Prayer: I pray Lord that as we look at your word today we may hear and respond to your amazing love and grace. Amen.
I was about 22 and deep in prayer at the end of an evening worship service. I felt a call of repentance and then experienced what I can only describe as a sort of vision. In my vision I was on a boat crossing over to the other side of a river where a man I believed to be Jesus saw me coming and when I arrived on the shore greeted me with such joy and exuberance spinning me around in an embrace and dance. I felt so light and happy after this. You see I had just experienced a year or so of confusion and pain over a relationship that didn’t work out, a relationship that was not a good one. It had caused me to wander from walking straight in God’s ways and it had ended with me feeling very hurt. It left me thirsty for God and needing his healing.
That night was a turning point for me, and I never looked back. I had grown up a Christian and been a ‘good girl’, I had had a conversion experience and knew of the grace of God but that night I admitted my sin anew and need to repent and I experienced forgiveness and new life.
So, I can totally picture this parable of Jesus’ from Luke 15 of the loving father running to welcome and embrace his lost or prodigal son. For I had been a prodigal daughter and can imagine the humble joy and relief of that son who was feeling oh so unworthy to be received with such lavish love from his father.
Likewise, I can join with David in Psalm 32 as he rejoices in the blessing of knowing God’s forgiveness.
When we don’t confess our sin, feelings of guilt can eat away at us. I love David’s description of his experience…
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 sapped as in the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.
Guilt is a burdensome emotion to carry around.
When I looked up the meaning of guilt I found this from the Mirriam Webster Dictionary 1 : responsibility for having done something wrong and especially something against the law He admitted his guilt. 2 : a feeling of shame or regret as a result of bad conduct.
Then there was a further definition on the ‘feelings’ of guilt.
Guilt is described as a self-conscious emotion that involves negative evaluations of the self, feelings of distress, and feelings of failure. 2 Some of the signs that you might be suffering with guilt include: Anxiety. Crying, insomnia, worry, muscle tension, upset stomach, regret, rumination on past mistakes…2 May 2021
Carrying the feelings of guilt around are definitely not good for us!
What is the treatment for this guilt? David says when he kept silent about his sin, he felt terrible, but when he acknowledged his sin then he knew the joy of forgiveness. Those feelings that impacted both his emotional, spiritual, and physical health were lifted.
We need to make sure we are not carrying false guilt around – sometimes we are good at blaming ourselves for things perhaps out of our control. But there are plenty of times when we do need to acknowledge our failures and say sorry so we can be released from our burden and move on.
David very clearly had done something wrong…he uses 4 different words – sin, deceit, transgression, and iniquity. Sin and transgression are not terms we generally use anymore – but they are in the bible. We can think of them in terms of rebelling against God, going our own way, hurting others, or even doing something that is not good for the wider society. Iniquity apparently comes from a word meaning bent or twisted, it has the nuance of perverting that which is right, of erring from the way. Deceit is perhaps the most familiar word for us today meaning to deliberately cover something up, a falsehood, hypocrisy.
David doesn’t say what his sin is – he had confessed this to God. But we do know one time that is recorded in 2 Samuel chapter 11 where David sinned, transgressed, covered up his iniquity and was deceitful! This was his adultery with Bathsheba, and consequent cover up and deceit and further sin in murdering her husband.
Psalm 51 is generally referred to as the one where David is reflecting on this sin, but this psalm 32 could just as easily fit…we can only imagine how his bones wasted away as he kept silent over this sin where he was so deceitful. God eventually sent the prophet Nathan to challenge him over this sin. There were consequences but David was forgiven by God, and he went on to continue to be King and to love and serve the Lord. How great is God’s grace. David did not deserve this.
Neither did the prodigal son who had demanded his inheritance from his father and squandered the money and lived life totally to satisfy his own desires, until realizing they brought no satisfaction at all. The son recognized what he deserved…to be treated like his father’s hired hands, but his father forgave him and celebrated his return. He accepted his genuine apology.
After confession, we do need to desire to change, to be transformed, to live differently. We need to be genuine in repentance. In Psalm 51 David prays to the Lord; create in me a clean heart, renew a right spirit within me.
God’s forgiveness really is remarkable and should cause us to rejoice and spur us on to live new lives.
What does it mean to be forgiven? It can be described as to bear, carry off, or take away a burden. Our sin is a burden which God himself bears or takes away. You are probably familiar with the term ‘scapegoat’. That is when someone takes the blame while others go free. It comes from the Hebrew sacrificial system; you can read about it in Leviticus 15. The high priest would select a goat, lay his hands on its head and confess the sins of the people, thereby, supposedly putting their sins on the goat. The goat was then sent into the wilderness as a picture of how God carried their sins away.
