Our text this afternoon is the Word of God as we find it summarized in Lord's Day 51. Lord's Day 51 of the Catechism, which you can find on page 563 of your Book of Praise. Here we read as follows. What is the fifth petition? That being the fifth petition of the Lord's Prayer. And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. That is, for the sake of Christ's blood, do not impute to us, wretched sinners, any of our transgressions, nor the evil which still clings to us. As we also find this evidence of your grace in us, that we are fully determined wholeheartedly to forgive our neighbor. After the ministry of the word, we'll sing from Psalm 51, stands as four, five, and six. Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, today we've come to the fifth petition of the Lord's Prayer. forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And if there's one thing that we've noticed about the Lord's Prayer so far, it's that we don't really grasp what these things mean in their fullness. You get that with the Ten Commandments too. It's so simple, so compact, and yet so deep that you never really get to the bottom of it. And that's why we need to go back to it every year, and every year grow a little bit in our understanding of these things. The fifth petition is like that as well. It says, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors, and you would expect that there would be some kind of an awareness of sin in order for you to pray that. And where there is awareness of sin, you would think there should also be grief over sin. But the fact is, I think for most of us, we don't engage with this petition on that level, certainly not when we pray the Lord's Prayer. I think a lot of us, myself included, don't really have that sense of grief. We have maybe a sense of, of regret, but not grief. And if there's no grief over sin, then what does this petition really mean to us? Can it even mean anything? If there's no grief over sin, then how is this any different from what you say when you bump into someone at the grocery store? And I mean physically bump into them, maybe at the checkout line or something. You say, oh, excuse me, I'm sorry. And you apologize, right? But it's more of a social politeness than anything meaningful. There's no real meaning behind that kind of a statement. You're not going to feel a lot of emotions beyond maybe some embarrassment. And probably when we pray the Lord's Prayer and we come to the fifth petition, it's not actually all that different for us. We don't do a whole lot better. So the catechism wants to help us in that. The catechism wants to bring us to a deeper understanding of what it actually means when you pray, forgive us our debts. So this afternoon we're going to spend some time examining the fifth petition in light of grief over sin. So I may bring to you the gospel this afternoon summarized as follows, that you cannot genuinely pray for forgiveness without experiencing grief over sin. And there's two kinds of grief, your own and that of others. Or rather, that's grief over your own sin and grief over the sins of others. So you cannot genuinely pray for forgiveness without experiencing grief over sin, your own sin and the sin of others. Now a big part of Lord's Day 51 is spent raising our awareness of sin because you cannot pray for forgiveness of sins until you understand what sin all includes. And Lord's Day 51 does three things here, does three things. It impresses on us the seriousness of sin, the misery of sin, and the ongoing power of sin. First of all, the Catechism impresses on us the seriousness of sin. It does that already right from the very first line when it says, for the sake of Christ's blood. And you notice that that comes before anything else. It's almost as if that is our starting point. Before we talk about anything else in this petition, we're going to talk about for the sake of Christ's blood. There's nothing else in all this world that gives you the right to ask for forgiveness of sins beyond the blood of Christ. So it's a reminder in that sense, but it also serves to impress on us the seriousness of sin. That phrase, for the sake of Christ's blood, that puts you right at the foot of the cross. Right in the opening lines of this petition, you're at the foot of the cross, you're at Golgotha, in the middle of Good Friday when the Lord was crucified. That phrase, the sake of Christ's blood, that reminds us of the horrific punishment that Christ suffered for our sins. And all of that is summarized in that one word, blood. It's a very graphic word, a visual word, and it conjures up a whole range of related ideas. It shows, reminds us of the Old Testament, for example. God's hatred of sin. Remember what it says in Hebrews, without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. Sin deserves death. Sin is when you turn your back on God and you go your own way. And that means you may no longer walk on God's green earth or feel God's sun on your face or look up at his blue sky because God owns all of those things. The earth has the Lord's and everything in it and he will not give it to people that shake their fist in his face. So blood reminds us of the seriousness of sin and about how much God hates sin. But then it also tells us about God's love for sinners, right? Tells us about His grace because it says, for the sake of Christ's blood, do not do what? Do not impute to us any of