The Way To A Blessed Life | Psalm 32
The Way To A Blessed Life | Psalm 32
INTRODUCTION
We all have our own concepts and ideas of being blessed or the best life for us. We want to have a good salary, then we use the money to go for coffee shops, buy the best brands, have the best car, a good home, then take vacation and eat at fine dining restaurants etc. That is the good life or blessed life for most of the people of the world today.
We all have our version of the blessed life and this is what this verse is talking about. This is oh the good fortune of the person who has this setup. That is how this prayer is starting here. This is about living in an envious or desirable stage of well-being and fulfillment.
Psalm 32
Of David. A maskil
Blessed is the one
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the one
whose sin the Lord does not count against them
and in whose spirit is no deceit.
When I kept silent,
my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night
your hand was heavy on me;
my strength was sapped
as in the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you
and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, “I will confess
my transgressions to the Lord.”
And you forgave
the guilt of my sin.
Therefore let all the faithful pray to you
while you may be found;
surely the rising of the mighty waters
will not reach them.
You are my hiding place;
you will protect me from trouble
and surround me with songs of deliverance.
I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.
Do not be like the horse or the mule,
which have no understanding
but must be controlled by bit and bridle
or they will not come to you.
Many are the woes of the wicked,
but the Lord’s unfailing love
surrounds the one who trusts in him.
Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous;
sing, all you who are upright in heart!
- We all fail many times in various ways.
- How do you pray when you fail?
- How do you process and pray through experiences of real failure before God, failure before people?
- How could we experience confession in a way that ends the way David ends this prayer, a way people praise and rejoice because of God’s love and faithfulness and you are happy?
Look at the first word of this Psalm:
Psalm 32:1
Blessed is the one
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
The first word is “blessed.’ This is also the first word of the first chapter of Psalm 1. Psalm 1 talks about the person who is blessed because he does not do a dozen of things. There are probably about a dozen prayers in the book of Psalms that begin with the word “blessed.” This psalm also starts with the word, “blessed.”
The Blessed Life
So, notice how this prayer begins. It says about the lifestyle of a blessed person. A person who has the most desirable and envious life. According to this psalm, a blessed person is the one whose sins are covered. Such a blessed person is the person who knows that they have deep problems. They have flawed and they know that they need forgiveness and they know that they have forgiveness.
How enviable is the person who has a deep understanding of his/her character flaws and their failures? They know that they are not okay, they need forgiveness and they have it. Imagine that kind of life.
What This Kind Of Prayer Does Is Creating The Blessed Life As The Forgiven Life.
You Cannot Experience The Blessed Life If You Are Religious
The blessed life if you are religious is to be perfect. You are not able to take this Psalm 32 into your life because you feel that you are ok, you are good enough. But we are really messed up. We are not able to appropriate this psalm into our life because we do not know how messed up we are.
You Cannot Experience The Blessed Life If You Think Too Low Of Yourself
You feel low in your mind and you think you are beyond forgiveness where real restoration will change. And you don’t know what I have done, you don’t know my past, you don’t know what kind of person I am. So that person will also be unable to hear the constant pronouncement of forgiveness that is available to those who confession.
The blessed life is available for those who submerge both by saying, “I have a realistic view of my flaws and my failures. I know I need forgiveness and I know I have it.” Living in that kind of mindset is an empowering experience.
I want you to image with me a life that is lived where you actually have a real handle on what is wrong with you. You know that there is someone in your life who has the power and the will to heal you and transform you and already made that commitment to heal you no matter what kind of person you are. Psalm 32 talks about living with that kind of mindset.
Psalm 32:1
Blessed is the one
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
The language used here is how blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven. The language of guilt and of shame and I have offended God and I am away from God or separated from God and I need forgiveness. This is not a popular idea in our culture for lots of different reason.
We live in a culture where people says, “Don’t tell me what I need to do.” As long as what I do not injure anyone, what I do must be morally acceptable. This is how we grew up.
So from this kind of worldview, when we come to the Bible, we understand that, “Actually there is something wrong in my behavior, there is something wrong with me. When I check with the standards of God’s word, I am actually ending up wrong than what I think myself to be. The one I have wronged in my deeds and deeds to others is my creator. This is not popular in our culture.
Here it says forgiveness is available for those who feel guilty does not appeal to lot of people, because a lot of people do not feel very guilty. You say to others, “Forgiveness is available.” They say, “I am not feeling guilty. I am morally right and I don’t think there is anything wrong with me.”
