Petition, Penitence, Purging

Psalm 51 Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.

Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. so there's a reason we sang that psalm again because I thought it would be thank you, I thought it would be good to sing it before we preach about it and in the confession chapter 15 is titled of repentance unto life and salvation and paragraph 2 says whereas there is none that doth good and sinneth not and the best of men may through the power and deceitfulness of their corruption dwelling in them with the prevalency of temptation fall into great sins and provocations God hath in the covenant of grace mercifully provided that believers so sinning and falling be renewed through repentance unto salvation. Paragraph 4 reads, As repentance is to be continued through the whole course of our lives, upon the account of the body of death and the motions thereof, so it is every man's duty to repent of his particular known sins particularly and paragraph 5 which I'm reading for the justification of my very existence I'll preface it with this a faithful preacher is going to be accused by two different sides of people of two different things people who are legalists and love self-righteousness and religion of man will accuse a faithful preacher of antinomianism. They'll say that he's preaching in such a way that people don't think they have to do anything to be good.

Because when we preach faith alone in the righteousness of Christ alone, the unregenerate who hears that will see that as a license to sin. And there's a world full of people like that. And so it's not without evidence that people have seen that that type of preaching can cause that, but in the unregenerate only, I'd say. But also, a preacher who preaches the truth will be accused by people who don't want to do the right thing of preaching too much works.

And they will say that you're preaching a works-based salvation. And according to the paragraph 5 of chapter 15, such is the provision which God hath made through Christ in the covenant of grace for the preservation of believers unto salvation that although there is no sin so small but it deserves damnation yet there is no sin so great that it shall bring damnation on them that repent which makes the constant preaching of repentance necessary so if you get tired of hearing about repentance find a non-1689 church and I'm sure you can find preaching that you like there I was asked by a dear member of this congregation to try to use alliteration and so I came up with a number of different mnemonic devices to help us with this week's sermon. And some of them weren't so great.

But there's going to be three words that you're going to maybe be able to remember from this week's sermon. It's going to be petitions, penitence, and purging. And so my sermons generally are not outlined in any kind of format like that though so usually I just go verse by verse and sort of talk about them but it will go in that order in general so let's talk about petitions what's a petition a petition is basically just when you ask an authority for something or doesn't even have to be an authority necessarily but David starts out this prayer if you remember the context the psalm tells us the context when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba.

So we all should remember Nathan went to him. I think this was just two weeks ago. We saw this passage where Nathan goes and he tells him the story of a man who takes the poor man's sheep and David instantly and hypocritically denounces, announces that that man should be punished for it. David has very little mercy, it seems, on this other guy that simply took someone's sheep, which is a bad thing.

And then Nathan says to David, you are the man, which is different from you the man So just remember he says you are the man or thou art the man if you like the King James And David said in 2 Samuel 12 you remember he said I have sinned against Yahweh And that all he says And then Nathan tells David, well, Yahweh's going to forgive your sin. Nevertheless, the child's going to die and then Nathan leaves. And so then we're left with Psalm 51 here, which appears to be the type of thing that David did when he was alone with the Lord.

I don't know if I could say that it was before this whole ordeal with the child happened, or this was a prayer that he wrote during his child's sickness or after. But I know that what this is, is this is the closest thing in the Bible to what we commonly call a sinner's prayer. And so there's a thing that we have heard about in the United States called the sinner's prayer, which is when you're evangelizing someone and you say, hey, do you want to go to heaven?

And they say, yeah. And you say, okay, well, repeat this prayer after me. And you say, Lord Jesus, I love you and I want to go to heaven and I don't want to have to pay for my sins. And you get someone to repeat that sinner's prayer. And then a lot of evangelists, I use that term loosely, here, at least in the United States especially, will say, will pronounce that person saved because they repeated the words of a prayer that they call a sinner's prayer.