our transgressions. To impute means to ascribe or to credit something to someone. So when it says, do not impute to us any of our transgressions, what it really means is, do not ascribe to us, do not attribute to us, do not credit us with any of our transgressions, any of our sins. Instead, those sins are imputed to Jesus Christ. And in the words of Lord's Day 23, God, without any merit of my own, out of mere grace, imputes to me the perfect satisfaction righteousness, holiness of Christ. So the very first line of Lord's Day 51 already has the whole gospel squeezed into it, right at the beginning. It impresses us with the seriousness of sin. That's the first thing that it does. And Lord's Day 51 also impresses us with the misery of sin, calls us wretched sinners in the next line. What does it mean to be wretched? All it means to be miserable, unhappy, heartbroken, sorrowful, distressed, forlorn, pitiful, pathetic, helpless, despicable. In other words, not what we should be. When you pray the fifth petition, you're saying, that's me. That is me. And the strange part is that it doesn't even bother us all that much. I mean, we've all memorized this for catechism, or most of us anyway. Try to recite that. How often do you actually think about what it means? These words that you know. It doesn't bother us all that much. And we can always find someone else who is worse off, right? So we don't actually grieve what we have become under the influence of sin. And that's why we find it difficult to pray this petition. Because we're not all that impressed with the misery of sin, actually. And the third means that the Catechism uses to raise our awareness of sin is by reminding us of the ongoing power of sin. Most of the time when we think about sin, we think about things that have happened in the past. And the Catechism says, no, no, this is still a current problem in my life. It refers to the evil which still clings to us, right? Any of our transgressions and the evil which still clings to us. Now you may wonder if God forgives sin, then how can evil cling to me still? Well, the canons of Dort answer that question much better than I can. So let's turn together to the canons of Dort, chapter 5. I want you to read the canons of Dort, chapter 5, articles 1 and 2 with you. That's page 582. Canas of Dort chapter 5 articles 1 and 2. Article 1 says, it's entitled The Regenerate, those who have been regenerated by God, not free from indwelling sin. Those whom God, according to His purpose, calls into the fellowship of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and regenerates by His Holy Spirit, He certainly sets free from the dominion and slavery of sin, but not entirely in this life from the flesh and the body of sin. Therefore, daily sins of weakness spring up and defects cling to even the best works of the saints. These are for them a constant reason to humble themselves before God to flee to the crucified Christ, to put the flesh to death more and more through the spirit of prayer and by holy exercises of godliness, and to long and strive for the goal of perfection until at last, delivered from this body of death, they reign with the Lamb of God in heaven. So that's what the Catechism is referring to. when it reminds us of the ongoing power of sin. It is basically in a more compact form saying exactly the same thing as what the canons of Dort say here in chapter five, articles one and two. Now everything the catechism has told us so far this afternoon is meant to raise our awareness of our own sinfulness because you cannot pray for forgiveness of sins unless you also have an awareness of sins. And with that awareness comes grief. So what does that look like in practice? Well, sometimes the best way to understand something is by looking at what it is not. So our reading this afternoon is a case study in false grief. To understand the gravity of what King Saul did, you need to understand what God wanted from him and why. In the opening verses of our reading from 1 Samuel 15, Samuel tells Saul that he needs to attack the Amalekites and devote them to destruction. And the technical term being used here in the original language means to dedicate something to the Lord by destroying it completely. You see, in the Old Testament there's only two ways, only two ways to be dedicated to the Lord. The first way is by being set apart for His service, being holy. The second way is by being utterly destroyed. That's a different way of being set apart. But in both cases, you're set apart for the Lord. There is no third way. And Saul is told, you need to go to war against these Amalekites. You need to wipe them out. Now the reading is quite clear in spelling out what that means. It means that everybody dies. Men, women, children, animals, everything. Today we would call that genocide. And probably if we're honest with ourselves, we have a pretty hard time with that once we start to think about it. These are passages we like to avoid in the Bible because they make us uncomfortable. But you need to understand a couple of things. First of all, God did not command this very easily. As a matter of fact, in Genesis 15 verse 16, he tells Abraham, the forefather of the Israelites, he tells him, in the fourth generation, your descendants will come back here to Canaan for the sins of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure. So they were going to be, his people, the