your sins to one another. Pray for one another so that you may be healed. So confession, whether it’s to God or to one another, it just gives an opportunity for our guilt to be flushed out of our system before it can do any more corrosive damage inside of us. So it’s no small part of why we come together this morning. We’re going to look at this famous psalm, Psalm 51, one of the most well-known portions of scripture dealing with guilt and confession. It’s a woman named Leslie Jameson in her book The Recovering writes of making a couple of failed efforts on her own to stop drinking and uh and then she started attending alcoholic anonymous meetings was able to achieve 7 months sober and that was followed by a 7-month relapse where she was drinking again and and then she crawled back to the AA meetings and n months into her second bout of sobriety her and her boyfriend moved back to New Haven. in Connecticut. This was a place they had lived before. Every corner represented a place where she’d had drinking experiences in the past and it was difficult place for her to move back to. She knew there’d be AA meetings there, but wasn’t sure she wanted to attend any more of them. Maybe she could be someone who didn’t have to go down into those dark church basement and uh and have to keep doing this over and over again. And she she’d go to meetings very very regularly back where they’d been in Iowa. But been 3 weeks now since her last meeting and she had this this firm belief that she could maybe start drinking again was back in her mind. This little voice telling her, “I’m not saying you can definitely drink again. It would just be an experiment.” So over dinner one night, she told her boyfriend that she was thinking of drinking again, and this time she thought she could do it better. He didn’t tell her that she shouldn’t do it. He said, “Go to a meeting and see how you feel after that.” So she went to a church the next night and she tried the door. It was locked. Thank God, she said, and walked back to her car and and something in her gut didn’t feel right. So, she circled around to the side or the back of the building. And there was the typical signs, the the lit basement and uh brick propping the door open and some stranger in camo out smoking on the outside. And during the meeting, as others were speaking, she tried to figure out how she could spin her drinking so she could leave room for her to eventually start drinking again. Instead, she raised her hand and she said out loud exactly what she was thinking. She said, “I’m trying to figure out how to spin my drinking so I can eventually do it again.” She says that when she when she did that, when she opened her mouth to speak, it was like a valve releasing this toxic pressurized gas. So, what she was experiencing that moment was just the power of confession. the ability confession has to release those pressurized toxic gases of sin and deceit that lie inside all of us. And our passage this morning, Psalm 51, probably the most potent and vivid example in scripture of a believer of King David in this case, releasing those toxic gases in his spirit. And in doing that, he gives us a map that all of us can follow as well. So the heading of this psalm, if you notice it, the heading or the superscription of the psalm, it points to the backstory, uh, telling us that David wrote it after Nathan the prophet confronted him about his relationship with Basheba. Now certainly David’s sin, it’s in the Bible, it’s played out on a much bigger scale than our own, but his sin isn’t particularly unique. You know, when the sins of politicians or celebrities are exposed on the internet for everyone to see, their sins are really no more elegant or original than any of our own. All sins, no matter who does them, are surprisingly benol and surprisingly common place. In fact, before speaking for the first time at her AA meeting, this Leslie Jameson, she was a writer. She assumed that she could tell her story probably better than most. So she practiced with note cards beforehand and spoke fluently then to the group about the repercussions of her drinking, about how she drank after she found out she was pregnant and subsequently got an abortion and the tales of her frequent blackouts. And she’s going through all the talking points of her pain. And an old man in a wheelchair in the front row, known to the group as being quite unfiltered, just shouted out, “This is boring.” and she got flustered and uh she teared up and she thought she’d failed to make her story bold or bad or interesting enough. But over time she came to realize that part of the power of recovery is that everyone’s story is essentially the same and that being unique is a lot less important than just being able to share a common story and pursue a common path to healing. So David’s story, it’s related in quite a bit of detail in 2 Samuel chapters 11 and 12. It’s at its root, it’s very garden variety, lust, just a form of pornographic pursuit. He he catches a glimpse of a naked woman and he doesn’t stop looking and he feels he has to have her. He sends messengers. He’s the king. He can do this. He sends messengers. They bring her to him. She’s a married woman. That doesn’t matter to him. And this is no mutually agreed upon marital love, extrammarital love affair. I mean there if