“12 Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults. 13 Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. Then will I be blameless, innocent of great transgression. 14 May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”
There is not one person alive today who has an accurate view of sin. None of us considers it as deadly as it is. Not me. Not you. None of us hates it the way it deserves to be hated. None of us is sufficiently set on killing it.
None of us realizes how weak we are before sin. You think you are stronger than you are when it comes to sin. I think I am stronger than I am when it comes to sin. I want you to remember something that might be difficult. I want you to remember the time when you felt most broken in sin before God. In that moment, you knew without a doubt that you could do nothing but sin without God’s help. In that moment—in that moment of fullest realization of your brokenness in sin—you didn’t come near to realizing the full extent of your brokenness.
In a roundabout way, this truth is very encouraging. When you see the extent of your helplessness before sin, you realize something of the extent of God’s willingness to help. When you see the power of sin, you realize something of the power of God to help. You are more helpless before sin than you realize. God is more willing to help than you might think. That is the claim of this sermon: you are more helpless before sin than you realize. God is more willing to help than you might think.
We will study this in three points. First: hidden sins. Second: willful sins. Third: praying to act pleasingly. First, in verse 12, David asks for help with hidden sins. Second, in verse 13, David asks for help with willful sins. Third, in verse 14, David prays that his life might be pleasing to God.
First: hidden sins. This is our fourth week studying what the word of God can do according to Psalm 19. To this point our response has seemed straightforward. The word of God can give life to the soul, light to the eyes, and joy to the heart and of course you want that. It warns of dangers and explains the rewards of obedience and so of course you want it. Of course you find it more precious than gold and sweeter than honey.
“Except when you don’t because sometimes you won’t,” to borrow a line from Dr. Seuss. Our response to the word of God should be straightforward, but the problem is that you and I have hearts that are anything but straightforward. You want life, light, and joy, and yet you habitually ignore the warnings of God. I want the rewards that come from obedience and yet I regularly fail to obey. We are confusing people. John Goldingay is right, “The mystery of human sin is the fact that we all go astray even though we can see that God’s expectations make sense.”
You have the perverse ability to hear “the Lord is my shepherd” during your devotions at 7:00 in the morning and forget that throughout the day in the very moments when you need to remember that the Lord is your shepherd. You and I have the perverse ability to be hearers of the word without being doers of the word. “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says,” James says. “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.”
You can listen to the word of God in such a way that you can agree with it without acting on it. This is deadly. This is like going to have an MRI scan to look for cancer but never actually turning the MRI machine on. You feel as if you’ve done something. You laid in that MRI tube. You can say, “hey, it didn’t find anything” but that’s only because it was never turned on. That isn’t really a scan. David doesn’t want that; that’s what verse 12 is about, “Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults.”
David doesn’t want to encounter the word of God without being truly scanned by the word of God. He knows that he has hidden sins that only the word can reveal. Think of our study of 1 Corinthians 13. I dare say that the majority of us knew 1 Corinthians 13 quite well before that study. We could have rattled off that list—“love is patient; love is kind; it doesn’t not envy; it does not boast.” We knew that list and yet every week of that study as we focused on each of those descriptions of love we found ourselves hurt in a good way. The word of God scanned us and although we knew that love was patient, we came to see that our love isn’t all that patient. The word of God scanned us and although we knew that love was kind, we came to see that we our love doesn’t show near as many kindnesses as the love of God. The word of God scanned us and revealed our hidden sins.
You can’t scan yourself like the word of God can; that’s the first half of verse 12, “Who can discern his errors?” You need God to dredge that sin up so it can be dealt with; that’s the second half of verse 12, “Forgive my hidden faults.”
Let’s take David’s life as an example. David didn’t come under conviction of sin for what he did to Bathsheba and Uriah until the word of God scanned him through the prophet Nathan. He didn’t discern those errors on his own to use the words of the first half of verse 12. The word of God scanned him through the prophet Nathan so that those faults might be forgiven to the use the words of the second half of verse 12.
