Honest to God
As we get started this morning, I need you to use your imaginations for a minute:
Imagine a big circle, and within this circle is all the ways you interpret reality. Within this circle is your perspective on the world around you; and your posture toward the world around you — this is basically how you live and do anything.
Now within this bigger circle, there’s a smaller circle, and this smaller circle is how you relate to God. It’s your relationship to him. And the way this works is that: whatever is in this smaller circle is actually what impacts the bigger circle. This smaller circle emanates an influence. It has a ripple effect into everything else.
Which means, if we want to make any sense of all this big circle stuff, then we need to focus on this smaller circle. And the question here is: what shapes this? What mainly shapes how we relate to God?
Two things:
- what you know about God
- what you know about yourself
Those are the two most important kinds of knowledge you have.
John Calvin, the 16th-century Reformer, tells us this. In his book Institutes of the Christian Religion, which is a big two-volume magnum opus, Calvin writes in the very first sentence:
Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.
So it goes like this: What we know about God and what we know about ourselves determines how we relate to God, and then that shapes how we interact with everything else in the world.
And I’m starting here today because Psalm 51 is all about this.
Psalm 51 shows us mainly how David relates to God through 21 petition verbs (that’s most of this psalm! Most of this psalm is David asking God to do something!)
But there are a couple important places where David is confronted by reality and he says, basically: I know this about myself, and I know this about God.
And what I’d like for us to do this morning is to slow down on this and see how it’s all connected. Now we’re only gonna look closely at a few verses, but I think these few verses will help us understand the rest. Overall, Psalm 51 teaches us three truths:
- We are worse sinners than we think.
- There are two things God will not do.
- We can (and must) seek God’s mercy.
Let’s pray:
Father in heaven, we ask again, that by the power of your Holy Spirit, speak to us and accomplish your will, in Jesus’s name, amen.
We are worse sinners than we think.
Now this is not the most pleasant thing to hear, but it’s necessary that we see this in Psalm 51. And what I especially appreciate about this psalm is that it builds upon something that we already know. Because we all know we are sinners, right? Try this: raise your hand if you know you are a sinner.
We all know that we are sinners. We know that something is off. We know we’ve fallen short of God’s glory.
Either through what we do or don’t do, either through our thoughts or words or actions, we have all transgressed the moral will of God. We are sinners and we know it — but at the same time, we often don’t understand how badly it really is. Our understanding of sin tends to stay pretty light. And this is where we can learn from David.
David Knew His Sin
Look at verse 3. He writes,
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
See at this point as much as David had tried to ignore his sin, and to hide his sin, that was no longer an option, because now his sin is right in front of him, and there’s no getting around it.
Psalm 51 of course has a backstory. The little superscript above the first verse tells us that this psalm came about after the prophet Nathan rebuked David for his sin against Bathsheba and her husband Uriah. (That full story is in 2 Samuel 11–12 and it’s gruesome.) David, who had not seemed to be a horrible person, had done a horrible thing, and the whole account of his sin and the fallout in 2 Samuel actually patterns the fall of Adam in Genesis Chapter 3. Basically, this is the “Fall story” of David, and his sin is meant to disturb us. It makes us sick.
And by the time David is writing these words, his sin is all he could think about. When he says “I know my transgressions” he means really know. David knew his transgression because he had drilled down into its depths, and the deeper down he went, he understood, first, that his sin was mainly against God; and second, that his sinfulness was pervasive.
And I want us to look more at this, because as much as David’s sin makes us wanna distance ourselves from him, what’s true about David’s sin is true about our sin.
Sin Is Mainly Against God
Look at verse 4:
Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you may be justified in your words
and blameless in your judgment.
David obviously felt God’s displeasure through Nathan’s rebuke, and God’s displeasure was completely justified because David’s sin was first and primarily against him. Now of course David’s sin was against others too — he sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah and it was horrible — but even worse is that David sinned against God. That’s certainly the way 2 Samuel 12 puts it when Nathan rebuked him. Nathan tells David you have despised Yahweh; you have utterly scorned Yahweh — and when David repents, he says, “I have sinned against Yahweh” (2 Samuel 12:13).
