Create In Me a Clean Heart

Psalm 51 as a Prayer for Sinners

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. Our Old Testament reading.

Is taken from Psalm 51. Have mercy on me O God, according to your steadfast love. According to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Against you and 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.

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, you delight in truth and the inward being and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.

Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins. Blot out all of my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart O God and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners will return to you.

Deliver me from blood guiltiness O God. O God of my salvation and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. O Lord open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise. For you will not delight in sacrifice or I would give it.

You would not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart O God. You will not despise. Do good to Zion in your good pleasure. Build up the walls of Jerusalem.

Then you will delight in right sacrifices in burnt offerings and in whole burnt offerings. Then bowls will be offered on your altar. In the name of Jesus. Amen. A sermon is taken from our psalm today, from our Old Testament text.

Psalm 51. Now we all know the historic context of this particular psalm. This psalm if you look in your Bible, in the note right above where verse 1 begins, notes the fact that this is the psalm that David wrote after Nathan the prophet confronted him with his sin.

And which sin would that be? The sin of adultery, of Bathsheba, of murder, of Uriah the Hittite. And I gotta say this. One of the things that I am a strong advocate of is rightly understanding how scripture points us to Christ.

The psalms are slightly different. And what I mean by that is that rather than read yourself as David in the story of David and Goliath, it is good for us as Christians to learn how to pray as David has prayed.

And so rather than focusing in on what David did, I think this Lenten tide, as we begin the season of Lent, I admonish you to make this psalm your prayer. And the reason for that is because as your pastor, I know that you are all like me.

Sinners. I know that many of you you struggle to obey God. And you daily fall short. I know that some of you come to church on Sunday and you hang on the very words of the absolution. I forgive you all of your sins.

And it's not because you are a hypothetical sinner. It's because like me you are a real sinner. You've committed real sins. And there's several stories in the Bible apart from the Gospel that provide so much comfort for me.

Because I look at those sinners whom Christ has forgiven. King David in particular. And I say to myself, self if God can forgive David for that He can forgive you for that. And see the thing is, is that it's kind of a cockeyed way of looking at things.

And the reason why it is, is that James, the half-brother of Jesus, makes it so clear that if we have transgressed even one of God's holy commands, even one, we're guilty of breaking them all. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai when the children of Israel decided they were going to rise and revel and play and they had Aaron fashion for them a golden calf.

When Moses came down the mountain which commandment was being broken so flagrantly? The first. You will have no other gods before Me. And yet when Moses threw the stones down all the commandments were broken.

Think of that. If you have not yet learned how to pray and really, truly cry out from the bottom of your heart in anguish and shame, have mercy on Me, O God. Then you do not understand your guilt. You do not get it yet.

You will not be able to stand before God and say, yeah, but I was a good person. I promise you that answer will land you in hell. Christ didn't come for good people. He came for sinners. And so tonight, I encourage you to take up the words of this psalm and make them your own prayer.

The Psalter is the prayer book of the Bible. And the older I get, the more the Psalter becomes the go-to book for me in the Scriptures. When I was young and learning theology and enjoying the headiness of it, the Epistles and Romans and Galatians were my go-to book.

Eventually, I wanted to tackle and learn and really get to understand the Old Testament. And it truly came alive in understanding that all of the stories are about Christ and pointing us to Him and what He would do for us.

But then when you get to the Psalms, the Psalms are a little bit of a different thing. And I'm almost convinced you have to be an older man to be able to pray them, or an older woman. You have to have a little bit of life behind you.

And if you look at your life, it's a lot like mine. Look behind you. There's a wake of destruction. You're not a victim. You have victimized other people. You have sinned against your brothers and sisters, your neighbors, your children, your husbands, your wives.

And you've sinned against God. And it's not going to stand up before God by saying, yeah, but I really tried really hard. I meant well. Yeah, it's not that at all. You see, David committed adultery, and he murdered Uriah the Hittite.

This is most certainly true. But I assure you that all of the sins that you've committed are equally as bad. Because if you've broken one of the commandments, you're guilty of breaking them all. So when you tell that little white lie to your neighbor, and you justify it by saying it's a white lie, since when do lies become white?

Lies? Well, that's the language of the devil. That's his native tongue. I didn't realize the devil was able to speak in light, to speak in white. You justify it by saying, well, it was just a little bit of a lie.

When you do that, you are guilty of being an idolater, a blasphemer, a thief, an adulterer, a murderer, a covetor. Name the list. You've broken them all. Period. And God's law makes it clear that the wages of these transgressions is not only temporal death.

This is my second Ash Wednesday. It's been a year and a day, if you would, since I was last here preaching on Ash Wednesday. And you know what? I looked in the mirror this morning and I said, Chris, you look a year older, maybe two.

