You take your Bibles and turn this morning to Psalm 32, Psalm 32, as we prepare ourselves to come to the Lord's supper. Psalm 32. Hear the word of God. Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered, Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night, your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my iniquity, I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found. Surely in the rush of great waters, they shall not reach him. You are a hiding place for me. You preserve me from trouble. You surround me with shouts of deliverance. I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will counsel you with my eye upon you. Be not like a horse or a mule without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you. Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord. Be glad in the Lord. Rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in the heart. Amen. So far, God's word. Let's pray. Lord, open our eyes this morning that we may behold wonderful things from your word. We pray that you will speak to us and teach us. Open our eyes so that as we come To the Lord's supper today, we might do so as those who understand their sin, but also understand the gracious provision for that sin, which you have made in Jesus Christ. And we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. I have a friend who is a member of the Lutheran church. He, loves to worship at his congregation because he loves to hear his pastor, who is one of the old time European Lutherans who likes to throw out a little Latin and German in the middle of every service. He loves to hear his pastor say absolvo at the end of the prayer of confession. If you don't know what that means, in Lutheran churches, the service always begins with the people confessing their sins out loud to God in unison. And after this corporate prayer of confession, the pastor raises his hands and says, absolvo, I absolve you. The pastor sees himself as a Christ representative at that moment, declaring that Jesus Christ does indeed forgive the sins of those who confess their sins, who repent of those sins, and who seek God's mercy in Christ. Presbyterians have been kind of reluctant since the beginning to say things like absolvo. We don't think ministers particularly have that kind of authority. But we do believe that God does forgive sins and that he pronounces his forgiveness on all those who truly do repent. It doesn't take a minister to say, I absolve you. We believe that God directly in his word makes such proclamations. One of the glories of gathering for worship on the Lord's day is not simply to be entertained by professional singers or to have a light and smoke show. where we find our kind of spirits lifted up a bit. But we come because we know that we're sinners and we know that we need to hear the word of God. The word of God that says, I absolve you from heaven. The word of God that says, Jesus Christ has paid for your sins. He has already atoned for those sins. Believe the gospel. This is the good news that comes from God. And this is the theme of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, that people sin and that God graciously provides for their remedy by his own power. Psalm 32 is no exception to that. It's one of the seven penitential Psalms that we have in the Old Testament book of Psalms. And in each of these seven Psalms, the Psalmist comes and confesses some particular sin. We know the sin, for example, in Psalm 51, where David is in the aftermath of his sin with Bathsheba and the the immorality that was taking place in his own life there. Here, David's not quite as particular. Maybe this also refers to the aftermath of his experience with Bathsheba and the subsequent conspiracy to murder her husband. But we do know that in this particular Psalm, David is singing not so much about the devastation of sin, although that's part of it, he's singing about the glory and the joy and the delight of knowing that God has put away his sin. It's the excitement and the deep-rooted, intense feeling that comes from faith when we grasp the idea that God knows how much we have sinned just as much or even better than we do, and yet God, knowing my sin, has still decided that he will put it aside, that he will not judge me according to the depth of my sin, but that he will treat me with mercy. and compassion. You can't help but notice the joyful sense of the psalm at the beginning and the end. Verse one and verse two both begin with the word blessed which sometimes is translated as happy is the man. or to be delighted or to be rejoiced over is the man whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Oh, how happy and delighted and joyful is the man against whom the Lord does not count his iniquity. and in whose spirit there is no deceit. And look at the end where in verse 11, the hearer is commanded, be glad in the Lord, rejoice, O righteous, shout for joy, all you in upright in heart. Why are we to shout to God? Why are we to sing loudly during the hymns? Why are we to be with big smiles on our faces when we worship God? It's because the Lord has taken our sins and he's laid them on the Lord Jesus Christ And he has not counted those sins against us. How can we not rejoice? How can we not be glad? How can we sing our hymns like a dirge? And how can we mumble our way through the prayer and the creed when we realize that God knows exactly how sinful we've been? And he doesn't say, oh, it's OK. He says, instead, I forgive you. That's the delight of being in covenant fellowship with God. It's the idea that God knows everything about us inside and out and that he still saves us. have in this psalm really three distinct parts if you look at it. There is the blessedness of being forgiven in the