I hope that you want your hidden sins revealed to you. I hope that you see that as a good kind of hurt. If you don’t, I want you to consider why not—why don’t you want your hidden sins revealed to you? Some people don’t want their hidden sins revealed to them because they expect themselves to be sinless and yet another exposure of sin will reveal that they are not sinless. They would rather turn a blind eye to sin than to admit what the Bible tells them again and again about themselves, which is that they are sinners.
Some people don’t want their hidden sins revealed to them because they think that God expects them to be sinless; they think that yet another exposure of sin means that God will write them off. They don’t seem to see that it is God who is bringing this sin to their attention. God doesn’t bring sins to your attention to tell you that He is writing you off. If God wanted to write you off, He would stop bringing sins to your attention. The man who has hidden sins revealed to him by the word of God is alive to God. The man who never has hidden sins revealed to him by the word of God is dead to God. That’s why we say that repentance is the way of life for the Christian.
Seeing sin in yourself is a sign of spiritual life. Having hidden sins exposed to you by the word of God is a sign of spiritual life. The humble man acknowledges that he doesn’t know one percent of his own sin. That’s what Calvin thought. He wrote, “Satan has so many devices by which he deludes and blinds our minds that there is not a man who knows the hundredth part of his own sins.” That is what we saw at the beginning of the sermon: there is not one person alive today who has an accurate view of sin. None of us considers it as deadly as it is. None of us hates it the way it deserves to be hated. None of us is sufficiently set on killing it. None of us realizes how weak we are before sin.
We tend to think of our sins as if they could be numbered fairly easily. We hear the Ten Commandments read and think we know the full extent of the business that must done with God. We think we can actually number our sins. Charles Spurgeon spoke about that saying, “In the Lateran Council of the Church of Rome, a decree was passed that every true believer must confess his sins, all of them, once a year to the priest, and they affixed to it this declaration: that there is no hope of pardon but in complying with that decree. What can equal the absurdity of such a decree as that? Do they suppose that they can tell their sins as easily as they can count their fingers?”
You need the mercy of God for far more than for one or two sins this past week or eighty or ninety this past year. You need much more grace than you think.
That’s hidden sins. Now let’s turn our attention to willful sins. That’s our second point: willful sins. There are plenty of sins that fly under our own radar—hidden sins as we’ve called them—but there are also some sins that show up on our radar, set off any number of alarms, and yet we still choose to commit them. Those are the ones David calls “willful sins”; verse 13, “Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me.”
This word “willful” can also be translated as “insolent” or “presumptuous.” These are the sins that we know are wrong, have some understanding of why they are wrong, know we are about to do wrong, and do it anyway.
You see these sins very clearly in children. A child is told what not to do and chooses to do it anyway. We adults do this too, but we are better at deceiving ourselves and others. It is simply easier to see this in children. That’s how it goes for a lot of spiritual matters.
The Bible is full of examples of willful sin. Eve clearly knew the commandment of God regarding the fruit of the tree. She was talking about that commandment moments before she broke it. She knew she was doing wrong but chose to do it anyway. That’s willful sin.
Achan committed a willful sin. He knew that God had said that the plunder from the city of Jericho was to be destroyed. He knew that God didn’t want anyone to keep any, and yet Achan kept a robe, some silver, and some gold. He heard the commandment and made a distinct choice to disobey the commandment. That’s willful sin.
King Jehoash committed a willful sin. From the time he was a boy, he was mentored by the righteous priest Jehoiada. Jehoiada taught him what was right and as long as Jehoiada lived, Jehoash did what was right. When Jehoiada died, that influence was gone, and Jehoash went off the rails. He opened the country back up to idol worship. God sent prophets to correct him. He didn’t listen. God sent the son of the righteous priest Jehoiada to correct him. Not only did Jehoash not listen to him, he killed that man. Jehoash knew what was right; he wanted to do wrong. That’s willful sin.
That’s dangerous. David saw that. Jehoash didn’t. Jehoash lived after David, but verse 13 is essentially David’s prayer not to be like Jehoash, “Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me.”
