Brokenness As A Response To Sin

Good morning friends and thank you for having me back here to preach to you today. It’s so nice to finally be in the church building, even if we can’t yet all be with each other. I had to preach through a recording when I preached back in February, and it was just a bit naff not having people to actually talk TO, as well as my mum turning on the vacuum cleaner right outside my room half way through the sermon and having to start all over again. So it’s lovely to be here, and I pray that it won’t be too long now before we can all start returning back to the building so that we can be with each other.

So we’re continuing today in this theme of finding our identity in the Psalms, and what I wanted to bring to you today is the idea of brokenness being an appropriate response to sin.

‘A Broken and Contrite Heart’

King David is someone who we see in the Psalms coming to God and identifying his own unworthiness through what he writes.

And we know that David is an incredible worshipper, we see that in the Psalms that he wrote. He wrote dozens and dozens of incredible psalms, psalms of praise and adoration where he writes and sings about how wonderful God is and how worthy of all our praise He is.

But while David made worship central in his life, he also equally recognised the importance of the Believer in coming to God and admitting when they’ve done wrong. Crying out for mercy because of how unworthy we are. David was a man of God who was after God’s own heart. He hated sin in other people’s lives, but he hated it even more in himself. He knew that he was a broken man in need of forgiveness.

And he is going to be the one who is showing us today how we should approach the Lord and confess what we’ve done.

Let’s turn together now and read from Psalm 51

Psalm 51 NIV

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, O 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. Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will 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. Create in 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 teach transgressors your ways, so that sinners will turn back to you. Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, you who are God my Savior, 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 righteous, in burnt offerings offered whole; then bulls will be offered on your altar.

Before we begin, let’s just pray.

Gracious and loving God, as we come before you this morning, I just ask that you will quiet our minds, and open our hearts to your word. May we have ears to hear this morning so that we might be able to discern your voice and be transformed by you today. Lord I just ask that you will use me to speak your truth to everyone in this church this morning, that your Holy Spirit will fill me now and that I might be simply a vessel for your people to encounter you. I just ask that you will allow your words to penetrate people’s hearts today and transform them in the power of your Spirit, and anything that isn’t from me to be discarded and forgotten. With your written word, through the spoken word, may we all encounter this morning your LIVING WORD.

In Jesus’ name we pray,

Amen.

So we’re talking when we look at this Psalm about brokenness being an appropriate response to sin and to our rebellion against God.

The first thing that David says here in verse 1 is ‘Have mercy on me, O God...’

‘according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.’

We see this incredible comparison between this opening plea to God from David and the words of the prodigal son in Luke 15:21

Luke 15:21 NIV

“The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

Right from the first line of the psalm, we can see David’s posture is being made abundantly clear. For all his unworthiness, he knows that he still belongs, but he also knows that he is unworthy of that belonging. He has turned against his father, and here he is begging for God’s forgiveness and mercy.

One commentator on Psalm 51 puts it like this,

“The opening plea, have mercy, is the language of one who has no claim to the favour he begs. But steadfast love is a covenant word.”

I love that. That is how we should approach our brokenness, and that’s what we’re going to be looking at more closely today.

‘according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.’

This term ‘blot out’ or ‘mahah’ in the Hebrew (everyone say Mahah...!) is used several times in the Hebrew Bible, but most notably it is exactly what God says he’s going to do in the flood with Noah. The same Hebrew word. God sent the flood in order to wipe the slate clean and start over again.

And David in this Psalm says, ‘Lord I need the slate wiped clean! I need you to take all of this away from me, wash it away just like you cleansed the earth through the flood!’

These verbs that David used in the first two verses to depict this sense of being made clean emphasise just how broken he knows he really is.

And one of the things that we need to learn from this is just how serious sin is. David knows how wretched he is, and what the consequences of his brokenness are, and it is this knowledge that makes him come before God in this Psalm with open arms and cry out, asking to be cleansed, asking to be wiped clean.

Now I do want to talk today about the hope that we see in this Psalm, but I think often we can too quickly skip over sin because we know that we are forgiven for it through Jesus and we forget the consequences that it has.

Sin is not meant to be forgotten. Our sins have a lasting effect on us, and we remember them.

You might say, oh but ‘as far as the east is from the west’ that’s how far my sin is from me because I am forgiven.

Yeah, but you remember it. Sin weighs us down, it plays on our mind, it comes back to us over and over again to trouble us.

