Psalms series

Psalm 51, for the director of music, a Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after David had committed adultery with bathsheba. Have mercy on me, oh god, according to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions, wash away all my iniquity. And cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me 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 surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me, yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb. You taught me wisdom in that secret place.

Cleends me with hiccup, and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity.

Creating me a pure heart o god. And renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. Then I will is your ways so that sinners will turn back to you.

Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, o god, you, who are god my saviour. And my tongue will sing of your righteousness. Open my lips lord, and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in sacrifice or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.

My sacrifice o god is a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart you god will not despise. May it please you to prosper Zion to build up the walls of Jerusalem, then you will delight in the sacrifices of the right in burnt offerings offered whole, then bulls will be offered on your altar. If you wanna turn back to Psalm 51, psalm 51, adultery, lies, murder, corruption, betrayal of a best friend, and cover up. They're all the ingredients of a story that, any any newspaper person would wanna, you know, what would wanna break.

But if you add to it then, the head of a religious state, the king of Israel, then wow, you have got a story that would be all over the press all around the world. And that that is exactly the story as we've read, which is behind this little song, this poem. That, King David wrote. Let me fill you in a bit just to remind you. Here's King David.

He had a a group of elite followers. They were called his mighty men, David's mighty men. They were really his best friends. They were his best mates. They were prepared to lay their life down for David and actually even lay their life down for his comfort.

He had to tell them off on, on 1 occasion because he he wished for some water from Jerusalem. And these were the mighty men that went and got it at the at the risk to their lives. So these were really his best mates and they absolutely loved David and they loved David to be the king of the kingdom. And among those men was a bloke called Eurya, and Eurya was the husband of bathsheba. And like the other mighty men, uriah was out fighting for king and kingdom.

But David who should have been out there leading the way, obviously decided that he had done enough for the kingdom and could, sort of sit around in his own comfort. And that's when the sordid story begins. David had given up fighting The mighty men were fighting on his behalf. He, comes out in the evening and he's walking around the rooftops and he spies this gorgeous thing from the distance. And it's bathsheba.

And she is really gorgeous. And she's purifying herself. She's going through religious things funny enough. And he spies her and wants her, and he sends a messenger, and he gets her. And they have sex together.

And, of course, she becomes pregnant. Now, this is the wife of 1 of his most faithful friends. So you get the betrayal here? This is a pretty horrible thing going on here. And so David doesn't know what to do.

So what do you do in a situation like that? Suddenly you know, you're uncovered. Your adulterous act has been uncovered by a pregnancy. And so he wants to cover up. That's what we normally do.

We want to cover up. And his first covering is a very simple plan. I'll tell you what, I'll get you right back home under the guise that I can hear what's going on because I'm really interested in, in what's going on on the front line. We'll get Eurya back from the front line. He can tell us what's going on, and then Eurya will obviously go home sleep with his wife and Bob's your uncle or David will be your uncle anyway of the of the kid.

And that's and that's what's gonna And so it's a great plan and Eurya comes back, but he's so noble. He's such a noble bloke that he says, no, while the others are fighting, not going to sleep with my wife, I'm going to sleep on a mat away from my wife. So David, you know, we're just plan 1 cover up. And gets uriah drunk. That's about to do it, isn't it?

So he gets uriah, 1 of his faithful men drunk, and then hopefully, you know, uriah will go back to his wife weren't quite know what he's doing, won't actually remember the event, but it doesn't matter. And, that doesn't work because he's so noble. Even when he's drunk, he actually won't go back to his wife because his mates are fighting. Why should he have comfort? So cover up plan 1, a doesn't work, cover up plan 1, B doesn't work, cover up plan 2.

He's getting worse and worse. Murder. Murder is what we need. And so he orders the commander in chief Joab to engineer things to put, Eurya on the first front line, and then the men will retreat and Eurya will get killed, and that's exactly what happened. Now do you see how hardhearted David becomes?

How his laziness how his commitment to himself and comfort not to the kingdom actually turns into horrific premeditated murder of 1 of his mighty men, 1 of the best friends. Now what what's he thinking? No, you could go through this. He's he's broken at least 3 of the 10 commandments. But there's 1 commandment he mustn't break.

It's the eleventh, which is thou shalt not get found out. And that's really very important. And, if he cannot get found out, it will soon be over. It'll be a past life. Nasty thing to think about, but I won't think about it that much.

I can put it in the past It'll be a shadowy memory of of someone else, really, back then and, another age. But here's the problem, and this is what I want you to hear. Human beings are not made like that. We're just not made like that. We're not made to hide from the past.