Israelites, were going to be in exile in Egypt for 400 years. In other words, God is so patient with his Amorites these heathens that he would rather keep his own people in slavery for 400 years rather than destroy the heathen for their sins. Okay, so this doesn't come easily. His patience does run out eventually, but God is not, if I may use the word, bloodthirsty in that sense. The second thing you need to understand is that the Amalekites, these people now, that Saul had to kill. They were Israel's arch enemies. And in Deuteronomy 25 we read why. Here the Lord says, Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt, when you were weary and worn out. They met you on your journey and cut off all who were lagging behind. They had no fear of God. When the Lord your God gives you rest from all your enemies around you in the land he has given you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget. So these people are not innocent. These are evil people who have a track record of harming God's people. If they don't get wiped out, God's people cannot retain the promised land. That's why God commanded Saul to go to war against him or against them. So what you need to understand is Saul is not supposed to do this for himself. Okay? He's God's anointed king. He needs to carry out God's command. And that's why Saul, Samuel, reminds him of that anointing in this passage, in the very first verse. He says, the Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel. It's like a reminder, hey, Saul, remember your anointing? Remember that you are king? You need to live up to that now. You're gonna have to do something difficult. But Saul didn't. He did not show the leadership that he was supposed to show. And the problem is not that he's soft. Problem is not that he was against genocide. He had no trouble killing most of the population. He carried out that part of the command very effectively, but he carried it out incompletely. He turned it into his own personal war against the Amalekites. Verse 19 says, if you look at verse 19, it says that he actually took the opportunity to plunder them. Right? Verse 19 says, why did you pounce on the spoil? It's a description of plundering. And in verse 30, he says he did it because the soldiers told him to. Well, he could have prevented it easily enough, but that probably would have made him unpopular. He would have had a drop in his approval ratings. So Saul does what every other ordinary king does, took the best of the cattle to sacrifice. And you know, if you sacrifice cattle, what happens afterwards? You get to barbecue some of it and you have a big feast. So it turns into this big party. And not only was that the custom in those days, or not only did he do that, but he also did what was the custom in those days. He took along the king, Agag. That way he could show him off and kind of, you know, parade him around, show him off, and then maybe afterwards make a treaty with him. Be a good political move. And just to make sure that nobody would forget what he had done, he went off and set up a monument in honor of himself. It kind of makes you sick when you read it, really. By doing all of these things, Saul cheapened the divine command. It was no longer the Lord's anointed king carrying out a divine mission, but instead, a king like any other pagan king, looting, killing his way across enemy territory just for himself. And it wasn't the first time that he had disobeyed the Lord either. Two chapters prior to this, he was also disobedient. So he is turning away even more from the Lord's command. So do you understand the background now? And now, it's interesting without in mind to study Saul's reaction when Samuel comes and talks to him, because Saul is completely oblivious to the seriousness of what he's done. Three times he assures Samuel that he has in fact carried out the command of God. And even though they both know that this was not the case. And he downplays his sin. And then when he finally does confess it in verse 24, he immediately gives an excuse, doesn't he? I have sinned for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord in your words because I feared the people and obeyed their voice. He should have stopped before saying because. These are not the words of a man who gets it, who really understands the seriousness of what he's done. Now why was it so serious? What in essence was the problem here? In verse 23, Samuel makes a really interesting comparison. He says, look at verse 23, he says, for rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Why does he compare it to divination and idolatry? What do these things have in common with rebellion? A divination, by the way, is when you try to predict the future by divining omens. And idolatry, we all know what idolatry is. So what do these things have in common with rebellion? Well, they all constitute a lack of submission to the Word of God. That's what it comes down to. That, in essence, is what this sin was. A lack of submission to the Word of God. All of these other things constitute letting yourself be guided by something other than the Word of God or the will of God. And that puts you in the same category as people who practice fortune-telling, divination, or idolatry. That's how serious this sin is. Saul was not aware of the seriousness of what he had done at all. And because he lacked that awareness, he displayed no grief, right? Ties back