The Way of Life: Confession | Psalm 38
Brian Hedges | November 10, 2024
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to Psalm 38. We’ll be reading the entire psalm here in just a moment.
While you’re turning there, let me read a quotation to you from Charles Haddon Spurgeon. This is from a sermon I read a couple of months ago, a sermon on repentance. I think this is very helpful and a good way to start this morning. Spurgeon said,
“Repentance is the daily and hourly duty of a man who believes in Christ. As we walk by faith from the narrow gate to the celestial city, so our right-hand companion all the journey through must be repentance.”
Now, I wonder if you think of repentance in that way. I think for many of us we think of repentance as something that the really bad sinners need to do. We think of repentance as something that maybe needs to happen when you first come to faith in Jesus Christ, when you’re first converted and experience salvation. But do you think of repentance as the “daily and hourly” responsibility of the Christian, repentance as this lifelong companion through our whole journey in this life?
I think Spurgeon is right. I think the Scriptures commend the ongoing practice of repentance to us. And I think it’s important that we grapple with the need for ongoing repentance and how that works itself out in our lives.
It’s fitting in this series that we’re doing together, called “The Way of Life: Vital Practices for Your Spiritual Journey.” We’ve been saying for the last several weeks that the way of Jesus is the way to life. It is the way not only to eternal life, it is the way to a rich and a satisfying life, a full and an abundant life. But the way of Jesus is marked by practices. There are certain practices that Jesus-followers are called to do, and we have looked at some of those practices so far in this series, such as meditation and contemplation and so on.
Today I want to talk about the concrete spiritual practice or discipline that helps us live out a life of repentance. It is the practice of confession—that is, the confession of our sins.
We’re going to root our thoughts today in Psalm 38. You may know Psalm 38 is one of the seven penitential psalms; that is, it is a psalm of confession, a psalm of repentance, a psalm of penitence. It’s not quite as famous as Psalm 51, the most famous of these psalms. Psalm 51 is when David wrote a prayer, a song to the Lord, following his repentance from his sin of committing adultery with Bathsheba, and then even seeing to it that her husband, Uriah the Hittite, had been put to death. It was a terrible sin, but David repented and God forgave, and Psalm 51 is the record of that. You may be familiar with that, or Psalm 130, which is a psalm that’s all about waiting for the Lord. But here’s Psalm 38, lesser known, but I think an important psalm for us as we talk about the practice of repentance.
I’m going to read the whole Psalm. I’m using the NIV, if you want to follow along on the screen or in your own copy of God’s word. David is writing. He says,
“Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.
Your arrows have pierced me,
and your hand has come down on me.
Because of your wrath there is no health in my body;
there is no soundness in my bones because of my sin.
My guilt has overwhelmed me
like a burden too heavy to bear.
“My wounds fester and are loathsome
because of my sinful folly.
I am bowed down and brought very low;
all day long I go about mourning.
My back is filled with searing pain;
there is no health in my body.
I am feeble and utterly crushed;
I groan in anguish of heart.
“All my longings lie open before you, Lord;
my sighing is not hidden from you.
My heart pounds, my strength fails me;
even the light has gone from my eyes.
My friends and companions avoid me because of my wounds;
my neighbors stay far away.
Those who want to kill me set their traps,
those who would harm me talk of my ruin;
all day long they scheme and lie.
“I am like the deaf, who cannot hear,
like the mute, who cannot speak;
I have become like one who does not hear,
whose mouth can offer no reply.
Lord, I wait for you;
you will answer, Lord my God.
For I said, ‘Do not let them gloat
or exalt themselves over me when my feet slip.’
“For I am about to fall,
and my pain is ever with me.
I confess my iniquity;
I am troubled by my sin.
Many have become my enemies without cause;
those who hate me without reason are numerous.
Those who repay my good with evil
lodge accusations against me,
though I seek only to do what is good.
“Lord, do not forsake me;
do not be far from me, my God.
Come quickly to help me,
my Lord and my Savior.”
This is God’s word.
I want us to see three things this morning:
1. The Problem of Sin
2. The Practice of Confession
3. The Promise of Restoration
1. The Problem of Sin
You can see this in the text. We’ve just read it. There are many references to his sin. He speaks of his “sin” in verse 3, his “guilt” in verse 4, his “sinful folly” in verse 5. In verse 18 he says, “I am troubled by my sin, and I confess my iniquity.” Clearly, this is a psalm written by David with a deep consciousness of his sin and his guilt.
