#DailyDevotion Do We Confess Ours Sins To God Or Try To Minimize Them?
Psalm 51 14O God, rescue me from bloody wrong, O God Who saves me, and my tongue will sing aloud about Your righteousness! 15O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will praise You.
David pulls no punches with confessing his sin. He doesn’t try to justify it. He doesn’t try to minimize it. He was guilty of murder on top of adultery. By all accounts, he deserved to be killed for his sins. We should be so bold when confessing our sins to God and to him through our pastor. God is the only place he can turn to for mercy and kindness. Only God could save him. Only God can save us. Jesus Christ of Nazareth is the LORD who rescues us from sin’s punishment.
In this salvation the LORD provides us, we need to sing about His righteousness. We need to sing about Jesus’ innocent suffering and death for our sake. But how can we sing if God does not open our lips. So we ask God to open our lips so we may praise Him with our mouths. We should all own a hymnal so we can have some ready hymns to sing God’s praises rightly. We should take some time out of our day to sing a hymn of praise to the LORD. Perhaps your congregation prints the words and/or music to the hymns you sang last week. Use those!
16If You wanted sacrifice I would give it, but a mere burnt offering doesn’t please You. 17The sacrifice which God wants is a broken spirit. A broken and crushed heart, O God, You won’t despise.
With all the sacrifices prescribed in the Torah, you’d think God wants sacrifice. But the sacrifices are for our sake, not His. Merely offering the prescribed sacrifices doesn’t please God either. The thinking it does lends itself to the false teaching ex opera operatum, which means from the work itself.
What does please God then? God wants a broken spirit, a broken and crushed heart. That means He wants us to realize the totality of our sin. He wants the crushing weight of the Law, the due punishment of our sins to have done its work on us that we hate and despise our sins. He wants us to know what we truly deserve for our sins and to acknowledge that. He wants us to be contrite over our sins. The best way to do that is to look at Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Jesus is God incarnate, in the flesh. He took our flesh upon Himself. He lived a blameless and sin free life. He did not deserve to die. To comprehend what our sins deserve we need to look at His passion, i.e. his suffering from the Passover Supper to His burial. There we will see betrayal, abandonment, accusations, insults, mocking, beatings, whippings, cruel hatred, being stripped and exposing His shame, and a most cruel death. He deserved none of that. We do deserve all those things. Eternal death afterwards we deserve, eternal separation from our God and Jesus experienced that for us on the cross as He cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”
18By Your kindness be good to Zion, and build the walls of Jerusalem. 19Then You will delight in the right kind of sacrifices, burnt offerings and whole offerings. Then young bulls will be sacrificed on Your altar.
Having a contrite heart and a heart that believes God the Father has been kind and forgiving of us on account of Jesus Christ, our sacrifices, our good works become acceptable to Him on account of faith. When God gives us this faith, He builds up the walls of Jerusalem as we become its living stones laid on the foundation of Jesus Christ. We offer up to God our spiritual sacrifices of thanksgiving and praise.
Heavenly Father, help us to rightly understand our sins and their end so our hearts may be right with you. Give us faith in the sacrifice of Your Son Jesus Christ so we may rightly know Your kindness, mercy, forgiveness and steadfast love. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.