Psalm 32, beginning in verse one.
How joyful is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
How joyful is a person whom the Lord
does not charge with iniquity,
and in whose spirit is no deceit.
When I kept silent, my bones became brittle
from my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy on me,
my strength was drained as in the summer's heat, Selah.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you
and did not conceal my iniquity.
I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,
and you forgave the guilt of my sin, Selah.
Therefore, let everyone who is faithful
pray to you immediately.
When great flood waters come, they will not reach him.
You are my hiding place.
You protect me from trouble.
You surround me with joyful shouts of deliverance, Selah.
I will instruct you and show you the way to go.
With my eye on you, I will counsel.
Do not be like a horse or mule without understanding.
That must be controlled with bit and bridle,
or else it will not come near you.
Many pains come to the wicked,
but the one who trusts in the Lord
will have faithful love surrounding him.
Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, you righteous ones.
Shout for joy, all you upright in heart.
Let's set this over here.
If you open your eyes, you turn on the television,
you scroll through social media,
you will only take a few moments before you are hit
with the reality of the sin that is all so prevalent
around us.
Governments, social systems, institutions are all,
or have corruption within them,
we have a media system, media companies
that profit or monetize suffering.
The more salacious or suffering,
the more money, potential income for these media companies.
We have all kinds of stories of injustice
and stories of mistreatment, of oppression and corruption.
These are, dare I say, a dime a dozen.
As horribly callous as that sounds,
and rightfully so, it's true.
Assault, rape, robbery, murder, slander, lies,
filthy language, this is what it means
to live as human in human civilization,
quote unquote.
And you might say, as I've heard many people,
I think I even heard someone yesterday say,
man, the world needs saving.
Man, the world needs saving.
And I don't think that's too difficult to see.
The sin that's out there is so great.
But what if that was only part of the problem of sin,
the sin out there?
And what if that part of the problem of sin
was not even really the most pressing part,
at least for you and for me?
What if what we are able to see so clearly out there
is oftentimes unseen and invisible in here?
For the modern and postmodern mind,
it's very hard to see the brokenness
that is so much closer to home.
The postmodern mind says that
there's light of goodness within,
and it is my job to clean the lens, clean the glass,
so that the goodness within me can show out to you.
And you are to simply accept it as it's presented.
No questions asked.
And so the idea of brokenness within,
broken in the heart,
broken at the level of desires and affections
is all but foreign to our modern moment.
And I believe the season of Lent,
these 40 days, not counting the Sundays,
leading us up to the end of the year,
Easter, these are an invitation for us
to take the first steps toward God's offer of salvation.
Most of you, many of you, all of you,
have already done that.
But we proclaim it year after year, day after day,
because it is in that salvation that there is great power.
And it is in that story of the gospel
that God intends to reshape the world
and call sons and daughters to himself.
And so it is our job to continually remember
and retell the great story of God and his salvation.
It's easy to recognize the corruption out there,
but it is not easy to recognize the evil inclinations
of our own heart.
And even more so, it's more difficult to call them out
through confession and repentance.
And here we have Psalm 32, where David,
who was a shepherd boy, who became king,
anointed king over Israel, he was a man, the Bible says,
who was after God's own heart.
And yet we also know that the Bible shows us
that he was a sinful and flawed human being,
very relatable to us.
And yet he loved and walked humbly with the Lord.
And he is the one, we are told, in the heading of Psalm 32,
who wrote this Psalm.
And in verse one, he uses a word that is pretty much foreign
to all of our colloquial speech.
He says, how joyful is the one whose transgressions
are forgiven, whose sin is covered.
Transgression is not a word we just throw around, right?
That doesn't just slip out while we're at the grocery store.
Transgression is taken from the Hebrew word,
which means self-centered rebellion.
Self-centered rebellion, it means to revolt
or to rise up in clear defiance to authority.
Now we love to use all kinds of euphemisms
when it comes to sin, don't we?
I made a mistake.
I messed up.
Whoa, I had an error in judgment, man.
I made a poor choice.
I had a moment of weakness.
And to be certain, we all can make mistakes
and we all have moments of weaknesses
and we make unwise choices all the time,
but actually, some of those are not sinful.
They're simply the frailty of being human
and what it means to live in a broken, corrupt world.
