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The morning is Psalm 51, reading verses 1 through 17. Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love; according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions; wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

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For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. 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. Behold I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

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Behold thou desirest truth in me inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Fill me with joy and gladness; let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice. Wipe thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.

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Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit. Then I will teach transgressors thy ways, and sinners will return to thee.

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Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation, and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy deliverance. O Lord, open thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise. For thou hast no delight in sacrifice; were I to give a burnt offering, thou wouldst not

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be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. And may God bless to us this reading from his holy word.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Earlier this year I was in Australia, and I visited there its southernmost state, Tasmania,

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which is an island off the southern coast of the main continent. I went to Tasmania to visit Port Arthur, which is the best preserved of all of the early prison colonies from Australian history. As you remember, the land down under was populated at the outset by prisoners sent from England

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and by those who came to guard them. They have museums there where you can see the implements associated with one of those crimes. And I remember particularly this morning the large leg irons which prisoners were forced

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to wear. These leg irons were soldered onto their ankles. And these balls of iron weighed as much as 40 pounds. I lifted several of them.

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And I remember thinking to myself how limiting, how hampering, how crippling, how painful it must have been to have dragged one of those balls with you year after year after year while serving as a prisoner. Well guilt is very much like that.

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Guilt limits us, it hampers us, it cripples us, and it gives us a great deal of pain. And there are many hearts that know the weight of great guilt. Some know it because of overt sin. They have lied.

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They have stolen. They have cheated. They have abused those who worked for them. They have gossiped.

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They have entered into sexual promiscuity. Their lifestyle is pride and arrogant. They are redlining and prejudiced people. There are those who give themselves over to a very overt kind of sin.

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That leads to a heavy guilt. But there's another kind of guilt and that is far more subtle. This is the guilt of the person who is wasting life. The individual who has never sacrificed for anyone else.

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The person who has never discovered what it is to serve another without pay or recompense. There are a lot of people who claim to be disciples of Jesus and yet lead a very easy and cheap devotional life. These more subtle sinners, it can be said of them that their behavior is good, but it

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is good for nothing. It is not so much that they have committed those things which are wrong, it is that they have omitted so many things which are right. Many then with one form of guilt or another carry about the weight of their past and of

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their present behavior. Their hearts are chained. Their hearts are shadowed in a deep darkness. And that's the reason I would like to think with you this morning about confession, which

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I call light for the shadowed heart. You know there are 18 Psalms which bear the name of David. And this 51st Psalm, which I read to you a moment ago, is the most profound of all of them.

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It was the prayer that David prayed after his sin with Bathsheba. You remember the story. How he fell in love with a married woman named Bathsheba. How he seduced her and impregnated her.

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How he then had her husband, Uriah, murdered so that he could take her to wife. And after he has done this, he is confronted by a prophet of God, Nathan. And he is struck with the depth of his sin. And he prays a prayer of confession.

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And that confession is the Psalm we call Psalm 51. Think of it with me. He begins by saying, "Lord, hear me." Verse 1, "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy steadfast love and abundant mercy."

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Notice there's no pretense here. He doesn't go to God saying, "Look, I've done these things right, so hear me when I tell you about these things I've done wrong." There are no excuses advanced.

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No catalog of self-justification. There's no plea bargaining here. He simply throws himself on the abundant mercy of God. And that word "abundant mercy" is very interesting because it's related to the word "womb" in

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the Hebrew language. So what it really speaks of is the motherhood of God. You see, in the Bible, when one thinks of mercy, one thinks of it most often in feminine terms.

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Men are thought of as being just. But women are thought of as being merciful. So often when people go to God in repentance in Scripture, you will find them using words which emphasize the motherliness of God.

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And that's what David does here. He throws himself on the motherliness, the tender mercy of God. And that's where any act of confession must begin. You know how it is with your children.

