Rt_PLVIPKN4

Oh, good evening. Please turn in your Bibles to Psalm 51. Psalm 51, I want to continue a study. Started about a month ago, focusing really on the title, Let the Bones You Have Broken Leap for Joy Again. Psalm 51, 8. Make me hear, make me to hear joy and gladness.

Let the bones which you have broken rejoice. The word for rejoice there is leap for joy. Let the bones that you have broken leap for joy again. David had sinned in a gross, horrific way with Bathsheba. That event and basically murder of Uriah the Hittite, devastating to the nation, devastating to the morale, a horrific Episode in the Davidic house, gross sin, great sin, hardly any like it in the history of the earth.

Prophet Nathan comes to him, confronts him with the sin, and immediately David is convicted, crushing, so crushing was the conviction of the Holy Spirit upon him that he felt crushed. His spirit crushed. And so he prays. He responds to that conviction of the Holy Spirit. And he makes this prayer in verse 8: let the bones which you have broken leap for joy again.

How can you do that? How can anyone leap for joy? What kind of work would have to be done within him for him to again leap for joy? Well, he started this study. We're learning from our study in Hebrews that there is no rest in an incomplete work.

God's work in forgiveness. Forgiving sinners has to be complete. It has to be perfect, or else we'll never be able to come boldly to the throne of grace. And so, in our first installment, we looked at verses 1 through 7. Tonight, I want to focus on verses 9 and 10.

Verse 9: Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. By way of review, I use the analogy of a car wash. This psalm teaches us one of the most important lessons about life, and that is, how does a soul become clean again?

I use the image of a car wash with windows. All right, you could actually see a car going through the different stages of being washed. What does that look like in the spirit world? What does it look like a soul being cleansed? Well, we looked last time. There were really three stages of God's cleansing work: the Holy Spirit's conviction, the Father's compassion, and the Son's sacrifice.

Look at that heading. Psalm 51 for the choir director, a psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him after he had gone into Bathsheba. The Holy Spirit convicted him, and David responded. That's the first thing. If your soul is ever going to be cleansed of sin, you're going to have to respond to the Holy Spirit's conviction.

You don't suppress the truth, you don't deny, you don't blame, you don't excuse, you confess. Second, as a response to the Holy Spirit's conviction, David cries out to the Father. Look at what he says in verse 1: Be gracious to me, O God, according to your loving kindness, according to the greatness of your compassion, blot out my transgression.

We must look to the Father's compassion. Third, we must appeal to the Son's cleansing. Listen to what he says in verse 2: Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. It's an appeal to God to do a thorough washing, a perfect cleansing. Verse 3: For I know my transgression and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you only. I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified when you speak and blameless when you judge. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. I was a sinner. My very framework was one bent towards sin, and evidence of that bent toward sin is the great sin that I committed.

Behold, verse 6, you desire truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part you will make known to me wisdom. Deep down, God wants cleansing, cleanness, wise living, right spirit. Then he says in verse 7, purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

You must put me into a state of purity, and that purity is going to come through the righteous blood sacrifice of someone else. Someone else's lifeblood, one of perfect righteousness, is necessary for my cleansing. Hyssop, the very instrument that was used to put the Passover, the blood of the Passover lamb on the doors, sprinkling, clean, and the very thing that was lifted to Christ.

Upon the cross, we must appeal to the Son's cleansing. So we looked at the three stages of God's cleansing work last time. This time, I want to look at four results of God's cleansing work. Four results. And they come off the page in verses 9 and 10 with four commands to God.

David commands God. He appeals to God. It's that earnest appeal. He's not irreverently dictating something to God. He's earnestly pleading. And so as we walk through that, there's four of these earnest pleas. And so tonight I want to look at the results of this cleansing work. First, God blocks our sin from his sight.

Look at verse 9. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. That first part of verse 9, hide your face from my sins. So a thorough cleansing is going to involve God blocking our sin from his sight. Hide. Notice that first word, hide. You must hide.

You must cover over. You must block from your sight. That's what he's saying. You must block my sins from your line of sight. You must cause yourself not to see the idea, your face. Hide your face. Hide your presence. Hide my sins, which are right before your eyes.

God knows it all. He sees everything. Everything you think, everything you do is like on a jumbotron with high definition right before the throne. He is omniscient. He sees everything totally, vividly, and every aspect of it. And so here's David. He knows God, and he knows his sin is right there in the face of God, his all-seeing eyes.

