PSALM 51 - True Worship & True RepentAnce
By Maykell Araica
KING DAVID
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE ULTIMATE WORSHIP LEADER?
I was talking to a friend this week about worship and Christian music. I am of the opinion that worship and Christian music are two different things. Christian music, especially contemporary Christian music (CCM), tends to reflect our struggles and what God can do for them, or how much Jesus loves us. It tends to be very self-focused. Worship music is praise to God in response to what He has done and is outward-focused.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily have a problem with CCM. It just feels like it’s missing something… so I thought how perfect it would be to look at one of the best worship leaders who ever penned worship music to learn a little bit more about what makes worship, worship. So we are going to talk about King David.
Worship is much more than just the music we sing. True worship goes beyond that. It’s how we live our lives, how we pray, and how we approach the throne of God. It’s our posture before a holy God, fully knowing we deserve hell, yet God gives us grace. So let’s dive into what made David such a good worshipper.
When we worship, we rejoice, we praise God and thank Him for His goodness, His mercy, His loving kindness. Still, the church is the only organization where people gather at least weekly in agreement that we are all sinners, which, if you boil it down to that, sounds like such a bummer of a reason.
Sin is not a very popular topic in today’s church. Many popular pastors even refrain from using the word "sin," but we must acknowledge this word because it is the most damning thing we all have in common. The reason we gather here is because Every. Single. One of us has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and God saved us through His Son.
So how do we respond to God’s grace towards us? We worship. Our initial response is to confess and repent from sin. Once we become believers, we live in this tension of growth in sanctification and repentance to Christ. We as believers never outgrow our need for the gospel.
When was the last time you wrestled with the sin in your life? When was the last time you took it to the cross in prayer? Oh, how often do we roll into church on a Sunday and sing our hymns and pray our prayers but fail to consider our unworthiness before a holy God, knowing full well He is faithful and just to forgive us.
I believe the reason is because we tend to think we can manage our sin, or perhaps we are too ashamed of it. Perhaps we think the sins we have are respectable sins. Or perhaps we think of ourselves as too big of sinners.
The apostle Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 1:15: “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” And in Romans 7:24: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
To you, struggling with your sin and the weight of it, I say this: Paul was the best of us. Yet he called himself the chief of sinners. I’m not telling you this so you have a license to carry on, but to be encouraged like Paul was to turn to Christ with his struggles. To remind others and remind yourself of the truth of the gospel that is, as Romans 1:16 says, “the power of God unto salvation.”
J.C. Ryle once said, “The best of men are but men at best.”
Now, with the gospel at the forefront of our minds, let’s dive into the passage of Scripture we will be learning these truths from. Turn your Bible to the book of Psalms, chapter 51.
Here we encounter a Psalm of David’s, but not just any Psalm. Here are some key details to know before we dive in: David was a worship leader unlike any other. David knew that a critical part of his posture of worship before God was the recognition of his sin before our holy God. David, King David, the man after God’s own heart, wrote this Psalm in complete anguish for the sins he had committed.
Psalm 51: 1 - 4
“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.”
Can you feel the pain in this man’s heart? Can you feel the weight of his sin upon him? Do you remember the first time you felt that in your life?
When I was a young teen, I thought I was saved because I repeated a prayer. I sincerely believed there was a God and that I would stand before Him in judgment. So I changed my ways, but if I’m being honest with you, it was simply convenient and a way to modify my behavior in order to get what I really wanted in life:
Acknowledgement
Favor
Some of you got saved when you were really young. Praise God for that, but with that incredible blessing comes also a whole other set of struggles. Sometimes it’s pride; you may think that you are better than other Christians who didn’t come to Christ until they had lived a hard life.
But whether you got saved at an early age, or after having some life under your belt, we still have to wrestle with the same thing: our sin before God. Maybe you didn’t when you were 8, but you had to when you became an adult and came face to face with this broken world. Maybe you wrestled with your sin later in life, and you carry that with you still.
But since you’ve been saved, have you faced your sins and taken them to Christ? Have you felt crushed under their weight and laid yourself at the foot of the cross, asking for forgiveness?
