Confession
Heidelberg Catechism • Sermon • Submitted
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Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin!
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
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.
Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones that you have broken rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence,
and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit.
Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will return to you.
Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God,
O God of my salvation,
and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.
O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;
you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
Do good to Zion in your good pleasure;
build up the walls of Jerusalem;
then will you delight in right sacrifices,
in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings;
then bulls will be offered on your altar.
Scripture: Psalm 51:1-19
Sermon Title: Confession
As we read a little bit earlier, the subject of the Catechism that is before this afternoon, is genuine repentance. The Lord’s Day used terms that are likely familiar—the old self and the new self. If you remember our message last week, we were in Romans 6, where Paul used a similar concept in that we can be slaves to sin, or freed by the Holy Spirit, we can be transformed and identify as slaves of righteousness.
We are going to look focus our attention today on what comes from question and answer 89, “What is the dying away of the old self? It is to be genuinely sorry for sin, to hate it more and more, and to run away from it.” If that can be summed up in a word, this is confession. Our scripture reading is one of the great psalms of confession, which came after David’s adultery with Bathsheba and all the circumstances of that. Lord-willing, we will return at the end of the month to answer 90 about the coming-to-life of the new self.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, confession of our sins is something that can bring up a bit of anxiety for believers. We might wonder how does God exactly expect us to confess? Should this be something we do immediately following every sin, and if we don’t, then there will be extra wrath? Or is it acceptable to do it at the end of the day, looking back on where we messed up, and ask God to forgive us and help us do better tomorrow? Maybe some people wonder if confessing on Sunday in church with the words given during the time of confession is “enough?” Do the Catholics know something more, and have it right to be confessing to a priest or a pastor? What if we forget a sin we committed, will God hold that against us? If Jesus died “once for all” and has already redeemed me, why do I have to keep on confessing?
At the heart of most, if not all, of these questions is the anxiety of we as humans wondering about what we do. If these are questions you have, or find others asking for their own lives, what they are really getting at is how will we merit the forgiveness of the Lord? Have we done the right things, have we done enough to get it? Yet we must remember that grace is a free gift given by God to all who sincerely repent—all who are sorry for and hate the sin they have done, and from now on seek to flee from their sin. What is enough when it comes to confession? As David confessed to God in verse 17, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
As we go through this message today, we are going to be looking at some of the steps from David’s journey of confession and repentance in this psalm. But to see his journey, we must understand the foundation that God desires to hear us, God wants us to see when we have sinned, when we have chosen to take paths leading away from him. In admitting our sins are sins, then we will be able to move forward to find where our hope truly lies.
The backstory of this psalm as is fairly well known, but let’s revisit some of the details. 2 Samuel 11 tells us it was the time of the year when kings go off to war. David sent his men to fight the Ammonites, and he stayed behind in Jerusalem. The Israelite warriors were doing just fine, achieving victory, and were holding Ammon’s chief city of Rabbah under siege. This city was located about 40 miles east, northeast of Jerusalem across the Jordan River.
His men were away from homes and from their wives and family. They were in war mode. But David, the commander-in-chief, was in the security and luxury of his own home, and one night was watching a beautiful neighbor woman across the street. Filled with lust David had to have her, and so he got one of his servants to bring her over. Before going though, he told the king, “Isn’t this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” He was telling David, “This woman is married, her husband is one of your soldiers,” but David sent him anyway. This was likely meant as a one-time fling, but he had gotten her pregnant.
The long story short, David brought Uriah back and tried to coerce him to go and sleep with his wife that it would seem he got her pregnant. But no matter how much food or drink or alcohol or gifts he tried to shove Uriah’s way, David’s strategy did not work. Uriah would not go home when his brothers were in the war camp. So David sent him back to battle with a letter for his commander. The contents were, of course, the successful plotting of Uriah’s death. After her grieving, David brought Bathsheba into his house as his wife, and all seemed to be well.
