Mercy and Forgiveness

Psalm 32.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away, through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me.

My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity.

I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

Therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found, surely in the rush of great waters, they shall not reach him.

You are a hiding place for me.

You preserve me from trouble, you surround me with shouts of deliverance.

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go.

I will counsel you with my eye upon you.

Be not like a horse or a mule without understanding, which must be curved with a bit and a bridle, or it will not stay near you.

Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord.

Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

This is the word of the Lord.

Let's pray over the word.

Lord, Father God, I thank you so much for this time, Lord, that we can come and hear your word collectively together as saints, Lord.

We just we pray for this time, Lord, um, that you, your power of your word, the word that is living, the word that is powerful, that it can change lives and set our directions and our hope and our future in you, Lord.

We just pray, Lord, that that word would rest upon our hearts and minds today, Lord, that we would get out of the way of ourselves in order to hear the word, and that Pastor Robert would be a great vessel today, Lord, to deliver your word and help him to just be a conduit to our hearts, God, with your word.

Father God, we know that there are seasons, and this is one of those seasons, Lord.

There's lots of spiritual warfare throughout all of the lives around the church, the nations.

Lord, we just pray that your word will cut like a knife, a double-edged sword, Lord, and bring us to you and to your truths.

And I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Amen.

Thank you, brothers.

You guys can be seated and good morning.

Welcome to Heartland.

I had a chance to speak to many of you, but not all of you.

But I'm grateful that you are here this morning as I am grateful that I am here.

It is a pleasure together weekly with God's people, and it is a pleasure for me personally to do that weekly with this particular set of God's people.

So I'm grateful for the church.

This summer we've been working through the Psalms.

We've been working through the book of Psalms.

We've hit several different ones.

Today we find ourselves in Psalm 32.

And if you haven't already flipped your copy of scripture to Psalms 32, I would encourage you to do so.

And I am grateful for all of God's word.

But for whatever reason, in this season of life and ministry, the the series of the Psalms has been such a blessing to my soul.

And I pray the the same for you.

And I think part of that as I was reflecting on this earlier this week, Wednesday or Thursday, I don't even remember what day it was now, but I was reflecting on uh the life of David in particular.

Uh it is so very practical for us, and it comes out for us in his writing, and I'm so grateful for that as we see that before us in Psalms 32.

I want to one of the things I do every week when I when I start sermon prepping is I print out the sermon text on like a big 11 by 17 piece of paper.

And I need reading glasses, but that's not why I printed on on there.

I printed on there so I can just have space to write my thoughts.

And what I found myself doing this week as I did that is I found myself just systematically going through the Psalms, and I identified all the things that I saw from verse one to the end in this particular psalm.

And let me I'm gonna run through those for you.

I saw forgiveness of sin.

I saw an attempt to leave sin in darkness, see conviction of sin, we see confession of sin, we see prayer, we see relief from sin, we see instruction, we see sorrow, we see love, and we see the fullness of joy.

Can I just say what a roller coaster?

What a roller coaster of 11 verses that we see David express here for us in God's word.

And it wasn't just that he was writing about a roller coaster, he was living a roller coaster.

And many of us live roller coasters as well.

And David lived out the very thing that he pins for us in Psalms 32.

Obviously, the power of these words are in the fact that this is God's inerrant word, right?

This is his word.

So the power is that reality.

It is living and active, as my brother prayed a moment ago.

But this is also a living testimony of David, of both the power of sin and the goodness of God's grace and mercy.

And we can't miss either one of those.

You see, in the Old Testament and in the New Testament alike, God has provided a way for sin to be confessed and for people to be forgiven.

And I think sometimes we we miss one or both of those.

Sometimes we miss that there is sin that needs to be confessed, most certainly.

And then other times we miss that we have been forgiven.

And we don't need to miss either one of those.

So that's my prayer as we dive into this text.

And the process that I just highlighted as I ran through for you what I put on my sheet of paper this week is often the very same process that we go through multiple times throughout our life with different things that well up inside of us.

As I've said before, we have a lot to learn, certainly from God's word, but we have a lot to learn from David as well.

