Sermon Tone Analysis

! Introduction

\\ He made preaching his business.

1.

The doctrine he preached was that of repentance (v.

2); /Repent ye./

The argument he used to enforce this call was, /For the kingdom of heaven is at hand./

I want to talk to you in this message about true repentance.

How does a person know if he or she has truly repented?

How can we tell if there is true repentance in another?

I'd like you to go with me to God's Word to find out.

Please turn to Psalm 51.

Let me see if I can present a couple of possible situations where the answer to these questions might seem relevant:

\\ | A person has "gone forward" many times to express public repentance, yet a sin continues to have control of his~/her life.

|

| A person has doubts about his~/her own /initial/ salvation.

(Such people often want to be re-baptized when they can't settle these doubts.)

|

| We doubt the sincerity of another brother~/sister who says "I repent" but we really don't trust that they have.

|

\\ In Psalm 51, we have a word picture of a repentant man.

This Psalm was written after David's sin with Bathsheba.

Nearly one year had passed between the sin and the confrontation by Nathan the Prophet.

David had covered up his sin and never repented.

God finally /forced/ him out of his hiding in a dramatic confrontation by the prophet.

This Psalm was written perhaps, just a few /hours/ after Nathan's confrontation.

*(Read Psalm 51:1-17)*

As we will see, repentance is more than just having "second thoughts" about what one has done wrong.

Repentance is a complete change of mind that will lead ultimately to changed actions and a changed way of thinking.

Said another way, /repentance signals the end of some things and the beginning of some things./

First, repentance signals,

!

I.

The End of Fooling Ourselves.

(v.

1-4)

A common way of dealing with the guilty conscience we all get in the wake of sin is /euphemizing//.

/

Euphemizing is the practice of substituting a mild, indirect, or vague term of description for one considered harsh or blunt.

We do this in public, but even more damagingly, we do it in the privacy of our own minds - thus, fooling ourselves.

When thinking of our sin, we substitute words like /my weakness, my mistake, my misstep, my problem./

Each of these expressions carefully camouflages the ugliness of the offence.

It lessens the impact of a full admission of sin, allowing a person to escape some of the guilt and self-incrimination.

After all, doesn’t everyone make mistakes?

Doesn’t everyone have to cope with problems?

We carefully construct an elaborate rationale for why we do what we do.

As long as no one is ever allowed to see it or question it, the deception is effective.

Our conscience is appeased.

We fool ourselves to the point that what we are doing wrong doesn’t bother us very much.

In this way we never fully face our wrong.

A young man once said to a preacher, "I don’t think I am a sinner."

The preacher asked him if he would be willing to tell his mother or his sister all the things he had done.

After a moment the young man said, "No, I certainly would not like to have them know; not for all the world."

This man was fooling himself.

The things he had done wrong, when reviewed in the personal court of his mind amid carefully constructed subterfuges and euphemisms, didn’t look /that/ bad.

When he looked though the eyes of his mother or sister, though, the truth was seen.

He had much to be ashamed of.

David had been playing these games for nearly a year and might have gone on indefinitely had not he learned that someone else knew what he had done.

Then suddenly, he saw his sin through the eyes of Nathan the prophet.

His immediate realization was expressed in the words that came out of his mouth: /"I have sinned against the Lord."/

That is what we find in this Psalm, too.

/4 Against Thee, Thee only, I have sinned, and done what is evil in Thy sight, so that Thou art justified when Thou dost speak, and blameless when Thou dost judge./

A person puts a halt to fooling himself when he admits, just as David did, /"I have sinned and done evil"/ and that God is justified in His judgment.

Actually, David admits his sin six times in the first four verses of this Psalm.

I have worked with our elders for some time now and over the years, I have watched them deal with the delicate issues of shepherding the members of this congregation.

When they are speaking to a person in the wake of an admission of wrong, I see them straining anxiously to hear those words from the person.

/"I have sinned."/

Usually, these words are an indicator that a person is finished with the deception.

He’s getting it out in the open - a strong indicator of true repentance - the end of fooling one’s self.

True repentance signals the end of fooling ourselves.

It also signals

!

II.

The End of Blaming Others.

(v.

1-4)

Paul Harvey, in his daily radio broadcast, had this in his "For What It’s Worth" department:

Mrs. Gladys Gibbons is suing the man who was teaching her to drive a car.

Mrs. Gladys Gibbons of London is suing her driving instructor.

She tells High Court that it was all his fault.

That during her nineteenth driving lesson… Let me quote her precisely from the transcript of yesterday's court proceedings… Mrs. Gladys Gibbons, 55, says, quote: "If he"-meaning Howard Priestly, the driving instructor- "If he had just reached over and hit the brake or switched off the ignition-I might never have hit that tree.

But no - all he did was to brace himself, close his eyes, and shout: ‘Now you've bloody done it!’"

End quote.

She charges "negligence,"wants him to pay the damages.

It’s always someone else’s fault.

That’s the way many people live.

Shifting the blame.

Pointing fingers to avoid accepting responsibility.

Like someone once said, "The only thing some people learn from their mistakes is how to blame them on others."

Again, in verse 2 of our text, we read,

/2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin./

David could have said, "Well, what did you expect me to do with that woman taking a bath on her roof!"

He could have said, "Well, things just got out of hand.

If Uriah hadn’t been so stubborn in refusing to sleep with his wife when I sent him home, he’d still be alive today."

But he said none of these things.

That’s because he was truly repentant and true repentance signals the end of blaming others.

It signals the acceptance of full responsibility for sin.

True repentance also signals

!

III.

The End of Covering Up. (v. 6)

In verse 6 of our text, David says,

/6 Behold, Thou dost desire truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part Thou wilt make me know wisdom./

Economists sometimes speak of what they call the /underground economy./

Do any of you know what that is? Apparently, there is an entire second economy in this country that functions outside the view and reach of agencies like the Internal Revenue Service.

It is a cash-only, no-contract, no-paper-trail economy, covered up by careful dodging and elaborate schemes designed to avoid detection.

Regardless of how we might feel about the powers of the IRS, a repentant person has no "underground economy" in his life.

He has no hidden places that he carefully guards and covers up.

Repentance, you see, involves opening it all up and airing it all out.

The repentant person has no "double life" where he lives one thing for onlookers and carefully guards a secret, sinful life for himself.

Someone once said, "To err is human, to cover it up is too."