But more often than not, we know the difference.
We know what we're doing if we really stop and examine.
We know inside what is right
and we know what we have instead chosen to do.
And therein is what the word transgression means,
self-centered rebellion, to revolt,
to rise up in clear defiance to authority or to an authority.
And in this case, our euphemisms are all just softball ways
of us passing off the buck, passing the blame for our sins.
Handing it off and saying, hey, I'm not gonna own up to that.
I'll own up to a mistake, but I won't own up to rebellion,
revolt, defiance of authority.
Augustine in his confessions, his writing called Confessions,
he gave a story from his youth.
He and his buddies used to go out
and they would steal pears,
just steal pears off of other people's trees
and they would eat them.
And he recalls this story and he remembers at one point
in time asking himself, why do I do that?
He had a little bit of a moment of self-reflection.
Why do I go and I steal these pears
off of these trees with my buddies?
And he realized that it wasn't
because the pears were particularly great.
He recognized in his life he had access
to all kinds of top-notch fruit available to him,
including pears.
These weren't exceptional pears that you had to eat.
These weren't exceptional pears that you had
to get your hands on and therefore it was worth stealing.
He also wasn't hungry.
It wasn't like he was starved or he was an outcast,
you know, or someone who didn't have food,
someone living on the streets.
And so he continued this process of reflection.
Why do I do this?
And after deliberating with himself for a bit,
it dawns on him and he writes this.
He said, my pleasure was not in the pears.
My pleasure was in the crime itself.
I liked stealing.
I enjoyed it.
I enjoyed taking what was not mine.
It made me feel something.
And this self-centeredness that Augustine is recalling
where everything revolves around what I want
or what my eyes desire and therefore I do it
and it feeds that desire and causes more desire
to rise up, well that is the root of all evil
and problems in the world that we face.
The problems out there that we recounted at the beginning
are all at root self-centered pride, self-centered desire
that reaches out and takes the forbidden fruit
because it wants to.
It ignores the good and right commands of God's word.
Why?
Well, in Augustine's perspective in his situation,
simply for rebellion's sake.
Because I can, so I will.
I ask you today, do you take it seriously?
Do you have a right view of sin as rebellion?
Do you agree with the word the Bible chooses?
Transgression, rebellion,
do you take seriously or do you mask over the sin
in your own heart with niceties?
Oh, that's just my personality.
You know, baby, I was born this way.
Do you put lipstick on the pig
to make it sting a little bit less
and forget that it's a pig?
Well, what is the sin of rebellion?
Well, what is the solution?
What is the hope in the midst of this sin-stained reality
we all find ourselves in?
Surely it's not to keep quiet about our sins.
It's not to push it down all the way to the back,
to the dark recesses of our heart.
Maybe if we put it out of sight,
then it'll be out of mind,
or maybe if we don't make eye contact with it,
it's not real, like it's a horror movie or something.
Well, David in Psalm 32, what he said is that
when he kept his sin hidden, something happened to him.
When he tried to do that, when he tried to push it down
and not call it for what it is
and not acknowledge what it is, something happened to him.
He says his bones were wasting away within him.
It felt like his bones were wasting away.
He said it felt like being out in the midday sun,
beating down on him like heat stroke.
It was draining the strength from his body
when he tried to keep silent.
Did you know the effects of unconfessed sin
can actually cross the boundary between the abstract
into the concrete, into the actual physical?
Did you know that the effects of unconfessed sin
can drain you of your life's vibrancy?
That you can hang your head in sorrow and grief
and not even know why, because of unconfessed sin
that has been shoved to the back into the darkest parts
and it will strangle out the joy of living.
David experienced it in Psalm 32.
But he actually adds to it.
He says my unconfessed sin had this physical,
it was almost like a physical effect on my body,
but then in verse four he says that he was also
experiencing the heavy hand of God on him.
The heavy hand of God convicting his sin,
trying to draw him to the place of repentance.
He felt God's hand on him.
He realized that God would not allow him
to carry on in comfort
while sin slowly eroded away at his heart.
God would not withstand that.
God would not bear that and so he placed his hand
heavily on him.
And so he placed his hand heavy upon David
so that he might feel the effects of sin.
