Psalm 51: Longing for a New Start

Do you ever wish you could have a life mulligan?  A mulligan being the golf term that allows for a stroke to not be counted.  When you take a bad swing and can pretend it never happened.  In fact, you can just put down a new ball right away and start over.  Have you ever wanted to be able to do this with life?  With words you have said or choices you have made?

I have.  In fact, I have bene thinking some lately about my 20 years serving at Lake Ave Church and the many moments I would love to have a do-over.  The conversations I would do differently, the reactions I would control better, and the many times I served from my own sense of strength and conviction rather than the Lord’s.

December 2007 was one I think about often.  When my emotions took over and while at Winter Camp when I inappropriately and immaturely reacted and responded to a high school student in ways that shamed him in front of his friends and peers.  I will remember that moment forever and I will also hold the grace and kindness of that same student who was able to forgive me years later when I apologized. 

I have more.  And because you and I are both human, you have more too.  Because part of being human both the reality of our sinful nature that hurts ourselves and others – but paired right next to the reality of the sin, is the longing for a new start, for forgiveness, for freedom. 

Our longing is connected to all of human history, and as we have been looking at this summer, the Psalms are an ancient text that still speak to our modern longings and today we will look at Psalm 51 and the longing for a new start.  To want the new start, we need to acknowledge what we want a new start from.  Psalm 51 has been so helpful to me in this regard, and I pray it will be for you as well.

Context of the Psalms and of Psalm 51

The Psalms: 

• Wisdom Books: human beings expressing to God what it is like to live in God’s world. The human experience of following God.
• Full expression is communicated: joy, lament, thanksgiving, fear, blame, trust, lack of faith, full of faith…
• Poetry: human expressions / art.

Psalm 51:

• A Psalm of Penitence (regret and sorrow for what one has done against God, repentance)
• Superscription gives us context: David after Nathan confronts him for sleeping with Bathsheba and having her husband Uriah killed.
• This is the context of regret and sorrow of the Psalm)
• This is the motivation in the poetry – the words written come from the human experience of having done something wrong, regretting them, and now desiring what we all desire – a clean start, forgiveness, and freedom from what one has done.

How do we study this part of the Bible?  How do we study art?  For me: I have attempted to be saturated in the art and have found a few themes, a few movements of the Psalm that can help us address the desire and longing for the fresh start. 

Psalm 51 is an ancient expression that can be our expression too.  How we talk to God when we have done wrong and we desire to for the new start, the forgiveness and freedom that God offers. 

There are 3 Movements of Psalm 51:  Self-Awareness, Knowledge of God and God’s Ways, and Forward Commitments. 

First:

1. Self-Awareness (1-6)

¹ Have mercy on me, O God,
    according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
    blot out my transgressions.
² Wash away all my iniquity
    and cleanse me from my sin.

³ For I know my transgressions,
    and my sin is always before me.
⁴ Against you, you only, have I sinned
    and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
    and justified when you judge.
⁵ Surely I was sinful at birth,
    sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
⁶ Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb;
    you taught me wisdom in that secret place.

• For David to be self-aware he needed his friend Nathan to show him his sin in 2 Samuel 12:7, “You are the man”.
• Once confronted with sin, the Psalmist shows their awareness of their sin and they are not hiding from them.
• Our world, when confronted with sin, justification and excuse can be our reactions. We see none of this in Psalm 51.  We see someone not blaming others nor blaming God at all.  We see a self-aware man who knows what they have done.
• Dr. John Goldingay’s commentary on this has been helpful, he suggests 3 areas of awareness of the Psalmist.

Aware of Rebellion (1, 3, 13)

• Image of a child and parent, when the child knows what is expected and willingly chooses to go in a different direction away from how they have been raised.
• Refusal and denial of what is right, what is expected.

Aware of Waywardness (2,5,9)

• Our translation today uses the words “Iniquity” in verses 2 and 9 and “sinful” in verse 5.
• These words all communicate the same idea of waywardness – which is a word we do not often use these days.
• It communicates the idea of deliberately choosing the wrong. Not mindless sin, but intentional sin and intentional choices to go against the ways of God.

Aware of Failure (2-5, 9, 13)

• Consistent throughout the Psalm, remember the superscription…
• Speaks to the moral sin, the moral failure to human beings but links that moral failure to failure to God.
• Verse 4: Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight;”
• Awareness that sin to other people is rooted in sin to God.
• We can apologize to others more easily than we can apologize to God… because we are mindful of seeing that person or wondering what they think about us. Do we think the same way about God?

Self-Awareness of Rebellion, Waywardness, and Failure.  And the poetry moves in verses 5 and 6 to fully own it all.  “I was sinful at birth” and “you desired faithfulness”

Superscription can thwart us… our human nature might read this as a Psalm for really really bad people.  People who give into lust, get another woman pregnant, and have her husband killed.  This Psalm is for them, and not for me.  Notice that the Psalmist never speaks about the specific sin and this Psalm made our Bible.  It is not just this Psalmist who needs to be aware of their rebellion to God, their waywardness away from God, and their moral failures to God himself – for this Psalm is for Israel as well – because they also have done all these things too… and beyond them, this Psalm is for me… for you… and for us.  Because we too must become aware of the ways in which we sin, the ways in which we choose away from God.

But to be self-aware of sin, we have to be aware of who God is, the standard we are reflecting against.  So, the second movement of the Psalm is:

2. Knowledge of God and God’s Ways (7-12)

⁷ Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;
    wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
⁸ Let me hear joy and gladness;
    let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
⁹ Hide your face from my sins
    and blot out all my iniquity.

¹⁰ Create in me a pure heart, O God,
    and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
¹¹ Do not cast me from your presence
    or take your Holy Spirit from me.
¹² Restore to me the joy of your salvation
    and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

God Cleanses Our Sin (7,9)

• Cleanse white as snow: not a landscape image but a laundry one
• Scrubbing clean, abrasive image not a magical disappearance image

God Speaks Forgiveness (8)

• We all need to hear “you are alright”
• Story: with Jenny after a heated discussion, “are we okay?”  YES
• God does this…Let me hear your joy and gladness!

God Creates and Recreates Us (10-12)

• New act of creation (10)
• Spiritual presence (11)
• Spiritual support (12)

The final movement of the Psalm is what

3. Forward Commitments (13-19)

¹³ Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
    so that sinners will turn back to you.
¹⁴ Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God,
    you who are God my Savior,
    and my tongue will sing of your righteousness.
¹⁵ Open my lips, Lord,
    and my mouth will declare your praise.
¹⁶ You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;
    you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
¹⁷ My sacrifice, O God, is^[b] a broken spirit;
    a broken and contrite heart
    you, God, will not despise.

¹⁸ May it please you to prosper Zion,
    to build up the walls of Jerusalem.
¹⁹ Then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous,
    in burnt offerings offered whole;
    then bulls will be offered on your altar

Commitment to Proclamation (13-15)

• Publicly sharing about who God is and what is has done (His Ways)

Commitment to Devotion (16-19)

• True devotion away from institutional religion to being a humble person following God (broken spirit and contrite heart)

Application Questions

1. Do you have regular space for self-reflection?

• Life is full and fast, where is the space to reflect?
• Space to own your sin?
• Voices to help you?

2. Are you growing in your love for God AND God’s Ways?

• We can know something true about God and yet, not know his ways
  • Bachelor show this week: I have had sex and Jesus loves me
  • TRUE statement but, does not acknowledge God’s Ways
• What have you learned lately? Unlearned lately?
• How is God growing you, challenging you?
• Difference between youth ministry and what I do now: teenagers want challenge… want growth… want to see how Jesus changes and challenges everything. Adults struggle to want this and can push against it… their knowledge of God is formed and full.

3. What are your commitments to God moving forward?

Forward Commitments are declarations of what life is about… from Psalm 51 we see that life is about proclamation of God and devotion to God.  Do you know what your life is about?  Do you know what following God is about?

4. Do you hear Psalm 51 for yourself or someone else in your life?

Blame world.  We look at others more than the mirror.  We can spend more time thinking about who we know needs Psalm 51 than reading it for ourselves.