A Clean Heart

Introduction-Eustace

Sarah has inspired me, as she’s been re-reading the classic work by C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia, I’ve been picking them up and reading them too.

The book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader starts with this incredible line to show how good, and funny, Lewis is in his writing:

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

That’s a fantastic line!

But I’ve been thinking about our attitude lately when it comes to who deserves what.

Many a night this week, after countless meetings and long days, I’ve come home and thought “You know, I do deserve some ice cream tonight!”

Harmless as that is, the vast majority of people who get themselves into trouble when it comes to fraud, waste, and abuse in their companies usually get there by some line of thinking like “You know, I’ve been working hard. I do deserve to have the company pay for my dinner tonight.”

Most insidiously, I have heard some people (mercifully, this seems reserved to those on the very fringes of our cultural discourse, but still), some people say of Charlie Kirk this week that because of how they differ in their view points, that he must somehow deserve what he got.

Because this is the introduction, let me be very clear: no matter where you are in your political understanding of Mr. Kirk, that is a child of God.

That is a wife who lost her husband.

Those are children that lost their father.

That’s someone we should mourn, and not something over which we should gloat.

While these are very much escalating examples, they all have the same root behind them:

What is it exactly that we deserve?

What do we think we deserve?

And, at least from God’s perspective, what is it that we get?

Psalm 51

What Got David To this Point?

The Sin(s)

2 Samuel 11

To make a very long story short, David, a man after God’s own heart,

Sees a woman bathing on the roof top.

Lusts after her.

Acts on that lust by inviting her over and sleeping with her.

Discovers she is pregnant.

Tries to frame her husband Uriah for it by getting him drunk.

And then ultimately has her husband killed very intentionally in war.

Man after God’s own heart.

This is one of those stories where the people who deserve the punishment, like David, get off scot free, and the people who don’t deserve the punishment, Uriah, end up paying the price.

This happens some times.

Nathan sets the trap

Nathan is a prophet of God, and comes to talk to David.

He tells David this story about a guy who deserves punishment and gets off scot free, and another guy who didn’t deserve the punishment paying the price.

And David absolutely freaks out!

He says “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!”

To which Nathan has this excellent line of scripture “YOU ARE THE MAN!”

You’re the one who got off scot free.

You’re the one who has robbed someone innocent.

You’re the one who deserves to die.

And so in response to all of this, David the poet and writer sits down and pens what we read today in Psalm 51.

What is David saying?

Sin is an offense to God

Psalm 51:4 “Against you, you alone, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.”

This is important, because sometimes I think we figure if we don’t have to interact with the person we’ve wronged, we got off scot free too.

This is, I think, why social media has gotten so bad.

We can say whatever terrible thing we want about a person, or about a person’s beliefs, or a person’s political ideology.

And because we never actually have to see the reaction of the ones we’re wounding, we figure we’re ok!

But first of all, we are wounding folks whether we can see it or not.

And secondly, David rightly points out that the ways we hurt each other is ultimately a hurt toward God.

He doesn’t say “Against Bathsheba have I sinned.”

He doesn’t say “Against Uriah have I sinned.”

He doesn’t say “Against Nathan have I sinned.”

No no…David knows who he hurt.

He hurt God by hurting those around him.

Whether we feel like they deserve it, or not.

Sin is inescapable

Psalm 51:5 “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”

I’m going to have a moment of pastoral confession here.

I’m uncomfortable about this, it’s like a super weird side of myself that I don’t share with many people.

So here in this crowded sanctuary at an event that’s being live streamed, let me tell you this…

I can’t make the number three.

I don’t know if my fingers are like, fused together or what…

But no matter what I do, I just can’t make the number three.

Does anyone know what the Boy Scout Salute is?

You bet!

Three fingers!

Do you know how hard it is to be a part of something that asks something of you that you are not capable of doing?

Of course you do…

We can’t get it right friends.

We can try all we want.

It’s like our hearts are fused together in sin right from the start.

No matter how much bending and contorting and configuring we try to do…we’ve been broken from the start.

And we always will be.

God creates the clean heart.

Psalm 51:10 “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.”

It is of essential importance that we realize that God is the one who creates our clean heart, not us.

Not how much we pray.

Not how much we come to church.

Not how “good” we are.

Only God, ultimately by the action of Christ in our lives, is capable of giving us a clean heart.

And in fact, it’s God’s very good pleasure to do so for us.

Luke 12:32 ““Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

I think sometimes our response is to assume that to ask God for the forgiveness and healing we need is some kind of burden for God.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

God delights in creating a clean heart in us.

God delights in restoring a right spirit in us.

