Episode 643: TLP 643: Humility in Confession, Part 1 | the foundation

Humility as the Foundation of Confession

If you don't care about God or wish to be reconciled to Him no matter the cost, well, then you aren't humbly confessing your sin, are you? Parenting isn't about us. In fact, parenting isn't even about our kids.

Parenting is just one way Christian dads and moms are to worship God. So welcome to the Truth, Love, Parent podcast, where we train dads and moms to give God the preeminence in their parenting. Welcome to the Truth, Love, Family podcast.

I'm your host and resident biblical counselor, Aaron Ambruster, and I'm so glad you're joining us for this short two-part episode entitled Humility in Confession. We're going to discuss the foundational truths necessary to understand the importance of confession as well as outline a number of practical applications for growing in the humble practice of confession.

You'll likely notice that our usual free episode notes have been replaced with a piece of life work. I recommend everyone who listens to these episodes should have their own physical copy in front of them so that they can fill out the life work as we go.

And speaking of participants, this material is designed for the parents and children to sit down together and experience as a kind of family devotional or counseling session. I recommend you listen to the audio together, fill out the life work, and then save some time throughout the week to review the material as you strive to implement it in your family life.

In the description of this episode, along with life work, you'll also discover a transcript and links to related resources that will help you dig deeper into this discussion. A short podcast episode isn't enough to fully unpack these truths, but the accompanying resources should help continue the study.

So feel free to pause this episode if you want to print out the life work, and then let's begin. This study is going to primarily revolve around Psalm 51, which David wrote after Nathan the prophet confronted him about his sin with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah.

These events are carefully detailed in 2 Samuel 11 through chapter 12, verse 23. If nothing else, I hope you have your Bible with you. We'll be working through this passage, and it's best if you can see the verses yourself.

Also, if you have the life work in front of you, we plan to cover pages 1, 2, and 3 on this episode and pages 4 through 6 on our next episode. I'll move through the content quickly enough to stay within our time constraints today, but I want to express that this material could be the foundation for far more involved study of 2 Samuel 11 through 12.

Also, given the nature of David's sin, I will be discreet in how I discuss it here. Lastly, I'll be reading passages from the Legacy Standard Bible. And you know, there's one more thing that we need to talk about before we continue.

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David's Sin and the Need for Reproof

All right, so I'm hoping that most of you are familiar with who King David is. He was the second king of ancient Israel. He was described as a man after God's own heart, and he wrote many of the Psalms.

He's also the guy who killed Goliath. Unfortunately, we don't have time to talk about all the amazing ways God worked through David's life. We don't have time to talk about Saul and again, Goliath and his careful leadership of the nation of Israel.

Unfortunately, we only have time to talk about his most infamous sins and how by the grace of God, he responded humbly when he was confronted. So in 2 Samuel 11, we're introduced to David's sin. We're not going to read this passage, but I encourage you parents to cover this material in as much detail as is valuable for helping your children grasp the heinous nature of what it was that David did.

The Deception of Self-Justifying Sin

Number one, the sin. Here are a couple of notes concerning the sin that you're kind of just barely alluding to here. First, keep in mind that when David was sinning with Bathsheba, he was convinced that what he was doing was right and acceptable.

Also, remember that when David was having Uriah killed, David, again, believed it to be the best course of action. And had David continued in his arrogant, delusional self-deception, he would never have been able to see his sin the way God saw it and he never would have desired to confess and forsake his sin.

We do the exact same thing. We sin because we believe it's best. If we believe something else were better, we would be doing that instead. This means that in our sin, we too are delusional. We aren't able to correctly interpret reality.

We can do truly horrible things like disobeying our parents, stealing, lying, cheating, being lazy, gossiping, lusting, and even murdering and truly believe the whole time we're justified in doing it.

However, just because we think we're right doesn't mean that we actually are. What we need to do is be confronted by truth. We need to see and be convinced of reality so that we can see our sin the way God does.

Otherwise, we'll continue in our own personal lie. Well, I praise God that in David's case, Nathan loved God and David enough to do the hard thing and confront the king with his sin. 2. The Reproof. In 2 Samuel 12 verses 1 -6, we see Nathan using a metaphor to help David see the depth of his sin.

It's very helpful to see the wickedness of our sin by witnessing it in somebody else. Nathan was very wise to take the focus off David and instead tell this fictional story. When we're in sin, we're obviously believing a lie about ourselves.

But it's interesting that in the middle of believing our sin is right and good, we can so easily see the sin in others. That's called hypocrisy. We're all hypocritical in our sin. In fact, sin makes us increasingly hypocritical.

Knowing this, Nathan told David a story and David could clearly see the awful thing that the man in the story had done to his neighbor. David had an accurate, though extreme response to the sin described in the story.

