Forgiven

Well, good morning and welcome to Hope Lowertown. If I haven't had a chance to meet you, my name is Brian, lead pastor here, and I'm doing something I've never done before— wearing shorts. Huh? So you're welcome. No, it's just too hot in here and I just can't handle it anymore. There was one— my mentor, Steve Trigler, that was like his rule. Hey, Brian, we got one rule when it comes to dress code. You got to wear pants when you preach. Yeah. All right, I can handle that. And then he preached here one time and was like, all right, you could— you're allowed to wear shorts. So, but I just, I've just never done it. But today I did. We've been in the Psalms. We kind of took a little, taking a little summer break from the book of Mark. We've been going through the Gospel of Mark, kind of walking through that slowly, but just taking a little bit of a break. And I've really enjoyed the Psalms. I wasn't sure how it was going to go. And the Psalms, just kind of one of those things I I read when I just want to be encouraged or whatever. It's just kind of in my weekly reading plan. And as I've been able to really dig into these Psalms a little bit more, I'm looking at the order and the structure of the 150 Psalms and that they're not— it's not just random. It's not just, hey, we found this poem. Yeah, we'll just call that Psalm 45. There's an order to it and it's beautiful. And so, uh, we're not going to have time to get into all of that this morning, but looking at these Psalms and this quote by John Calvin. I'm not going to read the whole quote, but he talks about the anatomy of the soul. Last week I attributed it to Jonathan Edwards. Wrong John. John Calvin, older and deader guy. And he talks about the anatomy of the soul, that when you, you know, when you had a— if you're like in a class in biology and you had to dissect a frog or a piglet or something like that. I remember my youth pastor said they had kittens that they had to dissect, which is a wild take. And you— but just your emotions, your anatomy are just on full display. And that's exactly what's going on. And so we've kind of looked at these and different emotions of looking at delight and meditation and rootedness in Psalm 1 and 2. And then a couple of weeks ago, looking at grief and loneliness. And then last week, looking at longing and spiritual depression. And then this week, we're going to be looking at guilt. or the joy of forgiveness, or going from guilt to the joy of forgiveness. And so, uh, this is a, a maskil. It's called a maskil of David. And there's some debate on this, but between people that are Hebrew scholars and different things I was reading this week, but the majority of them agree that this is a teaching. They agree that it's a teaching. They disagree on who, even though in the Hebrew it says this, a maskil, a teaching of David. And so some people debate, well, is it, David teaching or is it God teaching? Well, yes, but I think this is David. He's learned, he's had— he's gone through the school of hard knocks, and he's saying, hey, I've learned and I want you to learn from me and from my mistakes in this whole thing. So this is a teaching from David who was king, the 2nd king of Israel, in about 1000 BC, and he's teaching from his experience. And so I had you just think about that. Who are your favorite teachers? When you were growing up, most likely it was somebody who actually had experience in the field that they were teaching, right? There's some people, and I remember in seminary, it was like, they went to school, you know, they got their Bible degree in undergrad, and then they went to seminary, and then they graduated from seminary and they got their doctorate, and then they got their doctorate. Now they teach full-time in seminary and they're teaching me how to be a pastor. And I remember struggling with those guys, right? Because it was like, you don't even know what this is like. Right. Right? And I know I've shared this before, but it's just so pertinent. And this is from The Karate Kid, where you've got Daniel, who's getting beat up, and he wants to learn karate. So he goes to the library and he gets a book about karate, and he's learning it. And then Mr. Miyagi goes walking by and sees Daniel learning karate, who— and he's this master teacher, has his own dojo with no students. And— but he's this master karate teacher, and he walks by Daniel and says, what are you doing? He says, well, I'm learning karate. Right. And Mr. Miyagi's response is, you learn karate from book? Like, you're learning this from a— you can't, you can't just learn this from an education. You need to be taught. You need to have that experience. And I would imagine that the people that we looked up to, or still maybe look up to as teachers, are people who know what it's like. They went through it. That's this psalm, that we're going to see King David say, hey, I messed up. Right? I paid the dumb tax. Don't do the same thing I did. All right. So I want to go back briefly to Psalm 1, because I think this is the beauty of looking at the Psalms as a cohesive book and story that's being developed. And so when we go back to chapter 1, verse 1, it starts off with this: Blessed is the man, or godly individual, who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scorners. Psalm 1 talked about the— this blessed individual, this blessed man. And the Psalm that we're going to look at today, Psalm 32, is going to use the same language of