The Bible uses many images to talk about sin and forgiveness, one of them is in the poem here. Look at the Psalm:
Psalm 32:1
Blessed is the one
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
This is a different kind of forgiveness. Forgiveness is someone reconciling with someone. But here forgiveness is having your sins covered and transgressions forgiven.
To have your sins covered, that is a very different idea of this whole conversation here.
Psalm 32:5
Then I acknowledged my sin to you
and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, “I will confess
my transgressions to the Lord.”
And you forgave
the guilt of my sin.
The word sin here is failure. How fortunate is the person whose failures are covered?
ILLUSTRATION
Remember the first story of the Bible in the book of Genesis. We have the story of the first human characters, Adam and Eve. There is the story of the tree of knowledge and evil that you are not supposed to eat from. This is about human beings humbly put themselves under God’s wisdom of defining good and evil. Or are humans going to see this opportunity and exercise their free will in defining good and evil for themselves and to draw the lines that they seem fit? That is what is happening in that creation and fall story.
So when humans see autonomy or free will, they define the freedom to define their blessed life in their own knowledge.
In the story what happens when they consume the fruit? The first thing that happened was that their eyes were opened and they realized that they were naked. So they are ashamed and they take some leaves from the tree and they make clothes for themselves. God then covers them the second time because their own covering was not good enough.
Coverup
This is a profound story about the human condition. This is a symbol of clothing but clothing is something that talks about what is deeply wrong with all of us. Most people think that clothing is a good idea. Clothing is a physical way that we cover ourselves because there are things in my life that I don’t want you to see. There are things about you that you don’t want others to have unfiltered access to. There is something within us to be the object of someone’s gaze and I have no ability to control what they see. That is a dehumanizing experience. It is humiliating for us because physically there are things that we are ashamed of. In the story of Adam and Eve, it is not about clothing but it is about who we are.
The fact is it is not just physical, if my thought life was available to all of you totally unfiltered 24/7, that will be horrifying to me and you will be amazed at what this person thinks.
Some of our worst nightmares are made up of moments where we are uncovered. We do everything we want but do not want anyone to know about it. We cover it up. Some of our worst nightmare would be when you are working on a room and your friends are around you and your internet browsing history appears on the screen in front of everybody. Then you are uncovered. Or you leave your phone somewhere and it is open. Someone goes through your pictures and messages. You are restless because you are getting uncovered. Or there are times that you are with your one family member and you are talking bad about someone in your family and then you realize that they are sitting just behind you and they have heard what you said about them. Then you ask the other friend, “Did they hear me talk.”
A lot of things that takes place in our life we want it to be confidential, just to yourself.
We do and say and think things that we are ashamed of. A great deal of our effort goes into covering what we do, that is the way we behave, that is the way we present ourselves so that you can control how others perceive about you. Because if someone really know what is going on in your covered areas, you will be ashamed.
This is a very different image here. How blessed is the one who has lived against the grain of the universe, who has wronged God, who has wronged other people, and who has so much of covered areas or mess in their own lives and they are forgiven?
How blessed is the person who knows their secrets, who knows where they are, knows those covered areas that they will not let anyone see? Imagine the freedom and the blessed life that can come from not living in the secret any more. From knowing that there is at least one being in the universe, my God, my maker who made me, who knows me and knows me fully so that I do not have to hide from Him. That would be wonderful. That is what this prayer is about.
So whether you are aware that you have wronged God and you are guilty or whether you are aware that you have this secret area that you don’t want anyone to know about; the psalm speaks to both these categories of people and says the way forward is the blatant language of confession, learning how to confess.
Look at what happens to a human being when we stuff it in. We are made to confess, we are made to open up.
This describes what happens when we don’t confess.
Psalm 32:3-4
When I kept silent,
my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night
your hand was heavy on me;
my strength was sapped
as in the heat of summer
Some of you have been here before. It is either a decision that you have made or what you did whether it is in your past or something in the present. You know it is wrong, you feel ashamed of it. You are bottling it up and it is eating you up.
We as human beings need to be cleaned up and flushed through every day, every now and then.
ILLUSTRATION
If you go to your refrigerator, you will find boxes that have old, contaminated food. You thought you would use them in a day or two and then it remains. Every now and then you need to go through your refrigerator and get those boxes and throw that stuff that is inside and clean them out. This is what we need to do when we come to God. We have hidden stuffs in us, it is concealed, it rots within us.