And that puts David’s sin in a category all its own. That’s why he can isolate it like he does in verse 4 and say: I’ve sinned against you only! That’s the worst of my issues here! David does not minimize the horror of his sin by focusing on how he has offended God, but he’s actually maximizing its horror. (And that is only a controversial statement if you’re an atheist.)
For those of us who have read the Bible and know something about the holiness and glory of God, we understand that our sin being against God is what makes it the worst thing we are capable of.
David had sinned against his Creator… he had sinned against the Most High God who had shown him so much unmerited favor… this is the sovereign God over everything who had been shockingly good to David against all odds. And David sinned against him. And see it’s this realization that left David heartbroken. Shattered.
And that’s actually a good test for us on whether our conviction of sin goes deep enough:
I think a lot of times, the whole topic of sin — and our sin — it can make us resent ourselves. When we think of our failures it can almost create a kind of self-hatred or at least an inward-frustration.
But get this: if that’s where you stay with sin, it’s because you’re settling for something too shallow. We should go deeper, and to go deeper means you need to get over yourself. Do not wallow in self-criticism — and as much as we might think it’s admirable, it’s not.
The problem with your sin is not how badly it makes you feel — and it’s not even mainly about how it affects others. Your sin is mainly an offense against God, the Father Almighty, Ruler of heaven and earth. We sin against GOD! Sin is violence against his holiness; it’s an insult to his purity; it’s rebellion from his sufficiency. And when we understand this, when we remember God, we don’t stay mad at ourselves but we become sorrowful because of how we’ve treated him. Our sin is against God, and he does not deserve it.
Sinfulness Is Pervasive
Look at verse 5. David says:
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
and in sin did my mother conceive me.
This where David has drilled down to see not just that his sin is mainly against God, but also that his sinfulness is pervasive. The morally outrageous behavior of David in 2 Samuel 11 was not out of character, but it was of his character.
See, a lot of times we can make little excuses for sin by saying things like “I was out of character” or “I was not myself” but the fact is you absolutely were. Your sin comes from you! David here knows that he has sinned because he is a sinner. And the capacity to sin in the way he did had always been in him, and it still was in him, even after Nathan’s rebuke, even as he wrote these words.
David knew he was a mess. He couldn’t ignore that anymore.
And Psalm 51 will really not make sense to us until we start to think like David does here. You could say the same thing about the entire Bible — or really everything in this big circle! Everything in this circle is going to be off and distorted unless we know this truth about ourselves.
Now we established that we’re all sinners, but drill down here …
Don’t comfort yourself by the thought that other people are worse than you.
Don’t think:
At least I’m not this or that.
Or at least I don’t do that thing anymore.
Or at least I do these good things now.
It’s like the Puritan Thomas Watson put it in 1692,
Some think, as long as they are civil, they are well enough; ay, but the nature is poisoned. … Thou carriest a hell about thee … thy heart, like muddy ground, defiles the purest water that runs through it. Nay, though thou art regenerate, there is much of the old man in the new man. Oh how should [our] sin humble us! (A Body of Divinity, 147)
And indeed it should humble us, but we have to know it. We have to stop living in a world of excuses and staying superficial — because that’s actually delusional. It means we are actively not knowing ourselves. We are distorting the smaller circle, which then distorts the bigger circle.
So we need to get this clear: We are worse sinners than we think.
But also, know this: there are two things God will not do.
There are two things God will not do.
And I want to say it this way because this is the language of the psalm. Look at verse 16. Again, remember most of this psalm is petitions. David is asking God to do things, but in verse 16 he says something he knows about God. He says:
For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;
you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
And with the mention of sacrifice in verse 16, Psalm 51 echoes Psalm 50, which we heard last week. Pastor Mike explained to us that in Psalm 50 God rebukes misguided and hypocritical worship, and a big part of that distorted worship is thinking wrongly about sacrifice (or offerings). We think wrongly when we think that God needs our sacrifice (which he does not), or when we go through the motions of offering more and more stuff to God while we keep back our hearts.