Therefore, recognizing that David wasn't so delusional as to miss the sin in the story, Nathan then rebuked David. He identified David as having been the one in the story who sinned. Nathan didn't do this to make David simply feel bad.

He didn't do it to beat David down. Far too often, we feel like the people confronting us about our sin are just being mean or harsh but what David was doing was actually loving. He wanted David to stop lying to himself and agree with God's assessment of David's character.

He also reminded David how many blessings David had received from the Lord so that he could instill and encourage godly shame in David. We have an amazing resource all about shame. Too many of us think that shame is all bad.

But some of it is bad and some of it is very, very good. If we don't recognize good shame, we'll fight it. But David needed to experience the shame that comes from sinning against a righteous, holy, and loving God.

And so do we. This is why Nathan detailed David's sin in order to contrast it against the abundance of God's blessing. And by using the illustration and eliciting such a powerful response from David, before David could even respond to Nathan's reproof, David had already outlined the consequences of his own sin.

He too deserved to die and to make restitution fourfold. However, how impossible would that have been? You can't make restitution to a dead man. Now let's stop here to consider what we normally do when our sin is presented to us.

Instead of seeing our sin and hypocrisy and delusion, what do we do? We argue for it. We double down. We add to our sin. We multiply our strife. We increase our pain and relational carnage. That's how we respond when people dare to tell us about our perceived sin.

Why do we do this? What is it in man that makes us so blind and aggressive toward truth? The Bible says that we are sinners and the Bible communicates that sin makes us blind and stupid. We're incapable of seeing our sin and we're foolish enough to try to defend it.

This is a result of pride and arrogance. We don't have time to unpack the heinous and destructive nature of pride. But I will say this. We absolutely cannot see our sin apart from a work of God in our lives.

That's why when someone takes the time to open the Bible to help us see the destructiveness of our ways, we need to choose to humbly submit to that. God is lovingly trying to stop us in our tracks. We're like blind people sprinting toward the edge of a cliff, but when he sends someone to stop us before we fall, we scream and kick at the person trying to save our lives.

We need to stop, humble ourselves, truly consider whether or not we were mistaken or in the wrong, and then we need to submit to the Word of God every single time. Even if we initially disagree with what the person is saying, we need to be honest with the Word of God.

Confronting Sin in the Family

Now, lastly, before we move on, I want to talk to those of us whom God wants to use to confront our family members when they sin. Nathan had to tell the king of Israel that he had sinned in wicked ways.

Listen, if David had rejected the reproof, he could have easily ordered Nathan's death. David had already had one innocent man killed. What was to stop him now? Nathan knew the only way to glorify God was to obey by confronting King David.

And yet, how often do we try to excuse ourselves from biblically correcting other people? We're afraid of the tantrum our child will throw. We're afraid of our spouse's reaction. We're afraid what our parents may do if we speak truth in love.

Now, I get it. People entrenched in their sin can be scary. But we need to trust God more than we fear people. We need to obey God more than we submit to the terrorist demands of our family members. Of course, this two-part episode isn't directed at the reprovers.

It's about the ones needing to be reproved. We have plenty of resources that will help the reprovers to overcome their fear and obey God the way they should. The anti-terrorism in your home collection should provide aid in that regard.

Also, I'll link the Parents 5 Job series as it discusses in depth what it means to biblically reprove. Okay, moving on. Number three, the confession before men. Praise the Lord that instead of arrogantly fighting and defending his sin and making excuses and remaining delusional, David humbly confessed his sin instead.

By the grace of God, help from Nathan, and the power of the Holy Spirit, David humbly confessed his selfish self-worship, his sin with Bathsheba, and his murder of Uriah. Nathan then communicated that God had forgiven David, and that is a glorious truth.

I wish we could take the necessary time to really praise God for his forgiveness today. We don't deserve it, but he forgives us anyway, and it's unconditional. He will never hold that sin against us again, but that doesn't mean there won't be consequences.

In David's case, God's forgiveness did not result in a removal of consequences, and it won't in our case either. We have a whole series all about consequences, what they are, how to give them, etc. You should check that out if anyone in your home needs a better understanding of the doctrine of consequences.

David's Public Confession in Psalm 51

Now, we're going to transition away from 2 Samuel at this point. Remember that that was the historical account of David's sin and correction, but Psalm 51 is David's permanent public record of his confession before God and man for his sin.

You could take the time to pause this episode, but we're going to interact with it a lot over the next couple weeks, so I suggest you can either read it now, but you should also read it in preparation for next week, and the life work will present even more ways of interacting with the Psalm.

Understanding God Through Confession

4. The Confession Before God. In Psalm 51, David did an amazing job of biblically confessing his sin. He wasn't just quote-unquote sorry. He truly saw and communicated the depth of his transgression.

