Welcome to Walk in the Truth podcast.
This season of messages takes us through some of the great comeback stories in the Bible.
Pastor John Metter of Cross City Church will show us how God can take any situation in
any life and bring hope and victory out of hardship.
These messages will inspire you to trust God in your own challenging seasons.
We are so very glad that you're here today and I know it's a holiday weekend and it takes
a little special effort to be here today.
Thank you for being here.
You know, the truth is God's not done with you.
Don't you like that statement?
God's not done with you.
Sometimes we think God is done with us, God's had it with us, God doesn't have any more
use for us, but God's not done with you.
The Bible tells us that all the way through from Genesis to Revelation today.
A message called after you've blown it, after you've messed up, after you have sinned so
big you think you're so distant from God that there's no way that anyone can bridge
that gap between where you are and where God is.
Anybody ever blown it in your life before?
Anybody ever had that moment in your life where you think I'm far, far, far from God?
I want you to take your Bibles this morning.
There are two parts to this message, part one means that we will be in 2 Samuel chapter
11, the story of David and David with his affair with Bathsheba.
So 2 Samuel chapter 11.
And then the second part of this message is from Psalm chapter 51, the first four verses
there.
2 Samuel chapter 11, Psalm 51, have them both open.
I'll tell you when we're in part one and I'll tell you when we're in part two and we'll
read along together in just a few moments.
Back in the year 2000, 23 years ago, a movie hit the theaters called Castaway, the Tom
Hanks movie.
And almost everybody knows what Castaway was.
Castaway was the story of a man that survived a plane wreck over the ocean.
And so he is the only survivor and he ends up being washed up on the shore of a remote
desert island.
There's no one living there.
He has no access, no communication, no ships seem to go by there.
He is completely and utterly alone.
It's what I call a disaster drama and it details four years of his life in an attempt to survive
far from anyone or any source of help at all.
It's fascinating really to watch Castaway and his numerous attempts to get back to civilization,
to get back home.
And at the conclusion of the movie, before he's actually rescued, you come to the conclusion
with him that he just doesn't know how to get back.
And ultimately he does shift or make a makeshift kind of ship, if you will, a boat, and he's
rescued by a cargo ship coming by and he gets back to society.
For the most of the movie, he absolutely has no idea how to get back home.
When I read the life of David at this particular time in his life, David is in the same situation.
He has no idea how to get back to God.
He has sinned against God through this act of moral decision that in an affair he had
with Bathsheba and he's so far from God, so far from his responsibilities that God has
given him that he has no idea how to get back in today.
We're going to look at the story of David's life.
Would you stand with me as we read a few verses out of 2 Samuel chapter 11 verse 1 is where
we're going to begin.
So it happened in the spring at the time when the kings go out to battle that David sent
Joab and his servants with him and all Israel and they brought destruction on the sons of
Ammon and besieged Rabah, but David stayed in Jerusalem.
This is the key part of the whole story.
David the king was supposed to be at battle, but he stayed behind.
Now in the evening time, David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the
king's house.
From the roof he saw a woman bathing and the woman was very beautiful in appearance, so
David sent service and inquired about the woman.
And someone said, is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?
Then David sent messengers and had her brought and when she came to him, he slept with her
and when she had purified herself from her uncleanness, she returned to her house.
But the woman conceived and she sent word and informed David and said, I am pregnant.
And most of us know that first part of David's story here.
We know what happened, we know how it unfolded.
And I want you to see this as we get to the second part that we'll look at in a few moments,
beginning with Psalm 51.
Now it is a year later when Psalm 51 is detailing the prayer of David as he comes to God in
repentance, but it's taken a whole year for him to figure out how to come back.
He's dealing with all the excuses that have been said, he's not coming to God and finally
in Psalm 51 he comes back to God.
And here's what we read there.
Be gracious to me, O God.
According to your faithfulness, according to the greatness of your compassion, wipe out
my wrongdoings.
Wash me thoroughly from my guilt and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my wrongdoings and my sin is constantly before me against you and you only.
I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you're justified when you speak
and blameless when you judge.
Pray with me.
In Jesus' name, my prayer today is that we will see both of these texts with equal weight
in how we connect with you and relate with you.
And Father, today I know there are many that have walked through the same kind of circumstances
David did.
Today they need to be reminded of how difficult sin is and how great your mercy is.
