This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series. For the next few weeks we are going to be looking at forgiveness. We’ll explore this important idea from a variety of different angles including our cry to God for it, where it comes from, how it works, and what it looks like when we have received it. If forgiveness is something you need more of in your life – whether offering it or receiving it – this is series you won’t want to miss. We’ll start today with a look at the natural cry for forgiveness found on our lips when we have sinned in some way and broken a relationship. Guiding us in our journey will be David’s writings in Psalm 51. Let’s dive in.

The Cry for Forgiveness

When I was little I watched a lot of TV. It was mostly cartoons. There aren’t too many cartoons I didn’t watch growing up. That was before they started making adult cartoons, so I wasn’t really in much danger in that regard. I loved cartoons. I still do. Because of this, when I occasionally stepped out of line, one of the pressure points my parents could use as punishment was to take away TV for time. I remember one time when I had lost the privilege of watching TV for a week. I don’t have any idea what I had done, but I’m sure it was something that more than warranted the punishment. 

During the week itself, this wasn’t such a big deal because of going to school and after school activities and the like. But on Saturday morning when I was the first one up by a long shot and all of my normal toons were coming on…abiding by the lines of my punishment was a bit harder. Okay, I’ll be honest, I failed. I turned the TV on, kept the volume low, and hoped that my parents wouldn’t hear it from their bedroom upstairs and on the other end of the house. 

As you can probably already guess—because that’s always how these kinds of stories go—my dad came down after a few minutes. Rather than just blowing me up, which really wasn’t his style at all, he asked me what I was doing. Well, I knew I was busted. There was no use trying to deny what I was doing. My wheels were spinning on hyperspeed, and suddenly an idea flashed in my mind that I started to develop aloud and in real time. I quickly explained that my parents were right. I really did watch too much TV. I needed more time away from it, and so I turned it on that morning knowing they would extend the time of my punishment which would ultimately be a good thing for me. So really, I wasn’t doing anything wrong at all. I was actually doing everyone a favor and making a decision that was in my long term best interest. And although I don’t think I said it out loud, I’m sure I was hoping somewhere inside that my reasoning would be considered sufficiently profound that they would reward my foresight and display of maturity by taking away the punishment altogether. 

Do you know what all that was? It was nonsense, for one. But more important than that, it was an attempt to justify my actions which I knew to be in the wrong. My folks had told me not to watch TV. I knew I was supposed to do what my parents told me to do. I disobeyed them and did it anyway. There was no question I was not doing what I should have been doing. To put some more theological language on things, I was trying to justify my sin. We all do that. And it’s really not all that surprising that we do. Sin brings consequences. We don’t want to face those consequences. And so we try to justify our actions or words to avoid bearing their full weight. I mean, who really wants to have to actually pay for the things they’ve done wrong? Not me, that’s who.  And I suspect that if you’re being really honest, you’d probably confess to being with me on that. 

But here’s the thing about justification. The only person who can actually justify us for our sin—that is, the only person who can make it just as if I’d never done the thing that I did—is the one against whom that sin was committed. And that’s only going to happen when we have been forgiven by them for whatever it is. Forgiveness comes first, then the making right of justification has space to happen. Forgiveness is one of those things we think about from time to time without really understanding. It’s one of those things that we know we’re supposed to do when someone has hurt us, but which we don’t really want to do when push comes to shove. It’s one of those things we know we need when we screw up, but we don’t always know how to get it. But when we land in that place where forgiveness—real forgiveness—actually happens, it’s a beautiful thing. 

Well, starting this morning and taking us right up to the Thanksgiving holiday, we are going to be talking about forgiveness in a brand-new teaching series called The Beauty of Forgiveness. And if you were in one of our Sunday school groups this morning, that title may ring a bell for you. This series is going to be piggybacking off of the Sunday school series all of our adult Sunday school classes will be going through during the same period of time. This means that if you aren’t already in a Sunday school group, now would be a great time to fix that. My guess is that before this series ends, we’re all going to be in here for Sunday school together anyway, so, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, it’s an even better time to get started on the habit than it normally would be. In any event, each week in this journey we are going to look at a different aspect of forgiveness from our cry for it as sinners to what we should do to positively demonstrate we have received the forgiveness God offers us in Christ. 