Some of us have lived verses 3 and 4 before. You have lived with regret of your actions and you have not spoken to anyone and you are living with it. You know exactly what it is for your bones to waste away and your strength sapped. Because you know you need forgiveness, you know need some kind of resolution.
We need forgiveness; therefore, we need to confess. That is what is happening in verse 5. Verse 5 is kind of the center of this prayer and this is one of the most beautiful actions of confession in the Bible.
Psalm 32:5
Then I acknowledged my sin to you
and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, “I will confess
my transgressions to the Lord.”
And you forgave
the guilt of my sin.
There is a very compact and beautiful nature of confession.
You see there are three things here: Three kinds of Sin & Three steps of confession.
In verse 5 there are three ways of confession. There are also three ways of sin.
THREE WAYS OF SIN
In ancient Hebrew they had three verses of sin. David uses all three verses here. They are all different in meaning.
Psalm 32:5
- I Acknowledged My Sin = Moral Failure
- I Did Not Cover Up My Iniquity = Going Astray
- I Will Confess My Transgressions To Yahweh = Willful Violation
Moral Failure
We are here for a purpose. We actually have a purpose. You can fail to live up to that purpose. The main ways we fail is by making moral decisions by defining good by what is good to me, good by the worldly standards, my self-advantage at the expense of others, elevating myself above others, meeting my needs before others. That is self-orientation. That is a failed human being according to the scriptures, one that live only inwardly and for self-advantage. And that is moral failure. You are failing to be what God made you to be. So I name it, I say it all loud, “I am a failure. I have failed morally.”
For some us that might be the big hurdle to own up the fact that you are wrong. This is really hard for some of us, but you cannot really make a step forward towards Jesus without admitting that you are wrong.
So you name your moral failure and then you stop covering over your iniquity.
Iniquity
Iniquity means going astray. This word comes from a metaphor of life as a journey and there is the path you need to go on to get to where you are going, and there is the other path and you choose the other path. It is going astray, it waywardness.
Going astray might be unintentional. In the book of Leviticus there are intentional sin and unintentional sin. Many times we are unintentionally going astray because of the lack of knowledge, lack of discernment, lack of wisdom, lack of counsel.
Lev. 5:17
“Now if a person sins and does any of the things which the LORD has commanded not to be done, though he was unaware, still he is guilty and shall bear his punishment.
Some of you may have problem with anger. But when the situation comes, you end up choosing that path of anger. You may have no idea that you have problems with anger. Jesus said anger is equal to murder.
I guarantee you that your spouse does, your best friends do. If you remain ignorant about it because they are choosing not to tell you. We usually do not point each other’s fault because of different reasons. Usually they are selfish ones. I want then to like me, I want them to think highly about me, I don’t want to create a conflict with you. So I will rather save my face and do not speak about you. This is what generally happens.
So the language of confession cuts right through and stops the cover up game with each other and with God.
The three ways of sin:
Sin = Moral Failure
Iniquities = Going astray
Transgression = Willful violation
David is using all biblical vocabulary of the ways we make bad choices and horrible decisions in life.
THREE WAYS OF CONFESSION
I Acknowledged My Sin To You = NAME IT
I named it, it set it out loud. Speaking it. Here is what I have done. Here is what I was covering all this while. He says now I don’t cover. I stopped covering. I own up to the fact that here is something that I am trying to hide because I am ashamed, because I feel guilty, I am rotting inside.
Did Not Cover UP
I stop covering. So I name it, I stopped covered.
I Will Confess = I TELL THE TRUTH
To confess means to tell the truth. Basically, we do two kinds of confession.
Frist, we confess the truth, confess Jesus as lord. Confess is an act of praise, which means tell the truth about who Jesus is, tell the truth about who God is.
Second, confession is to tell the truth about your own sin. It is about telling the truth about who you are and what you have done. It means telling the truth.
See the flow of his experience: I acknowledge it, it stop covering it up and I tell the truth about it.
Truth has the way of illuminating and flushing us and cleaning us out of the sin in us.
This is the best thing for us. Confess our sin before God. To get that covered up things in the table to God. This is the blessed life. This is the way to life.
So what is God’s response to all of this?
Psalm 32:5
Then I acknowledged my sin to you
and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, “I will confess
my transgressions to the Lord.”
And you forgave
the guilt of my sin.
God forgave David’s sin. This is a part of God being faithful to his own character.
What if you really get all that is happening around in your life on the table with God in an act of confession, can you imagine the freedom. Can you imagine the confidence you will have in God? You have the worst of you out there with God and you have God’s confidence, God’s freedom and that is an empowering experience. To know that grace is stronger than anything I have done and I receive that grace through the act of confession.