And Father, all of us are in some situation in our lives where we are in desperate need
of your grace and your mercy.
Father, help us be able to lead today understanding that it's truly there, that after we have
blown it, we can be restored.
And I thank you that you're the kind of God that restores people who wander like all of
us have.
I ask this in Jesus' name and all God's people said amen.
Please be seated if you would.
When I talk to people in serious sin, there's one thing in common about all of them that
Tom Hanks' character had in Castaway.
And here's what's in common, they don't know how to come back.
They have no real idea about how to come back and overcome disastrous decisions and moral
choices and illicit relationships.
They just don't know how to come back and consequently they end up drifting further
and further away or at least continuing to be remote and distant from where God is and
where their relationship really ought to be.
Now I might encourage you today, I hope it does, that one of the greatest characters
in the Bible is a character that fell so greatly and yet was restored to God and to others.
I hope it encourages you.
I hope it also sends a little bit of a warning to you if David could fall into sin like this.
David who was a man after God's own heart, David who was a passionate worshiper of God,
if this guy could fall into sin, this bold and this public, this was the most public
affair in human history, if this guy could fall so could you so be on guard.
But also remember that even if anyone does, God is there to restore and to forgive and
to cleanse and aren't you glad about the restoring, cleansing, forgiving God that we have.
Now we see all that in the life of David, we see all that in these two texts that we
read in just a few moments ago.
Remember we know David's story, David's sin against Bathsheba is a well-known story, it's
told so often.
And literally everything bad that could happen does happen with David and Bathsheba.
They have sex, she gets pregnant, David then tries to hide his sin and obscure it the way
we all try to do it and it doesn't work.
And David's story reminds us of what we need to know about sin, that sin will always be
found out.
We always have to deal with it at some point just like David had and we need to understand
how to deal with it as well.
So today I want to look at the life of David, I want to end up equipping you with a couple
of answers to the question, what do we need to know about coming back from sin?
What do we need to know about coming back from a distance from God?
What do we need to know?
Well let me give you four things today beginning in 2 Samuel chapter 11 that we began with
and let me give you the truth about ourselves.
You and I need to know the truth about ourselves, our nature.
In the account of 2 Samuel chapter 11 we're given a detailed look into David's life.
In reality we're looking into his bedroom window so to speak.
And if you dig even deeper we're really looking into his soul.
We're looking into his mind, his will and his emotions.
We're looking into how he deals with the fact that he's been tempted and fallen into this
temptation.
And we see something about the frame of David's mind and what he does after he sins.
Let me tell you something about ourselves, not just David but all of us.
First of all we try to cover our sin.
The Bible says in 2 Samuel chapter 11 and verse 6 that after David discovered that Bathsheba
was pregnant David sent to Joab his commander and said, send me Uriah the Hittite.
In other words, bringing back from the battle.
What David is doing here is attempting to cover his sin by bringing Bathsheba's husband
back home.
And he's hoping that Uriah will come back home like any man would after being at war
and being gone for a time and want to be with his wife.
And he's assuming that Uriah and Bathsheba will sleep together and that will cover David's
sin of impregnating Bathsheba.
But Uriah has such noble character that he's not even going to go home.
He actually sleeps outside the doorway to David's house.
He's such a loyal soldier.
How can I go home when all my fellow soldiers are out there doing battle?
I can't do that.
I'm going to stay and guard the king.
So David has another strategy.
He sends wine to him.
He tries to get him drunk and he literally gets Uriah drunk.
But even in this drunken state Uriah still doesn't go home.
He still doesn't sleep with his wife.
He's still trying to be this loyal, faithful servant.
And David's attempt to cover his sin fails.
Covering sin is always our first response.
We do it from the time that we're little children.
I remember being six years old and committing a capital crime in my house, which is to steal
the allowance of my little brother who was four years old.
I stole a dollar from him and I walked two blocks to the five and dime store.
Now this may date me.
I don't know.
Nobody in this room can remember a five and dime store, but it was a store where you could
— if you had a dollar you could get a lot of candy.
And I did that.
I bought a dollar's worth of candy at the five and dime store.
I remember the sack was about this big, around about that tall.
I went home and I ate it all afternoon, letting no one know where I'd got the money or where
I'd gotten the candy or even that I was eating the candy.
I ate it all afternoon.