(1) There are several things we need to understand about sin: first of all, the complexity of sin. Sin is presented in Scripture as a complex problem that affects all aspects of our humanity. You might even say that there are layers to sin. When we’re thinking about sin, we might think about sinful actions or sinful words or thoughts, but sin goes deeper than that. It goes down into the desires of the heart and to our habits, our vices, our idolatries, and even what contemporary spiritual writers call the “false self”; that is, a projection of ourselves as being better than we really are, a false self that holds up defenses, that is not willing to really look with honesty at our hearts and at our lives.
Sin is complicated, and it involves all of those things. And when we’re talking about confession, we’re talking about a kind of practice that deals not only with individual sins but, by God’s grace, can be a means of really digging into those deeper networks of sin in our hearts and in our lives.
You might think of it like this. Think of the difference between just swatting a bee or swatting a wasp that happens to get into your house, and then when you’re really going after the nest.
A few years ago, one of my girls ran inside. She’d been mowing the yard, and she came inside and she was screaming, because she’d come onto a nest of bees in our yard, and the bees had gotten in her hair. So she was trying to get those bees out of her hair, and I was trying to get them out, and she was stung several times, and I was stung. We were both fine afterwards, although they hurt like crazy. But then we had to go after the nest. We had to find out where this nest was in the yard, where the bees were. You can’t take a fly-swatter after bees in the nest; you have to use something much more powerful.
In the same way, it’s one thing to confess your little peccadilloes—the sins that maybe don’t seem that serious—or to just pray “Forgive us our sins” in your prayer before the meal, or whatever. That’s one thing. It’s a good thing to do. You should do that. But it’s another thing altogether to really go after those deeply disordered parts of your heart and your life—the habits, the vices, the parts of your deep heart that keep expressing themselves in sin.
So, when we’re talking about confession we’re talking about all of that. We’re talking about going after those sin complexes, those networks of sin in our hearts.
(2) What are some of the symptoms that show that we need this, some of the symptoms of sin? Again, the symptoms are varied, including spiritual, emotional, and physical dimensions.
You might remember, if you were here a couple weeks ago, that I showed you this illustration from Chuck DeGroat’s book Healing What’s Within, where he shows a number of different symptoms of disease in our lives. This was in the sermon on recollection: “Unite [the fragments of] my heart, that I might fear your name.” That was the prayer from Psalm 86. DeGroat encourages us to look at the thoughts and emotions and even symptoms in our bodies and our behaviors and in our relationships.
In this psalm, you see all of those things. Derek Kidner in his commentary says, “The burden is both inward and outward, a torment of mind and body which is accepted as God’s chastening.”
As you read through the psalm, you can see these different kinds of symptoms.
There are physical symptoms. He says in verse 3, “Because of your wrath there is no health in my body; there is no soundness in my bones because of my sin.” He has back pains in verse 7; he has heart palpitations in verse 10. It’s very clear that there are physical symptoms and manifestations that, at their root, are because of this deep psychological and spiritual disorder caused by sin in his life.
Now, that’s not to say that all physical symptoms—all sickness—are the direct result of sin. That’s not the case. We know that’s not the case because of the whole book of Job. Here’s a man who suffered even though he was righteous. Nevertheless, when we are dealing with physical problems and emotional problems and all the rest, it is an occasion where we should examine our hearts and examine our lives and see if something is out of order.
You also see the emotional stuff here in this psalm. He’s overwhelmed (verse 4); he’s mourning (verse 6); he feels anguish of heart (verse 8); he speaks of his longings and his sighings that are not hidden from the Lord (verse 9). There’s a deep emotional anguish behind this psalm.
It’s even affected his relationships. In verse 11 he says, “My friends and companions avoid me because of my wounds.” Even his enemies have found an occasion to accuse him. All of this, though, is rooted in his sin, but these are the symptoms.
When we have these various symptoms in our lives, it’s a call for us to do some heart work, to look within and see what’s going on.
(3) But the heart of sin, the deepest and worst feature of sin, is how it offends God and disrupts our relationship with him. That’s really what this psalm focuses on. It focuses on the heart of sin and the disruption in the relationship with God.