first two verses where David tells us that God covers all of our sins. He has three different words here that he uses, transgression, sin, iniquity. One of those words tends to describe just the general sinfulness that all of us have, that kind of disposition or bent for sin that dwells in our broken hearts. One of them describes specific acts of transgression or breaking the law. Those are the kinds of sins that we can confess at the end of the day where we say things like, Lord, I shouldn't have spoken to so-and-so the way I did, or Lord, I really feel bad about my anger getting out of hand this afternoon when I couldn't get the truck to start or something like that. And then the third word refers to just willful disobedience. Those times when we know what God wants us to do and we decide we're going to do the wrong thing anyway. Maybe it's the love of money that drives us or the love of success. Maybe it's hormones at times. All kinds of things cause us here and there to do things that we know are displeasing to God and yet we just willfully do them anyway. Sort of like little children who know what the rules are and who understand what the punishment for breaking those rules is going to be. They just go headlong into that disobedience. Adults do that too. Even Christians do that. And David says here, the glory of the gospel is that whatever our sin is, however it looks to us, big or small, petty or heinous, whether it's been a pattern of our lives or something we've just come upon, if we will confess that sin to the Lord and we will repent of that sin and seek to put it away, God in his great mercy will cover that sin. That's the word he uses. It's the same word that we find used in Leviticus to describe the sacrifices, the atonement of the sacrifices covers over all of our sins so that you can't really even see that it was there. The church in Collins recently had some old dead and damaged trees removed and they were massive trees. And some of them were in a rather precarious position. So we hired an expert to come up from the Hattiesburg area to remove the trees. And it was fascinating to watch him. He can remove a tree right over a house or over a fence and never touch a thing. And when he gets done, he cleans up better than anybody I've ever seen. He grinds the stumps and then he rakes the yard and he does everything around it so it's not just the tree spot. When he's done, it's hard to tell there'd ever even been trees there. I mean, just after a couple of days. It's indistinguishable. The whole job, which was to surgically remove something that was damaged and bad has been done so well that it's just covered over and you can almost forget that it was there. And that's the kind of idea that the psalmist is talking about here, that God so completely and so graciously and so powerfully deals with his people in covering their sins, that no matter how big and diseased and terrible those sins were, He is willing to so cover over them that he doesn't see them anymore. Then David uses the word count as well. Verse two, the Lord does not count our sins against us. If you have one of the older translations, it may say something like impute, and that's really a good word. It's the idea that God does not hold our sins against us. He does not hold a record of those sins up to us. How many times have you ever had someone say, I forgive you? for what you've done. I really do. I forgive you completely. But then the next time you mess up, they'll always say, now remember when? And they'll remind you that, oh, I forgive you. But they keep bringing it back up over and over and over and over and over again as a kind of club. And David says, God doesn't do that against his children. He doesn't count those uh, iniquities against us either now, nor will he account them against us on the day of judgment. When he forgives us, he forgives us completely. He forgives us permanently. Uh, he forgives us as those whose sins are already paid for in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So there is this joy, this blessedness that comes from knowing how God works. He works powerfully, personally, and he works permanently in our lives through his son. When you come to verses three through five, you have the relief that follows upon this. We can all identify, I suppose, with verses three and four, where David talks about the days before he confessed his sin, when he was still living in sin. He knew he had offended God. He knew he had broken the covenant. And he says, but I had been silent about it. And my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long, day and night, your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Some people read these two verses and say, these are physical things. These aren't spiritual conditions that David's describing, but I think he is describing a spiritual condition. We all know what worry and anxiety and fear and guilt can do to us, don't we? It can leave us depressed, it can leave us anxious, it can leave us physically sick. Our consciences rip us apart on the inside and our stomachs get upset and our heart races and we get anxiety and we face all kinds of pressures that leave us in bad condition at work and unable to perform even sometimes the most basic duties of life, sin can do that to us. And that's what David's talking about. He's reminding us that even though the sin is of the soul, it can often bear very debilitating physical consequences. There's been a lot in the newspaper the last several weeks about opioid addictions and how many people in Mississippi and other states are addicted to various kinds of prescription drugs. And many of these people started off in a very lawful and a reasonable way. They had some kind of physical problem. And the doctor prescribed what he thought was a safe remedy for it. But sometimes these people realize that the biggest problems they have weren't physical at all. They were the problems of the soul. They were spiritual problems. And they begin to rely on those medications to try to remove the damage and the blots that they feel deep down within themselves. The medicines may dull the pain for a while, but they can't do away with the pain. Only God can do that. And David understood that after a while, that's why he says in verse five, I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover up my iniquity any longer is the idea. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. I'll be open with him. I'll just admit that I have failed, that what I'm doing is wrong in his sight. That's part of repentance, isn't it? It's admitting that we have done wrong before God. It's admitting that maybe what we're still doing is wrong before God. And it's admitting that we have to be personally responsible for that sin. We can't just say, well, everybody else does it, or I just want to blame somebody else's problems, or I'm trying to help someone. If it's sin, it's sin. And David says, I just had to fess up to what I was doing. And I admitted my sin to the Lord. And the glory is at the end of verse five, you forgave the iniquity of my sin. That's all you asked of me was that I would be honest and open and ask for your mercy. You will surely give it, David says. When you come down to verse, this is eight through 11, you find that there's also a certain kind of fruit that comes from this being forgiven. Bible scholars are a little bit concerned about verses 8 and 9 as to who the speaker is. Some think this is God speaking. I will instruct you. I will teach you in the way you should go, David. I will counsel you with my eye upon you. Don't be like a horse or a mule without understanding, which must be curbed with bit or bridle, or it won't stay near to you, as though God is kind of warning David here. Now you know where you've been, you know what you've done, you know what I've done for you in forgiving you, don't go back to your old ways. It's kind of a stop sign for David. You be careful, you endured at the end, don't quit now kind of thinking. But to me that sounds a little bit out of context. I tend to agree with those who say that verses 8 and 9 are David warning other members of his family and his friends and the citizens of his kingdom Let me tell you, now that I have been forgiven, let me instruct you and teach you. Let me tell you how to go about things. Let me counsel you. Don't be like the horse or mule without understanding. When I was teaching school, just about the time it was spring break, and then prom season, and senior party season, and all those kinds of things that come along with the end of school. My regular Friday departure speech was, okay, I know what y'all are doing this time of year, I know that's part of it, so let me just give you one bit of wisdom. And by the end of the year, they could all just sort of recite it with me, and it was, Don't do something stupid. That was the last words that always got out of my room every Friday. Just don't go do something stupid. And that's sort of what David's doing here, I think. He's saying, you know, I know mercy. I know forgiveness. And I'm urging you, don't be stupid. Don't try to hide your sin from God. Don't act as if it's no big deal. Don't think that you can get away with it. Because we know that many are the sorrows of the wicked. What I want you to understand is that steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord. He writes in verse 10. I want you to understand that there is no better thing you will do today than repent of your sins and to ask God's forgiving grace. And then to believe his word and live in the joy of his forgiveness. So there is this concern for others. There's this testimony of faith, but then there is this call to worship that sums everything up in verse 11. David continues to talk to his friends and family and neighbors. And he says, I want you all to be glad in the Lord. I want you all to rejoice and to shout for joy. that the God of Israel is a God of mercy and compassion. He's not a God who's seeking to pour out his wrath on all who offend him. He is full of love and kindness and steadfast mercy. But not, not for those who continue to rebel against him. Not for those who act as if he isn't there. Not for those who pretend that God's just the kind grandfather who will forgive everybody in the end because he's just so nice and sweet. David says, what I want you to understand is that there is forgiveness, but forgiveness comes with repentance. It comes with confession. It comes with admitting our sins. And you'll never know the great delight of God's forgiveness. until you come to him and say, I am a sinner. I am unable to save myself. I cannot change myself. I know that I deserve nothing but your wrath. And you hear God say, absolvo. I absolve you. I forgive you. The Lord's Supper is part of that announcement of forgiveness. In the eating of the bread and drinking of the cup, we don't really do anything extraordinarily odd. There's nothing eerie or mysterious about what's in the cups or what's in the plates. They're common, ordinary things. But as we mentioned last Tuesday night, what makes them so extraordinary is the word of God that comes with them. where Jesus tells us, this is my body that is broken for you. This is the cup of the new covenant, which is shed for the remission of your sins. Drink all of you of it. Believe my promise. Confess your sins to me. I will forgive you absolvo. I will declare that you are mine. I will cover your sins and count them against you no more. Let's pray.