blessedness. And it's going to focus on how do we actually receive the blessing? Because as we looked at in Psalm 1, we looked at it and said, man, I can try my best to follow what it means in Psalm 1 to be blessed by God. But I can't. I'm just constantly falling on my face over and over and over again. And then we looked at Jesus. Jesus is the truly blessed one. And now here we are in Psalm 32, and it's going to kind of be revealed. How are we blessed by Jesus, the blessed one? We're going to see that be— being revealed here in this passage. So I've simply titled this passage, Forgiven. I'm going to be looking at Psalm 32. I've got the passage on the handout. Sorry, it's really tiny. Um, that format doesn't like, uh, poetry. And so it's gotta be kind of small. So I tried to fit as much on there, but all the scripture will be up on the screen, but you can follow along in Psalm 32 as well. And it's interesting. I was thinking about this and a couple of us were just praying in the library and we were talking about, I was just, I was thinking about this idea of being forgiven. It just becomes so, like, we become so used to it. We just take it for granted. Yeah, I'm forgiven. Yeah, my sins are forgiven, right? But I hope that today that we will see this forgiveness that God gives us for our sins in a new, fresh light. Or maybe you've just never seen it before and you'll see it fresh for the first time. Because it's there. It's right there. So just 3 quick things: the covering, the uncovering, and the lessons learned. So let's look at the covering. We're going to be looking at verses 3 and 4 first. Let's look at this. King David, 2nd king of Israel. Imagine the year is about 1000 BC, right? Right on that. He was a king for about 40 years, and he would have been about 10 years into his kingdom and his reign when, I think, that right around when this Psalm 32 was written. King David wrote a lot of the Psalms, not all of them, but the one today was— is written by David. Okay. And you can imagine, right? Just maybe you're just in the court, you know, maybe you're David's cupbearer. And for about a year of David's life, he holds court. He talks about taxes to the people and what taxes are owed to the new established king and the kingdom versus just the Levites and the theocracy. He's maybe dealing with disputes among neighbors that aren't getting along as kind of ultimate judge. He's overseeing worship in the temple and writing music for worship. He's writing foreign policy to how to deal with other cultures and neighbors and nations around him, and then he's deciding who to go to war with and who am I going to lead our nation of Israel into war with. He's just, business as usual. And if you were to walk by King David, you would have just gone, hey, what's up, King? I don't know if that's how you addressed the kings back then, but he just— that's just what it was. Just say, hey, hey, David. And he's like, hey, what's up? And that's it. But there's something else going on here, and we know that because Psalm 32 is revealing what's going on in David's heart When on the outside it seemed like everything's cool, everything's fine. Yeah, I'm just going about my business, but on the inside there's some intense struggle and turmoil. So let's look at this starting in verse 3. He says, for when I kept silent about his sin, which we'll look at, my bones wasted away through my groaning All day long. I kept silent, but my inner turmoil, my soul, was screaming out. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Notice here that David doesn't minimize the sin. He doesn't He's not going to go to this route, and I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but he's not going to say, yeah, I sinned, but God forgave me, so it's all cool. I can do whatever I want whenever I want because God's got this. He doesn't do that. He says, I have really been struggling with what's going on in my soul. And we don't know exactly what the sin is. We definitely have some clues. Psalm 51 gives us some insight into what was going on with David, but most likely, This is adultery and murder that's going on with King David, but he doesn't name it in this psalm. That's not the point. The point isn't, whoa, how intense is the sin? The point is he's hiding his sin. He's covering his sin. That's the point of this psalm. And he keeps silent, but again, his soul is crying out. These images— I just have really gotten to love poetry. Yeah. that there's this heat of summer, right? We've had a lot of rain and I feel like any, like, you know, dad or homeowner, I'm like, yeah, rain is great. It's good for the grass. And then we get a week of dry and it just, boom, it's gone. It's just gone. It's dried up. And he's saying, that's what my soul is like. That unconfessed sin doesn't just stay in the conscience. It might seem like that, like, hey, it's only affecting me, but it doesn't. It moves into the body. And there have been, and I was going to bore you all with all these studies and I just decided not to, but there have been studies by major universities that have talked about the pain of keeping a secret, that it's not just you that pays the price. It is your body. It physically moves on. And then mentally you're captivated by it, that in mid-conversation, I'm thinking about this thing that I'm keeping secret and it detracts from other relationships. John Calvin, in his commentary on the book of Psalms, he says that his bones, David's