The past is what makes you in the present. And unless that pass is absolutely properly dealt with, you're become the past story. And that's what's going on here. He slept with bathsheba in the past but that that action was turning him into a murderer in the now. That's what it does.

And here's my first point. Now, can I just say right up front? Don't walk out on this sermon. You might see yourself in the first point, but if you miss the last, You're gonna miss everything. Here's the first thing.

A fundamental mistake about ourselves, cover up cover up. It's a fundamental mistake about ourselves. Cover up. It doesn't work. Cover up doesn't work.

David had made a fundamental mistake about the human maker. And actually, it's his biggest mistake. It's bigger than his crime of adultery, It's bigger than his crime of deceit, and it's bigger than his crime of murder of an innocent person. And I want to say that this has become a modern problem because you're not allowed to talk about guilt because it's become sort of erased by our educators and our therapists. That actually it becomes a fundamental problem that ruins us.

Words like sin and guilt are now out of our vocabulary. It's only for the loonies, the sort of religious right or the nuts that talk about this. But when you try to contain sin to the past in that sort of easy way of dealing with it, trying to put it in the past. And and I haven't been the law courts haven't caught up with me, so I haven't done anything wrong there. I haven't been involved in a public scandal and exposed, and David was managing his hypocrisy because it seemed that he was doing his job even when he was in this hypocritical state of adultery and murder and deceit, you might still be going to church and doing all the outward things and praying and reading your bible as if it never happened, but the problem is you can't cover up with that hypocrisy and just getting on with life.

The past catches up with you. It's a skeleton in the cupboard. We use terms like that. It's a stinking corpse and the smell keeps leaking out of the cupboard. You can't cover your guilt like that.

And the educators and the therapists and the talk show hosts, they're all working very hard to get rid of words like sin and guilt, but it really hasn't worked, and you just have to look around at our culture to see the modern problem of guilt. Guills is like an iceberg. You know, they say an iceberg, is it some is it something like, you know, only a third of the iceberg? I think something like that, or it may be less, sticks out of the water, but there are 2 thirds. The mug most of the bulk is under the water hidden down.

I want to say this, and I say this carefully, and I know that there are other reasons for these things, but nevertheless much of what we call depression and boredom, and anxiety, and anger, those words that we use If you go beneath the surface of your anger and your boredom and your anxiety and your depression, you'll find a whole iceberg most of the problem with a guilty conscience. Underneath, hidden away. 1 of the most common problems I think today is the problem that we're not allowed to talk about it's the problem of guilt. Very often, something we've done in the past in the distant past. We might have even done it under the sort of abuse of other people in our lives.

Yes. I'm not saying that other people aren't culpable for these things, but nevertheless something that we've done that we haven't owned up to that we try to cover up troubles us, breaks us, ruins us. There's a restless feeling. There's an unsettled feeling. There's no peace in the heart.

There's an anxiety, a rush of the heart. There's a sense of shame, a sense of dirtiness, a sense of the haunting stink of a dead body in our lives hidden in the cupboard. And it's here we tried to cover up, and that's a fundamental problem. Sometimes we try to make excuses for our life. Fraud, uh-uh, Freud, that's the word, Freud, who is a fraud.

Freud taught us to blame our parents. It's my parents fault. Marx told us to blame the capitalist system. And there may be some truth in those things. We now blame our hormones or our upbringing or our lack of education.

And and but look, you see this even in a child, don't you? That that 1 of the first things a child knows how to do is to shift the blame, isn't it? It's not my fault to make excuses. Isn't that right? You you've only got to have a child for just a year or something before I didn't do it, you know, when there's chocolate all over their face and there's a there's a the chocolate cake has been eaten and their fingers are full of chocolate.

Who had the cake? Not me? And we constantly do that. We make excuses or the dog at it. Or something happened.

We learned to make excuses and to cover up. It's 1 of the fundamental things about the human nature. I I love a definition of a skew this excuse. I read this definition many years ago. An excuse is like a sausage immediately immediately got my attention.

And excuses like a sa sausage, it's a skin of a reason stuffed with a lie. There's always a skin of a reason There's always something true in the excuse. Yes, but nevertheless it's really stuffed with a lie. If only Eurya David is thinking slept with his wife, why didn't he do that? He used to play.

If he slept with his wife, this problem would have gone away. I tried to organize it. You foolish man? Why are you so committed to the king and to the kingdom? And I'm the king.