Let’s start today with that cry for forgiveness that resonates in our hearts and minds. Forgiveness is necessary because of sin. What makes it necessary is that sin breaks relationships. The trouble here is that we weren’t made to live with broken relationships. That state of affairs is objectively miserable. When we recognize that we have a broken relationship on our hands—which doesn’t usually take a lot of effort to figure out—there is something in us that naturally wants to see things made right again. Now, that’s not always possible depending on the severity of the sin and the context of the relationship, but God’s ability to reconcile broken things is pretty extraordinary. And even where it isn’t possible to be reconciled with another person, reconciliation is always possible with God. And indeed, when we sin and finally get to a place of recognizing our sin and desiring to repent of it, that’s exactly to whom we run in hopes of experiencing the beauty of forgiveness. 

Now, we see this forgiveness demonstrated throughout the Scriptures. We see it sought. We see it granted. We even see it rejected on occasion. But there is no passage that puts the deep desire in our hearts for forgiveness when we have been made aware of our relationship breaking sin quite as poignantly as what David writes in Psalm 51. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, join me there, and let’s talk context for just a second. 

Psalm 51 is David’s heartfelt confession of his sin after the whole Bathsheba debacle. We know that because the little chicken scratch at the beginning of the psalm tells us. It notes that this is “A psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him after he had gone to Bathsheba.” Unless we know a little more of the story, though, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. David was the king of Israel. He wasn’t the first king of Israel, but he was the greatest king of Israel. He was chosen by God to lead the people after Saul’s failed reign. He was a good and righteous man who sought the Lord with all of his heart. But for all of his love for the Lord, he was not a perfect man. In fact, the second book bearing the prophet Samuel’s name is built around David’s greatest failures as king and how things went in the aftermath. 

The editor of 2 Samuel tells us in chapter 12 that in the spring of the year, the time when kings went off to war, David remained in Jerusalem. It’s an innocent enough looking note, but one that carries an ominous tone. David wasn’t where he was supposed to be, which means he wasn’t doing what he should have been doing. That’s always a recipe for trouble. In this case, the married king was out strolling on his balcony one night, looking down into the city, when he spied a beautiful woman bathing on her rooftop. The woman was Bathsheba, and she was married to one of David’s military officers named Uriah. Ignoring all reason and rationality and the efforts of his servants to dissuade him from making a terrible mistake, David sends for her, sleeps with her (in an act that was likely not consensual on her part), and then finds out a few weeks later that she was now pregnant. In order to cover for his misdeeds, he calls her husband back from the frontlines in hopes that he would be overjoyed to see his wife and solve David’s problem. When he refuses even after being plied with alcohol, David sends him back to the battle with written orders that amount to his death warrant. In order words, David has him murdered. Then, to add insult to injury, he puts on a show of righteousness for the people and brings Uriah’s poor, grieving widow, Bathsheba, into his house to be one of his wives so that she will be properly cared for after this terrible tragedy that had befallen the nation in losing one of its favorite sons. What a great guy David was.

When all the dust is settled, God sends the prophet Nathan to David to call him out on the carpet for his evil deeds. That took some serious guts on Nathan’s part. Most people who called out kings in the ancient world wound up with their heads separated from their bodies. Consider what happened to John the Baptist for calling out Herod. Nathan sets up this elaborate hypothetical situation with a parable that gets David all fired up and calling for justice, and then Nathan reveals that he is calling for justice against himself because he is the one who did the awful thing. 

David could have responded in a whole lot of different ways. But for all of his faults and flaws, he was still a man after God’s own heart. He desired to live in a relationship with God—a relationship he had violently severed. And so with humility and shame he cried out to God, “Be gracious to me, God, according to your faithful love; according to your abundant compassion, blot out my rebellion.” Notice that he doesn’t cry out to God because of anything inherent to him, but because of who God is. He appeals to God’s character. “God, I know you are gracious and faithful and loving and compassionate. Please deal with me in light of who you are, and not in light of who I am.” 

His ask of God is bold. “Completely wash away my guilt and cleanse me from my sin.” He wasn’t asking for just a little bit of a break. He wanted God to wash away the whole thing, to not count it against him on his cosmic record. And he knew just what he was asking in making this request. He was fully aware of the guilt that he bore. “For I am conscious of my rebellion, and my sin is always before me.” Notice that he doesn’t confess to something less than he actually did. He didn’t just make a little mistake. He rebelled against the authority and sovereignty of God. 