That night I woke up in the middle of the night sick and throwing it all up.
My sin had found me out.
We're great at covering sin.
We're not so good at keeping it covered.
That's happening to David.
It's human nature and our first response is we want to cover our sin because we don't
want anyone else to know about it.
We ignore it.
We lie about it.
We deny it.
We blame someone else.
At some point we redefine reality.
Oh, that's not a sin.
I'm free to do whatever I want to do.
You live in a culture where all that's happening and it's okay.
It's okay to lie.
It's okay to deny facts.
It's okay to redefine reality.
You live in a culture where there is no absolute truth.
There is no ground to stand on, but you and I know better than that and we know there
is an absolute truth because there is an absolute God, right?
God has given us the truth, but no matter what's going on in our lives, when we sin,
we attempt because of our human nature to cover sin.
Everything I've just described is a coping mechanism for not acknowledging our sin and
none of those coping mechanisms fix sin.
Nothing makes it better.
The second thing we see in David's life is like us, David is trying to make up for sin.
We try to make up for sin.
If you read all the way through 2 Samuel chapter 11, you get to verse 27 and what happens is
Uriah is sent back to the front lines as David is commanded and Uriah is killed.
Word gets back and this pregnant wife who's just lost her husband is in mourning and 30
days later she's out of mourning.
The Bible says in verse 27, when her time of mourning was over, David sent and brought
her to his house and she became his wife and she bore him a son.
Now David is trying to play the noble man.
He's hoping that nobody really knows that it was he that impregnated Bathsheba, not
Uriah.
We don't have any indication that anyone else really knew apart from one or two people in
the palace who are presumably too frightened to say anything about it.
And so he's trying his best to make up for sin.
How noble is this king?
He will take the widowed wife of Uriah who died in battle and say, I'll take care of
her, she'll be mine.
And yet he's still unaccused.
Often in life we try to make up for our sin.
We also try to move on from sin.
In verse 27 we find this last line in that chapter, that verse that reminds us of where
David stands with God.
I want you to see what it says.
It's so important.
It says, but the thing that David had done was evil in the sight of the Lord.
In other words, he tried to cover it.
He tried to make up for it.
He tried to move on for it and from it.
But that last verse there says that David was still doing what was evil in the sight
of the Lord.
Doesn't that intimidate you to know that God knows everything about our lives?
He knows about where we are.
He knows about what we do.
He knows about what we think.
And even when we try to cover sin and are able to cover it with it from everyone else
being able to see it, we can't cover it from God.
David was an incredible king.
He had great power.
He had the ability to silence everyone, but he couldn't silence God.
And he couldn't hide from his sin at all.
God is not going to let him move on.
That verse tells us that God sees and God knows and God remembers.
That's a great warning for us that no matter where we are in life, God is aware of where
we've been and what we've been doing.
Now, if you keep reading in second Samuel, we get to chapter 12.
In second Samuel 12 is the chapter where Nathan, the prophet, comes and confronts David.
If your Bibles are open, I'm going to read the story of what Nathan said to David.
It's a parable, if you will, helping the king recognize what he's done.
So Nathan said this to David.
He said, Now there were two men in a city, the one wealthy and the other poor.
The wealthy man had a great many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing at all
except one little ewe lamb, which he bought and nurtured.
And it grew up together with him and his children.
It would eat scraps from him and drink from his cup and lie in his lap and was like a
daughter to him.
Now a visitor came to the wealthy man and he could not bring himself to take any animal
from his own and vast flock or his own herd to prepare for the traveler who had come to
him.
So she took the poor man, you lamb, and prepared it for the man who had come to him.
David's anger burned greatly against the man and he said to Nathan, as the Lord lives,
the man who has done this certainly deserves to die.
So he must make restitution for the lamb four times over since he did this thing and had
no compassion.
Nathan then said to David, you yourself are the man.
Now that's a wild moment for a prophet who was supposed to know nothing about what David
and Bathsheba did to come into the presence of the King and make this incredible statement.
It reminds us that there's no way that we can get away from God when we sin.
David has sinned, Nathan has exposed it, so now David only has one recourse, to go to
God personally.
Sometimes we come to that place in our lives where we're given no other opportunity but
to come to God personally.
Now by the time we get to Psalm 51, a year has passed since David and Bathsheba's sin
and of course the child that they have together has died, which is a whole different story.
