Clean and New
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Psalm 51
1. Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love; according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. 2. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! 3. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. 4. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight, so that thou art justified in thy sentence and blameless in thy judgment. 5. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. 6. Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. 7. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 8. Fill me with joy and gladness; let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice. 9. Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. 10. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. 11. Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy holy Spirit from me. 12. Restore to me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit. 13. Then I will teach transgressors thy ways, and sinners will return to thee. 14. Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of thy deliverance. 15. O Lord, open thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise. 16. For thou hast no delight in sacrifice; were I to give a burnt offering, thou wouldst not be pleased. 17. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. 18. Do good to Zion in thy good pleasure; rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, 19. then wilt thou delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then bulls will be offered on thy altar.
David has kept his unconfessed sin of adultery bottled up for a year. His sense of relief--and release--is almost palpable, isn’t it? He has not had a very good time of things in that year either. Life hasn’t exactly gone his way. He has felt adrift in the world, even in the midst of great wealth and power. He no doubt had an ever-present sense of unsettledness and probably a good dose of self-loathing. He just couldn’t give up his pride to confess his sin. He could not relinquish the hold sin had on him, because it would require him humbling himself before God. And that is always painful--never pleasant--even though we know that once we have done so, we’ll feel so much better!
God’s been working pretty strongly and deeply in me lately. Each time I peel off a layer of my humanness and turn it over to him, he asks for more. He continues to send me deeper and deeper within my heart and soul to examine my own sinfulness-the areas of my life that I hold back from him. And boy, I can put up a pretty good fight! My husband who is very tall and strong, considered himself complimenting many years ago as I hoisted one end of a sleeper sofa down a flight of stairs, “You’re short, but you’re sturdy.” Any one who knows me will attest to the fact that I’m pretty feisty, too!
I think I’m beginning to soften around the edges a bit, though. God has been chipping away at the rough exterior--the walls I’ve built around myself, the obstacles I’ve thrown up--my sinfulness. And he is polishing and smoothing out the areas of my life I have relinquished to him. That’s what David is talking about in the Psalm, I think. We humans puff ourselves up and stamp our feet to have our way. We want what we want. We want to have our cake and eat it too. But in the end, we know that once we surrender to God’s will, we will feel so much better about ourselves.
Once we admit our sinfulness-our innate proclivity to sin-we can freely run to God! He made us human. He understands our human-ness. And he rejoices when we admit our complete and absolute need for him to take away those parts of us that aren’t like him. Of course, if he took it all, there would be nothing left! Or would there? Maybe we would be like David begs God to become: cleansed with hyssop and whiter than snow. Christ-like in all our strivings. Filled with the Holy Spirit as we proclaim God’s unspeakable love to the world.
My prayer today is that you’ll offer up all the places in your life and in your heart that separate you from God. And that you run to him, begging him to make you clean and new.
Mary
