Immanuel Sermon Audio
Psalm 51
We're going to walk through Psalm 51 this morning. Before we jump in, let me mention this. Some of you who are in the youth, teenagers or adults, I've seen these in your Bible and I've also seen them in some of you grown-ups in your Bible. Hunter made these and I think he set them out on the youth ministry table, gave them to some of the youth, maybe on a Wednesday nights. This is a Bible reading plan through the book of Psalms and it's going to basically run the entire time that we're studying the book of Psalms on Sunday mornings. So it's not going to necessarily track with the Psalms that we're talking about week to week. You're not going to read them in that order because we're going out of order in our series. But if you're interested in this, there was some of them out on the table I know this morning, they may be gone, but we'll make some more and we'll put them out. And if you're interested in reading through the book of Psalms as we're studying it on Sunday mornings, that would be a great tool for you to use. So those will be out in the lobby if we're out of them this morning, we'll put some more out there next week. Psalm 51, we're just going to jump right in. It's one of seven penitential Psalms in the book of Psalms. So it's a penitential Psalm and the other penitential Psalms are six, 32, 38, 102, 130 and 143. Penitent is not a word that we use in everyday vocabulary in our everyday language. So basically the idea of being penitent means that you're sorrowful, you're remorseful, you're regretful, you're moved when it's used in a religious context to repentance. And so these seven Psalms are, you could call them Psalms of repentance, Psalms that express repentance. And when you look at that list, Psalm 51 goes with Psalm 32. I know they're separated from each other, I know they don't back up to each other and I know they're out of order and how we're going to study them, at least numerically, but they do go together, Psalm 51 first and then Psalm 32 next. And so next week, if you do want to get ahead, you can read Psalm 32. But look at Psalm 51 in your Bible, I want to point out one thing to you, Cory may have mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but before you actually get to verse one and Psalm 51, there's some typing in my Bible, it's in all capital letters and yours, it might be formatted a little bit differently. I'm not talking about the heading, a lot of Bible translations will put a sort of an added on heading above each individual Psalm, but I'm talking about the words right above verse one and they say to the choir master, a psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba. A lot of Psalms, not all of them, but many have these historical sort of details, these notes added on and I just want you to understand, those are not added by Bible translators. That's part of the actual Psalm. Sometimes it gives you some historical information about what was going on in the life of the person who wrote it or in the life of Israel when it was written. Sometimes it will give you musical information about you need to sing it to this tune or we sing this song in church with this instrument. Sometimes it will tell you who the author is or who it was written for and this note is interesting. It says it was written for the choir master, meaning when David wrote this, he wrote it for corporate worship to be sung by the people of God together. David is the author and the historical note is of importance. It says that this was related to David's affair with Bathsheba when Nathan came in rebuked him. Just to make sure we're on the same page, let's talk about the back story. The back story of Psalm 51, you can read later in 2 Samuel 11 to 12. David was the second king of Israel and one year we're going to make sort of a long story pretty short. One year when he was supposed to go out and lead his army in battle, he decided to stay home and not to do what the king was supposed to do and he saw a woman and he decided to have an affair with this woman and her name was Bathsheba and one small sin of omission not doing what he was supposed to do, not going out to lead his army in battle led to an entire long, dramatic, drawn out, horrendous trail of sins of commission and so one sin of omission led to a devastating sin of commission. He broke all 10 commandments. He destroyed a family. He permanently hurt his family and he brought trouble on his nation. You can read the details later. Maybe the worst part of all that happened in that moment is that David did not feel very penitent about any of it. He didn't feel bad about any of it. He didn't really see a problem in it. So God sent a man named Nathan and he used Nathan to bring David to repentance. The way that Nathan brought David to repentance, if you've read 2 Samuel 11 to 12, you remember the story, Nathan went to David with a story and the story is pretty simple. Story about a lamb. Nathan says to David, "David, once upon a time, it was a rich man. The rich man had many lambs, he had much money, he had property, he had homes, he was a rich