Mourning In Sin

Introduction

What do we do when we see brokenness in the world? How do we react when we see something wrong?

We see people who were once healthy and strong begin to grow weak and die. And we feel that that’s not how things are supposed to be.

Newspapers, television and social media channels shows scenes of refugees fleeing destroyed buildings, of babies wailing because their malnourished mothers cannot feed them. And we know that that’s not how things are supposed to be.

But it’s not just out there. We ourselves are imperfect! We know how easily we fall prey to temptations, how easily we become slack in following Jesus, how we handle life’s situations in ways that don’t always honour God, and sometimes outright insult God. And we know that this is not how we were meant to be.

There is something wrong with us. All of us. Something fundamentally broken, corrupted, twisted from something originally good and beautiful. And we don’t want to be! We want to be whole and restored and beautiful! What are we supposed to do?

Our culture has trained us to respond in two ways:

The first is to fix it as quickly as you can.

Here in Singapore, we love our efficiency. Whenever there’s a problem, complain to the MP and chase them until they fix it! If our phones or computers stop working, we expect to Google the problem and find a quick solution.

We sometimes import that mentality into our Christian life. Are you hurting people you love because you lose patience very easily? Are you worried about what happens to you when you die? We go looking for some God-given instructions and that will guarantee to change us. We imagine that if we just read our Bibles regularly, our behaviour will be transformed. We imagine that if we just attend church every Sunday, God will make life good for us and make us happy. We imagine that if we just hang out with the right people and believe the right things, that will solve all our problems. And that’s how across the world, we see a growing mass of people leaving the church, disillusioned because they followed all the steps, very sincerely too, but they realized they were still broken.

The second option: if you can’t fix it, ignore it. Pretend like there’s nothing wrong with us in the first place! And if we ignore it long enough, maybe the problem will go away by itself.

Some parts of Christianity buy into that, saying that God loves and accepts us just as we are because He is so loving, that our brokenness is just the way God made us, so we should just accept the way we are and move on.

Of course, we cannot bluff ourselves for very long. Life happens, we lose our temper, we damage a relationship, we live in ways that grieve the Holy Spirit. Our imperfections are far too obvious to deny.

The world has no good solution for human brokenness.

Scripture, on the other hand, offers something different. Scripture doesn’t offer a step-by-step solution; it offers us a story. Scripture doesn’t try to deny we have a problem; it tells us why we’re broken in the first place.

What Scripture offers us instead is the practice of mourning. Some of you may be wondering, “Is it okay to talk about mourning in church? I thought Christians should be hopeful and joyful all the time!”

The answer is, yes. Mourning, grief and lament always had a place with the people of God. These practices are healthy and important to building up a strong and resilient faith. It’s kind of like physical exercise: it is uncomfortable, but we become stronger.

Scripture is the record of God’s people who have been practicing mourning and grieving and lament for generations, and they teach us how to deal with our brokenness—how to mourn—in a godly way. And the place in Scripture where we find this the most are the Psalms. That’s what we’ll be exploring in this series.

Perhaps you came today feeling the weight of your own wrongness. Maybe you didn’t even want to come today because you felt you didn’t deserve to be in God’s presence after what you’ve done. Or maybe you came today feeling good about yourself, but the preacher started making you feel bad.

Well, let me assure you that there is hope at the end of this. There is light at the end of the tunnel. But in order to get there, we must first learn to come face to face with our brokenness. And I think we shall find that the journey isn’t so bad after all.

Let us pray.

Reading

A reading from the 51st Psalm. A Psalm of David.

Psalm 51 (ESV)

1 Have mercy on me, O God,

according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

blot out my transgressions.

2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

and cleanse me from my sin!

3 For I know my transgressions,

and my sin is ever before me.

4 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.

5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,

and in sin did my mother conceive me.

6 Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being,

and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.

7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;

wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

8 Let me hear joy and gladness;

let the bones that you have broken rejoice.

9 Hide your face from my sins,

and blot out all my iniquities.

10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and renew a right spirit within me.

11 Cast me not away from your presence,

and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation,

and uphold me with a willing spirit.

This is the Word of the Lord.

This Psalm was written three thousand years ago, and God’s people have constantly used this Psalm during times of mourning, grieving and lament.