into... to those ideas that we were exploring at the beginning. He doesn't understand what he's done, so he can't have any awareness of sin, so he can't display grief. He can't pray for forgiveness either then. Why the lack of grief? Because in the end, he didn't have a meaningful relationship with God. You see that even reflected in the way that he talks about God. Verse 21 and 30 he talks about the Lord your God. Your God! That's not a slip of the tongue. Some commentators have said, oh well you know this or that, but if you think about it the Lord your God very specifically it's not a slip of the tongue at all. It shows a lack of a meaningful relationship with God. He was far more interested in what other people thought about Him In verse 30 he says, I have sinned, yet honor me now before the elders of my people and before Israel, and return with me, that I may worship the Lord your God. Honor me before the elders. He's exactly the same as the rest of us, isn't he? He just wants to look good in front of the elders, doesn't he? He doesn't want to lose face. That's all that matters. Put up a good front, make sure you look religious, make sure that We're all part of the same system. We all pretend nothing is actually wrong. The Lord your God. And he wants to have Samuel with him because Samuel represents the word of God. He wants to have the status of having the representative of God's word in his life without actually wanting to submit to the word of that God. You see it in the lives of some believers today as well. You know, sometimes we like having office bearers around, but we don't want to listen to them, necessarily. It's exactly the same thing here. It's always no different from us. You know, we think sometimes the Bible's an old book and people had different problems back then. It's not true. They were exactly the same kinds of people with exactly the same problems and exactly the same spiritual issues as we have today. Only difference is a different culture, different context, same problems. Now having said these things, why did the Lord respond so strongly to Saul? Think about it. Scholars have pointed out that if you compare David, King David, and if you compare King Saul, they both committed sins that were evil in the eyes of the Lord. When David committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband Uriah murdered, Nathan the prophet came to him and he said, why have you despised the word of the Lord to do what is evil in his sight? So what David did was not really all that different from what Saul did. Both men showed a lack of respect for the word of God, but God dealt with them differently. Why? It was merciful towards David, but not towards Saul. Now you could argue that David didn't try to excuse his behavior in the same way that Saul did, which is true. Saul could have never written Psalm 51 because Psalm 51 comes from the heart of a true child of God and Saul wasn't. Psalm 51 is a reflection of genuine repentance. Saul didn't have that. But at the same time, the Lord did not forgive David because of the quality of his repentance. The Lord forgave David because of Jesus Christ, David's future son. See, both of them deserved the same punishment, but the Lord showed mercy to one and justice to the other. And he was able to show mercy because he showed justice in Christ. He punished those sins in Christ. Jesus Christ is the only reason God can forgive anyone. The sins that we commit are no less wicked in his eyes than those of anyone else. How many of us have let ourselves be guided by something other than the word or will of God? Which was the essence of Saul's sin, wasn't it? Isn't that basically our life story, struggling against these other things that guide us, giving in to them sometimes? That's what the Catechism is trying to teach us in Lords Day 51. We are the wretched sinners that the Catechism is talking about. Yet God is so gracious, so compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love like we heard this morning. Those are wonderful realities and we should celebrate them. But that celebration may still never make us grieve less over sin or take sin less seriously. Because sin is deadly serious. Now you cannot genuinely pray for forgiveness without experiencing grief over sin. We've seen that that applies to your own sin, but it also applies to the sins of others. You see, the last part of Lord's Day 51 is a prayer that we will find this evidence of God's grace in us, that we are fully determined wholeheartedly to forgive our neighbor. Why do we need to forgive our neighbor? because he or she sinned against us and that causes us grief. But that grief at their sin is an extension of our grief at our own sin, our grief over all sin. Grief over our sin becomes grief over all sin. Because when you see your own sin properly, you see it as a violation of God's covenant. You see that this is offensive to a holy God. And because you love God, that offends you as well. And it grieves you. You see the destructive consequences of sin in the lives of other people. You see how their sin has also destroyed the relationship that they have with you and with each other. And you see how this all cries out to God. And if you are sensitive to sin, And these things grieve you, even if it is sin in the life of someone else. Because now you're aware of what sin really is. And you see how other people also are wretched sinners, people