man." So there was also a poor man and the poor man did not have very much. He did have one lamb and it wasn't just a lamb, it was like the family pet. They loved this lamb. This rich man had guests come to his home and as was the custom in this culture, he knew he had to entertain these guests, he had to welcome them, he had to feed them but instead of taking one of his own many lambs and slaughtering it and serving it for dinner, he went to the poor man and took the poor man's only lamb and he killed it and they had it for dinner. That's the story, David. David was outraged, he thought this was the worst story he'd ever heard. In fact, David went so far before Nathan could even finish, David went so far as to say that rich man deserves to die for his sin. And then if you've read the story, you remember what comes next. Nathan looked at him in the eyeballs and what did he say? You're the man, you did it. In the very next verses that followed, David says something striking, it's in 2 Samuel and he says in chapter 12 verse 13 I have sinned against the Lord, the light bulb goes off. It's moment of realization. After he repented, he wrote Psalm 51. And next week we're going to see how out of Psalm 51 flows Psalm 32 and we'll talk about the connection there next week. But let's start by reading Psalm 51. You follow along in your Bible, starting with a note to the choir master, Psalm of David. When Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba, and 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. Where 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 conceived me, behold, you delight in truth in the inward being and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart, purge me with hyssop, 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 and 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, sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. Do good design in your good pleasure, build up the walls of Jerusalem, then you will delight in right sacrifices in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings, then bowls will be offered on your altar, let's pray. Father, as we look at David's life and we think about his sin and we think about his repentance described here in Psalm 51, we simply pray that you would help us to see ourselves as we truly are, help us to understand our sin for what it is, help us to see the consequences of it, Father, we pray that you would help us to see the beauty and the glory and the amazing reality that is salvation through Jesus Christ and we see it in Psalm 51 and we pray that you would open our eyes to it this morning. Father, for those of us who are followers of Jesus, help us to have a deeper appreciation for your salvation and for the things that you've done to save us from our sins and Father, for those in the room who are not followers of Jesus, we pray that you would open their eyes to the truth this morning and we pray it all in Jesus' name, amen. There's a lot we could talk about in Psalm 51. We could spend weeks upon weeks breaking down the things that David says here. We're going to try to take more of a big picture approach and cover as much of it as we can this morning. We're going to ask a couple of questions. The first question is this. What does Psalm 51 teach us about sin? I want you to just think about a few of these words that are mentioned multiple times in Psalm 51. Just as a preview for next week, you're going to see the exact same words next week in Psalm 32, but think about these words. First one is transgression. It's in verse 1, it's in verse 3, it's in verse 13. It describes intentionally crossing a boundary that you've been told not to cross. So you can go back in history and you can think about January 10, 49 B.C., Julius Caesar is marching towards Rome and he comes up to the Rubicon River and he knows the Roman Senate has told him don't cross the river. Keep your legions north of the river and what does he do? He crosses and he knows when I cross this river, I'm defying the Senate, I'm declaring civil war in Rome. That's a transgression and the Bible says you and I do the exact same thing. It's as if God has drawn a line in the sand and he says don't cross it. Crossing this line means a declaration of war and what do we do? Like any child told not to do something, we toe right up to that line, we look God in the face and we step across. That's a transgression. David uses the word iniquity, it's in verse 2, it's in verse 5, it's in verse 9, it's the idea of perverting something, of taking something good and twisting it until it's no longer good and in the context of Psalm 51, the particular idea of iniquity relates to marriage. Listen, the Bible says that God created marriage, he created everything that goes along with marriage, he created it, he planned it, he said it's very good and David takes that very good gift and he starts to twist it and it doesn't start with full out all on adultery immediately, it starts in his heart, it begins to be twisted, it begins to be perverted. That's iniquity. Then he uses the word sin multiple times, verse 2, verse 