I mean, I would look terrible if they find out about my adultery. Wouldn't wouldn't I? And anyway, look, listen. Euriah was 1 of my mighty men. He was prepared to die for me anyway.

So I'm only got sort of, you know, putting him to the test I'm without asking him, killing him. But I think if I asked him, he would have said, yeah, okay, well, kill me. We try to make excuses. That's 1 way of covering up. Instead of coming out in the open, we make excuses for our sin.

Why we gossip, why we lie, why it just excuses. But here's another 1. Sometimes we go into what is called repression, Now, this is 1 of the most dangerous cover ups of all, repression. In other words, we try to pretend We haven't done something. It's like aftershave when you're sweaty and stinky.

You're putting on perfume to cover up the stink. Doesn't quite work. I mean, they're talking about the 19 76 sort of heat wave and comparing with the heat wave now. I lived in 19 76 In those days, you didn't have showers. No 1 had showers not working across people.

We never had showers. You had baths and then you weren't allowed to bath in 19 76. Now what was I 18, 19, I was a young bloke. I was after the ladies, and we didn't have a bath. Well, they didn't have baths either.

We used to have this stuff that I didn't realize was still around. It was sort of a talcum powder you put into your hair to suck up the grease. It's disgusting. So you didn't shower or wash your hair. You put talcum powder in.

I had long hair in those days. It got greasy. I was into sort of heavy music, so you were meant to have it a bit greasy. And then you put talcum powder in to suck up the grease, and all it did is clog it up. And I was talking to some of the girls on revive, and they say, yeah, we didn't show.

We put talcum powder in their hair. And you could see it. It was all lumps and clogged up lumps of grease. It's disgusting. There's my rebuke, by the way.

This is what we do in repression. We try to cover up. We try to make a sweet perfume. We try to repress the guilt And in the end, and psychiatrists and psychologists tell us this, and they know this, that that festering guilt breaks out in different ways in our lives. Sometimes it seems totally unrelated to the iceberg underneath.

So it can rise up, get this in an inferiority complex. This is the person that's always feeling inferior. Now why are they feeling inferior If you follow the inferiority down, it's to festering guilt that's never been confessed and covered up. This is how it goes because it's funny because inferiority complex sounds like these people are over guilty doesn't it? But this is how it often works.

When you dig a little deeper, People are always going on about how rubbish they are and what a disaster they are in whatever area of life, this inferiority complex. Why? To cover up the real ugly sin. Because when people talk like that, We can't help putting our own arm around that person and say, they're there. We're all bad.

They're there. You're really nice. Oh, you're lovely. That's what repression does. It can come out in an inferiority complex in all kinds of ways so that we confess how bad we are and there's a sense that it's better to have a general feeling of feeling bad about ourselves with people then saying, no, you're not that bad rather than known up to the real sin that's festering under underneath.

It's a it's a strange we're strange, aren't we as humans? But do you know this in your own life? I do. I'm quite happy to say, oh, I'm terrible at this. I'm terrible.

I'm rubbish at rather than deal with the actual problem, because I always get sympathy, or you're not that bad. Actually, not from the staff team. It's usually yay and rubbish. That sort of stuff. Oh, we're strange creatures or or repression can come up and rise up in our lives in a perfectionism.

See, we accept perfectionism, and we often think that it's a good thing. We quite like it. You know, when people say I'm a perfectionist, They actually quite like it when you're saying that, but you should say to them, you need to sit down and repent of that. Perfectionist or work workaholics. If you're a workaholic or a perfectionist, I guess we could trace it down to some hiding of guilt underneath.

Always cleaning, faultless, trying to prove themselves faultless in their job, in their work, in their cleaning of their house. So like lady McBeth, always washing their hands to try to cover up the blood on the hands. Working like mad to prove themselves that they're brilliant in this area. They can achieve in this area rather than admitting the failures they'd deep down inside. Or another way is we party hard, we turn the music up, we haven't got a care in the world.

I don't care about anything. Yeah, or walk down the street, or we drink hard to silence the inner voice of guilt So hard, work hard, drink hard to cover up the guilt Are we going to religion? Self righteousness? To prove myself better than other people because it makes me feel good to be religious because I'm not like those dirty people there, and I cover up the real guilt I have before a living god. In my religious self righteousness?

You know all that, don't you? I think I can point out all of those things in my life. And it seems David suffered the consequences of this repression. Look at that little phrase in verse 8, You see it in Psalm 51? That little phrase in verse 8, it's extraordinary.