This is nowhere more clear than in Psalm 51, which is the most famous of the penitential psalms, when David says, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. So you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge.” That is an amazing thing to write considering his sin with Bathsheba and his sin against Uriah and his sin, really, against the whole nation of Israel. It’s not that he hadn’t sinned against those people; he had. But David recognizes this Godward dimension to his sin.
At the heart of sin, there’s always this Godward dimension, this Godward element. Neil Plantinga puts it like this in his wonderful book on sin. It’s called Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary on Sin. He says,
“All sin has first and finally a Godward force. Sin is any act, any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed (or its particular absence) that displeases God and deserves blame. Let us add that the disposition to commit sins also displeases God and deserves blame. Let us, therefore, use the word ‘sin’ to refer to such instances of both act and disposition. Sin is a culpable and personal affront to a personal God.”
Now, that’s the problem of sin. The problem of sin is that sin offends God, that sin affects our relationship with God, that sin is an affront to a holy God. The consequences of sin in our lives, while they can be many and varied, at the root it is alienation from God. Again, you see this in Psalm 38:1-3. He says,
“Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.
Your arrows have pierced me,
and your hand has come down on me.
Because of your wrath there is no health in my body;
there is no soundness in my bones because of my sin.”
Here’s a man who is conscious of the fact that he has alienated himself from God, that his sins have posed a barrier in his relationship with God, that God has been provoked and that he is under the discipline of God.
It’s the same experience that I think William Cowper, the poet and hymn-writer, who along with John Newton wrote many of the Olney Hymns—he wrote “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” and “God Moves in a Mysterious Way” and many others—he wrote these words. He said,
“Where is the blessedness I knew
When first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul-refreshing view
Of Jesus and his word?
What peaceful hours I once enjoyed,
How sweet their memory still;
But they have left an aching void
The world can never fill.”
“Where’s the blessedness I knew? I once knew what it was to be close to God, I once knew the joy of walking closely with God, but I’ve lost it. It’s gone. Something’s happened. There’s a barrier; there’s a distance. There’s been a disruption in my relationship with God.”
I may be that some of you are there this morning. There was a time in your life when you walked closely with Jesus, but you realize that you’ve drifted, that you’re not so close now, that you’ve walked at least some distance away from the Lord. Maybe you’ve backslidden in some way, to use that older word. But you are not as close to Jesus as once you were.
If so, you have some heart-work to do, and there’s a practice that can help you. It’s the practice of confession.
2. The Practice of Confession
That’s point number two: the practice of confession. What I want to do is give you a definition, as I’ve tried to do with each one of the practices we’ve looked at each week—give you a definition and nuance that a little bit, and then I want to dig into some of the key ingredients in the practice of confession and try to get practical on some ways in which you can do this in your life.
(1) Here’s the definition. This comes from Eric Johnson and his book God and Soul Care. He says, “Confession is the verbal acknowledgment to God and oneself (and possibly others) of one’s personal sins and sinfulness.”
That’s a simple definition. That’s pretty easy to understand. But I think it’s right and I think it’s important.
Confession is a verbal acknowledgment. Even the words “to confess” carry the idea of saying something out loud or agreeing with our words with this verdict.
It is a verbal acknowledgment to God and oneself and possibly others. Now, we’re not Roman Catholic, so we do not practice auricular confession; that is, confession to a priest who then has the authority to absolve us of our sins. We don’t practice that at Redeemer Church. Most of us are not from a tradition that practices that. But are there situations where confession needs to be not only to God but to others? The answer is yes, because James says in James 5, “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other, so that you may be healed.”
So, when does confession need to be not only to God but also to someone else? I think we could say that there are a couple of cases when that’s needed. One is when you’ve clearly sinned against someone else in a way that has broken the relationship, that’s broken the friendship, so there’s some kind of disruption in the horizontal relationship in your life. You sinned against your wife or your husband or your children, or a fellow believer. You’ve said something you shouldn’t have said. You’ve lost your temper. You’ve gotten angry or you’ve been cruel or you’ve been selfish, or whatever, and that relationship is broken down. There needs to be some kind of confession, not only to God but also to them, so that there’s restoration of that relationship.
