FAILURE NEED NEVER BE FINAL
Psalm 32:1-7
Series: “What Do I Need to Know for Life?
Lesson Seven (David)
July 25, 2010
It’s great to be back with you! Cindy and I missed you last Sunday, but last Sunday we were thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to be with our three kids, their spouses and our two grandchildren in Nashville, Tennessee. And then last Sunday afternoon, we gathered with my parents and my two brothers and all of their families as we spent a couple of days celebrating my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. It was a wonderful time!
And I heard a missed a great sermon on Ruth—another hero from the Bible! My thanks to Gail Zickefoose for opening the Word for us last Sunday.
Can you believe that we’re two-thirds of the way through the summer?!—and through our series on Lessons from the Heroes of the Bible that I’ve entitled “What Do I Need to Know?” We’ve considered heroes like Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Job and Ruth and the lessons learned through their life stories:
- God can be trusted.
- We win when we forgive.
- God uses ordinary people in extraordinary ways.
- We can be strong and courageous.
- God is with us even when we suffer, and
- God will provide.
Hopefully you’ve found these truths to be helpful in your own life!
Today we move to consider the life of King David—one that I suppose is a favorite hero for many people. Many of us even as kids identified young David as a hero as we heard the amazing story of how David, with only a slingshot and a few small stones, single-handedly downed the towering giant Goliath and protected the people of Israel from the Philistine army which had attacked them. There’s something amazing about how God chose David to be King—even though David was the “little brother” who wasn’t considered to be significant at all among even his own family. We have loved the image of David the musician soothing the troubled spirits of King Saul—and we have read and re-read from the Book of Psalms, many of which were written by David himself. We love the stories of David’s loyalty to King Saul, and how David and Saul’s son Jonathon represent the ultimate height of what it means to be friends. And the thought of David being called “a man after God’s own heart” is something that not only challenges us but also helps us to see that’s it’s possible to have that kind of relationship with God.
David had been chosen by God and anointed to sit on the throne over the people of Israel. He became the nation’s leader and enjoyed God’s favor wherever he went. He was loved dearly by the people who served under him, and God gave David great success as a leader.
You know, when I first planned to consider David for this series of sermons, my mind went to a scene we find in 2 Samuel 11 and 12. It describes not the height of David’s days, but what was likely the lowest point in his life. You see, in the midst of all his high privileges, David saw, desired and took for himself the wife of another man—and he then sank even further into the darkness of sin by arranging the death of the woman’s husband in battle. The woman’s name was Bathsheba, and the mere mention of her name ushers in the harsh reality of David’s most shameful moment.
If you’ve never read the story, you need to do that, for it paints word pictures I can’t do justice to! God sent the prophet Nathan to confront David with the ugly truth. Nathan told David a story about a wealthy man of privilege who assumed possession of the only thing of value held by a very poor man. David was outraged that the man of great means would take advantage of the poor man in such a heartless and callous way. And after David had finished his self-righteous tirade against the offender in the story, Nathan looked at David and said boldly, “You are the man!” And Nathan began to expose the ugly sins which David had committed against Bathsheba and her husband.
David was devastated as he was forced to see his sin for what it was. As I’ve said before, Satan is such a liar. He will lead us into the most awful things, and put blinders on us so that we don’t see it for what it is. That’s what he’d done with David. But with Nathan’s bold confrontation, David had to admit that he was an adulterer and a murderer. He had destroyed a happy home. He had allowed his sexual desire to go rampant and uncontrolled. And God was not pleased with David—just as God is not pleased whenever we get caught up in sin.
I also considered for our text to go to Psalm 51. It records David’s powerful prayer of confession—a prayer many of us have prayed many times. It begins—
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge…” (Psalm 51:1-4)
But when I got into my sermon preparation, I realized that the real story of hope is that God allowed David to get past the shame of 2 Samuel 11 and 12. God answered David’s plea for forgiveness and cleansing in Psalm 51. The rest of the story is that God redeemed David’s life. While David’s escapade with Bathsheba had an impact on the rest of David’s life, it did not define who he was. God helped David to get past that—and the lesson I want us to glean today from David’s life story is this: Failure Need Never Be Final. Our sin and our failure need not define us. If we will humbly turn to Him, God forgives sin and helps us to get beyond failure.
In Psalm 32, we read that the broken man has become the blessed man. That’s an act of God, you know! That’s not something we can do on our own! Listen to the first seven verses of this Psalm that David wrote and is numbered Psalm 32—
[Read Psalm 32:1-7, NIV]
In preparing for this sermon, I kept coming across a quotation from Winston Churchill—
Success in not final; failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts. (Winston Churchill)
From a purely human perspective, that’s true—and it gives encouragement for us to do all that we can to push beyond the failures in life—to exercise courage to keep going even when we have failed miserably. But, as I think you’ll see, there’s a greater, more important source for us to tap into when we realize that we have failed. David wasn’t merely exercising courage as he continued beyond the Bathsheba incident. David needed forgiveness. And while he had violated a woman and her husband, even more significant was the fact that he had violated the trust God had placed in David. And yet in a sad twist of reality, it was only this God whom David had violated Who was able to cleanse the dark stain of sin in David’s heart. Only God could forgive—and the Good News is that that is exactly what God did for David! God forgave David and redeemed the mess David had made of his fairly charmed life—thus we learn that failure need never be final!