The Psalms are amazing because they give us language to grieve when we don’t have words. The Psalms model for us a way to recognise and respond to the fact that no, not everything is perfect and rosy in the world, and not everything is perfect and rosy in me. And the Psalms also show us how it is through mourning and grief and lament that we can hope in a God who, in spite of everything wrong and broken in us, He remains compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

So as I’ve been reading and meditating on this Psalm, there were three questions that came to me that I want to share with you. What brokenness is God inviting me to mourn? How is God inviting me to mourn that brokenness? And where is God leading me through this mourning?

What brokenness is God inviting me to mourn?

The Psalm begins like this:

Psalm 51:1–3 (ESV)

1 Have mercy on me, O God,

according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

blot out my transgressions.

2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

and cleanse me from my sin!

3 For I know my transgressions,

and my sin is ever before me.

We’re introduced to the three words that keep appearing over and over again: sin, iniquity and transgression.

What exactly does that mean? We know from the context that this Psalm was written by David in the darkest, most sinful episode of his life, when he slept with the wife of a loyal soldier and then murdered that soldier to protect his reputation. Obviously, it was a big scandal. David made some very poor and sinful choices. So maybe that’s what he means by sin and iniquity and transgression, that he’s referring to this incident and asking for forgiveness for that.

That seems to be the case as we continue to read on:

Psalm 51:4 (ESV)

4 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.

But then we read the verse 5:

Psalm 51:5 (ESV)

5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,

and in sin did my mother conceive me.

This is the point where we start to get jittery. There is a big rabbit hole we could go down about original sin and are babies born sinful, but we don’t have time for that today. In context, David is not arguing a theological point about his infantile sinfulness; David pouring out his heart as he realizes the horror of his own sin. This is a broken man who realises that he caused his own son to die. This is a failure of a ruler who caused 70 000 innocent Israelites to die because he couldn’t control his lust or his ego.

David is not just mourning that he did something sinful, that he committed sinful deeds. Yes, they were terrible, and there were terrible consequences. But David knows that the problem goes deeper than that: the problem is that he is sinful by nature. He is rotten to the core. The problem is a heart misaligned from the heart of God.

It’s not just that he slept with another man’s wife. That’s bad, of course, but that was just one symptom of a lustful heart. A heart that is always chasing for something that’s not God.

It’s not just that he killed a man to protect his reputation. Killing a man was just one symptom of a selfish heart. He so obsessed with himself and how other people see him that he stopped caring about how God sees him. That’s what he’s mourning.

You know, I can’t help but see myself in David. I mean, I haven’t done what he did, but I think about my brokenness in the same way.

If I can be vulnerable for a moment, and say something that ministers or preachers probably shouldn’t say. Sometimes it’s a struggle to read my Bible. And maybe you feel that way too. And maybe that doesn’t seem as sinful as David’s adultery and murder. But I wonder, why is this a struggle? Don’t I believe that this contains words of life? Haven’t I been taught and groomed in this church family to memorise and love the Word of God?

So why do I struggle to make time for it? Why do I still have days when I just forget about it? Even if I force myself to do it, why do I find no joy?

Because I have a problem: my heart is not fully aligned with God’s. I still choose myself before I choose God. I commit idolatry every time I choose my pleasure over God’s desires. Every time I give more time and effort and energy to what I want instead of what I know God wants.

And my guess is that I’m not alone in this.

What brokenness is God inviting me to mourn? It’s not that I do sinful things; those are symptoms of a sinful nature that causes me to do those things.

It’s not that we miss a Bible reading; it’s that we fail to appreciate the goodness of God in Scripture

It’s not that we didn’t help a person in need; it’s that we idolise our comfort and convenience over loving our neighbour.

It’s not that we lose our self-control every now and then; it’s that there is a wild animal inside us, a beast that is always screaming, I want to be in control of my own life!

Which leads us to our second point: what do we do when we recognise what we’re mourning? How do we respond when we come face-to-face with the horror of our sin?

How is God inviting me to mourn that brokenness?

Basically, that’s what Psalm 51 is for. What better way to pray to God than to offer the very words He has gifted to us by divine inspiration?