The other case when sometimes we need to confess to someone else is when we find ourselves stuck, so that we’re not able to move through and get back into fellowship with God on our own. Now, often, the reason that’s the case is because of our own inadequate grasp of the gospel, or because there are deeper issues lying beneath the sin that maybe need some help, maybe need some counseling. There are occasions when you need to speak with someone who can give you spiritual direction or pastoral counseling or pastoral care of some kind.
But we don’t do that because we are bound by conscience to do so and can’t get forgiven unless we confess to someone else. We get forgiven as we confess to the Lord. But if we’re stuck and we can’t find, psychologically and emotionally, an experience of the assurance of God’s forgiveness, then sometimes we need to reach out and find some help.
Okay, that’s the definition with some nuances.
(2) Now, here are some ingredients to confession. I’m going to give you five, and I call these “ingredients” for a reason. I want you to not think of these ingredients as steps. The wrong application of this would be to have your quiet time tomorrow and pull out your notes and think, “Okay, I have to check off each one of these five things to confess my sins.” That’s not the idea.
Think of ingredients. Ingredients are something that are essential. Think of baking a cake. You want all the ingredients in the cake, but when you’re eating the cake, you’re not thinking about the cake; you’re not thinking about the ingredients, you’re not thinking about the flour and the sugar and all the rest. But if something’s missing, then you’re going to know, as I know. One time I baked a cake and I got the recipe wrong, and it was not a cake; it was more like sugary soup. It was not very good.
In the same way, if some of these things are missing in our lives, then we’re going to have an inadequate—it’s not really going to work for us. We’re going to find that the act of confessing maybe is not leading to the kind of spiritual renewal that we long for, and it may be because something is missing. It’s important to do this analysis in teaching, but don’t think of this as steps to work through in practice.
Let me give you five of these. Number one is what we might call confrontation. Any time we are dealing with our hearts, we’re dealing with our sins, we’re dealing with ourselves, there is a moment of confrontation where we have to honestly face ourselves. We have to see that something’s wrong, that something’s off. Now, it may just be that confrontation comes about as we read Scripture and we see very clearly in the mirror of the word of God that something is off in our lives, and it’s just between us and God. But it may involve another person who actually confronts us with a problem in our lives.
I draw the language here from Robert Mulholland in his very helpful book Invitation to a Journey: A Roadmap to Spiritual Formation. I read this a couple weeks ago and this quote stood out. He said,
“If indeed the work of God’s formation in us is the process of forming us in the image of Christ [and that’s what we’re after in this whole series, conformity to Christ’s image], obviously it’s going to take place at the points where we are not yet formed in that image. This means that one of the first dynamics of holistic spiritual formation will be confrontation through some channel…”
And he then lists several—the Scriptures, worship, a word of proclamation, the agency of a brother or sister in Christ, even the agency of an unbeliever.
“...through some channel, the Spirit of God may probe some area in which we are not formed in the image of Christ. That probing will probably always be confrontational, and it will always be a challenge and a call to us in our brokenness to come out of the brokenness into wholeness in Christ. But it will also be a costly call, because that brokenness is who we are.”
It all begins here. It begins with this honest look at ourselves and some aspect of our lives that is not like Jesus. It’s part of the process, because if we don’t acknowledge that we have a problem we can’t really be cured.
Now, a dramatic illustration of this would be an intervention. In Steve Turner’s biography of Johnny Cash, called The Man Called Cash, he talks about this in the life of Cash. If you know anything about Johnny Cash, you know that he was not only a very popular singer, by the end of his life he was a committed Christian, but he had an ongoing conflict with addiction in his life.
There was a point in his life where he had gotten deep into drugs, and his family did an intervention. The first step they had made were plans to actually check him into the Betty Ford Center for rehab, and they flew to Nashville to stage an intervention. Turner describes it. He says,
“In his private hospital room, his inner circle attempted to show him in the clearest possible terms the effect his selfish behavior was having on those he loved. His wife, mother, children all participated, each having written out a specific example of how his drugs had affected them. They told him how he was hurting them, how he had become distant to them, how his personality had changed. They were worried about his health; they were afraid he would die. His son, John Carter, talked about how humiliated he felt when he brought a friend home and his dad was stoned.