If you don’t believe me, ask David, because in verse 3 he says,

“For I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me.”

This is more than likely David sitting down around a year after what he did to Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11, I imagine most of you know the story, and he sits there and says that STILL his sin is before him. It haunts him, and this is the effect that sin has on us.

Most of us are probably still weighed down by something that we did a long time ago, something that even though we know we are forgiven for, it still keeps coming back to us and filling our minds.

But this isn’t all bad. We can find the beauty that God makes from the ashes.

Firstly

If you could forget your sin, you could never testify of the goodness of God.

‘Do you know the goodness of God?’

‘You know, I think I do, but I really can’t remember any of my sins, so I don’t think I can really testify to the goodness of God.’

And yet people go around saying ‘Hey I’ve forgotten my sins.’

That’s not the way humans work, it’s not the way that we were put together. And we ought to be BROKEN over our sins, because when we sin, we create an ultrahigh definition, 4k, major motion Hollywood movie of our sin that will be fixed in our minds for years and years and years.

But we hear these stories of people who can look back, and I’m sure we can all look back, to a time in our lives that God has saved us from. That God has wiped us clean from and forgiven us for. We can all testify to God’s goodness in our lives BECAUSE we remember our sin.

Secondly

If we couldn’t remember our sins, we wouldn’t be warned against doing them again!

Can you imagine if everyone just forgot that fire was hot? If everyone just walked around getting burned all the time because they kept putting their arms in fire and getting burned.

Everyone just walking around all crispy and charcoaled like ‘Oh what happened?!’

‘I don’t know, these flames they just keep coming onto my arms and burning me for some reason.’

The past two weeks we’ve had the young people at Quench back in person for the first time since October and we’ve been sat outside the church with the fire pit and marshmallows.

Now it’s probably a bad example because the way that some of those young people deal with the fire makes you think they probably have forgotten that fire is dangerous, but that’s besides the point.

Can you imagine how we would deal with that fire if every time one of us got burned, we just forgot about it and then were shocked when it happened again?

Well friends, this is what its like if we forget our sins.

God gives us the gift of being able to remember our sins so that it acts as a constant reminder of the consequences that it has on us and others.

And He uses that to correct us, to call us, to cry out to us to repent, to call us to brokenness.

I might not be who I want to be yet, but praise God, I’m not who I was. I can only know this truth by remembering my sin and how God has delivered me.

Brokenness is an appropriate response when you understand that.

And we create a snapshot, a memory of our sin that sticks with us. Not so that we can dwell on it and beat ourselves up about it.

But brokenness is important.

Thirdly

Brokenness over our sin is appropriate because our sin is an affront to a holy God

Listen to David in verse 4

Psalm 51:4–6 NIV

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.

In other words, here’s all these things that God desires and delights in, and yet against Him David has sinned.

All of this is against YOU oh Lord. Who was Uriah but the man that YOU created? Who was Bathsheba but a servant of the Most High? So yes, David is convicted that he has sinned against God and God alone!

This is what is worrying about these pastors that you may hear telling their congregations, ‘We don’t need to preach about sin because people already know that they’re bad.’

Do they? I don’t think so. I think we sit down in the evening and stick the news on and look at the bad people that are making the headlines and we think, ‘Now THOSE people are bad, not me.’

We don’t recognise that on a daily basis, we sin against a holy God. We are broken, and we need to recognise this in order to be made right with God.

We need to remember our sins so that we know just how severe they are, just how they hurt us and hurt others, and to make sure we don’t do them again. To turn away from them and repent.

Brokenness As Our Identity

But here’s the amazing thing. This is what should make us fall down and worship. This is the God that we praise here on a Sunday morning, and the God that we praise every day of our lives with every fibre of our being.

When we sin, we sin against the almighty Creator of the universe, the maker of the heavens and the Earth.

And YET

Are you ready?

Even though he should have killed me in my sleep for what I thought, said, and did yesterday, by His grace alone He has allowed me to live another day.

Brokenness is extremely appropriate.

When we understand that, that brokenness is an extremely appropriate response, in fact what other appropriate response is there when we understand that about our God.

In this series, we’re looking at finding our identity in the Psalms, and this brokenness is our identity.

We are a broken people, who by the grace of God have been made right with Him and brought into relationship with Him despite our sin. We are sinners, redeemed by the blood of the lamb; by the once and for all sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

When we understand that, we cant run away from our brokenness. But it is our response, and should prompt us (just like it does David) to worship and to want to go and serve others. To build up God’s kingdom. This is where we truly experience God’s love.