bones, were not consumed with age but were with dreadful torments of his mind. This is what happens when the anatomy of the soul is trying to hide from a God who can see everything. You're on display. Why are you trying to hide this? You can't. As we saw in Psalm 1, I, I know you. I know you in and out. The pressure that David felt, this guilt was not in the abstract or, or meaning that it wasn't from fear of exposure, right? That he was hiding this and he just was like, and he was getting all worked up thinking, man, if this thing gets exposed, I'm done for. That's, that might've been part of it, but it's not what he talks about here. Amen. We see based on this passage, based on verse 4, that it's actually the guilt that he felt is God, that there's this heavy hand that's upon him. In verse 4, day and night, your hand was heavy upon me. This is God's hand. The hand is not God's rejection. God is not rejecting David because of his sin. His hand is heavy upon him. It's God's refusal to let him go. That, that is good news. That's good news for all of us in here, because if you're in silence right now and you feel it heavy, or you feel like we've looked at the last couple of weeks of loneliness or feeling abandoned by God, that heaviness you feel is the hand of God on you. And so this is the psalmist and King David's first piece of good news that we see. We're going to see some more good news in this passage, But the weight is God not abandoning you. Now, when you feel that pressure, we should interpret that as God is here and he's pursuing me. It's his hand, and it might feel heavy, but it's a heavy hand that hasn't let go. I was thinking about this a little bit more of like it's kind of like it. Maybe when you were younger, you went on like to an amusement park with your dad, or maybe you've done it as a dad, or you've gone tubing, or you've gone down a slide with your kid, or as a grandparent, maybe you've done it, or as an aunt or an uncle, or just as a friend, whatever. Anybody in here at some point has probably done this with a child, okay? And the point is that when you're doing something and it gets a little dangerous, right? What do you do? You grab that kid and you hold them tight. You tuck them into you. You got them like a dad. Oh, yeah. around the neck, around the head, right? You just kind of hang on to them. And afterwards, when the danger has passed and you let go, that kid might look up and go, ow, that kind of hurt me when you grabbed me like that. Yeah, yeah, that might have hurt, but it protected you from the danger. And I think that's kind of what the image is that, that David is saying here. There's this heavy hand, but this heavy hand is good news because it's actually God protecting me from my sin and from myself and from destruction. So now let's look at what I think is really the meat of this passage, and that is the uncovering. It's not 1 and 2. Yeah, it's 5, verses 5, 1 and 2. Excuse me there. Looking at verse 5 says this, I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgression to the Lord. This is the confession. David has sinned, we know that. He talks about how he's held it into his conscience even though he's been carrying on for a year and nobody knows the difference. And now he has this confession. There's a threefold aspect to it. He acknowledges the sin, he doesn't hide the sin, and he confesses it before the Lord. John Calvin, again, he says that we like to disguise or misrepresent our sin, or maybe a modern day— I know that I've talked about a guy named Bob Thune a lot, and he's got a little booklet called The Gospel-Centered Life, a little small group Bible study. He talks about how we minimize and downplay our sin. It's the same thing, that we disguise or we misrepresent. It's not really as bad. As it makes it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's sin, but come on, is that really that big of a deal? It's not hurting anyone. I've been inundated right now with school of reading psychologists and looking at that this moral compass that all of humanity has, they would say that kind of the big thing for about 200 years was that, oh, our morality, it comes into play when somebody is being hurt. Yeah. And if nobody's being hurt, well, then we can do whatever we want. The problem is someone's always getting hurt, including yourself. That's the whole point, that when you choose to sin, you choose to suffer. And so we just downplay, I'm not hurting anyone. It's really not that big of a deal. No one's noticing, so who cares? But what we read about in this passage is that the confession can happen. He says, I said, and you can do that on your own. I say, I will confess. And you can do that before you crack. You can do that before you have a mental breakdown due to the stress of what you're hiding. You can do this before it gets exposed. You can do this on a Tuesday afternoon. You can confess this to God. I love this. I held this back on purpose. I acknowledged my sin to you. I did not cover my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgression to the Lord. And the next phrase is, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah. I love this. He doesn't even finish his thought, right? This was just one of these moments this week as I was just reading this over and over and getting into this and just like, holy cow. He says, he says, I said, I will confess my transgression to the Lord, and you forgave me the iniquity of my sin. He