I want to highlight some things about David.

He was a sinful brother.

He was a sinful brother who didn't always get everything right, including confession, right?

Because he was delayed in it.

We'll come back to that in a moment.

But get this, we see this at the end of the verse, the end of the section, the end of the chapter.

But he found joy in thanksgiving and the forgiveness of the Lord.

I don't know how you walked in here this morning, but I walked in here as a sinful brother, much like David, who doesn't always get everything right, much like David.

And I don't always find joy and thanksgiving in the forgiveness of the Lord, much like David.

So we have a lot to learn from David.

We can all relate to one or more aspects of that statement.

And I would go so far to even say, if you are here today and you have never put your faith in Christ, you are not a follower of Jesus, you can relate to that statement as well, because you are a sinful individual, just like David was.

So as we begin, I would encourage you to lean into what the Lord may teach you through the real life example of David that is written before us in God's word.

We're gonna work through four specific things.

These are in your listening guide.

We're gonna work through lean into suffering, acknowledge and confess your sin, live in God's grace, that's provided by his forgiveness, and then trust, rejoice, and be glad.

As we work through these things, if if you were like me when you heard that scripture read, one of the first things that popped to my mind was 1 John 1:9.

1 John 1:9

And many of you know this.

If we confess our sins, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us.

So as we work through it, let that be what colors your understanding of what we're reading.

So let's begin with lean into suffering.

And we start here in verse 3.

We'll come back to verses one and two at the end of the sermon, but we're starting here on purpose in verse three.

And we know if you've been here more than this time so far today, if you've had any interactions with me or us at all, we know that sin, or you know, that sin destroys our relationship with a holy God.

Right?

Our relationship, mankind's relationship with God was destroyed by our sin.

And we have some instruction here on what to do with that.

And it's not to leave that sin in darkness, it's to bring that sin into the light.

Verse three and four point to some very difficult things, some sufferings, you could even say, that David was enduring in large part because he was hiding his sin or trying to cover it up.

David had unconfessed sin in his life and he suffered.

And some of us look at that and like, why?

Can I just say, what a blessed assurance.

What a blessed assurance.

Let me double-click to help us further understand what I'm saying there and what we see in the context here.

The Bible speaks to sin quite frequently, right?

I think at 600 and something times we see it mentioned.

And many times, this will tell you a little bit about the life of David.

Many of times when sin's brought up, it has to do with David, right?

And the things that he did and the ways that he missed steps.

And in the case of Psalms 32, it highlights for us certainly sin, but we can't miss that it highlights the mercy and the forgiveness of God.

Most would agree that it's appropriate to interpret Psalms 32 in conjunction with Psalms 51.

Many of you are familiar with with Psalms 51, right?

And from what we can tell, most would also agree that Psalms 51 was written before Psalms 32.

I'm going to read for you, and this is my belief, and many scholars would agree that are much smarter than I.

I'm going to read for you a verse of Psalms from Psalms 51.

And it is my belief that that what we are reading in Psalms 50 or Psalms 32 is a double click of this verse from Psalms 51.

It's the process of this taking place in the life of David.

I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.

And David is expressing for us how that played out in his life.

Now, hang on with me for a second as we work through and you see that.

Let me back up.

Now we know this from the story of David.

If you don't know the story of David, I'm going to do like a quick, really high overview of it.

David saw a beautiful woman, right?

He saw a beautiful woman.

That woman was named Bathsheba.

He was consumed by the pull of lust.

It was his all-consuming pursuit.

He gave in to that lust that he had for that woman who was not his wife, and he slept with her.

She became pregnant with his child.

What an oh-crap moment for the king of the land.

Right?

Can I just say that?

For the king of the land.

And his response wasn't immediate confession.

Oh no, I have sinned.

This is terrible.

He was his response was, Let me try to get her husband to sleep with her by bringing him back from the war.

And that didn't work.

So let me go to the next thing, plan B.

Let me ensure that he goes to the front line so that he will die and we can cover this thing up.

So you have adultery, and then you have this desire to leave the sin of adultery in darkness, which then led to the pursuit of a cover-up, which then led to the murder of a man.