David knows that God does not want that. Because it’s empty. So this is something God will not do: God will not delight in empty sacrifice.
Because the real sacrifice, the real offering, verse 17, is a broken spirit — “a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
Did you hear the two negatives in these verses? David tells us two things God will not do:
God will not delight in empty sacrifice;
God will not despise a contrite heart.
And this is really important for us to know about God. These are strong words. They are a vantage into God’s heart, and David under-states this in a poetic way that’s meant to draw us in as readers. I wonder if some of you caught this in verse 16.
Intentional Understatement
David is using a kind of rhetorical device that we use all the time in modern speech.
For example (this is completely random and made up): but say the boys and I are playing whiffle ball at a park that happens to be by some tennis courts, and Micah is hitting, and he gets ahold of one, the ball flies over the fence into the tennis courts and it hits a tennis player in the head (no offense tennis players).
Now, imagine this is happening in slow motion. I threw the pitch and now I’m watching this ball fly through the air and bonk! Now when that happens, I’m saying: “Not good.” What do I mean by saying “not good”?
I mean: This is bad!
We talk like this all the time:
If we see something and say “Not too shabby” we mean: This is nice!
Or we say: “It’s not the cheapest” and we mean: It’s expensive!
It’s an intentional under-statement. And we talk this way not to dim reality, but actually to highlight it! And that same kind of speech is going on here. David wants us to make a connection. Look at the words:
There are two main objects David is talking about in verses 16–17:
empty sacrifice
contrite heart
We know that God does not delight in empty sacrifice.
And we know that God does not despise contrite hearts.
Making the Connection
And so we’re supposed to think here: What does it mean to delight in something? To delight in something means you enjoy it. You love it.
What’s the opposite of loving something? The opposite of love is hate. What’s another word for hate? Despise. Okay, so this means that the words “despise” and “delight” are opposites.
Look at these verses:
God does not delight in empty sacrifice. Which means: God despises empty sacrifice.
God does not despise a contrite heart. Which means: God delights in a contrite heart.
So see, in verses 16–17 David has put it all right here together. We just drop the negatives and switch the verbs, and what we learn as we meditate here is that God actually despises empty sacrifice. And God actually delights in contrite hearts.
And it’s one thing to just read it this way, we need to discover this. I think that’s why David puts it this way in Psalm 51. For those of you who are educators, you know that the best learning doesn’t come through wooden repetition, or mindless recitation, but we learn best through discovery. It’s when we see it for the first time and the lights come on! It’s that eureka moment and then the deep encoding that makes a difference.
And I wonder: Has that happened for you when it comes to this truth about God? Do you know this about him?…
God hates your pretense. God loves your honesty.
And it’s honesty, most fundamentally, with him. And of course that is humility. If we know the truth about ourselves, and our sin, we’re not bringing swagger to God. We don’t shake our fists at him with entitlement. If we are honest, our hearts are contrite. This is what it means to be real with God.
We’re not trying to hide. We’re not trying to make him think we’re something we’re not. We just say: God, here I am. This is me. You see it all.
Brothers and sisters, do you ever say that to him? And if you don’t, if you’re never honest with God, how heavy is that burden you carry? Aren’t you tired of constantly sewing fig leaves together?
Close to God’s Ear
One of my favorite lines from Augustine is this — and maybe you’ve heard me say this before; seems like I say it all the time — in his book Confessions, Augustine writes:
Nothing is closer to the ear of God than a confessing heart and a life lived by faith.
And see, the way this goes is that the life of faith is the life of confession. Faith in God is being honest with God. And you can’t be honest with God unless you know that he delights in it. He does. God wants you. Not your avatar; not your resume; not your fig leaves. You.
So to put it altogether: what we learn from David is that we’re worse sinners than we think. Our sin is mainly against God, and our sinfulness is pervasive. And while God despises our sin; he delights in our knowing that we are sinners because he delights in hearts that have been humbled by the truth of who we are.
Because it’s only those hearts that can (and must) seek God’s mercy.
We can (and must) seek God’s mercy.