you think of the power imbalance between the king of Israel and the wife of a soldier it makes it far more predatory elicit relationship carries on and one day Basheba shows up with a positive pregnancy test and David’s in trouble. His whole family, his whole reputation could be unraveled by this. Meanwhile, Basheba’s husband has been away the whole time of the affair. He’s out in the borderlands fighting the Ammonites on behalf of of King David. So that begins David’s cover up, which is often a lot worse than the sin itself. Tim Keller writes, “The results of sin are often more like the physical response you have to a debilitating dose of radiation. You don’t suddenly feel pain the moment you’re exposed. It isn’t like a a bullet or a sword tearing into you. You feel quite normal. Only later do you experience symptoms, but by then it’s too late. So, it’s only hours later or days or weeks after the exposure that a person’s skin starts showing the burns and their hair falls out and they go through nausea and fatigue and disorientation. And I’m sure we we can all be sure that David’s sin with Basheba probably felt wonderful, even transcendent at the beginning, but it exposed him to this high dose of radiation. And soon David’s life begins reflecting the implications of his choice. So his cover up meant containing this truth, a cloak of deceit, ruining the lives of others in the process. When David had been a younger, younger man, he had been pursued by King Saul. He spent about 10 years of his life like a fugitive outlaw, like Robin Hood, leading a band of merry men in the wilderness. And he stayed out there, lived off the land. He was hunted by the king’s army. And he gathered to himself a group of people known as David’s mighty men. You can read about them in 2 Samuel chapter 23. They’re like his special forces, his Navy Seals, mighty warriors, fiercely loyal to David. They’d do anything for him. And mentions three of them who at total risk to their own lives, fought through Philistine uh lines just to bring David some water from his special well in Bethlehem. One guy, it says, struck down so many Philistines, his hand cramped up and it froze to his sword. Another guy went down into a pit on a snowy day and killed a lion. These guys, we’d all want these guys on our team. 2 Samuel 23 lists 37 of these mighty men. At the end of the list is a man named Uriah the Hitittite, who was the husband of Basheba. So, David made some clumsy attempts to bring Uriah home on leave to Jerusalem so that he could sleep with his wife and the baby would be assumed to be theirs. Uriah was a man of loyalty and integrity and he felt great devotion to his fellow soldiers didn’t go to his wife. So David then ordered Joab his military commander to make a deliberate tactical error in battle. Says put Uriah on the front line where the fighting’s the heaviest. Have all the other troops fall back and ensure that Uriah would be killed. That’s what happened. David felt that he’d cleaned up his mess by then. He took the widowed Basheba to be his new wife. The baby, however early, was assumed to be theirs legitimately. No one was the wiser except this ominous verse at the end of 2 Samuel 11 stating that the Lord was greatly displeased with David. Now, life went on at least the better part of a year passed because the baby was born and all seemed well. I don’t know how that year went internally for David. I can’t imagine it not being a time of great spiritual drought. He had once been described as a man after God’s own heart. He was an intimate poet, songwriter, a passionate worshipper, a guy who had danced vigorously before the presence of the Lord, spirit enabled warrior, king, slayer of giants. What did that year feel like after his act of adultery? murder, deceit, unconfessed sin, deadly radiation poisoning having long-term effects on him. How could he write any poems or songs or go with all the crowds to the tabernacle for the for the feasts and for the sacrifices? Just going through the motions. So, we’re not told how that was for him. Maybe maybe he adjusted to his double life and it didn’t overly bother him. But God didn’t leave him alone. eventually sent the prophet Nathan to him, let David know that his cover up hadn’t been successful. God knew about the sin. Through Nathan, it was exposed, and David began to feel shame. And that brings us to Psalm 51. This road map pointing the way toward restoration and recovery. David puts himself in the path and the presence of God. And he does it as honestly and sincerely as he knows how. Goes to a place where God can rescue him. And he follows. It’s a difficult, it’s a tough path, but a necessary path. And by the end of the psalm, it’s astonishingly powerful. The confidence and the joy and the gladness that is being uh re-released into David’s soul. We won’t through work through the whole psalm clause by clause. It’s packed with a lot of insight, but just notice a couple of important points. First, you notice uh the Godword direction of David’s repentance. There’s no excuses here. He’s not saying, “But she was naked on the roof. What do you expect me to do?” Or, you know, “I gave Uriah every opportunity to be with his wife. It was the Ammonites who killed him. It wasn’t me.” There’s no flimsy excusem making in this psalm. Instead, David gets before