Psalms 51:4

Psalms 51:4

Modern blasphemy delights to blacken "the man after God's own heart." His wasa terrible fall, terrible as well as piteous. He, so blameless in youth could he, when life had begun to set, be stained so miserably through the passions of youth? It is an intense mystery of sin that man should admit so black a spot where all around was so fair; it is an intenser mystery of God's love that He should have arrested so black a spot from spreading, and overcasting, and infecting the whole.

I. In one way the sin was irremediable. It changed David's eternal condition. David, like the blest robber, the first-fruits of the redeeming blood of Jesus, is, through those same merits, glorious with the indwelling glory of God; yet his soul, doubtless one of the highest of much-forgiven penitents, is still a soul which, by two insulated acts, broke to the uttermost God's most sacred laws of purity and of love.

II. How then was he restored? Grace had been sinned away. He was left to his natural self. He had still that strong sense of justice and hatred of the very sins by which he had fallen, which responded so quickly and so indignantly against cruelty and wrong when called out by Nathan's parable. He must have had remorse. Remorse is the fruit of the most condescending love of our God. Neglected or stifled, it is the last grace by which God would save the soul; it is the first by which God would prepare the soul which has forfeited grace to return to Him.

III. But remorse, although a first step to repentance, is not repentance. For remorse centres in a man's self. While it is mere remorse it does not turn to God. And so God, in His love, sent to David the prophet, the very sight of whom might recall to him the mercies of God in the past, His promises for the future, and the memory of those days of innocent service and bright aspirations to which the soul overtaken by sin looks back with such sorrowful yearning. The heavy stone which lay on the choked, dead heart was rolled away; the dead was alive again; the two-edged sword of God's word, judgment and mercy, had slain him to himself that he might live to God. The awakened soul burst forth in those two words, "I have sinned against the Lord." Then was remorse absorbed, transformed, spiritualised into penitent love.

IV. But this was the beginning of the renewed life of the soul, not the end. It issued in a constant longing for a recreation, a reverent fear springing from the sense of what it had deserved, an earnest craving for a more thorough cleansing from every stain or spot of sin, a thirst for the purging by the atoning blood, an unvarying sight of his forgiven sinfulness, spreading far and wide from the core of original sin, a longing to do free, noble, generous service, and all from God to God, from God's re-creating, renewing, enfreedoming, ennobling grace.

E. B. Pusey, Cambridge Lent Sermons,1864, p. 163.

Reference: Psalms 51:4. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ii., No. 86.