So you have adultery and murder.

Darkness and darkness leads to more darkness.

Guess what David did next?

He continued to keep silent about his sin.

And most people would believe that that wasn't a silence for a day.

That wasn't a silence for a couple of days or for a long weekend or even a month.

That was a silence for a year at least.

So he commits adultery, commits murder, and then he's silent about it.

He's silent about it.

Again, we don't know for sure if that is the specific sinful action that he is addressing in this particular text.

But please, brothers and sisters, hear me.

The implications are the same, regardless of the sin that is at play.

The implication is the same.

We are to confess our sins before a holy God, and he is faithful and just to forgive.

David's body, as we see in verse 3 and 4, was in turmoil because of his sin.

His silence wasn't silence for joy.

His silence led to both physical and spiritual turmoil.

And we see that here in the text.

Look with me at what it says in verse 3.

It says, His bones wasted away.

His groaning was all day long.

There was intense physical impact on him, and that was not by accident.

He was physically drained.

I discovered a word as I study this further.

The word for groaning is often referred to in the original language, also to refer to the roar of a lion.

This wasn't some soft groan that he's talking about here.

It wasn't some, oh, it was a groan with the magnitude of the roar of a majestic lion.

That is the pain and agony that he was in.

He was consumed by his sin and it was destroying him physically.

It will do that to us physically, and it will do that to us spiritually.

Verse 4, day and night the Lord's heavy hand was upon him.

We're certainly not in the Middle East, you guys know that, but we are in Mississippi.

I want you to think about something for a second.

Think about when you go into your attic.

Maybe you were smarter than me and you've never done this, but think about when you go to your attic in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the day, and how oppressive the heat is.

And how on the hottest day of the year you're in there and you are thirsting for some relief.

It's palpable.

You need some relief.

David's soul was dried up like your soul or like your thirst is dried up in the attic of your Mississippi home in the middle of the hottest day with the greatest humidity in the year that you can even begin to imagine.

That is the dryness that David was feeling within his soul.

He was in pain physically, he was in pain spiritually.

He was paying a great price for what?

For keeping quiet.

For living with unconfessed sin, as one commentator put it, physically drained and emotionally distraught.

This is the price that he was paying for covering up his sin.

And we think, oh man, how can God do that?

But we must understand this was for this brother's good.

This was for his good.

I fully believe that the difficulty that David was enduring and experiencing in those moments was for his good.

And contextually, for us, it is the same.

How often have have you sinned where you've seen someone else sin and then just then completely apathetic towards it?

It's not a big deal.

Everybody's doing it.

I spoke ill of my brother or sister.

Who cares?

Not a big deal.

I looked at porn last night.

Woo, everybody's doing it.

At least I wasn't sleeping with somebody.

I did not respect my husband.

It's his fault, not mine.

I did not respect my wife.

It's her fault.

She shouldn't have done this, that, or the other.

Some of you may be blind to your own sin.

In a season of loneliness, a dark night of the soul, spiritual dryness, pointing to all sorts of things as the reason for that dryness, but failing to see the sin in your own life right in front of you.

That is what's happening to David.

Some of us are really good.

And when I say some of us, I am including myself.

Some of us are real good at pointing out the sins of other people while completely being blind and ignoring the sins in our life.

If you spend more time talking about the failures of other people and why they're wrong and how they have sinned than you do on your knees before God confessing your sin, that is a problem.

That is a problem.

And the spiritual and spiritual suffering and physical suffering that David is experiencing is what the Lord is using that to take that brother from apathy and blindness to his broke from his brokenness.

Take him from that to open his eyes to conviction so that he will confess his sins and live in the grace and the forgiveness of God.

So if we look at the suffering and we say, there's that, how can God do that?

We are looking at it with the wrong perspective.

God is doing this with purpose, and that purpose is for David's good.

And in your own life, God is doing that on purpose, whatever it is, and it is for your good.

Brothers and sisters, I think often we look at the story of David and other stories, and we put ourselves in the hero.

I know I've read the story of David often, and I want to say, I'm Nathan, right?