So look what David describes here as a result of his confession and the forgiveness he received.
Benefits Of Confession To God: Confidence in GOd
Psalm 32:6-8
Therefore let all the faithful pray to you
while you may be found;
surely the rising of the mighty waters
will not reach them.
You are my hiding place;
you will protect me from trouble
and surround me with songs of deliverance.
I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.
This is a confident language here. He is not confident in himself. He knows what kind of person he is. Knowing that he is capable of sin, iniquity and transgression. He is confident in the one who has taken his cover. God is the one in whom the psalmist is confident in. He is confident in the one who has moved towards him in the act to forgive. The experience of grace is so mind-blowing that God is willing to forgive us by and extend his grace to us.
Our confession must result in this kind of experience of grace and confidence.
Why is that for many of us confession doesn’t result in lasting change? Why does it not result in life transformation?
Psalm 32:9-11
Do not be like the horse or the mule,
which have no understanding
but must be controlled by bit and bridle
or they will not come to you.
Many are the woes of the wicked,
but the Lord’s unfailing love
surrounds the one who trusts in him.
Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous;
sing, all you who are upright in heart!
There are two roads of confession. There can be a form of confession or refusing to confess that will land you with the woes of the wicked. But there is a way through confession to joy and confidence. He says it is not being like a foolish horse or mule.
This is a little understanding about donkeys and horses. But growing up I have heard of some horse that are full of power, vigor, and smartness. But then there are donkeys and horses that are dumb too.
So don’t be like a dumb horse or a dumb donkey.
Psalm 32:5
Then I acknowledged my sin to you
and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, “I will confess
my transgressions to the Lord.”
And you forgave
the guilt of my sin.
When I confessed, you forgave God.
Look at verse 2
Psalm 32:2
Blessed is the one
whose sin the Lord does not count against them
and in whose spirit is no deceit.
That is a great statement. The God that we believe in is not in the business of counting people’s wrongs against them.
ILLUSTRATION
There is a TV show called Caught in Providence, where it is a real court scene where people come to pay their fines for violating traffic rules. Judge Frank Capiro hears the case. He goes through the footage and he sees that the person has jumped the signal or parked at the wrong side. Then he hears their side of the story. Sometimes it maybe a single mom who rushed her toddler to the playschool and is rushing to school. Looking at her situation and the fact that she has come to court leaving the toddler with someone and skipping some hours of work, he forgoes the fine. Sometimes there will be people who would want to help people pay fines for genuine cases and he uses that money to bail the accuser out.
God is like this in this scene. You go to God with an open heart. Everything is laid bare before God. You confess and accepted that you have violated him through your sins and ask him for forgiveness, and he is willing to forgive you. That is because someone else paid for your violation, someone paid for your secret sins and iniquity.
All these stories of the OT is a sign post to the great act of God on the Cross and the resurrection of Jesus where God deals with the sin, and the iniquity and the transgression of humanity. This God is in the business of forgiving people and accepting them if they are open enough to understand their life and ask for forgiveness and he has given his Son, Jesus Christ over to punishment instead of us. He gives people the blessed life because His Son, died on the cross for us.
Paul picks up this theme in
2 Corinthians 5:21
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
CONCLUSION
The greatness of confession is not in feeling sorry for oneself but to come and confess to God and the forgiveness is purely on what Jesus has done for me in the cross that I cannot do for myself. The Christian confession is about the honesty about who I am but it is this trusting by faith acknowledging that there is forgiveness and a covering available to me long before I was even born and it is still available to me in the future.
That gets us out of being sorry for our life and know that the cross was for me and has the power to change me and heal me and then confession becomes the pathway to joy and confidence in God.
We all have our version of the hidden things. The question is what do you do with that? David gives us a pathway that points to the cross. Jesus was given a treatment that he did not deserve that you and I when we believe in Jesus receive a status that we do not deserve. This is good news of God’s grace to the people of this world.
- Man Is Utterly, Always, From Conception, And In Every Aspect Of His Relationship To God, Sinful.
- Man Is Wholly Dependent On God For Forgiveness And Restoration Before He Can Enjoy An Undisturbed Relationship With God.
- Man’s Responsibility Is Humbly And In Faith To Confess His Sins To God And To Acknowledge That His Judgments Are Just.
- Man, Once Forgiven And Restored, Can Enjoy The Blessed Life The Lord For Him, And
To Extol His Virtues.
To Watch Video Sermons: Click Here