And now he's coming to God having been exposed by Nathan and we come to Psalm 51.
You know, David tells us so much about the truth about ourselves, but Psalm 51 and the
prayer of David tells us the truth about God.
And it's the truth about God today that's the difference maker because we're all the
same.
We all have human nature.
We all try to hide sin.
We all try to make up for sin and cover sin, but the reality is there is a God who knows
what to do with sin and how to deal with sin.
And that's what Psalm 51 is.
It tells us the truth about our God.
Notice chapter 51 verse 1, that's where you should be in your Bibles now.
The Bible says that David prays and says, be gracious to me, O God, according to your
loving kindness.
I love that David doesn't go the religious route.
I love that he doesn't go to some intercessor.
I love that he realizes that he's got to go to God himself.
He's got to go directly to God.
He's got to talk to God.
He's got to acknowledge his sin before God.
But while he does that, he's also acknowledging what he knows about the character of God.
You know, the tendency we all have is to run from God when we sin.
But finally, after running from God for a year, David is now running to God in his sin.
I want to tell you today, that's the difference maker in your life.
You can run from God as long as you have strength, but one day you'll get worn out and weary
and discovered.
Or you can turn the other way and run towards God the way David is at this moment.
And it's so hard to watch people run away from God.
So hard for me to interact with people, talk to people who say, I know what I need to do,
but I'm just not ready to do that yet.
And they sometimes compromise their livelihoods.
They compromise their families, certainly their reputation by continuing to run from
God and they just get to a place where they're finally, finally desperate.
It's hard to watch.
David's life was a hard life to watch for that year before he ran to God.
But now David's going to run to God.
And as he runs to God, he's going to throw himself at the mercy of God.
The loving kindness of God is on David's heart, correctly.
I mean, God is filled with loving kindness.
The word means goodness and kindness and tenderness.
Our heavenly father absolutely loves us.
The latter part of chapter 51 in Psalm verse one says, according to the greatness of your
compassion blot out my transgressions.
The word compassion means the insides of God, the bowels of God is one way that is sometimes
translated in what David is acknowledging is even though he knows God is a holy just
God, he also knows that God is a loving, compassionate, merciful God.
And of course he's emphasizing the mercy of God as he comes to confess his sins to God.
This is what I call the prodigal son in the Old Testament.
How many of you know the story of the prodigal son?
Luke chapter 15 that Jesus told, what a story.
What an amazing story of this prodigal son who had much to inherit and demanded the inheritance
from his father.
And as the father gave the inheritance, the son went to a far country, the Bible says,
and spent it all, spent all of it and rioted living.
And finally he comes to the end of himself.
He's eating the food that the pigs are eating and he doesn't have any hope of any change
taking place in his life.
And he says, this is what I'm going to do.
I know I've stolen from my father.
I know I've squandered the inheritance.
I'm going to come back to him, but I know I can't come back to him as a son.
I'm coming back as a servant.
I'm going to throw myself at his feet.
I'm going to say, father, I know I've sinned against you.
I don't deserve to be restored to be your son, but would you just let me work for you
and just let me eat in the same level that your servants eat.
But of course, you know the story is a great story.
As he comes back, he comes back straight into the arms of his waiting, compassionate, patient
father who is just standing there waiting for him to come back and embraces him when
he comes back.
And of course, the story is he's restored as a son and the ring is placed on his finger.
The fat calf is killed.
They have a big feast because the son that was lost is now found.
That's the God we have that the scripture paints a picture of for us.
If you go to Romans chapter two, there's a great verse or two that talks about the character
of God.
Romans chapter two, verse four said, do you think likely of his riches and his kindness
and his tolerance and his patience not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?
Or the way in life, I don't believe that most people think about the judgment of God leading
them to repentance, but the Bible says the kindness of God always leads you to repentance
to know he's a personal God that knows you, that realizes where you are, a God who can
forgive you and cleanse you and restore you.
Now that surprises some of us because we're brought up to believe that God has been indicative
and he's angry and he's judgmental and that he's just waiting to zap us for our sin.
I like to remind myself and others that if God wanted you zapped, he would have done
it a long time ago.
But this patience of God, this patience of God means that he's waiting for you to come
home like that prodigal son's father waited for him to return like God was waiting in
Psalm chapter 51 for David to return home.