4, verse 5, verse 9, verse 13. Sin is the idea, you've heard this before, it's an archery term, it's the idea that you've missed the mark. God has set the target up for you, he showed you what to aim for and you didn't hit the target. So he talks about transgression, he talks about iniquity and he talks about sin. Here's the takeaway, here's why these three words matter to you. Number one, sin affects the way that we approach God. We like to think it doesn't, we like to think we're still buddies with God, we like to think we can still just chum up with him, it's not that way. The first thing that David says in Psalm 51 when he's realized the horrendous thing that he's done, the light bulbs gone off, he sees the sin as it truly is, the first thing he says is have mercy on me, have mercy on me. God give me what I don't deserve and please don't give me what I do deserve, have mercy on me. You think about a Psalm like Psalm 23, we're going to talk about Psalm 23 in this series where he says the Lord is who's shepherd, the Lord is my shepherd. Then use that pronoun in Psalm 51. He doesn't come to God saying you're my God, look how he comes to him, have mercy on me, oh God, not my God, oh God. That's important. Throughout the book he calls God my God, my God, you're my God, you're our God. And here in the depth of realizing and recognizing the sin, he doesn't presume to say that he just comes to him as God, have mercy on me, oh God, it affects the way we approach God. Secondly, it's a heart issue. It's a heart issue. David's done a lot of bad stuff at this point in his life. He's committed adultery and he's committed murder and he's created a national conspiracy and he's lied about it and he's affected his family and many, many, many people have been touched by this. But the biggest problem, verse 10, is that he needs a clean heart. His heart is the problem. Verse 17, the thing that God is looking for is a contrite heart. One is really a heart issue. That's true for David and it's true for you. We like to think about all of the bad things that we do as sin. More foundational is the Bible is the fact that you are a sinner. And then we even go back and we try to get those flipped around and we say, well, I know I'm a sinner because I do bad things. I do these bad things. That's why I'm a sinner and the Bible says, no, you've got to take that and flip it. You do the bad things because you are a sinner. The problem is not all the things that you do. The problem is, are you ready for it? You. And me, it's a heart issue. So you can't fix your sin problem by changing your behavior. You can't go through some sort of discipline program and sort of change the things that you do and the things that you say. You can change all that external stuff, all that outward stuff. You can't change you in your heart. It's a heart issue. Number three is primarily an offense against God. This is a shocking truth and a lot of people don't like it. Usually the people don't like it are the people who have been sinned against. Psalm 51-4 against you and you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. Think about the people David has sinned against in this instance. He sinned against his army by not leading them into battle, sinned against his nation by not doing what a king ought to do. He sinned against himself by giving himself over to lust, sinned against Bathsheba by putting her in a situation that she had no business being in, sinned against her husband, Uriah, while he was out fighting and David is not fighting by having a affair with his wife, sinned against his generals by bringing them into the whole thing and using them as pawns to kill this man to cover up his sin, sinned against his own family, his own children, his own wife, and here he has the audacity after sinning against all those people. Just before he says against you and against you only have I sinned. Listen, David understood that he sinned against other people. He got it. He knew it. He's using a sort of exaggerated way of talking here to say, "Way more significant than the fact that I've sinned against you and you and you is the fact that I've sinned against God." If you don't get that, you're not ready to be done with sin. You're not ready to come to Christ. As long as you think of sin as just sort of these bad things that you do and some of those bad things affect other people negatively, you don't get sinned yet. The biblical picture of sin is that yes, sometimes it's against your neighbor and yes, sometimes it's against yourself, but it's always against God. It's primarily an offense against God. Verse 4, "It's with us from birth," verse 5, "Translations vary a little bit here in the ESV. It says I was brought forth in iniquity." I think the NIV says, "I was sinful from birth," and he's using poetic language in a poem, in a song, to say, "This has been a problem for a long time." It's not just a result of, "I had bad upbringing," it's not just a result of, "I had a disadvantage in environment growing up," this is not just, "I have some bad influences in my life," this is something that has been