I'm the one who confronted David.

We are more often than not, we are David.

We are David.

Which is one of the reasons I'm so very grateful for what he emphasizes next in the text.

Acknowledge and confess your sin.

Verses four through seven.

Can I just say the Lord knows you need his grace?

He knows you need it.

He knows you will never live up.

Many of you, as do I, walk in a mountain of failures each and every day and week and minute and hour.

Some of the things from our past and some of the things from your past I know because you've told me absolutely cripple you, put you in a fetal position on the daily basis.

And we bring ourselves to our knees and we say, We're unworthy.

No one will ever hear what I have to say or consider anything that I say because of all of the things that I have done, all the things in my past.

David took a man's wife, and when that didn't play out the way he wanted it to, he took that other dude's life.

And guess what?

The Lord identified himself as the son of David.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Keeping silent in the midst of sin is crippling, as we already saw.

And David went from, praise God he did, he went from silence to acknowledging his sin before a holy God.

And then he confessed this sin.

And what does the text say?

The iniquity was forgiven.

At some point in David's life, he he came to the understanding, and we know this not just from Psalms 32, but also from Psalms 51 and other places.

At some point in his life, he came to the understanding that his sin most primarily was against a holy God.

He acknowledges that for us specifically in Psalms 51.

He began to To see his sin as God saw it.

I want to highlight three words for us in verse five that we just can't do justice.

If I preach for 45 minutes on these three words, I couldn't do it justice.

Sin, iniquity, transgression.

Sin, iniquity, transgression.

David isn't saying, man, I slipped up.

Temptation was real difficult today.

I made a mistake.

That's not what David is saying.

Many of us hide behind, hide the magnitude of our sin behind some self-uh subconscious self-justification that we tried to make.

I had a right to do this or that because of the situation I was in.

If he or she wouldn't have done this, then I wouldn't have done this.

Or when my sin is compared to someone else's, it's not really that bad.

That was not what David was doing here.

I want to be crystal clear.

David is saying from the context of those three words in Hebrew, he is saying, I was disobedient before a holy God.

I was disobedient in thought.

I was disobedient in action.

My disobedience was 100% wrong and 100% my fault.

It's not anyone else, it is my fault.

Full ownership, full acknowledgement, which ultimately leads to what we see happen next, and that is full confession.

As we see in verse 6, he speaks of godly.

I wanted to be crystal clear.

Godly doesn't equate to perfection.

Godly does not equate to perfection.

So if you think you are expected to be perfect, that is not correct.

And if I had led have led you to think that, that is not correct.

I will repent of that before a holy God.

That is not correct.

Godly is acknowledgement of sin and confession to a holy God who is perfect.

That's what godly is.

You are not expected to be perfect, and neither am I.

But we are called to acknowledge our sins before a holy God and confess those to him.

And he is faithful to forgive us.

And some people have a really difficult time with this.

I know that from talking to many of you.

And I believe that a part of that is we fully, we don't fully grasp the beauty of what comes with this process.

In the midst of sinful, disobedient, obedient confession results in immediate, immediate forgiveness.

Verse 7, God is safe.

Why are we running from him?

He is safe.

We don't run from him, we run to him.

God is safe.

But the natural inclination for many of us when we are caught in some kind of transgression or we make some kind of mistake is we flee from the Lord because we're embarrassed.

What are we doing?

What are we doing?

When you were saved, when you put your faith in Christ alone, the blood did its job.

So we gotta stop sitting in silence about our iniquities and take our iniquities to the only one that can provide us any relief.

You cannot change your past.

Believe me, I wish I could change mine.

You cannot change your past, you cannot change the mistakes that you have made.

If that was 10 minutes ago, in the four-year or 10 years ago, or 70 years ago, you cannot change the mistakes that have passed.

You can't do it.

I think sometimes that's crippling for us, but can we just acknowledge that's exactly the way that God designed it?

If he wanted us to change our past, he would.

He's God.

That's the way he designed it.

We have to stop weeping alone about all the different ways we have failed the Lord and get on our knees before the Lord and bring those iniquities to him.

