Let's stand together as I read the words of the Scriptures. We're in the 51st Psalm yet again, and this is the heart of the Psalter, the Hebrew hymn book, Psalm 51. Hear the words of the Lord. 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. 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 in the inward being and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. Purge me with hissep and I shall be clean, wash me and I shall be wider than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence. 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 will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart. O Lord, O God, you will not despise. Do good to Zion in your good pleasure. Build up the walls of Jerusalem and then will you delight in right sacrifice is in burnt offerings and the whole burnt offerings. Then bulls will be offered on your altar. The word of the Lord, you may be seated. But by now we're all familiar with the background of this particular psalm. David has committed the sin against the Lord in sinning against the Lord. He broke several of the commandments against coveting against adultery against murder. He had brought shame upon himself condemnation upon his house and embarrassment to Israel. He had not only committed adultery with Bathsheba, but he had ordered Eureia murdered in the battle and he had covered it up and he had allowed other men to be killed in the battle. And he had thought lightly of his sin and the prophet Nathan came into him, telling him a simple story and then accusing David. And when David realized when the spirit of God broke his heart, he realized his sin. He poured out his heart in confession and this is that confession. In that confession, he pleads to the Lord for many things. Mark Davis and I have studied through this together says he's counted 17 things that David asked for in the psalm, 17 petitions in this prayer. But as he has recognized his condition before the Lord and before the law of God and before the people of God and before the prophet of God, he has been humbled and broken. And he pours out his heart pleading for forgiveness, mercy, asking the Lord to do that, which the Lord has promised to do, pleading with the Lord to keep covenant faithfulness, according to thy loving kindness, your covenant love and faithfulness. Forgive me of my sin. David is pleading for a restoration of his soul and he remembers that psalm in the valley. He restored my soul. David had been through the deepest, darkest valley. The valley of sin, the valley of sin is the valley whose consequences is death. The wages of sin is death. David knew his blood, guiltiness. He knew his condemnation. He knew the death sentence that was upon his soul. And now as he realizes, as the spirit of God breaks him and as the tears flow from his face, like the prophet Jeremiah, he said, my head is a fountain, broken up with tears flooding down my face. As David has been appentant before the Lord in humble confession of his sin. The tears have purged. The tears have washed away the sorrow as the blood of Christ washes away the stain and the guilt. And David knew out there that there was a better day. He said, let me hear joy and gladness. David knew a happy day with the Lord. David knew a day of conversion. He knew when there was a day when he had put his faith in trust in the Lord and the Lord had lifted the burden and the Lord had broken through the clouds as it were and the light of the glorious gospel had shown into his heart. And he had believed and received and had been greatly blessed. He knew the warmth and he knew the vigor of the conversion of the spirit of God coming upon him. He knew the strength, the inner strength that comes from faith. He knew the joy and the gladness of serving the Lord. He knew what it meant to have his sins forgiven to have his transgressions taken away. And now the Lord begins to restore his soul, restoring the joy of his salvation. That was his prayer. Verse 12, restore to me the joy of your salvation. David apparently was a very emotional person. He just could not live. He could not live without having peace in his heart and joy in his innermost being. He just could not live with himself until God did the work of restoring his soul. And this is exactly what takes place. And I'll tell you when it took place. I'll look back to the story found there in 2nd Samuel, chapter 12. And after Nathan came in to David and told him that he was the man and David realized his sins and Nathan told him all of the things that would be the consequence of his sins. Then there's this little verse. It's an exchange. It's verse 13 of chapter 12 of 2nd Samuel. David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. That's his confession. I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said to David, the Lord also has put away your sin. Blessed is the man whose sins are forgiven. Those transgressions have been taken away. The man that hears, the person that hears, the man, woman, boy or girl that hears, there is therefore now no condemnation. The person that hears the Lord say, coming to me and I will give you rest. The person that hears within their soul, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. The very divine Father that had been most defended in David's sin had provided a means of atonement, a propitiation for that sin. And David's sin was purged, forgiven, unknowed, blotted out, stricken from the records, removed as the far as the east is from the west and remembered against him no more. If David now stood before his righteous judge, there would be no evidence to convict him because the evidence had been plunged into the depths of the sea. That's where your sins are in Christ. When God forgives you your sins he remembers them against you no more. When God forgives your sins they are gone. Your sin is taken away. The ceremonies of the law were quite elaborate in places and one of the most elaborate places was in the particular ceremony that involved a couple of goats. They would bring a couple of goats in and one goat they would slay and shed his blood for an atoning sacrifice. But the other goat, the priest, the high priest, would take his hands and place it upon the head the old scruffy, gnarly, bony head of that goat and pronounce the sins of the people laid upon that goat. And that goat then would be released into the wilderness outside the camp, turn loose in the wild. That goat was the scape goat. That goat scaped and was gone and it represented the removal of sins. The goat that died represented the atonement, the covering of sin. The goat that was the scape goat into the wilderness represented the removal of sin. Why must God remove our sins from us and not just forgive us? Some people think the forgiveness of God is just kind of a wink and nod. Where God says in some celestial way, I don't worry about it. No worry about it. I'm a big God. I can take a little offense. I'm not offended by a wayward child. I'm not offended by a strange person. A little bit of breaking of the law here. A little bit of disobedience there. A little bit of rebellion over here. I'm a big God. I can take it. Don't worry about it. I'll dismiss it. It's not the way God considers sin. God considers sin to be a violation of his authority, his sovereignty, a violation of his character. God cannot tolerate sin. He cannot look upon sin. He is a too pure of eyes to behold aiquity, says the prophet. God's got to get rid of it. But first, it must be paid for, and thus the atonement of Jesus Christ in taking our sins to the cross. But then sin must be gotten rid of, removed, taken away, put away, hence the burial of Christ, taking our sins to the grave, burying them there, covering them there, leaving them there, where they belong. Lages of sin is death. Take it where death takes you. Take it to the grave. That's why the gospel is the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus. How what the Psalmist David's talking about is the resurrection, the resurrection, the bringing to life of that stricken, smitten, contrite soul, the re-energizing and the recreating of that broken heart, the putting back together of the pieces of the broken life. Have you ever been broken spiritually speaking? I'm not talking about if you've been broke financially, at some most have been there. But I'm talking about your spiritual life. Have you ever been at that place where you feel like you've come to the end of yourself, the end of your abilities, and the absolute dead in street of all your possibilities? And when you were there, if you were there, did you look up and cry out to the Lord?
And if you did, cry out to the Lord. When you cried out to the Lord, did he hear you? Did he come? Did he heal? Did he restore? Did he take the hand and dry the tears from your eyes? You see, that's what salvation is all. One day it's going to ultimately be summed up in one little statement. God will wipe away every tear, every tear, everything that breaks us. God can fix everything that makes us sick. And we talked last week about the sickness of sin in our life. God can heal, and he does it. And all we do is ask. All we do is call upon him, whosoever calleth upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. And when we call upon the Lord, he hears our prayer, he saves our souls, he forgives us our sins, and he begins to restore the joy to us. Putting back into our hearts that peace. As David says here, putting a back on our lips and in our mouths, the song of praises and testimony. And we'll sing, oh, for a thousand tongues to sing. My great redeemer's praise, the glories of my God and keep. See, that's what he wants us to do. And that's what he does for us. There is joy, the deepest kind of joy. The thing that Paul keeps calling on the church at Philippi when he says rejoice, rejoice, rejoice. Again, I say rejoice over and over and over. This rejoicing that we find in the book of Peter that we've just studied, that we find in other places where God calls that joy is what the Lord gives us. There is joy in sins forgiven. There is joy in a clean heart and a renewed spirit. There is joy in serving the Lord. There is joy in testifying and speaking to our neighbors about what God has done for us. And we, like the early apostles, cannot help but speak that which we've seen and heard in our own hearts. Restoring joy. Putting it back. David described this many ways. One of the ways he describes it and one of the songs says you've picked me up out of a myry pit and you put me up on a solid rock. Another way he describes you taking me and hidden me in the cleft of a rock. You see our Lord, one of the earliest motifs in the Bible describing God is that of a rock. We sing the song on Christ, the solid rock I stand. There's something about being on solid ground spiritually that leads us to be on solid ground emotionally and that might even manifest itself in being on solid ground physically and in many other ways. The little phrase I like the most in other, just so much in this song, it's so rich, but this little phrase here just really does say it all, verse 14, oh God, oh God of my salvation. He ascribes his salvation to the Lord and he describes God as a savior. It's literally what he's saying. One who delivers, one who rescues the fallen. Let me ask as I close, what what's the condition of your heart? We need to take inventory.
We need to ask the Spirit of God to search our hearts, to know us, to try us, to see if there be any wicked way in us, to lead us in the way everlasting. We need to ask the Lord to restore our souls, to bring back the joy. I'm not talking about just a cheap and temporary thrill. I'm talking about a lasting eternal joy, a rejoicing in this veil of tears that will lead to a rejoicing and singing around the eternal throne forever and ever. Don't you love the Lord? Don't you love the Lord because He's done this for you. He's shown you your sin. He's made provision of atonement for your sin. He's taken away your sin. He has forgiven you and He's put joy, joy, real joy in your heart. Don't you love the Lord for doing that for you? We're talking about your spiritual well-being, your emotional well-being. You need this. If you don't have it pray before you leave this house this morning, God will give it to you. Come to the table expecting it.