CS Lewis said every uncorrected error
and unrepented sin is in its own right
a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin
flowing on to the end of time.
Truth is that hidden sin kills.
Hidden sin slowly kills.
And also hidden sin multiplies sin.
It multiplies sin in our life.
It causes us to always retract back to a hidden state,
always back to a place of darkness
and the deeds of darkness,
the things that happen in the dark
are not the things that happen in the light
and so sin is multiplied by sin.
Sin is multiplied when we withdraw into that place,
when we leave things in the cupboards,
push far back.
You know that you always,
you have that cupboard in the house, right?
That one cupboard that no one goes in.
The one over the fridge for us, right?
It's like no one could reach it anyways,
certainly not in our house.
I could reach it but no one else could reach it.
And no one's gonna go in there.
Well, just shove our sin in that one cupboard.
We also make an error in that.
We make an error in the fact that we think time
actually erases sin.
For some of you, you think an egregious sin
against heaven, against God
that is currently unrepentant in your heart
that you did 15 years ago
and you have never acknowledged
and brought before the Lord in repentance,
you think that the 15 years has erased that sin.
It hasn't.
It's a dark spot.
And we oftentimes withdraw and go back to those places.
And from that place is like cancer.
One cell multiplying, multiplying, multiplying
until it consumes.
And we've all experienced exactly what David's speaking of.
I think maybe when we were younger
and we were a little more sensitive,
but you knew when you were under guilt,
trying to hide something,
hoping that you would be able to get out of it.
Hoping no one would find out,
but thinking that everything anyone ever said to you
was actually them seeing right through you.
And they could see the guilt and they knew you were guilty
and you just wanted to say something,
but you couldn't say it.
The first sin that's recorded in history,
in human history, led immediately to hiddenness.
And you and I, we don't hide behind bushes.
Maybe some of us do,
but we typically don't hide behind bushes because of our sin.
But we hide behind busyness.
We hide behind 80 hour work weeks.
We hide behind anger,
pointing the finger at those other people
who are causing harm and distress in my life.
My life would be better if not for them.
We hide.
We hide all the time because we will do anything
to avoid contact with Almighty God.
Because contact with God will require
facing the rebellion in our own hearts.
David then says, then I acknowledged my sin.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you
and did not conceal my iniquity.
I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord
and you forgave the guilt of my sin.
You forgave the guilt of my sin.
Sin must be confessed.
And confession begins with acknowledging that sin is sin.
It acknowledges that in the sinning,
when we sin, we enter into a forbidden area.
We cross a divine boundary
that was set by God between what is good
and what is evil or wrong.
And when we confess, we first have to acknowledge
and in acknowledging, we first agree with God
and God's perspective.
We say, we see this as you see it.
And when we do that, when we acknowledge sin,
we draw a boundary around it
and we isolate our sin
away from the other parts of our heart.
We draw that boundary around it
and then God can come in and do surgery on that part.
When we isolate it by confessing and acknowledging it.
True confession is not punishment for our sins.
Some of us parents have fallen in, we're guilty of this
because we'll force a confession out of our kids
and they'll begin to blend the thinking
that confession is a part of the punishment.
You're going to make me say this out loud.
And what we really should be doing
is acknowledging the ways that they erred
but showing them that confession is the route out.
Confession is the way to healing.
Confession is the first step toward pardon.
It's not the punishment.
It's the remedy.
It's the fixing.
But even in confession, there is a danger that we face
and that is of self-pity.
We can even get confession wrong.
In the book of 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul says
that there are two kinds of grief, not this one yet, Nate.
There are two kinds of grief that we can respond to sin with.
Says that we can respond with godly grief
or we can respond with worldly grief.
And he says of godly grief and worldly grief,
godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation
without regret and worldly grief produces death.
There's two ways to grieve over our sin,
godly and worldly.
And the difference between these two
is pretty much illustrated by any person
who gets caught breaking the rule
and you guys all know them, maybe you've been one of them.
And the apologies, man, they certainly sound identical.
I'm sorry.
Right, I'm sorry, but at a heart level,
they could be galaxies apart.
One could be saying, really, I'm sorry because I got caught.
I'm sorry because now I have to be in grief
and I'm sorry because now I must deal with the fact
that my sin's been exposed.