with me from the very, very beginning. There's a great theologian who wrote a song about this, and I thought about playing it for you, but I'm not going to do that, that theologian's name was Bob Dylan, and Bob Dylan wrote a song, he wrote a song called "Saved," and here's the first line of the song. "I was blinded by the devil, born, already ruined, stone, cold, dead, as I stepped out of the womb." You don't have to like Bob Dylan to understand and to see he got that straight out of Psalm 51. The problem has been with us from birth, and it's a hard issue, and it's an offense against God. Lastly, fifth, sin leads to more sin. I know that in your brain and in my brain we sort of tell ourselves this lie that says, "One more sin and then I'll be done with it. I need to do it one more time or I need to do one more thing and then I'm going to cover it up." It doesn't work that way, and you don't necessarily see it spelled out here in Psalm 51, but you see it in 2 Samuel 11, where it's just one sin leads to another, leads to another, leads to another, leads to another, and the only way off of that train is to repent. You're never going to get to a point of neutrality where you just say, "Look, I've got to do it one more time. I've got to be angry with this person one more time and then I won't be angry with them. I've got to tell one more lie and then I won't tell another lie. I've got to get one more dollar and be greedy for one more dollar and then I won't be greedy for any more dollars." It doesn't end. It's like cancer, it grows. It always leads to more sin. So I read Psalm 51, and I think about all the things that it says about sin, right? It's not the most uplifting stuff. You read David's story, it's kind of a downer. You think about how it applies to us. You say, "Yeah, we're not that much different than David," and it's not so encouraging. It reminds me of a football story about a guy named Roy Regles. Roy Regles played football in the 20s. He played for the University of California, and in 1929, Cal played Georgia Tech in the Rose Bowl, and his big game, Rose Bowl Game, you know, that's a big deal. So Cal, Roy Regles' team is playing and they're playing Georgia Tech, and Regles is a defensive player, and so in the first half, he's playing defense, and there comes a run sort of around the left side, and he's over there, and the run comes, and the ball, it's sort of a funny thing. The ball just kind of pops out. You know how that happens in football? A guy just kind of coughs it up, and it's one of those great bounces where Regles is running, and it just sort of right in the bread basket, he picks it up, and he's 30 yards from the end zone, just 30 yards, and he's going to score a touchdown. He's really nobody in his way, and he picks the ball up, and he takes a few steps, and he turns around, and he just runs the wrong way. And you can see his teammates, they're kind of waving, and they're kind of screaming at him, and one of his teammates is really fast, just takes off after him, and catches him on the one yard line before he runs into the wrong end zone. You think I'm making this up, check it out. There he goes, running backs coming around the edge, the ball comes up, I had to cut the video, bounces right up into his hands, and there he goes, stop, stop, stop, watch it one more time. Now you know what's going to happen, 1929, there he goes, he's home free, and he just turns around, stops him on the one yard line, he got tackled on the one yard line, and coach decided, coach Knibbs Price decided, backed up on the one, it was first half score, it was zero, zero, it was a tight game, said I don't want to get a safety called on us, so he said we're going to punt, first down, right, we're going to punt, and he tries to punt and gets blocked out of the back of the end zone, safety, going in half time it's two to nothing. Sad part of this story, I'm just going to go ahead and tell you, because sometimes you hear preachers tell stories, and you think they all, all these stories end with happy endings. They get this safety in the first half, and it's Regal's fault, and in the end they lose the game by one point. That's tough. Here's the happy part of the story, yes, if there is one, they go in the locker room at half time, and Regal's is humiliated, he just, from the stories you read, he just goes to the corner and sits down and he just starts crying, he's embarrassed, he's matted himself, it's the biggest game of his life, and you saw the video, I mean he's home free to a touchdown, and he just, nobody hits him, nobody spins him around, he just, it's a U-turn, he's beating himself up, and so the coach does his best, it's two nothing, they're down, he gives us big, you know, half time speech, we got him, we can do this, hoorah-hoorah. Everybody leaves, and Regal's just sitting in the corner, he's not going out. And the coach, Coach Price, goes over to him and says, "Roy, let's go." And he says, "Coach, I can't." You know, I'm embarrassed, I'm humiliated, disappointed in myself, I can't do it. Coach says, "You know, it was not the best play ever, but