In the next part here, he says something really interesting. “Against you—you alone—I have sinned and done this evil in your sight. So you are right when you pass sentence; you are blameless when you judge. Indeed, I was guilty when I was born; I was sinful when my mother conceived me.” He doesn’t question God’s right to judge him, to condemn him for his guilt. That is an important thing for us to factor into our own confession. If God really is sovereign, then judging us for our sin is His right. He’s not wrong to do it. Sometimes we act like God isn’t really right to judge us for our sin. But if He’s not right to do it, then who is? Unless and until you agree with God about your sin, you’re never going to take the necessary steps to deal with it properly. You’re just going to keep wallowing in it. That’s probably a prayer you need to pray: God help me agree with you about my sin. But do that carefully because He just might answer it, and when you finally see your sin like God does, that’s not going to be an easy day. 

But that’s not the most interesting thing here. Did you catch the first part of that? “Against you—you alone–I have sinned.” Really, David? You don’t want to maybe include Bathsheba and…oh, I don’t know…Uriah in the list of people you sinned against? Before you get all fired up about David’s rather glaring omission here, let’s stop and think. What David is doing here is pointing to a theological truth about all sin that is important for us to understand. All sin is ultimately against God. All sin ultimately starts as a rebellion against His authority and sovereignty as God. Now, it very well may have a direct and painful impact on a particular person or group of people, but that’s always collateral damage. It’s collateral damage that makes God intensely angry because He hates it when His children are hurt, but those victims of our sin are not its primary target. When we sin we sin against God first. We violate His character and command and this violation takes the form of whatever exactly we do to the person it is secondarily against. So, David is right here. His sin was against God alone. Bathsheba and Uriah were the tragic collateral damage of his rebellion against God.

Your sin and mine is going to have collateral damage. And if we want to see the relationships broken by that collateral damage restored, we are going to have to genuinely address the harms we cause. But if we don’t repair our broken relationship with God first, it’ll all be for naught. In fact, if we don’t address our broken relationship with God first, we probably aren’t actually going to do anything meaningful to address our broken relationships with the people around us anyway. We may throw some bones to get things back to some semblance of stability, but we aren’t likely to commit long term to the real heart work necessary to see things fully restored to where they were before our sin. 

God’s forgiveness comes first. That’s what David sought. After owning his sin, he goes back to his request, his plea for mercy. But he takes a slightly different tack here. He doesn’t just ask for God to make his sin go away. He asks for God to change him into the kind of person who doesn’t sin anymore. Look at v. 6 now. “Surely you desire integrity in the inner self, and you teach me wisdom deep within. Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Turn your face away from my sins and blot out all my guilt.” 

What David understands here is that he needs something more than just forgiveness. He needs that justification we talked about. He needs his relationship with God restored. He needs to live in such a way that he doesn’t break it anymore. He doesn’t just need to be cleansed, he needs to be restored. Yet this is not only for his own sake. He asks for God to restore him so that he can help others avoid his path and otherwise be restored from his path as he has been. “God, create a clean heart for me and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not banish me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore the joy of your salvation to me, and sustain me by giving me a willing spirit.” Help me want to do it, God. “Then I will teach the rebellious your ways, and sinners will return to you.” David’s prayer here is for God to use his brokenness; to redeem it and transform it into something that can be used to advance His purposes. 

Doesn’t that sound good? That’s the kind of God we serve. We serve the God who loves us so much and whose goodness is so much bigger and better than our brokenness that He can take our brokenness and use it to accomplish His righteous purposes. But in order to experience that, we’ve got to demonstrate the attitude of David here. We’ve got to own our sin. That’s the first step, and it’s a hard one. To belabor the point we’ve already made: We’ve got to agree with God about our sin. What we did wasn’t just no big deal. It wasn’t just a mistake. It wasn’t boys being boys or girls being girls. It was sin. It was rebellion. It was evil. 

And once we’ve owned our sin we can confess our sin. God I did, _______. When you confess your sin, you don’t need anybody else around. It can be just between you and God. But having somebody else around can add some accountability to the process of restoration that will unfold from that point forward, especially if it’s the right person. Here’s one important thing to know about confessing our sins: Confess specific sins. You don’t sin generally, so don’t confess generally. Confessing generally allows you to justify continuing in a particular sin in your broken internal justification system because you didn’t actually mean that one when you confessed. No, confess specifically. Confess explicitly. “God I did _______, and I’m sorry. Forgive me for that, and help me to not do it again. Help me with the process of restoring the relationships that I have broken because I did that.” 

When you do that, God will forgive you. He will answer that prayer when you pray it with a genuinely repentant spirit. He will do that because of something David points us to next but which he couldn’t understand as fully as we do now. Come back to the text with me in v. 14. “Save me from the guilt of bloodshed God—God of my salvation—and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.” This is his confession once again, and a plea for forgiveness for the third time, but look at where he goes next. “You do not want a sacrifice, or I would give it; you are not pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. You will not despise a broken and humbled heart, God.” 