It says this, the bones you have crushed Do you see that? Inside he's crushed outside, he's giving the his hip hip hypocritical lie that he's still king, he's still in control of himself, he's still But he's crushed. And the consequences of his guilt, unconfessed, covered up, are crushing him and ruining his life. Repression needs to give way to confession And that's what happened to David. So there's my first point, a fundamental mistake in life is cover up, come out of the covering, come out of hiding, and here's the second point, a faithful friend blows his cover.

A faithful friend blows his cover. This is god dealing with David now. In a very gracious way. This is the goodness of god, coming and and holding up the mirror to him, and it's not pleasant. When you see the scanner of the interior of your life and you see a tumor and a cancer there, I cannot I can't think that would be ever a pleasant thing to see.

I can't think that would be pleasant. And when god holds up the mirror, this is not pleasant. This is why I really want you to stay in. This is not a pleasant thing. And perhaps already, the mirrors come up to your life, and it's just not pleasant.

You want to look in the mirror and see a beauty there, but you look in the mirror, and oh my goodness, I'm reminded. Why is he reminding me of my sin? Let's get rid of the word guilt and sin from our vocabulary, so we're never reminded of it. Let's repress it. Let's cover it up.

But a faithful friend and a faithful god will show you the cancer within. Why? Because he's a surgeon to heal you. Because he wants to heal you. God, in his utter kindness, comes to this law breaker, David, to his hiding place and he's covering up, and he pulls him out of hiding urgently so that he sees it.

That is what god is about. And I want to encourage you in this. This will hurt things hurt to come out of hiding hurts. I mean, just for the very reason that it's slightly embarrassing, isn't it? If if you just take the embarrassment yet alone the proper guilt.

I mean, you've been embarrassed. You've you've done an embarrassing things in your life when you and then you've got found out. It's just flipping embarrassing, isn't it? Don't you think? You know, if if I've lied and it's a flipping obvious lie, before 1 that only loves the truth.

It's just really embarrassing to come out and admit it. I I think I'd rung it and run away. Isn't it? Why do we run away? You know, we run away because we know it's just bad before a perfectly beautiful god.

But I wanna show you that god is happy with you coming out of hiding. This is what he's about. Just look at some of the verses in Psalm 51. Look at verse 2, wash me. That's a beautiful thing in it to be washed by god.

Wash me wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. Don't just wash me on the outside, cleanse me. That's what god is about. Or, look at verse 7, cleanse me with his sock. We'll see what that means in a minute.

And I will be clean, wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. That's what God is about. Or look at verse 12, restore to me the joy. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have joy in your life? Instead of that anxiety and that hiding and that repression and all of the stuff that comes out to the surface, a joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.

Or or look at verse 14, deliver me, buy me back, ransom me, pay the price, deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed. Deliver me from the bloodshed that I've done. Oh god. And you who are god, my saviour, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. There'll be a singing when I know I've been delivered from blood, guiltless.

We'll look at verse 1, the introduction to the entire song. Have mercy on me, oh god, according to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion, blot out my trench questions, don't run and hide from god, come out of hiding and get washed and no joy of salvation. Because that's what god is about. And the way god does it is through a preacher, an irritating preacher If you know the story, his name is Nathan. He's an irritating preacher.

And he's a clever preacher, and I have no time to show you how clever he is but he comes to David with a story that gets David really angry, a story about someone else. You see, because we know truth we know it applies to other people. And then David, once he's got once he's got, Nathaniel has got David seeing the horror of how these murder and adultery and that sort of stuff applies to someone else. And David's going, this is disgusting. Whom is this man?

I'll kill him Yeah? Nathaniel says you're the man. You're you're the bloke, and David is exposed. And god does this out of his kindness because it's not until then he comes out of his cover up. But when he does and sees the horror and the guilt of his blood guilt, It's then he is rescued by the surgeon, by god, by the merciful 1, the cleanser, the cleaner.

So much so that when he knows this rescue, he can say in verse 13. Look at it. Then I will teach transgressions. Other transgressions, other people I'll teach them your ways so that sinners will turn back to you. Then I can declare.

Look, I'm a sinner. And he cleansed me. You could know the same washing machine as as I have. So that leads me to my third point. A fundamental requirement in this cleansing is repentance.

A fundamental requirement is repentance Look at verse 4. This is a staggering verse. Let's have a think about it. Verse 4 against you, he's talking to god against you god, and you only have I sinned. Hey?

What about Erya? What about bathsheba? What about the people you've been hypocritical to? What a now David isn't saying that they're not hurt by his sin. But what he's got is god that your sin is not just against you, Ryan, killing him, It's not just against bathsheba committing adultery with her.