We confess because we are weak, we confess because we are broken, we bec confess because we need the Lord's help.

We confess because the Bible tells us to.

We confess because the Lord, yes, he's most certainly just, but he is merciful.

I want to challenge you with something.

Just gonna be full transparency as I read this text this week.

I had caught myself doing this multiple times.

If while I was discussing confession, you were only thinking about other people.

Stop.

Please for your own soul, stop, think about yourself.

Verse four is so important for us.

Because sometimes, and I know I'm I'm fall into this category at times at well as well.

I've heard you guys express this.

We have a hard time identifying the difference between the weight of the Lord's hand upon us and the flaming arrow of the enemy that's being shot at us.

I'm gonna explain that further for a second.

If you are a follower of Jesus, if at some point in your life the Spirit prompted in you to respond, like open your eyes to the fact that you are sinful and you need Jesus and you responded according to scripture and put your faith in Christ alone, you are forgiven, period.

Nothing is ever going to change that.

You are forgiven.

No one, no anything is going to pluck you from his hands.

However, I think what we see in scripture that doesn't negate the importance of actively confessing sin.

I'm not saying that confession of sin over and over again is what keeps us justified.

We are already justified.

Want you to understand and know that.

But the confession of sin helps you better comprehend God's grace and better fend off the attack of the enemy.

Some of us wake up every single day and we are living in the shame and guilt of sins that we have already been forgiven of.

That's my tendency.

And that's exactly what the enemy wants.

The enemy leads me after confessing sin, after I've already been justified at the moment of salvation, and then I bring my sins humbly before the Lord and I confess those to him.

The enemy leads me to still sit and dwell on that mistake and that sin, that iniquity, that transgression, whatever it is.

And when we do that, the enemy has us right where he wants us.

David knew what his sin was, and he knew who his sin was against.

You know what else he knew?

And we see this in the text, and it's gorgeous.

He knew that you, Lord, are my hiding place.

He knew that you, Lord, preserve me.

He knew that you, Lord, surround me with the shouts of deliverance.

Remember what we've seen thus far in this text?

We saw apathy.

Remember, this started with apathy.

Actually, it started with sin, but it started with apathy after that.

He was keeping silent about his sin.

And then we saw there was suffering.

Then there was this acknowledgement, and then there was confession.

There was hesitancy in David's spirit to offer repentance.

But do not miss, there is zero hesitancy in the God of creation to offer forgiveness.

It was immediate.

We put our faith in Christ, we are forgiven.

Brothers and sisters, the act of confession is reminding ourselves of the immediate forgiveness that we have been given because of the blood of Jesus Christ.

That's what the act of confession helps with.

And verse six represents a shift in the text.

I want you to see how practical it is in verse six.

Look at what it says there.

Seek him in prayer, and you will find multiple things.

You'll find protection.

Says that you will find preservation.

It says that you will find deliverance.

If we seek the Lord in prayer, we will find those things.

It's not, oh, maybe you will.

Maybe if you get lucky and it's the right day, you will.

No, you will find protection, you will find preservation, and you will find deliverance.

You see, here's the beautiful aspect of all this when we think about this in the context of Old Testament, New Testament.

David looked most certainly with eager expectation to the Messiah that was coming.

He looked with eager expectation.

We today in 2026 have the blessed opportunity to look with absolute confidence that the Messiah already came.

The Messiah already came.

He saw sin and death and he kicked its tail.

No question, he kicked its tail.

He rose again and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He conquered it.

And confession is an act of us going and to the throne of grace that has been provided to us by the blood of the Messiah.

May we be a people who actively pursue this because it is for our good and for his glory.

Our capacity to see sin, acknowledge sin, and certainly confess sin in itself.

I think we look, we overlook this sometimes.

It is an act of pure grace.

The fact that we can get on our knees wherever you get on your knees at, and you can go before God the Father, and you can confess your sins to Him.

That is an act of pure grace.

May we not overlook that.

That is a privilege for us.

We got to stop looking.

Oh, I have to do this.

Get that out of here.

It is a privilege.