Not all was well with God though. He sent a prophet named Nathan, who David had met before, to confront him. Nathan revealed to the most esteemed king of Israel that he deserved death. God spoke through the prophet in 2 Samuel 12:7-9, “I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more. Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes?” David knew his sin, and confessed, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
David’s process of confession began with recognizing that what he had done was not just unwise, but it was a sin and an offense to God. It is even deeper than that, sin is an “iniquity…a transgression;” it is despising to God. Sin is the way we talk back to God to tell him that his blessings are not enough; his commands for how we are to live are either irrelevant or too restrictive in our opinion. Sin is our creaturely way of saying we think we deserve more than what God has given us. When we are convicted of our sin though, as David was, we remember who God is and our relation to him. We come to realize that God has the right to set and uphold his design for our relationships.
David was convicted of his sin. Yet conviction did not lead to hopeless shame or to despair over how wicked he had become, but rather the guilt he felt was God’s way of humbling him to seek forgiveness. Recognizing sin for what it is reminds us that God did not originally create humans in sin; how things are now is not the way he intended for them to be. He is continually working to bring renewal in our lives towards how he created us.
David did not just wrong another woman and another man, but what he had done with Bathsheba and to Uriah undermined what God had put into place. In claiming his sin, David also recognized the patterns of God’s goodness, which he will not take away. This is what David was seeking when he prayed, “Have mercy on me, O God…blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from sin…Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me…Restore to me the joy of your salvation.”
After being convicted of sin, David asked God for help. This is the second step of confession we find in this psalm. The king had done wrong against the Lord, and yet it is only God who is capable of washing that sin away, of removing that blemish. When we have sinned, it is an incredible gift that God does not run away and leave us to wallow in our mess, but for those who believe, he remains with us and he sustains us.
Brothers and sisters, this step in confession, asking for help, is where I think many Christians tend to get caught up. In looking at this psalm and passages throughout Scripture, we get a different picture of confession than what I think what we may be accustomed to. As we mature as believers, we come to greater recognition of just how sinful we are. Along the way, as we are aided by the Holy Spirit to increase in holiness, we may also find times where we worry we have not confessed a particular sin. We might think, “What if I forgot or missed one?”
Most of here probably went to schools that had classroom with chalkboards or more recently whiteboards. When I was younger, our teachers would write on those the names of students who had unfinished assignments, or who came to class tardy, or who were absent. No one really wanted their name to get on the board, and if it did, they wanted it erased. My fear is that confession may be misunderstood as a way of getting our names off Jesus’ chalkboard of sinners; we feel like our names will only be erased when we have remembered and confessed to God every last sin in detail.
The problem of thinking about confession and forgiveness like that, or like trying to balance the checkbook and making sure you have cent accounted for, is that it becomes all about what we do. Just like where we started, I am not saying confession is unnecessary, but when salvation becomes about what you can do rather than what Christ has already done we have missed the point. If we come to Christ and are in relationship with him, then we must understand that long ago he erased my name and yours from the board of wrath and added it to the book of life; we have no need to worry.
The even greater problem with thinking about confession like this is that when you get caught up in traps of particularly repetitive sins, if we get addicted to certain rhythms of wickedness, asking for help seems humiliating and does not appear to be an option. If you get so entrenched in one of these patterns, it can feel like we cannot even turn to God for help. But that is a lie; the only reason that is in our minds is because the devil tricks into seeing God as our opponent rather than our help. We get tricked into thinking that God does not already know our sin, and that he is unable to forgive certain sins.