It's not just against the deceit and the lies and bringing even godly men into your little plans. It's not all of that. Actually, the big attack here the sin behind all of those sins, the sin that led to those sins It's the big 1. You didn't love god with all your heart and mind. You didn't follow god.

You believed, David, in your comfort, you believed that you knew how to run your life better than god knew how to run your life. Let me try to illustrate it. Let's say tomorrow. If you lie tomorrow, you'll be in the money. You'll be perfectly alright for the rest of your life.

You'll be in the money. If you lie, you'll be in the money. But if you don't lie on this occasion, you're going to be out of pocket. You're going to be in trouble money wise. Now god says, don't lie.

Now in that situation, let's be honest with this. We all believe that lying is a bad thing until it comes to this moment, doesn't it? Everybody's, I agree with God. Yeah. God lying is back.

But now at this moment tomorrow, if you lie, you'll be in the money, And if you don't lie, you're gonna be out of money. Now it's there that you're tested to whether you believe in God, isn't it? God says, don't lie. Yeah. But he doesn't understand.

God says, don't lie. Yeah. But, I mean, you know, I won't. After this 1, because I'll be in the money. I'll be able to give to the church for goodness sake.

You know, and we'll be able to have some more missionaries to go out with with the gospel of Don't lie. And, you know, so it's worth it. Isn't it? Just just 1 little, just, yeah, god, you don't understand. God, okay, I get it.

The general principle is really good, and I wish everybody would follow it. But on this moment, I know how to run my life better, and I don't wanna be listening to you. You've got it wrong. I've got it right. I'm going to lie.

Do you see? The big sin is not the lie. The sin is you don't believe God is a good god. You don't believe that god is for your good. You don't believe that god can work even in this difficult situation.

The big sin is not that you broke a law, but you didn't care about the lawmaker. You don't love him. That's the big sin. That's the big sin. And actually, you can see that in the difference between remorse and repentance Someone who is remorseful says something like this if if you're David.

Oh, how could I have done that to my best friend? Oh, how could I have just in a moment, seeing this gorgeous woman and, you know, had sex with her. Oh, how could I have, if only I hadn't have done that, you know, and and it's gone public and, if if only, it's so embarrassing. That's remorse, but repentance sees Not only have I done bad things to my friends and to people, and my blood guiltness is clearly there, but actually the big sin is I didn't believe god. And repentance sees sin.

I see the sin behind the sins that I was out of relationship with God. That I didn't think he was a good god. And listen, listen, listen. When you start to repent and you know someone who is, for this reason, When you start to repent, you start to see, oh, god was a good god. If only I'd followed god's ways, I wouldn't have done that.

Oh god's ways are good. And when you start to see that your sin is a matter of how you treat god, Then you start seeing that god was a good god. It would have been better to follow his ways because he's good. And when you start to see that, you start to see that this good god is the god that has mercy on sinners. He's so good.

He's so big. He's so vastly forgiving. That even my murder can be forgiven. Do you see that? And so repentance is what is needed.

And repentance is saying my sin is against you. Against you. And that leads me to my fourth thing. A faithful god has mercy. Hey, I'm gonna finish in a minute.

I just so long for you to see this. Can I read verses 7 to 10? Just have a look. Listen to what he says. Cleansed me with hyssop.

Now hyssop is a herb, and it was used in the temple It's like a bushy thing, and they would dip it in the sacrificial blood of the lamb. And they would sprinkle it. So it's a picture. It's poetry when you say just hissop. It's shortcut.

It means that I'm sprinkled in the innocent 1 that's died for me. My sin is not just come out of hiding. It's now been covered by the blood of the sacrifice of the lamb. That god hasn't just said come out of hiding, and then he just says, okay, well, we'll let it off because god can't do that. No.

No. No. No. No. God said your sin is so bad.

But an innocent 1 will have to die in your place, to cover, to pay the price, to cover your sin. And that's what they did with the lamb. The lamb was seen to be the innocent 1 And I was the guilty 1. And I would put my hands as the guilty 1 on the lamb. In fact, I'd lean my whole weight on the lamb because the lamb is taking my weight, my sin, and whereas I should die, and I should be rejected from god because of my sin.

The lamb dies. And its blood flows, and I'm covered by its life, and it takes my death. And all of that is a picture of the lord Jesus Christ. So when he says this in verse 7, he's looking forward to Jesus. Look, cleanse me with Hisop.