doesn't even like get it out. He just says, yes, I'm going to confess, and just boom, God says, you're forgiven. You're forgiven. He doesn't say— God doesn't say to David, well, let's give it a 6-month waiting period. Let's make sure you've actually changed. Let's, let's see if you've actually had some kind of improvement. Let's see if this is authentic or not. I think as an individual, we sometimes feel that pressure of, I don't even want to repent of this thing. I don't even want to confess this thing because I've confessed that and repented of this thing over and over and over. And so I don't think my repentance, I don't think my confession is genuine because I just keep struggling with this thing. This is what we get to do. God doesn't say, well, David, let's make sure that we fix this. Are you going to be perfect from here on out? No, David is not, not even close to perfect. God forgives him of his iniquities. So we can go to God and we can repent. And he will offer forgiveness again and again and again. Another lesson, I think, for those of us who have been sinned against, do we show the grace and mercy that God shows us? I know I've done this with my kids. Hey, Dad, I'm sorry. This is— and again, this is just the way I grew up. Yeah. And I've transferred that to my kids. Hey, Dad, I'm sorry. And the phrase I will say is, no, you're not. You know how I know you're not sorry? Because you keep doing the same thing. As if I don't do the same thing. Sorry, boys. Love you. God is waiting to forgive. He's just sitting there waiting with open arms. It's the whole story of the prodigal son. that Jesus teaches that someone leaves, abandons God, finally comes back to his father and says, Father, I don't even get it. I'm not even worthy to be called your son. And what does the father do? He wraps his arm around him and says, my son has returned. That's the forgiveness. Yeah, but I keep doing the same thing again and again. And God is just sitting there waiting, waiting for you to confess. At the moment you just say, yes, I need to confess. He says, yes, I forgive you of the iniquity. I forgive you. I want communion with you. And then we have this word Selah, which is beautiful. Again, these are poems. These are meant for worship, a lot of them for public worship. This just means like a pause. What's it called in music when there's like an instrumental? Is that what it's called? An instrumental? There's like a break in singing and the instruments just— it's just called an instrumental? Okay. All right. What? Is that right? Okay. All right, so you've got this instrumental. Maybe that's what it was, or maybe it just stopped and people just reflected on the words. That's this. Reflect. You are forgiven. You can be forgiven. Sit in that. Now let's go back to how David chooses to begin this Psalm. There's this double blessing. Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man who the Lord counts no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit. Again, Psalm 1. I can't achieve that, but I can achieve Psalm 32 through the truly blessed one of Psalm 1. Amen. And how am I blessed in the Psalm 32 sense? I'm blessed by being forgiven because it's completely passive. It's the best part about this. There's 3 different words here that David uses for sin, and he's going to repeat them again in verse 5. This rebellion of transgression, failure for sin and crookedness of iniquity. Just defiance, this defiant branch of rebellion, twistedness, failure, or sorry, of iniquity. But then we see this also in verse 5 of being lifted, a burden being hoisted off the shoulders, that it's being covered. It's not counted. I love this. I even put 3 stars in my notes next to this one. I love— this is just— this is it. I should have just said, here's the sermon in one sentence. The man who did not cover his iniquity is the man whose sin God covered. This is poetry, and it's beautiful. He starts off saying, blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is not covered. And then in verse 5, he says, I have covered my sin. And I have uncovered it before God, right? I've hid my sin, I've gone about my daily business, and I have uncovered my sin, and then God shows up and says, I'll cover it. It's just this beautiful wordplay that we see from David. It's the same verb that's used here, but just an inverted subject of this covering. Self-covering and God covering are mutually exclusive, meaning David spent a year proving you can't do both simultaneously. Here's why. Because your covering works in the worst way. When you cover your sin, you can hide it from other people in the worst possible way. It successfully keeps you from the God who does cover the sin with his own blood. Amen. David is teaching us from his experience in this mask format, uncover your sin before God and it will be covered forever. That's the psalm. Keep covering yourself and it just stays exposed because your anatomy is on display. And your conscience is groaning. day and night, and we can experience this kind of forgiveness. I love it when we— when I read a Psalm and I— there's a footnote that's a connect to the New Testament, very explicit. Well, how do we find Jesus in this Psalm? Paul does that for us. We can see this in Romans chapter 4, 4:8. He says, now to the one who works, Meaning the one who does good works. I'm going to be a good person. I'm going to do good deeds. I'm going to be very kind to people who are very mean to me. I'm going