“When they came to the end of the session, they said, ‘We want you to go to the Betty Ford Center.’ [They wanted him to check himself in.] Cash was humbled. He knew that what they had said was true. He knew also that he was loved. He agreed to go and actually begin to work on the addictions.”
Now, that’s a dramatic example of an intervention, a confrontation. But in lesser ways we all need that sometimes. Sometimes we need it from someone else, and oftentimes it’s just the Spirit of God doing that in our lives as he intervenes, he confronts, he makes us uneasy, he targets some aspect of our behavior or our motivations or our words or our habits, and he confronts us with the need for change. That’s the first step. Until there’s some kind of confrontation, you won’t really do real confession, where you’re dealing with the real sins, not just kind of vague, general, “God, forgive us of all of our sins,” but actually doing the real work of confession.
Secondly is evaluation. I don’t really like this word, but it’s the best I could think of: evaluation. What I have in mind here is us taking God’s side against our sins, where we make the same evaluation of our behavior that God himself makes.
You see the psalmist do this in Psalm 38:5. He says, “My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly.” The commentators point out that the word “folly” is the word for the fool, the ceaselessly flippant person who takes nothing seriously, including moral principles and values. Here’s David acknowledging that his sin was foolish. He’s not hiding it, he’s acknowledging it. He is evaluating his sin in the same way that God does. He’s taking God’s side against his sin.
This is where you really have to lower the defenses. This is where you have to own the guilt, own the behavior, and agree that what you’ve done is wrong.
You see the psalmist doing this in verses 13-14. I think this is what he means here, when he says, “I am like the deaf who cannot hear, like the mute who cannot speak. I have become like one who does not hear, whose mouth can offer no reply.” I think what he means here is that, “I have no defenses to make. I’m not excusing my behavior anymore.” He’s silent in the light of this confrontation, he’s acknowledged his sin, and there’s no more blame-shifting, no more defenses, no arguments, no excuses.
This is a hard place for us to get, because so often when we’re confronted with sin we want to blame, don’t we? We say, “Well, yeah, I got mad at you, but I wouldn’t have gotten mad at you if you hadn’t said this to me.” We shift the blame to the other person. Or, “Yeah, I know I have a problem with my temper, but my mom had a problem with her temper. This is just the way our family is,” shifting the blame to your parents. “I know I handled that badly, but I was just tired. It was the tiredness.” Instead of taking ownership for our behavior, we’re blaming it on our circumstances.
There are lots of ways for us to do this, but part of the process of dealing honestly with our sins is actually dropping the defenses and just saying, “Yes, I see it. You’re right,” whether they’re saying that to the Lord or someone else. “This was wrong, and I need to change.”
Acknowledgement is three. Verse 18: “I confess my iniquity; I am troubled by my sin.” Here’s Johnson again. I’m going to quote Eric Johnson extensively here over the next few minutes, because our staff read this book this year, we found it very helpful, and I think he helps us dig a little deeper into what’s needed for us to actually deal with our sins. Here he is, saying—he’s borrowing from John Owen, the Puritan—he says,
“Christian confession is a free, soul-opening acknowledgment of one’s sin in the light of the gospel of Christ and typically includes taking responsibility for one’s sinful action or character without qualification or excuse, so that the heart is made free. Confession also undermines hiding, defensiveness, and dissociation, and someday research on the confession of sin will document its therapeutic benefits.”
Confession is good for the soul, but it’s this free, open confession, this acknowledgment of our sin and our behavior, before God, sometimes before others.
Joined to this, then, is number four: repentance. This always has to be there for the confession to be genuine. You have to see the sin and say, “Yes, it is sin,” and then there has to be the intention to turn away from the sin. So repentance is a change of mind, a change of heart that leads to a change of life.
Now, Johnson talks about repentance and describes it in a twofold way. He says that there is direct repentance and indirect repentance, or primary and secondary repentance. I’m going to read you here—this is the longest quote I want to read—I want to read to you how he describes these two aspects of repentance, because I think that will help us dig a little deeper to do the kind of heart work necessary.
He describes primary repentance as “an aggressive, active disavowal of sins.” He says this is like “fleeing from the dragon.” Now, all of us need this. We need to flee sin. We need to disavow sin. We need to turn from the sin. The things that are obvious, we see it, we acknowledge it, we recognize it, and we deal with it, and we turn away from it. That’s direct repentance. That’s necessary.
