When God Restores Us 2: Create in Me a Clean Heart

This podcast is brought to you by Walnut Grove Lutheran Church in Langley, D.C., in the hope that it will draw you closer to the one who loves you most.

And I should actually thank you, Eve.

Yes, he's got my back.

What happened was he had failed to properly supervise his troops that were under his command, and those troops committed terrible atrocities.

They treated Allied prisoners of war brutally and even executed some of them.

And he was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

And his guilt was never in question.

Prior to his trial, he wrote a letter to the court asking them to expedite his case so that those under his command could be tried and dealt with more quickly.

He served his sentence and he walked out of prison in 1954, his legal debt fully paid.

But his guilt remained.

So he built a replica of his jail cell in his back garden and imprisoned himself in it for the rest of his life.

He lived in that prison cell for 14 years until he died in 1968.

Now Hitoshi Emamuro was not crazy.

This is what guilt does to any human being who has no way of getting rid of it.

We might not be guilty of war crimes, but we all at one time or another live in a prison of guilt, of one kind or another.

Our soul is burdened with a long list of regrets.

We may grieve over the harm that we have caused others.

Or we look back and we see that we have left a trail of brokenness behind us.

And so we serve as our own judge and jury and we meet out the punishment we believe our crimes deserve.

No longer will we consider ourselves to be someone who can live in freedom and fullness of life.

Instead, we believe we must continue to wear the stain of our faults, be weighed down by our shame, and be chained to our sin forever.

And all this is tragic because God has a much, much better way for us to live.

And so, how do we deal with guilt God's way and live in the freedom and fullness of life that He has for us?

And to answer that question, we are going to turn today to Psalm 51.

And as we do that, we see at the very beginning of this psalm a heading that is unique among all the other psalms in the Bible.

That heading says a psalm of David.

That's not unusual, but the next part is when the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.

And so that's a reference to a specific event in David's life.

You see, one day, while his army was away at war, David went for a stroll on the roof of his palace.

And he happened to look down, and he saw a beautiful woman taking a bath on the roof of her house.

This was not unusual.

This was what's called a mikvah bath.

It's a monthly ritual that married Jewish women did back then, and many still do today.

And what they do is following their menstrual cycle and then a seven-day clean period, they have this ritual bath to mark the resumption of normal marital activities.

David saw Bathsheba as she was having this bath.

So he sent messengers to get her, and she came to him.

Because he was the king, she really had no choice in the matter.

David slept with Bathsheba, and when she became pregnant, David tried to cover up his sin by summoning her husband Uriah to come home to his wife from the war.

But Uriah was an honorable man, and he would not sleep in his own bed with his wife when his fellow soldiers were sleeping in tents far from their homes.

And so David arranged for Uriah to be killed in battle.

And all of this is described for us in 2 Samuel chapter 11, where we read, After the time of mourning was over, David had her, that is Bathsheba, brought to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son.

2 Samuel 11 · chapter mention

But the thing David had done displeased the Lord.

So the Lord sent the prophet Nathan to confront David, which he did by telling him a story about a rich man who had many flocks and herds, but took the only lamb that belonged to a poor man and used it to feed a guest.

The rich man had.

David became angry and said that the rich man deserved to die for what he did.

Then Nathan said to David, You are the man.

You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own.

Then Nathan said to David, You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.

Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.

Then David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord.

Nathan replied, The Lord has taken away your sin, you are not going to die.

But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the Lord, the Son born to you will die.

So 2 Samuel chapters 11 and 12 tell us what was going on in David's life as he wrote Psalm 51.

2 Samuel 11 · chapter mention

His secret sin with Bathsheba was publicly exposed, and there were consequences for David and those around him, including the child that he and Bathsheba had conceived.

And then when we turn back to Psalm 51, we see that David is here giving us a picture of what was going on in his heart at that time.

And he also gives us a pattern to follow when we struggle with guilt.

For centuries, God's people have been confessing their sins by praying Psalm 51, and we can too.

David begins, first of all, with a cry for mercy.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions, wash away all my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

There is no other way than this for us to approach God with our guilt.

For God would be totally justified in sentencing us to the doom that we deserve.

And yet, on the basis of God's qualities of loving kindness and compassion, David pleads for mercy.

And he uses three different words to describe his wrongdoing, each of them revealing a different aspect of his moral missteps, and each requiring a different remedy.

He uses the word transgression, which is willful rebellion or crossing a known boundary, such as David did when he broke several of the Ten Commandments with Bathsheba.

And what transgression does is it leaves an ugly blotch on a sinner's record, which God must erase.

He also uses the word iniquity, which is the inner twistedness from which all sin springs.

And it needs to be washed away.

Now, we might think of washing like we do today, washing clothes, but in ancient times, washing clothes required aggressive action, such as beating those clothes on flat stones in a stream to loosen the dirt so it can be washed away.

Sin is missing the mark.

And that only yields to God's cleansing action.

In ancient times at God's direction, his people offered animal sacrifices that took the place of the sinner and shed their blood so that the sinner's sin could be washed away by God.

And these were all only a temporary remedy until God's own Son, Jesus Christ, gave himself as the ultimate sacrifice that cleanses us from all of our sin forever.

David then confesses his sin.

For I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me.

Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.

David is fully aware of his sin, and that awareness illuminates the guilt that burdens him.

Though he knows that others have been hurt by his actions, David realizes that above all else, he has offended God with his sin.

He knows that his actions were totally against what God desired he do.