But I'm looking across and I'm saying the same thing. None of you are any closer to 18 than you were last year. You're closer to the grave. You're closer to joining them out in the graveyard. And if you're like me, that thought actually jars you.

There have been nights when I've woken up in a cold sweat, gasping for breath. I'm going to die someday. And I don't think my experience and my fear of death is unique to me. I think you all have a sinful nature, just like I do, that doesn't want to die.

I've heard people close to death crying and weeping, saying that they didn't want to die. And there was nothing I could do to keep them from doing it. So this Lenten tide, think hard on your sins. You say, but Pastor, that is really depressing.

It's not going to make me feel good. It's not supposed to. But there's a method to God's madness. There is. You remember the story that Jesus tells about the two people who had big debts? Remember this story?

Let me see if I can do this from memory. Jesus was visiting Simon the leper, also a Pharisee. I like to read that text and say, well, if Jesus was at his house for dinner, he was Simon, formerly known as the leper, but he was also still a Pharisee.

And as the story goes, Jesus is there at Simon's house, and they don't offer him anything to wash his feet or to care for his basic needs. They're quite rude to Jesus, Simon is. Simon, the former leper, right?

And she crashes the party. We all know who she is. She's the town whore. She's the one with the loose morals. She's the one rumored to be making money on the side. On her back. Everybody knows about her.

Right? If she walked into Kongsvinger, some of you might be tempted. If she sat on this side, you might want to move over there. Because whatever she got, you don't want to get it. Right? She crashes the party.

She crashes the party and she runs straight to Jesus. And the text says that she washed his feet with her hair. Because she was weeping. And we know what kind of weeping this is. Who of you have never weeped like this?

I have. Weeping is a terribly ugly thing to look at. And it's just darn awful to experience. You can't see anything. And not only is water flowing from your eyes, but mucus is running out of your nose.

It's just a mess. And this is the days before Kleenex. Right? So what does she do? With her own tears, she washes Jesus' feet. And then, in what had to be ugliness upon ugliness, she takes her hair and dries Jesus' feet with her hair.

Simon, inside of his heart, is thinking this. If Jesus knew who was touching him, if only he knew who was touching him, he would not be allowing this to happen. Jesus, knowing what's going on inside of his heart, says to Simon, there was a certain man who lent money out to two people.

One, huge amount of money. The other, not so much. And here's the explosive sentence. Neither of them could pay. Neither of them could pay the debt back. That's the sentence that you can almost see Simon, three days later, washing his dishes.

Whoa, wait a second. Jesus said neither of them could pay. Because clearly one of the people in this parable was referencing her and the other was referencing him. And Jesus asked the question, so neither of them could pay, so the man canceled the debts of both.

Who do you think will love him more? And Simon rightly says, the one who had the greater debt canceled. Jesus makes the point, the one who is forgiven much loves much. Now I want you to think about this.

We don't like penitential seasons. We just don't. They're dreary. They're drudgery. They seem negative. Even the songs are all in these minor keys. Good night! How are we supposed to get through this lenten tide?

I feel like we're going on a march through a dirge, right? There's a reason for this. And the reason for this is quite simple. Because the one who is forgiven much, loves much. And the reality of the situation is this.

You have been forgiven much. If you don't love much, it's not because you haven't been forgiven much. It's because you have yet to really understand the magnitude and the depth of your own sin and just how much you have been forgiven.

Penitential seasons are times for us to get honest with ourselves and with God. Put down the pretense. Quit the pharisaical prayers. I thank you God that I'm not like other people. That I vote Republican, right?

That I am against gay marriage. There's nothing wrong with that. But when you hold up your righteousness up to God as if somehow that earns you brownie points, you still have yet to understand the basics of the Christian faith.

So let's make this prayer our own. And work our way back through the text now. Psalm 51. Have mercy on me, O God.

According to your.

Steadfast love. According to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. Wash me. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. And that's what we all need. For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.

It's a constant companion. And know this, that at the end of the day, regardless of who you've sinned against, what David says here is true. Against you God. And you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you might be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.

Those are important words. How many of us, when we approach God's law, somehow try to blame our faults on God? This might be a little simplistic. But God, if you hadn't have made your law so difficult to keep, I'd actually be a pretty good person.

I don't know if you've ever thought that thought. I hope you haven't. Unfortunately, I have. But against you and you only have I sinned, Lord. And you are justified in your words and you are blameless in your judgments.

I'm the one who's at fault. And you know that part that we confess in our corporate confession? The words are, I confess that I am by nature sinful and unclean. We get that idea from these words. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me.

David was not saying that his mother was a woman of loose morals. That's not what he's saying. What he's saying is that when he was conceived in his mother's womb, he was conceived a sinner. And that's all of us, by the way.