God and he says, “I know my transgressions. My sin is ever before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” There’s admitting I I can’t put this behind me. My sin’s always in front of me. And that second phrase there, it sounds odd and it even sounds a little unfair to us. But it reveals how David’s moved from just the shallow waters of simple remorse into the deep currents of true repentance. Against you, you only have I sinned and done what’s evil in your sight. That doesn’t mean that David doesn’t have any awareness that he’s obtuse to all of the other people he’s hurt through the consequences of his sin. Basheba, he messed up her life, messed up her home, her conscience, her purity, her her marriage, used his power as a king to summon her. His sin led to that very intentional premeditated murder of Uriah, a man who was entirely innocent and fiercely loyal to David. And David Sin didn’t care anything at all for the conscience of his military commander. Job ordered to participate in a plot that left Uriah in a heap and made Basheba Lady in black by the next sunrise. And those are very obscure cultural references for all you of you 1970s metalheads. If you pick up on any of them, now if his sin did so much damage to so many people, what does David mean then by saying against you, you only have I sinned and done what’s evil in your sight? He’s not denying the concentric circles of his sin’s effect. But he’s saying he’s he understands something really important about sin. He knows that before sin ever occurs against people, it first occurs against God. Before any of our sins impact fellow humans, it always challenges the cosmic lawgiver himself. Now, think about how this works. Before any of us sin sexually, we first have to maintain in our hearts somewhere that God is holding us back. He doesn’t know our needs sexually. He doesn’t understand or care about our urges. He gives us narrow guidelines for sexual purity. Then he withholds from us the resources to comply with them. Sexual sins begins by saying, “God hasn’t looked out for me in this area.” Or if we feel that by telling a lie, it’ll it’ll get us ahead. Well, it’ll get us some extra money or maybe some status. The sin of the lie itself is secondary. Before that, it’s just doubting the goodness of God. Feeling that he’s not doing a good job of taking care of us and meeting our needs, and he doesn’t know what will make us happy and comfortable. Same goes for stealing or coveting or murdering or worshiping other gods or dishonoring our parents. Any of the ten commandments, the sin behind every sin is that we know better than God what is best for us. So when David says against you, you only have I sinned, he’s moved beyond just ringing his hands in remorse, searching for the least painful way to clean things up. Remorse. When we feel just simple remorse for the messes we create, it it might not go any deeper than self-pity. When it was self-absorption and self-centeredness that got David in in the trouble in the first place, and shallow remorse really doesn’t move anyone any further forward. We can be really angry with ourselves. We can feel really badly for letting other people down, letting family members down. We can beat ourselves up, but we’re still just largely stuck on ourselves, thinking about us. Remorse can be so squarely focused on us that it doesn’t move us in any path toward God. It doesn’t send us running to him. But when shallow remorse gives way to true repentance, that’s when we ask the only question worth asking if we really want to make a confession. How could I have possibly treated God like that? Against you, you only have I sinned and done what’s evil in your sight. So remorse might cause us to hate ourselves. Repentance causes us to hate what we’ve done to our relationship with our creator and our redeemer and our father in heaven. It moves us in the direction of God once again. So even if we and even if we got in the mess by doubting the goodness of God, the goodness of God is still available to us for our restoration and recovery. David knows that he can’t just approach God and ask him for a second chance. He needs a new heart. And this is very key in this psalm. For a religious person, asking God for a second chance makes a lot of sense because a religious person is willing to go through the rigomearroll of making a confession. Uh receiving some act of penance that they have to perform, doing this or that to earn back God’s favor and get back in his good books. A religious person always wants just a chance to prove themselves. But that’s not what David does. He knows that one more chance won’t help. you know, he’ll just find another way to blow it. What he really needs is a new heart. He says, “There’s a rottness in my life. I can’t self-correct this no matter how many chances God gives me.” Look at how vividly he states this. Uh in verse 5, he says, “In sin did my mother conceive me.” And he’s not mad at his mom. He’s not speaking against his mom or against the process of his conception. He’s seeing that his sin sins are not just isolated acts. There’s something baked inside our nature. There’s a rottness in me. He’s saying a festering decay. It’s not going to go away with temporary measures. Uh that nature in me won’t just be o overcome by self-will or by trying harder. So