be slaughtered, and then you are to dip hyssop into the lamb’s blood and spread that blood upon the lintel of the doorpost, and when the angel of death sees the blood, the angel will passover that household and the firstborn will be spared.”

It was the first Passover. It was part of the celebration of God not bringing death to the households who were covered by the blood of the lamb. Now, David is appealing to that imagery when he says, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.”

It’s interesting that we find in the New Testament Jesus not was only crucified on Passover, but in 1 Corinthians, He is called our Passover, in chapter 5. You see, David, I think, understood that though God can forgive, there is still a cost to the sins that have been committed, and in the Old Testament a lamb was required to be sacrificed. In the New Testament, we know that Jesus became, “The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” What David is doing here in these first nine verses is acknowledging the greatness of the sins that he has committed, but he’s also acknowledging that he understood the character of God and that God is though a just judge, He is also a very merciful judge, so he appeals to the blood, that the blood of the lamb would atone for the sins that he has committed.

That was a good choice. It’s a choice that all of us need to make because all of us have done similar things to David. We’ve all fallen short of the glory of God. We’ve all made pretty bad choices in life, and we need to come to the place where we no longer justify it, we no longer blameshift, we no longer downplay it; we own up to it, and we bring it before the Lord, the Judge, the merciful Judge, full of lovingkindness because He desires to forgive.

That brings us though to the next choice that David made, another good choice. We find that in verses 10-12. He made the choice to change, verse 10, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a steadfast 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 uphold me by Your generous Spirit.” David is not just asking for forgiveness here in this psalm, he wants to be a different man. He doesn’t want to be a man who just keeps stumbling into the same types of sinful behaviors, he wants to be changed.

Having an inward change, and, by the way, that’s what God wants to do, too. You see, God’s not interested in just outward conformity to a list of rules and regulations. Sometimes we think that as long as we are obeying all of the rules and regulations that are laid out by Scripture, then that is enough. But, it’s not what God is looking for. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was explaining to His disciples that God is wanting inward change, not just outward conformity. When Jesus made statements like, “You guys know that you’re not supposed to murder, but do you have hatred in your heart? You know that you’re not supposed to commit adultery, but do you have lust in your heart?” In another place, Jesus, in talking to the religious people of that day said, “Well did Isaiah prophesy about you when he said, ‘These people honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.’” You see, God wants our heart, not just outward conformity, He wants inward transformation.

In a sense, that’s exactly what David is appealing for. In fact, if you look back in verse 6, he makes this statement, “Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts.” God is wanting us to walk with Him in the inward parts, not just an outward show but an inward life, and the only way that we could do that is if we have a transformed life. You see, we are to confess our sins, but we’re also to repent from our sins; and the two things are not the same. You can confess without repenting because confessing is simply acknowledging that, “I have done wrong,” agreeing with God that we have sinned. But, repenting is deciding not to do that sinful behavior anymore. In reality, David’s even taken it a step further than that. It’s not just confessing his sin, it’s not just confessing and repenting from that sin, David wants to be a new man on the inside. He wants to be transformed, and that is why he is saying words such as in verse 10, “Create in me a clean heart.”

You know that word “create” is the same Hebrew word that is used in Genesis 1:1 where we’re told, “God created the heavens and the earth.” You see, David has come to the realization that he cannot change himself. He can’t change his own heart. He is calling upon God to do something that only God can do. Only God can create the heavens and the earth. Only God can create in me a clean heart. And, then he said, “And renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

That word “steadfast” comes from a Hebrew word which means to be firm or to be stable. David is realizing that he’s been pretty wishy-washy. He’s been tossed to and fro with his feelings and his desires so that he’s caving to these desires, and he’s realizing he’s not in a good place and probably realizing that he himself, in and of himself, cannot be a stable man, he needs the help of God. So, “God, I need You to do what only You can do. Create in me a clean heart, and now place me in a position where I am firmly footed, planted in You, in a stable place that is much less likely to fall.” Then, he uses the phrase, “And do not take Your Holy Spirit”—away—“from me.”

A lot has been said about what that meant. Is it possible for a believer to have the Spirit taken away from him? I don’t think that is what David is getting at. I think what David is saying is really the bookend to what he began in verse 10, and is ending with verse 11, is that he cannot create in himself a clean heart, God must do that for him. And, he cannot live the life that God calls him to he needs the Holy Spirit to work that in and through his life. Essentially, he’s saying, “God, I want to be a transformed person. I don’t want to be this person anymore, but I can’t do it alone. I need You to create it in me. I need Your Spirit to help make it happen.” David is realizing that none of this is really things that he can do himself. He couldn’t undo what he had done. He couldn’t purge himself of his own sin, he needed God to do that. He couldn’t clean up his own life, he needed God to change his heart. He needed God to do everything.