And I shall be clean. Can I just tell you this? I really want you to hear this because whatever you've done, however blood guilty your hands are, there's another who shed his blood for you. If you are come out of hiding, your sin will not Not be repression anymore. It will be covered and dealt with, and therefore your past doesn't have to dictate what you are now.

Because something's happened in the past that can change you. The blood of Christ. You see that? Come out of hiding, and I'll cover you. That's always been god's way.

It's a story right from Adam and Eve if you know that. So let me just carry on reading. Look, please let this rub in I I god is wanting you to hear this so that you'll come out of hiding, cleanse me with his hope. And I shall be clean wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Isn't that a beautiful thing?

Before I was a Christian, I used to feel quite guilty about lots of things I did. I do them, but then I'd feel guilty. And 1 of the things I would try to do because we never had showers, as I say, was to have a bath. I would sometimes, or actually quite regularly, have a bath to sort of try and wash myself from the sin, which is just nonsense. There's only 1 bath can do do that, and that is what Jesus has done for you.

But the picture is there. Cleanse me with his hop and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Have you been washed by god? God washing you.

I'm not talking about being religious. All the sacrifices that you can do will mean nothing. But it's what Jesus has done, and you're washed, you're clean. Like, you've gotta get through this. I'm still on verse 7, verse 8.

Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you've recrust rejoiced. There is now a change Those crushed bones of repression and cover up. They've come out. They can be real.

You can start to grow. Hired your face from my sins and blot out my iniquities, cleanse me, creating me a pure heart o god, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. You'll become a steadfast person not dictated by the past anymore, not broken by trying to cover up. You've come out of hiding. You have been cleansed by the blood of the lord Jesus Christ, and now you have a new heart, creating me a pure heart.

What a beautiful prayer that is? I want to encourage you to pray that prayer cleansed me with the blood of Christ creating me a pure heart, and then my bones will start growing properly. I'll start being able to grow. Put a willing spirit in me. You see, this is a beautiful sentence.

That he says towards the end. Look at verse 17. My sacrifices of god is a broken spirit and a broken and contrite heart, you god or not despise god God will not despise you if you come out of your hiding. He won't point the finger and laugh and say, look at you. Naked and stupid.

God doesn't do that. God doesn't do that. I remember when we're when when I used to work with the down and outs, and I had to I had to I took I got to know a blog called James really well. He was a down and out and got to know him well, and I became quite close to him, and he, to me, And on several occasions, we had had a shower put in for the down and outs when I worked in in London. And he came and he had got so drunk.

He had pooed himself. He stank. He absolutely stank. And I and I remember just having to take all his clothes off, the indignity of of this man who was way older than me having a young, 19, 20 year old bloke, or a 20 year old bloke take his clothes off and put him in the shower and shower his bottom. It wasn't laughable.

I didn't point and laugh, I didn't make a joke about it. It was sad. But he was clean at the end with new clothes. God doesn't laugh and point and say, Hey, look at you, God says, I'll wash it. Come on.

Let me just wash it all around. Let's get the soap in those bits. Let's make you smell nice. Yeah. You're filthy, you're filthy, but come not I'm not gonna point.

I've got a lot of just come out of hiding and all your filth with all of the shit all around you. Let me clean you. Let me cleanse you. Let me wash you. Let me perfume you.

Let me now put new clothes on you. That is actually what god does. He's happy to get his hands dirty in your life. He's happy with the gross disgusting things that you've done. He's happy with that because god is cleaner, and a cleanser, and a lover, and a watcher.

Do you know that? Have you known God get dirty with your muck? If you've seen what he did on the cross for you, this is our god. It's beautiful And if you've got a contrite and a broken heart and you come out of hiding, he's not gonna point and laugh at you. He's gonna wash you.

It cleans you. And I want to encourage you to come to that god. Have you? And those of us that are Christians, and we've got wary with these truths, And we've got a little uncommitted about telling this story out to a lost world. Do we know how cleansed we are by price, doesn't that make us wanna say to transgressions come?

Doesn't it? Doesn't it? We're gonna hear a song, and the band kindly have learnt this to sing to us. And I'm gonna ask you to respond to the lord Jesus as we hear this song sung. It's based on Psalm 51.

Look at the words. And turn them into your prayer. I am a sinner, your blameless lord, My sins against you cannot be ignored. They will be punished. I know they must.

Your law demands it for you adjust, and then it'll show us. Jesus cleanses. Why don't use this as a prayer? That's a great start to your prayer, isn't it? Let's hear this and respond.