God, hide your face from my sins. Hide your face. Hide. Take your omniscient. Awareness off of my sins. Now, how does that happen? How can the God who sees it all, knows all, how can you appeal? What does David know? Hide your face from my sins, from my faults, from my sins, and from the guilt of my sin.

God, you must hide your piercing gaze, or I'm undone. So David here is appealing to God to do whatever is necessary to block his sin from God's visibility, to remove his guilt from God's line of sight. That's what a clean soul, that's a result of God's cleansing work.

One of them, that God blocks our sin from his sight. You see, something greater than our sin has to come in God's line of sight when he looks our way. A covering. The Old Testament concept of atonement. God must hide, make a covering. That he doesn't look upon our sin.

David knows this. Hide your face from my sin. And how do we do that? Well, we must receive the Holy Spirit's conviction, we must look to the Father's compassion, and we must appeal to the Son's cleansing. Second result of God's cleansing work. And this is something that God has to do on His side of the fence.

If you'll notice, we can't do that. We can't block God's sight to our sin. That's impossible. All our fig leaves. We can't block our sin from His sight. God has to do that. Second thing, second result of God's cleansing work is that God blots out all our iniquities.

Look at verse 9 again: hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. There's that second command, that second earnest plea to God. You must blot out, you must wipe away, you must remove, you must cleanse all of my iniquities. It's the same appeal that he makes in verse 1.

Look back at verse 1: be gracious to me. O God, according to your loving kindness, according to the greatness of your compassion, blot out my transgressions. Remove them from me. And there in verse 1, he's saying, God, show your grace to me. Show your kindness to me by blotting out my transgressions.

And that's the word he uses there in verse 1. Blot out my acts of mutiny. What I did, my rebellion, my faults, my mutiny against God and against his nation by killing Uriah, taking his wife. I mean, who wants to live? You wouldn't wish that on your worst enemy to live with that kind of guilt and shame.

But in verse 9, he doesn't use the word transgressions. He again appeals, God, you must blot out, you must wipe away. But he uses this, he says, blot out all my iniquities, all my crookedness, iniquities, all the activities that go on inside of me that are wrong. All that perversity, that inward sin that caused the transgression, that caused.

The harm. Blot out all my iniquities. You must do whatever is necessary to remove my sin from your memory. Blot out. Why? How does he ask for this? David again understands. Listen, what same expressions are used in Isaiah 43, 25. God says, This, I, even I, am the one who wipes out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.

David is saying, Do whatever is necessary to remove my sin from your memory. That's being washed. Thoroughly washed. God does everything thoroughly, perfectly. That's why we can rest in him. One of the very first places you need to come to rest in God is his cleansing ability, his cleansing work in Christ.

Because you never will approach the throne of grace with any kind of confidence unless you believe that God. Gospel. And at the heart of the gospel is this cleansing work of God blotting out our iniquities. David is saying, Disconnect me from all my iniquity. All, all, all shapes and sizes.

Every form. All my iniquities. In the first half of nine, hide your face from my sins, we get language atonement. And in the second half, removal of a disposition to sin. The language that involves death to the sin nature. God blocks out our sins from his sight. That's an atonement.

God blocks out, God blots out all our iniquities. And he does that by being crucified, by crucifying sin, death to the sin nature. So that nature has to, if God's going to thoroughly cleanse a person, he's got to block his sight from their sins, atonement. He has to kill the sin nature.

Third result of God's cleansing work. God bestows. A clean heart. Look at verse 10. Create in me a clean heart, O God. I know the word create is better than the word bestows, but it didn't have a B. I'm trying to stay with the B's. Blocks, blot, bestows.

But create. That's the idea. To bestow, to create. The word, there is, again, another plea, strong. You must create. You must bring forth. And it's the word bara. It's the verb, the very same thing in Genesis 1:1 when God created out of nothing everything. Created matter out of nothing.

And here is David in the depths of his sin. Create in me a clean heart, and you're going to have to create it out of nothing because there's nothing here that is clean. Complete. Another Genesis. Create in me a clean heart, a heart of cleanness, a disposition from impurity, a pure heart, free from impurity, pure.

Clean heart, create in me, you put in me a heart that is inclined to cleanness. We can't do that. This is the rebirthing, a bestowing of something completely new. Create in me a clean heart. Heart, an inner person, create in me a very clean inward person. Talked about there's the external person, the material, but then there's the immaterial.

How do we watch the immaterial be cleansed? And what are the effects of it? Here's the effects of it. And the word heart is in the place of interest, in the place of emphasis. A heart of cleanness you must create in me, O God. I cannot bring about a heart of cleanness.