But there’s also what Johnson calls secondary or indirect repentance. He says this flows from a deeper appropriation of God’s love. He says this is more like entering the dragon’s lair with Christ in order to slay it. This is a deeper work of mortification. This is how you go after the nest. You go after the network of motivations and desires, and this is a deeper kind of soul work. Listen to how Johnson describes it. He says,
“Secondary repentance utilizes a more subtle and indirect class of repentance activities—active receptivity, detachment, relinquishment, resignation, surrender, yielding—entailing more advanced inwardness skills, usually learned in meditative prayer and in the experiential knowledge that ‘God and Christ is for me, no matter what’ [Romans 8:31: ‘If God is for me, who can be against?’]. But in order to actually kill the dragon, one has to get very close to it. So secondary repentance does not just cut off or repress the sinful emotion or desire, but goes after it and aims to do it harm using Scripture meditation, guided imagery (for example, to actually nail it experientially to the cross), or contemplation on God’s love, or the harm sin has caused. The key to secondary repentance is that one feel the depth of sin by the change in one’s emotion state.”
That’s really getting to the heart of sin. He’s talking here about how to do mortification of sin, how to put this sin to death.
Now, I know he’s using psychological language here. What does this look like practically? What might you actually do to take that kind of technical, psychological description of the process of repentance and make that concrete in your life? Let me give you some ideas.
You could write by hand a list of your sins. Think of every sin that you can think of that you’ve committed, and you make a list of those sins. Then you take that list and, in a symbolic gesture, you pray to the Lord, you ask for forgiveness and for grace, and then you burn the list. It’s a way of saying, “I want to be done with these. I want to turn from this once and for all. I want to turn from these sins and believe that the sins are covered through the work of Christ.” That’s a way you could do it.
That’s going to take some time. That’s more than just adding confession to your prayer before a meal. That’s doing some heart work.
Here’s another thing you could do. You could, over a period of time, keep a journal of confession, where you write down not just lists of sins but specific, concrete instances of a sinful behavior, where you’re thinking through the emotions and the motivations and the desires that led you to that. Then the feelings afterwards of regret, and then you’re evaluating this in light of truth and in light of the gospel. It’s a way of doing deeper soul work.
You could spend a day in fasting and prayer, where you confess your sins thoroughly. It may sound extreme to you, but do you know Christians used to do this all the time? Many times I’ve shared the example of Robert Murray M’Cheyne. He was that great Scottish pastor of the nineteenth century, and he would set aside whole days for fasting and prayer and confession of his sins. He was going deep.
Here’s one other idea. You could spend time in confession of sins and divide your life into segments. You might think of each decade of your life. What were the predominant sins of that decade? It’s a way of actually going deeper into your background, your history, and the patterns in your life that have led you to wherever you are now, and sometimes our sin habits, our vices, sometimes they really are rooted in things that go all the way back to childhood and family of origin and early patterns of the way we related to God and to others and to the world.
Now, let me clarify. I’m not saying you have to do any of these things. I’m saying that if you’re stuck, if you feel a need to work through some issues in your life, these are the kinds of things you can do that will help you get at that deeper kind of repentance and do work on your heart.
Then the fifth ingredient is renewal, what Johnson calls the change in one’s emotion state. But it’s not just a change of emotions, it is a renewed assurance of God’s pardon and grace. It’s a restoration of communion with God.
3. The Promise of Restoration
That leads us into the third and final point: the promise of restoration.
The goal in all of this is not morbid introspection. That’s not the goal. The goal is a restored relationship with God. It’s a restoration of the joy of walking with Christ. It’s coming into the fullness of that rich and satisfying life. That’s the goal. But if sin is the barrier, we have to work through the sin, but we do so ultimately with our eyes on the promises of God, the promise of restoration.
You see it in the psalm, Psalm 38:15. He says, “Lord, I wait for you; you will answer, Lord my God.” Then verses 21-22 end with a prayer: “Lord, do not forsake me; do not be far from me, my God. Come quickly to help me, my Lord and my Savior.”
What’s interesting about Psalm 38 is it doesn’t really look like in Psalm 38 he gets all the way to the point of feeling all this restoration. Some of the psalms you have that, but this psalm ends with him still waiting and with him still praying. But what you do have is a note of confidence. He says, “Lord, I wait for you; you will answer me, Lord my God.”
