Lord, as we have just been singing, so we now pray that you would open our eyes, that from your law, great wonders we may see, O Lord. For Jesus' sake, amen. Psalm 51, and we'll read the title of the psalm as well, because it's important. For the director of music, a psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba. Have mercy on me, O Lord, according to your unfailing love. According to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions, wash away all my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge. Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Surely you desire truth in the inner parts. You teach me wisdom in the inmost place. Cleanse me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you. Save me from blood guilt, O God, the God who saves me, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. O Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in sacrifice or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. In your good pleasure, make Zion prosper. Build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then there will be righteous sacrifices, whole burnt offerings to delight you. Then boules will be offered on your altar. Amen. Now, I've told you before that it's It's not good to start a sermon with an apology, so I apologise for doing this. But let me apologise for stating the obvious, that physical birth comes before physical life. That's why a postnatal ward is a very noisy place with newborn babies announcing their arrival on planet Earth by crying out when they're hungry. by burping loudly to get rid of wind, and I'm always amazed at the decibels a small baby about this size can produce when they burp, or that contented sound that babies make when she's asleep after a good feed, or the noise of vociferous protest. I do not want my nappy changed. It's a noisy place and in some ways it's good because the noise says there's life there, there's physical life there and physical life comes after physical birth. Last time we started to look at how the gospel, the good news that centres around who Jesus is and what he has done and what he's doing and what he will do, how that gospel impacts people. We're thinking about what it means to be a gospel church for our community. And we thought last time about being born again. And just as physical birth leads to spiritual life, so spiritual new birth leads to spiritual new life. And the initial way in which the gospel impacts people's lives is that Being spiritually born again leads to repentance and faith in Jesus. And next Sunday, we're going to think about faith, trusting in Jesus. And today we're going to explore about what the Bible has to say about repentance. And our entry point is Psalm 51, because there's probably no section in the Bible that shows what's involved in repentance like the Psalm 51. Now you'll know that only some psalms have titles to them, titles that explain the context of their psalm and Psalm 51 is one of those minority psalms. It has a title and its title informs us that it's a prayer of repentance that David prayed after the shameful incident that's described in 2 Samuel 11 had been exposed by Nathan, God's prophet, in 2 Samuel 12. Let me fill in the backstory to remind you. It has to do with David's affair with Bathsheba, an affair that was inexcusable and extremely ugly. His decision to delegate the conduct of the war against the Ammonites to Joab, his military chief of staff, may have been a matter of laziness. His idle stroll on the rooftop after a nap during a time of war was certainly inconsistent with his responsibilities as a king. But his predatory sexual exploitation of Bathsheba was shamefully despicable. And had matters ended there, it would have been disturbing and ugly enough. But what follows is even more sickening and sordid. Bathsheba sent word to David that she was pregnant. David instantly recalled Uriah the Hittite, her husband, from the front line, obviously hoping that he would sleep with Bathsheba and no one would subsequently suspect that her child had been sired by another person. What matters, as we know, didn't work out is how David had planned and remember how after he inquired how the war was going, David sent Uriah home to his wife, but Uriah was a man of honour and he refused to go home to Bathsheba while the soldiers under his command were roughing it on the battlefield. So the next day, David got Uriah drunk, hoping that wine would do what his diplomacy had failed to deliver. But Uriah was not drunk enough to change his convictions, and he slept in the servants' quarters. And then things took a very sinister turn. David wrote to Joab suggesting that Uriah be exposed to maximum danger on the battlefield, clearly hinting to Joab that he wanted Uriah killed. And what happened next is history. Uriah dies in battle, and after a fake period of mourning, David takes Bathsheba to be his latest wife. David thought he had got away with it. How wrong he was. God saw everything David did. And in 2 Samuel 11, 27, we come across those very ominous words, as far as David was concerned. The thing that David had done displeased the Lord. And God sent Nathan, his prophet, to dramatically confront David about his sin. And you'll no doubt recall the story Nathan told David about the rich man who had hundreds of sheep and the poor man who had only one pet lamb. And when someone came to visit the rich man, the rich man killed the poor man's lamb and served it up for dinner rather than killing one of his own sheep. And David was furious when he heard the story and he shouted, the man who did this deserves to die. And Nathan points at David and he says, you are the man. And all of a sudden David realises the full horror of what he had done and he goes away and he pours out his heart to God in repentance. Now that was a longer than usual introduction but we need to know the back story to Psalm 51. It's written against the backdrop of a man repenting of a sin. And because it was, it explains very clearly what's involved in repentance, the steps that need to go through when we repent. And