David understood that simply throwing a dead animal at God wasn’t going to do the trick. His repentance had to go deeper than that in order for God to be able to forgive him and for their relationship to be reconciled. The change was something that had to happen deep inside of him. Yet in order to be restored to God fully, David had to give back the thing he took from God in his rebellion against Him. And what did he take from God? His life. If David was going to be properly restored to God, he was going to have to give back his life into God’s hands. Yet to do that would mean he wouldn’t have his life anymore. And if you don’t have life, what do you have? Death. This is why the punishment for sin is death. But God wants the relationship with us that David so desired to have restored here. He had to do something that would enable us to be restored without losing our life in the process. 

The solution God came up with here is to pay the price for our sins on our behalf. But this could only be done by someone who didn’t have to pay for their own sins. It was going to take a special case. It was going to take someone who was without sin. Well, there is only one who is without sin in this world: God. So, He came Himself. God Father sent God the Son to take on flesh; to become fully human in the person of Jesus, whose very name proclaims the salvation by the forgiveness of sins God intended to make available through Him. Jesus lived that perfect life we couldn’t. He kept the law just as God had intended for it to be kept. He remained on the path of righteousness throughout His life. And when the time was just right, He laid down that life as a willing sacrifice on our behalf. Then, on the third day, God honored His sacrifice with glory by raising Him from the dead to a new and permanent new life that itself serves as a promise of the life He plans for us to enjoy through Him. Now, when we are willing to accept that He actually did all of that for us and to receive Him as He truly is: the Lord of all creation, we can share in that life He prototyped for us. That is, we can have the forgiveness we so desire to experience. To put all of this very simply: When we sin, we can go to Jesus for forgiveness. 

This means that we no longer need to bear the weight of our sin on our own. Jesus will help us with that. Now, that doesn’t mean that our relationships here are going to be automatically restored. That very well may take some serious time and effort on our part. We will likely have to demonstrate a pattern of genuine repentance. And even then, there are no guarantees when dealing with a person. God understands that. But in Him, we can rest assured that our sins are forgiven in full. When we sin, we can go to Jesus for forgiveness. 

He is not only willing, but as David proclaimed for us, He is the only one who rightly can. He has the position to do it as the one against whom our sin was ultimately directed. He has the will to do it as the God who is indeed gracious and compassionate and abounding in faithful love for all those who turn to Him. And He has the means to do it since He paid the price our sins demanded and now shares the forgiveness He received on our behalf with all those who are willing to come to Him in faith and receive it. When we sin, we can go to Jesus for forgiveness. 

Okay, but preacher, my sin is just too great. You don’t understand. I’ve done things I can’t ever take back. I’ve wounded relationships I won’t ever be able to restore. There’s no way God is going to be willing to give me the time of day. Brother or sister, I hear that. I’ve felt that. But what the Scriptures proclaim time and time again is that you’re wrong. And you’re not just a little wrong in thinking that. You’re profoundly wrong. You’re so wrong you can’t even see what’s right from where you are standing. Don’t believe me? Just remember what the prophet Isaiah said: “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call to him while he is near. Let the wicked one abandon his way and the sinful one his thoughts; let him return to the Lord so he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will freely forgive.” And why will God do all of that? “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.’ This is the Lord’s declaration. ‘For as heaven is higher than earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For just as rain and snow fall from heaven and do not return there without saturating the earth and making it germinate and sprout, and providing seed to sow and food to eat, so my word that comes from my mouth will not return to my empty, but it will accomplish what I please and will prosper in what I send it to do.’” 

There’s a whole other sermon there I’m not going to preach today. Several of them, in fact. I just want you to hear this for now. What did the apostle John refer to Jesus as? The Word. The Word of God made flesh. And what did God send His Word to do? Jesus told us Himself: to seek and save the lost. And what did Isaiah say that His Word will do? Whatever it is that He sends it to accomplish. God sent Jesus, His Word, to seek and save lost sinners like you and me. And that’s exactly what He did. Forgiveness from all of our sins is what we can find in Jesus. He did not fail to accomplish His mission. We only need to go to Him to receive it. If you haven’t done that today, don’t delay. The forgiveness you long to experience can be found in Jesus. You only need to go and receive it. When we sin, we can go to Jesus for forgiveness. I hope that you will.