That’s not who our God is though. David is not the only one who deserved death; we all deserve death for our sins. It is in recognizing our depravity, how wicked we actually are that we can come humbled before our Maker. Notice, especially in the case of David’s sins, his confession came long after he committed adultery and set up the murder. Notice, his confession is not a factual statement of his wrongdoings. No, what we see is David recognizing how much he was in need of God’s work in his life. His focus was not worried about the fury of God raining down if he did not do things exactly right, but rather he trusted God to be just and merciful, to have unfailing love and great compassion. God is not only a God who is mad over sin, but he desires truth and wisdom in our inmost beings. When it comes to us, who live after the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we are able to know the one who offers us true forgiveness and salvation. He is the one that offers us his truth and wisdom.
Psalm 51 is such a rich passage, and could be preached over many sermons, but let’s look at just one for more piece tonight. The first step of confession is conviction of being sinful and that our sin is against God. The second step is recognizing God is our helper, he will come to our aid. The final part step is an opportunity for us. David was and is still looked at today as the greatest of Israel’s historical kings. Yet he realized that God knew his every deed, the good and the sinful. God knows all of us better than we even know ourselves; there is no way to hide anything from him. But in seeking God’s help, David made a commitment, verse 13, “I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you.”
That’s not only the calling for David because he was the king, that’s not only the calling for pastors and priests who people might confess their sins to; this is the calling for all who confess and repent. For anyone who recognizes their sins and trusts that God provides redemption, we are all called with the opportunity to teach about sin and what God’s ways really are. I pray that each of us has experienced the freedom and joy that comes in knowing that forgiveness is not about how proper your confession of sins is. It is about Christ and Christ alone, the one who is by nature perfect and who will not despise those who turn to him. We who are transgressors are called to help other transgressors.
This is so important. Others may find mistakes in our lives, whether in the present or the past, but we readily admit we are not perfect and we never have been. God came to save sinners, and that is what we are. We share that he continues to work daily for us and all who turn to him.
Our world is filled with people who are trying their hardest to cover up messes: affairs, lies, pride, greed-driven motivations. What if instead of seeing others as merely lost and hopeless, we saw the world populated by Davids? What if instead of writing others off, we better and more often communicated the gospel? What if we were more willing to confess to co-workers, our spouses, our neighbors, that we have wronged them whether they knew about it or not, and ask their forgiveness? What if we shared the burden of sins that we have struggled with for 5, 10, maybe even 20 years? What if we approached sin in our lives and the lives of others not by first accusing, but by seeking to share how God offers to fix us and renew us?
We conclude this afternoon turning our attention back to verse 17, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” A more literal translation is, “The sacrifices of God are a breaking spirit; a breaking and shattering heart, God, you will not despise.” The words that David uses are active and ongoing verbs. What we have as “contrite” literally refers to a heart that continually breaks. God desires to heal that ever-breaking heart that confesses its sins and its short comings.
True worship from humble sinners comes from breaking and shattering hearts which need someone to put things back together. When we think about what we have covered this afternoon, confession is a process of conviction, of asking God for help, and of teaching others. It looks a lot less like laying our dirty laundry before God, and much more an experience his discipline, his goodness, and his mercy. As confess our sins, may we daily practice humility and worship to the one God who has overcome all sin and death by his own death and the resurrection. Amen.
We live in a society that seeks to give people room to deal with things the way individuals see fit; “Whatever works for you, whatever stance you want to take, go ahead.” The Bible teaches us that there are proper ways to live though; God desires for us to do specific things, even as simple as loving him and loving our neighbor. His freedom is much different than the world’s freedom. When it comes to the good news that he offers, it is not a freedom that says, “Do whatever you want, just ask forgiveness later.” God offers salvation over whatever we have done when we confess it to him, but confession is not intended as a license to sin.
This is God’s way of saying when you do choose your own path, and you will, you can return to me. We need to be willing to teach that truth to others. All of us are in need of redemption through Christ alone, we all need the Spirit to sustain us, let’s treasure that Christ is the only sacrifice that will ever matter, let’s teach about our God who willingly and lovingly picks up the pieces of torn lives, not to sort through all our junk and garbage to put them on display but to make us like who he created us to be—image bearers of him.