we still got the second half. There's still a whole half to play. The game isn't over, so you're going out, and he went out. You get to this point in Psalm 51, if you look through that list of sins that are detailed and what it says about us, and how we apply it to our life, and you just sort of want to go to the corner of the locker room and sit down and cry and think, "Oh my goodness, I'm a worm. That's me." That's not just David, that's me. How embarrassing. How embarrassing did I think one more sin and then I'm going to stop? I believe that. I say that to myself all the time, "How foolish am I? How embarrassing that I've done all these things to hurt all these people in the worst part, it's an offense to God." And Psalm 51 kind of comes over like Coach Price and says, "Look, it's bad. I'm not going to tell you it's no big deal, it's bad, but that's not the end of the story. And so let's ask this question and answer it. What does Psalm 51 teach us about salvation? I gave you three words for sin. I'm going to give you three words used to talk about salvation in Psalm 51, blot, wash, purging cleanse, those two go together depending on your translation. So we'll start with blot. It's in verse one and it's in verse nine. And the idea behind this word is that you have canceled a debt. You've canceled a debt. Somebody owed you and the debt has been paid, the debt has been canceled, it's clear. So in college, I worked for about a year at a credit union in Amarillo. We had to answer the phone and we had to say, "Thank you for calling Amarillo Community Federal Credit Union." That's a mouthful. I couldn't even say it. I'm standing up here. ACFCU, Amarillo Community Federal Credit Union. And it was not the funnest job, but the fun part of the job, one of the fun things I enjoy doing is when a member would come in and they would make their last payment on a loan. Right? They've been paying this boat off, they've been paying this car off, they've been paying their house off, whatever, and they bring in the last payment and slap that sucker down in front of you and say, "Pay it off." That was just kind of a neat thing and you get to hit the button and then it's done. You don't owe us anything else. That's the idea of blot, something being paid in full. A debt has been canceled. David talks about that as he's describing salvation, canceling a debt. He talks about washing, that means what you think it means. It's used in Hebrew literature to talk about dirty clothes and they need to be washed. Bible talks about in the Old Testament, our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment. We're dirty. Sin makes us dirty and we need to be cleaned, we need to be washed. And then there's this word purge or sometimes it's translated cleanse. It comes from metal being smelted and it would be heated up. I watched some videos on this this week. You can find them on the Internet, not on how they do it today but on how they used to do it way back in the day and they dig this hole in the ground and they put the ore in the ground and they start a fire and they sort of covered up and it makes this oven and they blow air into the side of it and the metal reduces down and they take all the ash out and all the dirt out and all the junk out and then they have the metal. It's been purged. It's been cleansed. All the impurities have been removed and they have the thing that they want to have at the end and David is saying, "I need the junk to sort of be removed from my life. Melt me down. Burn me down. Heat me up and get this junk out of my life so that what stays is what you want to be there." So he talks about being blotted and washed and purged. Here's the application. First of all, salvation is something only God can do. You've got to get this down in your brain. Way, way down deep. Past your brain, do your heart down in your bones. You've got to feel it. You've got to know it. salvation is something only God can do. From beginning to end in Psalm 51 when David talks about salvation, he never not wants a single time, says, "You know, I'm going to try harder. I'm not going to do that anymore and I'm going to be a better person and I'm not going to go down that road. I've learned my lesson." He just says, "Will you please save me? Will you please have mercy on me? You can do that. It's out of my hands. I need you to blot me, to cancel my debt. I can't pay it off. I don't have the resources. I need you to pay it off. I need you to wash me. I need you to purge me. All of those things are things that God does." And David's asking God to do it. And then look at verse 10. We read this already. It says, "Create in me a clean heart, O God." That word "create" is the Hebrew word "barah" and it's used in the book of Genesis in the opening lines of the Bible when God creates everything out of nothing. And as you read through the Old Testament, you're looking for this word "barah." The only person who does that in the entire Old Testament is God. People make things but God creates things. And David is using that word on purpose saying, "I don't need you to just make me clean. I