And in fact, if you don't lead people in a sinner's prayer, there are people who will look at you and question whether they even got saved. We have been so taught in our culture to say this sinner's prayer in order to receive forgiveness that simply telling people to believe the gospel and repent and turn to Christ is considered not enough. and so if you said a sinner's prayer yourself at one point in your life then good for you, you hopefully said a sinner's prayer like David said a prayer where you really meant what you were saying before God and you truly had a heart that was repentant and you desired his forgiveness so there's nothing wrong with saying a prayer as a sinner wanting God to save you where we err is when we believe that it's the prayer that saves us often times it's treated it's treated more as a spell that we cast or a magic formula than it is an actual prayer there's nothing wrong with a prayer if somebody said will you help me pray help me learn to pray I would certainly want to help someone learn to pray and I would try to give them some ideas but just one last knock on the sinner's prayer here is if a guy cheated on his wife and he walked in and the wife is there and the guy says you know I realize I'm really sorry I want her to forgive me and then he had you come in and lead him in like a prayer of what to say to her she wouldn't believe you were really sorry she'd think if you knew what you did wrong if you knew what you did and you were truly repentant about it if you were truly sorry you would find the words to say even if they weren't good ones you wouldn't want someone else to do it for you. So go to God on your own.

So David goes to God and he petitions him. He says, have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. So he's petitioning the Lord. He's asking the Lord for something. In verse 2, he's going to petition God with wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. In verse 7, he petitions God, purge me with hyssop. wash me, he says.

And eight, let me hear joy and gladness and let the bones that you've broken rejoice. And nine, he says, hide your face from my sins. Blot out my iniquities. Ten, create in me a clean heart. Renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence.

Take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation. Uphold me with a willing spirit. Fourteen, deliver me from blood guiltiness. Fifteen, open my lips. And 18, do good to Zion.

This is a prayer where David is constantly asking God to do things. Now, even though some of the tenses of the verbs is imperative, David's telling the Lord what to do in a sense. He's going boldly to the throne of grace. And so we don't tell the Lord what to do in any realistic sense, but the Bible actually gives us language that's very bold when we approach the throne of God at times. we're to approach with humility we're to approach knowing our place before him as sinners but we're also to approach knowing our place as sons and if Jesus Christ has paid the penalty for your sins you to go to God boldly so petitions is the first P word that we're going to think about here but I just want to look at the first verse have mercy on me according to your steadfast love He says, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.

You look at Romans 5. I'm going to jump around a little bit today. Romans 5. Romans 5. Verse 17. Paul writes, For if because of one man's trespass death reigned through that one man.

He says, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. It's a super abundance of grace that God has available. When David says, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions, it's reminiscent of what Paul writes in Romans, that there an abundance of mercy The point is this that your sin your sin is horrible it heinous What did the confession say Although there is no sin so small, but it deserves damnation.

Yet there is no sin so great, that it shall bring damnation on them that repent. and so as much as your sin is heinous and as much as David's sin was heinous as bad as the sins that you've committed are maybe you're sitting here thinking well I'm worse than David maybe you are, I don't know but Jesus Christ's grace and mercy are super abundant above your sin and my sin so speaking of Jesus Christ He appears in the first verse. Psalm 51. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love.

God's steadfast love is God's love for his son, Jesus Christ. There are real relations in the Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. And there's real love that exists there. a perfect love, an unbreakable love, an unchangeable love, an infinite love, a love that we really can't approximate or even understand. But God the Father in the covenant of redemption promised that he was going to save a people for his son.

And Jesus Christ is who God loves. What did he say in the book of Matthew when Jesus was baptized? This is my son in whom I am well pleased. God the Father loves the Son and he sent him into the world to be the Savior of the world and everybody who comes to the Son who is baptized by the Holy Spirit into Jesus Christ is loved by God in the same way that God loves the Son it's such an inseparable union you have with Jesus Christ that God loves you in the same way your union with Jesus Christ you're part of his body the body of Christ and so David appeals not to his righteousness he doesn't appeal to his repentance he doesn't appeal to his former good deeds that he did he doesn't appeal to how much good he's going to do if God would just forgive him, he doesn't promise God if you just get me through this one I promise I'll serve you the rest of the days of my life he doesn't try to bargain with God he appeals to God on the basis of God's super abundant mercy and God's love.

Because there is no other avenue by which you can be saved. There's no other way to receive forgiveness of sins but by mercy. There are people who are going to spend eternity in hell who spend a whole lifetime living better lives than some of us will. And they're going to spend an eternity probably, some of them. I don't know how eternity in hell works.

I'm sure it's bad. But I I can tell you there's no repentance. And there's going to be people who are going to realize that they were relying on their own good deeds. So you must come to God on His terms and His terms alone. This is what David's doing. I believe David was already a Christian at this time.

So I believe David was already born again of the Spirit at this time. So this isn't a prayer that David prayed to get saved. I think David's an example of a backsliding believer. If you hate that term, we can talk about it. But I think David made some grave errors in his life. And he is an example for us of what the repentance looks like that a Christian will have.

So David's petitioning the Lord. He says, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. Even the smallest sin is worthy of damnation. Keep in mind, what was like the first sin that ever happened, really? The first one we can think of. There was a tree.

You want to tell me? yeah there was a tree that had some kind of fruit on it right and there was no natural way that you would have walked around a garden and thought well we shouldn't eat from that tree okay so I'm going to teach you a little bit about something called positive law today so a positive law is where there's no natural reason to believe something should be the way it is, and yet God tells us we're to do it that way. So we can look around the world, you can look around at cultures historically, you can look in your own house, and we know stealing's wrong. We don't need a book to tell us stealing's wrong.

That's a natural law. That's something that's manifested in creation. It's obvious to all of us because it's part of God's eternal, unchanging moral nature not to take things that aren't His. You know, God can't steal. God can't steal first and foremost because everything's his but if somehow there was something that wasn't he couldn't steal because he's perfect and he wouldn't ever be immoral but God can't steal and we're not to steal well eating from a particular tree is called a positive law because God told Adam and Eve not to eat from one tree and that was just a test he gave them he put Adam in the garden in what's called a covenant of works where Adam was allowed to eat freely of all the trees in the garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and It was a test.

Will you obey me? Will you be? My vice regent over this Dominion I given you and will you submit to me though as the ultimate authority and Adam had a chance to do that and if anybody would have gone up to Adam the day before God said that to him or the moment before and said, hey, can we eat from that tree? I don't know what Adam could have said. He'd have no reason to say he could or couldn't have eaten from the tree.

But once God said, don't eat from that tree, we have what's called a positive law. A positive law can be abrogated at any time. So God can say, don't eat from this tree, and then tomorrow He can say, eat from it. It's in time, it's created. And Adam ate from that tree. And I think what I want you to understand, I want to explain positive law a little bit to you, but what I want you to understand is that sin was eating a fruit.

It doesn't sound real bad. I mean even if one of you I found out stole a piece of fruit from somebody else's tree I think I'd want to talk to you about stealing it but still I don't think we think of taking a piece of fruit as a very big deal and yet that sin against our holy God is what brought us into this situation we're in now with the curse it's why each and every person in this room is conceived in sin like Adam like David talks about in Psalm 51. And so we are to understand our need to be cleansed from our sin according to verse 2.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. David's not asking God, hey, will you just forgive me of this one sin because I was already like a really good guy. David's recognizing that he needs a thorough washing. he needs to be cleansed from his sin there is no way he can enter in the presence of God the way that sinners are he needs to be cleansed thoroughly and so do you the second P word so you have your petitions, David's petitioning the Lord and one of them, David's penitent so I tried to do R with repentance because I like that word better, but David's penitent And what it means is he's repentant.

David is sorry for the things that he's done. He says in verse 3, For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Keep in mind, we calculated that David committed the sin and then wasn't confronted by Nathan for at least nine months. Even if it was a premature child, you know, six months or so. I don't think preemies lived that long back then, though.

So David has had almost a year of time, maybe more, where he has been daily assaulted by his sin. His conscience bearing witness to him that he is in violation of his father's law. And everybody here should know that feeling, Christian or not. I hope you have a conscience there's a handful of people in the history of the world that didn't have one and I'm willing to guess they had one at some age and then they seared it through their sin but your conscience is that thing that tells you what I'm doing is wrong or what I did is wrong and I need to have it made right this is what David is now repentant because he says I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.

So now you imagine this David trying to enjoy his life as the king and every time he goes out he's wondering is somebody going to find out today? Is somebody going to realize what happened? Am I going to be confronted like I was with Nathan? Is the Lord going to judge me? it also tells us in our confession that we don't have confidence that we've been justified if we're not experiencing regular sanctification and repentance that accompanies justification David very rightly may have lost sight of the fact that he is a child of God he may have started to wonder if God was really on his side after in a sense God had let him go to such a depth of depravity.

I'll reassure you that God has let his people and seems to continue to let his people often go into a very depraved behavior as Christians. And not every one of them is instantly snatched to heaven like Ananias and Sapphira were. But there's no assurance when you're in that state. it's one of the reasons we have something called church discipline the last step of which is when the church tries to get you to repent of your known sin and when you won't the church says okay you're not welcome here right now you're to be treated as an unbeliever we are to treat you in the way that you're actually acting unbelievers are unrepentant believers are repentant so we'll just treat you the way you're asking to be treated the goal of which being that the separation from the fellowship of the people of God is too great for a true child of God that they will eventually return this is why it's terrible if you go to one church and they do some kind of discipline and they do it correctly it's terrible if another church just welcomes somebody right in I understand that there's probably nuances and things that happen that makes some of it difficult.

But the goal of church discipline is restoration of the sinner to the fellowship. But so David is haunted by this sin and it's ever before him. And if you know what that's like, you know what it's like. And then David says one of the strangest sounding verses to a lot of people in this church. that we're calling penitence. He says, Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.

David took advantage of Bathsheba at the very least, had her husband murdered, had a number of other men in her husband's regiment killed along with him, not on purpose, but just out of his depraved indifference for their lives. He sinned against the entire nation of Israel. Sinned against all his other wives. Strange way to put it, but... So how can David say, against you, you only have I sinned? how is it even possible that it is only against God that David has sinned this should be hard to understand it should be almost scandalous, wait a second you killed Uriah after taking his wife and now Nathan the prophet says to you oh by the way the Lord has forgiven your sin it's really scandalous there's really nothing that can be said for a person that does what David did and then for somebody else to just say oh okay you're forgiven there's an important thing to understand here and that is that the Lord is the one who makes the rules and so when David says against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, I don't believe that this is a proclamation that David did nothing at all that would have been considered sin against Uriah or Bathsheba, or anyone else for that matter.

David's sin, like all sin, is always primarily, though, in opposition to God. If it wasn't for God, if it wasn't for God making rules, there'd be no such thing as sin against one another. This is why when you meet a person who says they're an evolutionist or an atheist or one of those things, the first thing you should do is just try to take their wallet.

Because they have no standard by which to tell you what you're doing is wrong. I don't really recommend that other than if you're joking. Or if you intend to give it back, I guess, and you know it well enough. But the point is this, you sin against God. Your sin is against God, and it's against God that you need forgiveness of sin. Now, if you want a decent relationship with another person in this world, you're going to have to repent, ask him to forgive you, and you're going to have to do that with him.

But Uriah is not going to forgive David. None of those men that died are going to forgive David. And even if they do, it doesn't matter. Bathsheba forgave him. already as far as we know what matters is whether the Lord puts away your sin or not whether the Lord sees you as repentant and forgives you in the name of Jesus Christ so when David says against you you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight he says so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment he's explaining to us how redemption works.

God is blameless in His judgment. Many people will say that God should not have let David's child die. God even says He won't make children suffer for the sins of the father. We talked about this though. But because God is the one who is sinned against, God is blameless in how He chooses to judge the world. And the fact of the matter is that that child, Uriah, all the men that died in that regiment, Bathsheba, and every person in the nation of Israel who David sinned against when he was supposed to be a good leader for them, a type of Christ, a king.

When David first started and he beat Goliath, people would have started to think maybe he's the Messiah. Like, do you understand this? People weren't like, oh, here's David. I hope he's special. The thought would have been, is this the one? That's what people would have been wondering.

And then David goes and actually does such a terrible job sinning against all these people. And you know what? Every single one of the people David sinned against deserved far worse judgment than the little bit of difficulty that David created for them in this world. That does not justify any of us to sin against anyone else because we're wrong when we sin. that God may choose to allow you to suffer some consequences in this life at the hands of other sinners, and you can't say that God is unjust to allow that to happen to you as a sinner or as a saint.

And if you spend 70, 80 years on this world, and then you spend eternity in hell, even the worst thing that happened in this world would be something you crave for a long, long time. and if you got saved, or if you're going to get saved, and you're going to spend a bunch of time in this world still suffering the difficulties because other people still sin against you, well then just know that that's a little taste of the judgment that you deserved, that Christ took for you. But there's a little phrase in here, in verse 4, where David says, so that you may be justified in your words. and I think that's an interesting phrase because in 2 Samuel 12 the words that God says to David through Nathan the prophet are in verse 13 Yahweh also has put away your sin, you shall not die. And I think this is where there's the scandal.

I think this is where there's the scandal of it all. I don't want to overuse that word, but the idea that someone could murder someone else, take somebody else's wife, order the murder of the one guy in such a way that causes the casualties of a number of other people's dads and husbands. The idea that God would forgive him should be scandalous. it should be too much to understand David has done nothing to make up for what he did but the point here is that because the only way of salvation is the abundant mercy of God the only way of salvation is the steadfast love of God bringing mercy because the only way of salvation is the looking forward for a guy like David and for all the people at David's time that a Messiah would one day come and he would suffer.

He would be numbered among the transgressors. He would have his grave with the wicked and with the rich man and his death and he'd be cut off from his generation and he would bear our griefs and bear our sorrows and be crushed for our iniquities and by the chastisement of him, he would buy us peace. It's because of the coming Savior that David can be forgiven, not because of anything he did.

And it's because it's against the Lord that we sin that God can forgive sins in such a way. So David proclaims some more covenant truth here in verse 5. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. The first time I saw that, I thought it meant, oh, his mom was sinning when she had David. Like, she was out of wedlock, and so David was proclaiming himself to be an illegitimate child of sorts.

And that's not what it's saying. What David is proclaiming is the sin that's to his core. He's proclaiming that it was from his conception that he was a sinner in the eyes of God, that he understands that Adam, when Adam fell in the Garden of Eden, that he was the federal head of all of humanity, and that everybody who would be born after Adam would be born with that stain of original sin.

And so there's a saying we use in Reformed circles, and that is that you sin because you're a sinner. You're not a sinner because you sin. and that was revolutionary to me when I first heard it that I'm a sinner by nature because of Adam passing down that sin to me and because of Adam passing down that original sin to me I love that which God hates and I hate that which God loves by nature and I love to disobey his law and in fact I'm actually interested to know what God's law is so that I can find creative ways to break it. In Romans 1, we're told that we've become inventors of evil.

It's not enough just to do evil. We have to invent new evils. One of the reasons you do not regulate abortion through legislation is that when you regulate abortion through legislation, what you do is you create better abortionists. You create people who are more efficient at it. I think I read last June that 80,000 abortions in the United Kingdom had been done since the lockdown started over FaceTime.

And that was in the first few months of the thing. They figured out, well, we want to follow these laws. It's interesting enough, murderers want to follow some laws. But the ones that keep them in business, they'll follow. And what they did is they found ways, hey, we can give people medicine, we can get in touch with people sooner. They're probably reaching out to people on a regular basis rather than waiting for people to come to them.

So you pass a heartbeat bill, you say, hey, you're allowed to kill your child as long as you do it before they're six weeks old. Guess what people will figure out how to do? They're going to figure out how to know they're pregnant sooner, they're going to figure out how to do things that happen sooner in the process, or they're just going to lie and do it anyway. we are sinners by nature.

David proclaims this truth. This is why David says, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. If you woke up tomorrow and there was a list of every single sin that you had ever committed and thought word and deed, and there was a list of them and we had books enough to fill up all your sins. We'll take the youngest person in here, the shortest book possible.

And we could go through and we could just mark them all off and say every single one of those is forgiven. You're still condemned before God because you are by nature a sinner and He can't be in your presence. This is why you need to be washed thoroughly from your iniquity and cleansed from your sin. And it's only the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit that can do that for a sinner.

Let's get to verse 7, purging. So there's a song I heard on the way here. So it's always good when you're preparing your sermon at 2 o'clock. But the song called the altering door by casting crowns. So if you go listen to casting crowns and they say something stupid, don't blame me. I not I not endorsing them wholly but he says that it called the altar in the door And what it it about it about a guy who in church or a woman in church and they would come up to the front where some churches have what they call an altar we don't do that but but they would come in the front and they would repent of their sin they have this known sin they're sorry they really are in that moment they're sorry like david is and then somehow between the altar and when they leave the door their resolve is gone And that's what the song's about.

So listen to what he says. He says, Lord, this time I'll make it right. Here at the altar I lay my life. Your kingdom come, but my will was done. My heart is broken as I cry like so many times before. But my eyes are dry before I leave the floor.

So he's on the floor praying. He's crying because he really is repentant right now. And he can't believe he did the thing again that he knows he's not supposed to do. and he hates himself for it, and he hates it and he keeps doing it, and he has this resolve that he's not going to do it again. And then the next verse, this is the lady singing, but she says, here at the altar, oh, my world is so black and white.

It's so clear when you're in the building here. When I'm preaching about sin, when Jason's praying about it, when Bert's reading about it, Elijah's reading about it, Jeremy's reading about it, it's clear. We know what we're supposed to do. There's not a whole lot of temptation in here. either in some ways that the world has. The world's so black and white, she says, how could I ever falter what you've shown to me to be right?

And then they say, Lord, this time I'll make it right. Here at the altar I lay my life. Your kingdom come, but my will was done. My heart is broken as I cry like so many times before, but my eyes are dry before I leave the floor. he says I'll try but this time Jesus how can I be sure I will not lose my follow through between the altar and the door it's a catchy tune and I like it and it captures what I think is a spirit that Christians will have on occasion I would actually argue with you that if you have never had a moment in your life that you were totally repentant for at least something in your life, and then crying out to God because you don't understand why you keep doing the bad thing that you don't will to do, or why you're not doing the thing that you know you ought to do, which is the cry of Paul in Romans 7.

If you've never had one of those moments, I question, you know, I mean, if you're a brand new Christian, that's different. But if you've been a Christian a few years and you haven't really wrestled with your sin, I question whether you're really wrestling with it, whether you're really in the battle. So it's a sweet song, but the song doesn't really give a solution.

The song constantly uses, get our Greek guys out here, the first person, present active, indicative pronoun, I, right? I. I'll try. I'll do this. I lose my resolve. I cry.

I have dry eyes. David says in verse 7, after petitioning the Lord, while petitioning the Lord, while being penitent to the Lord, he says, purge. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. David needs a purging. He needs to be washed thoroughly from his iniquity and cleansed from his sin.

He needs to be purged. Purge is where they get the word purgatory from. Purgatory is the magic land that the Catholics created where people go who weren't really bad enough for hell, but weren't good enough for heaven. And listen, kids, if you're listening, this is a fake place, okay? Don't leave with just a purgatory lesson. And it's a place that they created where people go because they didn't make it to heaven, but they didn't go all the way to hell.

And what they would do is they would put a box by the door and they would say, put a little money in the box and we'll help your relatives go to heaven. And a whole lot of people got rich off a whole lot of other people convincing them that they could buy their relative into heaven out of this place called purgatory. But the term purgatory comes from the idea that you're being purged.

That you still have remaining sin in your body. You have remaining sin in your life because in the Roman Catholic religion, you can't be completely forgiven and washed by Jesus Christ. And you go to this magic land where you're purged by fire, I suppose. I don't know what else they'd purge you with. And all these remaining impurities in your life would be going away as your relatives were giving all of their money to the church so that these popes and stuff could have prostitutes and alcohol parties and things like that.

If you don't believe me, you can just read a history book. But David says, purge me with hyssop, and he's not talking about purgatory. He's saying, I want the Holy Spirit to apply the blood of Jesus Christ to me. David could have gone out that day and sacrificed 10,000 animals. He could have told the priests, you're working overtime, nobody sleeps until they're all slaughtered, and all of the blood is on the altar, and I'm forgiven of my sins.

And David says, purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. He knows where real forgiveness comes from. And this is the distinction that you'll see throughout the Old Testament. And you'll see that there are Old Testament saints that very clearly know what they're talking about when they talk about salvation. It wasn't some magic thing that happened when Jesus appeared, and all of a sudden people were like, oh, it wasn't about the lambs and goats, it was about a man.

David knew this. And as my chronology is right you knew it before Isaiah wrote about Jesus which is pretty phenomenal That God reveals himself to whom he wills when he wills how he wills and David being a prophet was able to know these things and so he says purge me with hyssop we can get into the hyssop thing probably next week more hyssop was the little plant that they would dip in the blood and then they'd spray it against the altar and Moses when he sprinkled the people with blood he dipped it in hyssop so when you see David say purge me with hyssop he's saying apply to me the blood of atonement make me clean because I can't do it myself it's not about whether I have follow through when I leave the altar and walk to the door it's about if Lord you're going to do for me what I can't do for myself is what he's saying I relied on myself and what I did is I ended up taking a woman that wasn't my own and then murdering her husband and then lying about it and being a hypocrite about it for a long time. That's what self-reliance got David and he knows it finally.

And some of you are going to go through something like this yourself because you won't listen to the prophet just warn you. These things were written for our learning. they were written so that we may have hope I don't know what David thinks I don't know where he sits in heaven chances are there's a long line to meet him when you get there you got a long time so it'll be okay but I can bet you this if David is anything like I am and he's a better man than I am David doesn't want anyone else to have to go through the type of pain and difficulty that he went through. And as embarrassing as it is to have your life story written in the scripture for everyone else to see what you did, it's all in vain if you read it and then you go do the same things.

Or maybe you are an inventor of evil. You invent a new thing you can do that you know is contrary to God. And you get the same result. And there's people in this room, half of our church membership, as people whose testimony is I was saved when I was younger and then I walked away a little bit from the Lord. And the Lord chastened me and brought me back.

I'm sure they don't want their kids to go through the same thing. Here in the Valley Division there's a writer in the one called Mourning. He says whole prayer about the Lord forgiving them, it's really a lot like Psalm 51 in some ways. He's asking the Lord to help them, but he says something right at the very end that I want you to think about, okay?

He says, My adversaries are part and parcel of my nature. They cling to me as my very skin. I cannot escape their contact. In my rising up and sitting down, they barnacle me. They entice with constant baits. Now here's the line that really just hit me.

My enemy is within the citadel. He says, come, Lord, with almighty power and cast him out. Pierce him to death and abolish in me every particle of carnal life this day. John Owen said, be killing sin or sin will be killing you. your sin is ever with you because it's in you you need to be washed thoroughly and you need the Lord to help you with it I saw a quote this week I don't remember exactly how it went but it was something like this a sin that you're continuously struggling with is not a sin that's been mortified we're told to kill sin told to mortify the flesh and so this is your this is your call to repent to be penitent like David was to pray, to petition the Lord that he would purge you of this evil.

He does promise. He does promise to answer the prayers of the saints. Another P. Promise, yeah, thank you. I had like five of them. It was too much for me, so I had to quit.

So be in prayer for yourself. David David needed the protection of the Lord and you needed even more Father please bless us today as we go forward in the power of Jesus Christ whose forgiveness is greater than all our sin we thank you that we have full confidence in him we pray that you would cause us to be truly penitent sinners that we may walk in newness of life and really enjoy the joy of our salvation the joy that David lost temporarily we pray that for anyone here who has lost it that it would be restored that you would comfort that sinner in the way that only you can and that we would never cease to pray for one another not knowing what each other's struggles are privately that we would pray for one another's holiness Christ like this and conforming to his image we thank you that Jesus Christ has resurrected from the dead ascended into heaven, is at the right hand of the Father, and that He's coming again. We pray that when He comes, He would take everyone in this room with Him.

Amen.