It is a God that we don't deserve to have a relationship with, that we have a relationship with because of the blood.

Confession isn't a burden, it is a privilege.

We are being invited to the throne of grace of the God of creation.

That's what confession is.

Yet we overlook it.

We make light of it.

We make light of our brokenness.

Don't miss this.

I think often we hinder the work of the Lord by listening to lies.

The word tells us to confess your sin and live in his grace.

But often we confess our sin and live in our own misery.

I want you to know, I don't know the state of everyone's soul as they walk in the room this morning.

But I've been around long enough in life, and I just here, I've been around long enough to know that every single person in this room, there's some brokenness in your life somewhere.

I don't know all the details of it.

I want you to know and hear this truth that we see in the Psalm.

God uses your brokenness for his glory and for the good of others.

Please don't miss that.

He's inviting you.

He is inviting you to the throne of grace that you don't deserve to even look at.

Don't deserve to look at.

And whatever brokenness that you bring to the throne of grace, you don't know what opportunities you're going to have to use that for the good of others and for the glory of Christ.

Maybe your sin, your past is riddled with embarrassing sin.

Don't look past the conversation that you may have in three weeks with someone who's going through the very same thing.

And you can tell them, God is so good, and you will get through this.

Which leads us to live in his grace by listening to his instruction.

He is faithful to forgive, and praise God, he is gracious to instruct, right?

He is faithful to forgive, and praise God, he's also gracious to instruct.

He will instruct you, he will teach you, he will counsel you.

And we are called to hear the Lord's instruction, which is primarily provided to us in his word.

Right?

There are, but we're people.

There are times when every single one of us may be mule-like.

Just gonna say it.

My wife may refer to me as something a little stronger than a mule at times in her head.

I love what the text uses here, this imagery, right?

We're not the one putting the bridle in the mouth of the mule.

We are the mule, right?

That's that's us.

My wife does this in my life better than anyone I know.

And I'm so thankful for that.

And in a moment, in the moment, let me say it that way, in the moment, it may feel like, man, she just stuck a bridle in my mouth and nearly ripped my teeth out.

And I'm gonna have to say, hey, you're you're the hygienist, you're gonna have to fix my mouth that you just ripped apart.

Right?

Ripped my teeth out.

And there have been times when she and I have chatted and I was wrong, and I needed to be bridled, most certainly.

And there are times when she and I have chatted and she was wrong.

Be clear, she read this statement before this morning, so she's not being blindsided by me saying that she has been wrong before.

But there's been times when she was wrong, and I didn't need to be bridal because she didn't have the full understanding of the thing.

And the the longer that we are together, the better those conversations go, right?

The first year of marriage, they didn't go very well, right?

So if you're married for the first year, second, or even five years, and those conversations still stink, they'll get better with humility, they'll get better.

We celebrated 17 years of marriage yesterday by God's grace alone.

And by God's grace alone, each and every year, those conversations get better.

Do not know what I would do without my wife.

Also, I think that she would tell you, even after the bridle has been put into my mouth and she yanks me back to reality, that I do a pretty fair job of receiving the Lord's instruction through her.

And as I thought about that this week, I just replayed the first seven verses of this chapter over and over and over again in my mind, including acknowledging my sin and confessing my sin.

It's so easy for me to miss grace and mercy.

So easy to miss grace and mercy.

And I know it's the case for you, and it breaks my heart.

Brothers and sisters, if David can acknowledge and confess his sin before a holy God and receive the grace and mercy of God, then so can you.

Thank you.

And so can you.

David talks very specifically about confessing sin and living in grace.

And what I do often after Ashley and I have had conversations like that, when I've been in the wrong, what one of the things that is a sin on my part that I do is I will apologize to her time and time and time and time again, over and over and over and over again.

If I said a hundred times, that would be an understatement.

And there are two problems with this that are in opposition to this text.

I'm acting as though my sin is most primarily against her or someone else.

It may have hurt her, it may have hurt someone else, but my sin is primarily against the Lord, and so is yours.

And the second one is I am not living in the grace that the blood paid for.