God is waiting.
God is ready to restore.
I am so glad that I have parents when I was growing up that knew how to love me with a
tough love but knew how to restore me when I needed to be restored.
I love the fact that they would do what was necessary in order for me to not forget those
moments when I did wrong, disobeyed them or did something wrong at school.
And there were plenty of those opportunities.
And that instructed me well but at the end of the instruction, at the end of the punishment
or the discipline, whatever you might want to call it, at the end of that time they would
draw me close and hug me and say, you know, you deserve what you got but also we love
you and we will never let you go.
I am thrilled that I was raised by parents like that and I'm aware that not everyone
is.
Not every father, not every mother reflects the character of a loving, compassionate God
but we ought to.
And whether you had a loving, compassionate father or mother or not, let me tell you,
God is still loving, God is still compassionate, God is still forgiving even if your earthly
father was not.
So David comes to this God who is loving and compassionate and we learn the truth about
this God.
We will absolutely forgive him of sin.
As we walk into this story further, we have to also learn the truth about sin.
The truth about sin is discovered in this prayer, Psalm 51.
Notice what he says as he prays.
Verse three says, for my sin is ever before me.
In other words, I can't get it out of my mind.
We've been led to believe that sin is just simply pleasurable.
It's just a choice we make and we get what we want.
It has no consequence at all.
We believe this because we want to believe this and we don't want anything to get in
the way of our sinful activities but David is saying something entirely different from
that.
I can't get away from the sin I've committed.
It's there and it's irreversible in my life.
I can't remove the consequences of that.
Listen, I believe this.
If we knew what David experienced and thought about the sin that he had committed with Bathsheba,
it would warn us to never do it ourselves.
Verse three again, I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.
During that year between the sin and before Nathan confronted, it was ever before him
and his life was suddenly far different from where he thought he'd be.
If I'm considering serious sin, I need to listen to David's perspective about sin first.
Now, if you've got your Bibles open to the book of Psalms, Psalm 51, go over to Psalm
38 just a few pages away.
I will read Psalm 38 but I want you to see it for yourself because Psalm 38, in case
you didn't know, was a Psalm of David that speaks about how he felt and what he was going
through in his sin.
The first eight verses are very, very convicting.
Lord, do not rebuke me in your wrath.
Do not punish me in your burning anger for your arrows have sunk deep into me and your
hand has pressed down on me.
There is no healthy part in my flesh because of your indignation.
There's no health in my bones because of my sin for my guilty deeds have gone over my
head.
In other words, I'm buried.
I'm drowning in them like a heavy burden.
They weigh too much for me.
My wounds grow foul and fester because of my foolishness.
I am bent over and greatly bowed down.
I go in mourning all day long.
My sides are filled with burning and there's no healthy part in my flesh.
I feel faint and badly crushed.
I groan because of the agitation of my heart.
It's a study of anguish.
God, this is so painful.
If I'd only know how painful this sin would have been, I would never have done that.
That's where I am today because of my foolishness, David is saying.
It leads us to say what you've probably seen before.
Sin will always take you further than you intended to go, keep you longer than you intended
to stay and cost you more than you wanted to pay.
You find that to be true in your life?
The truth about sin is that it costs you more than you realize.
David goes on and says, against you, you only I have sinned in verse four.
I think we can all acknowledge that David was a man after God's own heart.
David loved God and did not set out just to sin against God, but his desires led him to
an exhilarating but disastrous decision.
That's just human nature.
We do that in non-sinful ways sometimes.
Sometimes we see something that we just think we just have to do.
We shouldn't do it.
We probably should stay as far away from it as possible, but it looks exhilarating.
It looks exciting.
It looks like it'll thrill us and we're going to try to do it.
The others are watching, so we just dive right into that opportunity and it's just human
nature.
A few years ago, my son, whose name is Joshua, lived in Colorado.
We went to visit with him and we went to St. Mary's Glacier, which in the summertime is
a beautiful crystal clear cold lake of water surrounded by cliffs.
He challenged me to jump off one of those cliffs, 60 foot tall cliff.
My ego kicked in and I thought, if you can do it, I can.
We climbed up the 60 foot cliff and we looked down into the water.
I could see rocks down there.
I thought I might be able to clear them, but I wasn't sure I could.
He jumped first and then I knew I had to jump after that.
