This message was given at Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. At the end, we will give information about how to contact us to receive a copy of this or other messages. If you have your Bibles, let's open up to Psalm 51. I'm doing the very opposite of having consecutive expository force you to the hard texts. Once you finish a book, you just pick all the ones you love, and that's what you do for the time being. I'm giving you kind of my greatest hits of the Psalms, really. Psalm 51. We'll just open with a couple of the verses, because I think it'll be more edifying if we go and pause and explain a few verses at a time. This is the reading of God's word. To the choir master, a Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to see him after he had gone in to Bathsheba. Have mercy on me, oh God, according to your steadfast love. According to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. We'll pause there. This is the reading of God's word. Please go ahead and have a seat. Let's open in prayer and then we'll dive right in. Father, we thank you for this glorious psalm. We thank you for forgiveness that we never exhaust. We thank you for your wondrous grace. I pray that you would hold out to every sinner in the room, to every guilty conscience, the wondrous grace that you offer us. May we have the faith to see and believe and experience the glories you've given us in the gospel. We pray this in Jesus's name, amen. Psalm 51 is just one of my favorites. And I imagine it is for many of you too. It resonates with your heart. We get this, don't we? Our Psalm begins in the aftermath of the infamous fall of one of the great ones of God. Many of you are familiar with the story and that introduction puts you right into the middle of it, but to remind you who it's not fresh on your mind, this is about King David. And King David was known for his faith and for his righteousness. He cherished the Lord and he cherished the Lord's ways. He lived and led for the Lord and Israel thrived underneath his leadership. Yet as David grows older, both the faith and the righteousness begin to wane. You see him drifting from his one time faithful ways and one spring, he falls deep. He falls deep into his sin. In faithlessness, he stayed home while his armies were out at battle. In weakness and lust, he spied Bathsheba, the wife of his faithful soldier, and he takes her for his own. In cowardice, he seeks to hide his evil. And then in treachery, he murders that faithful soldier and claims his wife for his own. The mighty and righteous King David had perverted justice and rejected the God who had led him so faithfully across the years. But by the grace of God, God would not allow him to have his story end there. God would not allow his servant to continue on in his sin. And so he sends a prophet, and he sends this prophet to confront David in his sin, because David's not repenting. David's just going on like business as usual with that hard, sin-hardened heart. And the prophet confronts him. I encourage you, go read 2 Samuel 12, and it's a vivid story. The prophet confronts him and David repents. You see, you have to have that context in place if you're going to do this Psalm any justice at all. You have to know how deep the fall of David was so that you can understand what this Psalm is saying. I titled this sermon, A Sinner's Psalm. But I don't want you to just think it's only about some other sinner. This Psalm is about us. This Psalm is about you. I encourage you, I exhort you, hear yourself in this Psalm. You pick up with the first couple of verses and you hear this urgent request for mercy and forgiveness. Picking back up in one and two, have mercy on me, oh God. According to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. Wash me, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. Four different appeals for basically the same thing. have mercy on me, blot out my transgressions, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, cleanse me from my sin. A sinner who knows they're a sinner and knows what that means, knows that they need mercy. We as Christians are such fans of God's grace because we know we would have no hope without it. I was thinking of the name of this church and many others across the country, Grace Community Church. If we named it Justice Community Church, none of us would stand. Justice in the face of your sin cries out, guilty. There's no doubt about the call, guilty. That's where you stand. And so we need grace. David cries out for grace. He pleads that he be spared justice. He cannot stand under justice. He pleads for mercy because he knows the deep and covenantal love of his God. He pleads that his sins would be blotted out entirely. One Hebrew scholar, his name's Robert Alter, he translated the line like this, with your great mercy, wipe away my crimes. Oh, that's beautiful. With your great mercy, wipe away my crimes. In the second verse, we see David experiencing what all of us know about sin, about how it makes you feel dirty, how it makes you feel despoiled. David says, wash me. Lord, cleanse me. Cleanse me of the guilt that I bear, that I rightfully bear. Cleanse me, Lord. As he moves into three through six, you see David understands his guilt as deeply as any man can. Verse three, for I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. He knows, he knows the guilt of what he's done. He cannot for a second claim ignorance here. He knows how vile his sin is before the Lord. And as a result, it just weighs on his conscience. It weighs on him and he can't get away from it. He can describe the ugliness of his sins. That first moment where he looked back at Bathsheba, the moment when he summoned her to his palace, the vile indignity of trying to hide Bathsheba's pregnancy. The moment that he thought that he could erase his fear and his guilt, if only he murdered her husband. He can remember every moment and he knows how ugly those sins are. And as a result, his sin weighs on him and it weighs on him constantly. His sin haunts him, ever reminding him, you are guilty and you know it. Verse four, David knows ultimately it is God that he sinned against. That's what he says, against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. He rightly identifies that the first person concerned here, it's God. Now to be clear, David's not saying that there's no such thing as sinning against another human being. You see that across the rest of the scriptures. But he is stressing that God is the judge over all. See, our sin against others is only sin because we are breaking the law of God. David recognized that God, the just judge, has defined what is good and what is right and what is moral. And the one time faithful servant of God trampled those standards in his sin. Trampled right over all of them. David has no doubts about his guilt. He has no doubts about his crimes and about his sin. They are so clear cut to him and even more so to God. It's flagrant what he has done and God is wholly justified in condemning him. Verse five. David knows that it's actually even worse. It's actually even deeper than just the sins that he committed. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me. David recognizes that his nature, his very nature is sinful. Even at his conception, he was a sinner. There's a wrong way to read this as well. Like he's throwing his mom under the bus. Oh, what a wretched mom I had. No, that's not it at all. He's saying his sinfulness is about more than what he has done. He's saying that his sinfulness starts with who he is. He sins because he is already a sinner. That is how deep the sin goes. It's not just a one-time action. It is who he is. And what makes that so troublesome is you place David the sinner next to God the holy. Verse six, behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. The trouble is all in the contrast with God. God is holy. holy and he delights in truth and the inward being. David, he is a sinner to his very core. What a gulf exists between a holy God over here and sinful man over here. over here, what a gulf exists. And this is the depth of David's problem. Faced with this, this is why he has to pray like he does. And this is why he launches right back into his request before God. Seven through 12, this is David just expanding on the request, expanding on what he needs, expanding on his prayers. And you can hear the longing as David cries out for mercy and for forgiveness. Verse seven, he prays for cleansing. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Again, that feeling of dirtiness, that feeling of filth, the feeling of your guilt wrapped around your neck. Sin stains our souls. And it's a stain that corrupts us. And it's a stain that bears witness against us of the evil that we have done, of the evil that we have thought. stains our souls and the stained sinner longs to be clean, longs to be pure. And maybe they can never even remember that once being the truth about their soul and about their life. They can never once remember being that pure, but they know that's what they want. That's what they need. That's how they want to be before God. And David here, he can remember walking righteously. He can remember being the man who people described as having a heart after God's own. He wants that back. He wants that back. Is this resonating with your souls? He wants to be back in that place. Verse eight, he longs for joy. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice in the depths of his guilt and of his sin. There seems to be only darkness. There seems to be only sorrow. And David longs for something different. He longs for joy. He longs for gladness. He longs to be restored from the sorrows of his sin to the joy of the Lord. You hear that yearning. You know that yearning. And verse nine, David prays that his sins would just be totally erased. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. It's like, I don't want these sins to be before you anymore, God. I don't want them to be in your presence any more. blot them out utterly, leave no sign that they ever existed, banish them from your presence and from everywhere. I don't want to even know that they exist. I don't want you to know they exist. I want them to be gone. And so David prays that God would transform him. David prays that God would make him new. Verse 10, create in me a clean heart, oh God. and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Again, the dirty sinner longs to be clean. He doesn't want to hide from his guilt. He doesn't want to act like his sin didn't happen or that it doesn't matter. What he wants is he wants to be cleansed. He wants to be cleansed from the guilt of his sin. He longs for his innermost being to be renewed. Slight difference between the ESV and the NAS talking about longing for a right spirit versus a steadfast spirit. Probably better is the NAS's desire for creating me a steadfast spirit. He wants an inner man that maybe for once it feels like will reliably follow and obey his God. Verse 12, we have a similar prayer for a spirit, and then there he's gonna pray for a willing spirit. And then on top of this prayer, you see David wanting to have that motivation of heart that would honor God. And David prays to his God that he would create, that he would create in him a new heart. In the scriptures, the word create, do you know who it overwhelmingly belongs to? It belongs to God. God is the one who creates. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He creates stars. He creates oceans. He creates animals with a word. David prays that God's mighty creating power would give him the clean heart that he lacks. And maybe even indicating how big a work he knows it is. I need the God who speaks things into creation. Create in me this new heart. In verse 11, he prays that he can remain near to God. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. We know, we know in our sin that our sin and our sinfulness, it is not compatible with the presence of our God. And the two, they cannot coexist. They cannot stay like that. The natural result of our sin is that we will no longer be in God's presence, if we ever were. And actually a better word for this word cast, a better word is probably fling. Fling, trying to preserve the violent nature of this word. When you cast a person, it may mean something violent, but when you fling a person, You get the picture of the bouncer with the unruly person in the bar and they just throw him onto the street. Lord, do not fling me from your presence. Don't violently remove me from yourself. David has known the nearness of God and he pleads with God not to throw him out for his crimes. Please Lord, don't throw me out. I know my sin is meant to be separated from your holiness, but please, please don't throw me out of your presence. Don't take away from me the precious gift of your Holy Spirit. David knows that his hope of salvation is in the Lord's presence and it's by the Lord's help. Lord, don't take your spirit from me. Don't take your spirit from me. Verse 12, weary with sorrow, David longs for joy in the salvation of God. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit. Lord, uphold me once again. In all these prayers, you can hear the longing, but more importantly, I hope you hear the faith. David knows the character of the God he prays to. He knows he prays to a gracious God. He knows he prays to a merciful and kind God. He knows the ability of his God. He knows that this God can cleanse souls. Who else can? Who do you go to to cleanse the guilt of your soul? No one but God. You know, by nature, we all know at least something of guilt. We know what it is to behold the stain of our sin upon our souls. And we know guilt is not something you just get rid of. Guilt is not something that just evaporates. So David calls on the one who can forgive sins. He calls on the one who can erase guilt. Who can create a new heart? Only God. Who can give joy to the sorrowful? Only God. Clearly David wasn't acting like a believing man when he committed these sins, but brothers and sisters, only a believing man prays like this. As 13 goes on through 17, you start seeing David describing how he will respond when God answers his prayer. David in verse 13, he says, I want to teach other sinners about God's ways and about God's forgiveness. Verse 13, then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners will return to you. Some of you might think that this reaction is hasty, like get your act together and then you get to go start talking about this. But no, this reaction makes perfect sense. What better reaction for the forgiven of God than to go tell others about how they can likewise find forgiveness. What better reaction is there than that? When you've tasted salvation, you want other people to taste it too. It's actually a totally backward reaction and an unloving reaction that would seek to hide the forgiveness that saved your soul from eternal torment and condemnation. David promises When I am forgiven, I will go and point needy sinners to the God who saves. 14 and 15, the forgiven and delivered sinner will return to praise. Deliver me from blood guiltiness, oh God. Oh God of my salvation. And my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. Oh Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise. You can actually picture this, visualize this. David's sin, it's almost like this gag preventing him from singing to the Lord. And then when God forgives, the gag is removed and the praises burst forth. Again, this is so right. If you grasp for even a second and even just a tiny fraction of what your sins mean, of how deep your crimes were, and if you grasp the seriousness of God's judgment on the wicked, then how can you help but rejoice when total and complete forgiveness is proclaimed? David praises God because he grasps how precious God's forgiveness is. As you hit 16 and 17, you see this famous verse, and it's David pointing out something really important. 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, oh God, you will not despise. See, God doesn't delight in bare sacrifice. He doesn't want your mechanical prayers, nor does he really want your mechanical church attendance. God's delight is in the heart of the believing. A broken and contrite spirit. That's how David describes it. Broken and contrite. Interestingly, contrite actually can also just mean crushed or broken. It's the same word used in verse eight about the broken bones. Essentially, this is a broken and crushed heart. See, God wants the humble. He doesn't want the proud. He doesn't want the showy. When you're seeking God's restoration, you don't get to go in and act like you're there for superficial repairs. We go to him in faith and we go to him in desperation, knowing that he alone renews spirits. He alone cleanses hearts. We need to recognize how low we have been brought. We need to acknowledge the brokenness of our souls in light of our sin. Spurgeon said that if we will deal seriously with our sin, God will deal gently with us. So let's view our sin in its full seriousness. Let's lose any pretense that we've got it together and let's approach God in faith because he is the one who restores the broken and he is the one who lifts up the downcast. You know, you might think that the Psalm would end there and maybe that's just our individualism speaking because David has to continue. David goes on in 18 and 19, in full expectance of his restoration, he pleads also for Jerusalem. Do good to Zion in your good pleasure. Build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then will you delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings. Then bowls will be offered on your altar. He looks forward to God's grace poured out on the whole people of God. And then, then the restored people of God might offer the kinds of sacrifices that God does delight in. Now, if we're to look for a parallel more directly related to us, it might be that the restored sinner naturally desires for grace to be shared. I've been forgiven. I want others to be forgiven too. I received grace. I want the people of God to receive grace too. Brothers and sisters, the forgiveness David believed in was sufficient for the darkest of sins. It was sufficient for murder. It was sufficient for adultery. It was sufficient for injustice. And it was sufficient for betrayal. And this is the forgiveness offered to you today. How can we be forgiven of our crimes? How can the guilt be lifted? How can the stain on our souls be cleansed? And the answer is only by the blood of Jesus. When the guilty sinner pleads the blood of Jesus for the forgiveness of his sins, he finds that Jesus's blood is more than sufficient for the darkest sins you've got stored up. As we approach communion, yes, take serious note of the depths and the darkness of your sin. Yes, do that. But more important than that, Take serious note of the perfect Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Come to the Lord with a broken and a contrite heart. Come in faith to the God of grace and mercy and find complete forgiveness for your sins. Rejoice in the Savior who bought you. Praise God. for the blood that washes your guilty soul whiter than snow. Let's pray. Our Father, what a Savior, what a salvation. Lord, have mercy on us. Even today, even for a people that look like they have it together, we know for, it's not even close. So have mercy on your people. Forgive your people, cleanse your people, Lord, and give us the faith to know that what Christ did is abundantly beyond what our sins require. We will not exhaust the riches of his sacrifice. Lord, I pray that the most broken hearted saint here today would know that they can confidently find forgiveness and cleansing because of the work of Jesus Christ. And I pray for those whose souls are still stained, that they would flock to the one who cleans souls, that they would live in their guilt no longer. Lord, give them the faith. Would you show them your forgiveness? I pray this in Jesus' name, amen. We hope you've enjoyed this message from Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. To receive a copy of this or other messages, call us at area code 775-782-6516 or visit our website gracenevada.com.