Let’s take a look at David and how he handled this situation. David was the chosen king of Israel and anointed by God. He wasn’t an unbeliever. He was the man after God’s own heart. You see, David had many things going through his mind when he wrote this. David had a problem with women, a sin his son Solomon would later fall into and far exceed his father in.
David was richly blessed and wanted for nothing, but David, being the sinful man he was, became infatuated with a woman named Bathsheba. She was the wife of a military officer of David’s named Uriah. David approached Bathsheba and took her for himself, and she became pregnant. David, now scrambling because of this, sent Uriah out to fight some enemies and instructed the men with Uriah to leave him behind so that he would die. David orchestrated the death of Uriah to cover up his own sin. He went as far as giving Uriah a proper military funeral with all the bells and whistles.
Can you imagine what must have been going through his head at that moment? Have you ever found yourself in this situation? You’ve sinned, and then you’ve sinned some more to cover up for that sin, and before you know it, you are in so deep that your whole reality begins to crumble before you. I know I have. It’s suffocating.
Let’s read this again starting in verse 3:
“For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned (Uriah might disagree, but hey) and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.”
This is a man deeply troubled by his sin. If there was something he hated, it was sin, especially his own. King David, being the masterful worship leader that he was, entered the space of worship before God by first acknowledging God for who He is, then acknowledging his own transgressions which he says are “ever before him,” and lastly by acknowledging who he is as a man.
Who God is: He acknowledges who God is by going to Him seeking forgiveness. “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.” He then tells God that He is “justified” in His judgment of David. Who but God would be blameless in the judgment of sin? David, who is a believer, tells God, “Were You to judge me on this, You are fully justified.” David knows how deep he is in because the only thing he has going for him is the love and mercy of God.
The Sin: “For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.” Like I said before, David is well aware of his sin.
Who he is: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” If this sounds familiar, it’s because we talk about this fact in the book of Romans 3:10: “None is righteous, no, not one.”
David then goes on in verse 7 to further appeal to God’s grace:
“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.
That is absolutely beautiful. Church, I can tell you right now that worship songs are not what they used to be.
Restore in me the joy of your salvation.
To the brokenhearted, to the one who is in sheer anguish, broken under the weight of their sin. For that sin, hell is what we deserve. But oh, how good it is that we can cry out to God, how good it is that He is rich in mercy, how good it is that He is faithful even when we are not.
David was not an isolated case. All of humanity suffers from this condition: sin. From which our only appeal to a holy and fully justified judge is mercy. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. So have we! Every. Single. One. Of. Us. We have all been brought forth in sin. All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. No one is righteous, not even one. For the wages of sin is death...
Let’s go back to Psalm 51. Verse 17: The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
Do you know what the word contrite means? It means feeling or expressing remorse or penitence, affected by guilt. Contrition is regarded as the first step, through Christ, towards reconciliation with God.
Remember when I began this sermon and I said, “We never graduate from the Gospel”?
Ephesians 2:1-3: And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
I want to zero in on that last line: "and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind." Does that sound like what David was struggling with? Yes, yes it does.
Followed by those words in Ephesians, we have some of the most incredible words in Scripture:
Ephesians 2:4-5: But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.
While we were still sinners, dead in our trespasses and sin, He cared for us and made us alive with Christ. Christian, take heed. If He cared for us while we were still in our sin and gave us the gift of salvation and the ability to repent, how much more will He care for us now that we are alive with Him, and part of His family?
David knew this. He knew this well, even in his anguish in sin, repented and turned to God. Christian, I want to encourage you to do the same. As you worship, repent of your sins, turn to Christ and remember this:
Romans 8:38-39: For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
God the Father stands as judge over all mankind. Jesus took our place and paid the fine, setting us free. Preach this truth to yourself.
Only God can use our sin sinlessly to bring about His will in our lives and in the lives of others. We can see that in the lives of King David, Abraham, Moses, and everyone in the hall of faith. We can see this in our lives today, but this is not a license to sin. It is a calling to righteous living and humble submission to God.
"We run to God when trials come only to learn that God's the one who sovereignly gave us the trials that we might run to Him." — Burk Parsons
So when you worship, humble yourself, acknowledge your sin, and praise God with a humble and contrite heart. Worship is more than the music you listen to, or the songs you sing during service. Worship is everything we do before a holy God, so let everything you do be done to glorify Him.