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One of your children does something wrong. Now you want to forgive what they've done. You want to use it as a teaching experience. You want to bring good out of that which started out as being definitely ungood.

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You can see all kinds of progress that can be made out of this momentary slip. But what can you do if your child never admits to being guilty? If the child resolutely refuses to acknowledge that he or she has done what is wrong, then regardless of what your plans are, they are frustrated.

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There must first be admission of guilt. And there are so many people who go through life trying to bury their guilts. And what they discover is that guilt, even when it's buried, struggles and shrieks. I don't care how much denial and how much deceit you pile on top of it.

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The fact of the matter is this. God forgives, but your nervous system does not. So confession must begin with no excuses. No "I'm okay, you're okay."

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No saying "I would have done otherwise if I'd had a better education." None of this "I'm depraved because I've been deprived." None of this "Mine is an alternate lifestyle." None of this "I've only done this because I'm maladjusted."

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Instead of that, we don't go to God as some indulgent therapist who blesses everything and damns nothing. Instead we go to God in honest confession as David did and throw ourselves on his abundant mercy and say "I have failed to live up to your dreams for me."

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Now the second thing we notice in David's prayer is, verses 2 to 5, that he cries out to God "Wash me." He says "Blot out my transgressions." A transgression is an act of rebellion against God.

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"Wash me from my iniquity," he says. And the word iniquity means the conduct of a contemptible and insolent child. "Cleanse me," he says, "from my sin." And sin in scripture means error, to miss the mark in your life, and not by accident

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but on purpose. And then David concludes this recitation of what he has done by saying "Against thee and thee only have I sinned." Now that always puzzles some people.

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They say it was Bathsheba he seduced. It was Uriah that he murdered. How then can he say "Against thee, God, and thee only, God, have I sinned." Well you must recognize that David is not on his knees before Uriah or before Bathsheba.

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He's on his knees before God. And what he recognizes is that what he has done to Bathsheba and Uriah has ruined God's plans for their lives. Uriah was a convert from paganism, and Bathsheba was a woman who had the right to expect the

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protection of the king, not to be seduced by him. And in doing these things, David interrupted, destroyed all of the beautiful things which God planned for their lives, as he plans for every life that will be lived in obedience to him.

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You know, this is what we often forget about our sin, is the impact that it has on the future. I don't care whether it is the closed fist of overt sin, or whether it is the clasped hands of the selfish sin.

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Whether it's a fist, or it's simply giving nothing at all. Whichever. That kind of sin impacts, it carries with it a history, and moves out into the future. Look what this sin did to David.

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His first son died. His second son rebelled against his father. The next son, Amnon, raped his own half-sister, Tamar. David wanted most of all to build the temple of God, and he couldn't build it because of

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the blood of Uriah, which he had spilled. All of history, you see, all of David's history was significantly altered by what he had done. He had interfered with the plan of God. And that's what happens when we sin, overtly or more subtly.

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We ruin the plan of history, and the plan of history is God's plan. That's the reason when we hit one of God's children, we're hitting him. And that's the reason when we allow one of God's children to starve, we're allowing God to starve.

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You know how it is. When after some sin of omission or commission that you've committed against another, you go to them and you ask for forgiveness, and they do forgive you, and yet you still have this kind of nagging sense of guilt.

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The reason for that is that the honest heart knows that in sinning, we have offended against the moral governor of the universe. And all of the future from that time on for us and all those involved in what we have been done has been changed and not changed for the better.

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So David says, "Blot out my transgressions." The word "blot" means to cancel a debt. "Please, God," he says, "wash me," and "wash" means to take away dirtiness. "Cleanse me," he says.

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That word "cleanse" has to do with the purging of leprosy. What he's asking for is nothing less than soul surgery. "Cut out of me the cancer of selfishness. Excise from me anything that is less than it ought to be.

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Purge me of those things which offend against thee. Heal me." He begins by confronting God, and then having confronted God, he confesses honestly the awfulness of what he's done or what he has failed to do.

