What If Your Sins Lead To Sorrow? (Psalm 38:1-9)
GIST: Remember: sin stinks, but Jesus restores.
Welcome to our fourth Summer in Psalms! I’m super excited to continue our walk through these songs and prayers… even if it’s going to take us about 15 years to get through them all ☺. Before we dive into the meat of today’s verses, I want you to watch a video I first saw years ago. Tim Hawkin’s is one of my favorite comedians, and he had this hilarious story to tell about...sharing Psalm 38 with his fans ☺. Tim Hawkins on Psalm 38:7 ☺️
~~~
The psalms themselves are packed with raw emotion. There are songs of praise exalting God for His wisdom and protection, and there are prayers of lamentation and penitence which reflect the psalmist’s heart in the darkest moments of his life. The exalting ones are sometimes easier for us to discuss in church, but the penitent ones, as uncomfortable as they can sometimes make us, hit home too because many of us know what it means to cry out to God from the bottom. The psalm we’re coming to first this summer is one of the penitential psalms. Though we don’t know what specifically was happening in David’s life when he wrote this, we do know he was being powerfully affected by his sin. I went back and forth about how much of this to cover this morning, but, as usual, I ended up deciding less is more, so we’re going to focus on just the first 9 verses this morning. Let’s read through it, and then break it down together.
"1 A Psalm of David, for the memorial offering. O LORD, rebuke me not in Your anger, nor discipline me in Your wrath! 2 For Your arrows have sunk into me, and Your hand has come down on me. 3 There is no soundness in my flesh because of Your indignation; there is no health in my bones because of my sin. 4 For my iniquities have gone over my head; like a heavy burden, they are too heavy for me. 5 My wounds stink and fester because of my foolishness, 6 I am utterly bowed down and prostrate; all the day I go about mourning. 7 For my sides are filled with burning, and there is no soundness in my flesh. 8 I am feeble and crushed; I groan because of the tumult of my heart. 9 O Lord, all my longing is before You; my sighing is not hidden from You.”
Here’s our big picture kind of gist for this morning: Remember: sin stinks, but Jesus restores. Now, let’s just walk through these verses together, then we’ll wrap up with some takeaways.
I. Sin Stinks
Look again at verse 1. "1 A Psalm of David, for the memorial offering. O LORD, rebuke me not in Your anger, nor discipline me in Your wrath!” Notice from the beginning here, he’s not asking God not to rebuke him. He feels the weight of his sin. He knows he deserves punishment. He just doesn’t want to face the wrath of God. He’s asking God to be gentle with him. We’ll notice as we move through this, the fact that he’s coming to God with his burdens in the first place points not only to his repentant heart, but also to his view of God. He doesn’t expect God to treat him violently or harshly because he knows that’s not God’s heart.
It still isn’t. God cannot stand sin. He hates it, and He hates what it does to us. Our sin destroys us. He could leave us in that, but He chose not to. He chose instead to take on Hell to rescue us. The same God David asked for gentleness is the One who shows us that compassion still today.
Let’s take the rest as a chunk here. “2 For Your arrows have sunk into me, and Your hand has come down on me. 3 There is no soundness in my flesh because of Your indignation; there is no health in my bones because of my sin. 4 For my iniquities have gone over my head; like a heavy burden, they are too heavy for me. 5 My wounds stink and fester because of my foolishness, 6 I am utterly bowed down and prostrate; all the day I go about mourning. 7 For my sides are filled with burning, and there is no soundness in my flesh. 8 I am feeble and crushed; I groan because of the tumult of my heart. 9 O Lord, all my longing is before You; my sighing is not hidden from You.”
This part is hard for us to read because David is clearly admitting that he is physically suffering as part of God’s discipline. We have very vivid imagery here but no real hints as to what kinds of ailments he was facing. Though some will try to make this about finding a medical diagnosis for David, that’s not the point here. David is crying out to God in a time of great physical despair that he knows is the result of sins he has committed. His pain is real and constant, yet he knows that God fully understands. He says all his longings and sighs are seen by God. His struggle is not overlooked. He has not been forgotten. Neither have you.
That was a pretty quick walk through, but don’t get too excited. I’m going to spend more time in the takeaways this morning because just this portion brings up several points of observation I want us to unpack together.
TAKEAWAYS
The first one we can’t ignore is the question of how illnesses and sins are connected. Here’s the key→
Not all illnesses or struggles are the result of your personal sin… but some are. There is real danger in thinking all sickness or suffering is the result of your personal sin. This is taught in some churches, and it has done a lot of damage. I’ve heard people teach that if you or your kids are sick it’s always a sign that you just don’t have enough faith or you’re harboring unforgiven sin. There is nothing in the Bible that would support that kind of perspective. Remember when Jesus was healing a blind man and His disciples asked whose sin, his or his parent’s, had caused this man to be blind? Jesus responded with, “Neither”. However, when Paul was writing the church in Corinth, he told them people were getting sick and sometimes evening dying because they were abusing the Lord’s Supper. What does that tell us? We can’t err on the side of extremes. There isn’t an unconfessed sin behind every sniffle. However, there are natural results to our sins. If in our sinning, we break laws, we will have to face the results of that. If our sinning leads to us abusing our bodies with drugs or alcohol, we will face those consequences too. And there are times God will discipline us because of our sin to call us away from that destruction. What we have to remember in even those situations, He is gracious and merciful and has a plan and purpose for us because He hasn’t stopped loving us. In fact, the very presence of our discipline points to His love. If He didn’t care, He’d just leave us alone and let us self-destruct.
However, all struggles and pain are the result of sin broadly speaking. Not every struggle you face has a direct correlation to a sin you’ve committed, but every struggle you face is the result of sin in general. Remember, with all of its beauty, this world is messed up and terrible things continue to happen because this is the broken version! If we belong to Jesus though, we look forward to a time when the brokenness will be ultimately made new! In the meantime, as you live in the midst of great brokenness, please remember→
You don’t need to sugarcoat your struggles in prayer. So many of the psalms, and this is a perfect example, remind us of the importance of honesty in prayer. David doesn’t sugar coat what he’s going through. He feels like crap, and in this case, he knows it’s because he’s messed up. Yes, this language is probably more poetic than most of you tend to speak, but this was David’s heart language here. Yes, he was a king, but he was also a poet. He poured out his heart in song, and that’s what he’s doing here. You don’t have to replicate his style, but you should adopt his vulnerability. Too often, we’re guarded in our prayers, or we try to make them sound like we’re reciting something formal. Get unscripted in your prayers. Praise Him with words that mean something when you say them, and when you feel like trash, tell Him straight up. Because→
You do want to bring your sorrow to Jesus...who desires to restore. There is sorrow that leads to despair, and there is sorrow that leads to life. If our sorrow just leaves us in self-pity because we never look beyond our circumstances, we’ll be stuck there. If, however, in our sorrow we turn to the One we know sees our struggles, understands who we are, and loves us extravagantly anyway, we can experience hope. Turn to yourself and stay stuck in the stinky life of sin, or turn to Jesus and experience His forgiveness and restoration.
No comments:
Post a Comment