I have a pastor friend who years ago, while serving as a youth pastor, had an affair. The Church of the Nazarene sees the integrity of its ministers seriously, and so my friend lost his ministry credentials and his position—as he should have. And while I know that we as a church may not always have handled such situations in the best way possible, I am glad that the church was also redemptive with my friend. When a minister has had a moral failure of this kind, it’s a long road to journey on and very few commit themselves to the process of restoration. Unfortunately, most get angry with the church and blame them, rather than acknowledging their sin for what it is. But fortunately, my friend was repentant and humbly submitted himself to the discipline of the church, which was fairly rigorous and extended through several years of time. I know it was a difficult season of life for him and for his family—and, I might tell you, his wife also stuck by him and, from all I know, they have a solid marriage today.
Fast forward now to a conversation I had with my friend a few years ago—one of the first times we had ever discussed the topic of the sin of his moral failure. He made a comment that has stuck with me a long time. While acknowledging his shame over what had happened and his gratitude that the church had a process by which his ministry could eventually be restored, he said, “But I know that there will always be an asterisk by my name.”
You know what an asterisk is, don’t you? It’s the little star-like symbol that is used after a word to point you to a footnote at the bottom of page that tells you more that you may need to know about that word in the text. So, do you get what he was saying when he said that he felt there would always be an asterisk by his name—that it would forever mark him, that it would be the thing others would whisper about when they spoke of him, that doors of opportunity would close before him when people learned “his full story.”
The truth is that every one of has an asterisk by our name—the asterisk of sin and failure. How do I know that? Because the Bible tells us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Besides it being confirmed over and over in scripture, I guess I’d have to tell you that I’ve also observed it to be true—that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist brain to figure out that not one of us is perfect. You’ve probably heard it said before, but they say that if you’re looking for a perfect church, don’t go there if you find it because the moment you step through the doors it will no longer be perfect and you’ll ruin it! We all have an asterisk that tells of sin in our lives. And, rest assured, David’s asterisk that told the shameful story of him with Bathsheba wasn’t the first sin in his life either—but it was the most well-known and it was the sin that seemed to force David to deal with his own sinful nature.
Most of us can also identify ourselves with some kind of failure—perhaps a failure that is so severe that we feel it may forever put an asterisk by our name, defining who we are (or aren’t!), perhaps limiting what we can do, somehow making us second-rate. More often than we like to admit, there are three small words that need to come from our mouths—“I blew it!” I suppose another version of those three small words is “I was wrong.” I don’t know about you, but I’m not overly fond of either set of three words—at least not when they need to come out of my mouth! But we all make mistakes! We are all imperfect, faulty, mistake-prone people!
Sometimes our mistakes are minimal, with minor ramifications—like when we misjudge which street to turn on and we have to go out of our way a few blocks or even a few miles. The sky’s not going to fall in because we have to take a few more minutes to get someplace! But other times our failures (or what we feel like are “failures”) are costly, humiliating and demoralizing—with serious consequences. I guess the kind of failures I’m thinking of here are things like business failures, lost jobs, home foreclosure, failing a class, divorce, rebellious kids…you fill in the blank. And we sometimes feel that others are keeping track of the asterisks by our name—and sometimes they may be!
Why would I deal with both sin and failure in the same sermon? The example of David’s affair with Bathsheba was clearly a matter of sin—no bones about it! There were no excuses! Sometimes we don’t want to call sin what it is—and we may as well get over that, because God doesn’t have any problem calling sin in our lives “sin” at all! I’m confident that God calls “sin” what some people may want to label “failures”—and I’m just as confident that there may be people who want to label something “sin” in your life when it may merely be “failure” in the eyes of God. The longer I live, the more I realize that I don’t have the full scoop on everyone’s lives—but God does, and that’s all that matters!
Psalm 32 actually uses three synonyms for sin, all of which connote something different. Forgiveness is freely and graciously given, regardless of whether it be of a “transgression,” “sin” or “iniquity.” A “transgression” is an act of rebellion and disloyalty. “Sin” is an act that misses—often intentionally—God’s expressed and revealed will. “Iniquity” is a crooked or wrong act, often associated with a conscious and intentional intent to do wrong. Clearly the words overlap. David’s point is that forgiveness of sin—however we define it—is to be found in God.
As I’ve been thinking about it, the distinction between sin and failure might be found in a puddle of grape juice on the living room carpet. I would think that it would be “failure” if it was caused by a child who, as a pure gesture of kindness and respect, spilled the grape juice as he tried to bring a glass of it to his mom or dad. But we’d see it altogether different if it was merely a matter that the child defiantly poured the grape juice on the carpet after he’d gotten angry over being told he couldn’t have the glass of grape juice in the living room.