In a word, what Psalm 51 is doing is confession. And confession simply means to tell the truth. That’s what we’ve seen David doing so far. He is not hiding his sin, he is not justifying it, he is not blaming it on someone else. He is telling the painful truth to God and also to himself in verse 3 and 4: “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—” and something powerful happens when we confess the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But we’ll come back to that something in a while, because that’s not the only thing David is confessing in Psalm 51.

We often think of confession only in terms of the guilty party admitting they are wrong.

But biblical confession has a second part. The first we’ve already seen: we confess the truth about ourselves and our sin and our brokenness, but the second part is that we confess the truth about God.

What does that have to do with anything, you may ask. God is God lor!

Look again at verse 1: “Have mercy on me O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercies blot out my transgressions.” Guess where that comes from?

I think that many of us are afraid of confession because we leave out this second part. When we confess our sins, that is only a half confession.

And when we only confess who we are without recognizing who God is, our default assumption is that we are confessing to angry God. He is raging mad at us for violating his ways. Confessing to that kind of God is a fearful thing that only leads to more hopelessness and sorrow.

Which is why when we confess the truth about ourselves and our brokenness, we must also confess the truth about God. We need to remember that the God who meets us is not judgmental but compassionate. He is not harsh but gracious. He is not fuming mad, but slow to anger. He bears no hatred, for He abounds in steadfast love. He will not turn away from us, for He is faithful and cannot deny Himself.

Whether we confess through silent prayer or by journaling or by speaking out loud, we must declare the whole truth: that we are broken and that God in all his goodness is near to us.

That leads us to the third question: what is God going to do with me?

Where is God leading me through this mourning?

When we confess the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, something powerful happens.

In Psalm 32:5, David talks about the experience of confession. He says “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to YHWH, and you forgave the iniquity of my sins.”

This is the light at the end of the tunnel. This is the hope after the mourning and the grieving and the lament and the recognizing our sin. The promise of forgiveness.

Psalm 51:8–12 (ESV)

8 Let me hear joy and gladness;

let the bones that you have broken rejoice.

9 Hide your face from my sins,

and blot out all my iniquities.

10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and renew a right spirit within me.

11 Cast me not away from your presence,

and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation,

and uphold me with a willing spirit.

Only a hungry person can appreciate food. Only a thirsty person can appreciate a drink. And only a person who recognizes, mourns and confesses their sin can appreciate the joy and wonder of forgiveness.

I have a vivid memory of when my sister and I were young. I don’t know when it was or what we did, but basically we made our parents upset. I remember we were in their bedroom, my sister and I were on the floor and our parents were towering over us. They didn’t raise their voices. I just remember them telling us how disappointed they were by what we did, how upset and angry they felt. There was no hiding the truth. And I felt so, so bad, because normally I’m a good kid! And it crushed me to think that I had failed them.

But it was the end that I will remember most. Because after the scolding and the talking was done, after all we had done was made known, they held out their arms and pulled us into an embrace. And in that embrace, somewhere in the middle of my little boy tears, I grasped the truth about who they were. They were modeling the truth about God, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. And I was forgiven.

How much sweeter is the forgiveness that flows from the cross of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ! Admitting that you are wrong does not prevent you from being forgiven. Mourning and confession are the very way that we draw near to the only One who can forgive.

I pray that we come away Psalm 51 with a confidence that mourning is okay, healthy and even necessary! I pray that through His word, God grants to us an assurance that we don’t have to hide our brokenness, but that through confessing the truth about our brokenness and God’s goodness, we will find healing and forgiveness and joy.

Transition to Communion

We’re about to participate in a ceremony where we practice that. The Lord’s Supper is a time where remember and celebrate the Lord Jesus Christ.

Here’s the thing: the only people who participate in this know they are broken. If you think you’re good enough as you are, then give your packet to someone else—it will do you no good.

The Lord’s Supper is only meant for sinners, those who recognise and mourn that we are broken, and for those who recognise that in this mystery of bread and wine is the reason for our forgiveness and salvation.

As we stand and sing together, let this be a time for us to come to the table, mourning with humble hearts that we are broken, yet confident in the God whom we confess as Lord and Saviour, Friend and Redeemer