Some of you may be hindering your brother or sister's effort to live in grace because you were unwilling to forgive them, acting as though their sin is against you.

What you're doing in that, what you're communicating to them and to others, is that you are acting as though you were God.

You may be going so far with this as taking an indifference of an opinion that you had, and you're treating that person like they sinned against you, and that's not it.

That's another sermon for another day, but we have a responsibility to confess and to receive the Lord's forgiveness, but I think we have to also see with forgiveness, we also have to have a responsibility to forgive, right?

And an unwillingness to do so.

You you may think, man, I'm just hurting that other person or they deserve it, but you are hurting yourself.

You are hurting yourself, and you're hurting other people.

Others of you may be struggling with a similar thing right now, where you can't seem to listen to the Lord's instructions, which tells you to go to the throne of grace and receive that grace.

Can I go all the way back to where I began this message in first John?

What does it say?

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive.

It also says, not just forgive us, but to cleanse us.

He is faithful and just to forgive, but he's also faithful and just to cleanse us.

We are to act on the Lord's counsel, instruction, and direction.

And that means in every area of life, every area of life, even the ones that we think we know better than the Lord, we have to kill our pride and submit to the Lord.

Or this is the warning in the text: get your teeth ready because you're about to get a bridle thrown in your mouth.

And it may hurt.

David's handling of sin was Bathsheba's a great example of this, right?

Nathan was the bit that got put in his mouth, right?

And the Lord bridled him, right?

There was public issue, public exposure, there was loss of loved one, there was loss of power, like we could go on and on and on.

I don't say those things to create fear, but we should see those actions and what took place in David's life as a sweet gift of the Lord, because ultimately it led him to the throne of grace.

I don't know about you, but if I can live with the perspective of whatever is the Lord is bringing me through right now, how joyful or how how much of a living hell it is, if it is leading me to the throne of grace, I'm going to be able to get through it a little better.

So we have to live with that perspective.

John Piper said it will.

Whatever happens to God's beloved happens according to his goodness.

He wasn't sleeping when this happened.

He wasn't weak when this happened.

He was wise.

He was strong.

Brothers and sisters, even in your pain, be reminded that the Lord is good.

He is wise.

He is strong.

He is looking out for your pain, which is why we can, instead of following ourselves, we can follow the Lamb.

Right?

Instead of following the crowd, we can follow the Lamb because we know that He is good.

The last thing, and then we'll be done.

Trust, rejoice, and be glad.

Praise God, right?

Trust, rejoice, and be glad.

The process of Psalms 32 in the life of a believer is a sweet and precious gift of the Lord.

If you don't get anything else from what I said today, remember Psalms 32.

Go read it and be reminded that the process that took place in David's life that often takes place in yours is a sweet and precious gift from the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is a sweet gift.

All of the things that took place conviction, confession, right?

The attempt to leave sin in darkness, prayer, suffering, relief, instruction, ignorance, sorrow, fullness of joy, all of those are an expression of God's grace on this brother's life.

All of them.

The blood of Jesus is a gift that we did not, we do not, and we will not ever deserve.

Ever.

I love how he bookends this chapter, verse one and two.

Look at it with me for a second.

Verse one and two, the summation there.

God provided atonement for sin, right?

Verse 10 and 11.

Rejoice and be glad for he forgives.

God provides atonement, right?

For us in post-life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, that atonement is through the blood.

God provides atonement and rejoice and be glad because he forgives.

We are wretched people, right?

We are a wretched people.

The things that we do and are capable of are incomprehensible.

And verses 1, 2, 10, and 11 remind us that we may be embarrassed of the things that we are capable of or the things that we have done.

We may be sin and we we sinful and we may be wretched, but the Lord God is gracious and offers us full and immediate forgiveness.

The thing that hit me this week as I was studying this is yes, we need to talk bluntly.

We need to talk bluntly about sin and its effects.

But we do not need to talk bluntly about sin and not talk bluntly about forgiveness.

There's a grave danger in always talking about the impact and reality of sin, but never talking about the grace that is offered through Christ.

Can you imagine if this message was only about the sorrow of David and the darkness of his sin?