It is God’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom.

Our Response to this Text

What do we deserve?

We are all under the same curse of sin.

Romans 3:23 “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God;”

I have checked roughly a thousand times…

That Greek word “all” there means…all…

It means you.

It means you when you are absolutely sure you’re right.

It means you when you think that you couldn’t possibly be a better person.

It means you when you think it means somebody else.

It means you in all circumstances.

We are all broken and under that curse of sin.

No exceptions.

No opt outs.

The wages of that sin is death.

Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The word “death” here is the word Thanatos, which gives all the Marvel fans in the room a bit of a shudder.

But for this portion of the sermon, I’d like to appeal to the prophets Coldplay:

They sang “I don’t want to follow death and all of his friends.”

Death has a lot of friends, doesn’t he?

Loneliness is a friend of death.

Gossip is a friend of death.

Humiliation is a friend of death.

Depression is a friend of death.

We have to be careful here:

We’re not talking about individual sins.

I’m not suggesting as some preachers might that if you sin, you’re gonna wind up with a nasty case of depression.

Not at all!

What I am saying is that sin is the curse that covers humanity.

It’s the reality that things are not as they should be.

The Kingdom of God isn’t quite right.

There shouldn’t be loneliness in the Kingdom of God.

There shouldn’t be gossip in the Kingdom of God

There shouldn’t be humiliation in the Kingdom of God.

There shouldn’t be depression in the Kingdom of God.

But there is.

It’s there because of our sin condition.

Death and all of his friends.

Tricking ourselves

One of the ways we creative humans have come up with to try to solve this on our own is to pretend it’s not really that bad.

We pretend that all that talk about sin, that’s for other people.

We pretend that death and all of his friends are actually a part of the way the world is supposed to work.

We pretend that we’re really good people, it’s just everyone else that’s getting it wrong.

We pretend that as long as we can point to someone who is doing worse than us, we’ll be in good shape.

But…pretending only gets us so far.

Admitting our weaknesses is actually a source of strength.

Paul to Timothy

1 Timothy 1:12–13 “I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he considered me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief,”

Paul doesn’t do much pretending with where he’s at with sin in the scriptures, does he?

He’s super honest about being a blasphemer.

He’s down to earth about being a persecutor.

He’s up front about being a man of violence.

He doesn’t mind coming clean about all of this.

Another passage from another place in scripture might shed some light on why Paul is able to do this:

Paul’s Thorn

2 Corinthians 12:7–9 “even considering the exceptional character of the revelations. Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”

Christ’s power, the real power in the world, is some how made even stronger in weakness.

When we get real about the thorns in our lives, when we get honest about the ways we’re broken, when we wake up to the control we’ve given over to death and all of his friends,

That’s when Christ really gets to do some amazing work.

That’s when Jesus is at his very best.

That’s when grace can be sufficient for us.

It is Christ that gives us a clean heart.

It’s more a promise than a condition.

This is one place where our capitalist mindset might set in.

What’s the cost?

If I want to get a new shirt, that’s going to cost me $12.95.

If I want a dozen eggs, that’s going to cost me $300.

If I want a house, that’s going to cost me $200,000

Everything costs something, right?

This isn’t a transaction.

Not everything in the world is.

This is a promise.

The promise is that when we find ourselves like David in need of a clean heart, Christ is the one who provides it.

The promise is that when we need a right spirit, Jesus is on hand for that too.

The promise is that even though we deserve death and all of his friends, Christ has made it so that we can have life and life to the fullest.

Christ does the work, we just have to accept it.

There is no dotted line to sign on.

There is no cash register at the end of the line.

There are no terms or conditions.

This is not a transaction. It’s a promise.

And a promise of God is a beautiful, powerful, and wonderful thing.

A clean heart allows us to help other people out.

Like Jesus

John 14:12 “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”

Jesus in the end looks at what we deserve, this close association with death and all of his friends, and Jesus decides to give us forgiveness instead.

And then Jesus has the audacity to tell us that we can do even better things than he has.

So…who in your life is in need of forgiveness from you?

Who has wronged you that you need to set free?

Who is it that you’ve been holding on to white hot rage for?

Wouldn’t it be better to set that down?

In fact, I think that’s the real sign of possessing a clean heart.

When our hearts are clean, we’re able to offer forgiveness the same way that we’ve been forgiven by Christ.

When our hearts are clean, we can rise above the “what do these people deserve” game.

In fact, we can move from seeing people for what we think they deserve, and seeing people for who they are.

Beloved brothers and sisters in Christ.

May God create in us a clean heart, and restore a right spirit in us.