Yes.
I'm sorry because now my day is over.
Because now my day's inconvenience,
my week's inconvenience, I've lost opportunity.
Me, me, me, I, I, I.
I'm upset that I have to now face consequences.
That's worldly sorrow.
Worldly sorrow is self-centered.
It thinks supremely of the effect
that the consequence of sin has on oneself.
Look what it did to me.
But there is another kind of grief, another kind of sorrow,
and that's called godly grief or godly sorrow.
And godly sorrow or grief recognizes first
the relational effect that sin has.
It recognizes that in sinning, I've wounded someone else.
I've wounded the Father's heart.
I've rebelled against perfect goodness.
I've grieved the Father's heart.
And it focuses on whatever is necessary
to repair relationship.
How do I get back?
How do I restore the salvation and the reconciliation?
How do I restore the relationship
that I once had with my God
that this sin has fractured or pulled apart or torn apart?
Godly sorrow is us wanting relationship with God
at all costs and not thinking about the consequence
to ourselves.
Whatever that may be.
Worldly sorrow leads to death, but godly grief
leads to salvation.
And in verse two, David writes this.
He writes, how joyful is a person
whom the Lord does not charge with iniquity
and in whose spirit is no deceit.
In the New American Standard Bible,
it translates that same passage.
How blessed is a person whose guilt
the Lord does not take into account.
And in whose spirit there is no deceit.
Truly, this would be a blessed person, yes.
God not taking into account, yep, that would be awesome.
But what on earth in Psalm 32
in whatever year that was written,
what on earth got into David
to make him think that was even possible?
What on earth made him think that God
would ever do something like that?
It's an outlandish speculation, it's bold.
That'd be like me saying, man, blessed is the person
whose guilt the California Highway Patrol
does not hold against him as he goes flying down
Highway 50 at 87 miles an hour weaving in and out of traffic
right past the cop.
That would be blessed.
But fat chance, highly unlikely.
And yet David makes his bold proclamation.
How blessed would that be?
How awesome, how joyful would that person be?
And it's awesome because the Bible
is full of cross references in quotes
and they become so helpful in understanding
how the Bible is to be read.
And this is one of those,
I'm gonna read it for you,
is to be read, and this is one of those.
Left alone, this Psalm 32 is like,
wow, that's really pie in the sky fancy thinking there,
but probably not gonna happen.
But then the apostle Paul grabs it.
He grabs that verse out of Psalm 32,
and writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit
which breathes new life into that scripture,
he plops it down right in the middle of Romans.
Right in the middle of Romans chapter four
where he's talking about Abraham,
and was Abraham justified by works,
the things he did by keeping the law, by obeying,
or was Abraham justified by faith?
Right there in the middle, he drops this scripture.
He says, what then shall we say?
Abraham our forefather according to the flesh,
for if Abraham was justified by works,
he has something to boast about, but not before God.
For what does the scripture say?
Abraham believed God,
and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
Now to the one who works,
his wages are not reckoned as a gift, but as his due.
You work, you get paid.
That's not a gift.
And to the one who does not work,
but trusts him who justifies the ungodly,
his faith is reckoned as righteousness,
restored relationship with God, the perfect and holy God.
And then Paul says, so also David pronounces
a blessing upon the man to whom God reckons righteousness
apart from works.
Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven
and whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the man against whom the Lord
will not reckon his sin.
And then we begin to see, oh my goodness,
it's not so outlandish.
It's not so crazy talk.
You mean there is a way in which God will not count
iniquity against a person?
He will not count sin against a person?
And Paul says, yes, in fact,
it is on the same basis that Abraham,
who received a special revelation from God
to come and go into the land,
and God would do certain things through him and his family
that ultimately led in Christ, and Abraham believed.
And Abraham was before the law.
The law wasn't even there for him to obey.
And yet in his belief, it was reckoned to him.
It was credited to him as righteousness.
It was righteousness by faith alone.
It was righteousness by grace alone.
It was a gift on the basis of belief.
It was by grace, through faith,
that Abraham received it from God.
And we find in the New Testament that in Christ,
this offering, this offering to be reckoned to God right.
To be reckoned to God right.