You, a heart of cleanness, you must create. You're the only one who can create those. And that is what I earnestly cry out for. Elohim. Creator God. That's the word often referred to God as the ruler of the universe and the creator. In me, O ruler of the universe, creator of the universe, creator of every star, every living creature, everything, you exercise your creative prerogative and put in me a clean heart.

So we already have, and God blocks our sin from His sight. That's the atonement language. The removal of a disposition to sin, it's the death of sin, death to the sin nature, and now the bestowing of something completely new. The bestowing of a heart for godliness, the bestowing of a new nature that agrees with God.

David has pretty good systematic theology, doesn't he? Or maybe it's the other way around. We get our systematic theology from somebody who knows, from a king, a good king, David, who wanted to teach sinners how to respond when they too find themselves guilty of sin. David could have blotted, could have tried to forget the Whole thing.

Instead, he puts it to song. He writes out his testimony. He writes out his instruction and he puts it to music so every generation would sing and remember the horror and the renewal. It's what a good king does. He shows us the way. But we know he points the way to a perfect king, doesn't he?

Well, there's one more thing, one more result that's needed in God's cleansing work, and that God breathes a new spirit within. Look back at verse 10, the second half, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Establish, renew, establish, re-establish. It's a word for a new moon. You must cause in me something else that is new.

You've got to give me a clean heart, a new heart, but I need a new spirit, a new breath, a new wind. And he calls this a spirit, a steadfast spirit. Spirit. It's a verb. The one causing me to be unshakable. The spirit causing firmness in me. The spirit causing uprightness.

The spirit that caused fixedness, determinedness, unshakableness within me. I need a new spirit within me. You must put a new spirit in me, in all of me. I need a new spirit in all of me, one that will empower me to live according to the clean heart that you have put in me.

You see, we need, in order to live out according to the new nature, we need a new spirit. We need a clean heart, and we need a new spirit, a spirit of power, a holy spirit that is inclined and empowers us to uprightness and steadiness toward the Lord.

Because anything in us is not very steady. And David knows this. Read it again, verse 9. Hide your face from me. My sins, blot out all my iniquities, create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. We have the atonement language, we have the death to the sin nature language, we have the rebirth of a new nature, and we have the implementing, the breath of a new spirit within.

These are the four things that have to happen for a person to be thoroughly cleansed from sin, and that's exactly what David is calling out for. God, block my sin from your sight, blot out all of my iniquity, disposition to iniquity, bestow, put in me a clean heart, and breathe your breath into my being.

So, how can you tell if a person has been cleansed by sin or cleansed of their sin? How can you tell if a person has been cleansed of sin? Well, you'll start seeing a degree of each of these. You'll start seeing an awareness of a need for forgiveness, an awareness of forgiveness.

You'll see the death to the sin nature, there will be a change. In an attitude towards sin, you'll see the rebirth of a new nature, and it'll be a change in an attitude towards what is right. And you'll see evidences of a new strength that is put in there by the very breath of God.

That's how you can tell. You'll start seeing those. You're not seeing evidences of those in your own life. You need to go back to verse 1 and say to your heavenly Father, Be gracious to me, O God, according to your loving kindness, according to the greatness of your compassion, blot out my transgressions, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity.

Just like David did. Listen, unless God blocks our sins from his sight, the guilt of our sin remains. We need atonement. Unless God blots out our iniquity, our crooked nature remains. Unless God bestows a new heart in us, we will never be inclined, truly inclined to his ways.

And unless he breathes his spirit in us, we will have no power to run in his ways. But a soul cleansed from sin experiences. Experiences all of these. Atonement, death to the old desires, a resurrection to new desires and a new spirit. And so David is going to go on, and he is going to show in this Psalm what an empowered life looks like.

We'll look at that on another occasion. Let the bones which you have broken rejoice. Let them leap again. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we can draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, knowing that we will receive mercy and find grace to help in every need that we have.

For you did not spare your own son. Father, you gave us the gift of heaven. You did what only you could do. You hid your eyes from our sin. Something else captivated your attention, and that was the glory and the beauty and the death and the sacrifice of your son.

Father, you have blessed us in so many ways. We see this as the grand testimony of your great love. We marvel at it. And so we are confident to come to the throne of grace, knowing we'll receive mercy for any and everything. If you did not spare your Son and gave him up for us, then we can truly rest in you in every way and in everything.

And so, Father, thank you for this cleansing work. Help us to really believe the gospel. What would we be like if we truly believe these words? Help us, Father, to really understand that our sins are forgiven. Let us run in your way. In Jesus' name, amen.