I think this is showing us that this restoration is not just something that we reason ourselves into, it’s not just self-help therapy. There is a real God that we are in a relationship with, and God is the one who actually restores us to himself, and we have to wait for him. We put ourselves before him. We open our hearts to him. We make space for the Spirit of God to work, and then we wait for the Lord. But we wait with confidence that the Lord will answer. So wait on the God of promise. How do you do that? You do it by trusting in the promises of God.
Let me end with one more passage of Scripture and a couple of illustrations, then we’re done. I think one of the best passages of Scripture to go to in dealing with confession in the New Testament is 1 John 1:9 and 2:1-2. John says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” That’s what we want. We want the forgiveness, we want the purification, the renewal, the transformation of our hearts. The practice is confession.
Then in 1 John 2 he says, “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”
Now, this is showing us that the basis of our hope for forgiveness is the cross of Christ. It’s what Jesus has done on the cross as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. That’s why we know that we can be forgiven. That’s why we can confess with this promise of restoration and of assurance.
Here’s a caution. Don’t let introspection and confession leave you paralyzed in sin. The goal is not to spend a day confessing your sins and then walk out of that day feeling worse about yourself. That’s not the goal. The goal is to actually deal with the real problems that most of the time we are dissociating from, we’re ignoring, we’re burying, we don’t want to deal with it, we have our defenses up. The goal is actually to honestly face ourselves and work through it to the point of restored fellowship with God. That’s the goal. In other words, we have to get back to Christ.
Here’s Spurgeon. He said,
“I tell you, sinner, any repentance that keeps you from believing in Christ is a repentance that needs to be repented of. Any repentance that makes you think Christ will not save you goes beyond and against the truth, and the sooner you are rid of it the better. This is how true Christians live [now, this is beautiful; listen to this]: they repent as bitterly for sin as if they knew they should be damned for it, but they rejoice as much in Christ as if sin were nothing at all. [There’s the freedom.] Oh how blessed it is to know where these two lines meet, the stripping of repentance and the clothing of faith.”
Alright, back to Johnny Cash, and I’m done. Johnny Cash, as you know, became a follower of Jesus. A few years ago we visited the Johnny Cash museum in Nashville, and there, behind a glass case, is this huge, big, black Bible full of notes. He was a devoted follower of Jesus, though a very broken man. But it came to be reflected more and more in his songs over the years. One of my favorite songs of all is a song simply called “Redemption.” The lyrics go like this:
“From the hands it came down,
From the side it came down,
From the feet it came down
And ran to the ground.
Between heaven and hell
A teardrop fell;
In the deep crimson dew
The tree of life grew.
“And the blood gave life
To the branches of the tree,
And the blood was the price
That set captives free.
And the numbers that came
Through the fire and the flood,
Clung to the tree
And were redeemed by the blood.”
Friends, that’s what we do in the practice of confession. We cling to the tree. We trust in Christ, the atoning sacrifice for our sins. We look to the one who bled for us so that we could be cleansed, so that we could be freed, so that we could be forgiven, renewed, and restored. This is our hope. This is why we can confess our sins with confidence of being heard and being forgiven. I commend it to you. Let’s pray together.
Gracious God, we thank you for the promise of forgiveness and of restoration, of a reconciled relationship with you that comes to us through the gospel. Thank you for the example of David in this psalm, who was so earnest in his relationship with you and so honest about his sins and the state of his heart. We ask you, Lord, to help us learn to practice confession, not just going through the motions of saying we’ve sinned and asking you to forgive us, but dealing with our real sins, dealing with the real disorientation of our hearts because of sin. We ask you to help us, Lord, to go deep after those nests and networks of sin, deep in our hearts and lives. We pray, Lord, for the transformation that only your Spirit can bring.
Lord, even now, as we prepare our hearts for the table, we ask you to search us, to know us. We ask you to show us anything in our lives that needs to be turned from. Help us confess those sins to you right now in the quietness of our own hearts. Lord, we pray that as we come to the table you would draw near to us in grace, by your Spirit, to bring renewed assurance and restored fellowship with you. Lord, work in us what is pleasing in your sight, and by the power of the your Spirit make us more like Jesus. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