The sacrificial system pointed ahead to Jesus. He was the perfect and final scapegoat for sins. He bore our sins away once for all, so that when we put our trust in what Jesus did on the cross, our sins are gone.
But even before Jesus, David knew what it was like to be forgiven – as he says in this psalm he was blessed/ happy because he knew the Lord did not count his sin against him. He was free from the guilt of sin. They were no longer counted – God doesn’t store them up – they are no longer charged to the account of our lives.
Another psalm of David puts it like this. From psalm 103…
Praise the Lord, my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
2 Praise the Lord, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
3 who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
4 who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion…
8 The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
9 He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
10 he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
13 As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
14 for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
God knows us, he knows our hearts and our tendency to wander away from him, but he loves us and has compassion as a father loves his children. We are his children.
In psalm 32 look from verse 6 David encourages the faithful to turn to God while he can be found. Don’t keep silent and suffer like he did. Be released from the guilt, the burden.
Seek God, turn to him, find in him a safe hiding place where you will be protected from trouble and know deliverance. Do this before the rising of the mighty waters. These waters signify judgement. David was possibly thinking of the mighty flood in Noah’s day where the wicked were drowned, or the waters that swallowed up Pharaoh and his men as they pursued Moses and the Israelites as they crossed the red sea.
Don’t wait for the day of judgement, come to God today, confess your sin and know the blessing of his forgiveness. Don’t be stubborn like the horse or mule.
This psalm is described as a ‘maskil’ – a teaching psalm. We pick this up in the opening verses, very similar to the beatitudes that Jesus taught his disciples…Blessed or happy are dot, dot, dot. In this case happy are those who know their sins are forgiven, then in verse 8 it is like the Lord himself talking, teaching us what we should do…
I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.
Isn’t that a lovely picture? God keeps his loving eye on us, he instructs us to follow his ways because he loves us and knows that his ways and not the ways of the world are the best ways for us. He calls us to trust him, and his unfailing love will surround us. We can then rejoice and sing!
David and the prodigal son discovered the cost of following their own desires that brought only temporary pleasure. How easy it is to be tempted, to think that it won’t hurt anyone. David hurt many people in his sin, including himself as he had to live with the deceit and guilt.
We may look at David and the prodigal son’s sin and think we would never do any such thing…but our transgressions do not have to be spectacular to cause hurt and damage to others or to ourselves.
It can be easy to make excuses, justifying our actions or not considering sin at all in this day of almost ‘anything goes’. I don’t mean look for sin when it’s not there either. Sometimes we do things inadvertently. I was at TMAG on Friday and didn’t read the sign about no food or drink and I had a swig from my water bottle when a security man noticed and pointed out my misdemeanor and asked me to put it away. I quickly apologized. But not without a rush of guilt for doing the wrong thing! I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being told off!
Whether it is something we consider to be large or small, the best relief from any burden of guilt is to repent, say sorry and then you can let go and move on.
Sometimes we are not good at forgiving ourselves and find it hard to move on. If that is you, I encourage you to read again those promises of God found in both the old and new testament. But especially in the person of Jesus Christ who died that we might be forgiven. We will soon be coming to celebrate Easter and what Jesus has done for us on the cross and in rising to new life.
We need only to confess directly to Jesus to receive his grace and forgiveness, but it may also be that you need to seek forgiveness from someone else, or maybe you need to forgive someone or maybe you need to forgive yourself. Please speak to me or someone you trust if you are burdened with a sense of unforgiveness.
How happy and blessed we will feel when we truly know that our sins are forgiven. I still remember the release that night when I was 22… Though of course there has been much that has been forgiven since then!
Let’s pray: Dear God, thank you for your compassion, your mercy, your amazing grace, your love and forgiveness. Thank you for this psalm of David reminding us of the joy we find when we know that you do not count our sin against us. Thank you for the wonderful parable Jesus told of the prodigal son, illustrating how you rejoice when one of your children return to you after running off on in their own direction. May we experience that joy of living in your grace, singing songs of deliverance and thankfulness.
In response let’s say together now the prayer of approach from the prayer book, that I have been including during this season of lent, and then we’ll pause, before the prayer of confession.
Prayer of Approach:
We do not presume to come to your table, merciful Lord,
trusting in our own righteousness,
but in your manifold and great mercies.
We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table.
But you are the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy.
Grant us therefore, gracious Lord,
so to eat the flesh of your dear son Jesus Christ,
and to drink his blood,
That we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen