Years ago, I read this
quote, and it has stuck with me to this day.
Why? I found it to be painfully
true. The writer Bill Owens said. People are not resistant to change. They make changes all the time. They are resistant to being changed. Isn’t that true? We can adjust our schedules. We can change our hair styles or the clothes
we wear, all sorts of things. But when
it comes to deep, inward change that is far more difficult.
Often even when we want that deep inward
change, when we’re not resisting it, it doesn’t happen. We can see changes that need to be made.
Yet still they don’t happen. Why?
After all, the Gospel says that we can be
changed. By God’s grace, we can
overcome anything. We can have the
victory. We can never fall so far that
God cannot reach down, pick us up, and set us on the right path. But why does that not happen? How can we get to a place where it does. How does real, lasting inward change
come?
We can learn from someone whose refusal to change
blew his life up, David, the great king of Israel. He coerced a close friend’s wife to sleep
with him, and then killed that friend, one of his own soldiers and several
other soldiers with him to cover up his misdeed. He thought he had even gotten away with it,
until God, through the prophet Nathan, called him out. And when God did, David woke up. He saw the great evils he had done, and it
threw him into deep despair.
When all of a sudden, you see a wrong, a
failing that you had been willfully blind to before, it can be pretty
devastating. You don’t want to face
yourself after something like that.
You’re ashamed. And forget about
facing other people. After this blew up,
David wondered how he could have the credibility to lead anyone much less a
nation. And he wondered too how God
could use him after he had fallen so far.
Yet in the words we are about to hear, David found a way out. He emerged from this disaster, one of his own
making, to become an even greater king, and
stronger servant of God. He did
experience deep, inward change. How did
it happen? In these words, God shows us
the way. Let’s listen and hear what God
has to say.
How did David do it? How did David not only recover from his deep
despair, but use this huge failing in his life as a springboard for
transformation? David does it by repenting. Now if you hear that word, repent, and go
what? How can repenting change me? Repenting just makes me feel bad -. If that’s the case, you’re not getting what
repenting is. Repentance means change,
and not just surface change, but change at the deepest part of who we are.
And that brings us to the first step in the
experience of change that repentance brings.
First, we’ve got to go deep. We’ve
got to cut down far enough to get at what actually is creating the
problem. And David does two things to
get down that deep.
First, David sees his wrong as God sees
it. As he puts it in verse 4. I have sinned, O God, in your sight. Often, that’s the biggest problem with us
not experiencing change. We’re not truly
seeing the real issue. All of us likely
have a favorite picture of ourselves, and why is it our favorite? We look good in it. And why do we look good? Probably because it covers or obscures some
unpleasant part of us that we know is there.
If you have a big nose, you can come up with a camera angle where the
nose isn’t that big or if you’ve got a little paunch like me, you can find a
way to get a shot that covers that paunch up.
Just like those pictures, when it comes to the messed up stuff in our
lives, all of us can find a point of view that hides that reality; that
obscures that truth. That’s why we need the one view that doesn’t
hide the truth. And that view is God’s view.
Why do we look to the Bible for guidance on moral issues, to discern
truth? In it, we find the viewpoint of
the One who created us. On our own, it’s
way too easy to deceive ourselves, to justify whatever we want to justify. Sure what the Bible tells us may make us
uncomfortable, but that’s what truth often does.
But beyond seeing his wrong from the truest
viewpoint there is, God’s, David doesn’t avoid the truth of why he did the
wrong. Again and again, he uses words
like my transgressions, my iniquity; my sin.
He makes it clear. I did
this. No one else made me do it. Yet too often, when it comes to the wrong
stuff in our lives, we cop out. We
avoid that painful truth. For example,
no one can make you mad. Sure people can do infuriating things. But we don’t have to react to them in
anger. We choose to do that. The only person who makes you mad is
you. In fact, whatever we choose to do
in life, including the wrongs we commit, we choose because in that moment that
is what we most wanted to do. For example, someone might say, I didn’t want
to lie but if I hadn’t lied, I would have lost my job. The circumstances forced me to lie. But is that the truth? No, the truth is you wanted money and security
more than honesty. You did it because
in that moment, that’s what you most wanted. (Tim Keller) Circumstances or
other people don’t make you mess up.
They might help shape how you mess up, but they don’t cause it. You cause it.
If you did wrong, you did it because that’s what you most wanted to
do.
I remember years ago, I was talking to my
sister about some bad habit I was struggling with and how I so wanted to stop
it. She asked me. “Well, Kennedy, what’s the pay-off?” I asked, “The pay-off” She said. “You wouldn’t be doing it if there
wasn’t some sort of pay off. It may be
a negative pay off, but there is a pay-off.
So find the pay off, then you’ll be on your way to freeing yourself of
the habit.” When we do wrong, nobody
makes us do it but us. And we do it,
because that’s what we most wanted to do in the moment. That’s the pay-off we
most wanted.
And David realizes. This is the simple but
difficult truth he had avoided. That’s
why he talks about how God desires truth in the inward being. David knows
now, in his inward being, there had not been
truth. And if we are to truly change,
we have to have that same deep inward truth.
We have to face the fact that the only
person who caused our wrong-doing is us.
David does no blame-shifting. He
takes it fully on. So often we can think we’re repenting when
we’re really complaining. Yes, God I
did that, but I did it because my spouse did this or my friend did that or the
pressure got too great. Whatever. In the end, you did it. Own that.
So now that we’ve gone deep, now
that’s we’ve gotten close to the root of our problem, how do we cut that tumor
out. How do we heal ourselves? We let our heart be melted.
If you have a piece of metal that is cracked,
how do you fix it? You can’t take a
hammer to it. If you do that, you’ll
dent it or maybe even break it, but no way will you fix it. So how do you fix it? You melt it.
Why? Then you can mold it. Then you can fill in the cracked or weakened
places. You can make it usable again,
maybe even better than before.
In the same way, when we mess up, we can
confront our failure in ways that simply makes it worse, that breaks us down
even further. Or we can confront it in
a way that truly restores; that actually heals. Both will cause us some pain, but only one
actually makes us whole. The hammer way
so to speak is that we make ourselves miserable through fear. And the melting way is that we make
ourselves miserable through mercy. And
that is what David does here.
Right at the beginning, David says, Have mercy
on me, O God, according to your steadfast love. When we read steadfast love, we are seeing a
translation of a very unique Hebrew word, Hesed. It’s such a unique word that we struggle to
find a way to translate it that really gets its meaning. I don’t know if steadfast love gets
there. It might be better to say,
according to your unbreakable love, according to your love that will never walk
away from me ever. That’s what Hesed
means. And when David starts off like
that, he is reminding himself of who God is.
Why did David mess up? He lost touch with this love, with the God
who loves him more than he can even grasp.
When he writes, restore to me the joy of your salvation, we can think
that David lost it because of the wrongs he did. But, no, it was his losing of joy that first
started him on the path to those wrongs.
When we do something wrong, ultimately, it’s because we have lost touch
with this unbreakable, irrevocable love of God.
We have lost the joy of our salvation.
That’s why David writes. Against,
you God, you alone, have I sinned. My
sin doesn’t begin with Bathsheba or with Uriah.
My sin begins with you, with my losing touch with the ultimate reality
of my life, your love for me. Until we
see that, we’re not down deep enough.
We’ve got to humbly place ourselves
before the One who would rather die, than walk away from us, whose love for us
is unbreakable, who loves us no matter what.
If you mess up, and just beat yourself with a
hammer. “Oh, God, please don’t punish me
for doing wrong. Please don’t walk away
from me.” You are never going to get
healing. You will just break yourself
down more. You won’t end up hating the
sin, but you will end up hating yourself.
Your fear and shame will restrain you for a while, but the sin will come
back. Why? Nothing has changed. You might even be more broken and beat up
then you were before.
But if you see the truth, how radically, how
utterly God loves you, you will start hating the sin, and loving yourself
more. Why? You will see more clearly how deeply, how
profoundly, God loves you. And that will
change you. It will lead you to walk
away from the things that mess you up.
Why? You won’t crave the false
gods anymore. You won’t desire the junk
that promises fulfillment but never delivers, but instead leaves you empty and
alone. You’ll want the God who seals his
promises with his very life. And like
David then, you will then stop living in the past and start looking to the
future. After verse 11, that’s what
David does. He begins to rebuild his
life. He begins to joyfully sing. So see your sin and own it. And as you do, see the One whose loves frees
you from it. And you will be changed, so
much so instead of grieving, you will even sing!
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