Psalm 51 Part 4
After David requested that God would change him, he wondered how God would treat him now that he had committed such a great sin. In Verse 11 he askes the Lord not to cast him away from his presence. He considered living in God’s presence and having a relationship with his Lord as the most important part of his life. He was sorry that he had allowed himself to drift away from God to the extent that he could commit such a sin and he did not want that to happen again. He cried out in verse 12 “Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with your generous Spirit”. When there is nothing between us and the Lord it is a joyful experience that we enjoy daily. Isaiah 12:3 declares: “Therefore with joy, you will draw water from the wells of salvation”. This is a good warning to us, if our Christian experience starts to become routine and out of habit it is time to stop and find out what we are doing that has squeezed the joy of the Lord out of our living. It is interesting to see what David wanted to do when he was full of the joy of the Lord. In verse 13 we read that he wanted sinners to be converted. We must never forget the power of our testimony when we are full of the joy of being born again. When our experience with the Lord is genuine we stand out for all the right reasons. In Verse 15 David declared that his mouth would show forth God’s praise, today we live in such a negative environment so when we speak good and encouragement to people we meet we stand out for all the right reasons. Then David makes such a profound statement, through this situation David had learned that sacrifice and burnt offerings did not change his heart and because of this God did not take delight in burnt offerings. He declared in verse 17 what pleases God and this has never changed, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit (Being humble), a broken and contrite heart – these, O God, you will not despise”. It is important to understand the word contrite means to be extremely sorrowful for sinning. David declared that God is looking for people who hate sin and sinful ways and to be prepared to humble ourselves before the Lord. We live in a world that promotes the importance of self and we must guard against any of that attitude being part of the way that we live. In this Psalm, we have seen the true nature of David, even though there was justification for his sinning, how he dealt with his bad actions has many lessons for us to learn and apply to the way that we live. He did not try to cover up his sin but acknowledged that he had sinned against God, this is so important for us to do, always come to the Lord and ask Him to forgive us. The final thing that is so important is that he wanted to change completely his nature to a God-glorifying nature and when that happened others will see that change and want to be changed themselves.
Amen.