All of us. We have inherited Adam's sin. The reason why we sin is because we are sinners. In sin, did your mother bring you forth? Did my mom bring me forth? Behold, God, you delight in truth in the inward being.

And you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. And he does that here every week when we come to hear the Lord's words. So he says, purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.

Who's doing the washing in this washing? Are you washing yourself? Are you scrubbing yourself? This isn't a shower. This is a bath. This is the waters of your baptism. And God is the one doing the washing.

Right? Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. And that's the idea, is that God breaks our bones with the law so that we will rejoice. Because what a terrible fate it is for the person who never feels the guilt associated with the law of God.

Who goes about their life thinking that good is evil and that evil is good and goes blissfully onto their grave, never having God's law break their bones and crush them and show them their need for the Savior.

That's not a blessing. That is a curse. Hide your face from my sins, God. Blot out all of my iniquities. And then we sing this. We've sung this many times here since I've come. Create in me a clean heart, oh God.

Renew a right spirit within me. Notice that David is right in his prayer. David doesn't look inside of himself and say, I'm just going to try harder, God. This time I'm going to clean up my act, God. This time I really mean it, Jesus.

That's not what he says. He pleads with God. Lord, create in me a clean heart. Because David knows if God is not the one who creates that clean heart within you, you are incapable of doing it yourself.

Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Your presence and take not Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit.

And see, that's the idea. When God creates a clean heart in you and He does this, He circumcises your heart in the waters of baptism. When God creates a clean heart in you, through His Word, through His body and blood received in the Lord's Supper, through the absolution, He restores within you a willing spirit.

A spirit that does good works because it has been created and renewed by God. It is a gift given, not something to be striven for, as if somehow you earn it. And then He says this, after God has done all of these things, then I will teach transgressors your ways.

And sinners will return to you. Indeed, the one who knows the Gospel and the wonderfulness of the forgiveness of sins can't help but go and tell everybody in Christ there is forgiveness. In God there is mercy.

And by doing this, transgressors and sinners return to God. Why? Well, Scripture is clear that it's God's kindness, His mercy, His forgiveness, His love that leads us to repentance. So deliver me, God, from blood guiltiness.

O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of Your righteousness. O Lord, You open my lips, and then my mouth will declare Your praise. For You will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it.

You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. But listen to this, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise. That's the spirit of Lent. The whole purpose is that together together we look into God's law and it's crushing work breaks us.

Knowing this, that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit and a broken and contrite heart. God does not despise these things. No, this is exactly what it means to humble yourself. So do good in Zion, and do a good pleasure.

Build up the walls of Jerusalem, and you will delight in right sacrifices. Now let me end with a traditional Old Testament text for Ash Wednesday. Joel chapter 2, starting at verse 12. Yet even now declares the Lord, return to me with all of your heart.

Return to me with fasting. Return to me with weeping. And return to me with mourning. Rend your hearts, not your clothes. Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and He is merciful. He is slow to anger.

He's abounding in steadfast love. He relents over disaster. Who knows whether He will not turn and relent and leave a blessing behind Him. A grain offering and a drink offering for the Lord your God. So blow the trumpet in Zion.

Consecrate a fast. Call a solemn assembly. Gather the people. Consecrate the congregation. Assemble the elders. Gather the children. Even the nursing infants. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her chamber.

Between the vestibule and the altar, let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep. Let them weep and say, spare your people O Lord, and make not your heritage a reproach and a byword among the nations.

Why should they say among the peoples, where is their God? Then the Lord became jealous for His land and had pity on His people. The Lord answered and said to His people, behold, I am sending you grain, wine and oil, and you will be satisfied, and I will no more make you a reproach among the nations.

So let us this Lenten tide rend our hearts, not our garments. Let us, with the people of Israel of old, with the congregation, weep and say, spare your people O Lord. Spare us, and make not your heritage, make not your people of Kongsbing a reproach or a byword among the nations.

Have mercy on us, O Lord. And with God, we hear these words again. Return to the Lord your God. Return, for He is gracious, He's merciful, He's slow to anger, He's abounding in steadfast love, and He relents over disaster.

And you want to know what? The disaster He even relents over? The very fires of hell that our own sin has earned each and every one of us, me included, twice. He relents over disaster. Why? Because Jesus is going to the cross.

He's going to the cross to bleed and to die for your sins, to suffer in your place so that you might live, so that you might be made the righteousness of God, or as our epistle text said, God made Him, Christ, to be sin, who knew no sin, so that you, you, yes you Janet, yes you Robin, yes you Don, yes you Duane, yes Fagerlands, yes you Renee, even you Arlen, so that you can be the righteousness of God.

With Him there is mercy, therefore He is feared. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

Lutheran Church, 15950 470th Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744. We thank you for your support. All of our teaching messages may be freely distributed as long as you do not edit or change the content of the message.

And again, thank you for listening.