he gets very very serious about what he needs and what he’s asking God for. Not a second chance, but just a clean heart. All the ways he states this, he says, “I need a clean heart. I need a right spirit. God, you have to do all this for me. I need to be washed thoroughly and cleansed from my sin. I need uh a house cleaning inside me, washed thoroughly, uh sprinkled with water from hissip branches. I need my broken bones reset. I need the restoration of joy of my salvation because I’m not feeling it right now and I’m not going to get my joy back through religious performance. I I deserve probably to be cast away from your presence and to have your Holy Spirit taken from me, but God, please don’t do that. So he’s enumerating all these radical things that God has to do. All this heart transplant that he needs for him to be made right. He says, “I can’t fix me. I need you, father, to supervise every aspect of my recovery. Second chance isn’t going to do me any good when I need a clean heart.” And you and I, we know what it cost God to actually do that for for David or what it cost God to do for any of us. Only the gospel reveals the true cost of giving us a new heart. took the cross. On the cross, for the first time in his life, Jesus turned to his father and his father didn’t turn his face to his son. Jesus looked up at heaven. There was no one there. He said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why have you abandoned me? Why have you hidden your face from me? Why have you cast me away from your presence? Why have you taken your Holy Spirit from me?” Everything that David feared, Jesus endured on the cross. God the Father hid his face from his son so that following his death, he wouldn’t have to hide his face from us. Jesus felt all that cosmic abandonment so that we could have access this morning to God’s abiding presence with us through the Holy Spirit. So the gospel leaning on what Christ has done on the cross on our behalf, we don’t have to try to hide from God. We don’t have to make excuses or minimize our sin. We can fully repent by acknowledging our sin all the way down to the bottom and then trust in God’s activity in our lives to rebuild us. And that’s exactly where David goes next. He deeply acknowledges spiritual bankruptcy, an inability to uh to make progress. He says, “God, I don’t just need a few bugs in my program squashed here. I need a whole new operating system placed inside of me.” So he moves forward with confidence, a positive sense that he can even be used in ministering to others in the future. When I was about 19, I I was at a Lutheran conference for Lutheran college students like myself near Chicago and the speaker had a very German Lutheran name of Wally Schultz and he spoke on this psalm and the title has stayed with me forever. It’s the title was evangelism begins with a broken heart. And that’s and where the speaker went with that is as David repents in this psalm and ask God for a new heart and a steadfast spirit and truth in his inner being and a renewed presence. In verse 13, he says, “Then I’ll teach transgressors your ways. Sinners will turn back to you.” He knows better than to try to do evangelism or minister to others without his own sinful heart being broken down by God. But once it’s broken down and he’s repented and God has regenerated, put something new there, he says, “There’s nothing to hold me back then from doing ministry, evangelism, and helping people come to know you.” He’s saying, “Uh, you’ve awakened me, God, to the depths of my own sin. That gives me an empathy toward other people as well.” And he’s not going to try ministering to people out of a sense of smug self-righteousness, thinking that the people, those miserable sinners he’s trying to reach are something less than him. Because people will always smell a rat if that’s the way we try to do ministry. But he also knows that his his fallenness hasn’t made him sterile from being able to effectively minister to others from here on out. Doesn’t have to carry the guilt and shame. He senses this deep connection between his personal recovery and being able to move toward a right relationship with God and helping others. So, the psalm ends on a very positive chord. Now, if we circle back to that woman I mentioned at the beginning, Leslie Jameson, the account of her alcoholism and her recovery, what she learned from AA lines up surprisingly well with Psalm 51. We’ve all heard of the famous 12 steps where begins with an acknowledgement that we’re powerless and that our lives have become unmanageable. That’s confession. Then uh I know it’s left very undefined for people who are part of aa but there’s a belief in a higher power who can restore as we humbly ask him. There’s subsequent steps involving uh making a fearless moral inventory and admitting to God to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. And she writes of her own halting connection with this higher power. She says, “The second time I got sober, I started praying with a sense of purpose.” And she would take her fumbling faith and she would kneel on the bathroom floor unsure that she believed in God, wondering if she was being dishonest in praying to him. The resurrection to her still seemed like that impossible miracle at the heart of everything. She was afraid of the