Again, it was one of those moments where I really shouldn't have done that.
There were people watching.
He had just jumped.
I was looking.
I was kind of longing to do it.
I was kind of leaning into it.
Finally, I leaned so far into it, I went off the cliff.
I'm standing here today so I am alive.
The story ends okay.
But I did hit the rock and I did end up with all kinds of bruises on my other side, you
know.
Will I ever do that again?
No I will not.
But sin's kind of like that.
We look at something, we rationalize in our minds, I could probably do that.
I might even be able to get away with that.
We look for a while, we long for it for a while, we justify it in our minds.
After a while we lean that way and before too long we leap.
This is what happened to David.
In fact, the Bible describes sin happening this way with all of us in James chapter 1.
James says, let no one say when he's being tempted, I'm being tempted by God for God
cannot be tempted by evil and he himself does not tempt anyone but each one is tempted when
he is carried away and enticed by his own lust.
Then when lust has conceived it gives birth to sin and when sin is accomplished it brings
forth death.
Now put David on that rooftop for just a moment.
He sees Bathsheba bathing.
He sees that she's beautiful.
He sends an invite.
All of those things should not have taken place.
When the inevitable conclusion takes place, and I want you to know today sin always takes
a step by step, decision by decision path.
It never just happens.
It never explodes on the scene.
It never just shows up.
We look and we linger and we long for something and we lean towards it before we leap.
That's just how sin works in any kind of sin.
I want you to be aware of this because you don't need to be looking and you don't need
to be longing.
You don't need to be leaning in that direction.
Temptation is not a sin but the second look is and the leaning and longing and lingering
is because the inevitable conclusion is you're going to leap at some point and be in the
same place that David was at the end of his sin.
And you do it all along knowing the character of God, his holiness, and his desire for your
life.
You sin willingly that you are really offending the character of a God who has perhaps already
forgiven you if you're a believer in Christ and a God who's promised to forgive you if
you repent and you are mocking his character.
To know his character and still sin is the worst thing.
John Munyon years ago made the statement, he said, sin is the dare of God's justice,
the rape of his mercy, the jeer of his patience, the slight of his power, and the contempt
of his love.
That's a strong statement.
All these were happening in David's life and he was acknowledging that his sin was before
him and his sin was against holy God.
Listen, when you sin, you don't just sin against somebody else even though others are involved
in the collateral damage, you mainly sin against God.
It is God that's called you to walk with him.
It's God that's called you away from the behavior that the rest of the world is involved with.
In verse five, David says one more thing.
He says, in sin my mother conceived me.
It's just a reference to original sin.
The idea is that I am prone to wander.
We have an o-hem that we sing from time to time, prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone
to lead the God I love.
I've got to tell you today, you're prone to wander too.
I'm prone to wander as well.
That's human nature, that's sin nature that we have been saved from by the power of Jesus
Christ.
You need to know about sin for you to come back to God.
Finally, you need to remember sin is always a setback.
Sin is never a secret.
Sin is not the end.
Aren't you glad it's not the end?
I want you to see one more thing and that is the truth about repentance.
By the time you get to verse six of Psalm 51, David is really, really breaking through.
He's really becoming clean before God.
He says, behold, you desire truth in the innermost being and in the hidden part, you will make
me no wisdom.
I consider this a breakthrough verse because David is saying, I know what you want, God.
You want me to be transparent and honest before you.
You want me to not try to hide anything from you or from anyone else.
I just need to bear my soul before you and be completely transparent with you so there
will be no deception between you and myself.
God will never deceive us, but we often try to deceive God.
And David is at this place where he says, no more of that.
No more of that.
I'm going to be real with you.
Repentance begins by being honest with yourself and your actions and taking ownership of them.
And if that happens, cleansing and confession are there.
This is what happened when we confess and repent of our sin.
It's spelled out in verses seven and eight and nine.
David says, on this side of God's cleansing, purify me and I shall be clean.
He knows where he wants to be on this side of God.
He says, cleanse me.
And on this side of that cleansing, I will be whiter than snow.
He says in verse eight, the bones you've broken will rejoice on this side.
He says, my sin that separates me, you will blot out on this side and remember no more.
In other words, in this prayer, he's saying, I know what's going to happen.
I'm on this side of you.
I'm separated from you, but as I confess my sin, I'm going to be brought over here to
cleansing.