Do you fear that you might become like Jehoash? Do you fear that you are the sort of person who could do something like Achan? Do you see that you have it within you to do something as disastrous as Eve did? If not, you are on very dangerous ground. You are on the ground of pride and you are prepped for a fall. If you know that you might just have it in you to do what Jehoash did and what Achan did and what Eve did, then you know why David prayed as he did, “Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me.”
You need to humble yourself and recognize that you could be ruled by willful sins. You could be ruled by gambling, be on the edge of bankruptcy, and still think in your heart of hearts that you are just one win away from making everything right. You could know the pain of sexual perversion and be utterly controlled by sexual perversion. That doesn’t simply happen to other people. The people to whom that happens are people just like you and me and David. We are those sorts of people. David saw that. Do you see that?
As he wrote this Psalm, David saw himself for who he was. He also saw God. These verses we are studying this evening were all spoken to God. David was asking God to reveal His hidden sins. David was asking God to keep Him from willful sins. David was asking God to keep these willful sins from ruling over him. David spoke to God about these sins because He knew that God was willing to help with sin. David knew that God is merciful, which doesn’t mean that He turns a blind eye to sin but rather that He stands next to His repentant people and rolls up His sleeves to work on their sin with us.
That’s how to avoid willful sin; now we turn our attention to living pleasing lives. That’s our final point: praying to act pleasingly. We often read the final verse of this Psalm as having to do with the Psalm itself; we see these words as David’s hope that God likes what he has written; verse 14, “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”
David didn’t write those words hoping that God would like this Psalm. He wrote those words asking that God would be pleased with his life. The phrase “words of my mouth” are simply an expression of what comes out of the heart. “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks” as David’s greater son put it. David wanted God to be pleased with what came out of his heart and to do what was necessary to make what came out of his heart pleasing.
David wanted God to be pleased with what was going on inside him. That’s what’s going on with the phrase “meditation of my heart.” This same word translated as mediation could also refer to music. David wanted his interior monologue to be a sweet, sweet sound in God’s ear. He wanted God to change him to make it so. This is very similar to the first stanza of the hymn by Adelaide Pollard, “Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way! Thou art the Potter, I am the clay. Mold me and make me after Thy will, while I am waiting, yielded and still.”
David was asking that his life be an acceptable offering to God. Other than in this instance here in verse 14, every other use of this word for “acceptable” along with this preposition in Scripture has to do with offerings. Leviticus 22:19, “if it is to be accepted for you it shall be a male without blemish, of the bulls or the sheep or the goats.” Isaiah 56:7, “their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar.” Leviticus 19:5, “When you offer a sacrifice of peace offerings to the Lord, you shall offer it so that you may be accepted.”
David thought of his life and what was going on in his heart in terms of a sacrifice and wondered if it would be an acceptable sacrifice to God. Paul encouraged all of us to think the same; “I urge you in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.”
Jesus thought of his life in the same way. He was the perfectly acceptably sacrifice, without any blemish of sin. David wanted to be a more acceptable sacrifice to God, which is to say that, without knowing it, David really wanted to be more like his greater son Jesus.
The end of this Psalm is really a prayer to become more like Jesus; verse 12, “Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults,” says “Father, I think I’m much more like Jesus than I actually am. Lovingly show me where I am unlike Your Son and make me like Your Son.” Verse 13, “Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. Then will I be blameless, innocent of great transgression,” says, “Father, I know that by nature my heart is not like Jesus’ heart. He hated sin. I often love it. He died to free me from it, but I seem to miss being its slave. Keep me free just as he died to make me.” Verse 14, “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer,” says, “Father, may my inner life look more like Jesus’ inner life. May what others see of my life look more like what others’ saw in Jesus’ life.”
There is not one person alive today who has an accurate view of sin. None of us considers it as deadly as it is. None of us hates it the way it deserves to be hated. None of us is sufficiently set on killing it. No one other than Jesus. He knows how deadly it is. You see that at the cross. He knows how weak you are before the power of sin. You see that in his willingness to help. Amen.