Sam, 51's teaching about repentance can be summarised in a number of statements and here's the first one. Repentance means to realise sin's seriousness. To realise sin's seriousness. In verses 1 to 3, David uses three different Hebrew words to describe sin and each of them focuses on a different characteristic of sin. The first one's found at the end of verse two, and it draws attention to the fact that sin is failure. It's the word sin. That's what David uses for what he did. And in the Bible, as you know, the word sin means to miss the target. You remember how Paul describes sin. in Romans 3, 23 it is, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Sin is falling short, it's missing the target, it's failure, it's knowing what to do, the right thing to do, but not doing it. And David realises that he ought not to have done what he did, and he failed to do what is right. And when we think of sin, we tend to think of the bad stuff that we do. You know, if you ask somebody out in the street, what's sin? And they say, oh, you don't, you don't, you know, it's doing this and doing that and doing the other thing. But in the Bible, the majority of what it talks about is sin, is failure. as known as sins of omission. We know what's right, but we don't do it, and David admits that too. And then at the beginning of verse two, David describes sin as inward corruption. He uses the word iniquity to explain what he did. He's thinking about that inward corruption, that inward bias that he has that caused him to behave so disgracefully. Now he's not downplaying the outward consequences of his sin and how horrible it was, but what he's saying is this, that his outward actions were not really the real problem. The real problem was his inward corruption. that caused him to sin. And David has got hold of something very important. It was not his acts of sin that made him a sinner, but it was his condition of being a sinner that made him sin. He grasped that he was not a sinner because he sinned, but that he sinned because he was a sinner. And that's why He says in verse five, surely I have been a sinner from birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. From the minute he was conceived and was born, he had this inward corruption, this iniquity, this bias towards sin. But David's not finished with his description of how serious sin is because at the end of verse 1 he points out that sin is rebellion. Transgression is the word he uses and that word highlights that sin is ultimately rebellion against God's authority, defiantly refusing to do what God commands. Someone I knew was once in a shop and in front of him in the queue was a man with his son. And the boy was bored and he started to mess around. Behave yourself, the father said. But the boy ignored him. And again the father said, behave yourself. And again the boy ignored him. And finally the father started to threaten him. If you don't start to behave yourself, you're going to be in trouble when you get home. And at that the boy turned to his father, looked him in the eye and said to his father, get lost. My friend was shocked by that. On the surface, it appeared that David's sin was a sin against himself because the Bible teaches that sexual sins are sins against our own bodies. On the surface, David's sin was definitely a sin against Bathsheba, whom he treated as an object to be exploited rather than a woman to be treated with honour and respect. On the surface, David's sin was unquestionably a sin against Uriah, whom he had disposed of callously when he became an embarrassment to him. However, David came to see while all that was true, he came to see that the crux of the matter was that he had sinned against God. He knew God's word. You shall not covet your neighbour's wife. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not kill. You shall not bear false witness. David knew that, but David looked God in the eye and said to God, get lost. And that's why he prays in verse four, against you and you only have I sinned. And he realises this about sin, seriousness, it's failure, it's inward corruption, it's rebellion against God. And he's telling us that this is where we take the first step on the road to repentance, realising sin's seriousness. We stop making excuses as to why we have not done what we know we should have done. We stop blaming everyone else for our failures. We put our hands up and say, no one forced me to do that. I am responsible for my actions and I was wrong. We live in a society that is always claiming to be the victim. You know, I did what I did because of the pressure that society's out-of-date values put on me. I did what I did because of my oppressive family and church upbringing. We blame everybody. Society, no education, lack of money. We blame everybody. We're the victim. But if we see the seriousness of sin, we stop doing that. We realize that the problem is not outside of us. The real problem is within us. We have this bias towards sin, which actually propels us to do these sinful things. When it comes to our failure, we need to stop seeing ourselves as victims and start to realise that we are in fact the culprits. We need to face up to the real ugliness of our sin, that we've told God who has lovingly shown us the way to live, a way that brings benefit and dignity and enrichment to our lives. We've told God to just get lost. We don't want anything to do with what he wants. So there's the first matter involved in repentance. It's to realise sin's seriousness. Here's the second matter. It's to confess specific sin, to confess specific sin. Now, when David confesses a sin to God, he doesn't deal in vague generalities. He's personal. The personal pronoun my appears five times in verses one to three. He's specific. He mentions particular sins. especially what he calls at the start of verse 14, blood guilt. It's a term that refers to the specific sins of murder and adultery, which according to God's law deserve the death penalty. Repentance is not a matter of confessing in some general way that we've sinned. You know, of