This is the third truth we learn in Psalm 51, and it’s really the main way we relate to God. This is how the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves come together. We actually see it right away in verse 1. David starts:
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
This first petition in verse 1 is really the banner petition over this entire psalm. Every other petition, all 20 of them, fit beneath this one.
Blot out my transgressions.
Wash me.
Cleanse me.
Purge me.
Let me hear joy and gladness.
Let my bones rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins.
Create in me a clean heart!
Renew a right spirit within me!
Don’t leave me!
Open my lips to praise you.
Do good to Zion!
All of these petitions are really extensions of this one petition, this first petition: Have mercy on me, O God.
And so, we must seek God’s mercy because of who we are; and we can seek God’s mercy because of who he is.
We are sinful and desperate; God is good and abounding in mercy. And there’s really no way that we can relate to God apart from these truths.
Praying Psalm 51
I really believe that. And so for several years now, it has been my habit to pray Psalm 51 every single morning. I wake up by the mercy of God, and I quietly get to my study while everyone else is still asleep. I gotta minty toothpaste taste in my mouth, a cup of coffee on my desk, my Bible is open in front of me, and I say: Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love.
And I have to tell you about this, and I have to commend this to you, because God has never not answered that prayer.
That is a prayer that is close to his ear, as it were. God delights in our seeking his mercy. He will always hear us seek his mercy.
In fact, we have great confidence that God will always hear us seek his mercy according to his steadfast love — because what is that?
God’s Steadfast Love
God’s steadfast love is a main theme in the whole storyline of the Scripture. Some English translations put it as God’s faithful love, or God’s unfailing love. And that’s what it means. God’s steadfast love is his relentless commitment to bless his people. It’s his steadfast, unfailing resolve to show his love to his people. The way my kids have learned it is that this is God’s never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love — and where is this love most clearly seen?
At the cross of Christ. We saw that a couple months ago in Romans 5.
See, in the Old Testament, when the saints prayed according to God’s steadfast love, they prayed in hope of this love; they’d prayed according to the promise of this love, but today, we pray according to how this love was demonstrated. And that was in Jesus, when he died on the cross, when Jesus poured out his blood of the New Covenant. So our praying today according to God’s steadfast love is our praying according to the blood of Jesus.
Have mercy on me, O God, by the blood of Jesus Christ — blood that was poured out for me! Blood that covered all my sin, because yes, I am a sinner… but the blood!
Yes, my sin is worse than I often think… but the blood!
Yes, my sinfulness is pervasive… but the blood!
God despises me trying to save myself; but God delights in a contrite heart that knows its only hope is the blood of Christ.
The dying thief rejoiced to see that fountain in his day
And there may I, though vile as he,
Wash all my sins away!
My only hope — hey, sinners, our only hope — is the blood of Jesus.
If you seek the mercy of God according to his steadfast love, according to the blood of Jesus poured out for you, God will hear you, and God will give you mercy. Yes, he will.
And so, do you seek him? Would you seek the mercy of God even this morning?
On behalf of God, I invite you to do that. We’re all coming from different places, with different stories, and we all have different things going through our minds. But on this point, all of us are the exact same, right along with David: it’s that we are desperate for the mercy of God in Jesus Christ, and it is offered to us. Receive it!
If you’ve never trusted in Jesus, put your faith in him. Ask him to save you. Become a Christian. Receive the mercy of God.
If you’re here and you feel beaten down by sin, and you’re exhausted from trying to keep up appearances, if you’re tired of empty sacrifice, you can stop. Receive the mercy of God.
And that’s what brings us to this Table.
The Table
This is a table where we come together. We eat and drink together, and we’re saying, Yeah, we’re all the same in that we’re all just beggars who have found bread. The blood of Jesus is our only hope.
And that’s really this circle. This moment of communion with Jesus, together, — all that this moment represents — this is truly what shapes and influences everything else.
So this morning, if you’ve trusted in Jesus, if you, sinner, have received God’s mercy, together with our church, I invite you to eat and drink with us.
His body is the true bread. Let us serve you.