Which means if the text was only about the sorrow of David and the darkness of his sin, I don't know about you, but that would stink.

Trying to think of an appropriate word to say.

That would stink.

I wouldn't want to preach it.

I know you wouldn't want to hear it.

If the message was only sin, there would be no gospel.

And we don't wouldn't have any purpose in being here.

But the gospel also has good news to the praise and glory of the Father, that is forgiveness.

We should be glad, we should rejoice, and we should shout for joy because of the Lord's forgiveness.

If we miss forgiveness, we miss the opportunity to worship the one who is worthy.

Right?

We miss up, we miss that opportunity.

So to say it the other way, we also need to talk bluntly about forgiveness.

But we do not need to talk bluntly about forgiveness and not talk bluntly about sin.

If we talk bluntly about forgiveness but miss sin, we do not even understand what forgiveness is.

If we only talk bluntly about forgiveness and we don't talk bluntly about sin, what in the world do we need forgiveness for if there is no sin?

There is no significance in forgiveness if there is no weight in sin, which ultimately would lead us to get stuck in verses three and four.

And what a hopeless message in life that would be the physical suffering and the spiritual darkness that is the impact of sin.

David had gotten to a point where he had kept quiet.

His bones were brittle, right?

He had to confess.

It's a super simple question.

I think the question is across the board for believers and non-believers alike.

Are you living in silence?

Actually, simple question.

Are you living in silence?

And I understand that this can be a hard concept to understand.

Look, theologically, yes, I can't say this enough.

If you have professed faith in Christ alone, then you are forgiven of all your sins, period.

Please don't miss that.

However, there is such immense truth and joy in what we see play out in David's life.

And that is the importance of us as believers in humility, actively confessing sin.

And I wrote down four reasons why that is important.

It reminds us of our sin and the fact that it's against a holy God.

The second one, it fights pride that wells up in us.

And look, I'm as prideful as the next guy.

I have to fight that.

It fights pride that wells up in us and builds humility.

It leads you to actively seek the Lord.

And we all need that.

And fourthly, a lot of us need this too.

It leads you to live securely in the forgiveness of God.

You are, if you are a follower of Jesus, you are secure.

God is safe, He has rescued you.

Please comprehend and understand that you are His child and you are secure.

So if you're a follower of Jesus and you've never practiced confession because it's been some weird thing for you, please, I would encourage you to start today and let that be what leads you to the throne of grace on a daily basis.

And then further, if you're here today and you're not a follower of Jesus and you've never experienced immediate forgiveness, that is, responding at the prompting of the Spirit, to put your faith in Christ alone, right?

The blood of the Lamb that was shed for you and I, let today be the day that you respond.

I would love to have that conversation with you at any point, at any point of the service.

If it hits you next week during the welcome, run to me.

I would love to have that conversation with you.

And so would many others, but respond and put your faith in him for the first time.

Let's pray.

Father, you are good and we need you.

God, the older I get, the more I realize, and the more, certainly the more I study your word.

God, we need you more than we even comprehend that we need you.

So God, we just, as an act of confession, we acknowledge that before you, that we are weak and you are strong.

And that often that we uh think that we can hold things up with our strength, we can hold things up with our competency or or whatever we fill in the blank with.

But God, at the end of the day, we are weak and you are strong.

So we praise you and we ask for help.

God, the areas where we may be living in silence, open our eyes.

However you see fit, open our eyes.

And God, as we come before the throne of grace, may we be reminded of what we see in this text.

Yes, there were some very difficult things in the life of David, but one of the things that we see in this text is the brother, once he came to the point of being obedient to confess, there was immediate forgiveness.

And for us as followers of Jesus, God, we have experienced that immediate forgiveness.

And may that reality be what prompts us to regularly bring our sins before a holy God as an act of confession so that we can live in the sustaining grace that has been bestowed upon us.

May we not be blinded to the grace that you have given us, may we not discount the power of the blood that rescued us.

May we live in it.

May we live in it.

And may we do these things for your glory and for the good of your kingdom.

It's in Jesus' name.

Amen.