saying, of course I'm a sinner, who isn't? It's not that at all. And repentance involved being personal and specific about our failures and rebellion against God. And neither is David simply admitting his sin. He's confessing it. Our society doesn't see any difference between admitting sin and feeling sorry for sin and confessing sin. According to our society, they're all the same thing. but according to the Bible, they're not the same thing. Admitting our sin and having remorse for our sin, feeling sorry for our sin, in that, the focus is on us, how we feel. When it comes to confession, the focus is on God. and not on us, because in the Bible, to confess sin literally means to say the same thing about sin as God says about sin. One of the incredible things about David's behaviour during this whole time was how for months and perhaps even for the best part of a year, he refused to realise and recognise that he had done anything really wrong. But when he realised the seriousness of his sin and saw it as God saw it, he started to say the same thing about sin as God did. This is why he prays in verse four, I have done what is evil in your sight. Before he downplayed what he had done, it was a matter, you know, that kings could sort out easily. but now he calls it the same as God calls it. It's evil. And that's the second step on the road to repentance, confessing specific sin, to say the same things about our actions as God says about it, calling them out as wicked and evil and inexcusable and not trying to minimise them or play them down. We don't simply admit we've made mistakes like everyone else. And it's not just even a matter of feeling remorse for our actions and the impact that they've had. Above everything else, repentance involves us confessing our specific sins, saying the same thing about them as God says about them. If realising sin's seriousness and confessing specific sins are the first two matters, involved in repentance. The third matter is to turn away from our sin, to turn away from our sin. For some people, repentance can be an emotional thing. But according to the Bible, repentance is not primarily a matter of our emotions. how we feel, but it's fundamentally a matter of our will, what we do. The Bible tells us that repentance is a command that God gives to us. When Paul speaks to the Athenian philosophers in Acts 17, he says this about God, God has commanded everyone everywhere to repent. Now, a command has to do with our will. Are we going to do it or are we not going to do it? It doesn't really matter how we feel. You know, when you were children, you maybe didn't feel like going up to bed, but when you were told, go to bed, you did what you were told. It's not a matter of, It's a matter of our will. Do we do what God says or do we not? It's not a matter of having a great emotional experience. Repentance can be emotional, but it's not about that. It's about obeying God. And I think this is something that has bothered me a little bit since I've been in the free church. and maybe it's something to do with Highland culture as well, maybe I shouldn't say things like that, but we maybe need to take this aboard. I've talked to quite a number of people from that background who've told me that they're not Christians, they're not church members, and the reason is that they haven't had a big emotional repentance experience. Let me run it past you once again. Repentance, according to the Bible, is not primarily a matter of our emotions, but fundamentally a matter of our will. You do not necessarily have to feel something big and highly charged before you repent. You have to do something. You have to turn away from your sin. And as we'll see in a moment, ask God for forgiveness. We need to remember that and understand that. You know, people say to me, I'm not a Christian because I don't feel that I should become a Christian. It's nothing to do with how you feel. Jesus says, repent and believe the gospel. It's a command. It's what we do. And repentance is what we do. And one of the things we do is we turn away from sin. And you can see that repentance is fundamentally a matter of our will, what we do. From what David writes in Psalm 51, he was sorrowful and sad, but he goes beyond how he feels to talk about what he wants to do. He wants to be a different man in the future. So we ask God to give him an inward willingness to want what God wants and a renewed ability to do what God wants him to do. He's ready to turn his back on sin and launch out on a new kind of life. And that's why he prays in verse 10, create in me a pure heart of God and renew a willing spirit within me. When I was a boy, I grew up in rural Nigeria and there were no washing machines and the way the Nigerian women washed their clothes In those days, they took their dirty clothes down to a stream and there they would bash them against stones to beat the dirt out of them. And as a small boy, I used to watch them and think to myself, if I did that with my clothes, my dad would be after me. But I thought they would rip their clothes to shreds, but they didn't. Instead, they got them spotlessly clean. And in verse 2, David prays, wash away all my iniquity. The verb literally means to pummel clean. David wants his life to have a thorough scrub. He wants it to be different. He wants God to do something radical about his sin. He wants to be done with his sin, to turn away from it. And that's what we have to do when we repent. And yet, I suspect it's at this point that most of us stumble on the road of repentance, because we want to experience God's forgiveness, but we also want to hold on to our sin. We want the best of both. But we can't have both God's forgiveness and our sin. We have to turn away from one or the other. And in repentance, we turn away from our sin. and we turn towards God. Because the fourth matter involved in repentance is to ask God for forgiveness. David is aware that what he has done is truly awful. So he throws himself in God's mercy. Have mercy on me, O God. Blot out my transgressions. Wash away my iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin. He knows he doesn't deserve God's forgiveness. So he asked God to deal with him, not on the basis of what he deserved, but, verses one and two, according to your own failing love, according to your great compassion. And what did David discover when he threw himself in God's mercy? God didn't reject him. Verse 17, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. So Psalm 51 is not only a psalm of repentance, it's also a psalm of restoration because David discovered that God has mercy on those who repent and ask for his forgiveness. And the final step then on the road to repentance is asking for God's forgiveness. We come to God and ask him to show us mercy. And when we do this, we discover that God doesn't despise us, but he forgives us. And we're amazed, and we say, how is this possible? Something that our culture can't understand. How is it possible for God to forgive people who sin so badly? Like David, we deserve to be punished for our sin, but God forgives us, so how can he do it? Well, here's the reason. It's because one Friday, one of David's descendants, one who had done absolutely nothing to deserve death, was put to death on a cross. And on that day, Jesus bore the punishment that should have been ours, paying in full the death penalty for our sins so that God could justly forgive us when we come to Him in repentance and ask Him to show mercy. So what is repentance? It's realising sin's seriousness, confessing specific sin, turning away from sin and asking God for his forgiveness. And just to get you back into the Presbyterian way of thinking after seeing the Creed, the Shorter Catechism summarises it very well. Question 87. What is repentance unto life? Repentance unto life is a saving grace by which a sinner, being truly aware of his sinfulness, understands the mercy of God in Christ, grieves for and hates his sin, and turns from them, fully intending and striving for new obedience. And folks, we want to be a gospel church. And if we want to be a gospel church, then we're, we're going to have to realise that the Bible's teaching of how the gospel impacts people in terms of repentance is something that we must unashamedly believe. Because there are many aspects of what the Bible says about repentance that are hated, hated, by the small minority who want to bully and intimidate our society into adopting its agenda. Douglas Murray is a journalist. He's not a Christian. In fact, he's a gay atheist, but he's written a very insightful book called The Madness of Crowds. And in it he states this, one of the most significant building blocks of contemporary morality is that people cannot change. Think about the identity politics that dominate Scottish politics. Think about the sexual morality that is out there and people are asked to say it's normal. It all comes from the fact that people cannot change. That you're born the way you're born, and that you're locked into that for the rest of your life. You cannot change. And the reason why people cannot change is, and this is unscientific, is because they're They're hardwired that way, that's just the way they are. So people have to decide for themselves who they are. And once they've decided who they are, no one, but no one, is even allowed to suggest that they can change. Nevermind actually encourage them and help them to change. And just open up, listen to the news, and that's all over it. Can't even suggest that people change. And they're hostile to the very thought of change. But the Bible's teaching smashes head on into that lie. The lie that you are what you are and you cannot change. The Bible says, yes, you must change because you're in rebellion against God, who is the creator king, and he commands you to repent. And if you don't repent, you will end up in hell. And the Bible says you can change because through Jesus' death and the Holy Spirit's activity, God has made it possible for people to repent. And these people Folks are going to try to shut us down and shout us down and take us to court and to categorise the Bible's teaching as hate speech. Probably what I've just said is hate speech. But no matter what they do or say, if we are to be a gospel church, we must unashamedly believe repentance means changing one's mind. so that one's views, values, goals and ways are changed and one's whole life is lived differently. And if we want to be a gospel church for our community, the Bible's teaching about how the gospel impacts people in terms of repentance is something we must uncompromisingly announce to our community. Repentance was one of the points of Jesus' first sermon, Mark 115. And repentance is one of the strands of the message Jesus commanded his church to take to the world, Luke 24, 45. And if we are to be a gospel church, we must uncompromisingly announce to those in our community who are not yet Christians that they must repent of their sin. and ask for God's forgiveness because they cannot become Christians without repenting. And we're also to uncompromisingly announce to those in our community who already are Christians that they too must repent. That Christians must repent because the Christian life is a life of continual repentance because each day the Christian sins, so each day the Christian needs to repent. So let me conclude by asking each of you this question. In order that you might experience Jesus' salvation for the first time, or in order that you may grow and progress in your Christian life, have you repented of your sins? Let's pray for a moment. Oh Lord, the King who commands everyone everywhere to repent, to realise sin's seriousness, to turn from sin and to ask for your forgiveness. Give us all that we need in order to obey your command. We thank you for your promise that if in repentance we confess our sins on the basis of Jesus' death on the cross, you will forgive our sins. Enable us to initially and continually to repent so that by your grace we might experience the eternal life you promise. to the broken and contrite in heart. And we ask this in and through Jesus our Lord. Amen.