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But then he continues, and he asks to be restored to God's grace. Verses 6 through 12, he asks for nothing less than a new beginning. He says, "Teach me wisdom in my secret heart." He says, "Wash me whiter than snow."

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He says, "Fill me with gladness." He says, "Don't look on my sin any longer." And then this sublime word, "Father, create in me a clean heart and put a new spirit within me."

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What David's asking for here is nothing less than a new personality. I read about a man who wrote a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, and in the letter he enclosed a check for $100. He said, "I couldn't sleep last night, so I'm sending you $100.

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If I can't sleep tonight, I'll send you the rest of it tomorrow." Now, that man's not going to get anywhere, you see, because he's not really asking for a new beginning, for a new personality. You know, when personality changes, the whole being changes.

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We get an interesting illustration of this from the world of medicine. We're familiar with that very strange and sad phenomenon in psychiatry of multiple personalities, when one personality or more than one personality will live within one person. We have countless evidences of instances in which one personality living in a body will

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be diabetic, but the other personality living there will not. And diabetes will show up or not show up in that body in accord with which personality is dominant at any given time. We even have instances in which one personality has been burned by a cigarette, and when the

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other personality takes over, the scar disappears. But when the first personality takes over again, the scar reappears again. You see, what happens to the personality affects the entire being. So David says, "I need a change from the very center of myself.

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I need a new personality." He uses the word "spirit" three times. He says, "God, restore my spirit. God, stay with my spirit.

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And God, lead my spirit with your spirit." He wants you to see the evidences of his being claimed again and remade again by God. You know, when Martin Luther separated from the Roman Catholic Church, there was one aspect of the Roman faith that he wanted to bring with him that he didn't and which he later

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regretted. And that was the practice of confession, going into the confessional booth and so on. Now it was not because he believed that you had to go to a priest in order to confess to God.

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Luther did not believe that. And it was not because he believed that you could enter into some meaningless ritual or some formalistic faith procedure and automatically be forgiven. There are people, you know, who will just walk into such a booth, mumble a few words,

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come out, and think that everything is all right between them and God. That's the reason many, many Roman Catholics today will no longer participate in the sacrament of confession as they describe it, because they understand that guilt is much deeper than some mere formula whispered in the dark of some booth.

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Now, these are not the things that Luther missed. What he missed, he said, was the symbolic value of going into a place, laying out in honesty your sins before God, and then getting up and going out of that place and leaving your guilt behind you.

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See, what David is asking for here when he pleads for a new spirit and a new personality is some evidence of the fact that he has been forgiven. When people come to my office to see me, oft times they come because they have some heavy burden of guilt.

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And I hear their confession, not because I am any special representative of God set aside to do that, not because my hearing their confession is any different from any of you hearing their confession, but because I want to be able to say to them, when they have uttered their words of confession in honesty and truth, "Hear the promise of God.

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God says to you, 'If you confess your sin, then I am faithful and just to forgive you of your sin and cleanse you of all unrighteousness. You have confessed your sin. I say to you in the name of God, relying upon his promise, you are forgiven.

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You can begin again. You've confronted God, you've confessed to God, and you've asked God now to renew you, and he will do it." That's when the light, you see, starts to come into that shadowed heart.

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And the evidence of the reality of this in David's prayer is shown in verses 13 to 17, where he says to God, "Send me." He says, "I want to evidence this new beginning. I want other people to know what has happened to me."

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His words are these, "I will teach transgressors thy ways. Deliver me from bloodguiltiness and I will sing aloud of thy deliverance. I will open up my lips and praise thee. My broken and my concrete heart will show my repentance."

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What David is saying is this, "Now that I've been erased, write on my life the new message that God forgives, and I'll go out and sing that song for everyone who will hear." Repentance, you see, is positive, it's dynamic, it's something that you sing aloud. You know, when the prodigal son came back from the far country and was received again

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in love by his father, ever thought of what it must have been like around the house for the next few weeks? I mean, if all the prodigal son did was to walk around the house every day and say, "I'm back, I'm back, I'm back," people would have gotten tired of that rather quickly.