need you to create in me a clean heart. I have nothing good for you to work with. I have no materials that are going to be of any value to you. You're going to have to start from scratch. And just like you created the world out of nothing you spoke it into existence, I need that kind of act from you in my life. It's something that only God can do. Secondly, salvation restores our relationship with God. Verse 11 and verse 12, he says, "Don't cast me away from your presence. I want to be with you." He says, "Don't take the Holy Spirit for me. I want your spirit to dwell with me." He talks about the joy of his salvation being restored. Salvation restores our relationship with God. Third, it results in witness and worship. We're really going to talk about this next week in Psalm 32, but look what he says in verse 13, "If you forgive me, I will teach transgressors your ways." If you do this for me, I'm going to tell people about it. I'm going to tell them how they can be forgiven. Verse 14, "If you deliver me, my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness." If you do this for me, I'm going to worship you. I'm going to respond in praise. I'm not going to take the credit for it. I'm going to give you the credit for it. And again, we're going to talk about this in Psalm 32, how he taught transgressors, how his tongue praised God, but it always results in witness and worship. Fourth, salvation does not remove earthly consequences. This is not spelled out in Psalm 51, but you can read about it in 2 Samuel. There were consequences for his sin, and they were pretty serious. You read this story where Nathan comes and he says, "You're the man," and David says, "I have sinned against God," and Nathan responds, and he says, "Your sin's forgiven." And you read it, and you say, "That's it? That's it? Just like that? You do all these terrible things, and then it's just forgiven? And yes, it was, but there were consequences, and you've got to remember this in your life. Nathan said that the child conceived, "My David and Bathsheba was not going to live," and it did not live. It was part of the consequence. Nathan said there's going to be a rebellion within your own house. Your family is going to live in turmoil the rest of your days. So you keep reading in 2 Samuel, and you just sort of turn the page, and you're thinking about what Nathan told him, and you say, "Oh, look, one of David's sons raped one of his daughters." There you go. It sort of seems at random if you don't read it in the context of the story, but Nathan said, "You just turned your family upside down, bud. You had these allegiances, and now you've invited these people into your family, and you did it in a wicked way, and it's all going to be a mess, and it starts almost immediately." Then one of David's other sons, Absalom, gets mad at Amnon, who raped Tamar, and Absalom goes and kills his brother. And there's David the dad, and you know what he does about all that? Nothing, nothing. It's chaos. You read it, and you say, "This is the man after God's own heart. This is the man that was forgiven." He was a man after God's own heart. He was forgiven of this wicked transgression, but there's serious consequences when you sin. Another one of those consequences is that there was an all-out coup, a rebellion against David, one of his own sons rebelled against his father, and David had to leave the city of David on and on it goes. This is something you need to get. You read Psalm 51, and you say sin is bad, salvation is great, 100 percent. But there's consequences for sin, and you can choose your sin, but you don't get to choose the consequences. That's just the way it works. So that doesn't seem fair. I don't like that. Well, that's the way it works. You can choose your sin, but you don't have any control over the consequences of that sin. And I'll promise you this because I talk to people all the time, all the time that say things like this. If I had known what was going to happen, I wouldn't have done it in the first place. There you go. You don't know what's going to happen, and it'll probably be worse than you think. It's consequences. Fifth, and this is the big one, salvation is found in the lamb of God, the lamb of God. If you're paying attention, you don't remember a lamb being mentioned in Psalm 51, but I want you to look with me at Psalm 51-7. Don't close your Bible yet, Psalm 51-7. This is one of the strangest verses in all the Bible. If you haven't read the rest of the Bible. 51-7, purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Okay, we've talked about the word purging. I told you it comes from smelting and reducing the metal with heat so that the metal comes down and the impurities are left and you get what you want out of it, right? It's from the world of smelting, metal, purge me. With hyssop, hyssop looks like a bush that would grow in your front yard. How you're going to use a bush to smelt metal, I have no idea, but he says purge me with hyssop, and then I'll be clean. And you say, "Wait a minute, I thought washing was about being clean. Now you're saying purging is about being clean. How does this fit together?" We're talking about metals, and then we're talking about bushes, and then we're talking about being clean. Those three words don't seem like they belong in the same sentence. How do you make sense of that? I'm glad you asked that question. Once upon a time, God's people were slaves in Egypt. God sent a man named Moses to Egypt to say to Pharaoh, "Let my people go that they may worship me, that they may serve me in the wilderness." And you remember the story, the plagues and all of it. The tenth plague was the death of the firstborn in Egypt, and on the night before the exodus, all of the firstborn in Egypt died. All the firstborn in Israel lived, and it wasn't because they were sinless, perfect people. They were no different than the Egyptians, I assure you. The reason they lived is that a lamb died as the substitute. Their lives were on the line, but a substitute took their place. And look what we read in Exodus 12. Moses called the elders of Israel, and he said to them, "Go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clans and kill the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop," there's your word, hyssop, "dip it in the blood that is in the basin and touch the lennel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. Not get a rag and dip it in the blood and smear it on your door. Not get a paintbrush and dip it in there and paint your door. You take the hyssop, dip it in there, and you smear it on your door with this branch. That's what I want you to do. And when David says in Psalm 51-7, "Purch me with hyssop," he's not confused about how you smelt iron ore out of a rock. What he's saying is, if the impurities are going to be removed from me, blood has to be spilled. If I'm not going to die in the process of purging, somebody's going to have to die for me. Because the reality is that my sin is a heart problem. And if you're going to purge me and my sin, you're going to purge me of me. I need a substitute to die in my place, and so he says, "I'm asking you, God, to purge me with hyssop." And he's hoping that you've read the Old Testament and you know the story of the Exodus, and you'll put the dots together and you're like purging with hyssop to be clean. That makes no sense. He's saying, "I need the impurity removed from my life, but blood has to be spilled and a substitute has to die. And when that happens, I will be clean." So read this afternoon, John 19. John is talking about the crucifixion of Jesus, and he just drops in this little detail that sort of seems innocent. He says, "Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world is dying on the cross, somebody comes to him with what kind of branch, a hyssop branch. And that detail is intentional, so you put it all together and you understand what David was talking about, and you understand what the Passover was all about. Salvation is found in the Lamb. Look, this morning you need to come to grips with two things. Maybe you just need to be reminded of these things, or maybe for the very first time God's going to open your eyes to it. You've got to understand sin as sin. It's not a shortcoming, it's not a mistake, it's not an oversight, it's not an accident. It's rebellion against God. It's an offense to him. You've got to get that. You've got to understand what transgression is and iniquity is. Don't wallow in that. The game's not over. That's half the story. The other half of the story is that God has made salvation available through the blood of the Lamb who was slain to take away the sins of the world. Bow your head, no one will pray for you. So we're grateful for Psalm 51 and we see ourselves in this description. Father, we're guilty of crossing your boundaries. We're guilty of taking good things and twisting them into bad things. Father, there are a million good things in our life that we worship as idols. We're guilty of iniquity. Father, we've missed the mark. You have set it out plainly and clearly and we have fallen far short. Father, our prayer this morning is that you would have mercy on us. Our prayer is that you would cancel our debt. Our prayer is that you would wash us and make us clean. Father, our prayer is that through the blood of the Lamb you would purge us, that you would remove any unpleasing thing, that you would forgive us, that you would restore the joy of our salvation, that we would experience your presence. Father, I pray for those here who are following Jesus and they love Jesus and I pray that it would be a reminder this morning of the dangers of sin and the glory of salvation. And Father, I pray for the unbelievers who are here, people here who are not followers of Jesus and I pray that they would get it, that their eyes would be opened, that their hearts would be opened, and that they would run to the Lamb of God who came to take away the sin of the world. Father be honored as we lift our voices, just as David talked about, we want to lift our voices and praise you for who you are and for the salvation we have through your Son. We love you and we pray in Jesus' name, Amen. I'm gonna