to fight for those who can't fight for themselves. I'm going to do what here Paul, the Apostle Paul, is going to say those are works. Even if they're good, nothing wrong with them, they're just works. Now the one who does works, his wages, what he's owed, is not counted— or what he gives are not counted as a gift, But they're his due. I don't know, this is— I don't know if you've ever like getting one of these like surveys from people. They, they do something and they're like, hey, how was my— how did I do my job? And I'm like, hey, well, you did, you did what I paid you to do, right? You, you did what you owed me. Good job, I guess. Like, no, you're expected to do that. And that's what God is saying. You do these good works. Good job. That's what you're supposed to do. But then Paul says, and to the one who does not works, like no good works, but believes in him, Jesus Christ, based on context, who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, as a right standing before God. It is a gift because we can't earn it. Just as David Here it is, also speaks the blessing of the one whom God counts righteousness apart from works. He says David got this right 1,000 years ago. Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and those whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. The Psalm says, I'm not counting your sin against you, whereas Paul is saying the same thing, just kind of looking at the other side of the coin, saying that your righteousness, your— the goodness of God is then given to you and given to us, not because of anything we've done or haven't done, but because of the same mercy that forgives sins is the same mercy that makes us right before God. We could see this also in Isaiah chapter 53, this beautiful prophecy about the Messiah. About the coming of the Christ, who Jesus shows up and says, I am that Christ. I am that promised Messiah. This is written about him. Out of the anguish of his soul, we shall see and be satisfied. By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. That's the thing about forgiveness. When you forgive somebody or when Christ forgives you, someone has to bear the burden of your wrongdoing. That if I say something, if I tease my wife and call her a name, which I never do, and she would— I don't. And she says, and she says, hey, that offended me. That kind of hurt my feelings when you said this thing. And I say, wow, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean that. I apologize. And she said, I forgive you. Cool. I'm in the free. I'm good to go. Yeah. She though isn't saying, I'm going to bear the weight of that. I'm going to let this thing go, but it's still here. That's what Christ does. The sin's not deleted, it's removed, but it's transferred. It's what Martin Luther called the Great Exchange, that we have these nasty, dirty robes on and we take off our robes, or Christ takes off our robes, these nasty, dirty robes, and then he gives us his righteousness. Amen. He puts on our dirty robes so we can have his cleanly robes. The great exchange. Our sin is covered at the cost of an uncovering. The one who knew no sin is stripped and exposed so that the guilty can be clothed. The cross is where this idea of this heavy hand in verse 3 and 4 landed on someone else's shoulders, on Christ. Spurgeon puts it this way in his commentary on the Psalms as well, says this: Blessedness is not in this case ascribed to the man who has been a diligent lawkeeper. Right, hey, you're blessed if you can just do the right works, if you can be a good person. Follow the law, read your Bible, pray every day, then you'll be blessed. No. For then it would never come to us, he says, but rather to the lawbreaker who by grace most rich and free has been forgiven. The prerequisite of being forgiven is being sinful. What a God we serve! And finally here, lessons learned. It says, therefore, in light of my sin being covered— uncovered and then being covered by God, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found, and surely in the rush of great waters they will not Reach him. The one who stops hiding, the one who uncovers is unreachable by this rush of great waters. You are a hiding place for me. You are a covering for me. You preserve me in trouble. You surround me with shouts of deliverance. Selah. Rest in that. Then he goes on again, this maskul. I'm going to teach you. I will instruct you and teach you in the way that you should go. I paid the dumb tax. I've messed up. I have some life experience. Now listen to me. I kind of know what I'm talking about here. I will instruct you and teach you in the way that you should go. I will counsel you with my eye upon you. Be not like a horse or a mule without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, Or it will not stay near you. I know we're not— what's the word? Equestrians? Is that horse people? Maybe so. Did anyone grow up with horses? Anybody in here? Yeah, I didn't think so. It's not very common, right? Usually a lot of middle school girls go through a horse phase. You know, they like their horses. They've got their folders with horses. They're beautiful animals. They are. Yeah. Sorry if that offended. They're beautiful animals, but what David is saying is, yeah, but, but they need to be controlled. They need to have a bridle in their mouth. And we can look at these donkeys like, what a dumb animal, like what a goofy animal. And David's whole point is saying, we've all been the donkey. We all are the donkey. Why? Because we don't listen to the words. We don't obey when we hear the words. God is clearly teaching us. David is teaching us. This is how we ought to ask for forgiveness and to expose our sins and be forgiven. But we don't, we don't heed. And then it gets exposed and we are crushed by it. Or it doesn't ever get exposed and our whole lives go on with pain and suffering and our bones growing old within us and groaning of our soul. Amen. He says, don't do that. We've all been there. Take heed of the correction of the teacher. Listen to the voice of God. Uncover your sins before him, and he will cover them with his blood. It's a beautiful psalm. Then he ends, many are the sorrows of the wicked, but a steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts the Lord. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart. We are now, because of Christ, we're in verse 11. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous. I mean, think about this, there's, for so many years of the history of Israel, They were worried, am I righteous enough? Am I good enough? You know that I've studied and I've read so much and everything about Martin Luther. And he did this thing where he went on a pilgrimage and he crawled up these stairs on his knees. He was in Israel and he crawls up these stairs on his knees and he prays this prayer and he gets to the top and he says, I hope that worked. Like, I just, I hope that I'm righteous enough. I hope that I'm good enough. What the gospel teaches us is You can't be good enough. You can't do it. Your works will never be good enough. And yet those of us in this room, myself included, we've grown up and we've heard that over and over and over and over again. And we hear, yeah, yeah, forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness. And then there are these moments where I have to go to God and I'm sheepish, I'm shy. Yet full well knowing he wants to embrace us as a loving heavenly Father. He wants us to do that. And so whether you have something that's a secret, confess that to God. You get to come to the table and just physically think of God just standing there at this altar ready to embrace you. And he says your sins, you think they're covered, you think you're hiding them, you think you're covering them, your anatomy is on display. I see everything, but you need to uncover them before me. And when you do that, I will cover them with my Son's blood. It's paid for in full. We have communion every week here at Lowertown, and I love that we get to do this. I love that we get to approach this altar, that we get to take these wafers. There's a gluten-free option on my left. If that's a dietary restriction. We get to take this little wafer that represents the broken body of Christ, right? Because a lot of times when we ask for forgiveness from anyone, hey, what can I do? How can I pay you back? Jesus is like, yeah, you, you can't. I already did that. I already, I already paid the sacrifice. I paid the sacrifice you can't pay, but I want to forgive. Amen. And we take this juice that represents the new covenant, the New Testament in his blood, in his blood, not your blood, not my blood, not some blood of a lamb, in the blood of God himself, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. How beautiful is that? Amen. We can uncover our sins at this altar freely because he will cover them and has covered them for us. So uncover your sins before God because they have already been covered in Christ. If you're a follower of Jesus, I'd love you to take these elements with us today. Maybe it's your first day or first time hearing, wow, that sounds too good to be true, but it's not. This is what the Bible teaches. This is how God has revealed himself in a way to love us fully. So I'd love for you to take these elements with us. If you have bent the knee to King Jesus, say, yes, I want to be part of that. I want to approach the altar. I want to uncover my sins so he can cover them fully. Worship team is going to sing 2 songs and how fitting, right? We're going to— we now get to uncover. And as we look at this Psalm, we get to be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous. And shout for joy, all you upright in heart. And we are not upright by anything we have done, but only because of what Christ has done. So as the worship team is singing these 2 songs, I'd love for you to grab these elements as we can worship together and rejoice in the Lord and be glad in our heart and uncover so it can be covered. Let me pray. Father, thank you just for our time together, together this morning. I think that we can look at this Psalm written by David, that it's easy maybe even to, to look at the sins that he committed and go, wow, he's really bad. I'm okay though. I don't think I need to confess the way that David did because my sins aren't really that big of a deal. God, would we be broken over our sin the same way that, that you are broken over our sin? That we would see our sin as treason against you, that our sin needs to be paid for, that I cannot keep downplaying, I can't keep minimizing, I can't keep disguising it. I need to uncover that before you. I need to confess it. And immediately you will forgive our sins because Christ has already paid for them fully on the cross. Amen. God, I pray that would be with— be us this morning as we take these alms. We love you. And it's in the name of Jesus that I pray these things. Amen.