Psalm 32:1-7
B.
“Blessed is the one whose transgression is
forgiven, whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in
whose spirit there is no deceit.
For 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 dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did
not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.
Therefore, let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when
you may be found; surely in the rush of great waters, they shall not reach him. You are a hiding place for me; you
preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance.”
I cannot think of a better analogy
for sin in the heart than that of drowning. Living with sin is like treading water in the middle of an
ocean. At first it seems easy,
almost as if it required no effort at all. But then, you begin to feel a slight burn in your leg
muscles coupled with an irritating thought telling you, quietly, that though
you are far from the end of your effort and still able to keep yourself afloat,
you cannot keep this up forever.
But, since there is still a good amount of strength left in your legs,
you can ignore those thoughts for the time being. (One’s own strength tends to obscure reality and makes it
far less real to the perception.)
After a while, however, your body begins to get heavy, and it takes more
energy to keep up the same effort.
You sink a little bit every now a then. You try to take quick breaks, and your head goes under, but
never long enough to the point that you cannot pop right back up again. The quick breaks give you a false sense
of regaining energy, but you soon discover that the burst of energy runs dry
quickly, and now you are more tired than before. The reality that the end of your strength is coming sooner
than you expected becomes very real—like a trap—and you begin to feel
trapped. At this point, you begin
to loose your sense of basic reason and think stupidly, looking around to see
if there is some place you could swim to as if you were not floating alone in
the middle of the ocean. You begin
to cry out for help as if someone could possibly hear you from the middle of
the ocean. When you find that you
are just as alone as you were afraid of, you begin to back the resolve that you
have what it takes. You are going
to do this no matter what it takes, whether hell or…high water. You become completely focused on
consciously treading water as if, if you applied your whole mind to the task,
you could will the continued motion of your legs and arms. That is when the sharks come…circling,
circling, checking you out, waiting for you to go under. There is very little time left now, and
though it seems like the most absurd thought—for how could anything save you
now—especially stranded alone in alone in the midst of a great sea? But, what if—even though it is the last
resort, and quite obviously a product of desperate delirium—what if God would
save you if you asked? Drowning
out in the middle of the ocean with no one around but the birds, when all logic
says that even if God wanted to save you, nothing could get to you in time, do
you ask Him? Or, do you give in to
what appears to be the inevitable and let yourself drown? It is an interesting question with an
even more interesting answer. For,
when we ask Him, we find that salvation does not come from a speeding ship or a
helicopter. No. He simply tells us to stop treading
water and to put our feet down, and when we do, we feel the ground beneath us. We are never too sure whether it was
there to begin with or not, but we are positive, no matter what we might
speculate, that to be saved from so terrible a fate is nothing short of
miraculous.
All
sin creates this feeling in us, whether it is the quality of our rebellion
before we bow to Christ, or when we take our eyes off of Him, and like Peter, once
again, begin to sink in our sin and our troubles. There is nothing worse than the feeling of floundering in a
world that is too deep and too wide for our fragile frames. When we try to keep ourselves afloat,
our strength dries up as by the heat of
summer, and we become overcome by great
waters. There is only one Rock
and only one way to stand on solid ground. We call Him the Rock, because the atonement He has won is
forever underneath us and runs far deeper than we could ever fall. For,
when the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheered my soul, and when I thought, ‘My foot slips,’ your
steadfast love, O Lord, held me up.
To wrestle with sin is common to man, and the fall to sin sometimes
seems too much to bear. But,
when vertigo rushes panic into our hearts and desperation to our limbs, if we
struggle we will only sink faster.
We must remember not to despair.
For, if we will only cry to Him who has accounted for all sin, then He
will set our feet upon the rock again.
And, though the waves crash angrily beneath us, though the wind blows
furiously against us, and the gates of hell rattle with hatred, the noise that
once proved terrible in our hearts cannot be heard above the shouts of deliverance from the One
through whom the wind and waves were created—the unshakeable rock of our
salvation—the Faithful and True, King Jesus Christ.
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