As I have these broken bones from the sin, I know those same bones are going to have
joy again because you're going to cleanse me and forgive me.
Folks, what David is telling us is the before and after of repentance, which is also the
before and after of the gospel.
Did you know that before the gospel, you are always over here?
Your sin is always before you.
You have no way of getting out of your sinful life and your sinful separation from God.
But after Jesus Christ dies on the cross, your sin is removed from you, placed on him.
He forgives you and you are now in a new place of restoration.
Aren't you glad about that?
The cross of Jesus means you move from being distant from God to being close to God.
And David is saying those kinds of words in Psalms chapter 51.
This is good news for sinners and practicals.
This is good news for every single one of us.
Like a sunrise after a long night of difficulty and anguish.
This conclusion in Psalm 51 is such a bright spot in David's life.
Now, make no mistake, his life after the sin was compromised in a number of ways because
of the consequences for his sin.
You can choose your sin, but you can't choose your consequences.
And some of those things happened to David.
He lost his son.
He lost some of his reputation.
He was restored to the throne, but he was still known for this adulterous affair.
That God did restore him back to a relationship with God.
Let me ask you today, did you hear the call to come back to God?
Do you hear the invitation of a loving father who says, it doesn't matter how far away you
are, you can be as remote as the most remote desert island imaginable.
But I can still bring you back if you would just turn to me.
I love one of the last lines of Psalm 51 verse 17, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,
a broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise.
David talks about what kind of sacrifices God does not want or honor, but he talks about
one that God will honor.
And that is a broken heart and a broken spirit, which takes us right back to the prodigal.
The prodigal son in the parable that Jesus told was so far away, so broken, had no answers,
no way to get back.
So he divides his own plan, I'll come back and be a servant.
And that loving father was waiting to restore him to become a son again.
I want to leave you with that truth today, that truth about God.
After looking about the truth about yourself, the truth about sin, I want you to walk away
knowing the truth about God.
When we turn and we come to God, He reaches out and restores us.
And in whatever way you come back to Him through this repentance, whatever time you come back
to Him, however far away you have been, you'll be perfectly restored to a God who forgives
and cleanses and transforms.
I wonder how many of you today need to make a decision to take steps towards God.
You've never taken any steps towards God.
I would say that one of the greatest experiences of your life, if not the greatest experience
of your life, is to take one step towards God and watch Him meet you there.
Today we have decision stations that will be available for you.
Take a step towards God by telling someone you want to take that step towards God.
They'll walk with you, pray with you through that decision.
Those decision stations are at the back of our services.
As you walk out today in just a few moments, you can't miss them, they're there, the people
that are there cannot wait to talk with you and visit with you.
But I will tell you today that you don't need to wait a year before you come back to God
if you're in sin.
Don't do what David did in the sense of how long it took him.
Go back to God quickly.
Go back to God directly.
Or if you're coming to Him for the first time, come today.
He's there.
He's ready for you.
My first invitation is for you to do that.
Maybe that you're a guest today, a second invitation I would give you is to meet me
in just a few moments in the guest reception room right outside our center exit doors and
across the hallway.
It's a glassed in room.
I'd love to talk to you about Cross City Church and our message and what goes on in our church.
So maybe you'd like to stop there if you've already made the spiritual decisions you need
to make today.
A third invitation would be bring someone with you next week.
They're invite cards as you leave today.
Week by week as we walk through this, God's not done with you.
It's a great opportunity for you to reach out to someone that thanks God is done with
them.
Next week I'm looking at the life of Peter who denied Christ three times.
Can you imagine denying Christ three times and being so disillusioned with Jesus that
you would do that but Jesus restored you.
We'll look at that next week.
Would you stand with me for prayer?
Father, I am so thankful for the good news of the gospel, so thankful for David's life
on display so that we would not have to walk that way into sin.
But Lord, I'm also thankful that his prayer shows us how to come back to you and that
you are a God filled with loving kindness and compassion.
Today there are many in the room that need to think through where they stand with you
and what next steps they need to take.
I pray that you'll give them the courage and the boldness to take these next steps and
come to you today.
Father, thank you so much that you are the loving father in the story of the prodigal
son that you are waiting endlessly for us to return.
Lord, let us return to you today.
I thank you for this.
In Jesus' name I pray, amen.