Psalms 41:4

I said, Lord be merciful to me: heal my soul, for I have sinned against thee.

An excellent prayer

I. He confesses that he is a sinner. The law brings the conviction of sin, but the greatest sin of all is unbelief.

II. He counts sin the disease of the soul--“heal my soul.” Sin affects the soul as disease the body.

III. He views God as the only physician--Lord, heal my soul We cannot heal our own soul; nor can any creatures. The sooner we see and feel this the better. But the Lord heals: “by His stripes we are healed.”

IV. He is also persuaded that nothing but mercy in God will induce him to heal his soul. Here is the only source of our hope. (W. Jay.)

A singular plea in prayer

I. A prayer.

1. “Lord, be merciful unto me.”

(1) It may--I dare say did--mean, at least in part, “Mitigate my pains.” When grieved with sore physical pain, you will find that the quiet resignation, holy patience, and childlike submissiveness which enable you just to pray, “Lord, be merciful unto me,” will often bring a better relief to you than anything that the most skilled physician can prescribe.

(2) He must have meant also, “Forgive my sins.” It is a blessed prayer, and I charge you never to cease from using it in the sense that our Lord taught it to His disciples,!” Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.”

(3) I think that David also meant, “Fulfil thy promises.” “Thou hast said of the man who considers the poor, ‘The Lord will deliver him in time of trouble.’ Lord, be merciful unto me, and deliver me in the time of my trouble, Thou hast said, ‘The Lord will preserve him, and keep him alive.’ Lord, be merciful unto me, preserve me, and keep me alive. Thou hast said that Thou wilt not deliver him unto the will of his enemies; Lord, be merciful unto me, and guard me from my foes. Thou wilt strengthen him upon the bed of languishing; Lord, be merciful unto me, and strengthen me. Thou wilt make all his bed in his sickness; Lord, make my bed.”

2. “Heal my soul.” David does not pray, “Heal my eye; heal my foot; heal my heart; heal me, whatever my disease may be”; but he goes at once to the root of the whole matter, and prays, “Heal my soul.”

(1) “Heal me, Lord, of the distress of my soul.”

(2) “Lord, heal my soul of the effect of sin.”

(3) “Heal me of my tendency to sin.”

II. A confession. “I have sinned against Thee.”

1. It is a confession without an excuse.

2. It is a confession without any qualification. He does not say, “Lord, I have sinned to a certain extent; but, still, I have partly balanced my sins by my virtues, and I hope to wipe out my faults with my tears.” No; he says, “I have sinned against Thee,” as if that were a full description of his whole life.

3. It is without affectation. I like a man, when he makes a confession of sin, not to be carried away into the use of proud expressions without meaning, but to speak with judgment, and to acknowledge and confess only what is true. This is the excellence of David’s confession, that he owns to what no sinner will ever admit till the grace of God makes him do it: “I have sinned against Thee.”

III. A plea. “I said, Lord, be merciful unto me: heal my soul.” Why? “For I have sinned against Thee.” That is a very remarkable way of pleading, but it is the only right one.

1. It is such a plea as no self-righteous man would urge. The Pharisee keeps to this strain, “Lord, be merciful unto me, for I have been obedient, I have kept thy law.” O foolish, self-righteous man, do you not see that you are shutting the door in your own face? You say, in effect, “Be merciful unto me, for I do not need any mercy.”

2. This is such a plea as a carnal reasoner could not urge, for he could not spy out any reason or argument in it. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Sin’s disease

I. Sin is a soul disease.

1. Of the understanding.

2. Of the affections.

3. Of the conscience.

4. Of the will.

II. God alone can heal it.

1. We must feel our malady, and--

2. Our impotence.

3. We must recognize His power, and--

4. Trust His mercy. (W. W. Whyte.)

The inveterateness of sin

Sin, we are told, is a survival; and that reverses and explodes all the traditional Christian theology. It is, they say, the effort of some past condition to assert itself when its day is over. It may be even a belated virtue which was once a true formula, under which we succeeded in securing our existence. For it has become a vice, in that it would hold us down at a lower level than that which lies open to us. It haunts us with strange and awful memories, it imprisons us with instinctive hopes which we should have forgotten and overgrown; it strikes against its own institution. It has old refuges in the blood and tissue, from out of which it refuses to be wrung. It has a dim, end-of-the-world impulse to appeal to. No wonder it is hard to beat it under. It carries on its subterranean war like the pagan deities of old, beneath the surface triumphant still. That is sin, according to this interpretation. Sin is the shadow cast out of the past; it reveals the law, out of which we have climbed to the new day. Still it sucks us down, and menaces, and defiles; but its death is sure; the future is against it; its sentence has gone out. There may be many a disloyal recrudescence of its ancient mischief; there will be strange moments when a sort of atavism will enable it to occupy lost ground; there may be even partial degradations, in which the higher will succumb to the lower. But the whole trend of life is upward, and under this sin will sink and disappear, for life is not a fail, but a rise, sin is that which is for ever being left behind. Now, of course, if this is the true account of sin, we had better wipe out the entire Bible story. Let us consider what that would mean. It would not be merely an abandonment of some obsolete dogma, nor would it be to realize all real living facts over against some blind authority. Rather it would mean the surrender of the widest, and deepest and most prolonged accumulation of human experience in the things of the living spirit that the world has ever known. Is there any statement more completely falsified by every scrap that we know of our own inward life than the one which pronounces that sin is the merest survival? That is just the sort of illusion with which we all begin, and which all further experience explodes. We fancy at first that sin is a misfortune, an accident, a weak surrender, to some invading and hostile attack. We never lived it, we are not of that sort, we know our own rightness of intention, our innate goodness in our best self. We will face and wipe off this wrong which has besmirched us. It is so unworthy of us and so unlike us. And now we have confessed and repented and we are ourselves again. We shall be stronger when next assailed. These will die away of themselves. How futile! how ignorant! how wrong! The old, old story repeats itself; the relapse recurs with strange regularity; the moral strength just breaks at the crisis when it ought to stand. Always the thing, somehow, is too much for it; always we do again that very thing that we had forsworn for ever. Why the strange persistent failure? Why this tremor at the heart? Why is the hand still put out to pluck that which we know to be forbidden? Why do the feet turn again down the paths which lead to death? Again it is the old cause--the thing that I ought to do I do not; the thing that I would not, that I do. And does this mean that we have not got at the root of the matter, that it is not the outside accident which we hope, that it is a monotonous revelation of a wrong that works by a regular law? It is I and not something that is upon me that is responsible for this disorder. Why cannot I do what I want? I, who seem to myself so inherently good, so thoroughly well-meaning, so far above these degradations, so resolute in my determination? I am somehow guilty. O miserable man that I am! O my God, it is I that have sinned against Thee and done this evil in Thy sight. Your sin will not disappear of itself. You will never grow out of it; it is too deep, too intimate, too personal for that. It will reappear within when you have expelled it from without. You are powerless. But you have the witness in yourself that sin and you can never agree. Sin is not your true life, but your death, and in the strength of that inner weakness you have force and right to appeal to; that invincible love that only waits for your appeal to find its entry. “Have mercy upon me, O God, heal my soul, for I have sinned against Thee.” Lift that cry, and the answer is in your ears in the Person of Jesus Christ our Saviour: “I will, be thou clean.” (Canon Scott Holland.)