Michael Card, the American singer songwriter you may have heard of, writes this:

He says,

“To allow myself to be loved by God in my deepest brokenness is to experience a love that defies human comprehension.

It is ONLY when we accept genuine brokenness that authentic worship to God makes any sense at all.

And it is ONLY in our brokenness that we recognise the answer to our problem.

Come back with me for a second to the text and let’s have a look at the verbs here.

Verse 1 - “blot out”

Verse 2 - “wash me”

Verse 7 - “cleanse me” “wash me”

Verse 8 - “let me hear”

Verse 9 - “hide your face”

Verse 10 - “create in me”

Verse 11 - “do not cast me”

Verse 12 - “restore to me”

Verse 14 - “deliver me”

Verse 15 - “open my lips”

What’s happened? David has recognised that EVERYTHING that he needs can only be found in God!

We try and do our faith on our own, to live on our own, and we see what happens.

Are you right with God? Yeah, I said a prayer once

Are you right with God? Yeah, I have changed my life around

Are you right with God? Yeah, I have been have my quiet times

I’ve been doing this, I’ve been doing that, I’ve said this, I’ve said that,

I, I, I, I, I, I

It’s all about I

And David says no. David says it’s not about you. David says, ‘Lord I’ve seen what happens when I make it about me. I’ve seen what I can do.’

‘I’m sick of what I can do, I’m broken, I’m sinful, I am undeserving of your love.’

‘But I’m not giving up, because I’ve also seen what YOU CAN DO’

‘So I need YOU to wash me. I need YOU to restore me. I need YOU to deliver me. I need YOU cleanse me and create in me a pure heart.’

Because in and of myself, all I can do is continue to crumble under the weight of my sin.

So may I never forget what God has done for me. May I never forget my sin, and forget what God has saved me from.

May I remember this truth always, so that I will spend the rest of my days wondering what I have done to earn the grace of the all-powerful creator of the universe. To be spared from His wrath and to spend eternity with Him.

THIS is our identity. We are broken sinners who have been made clean in Christ, but if we forget our brokenness then we are missing out on the beauty that we find when we realise this truth. That God welcomes our brokenness, He shines through it and restores us.

Brokenness is not just to make you feel bad. Brokenness is to make you aware of the magnitude of God’s love and mercy. Where we are crushed by the burden of our sin, but not so that we wallow in it, but that we are in the place where we can worship Him. Where we can understand more fully just what He has done for us. If we forget about sin, we forget about God’s grace, and we miss out on the whole path of redemption that we see God’s people going on throughout the Bible, and the path that we are on today by His grace ALONE.

So if you’re sat listening to this sermon thinking that its overly negative, or it’s making you feel bad about yourself, then I challenge to embrace the beauty of your brokenness. Just as David understands his brokenness and it allows him to worship more fully, I challenge you to accept it as part of your identity and allow that fact to transform you this week, and from now on.

Allow the knowledge that you are a sinner transform you and place you in a posture of worship, a place where you come before God and pray this very prayer that David cries out in Psalm 51.

“Have mercy on me, God!”

“Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

I want to close with the words of the incredible theologian Henri Nouwen as he talks about brokenness.

He says this,

“Our life is full of brokenness – broken relationships, broken promises, broken expectations. How can we live with that brokenness without becoming bitter and resentful except by returning again and again to God’s faithful presence in our lives.”

That is what we learn from today. What else can we do as broken people, but turn to an all-loving creator God who welcomes us again and again DESPITE our brokenness. Who wipes us clean, who restores us, who cleanses us, DESPITE our rebellion.

A God who does that, is a God worthy of the highest praise.

Let’s close in prayer together.

Loving father, we will never be able to understand why you continue to love us and have mercy on us despite everything wrong that we do, everything we think and say on a daily basis that goes against you. We ask you for your forgiveness, and we ask you will be transforming us in our brokenness and conforming us to your image. We stand at your feet and we give ourselves over to you, to a God who accepts us for who we are, and who still wants to be in relationship with us despite our sin. I just ask that this truth will have an impact on us as we go out today and into the rest of the week. That we will be more conscious of our sin and be able to use our brokenness as a means to worship you and praise you for your goodness in our lives that continues to make itself known.

In Jesus name we pray,

Amen.