He used God's vocabulary to describe his sin, but he also did something else very important. David couldn't truly understand his sin and see it for how terrible it was, nor could he understand the consequences he deserved if he didn't know who God was first.

Letter A, David understood God. I think our cavalier attitude toward our sin is a direct result of the fact that we don't know God the way we should. But listen to the 19 different ways David talks about God's character during his own confession in Psalm 51.

David talked about God being gracious, loving, compassionate, forgiving, powerful enough to cleanse him, the main recipient of his sin, righteous, blameless, judging, truth, wise, pure, steadfast, relational, joyful, sustaining, the Savior, worthy of praise, and good.

If you want to be someone who responds correctly to reproof with humble confession, you need to start now, before you get in trouble, truly understanding the glory and majesty of God. Only then will you see your sin for what it really is.

Now let me stop here real quick and talk to the parents. Your main job is not just to tell your kids what is right and what is wrong and give them consequences for doing wrong. Your main job is to introduce them to God so they see him for the glory and the majesty and the perfection and the awe that he is.

That is our most important job. And it's David's familiarity with Scripture that allowed him to do this next point as well. Letter B, David understood his sin as God described it. First of all, he spoke biblically about his sin.

As you read Psalm 51, you'll find four different words David uses to describe his sin. The first we're going to consider is the word transgressions. This Hebrew word is used to describe willful rebellion that crosses over a line.

He also called his sin iniquity. This word carries with it an understanding of being guilty and deserving of consequences. Of course, he also used the Hebrew word translated sin. This word is used of sin in general, as well as the specific sacrifices required of those who sin.

And finally, he talks about what he did as being evil. This word is used generally to describe a wide array of wickedness. But that wasn't the only way David proved he was thinking biblically about his sin.

Second, David didn't blame anyone else for what he did. He says things like my transgressions in verses one and three, my iniquity in verse two, my sin in verses two through four. And he even acknowledges the fact that he was a sinner from before he was born in verse five.

God says that we are responsible for our sin and David in his humility was prepared to acknowledge that. Of course, it was David's knowledge of God and his sin that clearly led to the next point. Letter C, David understood the necessity of consequences.

In verse four, we see that David understood that God's judgment was always righteous and good and everything that contradicted what God said was deserving of that judgment. Verse four says, against you, you only, I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you are justified when you speak and pure when you judge.

Secondly, in verse seven, we read, purify me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. One of the Old Testament consequences for being physically unclean was an arduous cleansing process.

David here acknowledges that he saw his sin the way God did and wanted to embrace God's plan for internal cleansing. Third, David didn't hate the fact that God, quote unquote, broke his bones. In verse eight, he says, make me to hear joy and gladness.

Let the bones which you have crushed rejoice. David is referring to the metaphorical consequences of his sin and instead of complaining about them, he rejoiced in God's chastisement because he knew it was designed to heal him.

Fourth, one of the very real consequences of our sin is a dwindling of our joy. In verse 12, David asked that his joy be restored, not because he thought he didn't deserve that consequence, but because he looked forward to reconciliation.

And fifth, David recognized he was guilty of the blood of Uriah. In verse 14, he talks of his blood guiltiness. He wasn't trying to pretend that guilt wasn't a legitimate consequence of sin, but simply that, again, he yearned for reconciliation.

Before considering our final two points, let's review. David sinned, Nathan reproved, and instead of pridefully being blind to his sin or deceptively trying to manipulate himself out of the consequences, David confessed his sin before Nathan and everyone present, but he also confessed his sin before God.

His confession wasn't a short sentence either. He wrote 19 verses about it. In that confession, he acknowledged God's character, the chief recipient of his sin. He also showed that he had a right understanding of the gravity of his sin, and he also acknowledged the legitimacy of the consequences in his life because of his sin.

The Desire for Reconciliation With God

The next thing we see throughout David's humble confession was this, letter D, David desired to be reconciled to God. I alluded to this on our last point, but it's important to talk about here. David didn't just want to escape the consequences.

He didn't want to merely get back into good standing with the people around him and have them see him in a positive light. He didn't just want to do what he was told so he could move on with his life.

David earnestly wanted his relationship with God to be restored. In verses 1 and 2, he asked for grace because he knew the ultimate punishment for his sin was more than he could bear. Be gracious to me, O God, according to your lovingkindness, according to the abundance of your compassion, blot out my transgressions.

He knew God wouldn't be gracious to him if he were simply playing a game. David was humbly asking God to forgive by blotting out his transgression. That would require mercy and grace. Second, David understood that consequences were part of the cleansing process.

We saw in verse 7, purify me with hyssop and I shall be clean, wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. But David also understood that regardless of how painful the consequences were, the cleansing they were designed to impart was a joyous thing.