vulnerabilities of belief. She was afraid that she would find something so beautiful in it that she’d fall for it. But as as her recovery continued, she says all of that was turned upside down, she found that the very act of doing it, the act of praying that was could coax out belief in her heart. I mean, she had had a thousand very sincere conversations with about her drinking with therapists and her mother and her boyfriends. They hadn’t done her any good. But prayer, even if it felt a little insincere, made a huge difference for her. She writes, “I began to question the way I had come to worship self-awareness in itself. It’s just a brand of secular humanism that says, know yourself and then act accordingly.” That’s the lie of secular humanism. What if you reverse this? Act and know yourself differently. She says, “Doing something without knowing if you believed it, that was proof of sincerity. It wasn’t proof of insincerity. She says, “I didn’t know what I believed and I prayed anyway. I called my sponsor even when I didn’t want to. I showed up at meetings even when I didn’t want to. I sat in a circle and I held hands with everyone. I opened myself up to cliches I felt ashamed to be described by. I got down on my knees to pray. Even though I wasn’t sure what I was praying to, I only knew what I was praying for. Don’t drink. Don’t drink. Don’t drink.” So desire to believe that there was something out there, something that wasn’t me, she says, that could make not drinking seem like something more than merely punishment. That desire began to dissolve uh all of the unbelief and uh and develop faith in her heart. She says, “Whatever the higher power was, I needed to believe in something stronger than my willpower. My willpower, it had done plenty of things for me. It gotten me straight A’s and gotten my papers written and gotten me through cross-country training runs. But when I applied it to my drinking, the only thing I felt was that I was turning my life into a small, joyless, clenched fist, a higher power that turned sobriety into more than deprivation. It just wasn’t me. That’s all I knew. Do you see all the parallels there between uh our lives with God, our acts of prayer and confession, even if we don’t feel like doing them, can bring great changes to our lives and new layers of joy and new layers of peace. We don’t have to wait until we we feel like we’re 100% sincere before we can come to God and confess sin because probably none of us are ever 100% sincere about anything. So instead of know thyself and act accordingly, we flip the script to act and know yourself differently. Now, she’s a skilled writer. She was trained to resist cliches. She found the cliches of AA to be solid and helpful. And by embracing those cliches, uh, we can make ourselves useful to one another. She says, “The beauty of the AA testimony is that no matter what you say, it doesn’t revolt people. Doesn’t even surprise them. They’ve heard worse. Your story is probably pretty ordinary, but this doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.” She said, “Often times the more celebrated people, uh, the celebrities who joined AA, they had the most difficult time seeing results. a well-known poet who joined an AA group and was with them for a while. One woman said he couldn’t ever be wholehearted about belonging with the rest of us. He was constantly retreating into his uniqueness. He really thought that was all he had that made him anything. And if we think that our church services and all the sameness and all the boring parts of church and all the cliches, if we think we’re bigger than this and we’re superior to such things, it’ll just block or lengthen the recovery time we need of just acknowledging our sin and getting right with God together. Referring to all those cliches of AA, she says they weren’t revelations but reminders. They were safeguards against the alibis of exceptionality that masquerade as self-nowledge. Submitting myself to the cliches of recovery was just another way of submitting to the rituals, gathering in basement, holding hands in circles, saying, “This applies to me, too.” And it started to seem necessary and just an essential part of her life. She learned to love the blueprint and the order and the sameness and the boredom of her AA meetings. And we all need to accept the fact that our church cliches are doing some lasting good in our lives as well. Cliches of confession, cliches of talking about our sin Sunday after Sunday, cliches of praise reports and prayer requests and singing and the Lord’s supper, this little tasteless wafer and something that resembles grape juice but maybe is not quite grape juice. It’s a cliched ritual, but it’s so necessary and it’s so helpful for all of us. We can we can try resisting it and fall into our own alibis of exceptionality and retreat into our own uniqueness and think we’re a little too cool for all of this. Or we can just accept the cliches and and learn to love them and say this applies to me too. I need a new heart. I need a right spirit within me. I need to be purged with hissip. I need my broken bones reset. I need God to keep supervising my recovery week after week, meeting after meeting. I need the cliches of church just to give me that comforting blueprint. And I need these people to do that with me. Let’s pray.