And I think I’ve considered failure and sin together here because so often we can embrace the fact that God can forgive sin, but we still struggle to set ourselves free from the mostly personally-imposed stigma of failures. If God can wipe clean the stain of sin, don’t you suppose He can and will also deal with the stains on the floor of our lives caused by failures?
The wonderful message of God’s Word is that He redeems lives! He forgives sin and sees beyond our worst failures. Let’s look closer at Psalm 32.
It begins—
Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him and in whose spirit there is no deceit. (Psalm 32:1-2)
Please catch that David is saying that not only is the sin removed, but God pours out blessing upon those He has forgiven! Three verbs express the absolute forgiveness God provides. Sins are “forgiven”—in other words, they are carried away. It’s the act of removal of sin, guilt, and the remembrance of sin on God’s part. Sins are “covered”—referring to the gracious act of atonement by which the sinner is reconciled and the sin is a matter of the past so much so that the Lord does not bring it up anymore as grounds for His displeasure in us! And when David said that God “does not count against him” his sins, He is referring to us being justified by God—as if we had never sinned at all.
When God catches us, exposes the sin in our lives, and forgives us when we repent, He also frees us from pretense. There is great freedom in David’s words! There is real blessing in coming clean with God—in being honest with Him. There’s freedom in that! I suppose that’s why people at AA meetings begin their sharing with the personal statement, “Hi, I’m Tim. I’m an alcoholic.” There’s something freeing in being honest! It breaks down the stronghold that secrecy has upon us!
And, as David described in verses 3 and 4, until that openness and repentance happens, we waste away from the inside out. Sin eats away at us. David is speaking here of his own experience.
When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of the summer. (Psalm 32:3-4)
David wasn’t having a good time, was he? His sin was wearing on him—making him old before his time. He was wasting away—angry at himself and angry with God. And it was constant—night and day. He felt God’s hand heavy upon Him—knowing but not wanting to admit that God was angry with him for what he had done and what he was doing. As long as we try to hide our sin and excuse it away, our refusal to repent brings depression, emotional pain, alienation from God and even physical problems. And the sad truth is that millions of people live in this condition. They’ve accepted it as the norm for life.
But verse 5 is where David gets to his confession—
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. (Psalm 32:5)
David came clean before God—and the burden of his sin was lifted from him! God forgave him! Even though his sin was ugly and shameful, God forgave him! Even though his actions wreaked havoc in the lives of others, God forgave David! Even though David’s actions were deplorable and so out of character for the man David wanted to be, God forgave David! He was set free! David’s confession led to God’s forgiveness. David gave up trying to hide his sin from God. He got real with himself and with the Lord—and God forgave him, cleansing away the stain of sin upon his heart.
And then verses 6 and 7 describe the protection found in the God who forgives—
Therefore let everyone who is godly pray to you while you may be found; surely when the mighty waters rise, they will not reach him. You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance. (Psalm 32:6-7)
Do you hear the words of inner healing here? And part of what I’m hearing is that not only did David experience the cleansing of God’s forgiveness, but it opened the door for David to forgive himself! The denial of sin is not the answer—it’s like an infection that eats us up inside. But when David humbled himself before the Lord and acknowledged his sin for what it was, God forgave him and David experienced once again the peace and assurance that God was on his side. David was relieved of the burden of trying to cover it up or even to make up for it.
And, in doing so, David was reminded of the grace and mercy of God—which is something every one of us needs to be reminded of daily. We need the assurance that God is working for us—that we can rest in His protection.
David’s reference to God’s protection from the mighty waters—the flood waters—takes me back to our time in Nashville, Tennessee earlier this week. I’m told that the flood that hit the area early in May did more damage than was done to New Orleans a few years ago—but we didn’t hear as much about it in the news because the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was dominating the news in those days. My brother Steve and his wife live high on a hill directly above the Cumberland River that went way over its banks and flooded so much of the city. While their home was safe because they sit so high above the river, Steve was showing us where they could look across the river and see cars floating out of apartment building parking lots—with water above the roofs of many buildings. They say that flood waters are the most devastating natural disaster, because of the ongoing, relentless force of the water.
So David is saying that God’s forgiveness and God’s redemption is so thorough that not even the worst thing that can happen to us can remove us from the protection of His presence! Wow! David had the assurance that God would deliver him—and thus David turned his attention to praise and worship! David had learned that the Lord is truly our hiding place, protecting us from trouble and surrounding us with songs of deliverance!
Aren’t you glad that our God is the God of the Second Chance?! Sin and failure need never be the last word in our lives. God forgives and restores and gives us the strength and the grace to get back on our feet to live lives that please and honor Him. He promises to be our hiding place, our strength, our Great Deliverer.
Those of us who have been at Campmeeting services have been reminded that the need of the church today is not for slicker programs but rather a fresh breath of God’s Holy Spirit blowing through our lives, unleashing joy and power. But to experience that, we need to come clean before God as David did. And if you’re struggling with the asterisk you think is forever attached to your name today, I want to remind you that sin and failure need never be final in our lives. The God who forgave and delivered David is the God who will meet you at your point of need today if you will humbly call upon Him.