Not on the basis of doing right or wrong,
but on the basis of faith alone by grace.
That Christ is actually offering that to the whole world.
Abraham had this special revelation from God,
and he began to walk in it.
And yes, he became a nation,
and some within that nation also put their faith
and hope in Christ, in God,
in the same way that Abraham had it.
And so they also were reckoned righteous.
But in Jesus, it blew the doors open.
And said this offer, this offering,
is actually for the whole world.
And so David in Psalm 32,
knowingly or unknowingly, was ultimately referring to Jesus.
He saw this is within God's character.
For whatever it is, however he had experienced,
he was a man after God's own heart,
his time in prayer, his time in worship,
his study of the Torah and his understanding of who God was.
He came to the conclusion,
this is the kind of God that I'm worshiping.
He's the kind of God who in the end
values faith over works.
In the end values trust, trust in him.
Loyal love to him.
And he just might do this crazy thing.
He just might count someone righteous,
not on account of the law, but by faith.
That's the kind of God.
Not that he imagined, he experienced.
And Paul just takes that from Romans
and continues to stretch that idea out
in Second Corinthians when he says this.
He says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ,
he is a new creation.
The old has passed away, behold, the new has come.
All this is from God who through Christ
reconciled us to himself and gave to us
the ministry of reconciliation.
That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world
to himself, not counting their transgressions against them,
or the trespasses against them,
and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
And so we are ambassadors for Christ.
God making his appeal through us,
we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
The door's open, kicked open by Christ.
This crazy fantastical idea that somehow
was planted in the heart of David
and written in the words of Psalm 32 is reality.
God is not counting trespasses,
God is not counting transgression
against the sinner anymore through faith.
So my final thoughts from this passage today,
and I'll bring the worship team up to close this out,
we're gonna close out with communion,
is that on the cross, Jesus took all our sin,
transgressions and iniquities.
And for a Roman crucifixion, a Roman crucifixion,
the guilty was stripped naked,
they were totally exposed,
and it was intended to be that they would be mocked,
that they would be ridiculed, that they would be spit on,
that they would be cursed,
because it was not just about the death,
but it was about the shame in the death.
There was nothing more shameful than a Roman crucifixion.
And at the very beginning,
at the end of that first verse in Psalm 32,
it says, how joyful is the one
whose sin is covered,
whose sin is covered.
And on the cross, Jesus was totally uncovered,
completely uncovered, subject to ultimate shame,
exposed, and what he went through
is exactly what the sinner deserves.
We deserve, you and I, to have all of our hypocrisy,
all of our self-centeredness, all of our rebelliousness,
completely uncovered and shamefully exposed
for everyone to see.
That's what we deserve. We have all sinned and fallen short
of the glory of God, but the Bible says
that Jesus went through all of that for us.
He was exposed so that we could be covered.
He was laid bare, subject to shame,
the shame we deserved, so that we could be welcomed in
as sons and daughters of the King.
What an exchange.
There's an old hymn that reads,
and can it be that I should gain
an interest in the Savior's blood?
Died he for me who caused him pain,
for me who he to death pursued.
Amazing love, how can it be
that thou, my God, should die for me?
We have to see our sin for what it is,
but it doesn't stop there.
You and I get to turn and look at Christ for who he is.
It's something that struck me in worship
as we were preparing, and as the worship team
will lead us in just a second.
And maybe I'm gonna go ahead and release,
as the worship team leads, I'm gonna lay out
the elements of communion.
We're not gonna do as our typical one
where you take it back to your seat
and we receive it together, but instead,
we've brought out the good old altars here,
dusted them off just for you,
and your creaky old knees for me.
And what I would encourage is while we're leading worship,
while they're leading worship and singing over us,
whenever you feel comfortable and wind kinda clears out
and there's room for you, come and grab some elements
and just spend a moment at the altar.
Something that I realized as I was worshiping is
to look to the cross, you have to lift up your head.
You can't see the cross on the ground.
You have to lift up your head.
You have to look to the cross.
You have to lift up your head.
And our heads down, well, heads downcast, that's shame.
But to look to the cross is to lift up our head.
Just remember that Christ lifted up our head
when he went to the cross and paid the ultimate price for us.
How can it be that you, my God, should die for me?