Which brings us to the last choice that David would make in this psalm, and that was the choice to testify. Verse 13, “Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, And sinners shall be converted to You. 14 Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, The God of my salvation, And my tongue shall sing aloud of Your righteousness. 15 O Lord, open my lips, And my mouth shall show forth Your praise. 16 For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it; You do not delight in burnt offering. 17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, A broken and contrite heart—These, O God, You will not despise.”

Notice in verse 13 that David makes the statement, “Then I will teach transgressors Your ways.” When is he going to teach transgressors? After he has been restored in his relationship with God. After he has confessed his sin, after God has purged his sin, after God has given him a clean heart, after God has given him a steadfast place to stand. He knew that now was the time to now testify of what God has done in his life. You see, one of the worst things that could happen is to go through what David went through, to do the things that he did, and then not testify about the great things that God has now done for him. Now is the time that he needed to testify, and so he is promising, “God, because You are going to do all of these things for me that I could not do for myself, I will let the world know about it.” And, he talks about giving a testimony, meaning that he’s going to speak it. Later on, he talks twice about singing about it, but the culmination of what he is going to testify is found in verse 17 when he says, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, A broken and a contrite heart—These, O God, You will not despise.”

David is a broken man at the time that he is writing this, but he’s also a man that realizes that that is exactly what God is looking for—a man who has been humbled, a man who no longer is going to justify himself but is going to acknowledge what he has done. He’s taking ownership of his faults, his failures, his sins, his compromises. In that brokenness, he knew that God would receive him.

Here’s one of the things I think is important for us to consider because there are probably some of us in here that have fallen as believers in some pretty significant ways. And there are times I think that we think that we are now unusable because of our fall that, “Yeah, God might forgive me, and I might make it into heaven, but I’m going to be in the shack on the outskirts of heaven, for one; and here on the earth, for the rest of my life, I’m going to be an unusable vessel because I have compromised, I have failed. I’ve been a bad witness.”

You know one of the things that Nathan said to David in 2 Samuel 12 as he was confronting David with the sins that he had committed, he tells David, “You know what? You have given reason for the enemies of God to blaspheme. You have given a reason for God’s enemies to blaspheme Him because they’re looking at you, supposedly the man after God’s own heart, doing things that God hates.” I think sometimes we can take that upon ourselves and feel the same way that, “I have given reason for God’s enemies to blaspheme. I’ve given reason for unbelievers to shake their finger at me and say, ‘You call yourself a Christian, what a hypocrite you are. Your God’s not even real because your life’s no different than mine.’” And then we can shrink back into our shell and believe that that is the truth and that we are no longer useful to God at all.

I want you to see that in spite of the greatness of David’s sin, he is ending this psalm by saying that he knows that his life can now again be a testimony. Why? Because his repentance was going to be as notorious as the sins that he had committed; and when your repentance and your getting right with God is as well-known as the sins that you committed, you have earned the right to testify of the greatness of God’s goodness and mercy in your life. Do you understand that?

If you are in here and you feel like you are the beat-down Christian, the second-class, because of the failures that you have made, understand that if your confession of that sin, your repentance of that sin is as widely known as the committing of that sin, you have a testimony because it’s not that Christians don’t sin, that we don’t fail, it’s that we know where to run to when we have failed, and we know what we need to do. We need to make these three choices: we need to choose to confess that sin; we need to choose to be changed into a new person by God; and we need to choose to testify about the great things that God has done for us because God is in the habit of using broken things.

Throughout the Bible we find God using broken things: Breaking pottery was part of God’s battle plan in Jericho in order for the walls to fall down; we read of Mary breaking an alabaster flask of fragrant oil in order to worship at Jesus’ feet; there are a number of times in Scripture where we read of brokenness being used by God. Jesus broke the bread, and that bread fed five thousand people. Now, we read here in verse 17, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, A broken and a contrite heart—These, O God, You will not despise.”

I don’t think that brokenness is even an option for us as believers, I think it’s a requirement. It’s part of us getting right with God, and at some point in our life, we need to go through that breaking where we realize that we cannot do it on our own. We are absolutely dependent upon God, not only for forgiveness, but even to live the life that God has called us to live. And, until we experience that absolute brokenness before God, I don’t believe that we can fully experience the joy that David spoke of here in this psalm when he said, “Restore to me the joy of Your salvation.”

Maybe you’re broken tonight. Maybe the reason that you are here tonight is because you realize that the life that you’ve been living has not been right. You’ve made some pretty bad choices. If you have given your life to the Lord at a previous time, know that you can bring that broken life of yours again to Him, and He, with His mercy and lovingkindness, will restore you. If you’ve never given your life to the Lord, understand that sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross two thousand years ago is sufficient to forgive you of whatever you have done. God gave His only begotten Son so that you can not only be forgiven of your sins, but have a relationship with God and be in heaven with Him one day. If that describes you, tonight could be your night to give your life to Christ. Let’s pray.