In the very next verse we read, make me to hear joy and gladness, let the bones which you have crushed rejoice. Consequences are uncomfortable, but from the sinner's perspective, they should be comforting as well because they recognize that the consequences are just part of having our relationship with God fixed.

David longed for the reconciliation regardless of how difficult it was, and we see that in verse 9, hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. And finally, David understood that God was the only hope for salvation.

We read verse 14 earlier when David pleaded with the Lord to deliver him from his blood guiltiness. If you don't care about God or wish to be reconciled to him no matter the cost, you aren't humbly confessing your sin, you're arrogantly trying to move past the conversation so that you can just go on living for yourself.

Repentance as Putting Off Sin and Putting On Righteousness

And finally, after recognizing who God was, understanding his sin as God described it, accepting the consequences, and yearning for reconciliation with God, letter E, David wanted to repent. To repent is to change.

We have a bunch of episodes and series linked in the description of this episode all about the nature, necessity, prerequisites, and methods of repentance. Teach your children to apologize, how your children respond to sin, biblical conflict resolution, and the biblical parenting essentials are just a few.

But for the sake of our conversation today, in order to see how David humbly acknowledged the necessity of repentance and showed his desire for it, we're going to explain repentance in its most basic form and see what David says about it.

In Ephesians, we learn that the core of repentance is stopping the sin, thinking right about our sin, and starting the righteousness. We're told to put off, renew our minds, and put on. I think that order is important because God says we need to stop sinning, even if we don't completely understand why.

But it requires seeing our sin and ourselves the way God does in order to truly live righteously. Anyway, in Psalm 51, we see that the whole passage reveals that David was finally thinking biblically.

His mind was definitely renewed. The whole passage also outlines, both generally and specifically, the sin David needed to put off. We already saw much of that. But because David was now thinking like God, and because David was going to remove so many sinful habits, he recognized that he needed to replace the sin with righteousness.

In verse 6, we read that he wanted to live in truth. It also shows that he wanted to become wise. Behold, you delight in truth and the innermost being, and in the hidden part you will make me no wisdom.

In verse 7, we read about the ceremonial cleansing, and in verse 10, we read, create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. It's clear David wanted to be pure. Verses 8 and 12 show that he wanted to rejoice in God.

Verse 10, which we just read, exemplified his desire to be steadfast. We also see how he wanted to remain connected to God. Verse 11 says, do not cast me away from your presence and do not take your Holy Spirit from me.

As we continue looking at the evidence that David wanted to put on righteousness and truly humbly repent, we see in verse 13 that he wanted to teach others about God's goodness. Verse 13 reads, then I will teach transgressors your way and sinners will be converted to you.

Verses 14 through 15 show that he wanted to praise God. Verse 17 really exemplifies his humble repentance because he recognized that the only thing God wants is brokenness. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

No matter how difficult or painful it would be, David wanted to have a broken spirit. He wanted to humbly see himself and his sin as God saw him. That requires brokenness and grief. He also wanted to be contrite.

We see that as well in verse 17. Seeing contrition is feeling sorrow and remorse for improper or objectionable behavior. And finally, David wanted to truly obey God in complete righteousness, the right thing in the right way for the right reason and in the right power.

In verse 19 we read, then you will delight in righteous sacrifices, in burnt offering and whole burnt offering. Then young bulls will be offered on your altar. Now, the fourfold nature of biblical obedience isn't seen in this one verse, but as we study the scriptures, especially as it has to do with the Old Testament sacrificial system, we see that going through the motions was never enough.

Please listen to our Teach Your Children to Obey series to go through a more thorough study of the Bible to understand what true obedience is and how it requires all four of those parts. And that, my friends, is humble confession.

That is the only way we can truly please the Lord and be reconciled to Him and the other people in our lives. A lot of empty words are spoken when we're caught in our sin, but we must all pursue true repentance and that will require humility.

Now you may think you respond humbly in reproof, and maybe some of you do, but if you're anything like I am, then what you think about most of your responses is wrong. It's your pride trying to convince you that you are humble.

So be sure to join us next week for the conclusion of this two-part episode as we humbly consider what absolutely needs to change in our own lives if we're going to be humble and repentant. Also please share this episode with your pastor, friends, and family, and never hesitate to email us at counselor at truthloveparent .com or leave a voicemail at 828 -423 -0894 if you need help with any of the things we've discussed today.

And then join us next week for Humility in Confession, Part 2, The Application. I'll see you then. Truth. Love. Parent is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you worship God through your parenting.

So join us next time as we study God's Word to learn how to parent our children for life and godliness. And remember that TLP is a listener-supported ministry. You can visit truthloveparent .com forward slash donate to learn more.