And David knows that sin permeates his entire being and has done so since the moment of his conception.

He also knows that God's words are true and his judgments are justified.

And yet, in line with God's truth and righteousness, David also knows something else about the desires of God.

And that is, God desires truth in our inner being, wisdom in the depths of every human heart.

And it's these desires of God that give David hope for his own personal restoration and renewal.

And then David pleads for a cleansing of his entire being, one that wipes away his transgressions, corrects his warped iniquities, and washes away his sin.

And David goes beyond that to anticipate the joy that will spring forth in his heart when God does cleanse him.

He writes, Let me hear joy and gladness.

Let the bones you have crushed rejoice.

He longs for God to transform him to the depths of his soul.

So he prays this beautiful prayer: Create in me a pure heart, O God.

Let's say these words together, shall we?

Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.

The radical shift from being guilty to being forgiven and the joy in our heart that forgiveness brings are entirely the work of God's Holy Spirit within us.

And then, based on God's cleansing, David dedicates himself to do two things.

First, to share with others, the sinners, share with other sinners, the joy that he has found and urge them to return to God.

And second, to sing songs of praise to God with the sincere gratitude of a broken and contrite heart.

He writes, then I will teach transgressors your ways, so that sinners will turn back to you.

Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God.

You who are God my Savior, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness.

And then finally, David ends the psalm by urging God to build up his people who, like David, humbly appeal to God's mercy, confess their sinful brokenness, and yearn for renewal by God's spirit.

For it is in the midst of this penitential community of faith, just like we have here at Walnut Grove Lutheran Church, that we see most clearly God at work amongst his people.

So, what does this mean for us?

Well, the reality of our guilt is not a matter of debate.

We are all guilty of sin in all its forms.

But what we do with our guilt depends in large part on the perception of God that we have in our heart.

We could ask ourselves questions like these in our inner being to do we relate to God as if he is loyal and loving toward us?

Is there a first inclination in our heart to reach out towards God when we sin because we know that God has faithfully bound himself to us with the incredible compassion a perfect father has for his children?

Please understand, I'm not referring to the perception you may have of God in your head.

This is the perception we have of God in our heart, in our soul.

Several years ago, when I was a student chaplain at a psychiatric hospital near Edmonton, one of our supervisors encouraged us to do some reflection and discover and identify what he called the God of our gut.

In other words, how we see God at the deepest depths of our being.

And as I went through this exercise of reflection, I realized, because of experiences I had had in the past, that the image of God I had in my gut was of an evil marionette master who repeatedly dragged me close to a fire where I would get burned.

And then as I held that image before God, he healed it.

And he helped me to see that he was a God who sacrificially sheltered me from that fire and then surrounded me and filled me with the Holy Spirit to live a new life of richness and fullness with him.

And that is now the God of my God.

God healed that perception I had of him in my heart.

And here is how that healing happened.

During the week leading up to the cross, as Jesus contested with religious leaders who sought to undermine and destroy him, he revealed the faithful loving kindness and the loyal compassion in his heart for all, including his enemies.

And he did so by saying this.

And then God used a story that I heard on the radio to illustrate what Jesus' words meant for me.

And the story goes like this.

During the 1930s, a young boy who lived on a farm sat in his farmhouse and watched as a raging prairie fire came closer and closer towards their farmyard.

As his dad and the hired man fought the fire, it grew so close that the glass on the house where the boy was was hot to the touch.

The fire came right up to the road that went past the house, but thankfully it stopped there.

The next morning, as burnt grass and fence posts smoldered, the boy went for a walk to view this devastation.

As he walked down the road, he saw a blackened clump laying there, and he gave it a kick.

And out scurried six little baby chicks.

You see, what happened is a mother hen seeing the fire approaching, gathered her chicks underneath herself and allowed the fire to consume her so that her chicks would be safe.

And that's what Jesus has done for us.

Jesus has shown us what God is really like.

He held out his arms as they were nailed to a cross, and he allowed the hellfire, the hellfire of all of the wrath and punishment we deserve for our sin to fall on him instead of us.

He was consumed by that fire.

But all of us who gather under his wings are saved.

Jesus' resurrection on the third day that followed proves God's love and compassion for us.

And then filled with his Holy Spirit, we live new lives that are filled with the joy of our salvation.

Dear friends, Satoshi Imamuro shows us what unresolved guilt does to us.

He lived the last 14 years of our life in a prison he built with his own hands.

Many of us might be doing the same thing.

We have been forgiven by God, and yet we continue to carry the guilt that Jesus has already taken away from us.

Psalm 51 shows us God's way for us to live.

Like David, we readily confess our sins to God and receive the heart healing that He freely gives to us.

And so the challenge that I'm setting before you today is this to take some time and reflect and then identify the perception of God that you have in your heart.

And if you perceive God as anything other than loyal in loving kindness and boundless in compassion for you, then ask God to heal any false perception you have of Him.

For when we see God as a faithful, loving Father who steadfastly adores us, confessing our sins to Him will be something that we readily do.

Amen.

Let's pray.

We thank you, Jesus, for being the Mother Hand that gathered us under your wings and you gave yourself completely so that we might have forgiveness for all our sins and eternal life in you.

And so we pray, Lord, that you would indeed create a right spirit within us as you cleanse us from all our sin and help us to live in the freedom and the fullness of life that you readily give to us.

In your precious name we ask this, and all God's people said.

Amen.

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Thank you and God's blessing.