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No, I think what he did was this. He enjoyed that party and that rejoicing at his return, and then he set himself to milking the goats and pressing the olives and getting in that barley which had been left in the fields because he wasn't there to harvest it.

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And he worked hard and he tried to make up for lost time, and he paid off that money which he had taken from his father. He began to build anew. And that's what confession and repentance leads to inevitably.

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You make restitution. You heal what you have broken. You tell the truth where you have lied. You restore that which you made into less than it ought to be.

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My friends, there is no gain without pain, and guilt is a heavy, painful thing. And so, when one has repented and known the restoration which comes from God, one goes out to restore. Gossip is cleared away.

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Fornication is atoned for. Cheating is eliminated. Where selfishness was, there's now generosity. A discipleship that meant nothing before now becomes a meaningful discipleship.

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Confession when it's real leads to correction. There's only one exception to this. Sometimes there are some people to whom you cannot confess a sin because their hearts are so tender and sensitive, they will not be able to hear it.

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I have known of married relationships in which one or the other has sinned, and they never could confess it to the other because the love of the one was so pure and so tender and so gentle that if they'd ever heard that word of confession, it would have utterly devastated them.

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So there are some people to whom you cannot go and say, "This is what I've done, and this is what I'm going to undo." But even with those people, it is possible to make restitution in some gentle and sensitive and loving way without their ever being specifically aware of what sin has been committed against

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them. First confrontation, then confession, then recreation, then restitution. It's interesting that here at the end of the psalm, David uses the phrase, "God of my salvation." That's another phrase that's very feminine in its origin.

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At the beginning of the psalm and here again at the end, he is speaking of God as the tender mother who forgives, "God of my salvation." It reminds me of a short story by Guy de Maupassant. De Maupassant tells about a man who was much loved by his mother.

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She sacrificed and did everything for him. And then this man fell in love with an evil woman, a harlot. And the mother tried in every way that she could to lead him away from this woman who was leading him into nothing but ugliness and sin.

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But she was not succeeding. The evil woman, on the other hand, realized what the mother was trying to do. And so she gave the son an ultimatum. She says in the story, "You must go and you must murder your mother, cut out her heart,

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and bring it to me. And if you do not do that, I will never see you again." And this man, so wrapped in her coil, so caught up in her evil, so, well, so low down in his own sin by this time, goes and does it.

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He murders his mother, cuts out her heart. And as he's running to give it to this whore, he falls flat out on the street. He falls. And the climax of the story comes at this moment.

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For when he falls, the bleeding heart in his hand says, "Oh, my son, did you hurt yourself?" And he begins to weep. When we sin, we cut away at the heart of God. When we do that which is evil or fail to do that which is good, we wound the heart of

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God who birthed us like a mother and supports us like a father. And when we so cut out the heart of God and go running with him, we too will fall. Inevitably, we will fall. But when we do, that beating heart of God says, "Oh, my dear one, have you hurt yourself?"

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And when your heart really hears that, your soul begins to sob. And you confess, and you ask to be restored, and you seek to make restitution. And as you do these things, surrounded by God's love, light, pure, precious light floods into all those places in your heart where darkness was.

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For David was quite correct when he said, "A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." Let us pray. Holy Spirit of God, because of the weakness of our frames, because of the frailty of our

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human nature, it is hard for us to hear this day. It is difficult to preach thy word and difficult to hear it. Do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Speak, Spirit, to our inmost hearts.

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And where our guilt is, lead us to seek the light of the love of God made known to us in the face of Jesus Christ, by whose cross we are saved, by whose victory we are restored. Hear us, then, for his sake and for our own. Amen.

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(skateboard wheels rolling)