whose life just runs off the rails because of sin. It makes you grieve, because now you are aware of what sin really is. Now without that awareness of how these things offend God as well, it just becomes grief over how the sins of others affect you personally. God is not in the picture. And that kind of self-centered grief is not good. How can you genuinely pray for forgiveness of your own sin if you cannot grieve over sin in the lives of others? Think about it. A key sign of imbalance in this area is when you spend more time talking about what others have done to you than about what Jesus has done for you. Did you catch that? Your awareness of sin is unbalanced if you spend more time talking about what other people did to you than what Jesus did for you. It's a really crucial distinction. People with false grief are only concerned about grievances against them personally, whether real or imagined. They never think about beyond what the other person has done to them. And so they don't spend any time thinking about their own sin or repenting from it because they're so busy pointing out the sins of others. Now all of that changes with a fifth petition. You cannot genuinely pray for forgiveness without experiencing grief over your sin. But when there is that grief, when there is that awareness, that you have been forgiven, then it becomes easier to forgive others. See, if God forgave me, then I know that his grace is also sufficient to forgive others who sin against me. But if I don't want to forgive, then could it be because I maybe believe that my sins are not actually all that bad? The fifth petition doesn't let you think that. On the deepest possible level it confronts us with ourselves. It forces us to come to terms with these things that we pray for. So what does it look like to be so sensitive to sin that you also grieve over the sins of others? Well, Saul gives us an example in our reading. Verse 11. He experienced great grief over the shortcomings of Saul. Verse 11 says that Samuel was angry and he cried to the Lord all night. And it doesn't tell us exactly why he cried out, but that word gives us a clue. If you do a word study on that word, crying out, in this particular word in the original language, then it often gets used in the context of the Psalms, for example, of someone crying out to God for deliverance. crying out to the Lord during times of distress. You see, Samuel is in distress because he sees Saul's life running off the rails. He understands where this is going. He knows what's coming. He grieves Saul's sin. Don't forget that Samuel was a little bit of a father figure to him, right? I mean, he met Saul and got to know him when he was still a farmer boy, right? and he became a bit of a mentor to him. He must have been somewhat close to him. So there's a personal aspect here, a relational part that Saul, Samuel is grieving, but he's also thinking about the consequences for the nation of Israel because so much, it could have been so different. Saul could have meant so much to the nation, but now the nation will miss out on his full potential because of his own sin. And that's the tragedy of sin that holds us back from our full potential. So Samuel grieved over Saul's sin and he grieved over the consequences it was going to have. Samuel was so sensitive to sin that he even grieved over the sins of Saul. But Samuel was a sinner himself. And even when he was at his best, he was still shaped by his own sins and his need to come to terms with those. But now imagine how much greater the Lord Jesus is, the ultimate king. If you think Samuel grieved over sin, imagine what the Lord Jesus feels like. Imagine his grief over our sin when he walked this earth. Because here was a man. He was God, yes, but also man. Here was a man who was fully in tune with the will of God, who had no sin of his own at all. Imagine how much more he would have been affected by the sins of others, how sensitive he would have been to all of those things. And Isaiah 53 says this was true. It describes him as a man of sorrow, one who was familiar with suffering. How much sorrow would he have experienced when he looked at this world, the world that was created through him? And he saw what sin had done and how far it fell short of its full potential. And here's the amazing part, he bore that grief. He did what we would have never done. He willingly entered the dysfunction of our sinful lives. He shared in it, he took it upon himself, he took all of it on himself. As Isaiah says, surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, that we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we have been healed. We all like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has walked his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He experienced the fullness of grief over sin, but the gospel is he did not leave it there. He dealt with it. He took it away. Oh yes, it is true. The canons are right. We still have the flesh and the body of sin in our lives, but we are no longer under its dominion. And the day is coming when there will be no more sin at all. Blessed are those who mourn, because there will be no more sin. They will be comforted. The day is coming when we will not need to pray the fifth petition anymore, because He will tread our sins underfoot. and hurl all of our iniquities into the depths of the sea and they will never grieve us again. Amen.