How do you feel tonight? How we feel can sometimes affect how we think about our relationship with God. Are you depressed by constant failure in your struggle against sin? If you are, perhaps you are still striving in your own strength, still thinking deep down that somehow you can achieve peace with God by your own efforts.

If, on the other hand, you are in high spirits tonight, and feel like praising God, then make sure that you feel that way for the right reason. Praise him and be happy, because you revel in God's free Grace and mercy and goodness to you. Don't be like the tax collector in the temple, who praised God because he was not like other sinners. Be very careful if you are feeling particularly pleased with yourself just because you haven't been weighed down by any terribly gross sin lately... or at least your conscience hasn't detected any.

Both our bad feelings and our good feelings should be linked in our minds to God's grace. Depression and despair over our sinfulness should lead us to call upon and trust God's saving grace and mercy. Praise and thanksgiving should proceed from that mercy.

With that introductory thought, let's turn to our text of Psalm 51, and I'm going to talk about verses 14 to 19. This is the first in a series of sermons on Psalms and parables which stress the reality and wonder of Grace. What is grace? Why is it the very grounds of our salvation? Why do we need to be reminded time and time again of the truth that we are saved by grace and not by works? Those are the questions this series addresses.

Verse 14: Save me from blood guilt, O God, the God who saves me, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness.

The bloodguilt that David speaks of relates primarily to his treatment of Uriah the Hittite, which 2 Samuel chapter 11 records. You know the story. David, who should have been out leading his army, was relaxing on his palace roof when he saw Bathsheba, Uriah's wife, bathing in her backyard below. David breaks the tenth commandment, and desires his neighbour's wife. Together, they break the seventh commandment, and Bathsheba becomes pregnant. David recalls Uriah from the front where he is fighting, and attempts to get him to sleep with his wife to cover up what has happened, but without success.

You see, Uriah was a righteous and faithful man. 1 Chronicles 11 lists Uriah the Hittite among the chiefs of the mighty warriors who supported David in his battles and were his companions when he was an outlaw on the run from king Saul. They did so, not just because they liked David, but because they knew God's prophet, Samuel, had anointed him king at God's instruction. 1 Chronicles 11:10 says that these men "gave David's kingship strong support to extend it over the whole land, as the Lord had promised."

Well, Uriah is too righteous for his own good, and refuses to spend the night in comfort in his house, when his men are asleep in the fields of war. Finally in despair David breaks also the sixth commandment. He orders Joab, the commander of the army, to put Uriah in the fiercest part of the battle and deliberately withdraw from him so he is killed. Uriah unknowingly takes his own death warrant to Joab when he returns to the battle.

This is the blood guilt of verse 14. Not some trifling little indiscretion, not even just breaking one of God's commands, but three capital offences, and the betrayal of a friend. Let me read you a quote from a man called Anderson, who translated Calvin's commentary on the Psalm's, because I think he put's it very well. He says,

"David's conduct towards Uriah, forming as it did a dark and atrocious deed of treachery and cruelty which has few parallels in the history of mankind, must, when he recovered a sense of its real character, have inflicted on his soul an agony which cannot be told. He escaped being tried before an earthly tribunal; but his conscience told him that he stood at the bar of heaven, laden with the guilt of murder; and he was convinced that the mercy of God alone could pardon him and purify his conscience. No wonder then that he cries out with such emphasis and earnestness, "O God! thou God of my salvation! Deliver me!" "

Psalm 51, and verse 14 especially, acknowlegs of David's guilt and complete spiritual bankruptcy before God. God alone can save him. And the result of God's salvation? "my tongue shall sing of your righteousness."

Verse 15 says essentially the same thing, in parallel, as verse 14. "O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise."

The first line of each verse is the initiative God takes. The second line is the praise and thanksgiving that results. I draw your attention to this because it's possible for us to think, or to feel, that praising God will somehow make us more acceptable to him. That if only we could lift ourselves up out of our depression or our lethargy and praise him, then he would be more pleased with us. Or perhaps when we're a bit down, we look at others who are happy and singing to God, and we think, "How pleased God is with them. I wish I could be like that, so that God would be pleased with me."

But such thinking is upside down. Unless God opens our lips, we are powerless to praise him. Unless he saves us, we WILL not praise him. God's grace comes first and our praise is a fruit of God's favour towards us, not a root. That is, a result, not a cause.

Let's go on to verses 16 & 17. "You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart O God, you will not despise."

David is not denigrating the sacrifices which God commanded through Moses. But what the Holy Spirit through David is saying here, is that sacrifice is only acceptable to God with a humble and contrite heart that admits your guilt and your inability to save yourself. The sacrifices themselves could never take away sins, but were an acknowlegement that the one offering the sacrifice trusted in God's mercy to the repentant sinner. David believed there was a place for sacrifice, as verse 19 shows, however, to offer sacrifice without a humble heart attitude of acknowleging his utter guilt and shame before God, would be no sacrifice at all.

Speaking of no sacrifice at all, there is another reason David says "You do not delight in sacrifice or I would bring it," and that is, in the Old Testament system, there was no sacrifice for murder or adultery. Only the death of the offender himself was sufficient. No sacrifice can save David, but only God's mercy. That mercy was declared to David through God's prophet Nathan. After David confessed his sin, Nathan said, "The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die."

This psalm is all about the wonderful truth that God saves sinners. David didn't know how God's mercy operated, he didn't know, as we know, that one of his own descendants, who would also be God incarnate, was to die as the perfect sacrifice for all sin, even the sin of murder and adultery. All David knew, was that by God's sheer undeserved mercy, he had been let off the hook.

He knew the only "sacrifice" he could bring, was the admission from a broken and contrite heart, that he had no sacrifice at all, and must rely entirely on God's saving character. And we are the same. No sacrifice we make, no gift or service that we bring, can make us any more acceptable to God than we are already by his grace to us in the Lord Jesus Christ. He is our only sacrifice. Jesus Christ has done it all - everything necessary to ensure our salvation. All we must do is accept God's mercy. That's what grace means. Do you believe that?

The concept of grace is totally foreign to our fallen human nature. We are, in our natural minds, much more comfortable with legalism, that is, to think that sacrifice on our part can merit God's forgiveness. Martin Luther, the great German Reformer of the 16th century, was like that before the Holy Spirit revealed to him the doctrine of justification by faith. He was striving to make himself worthy of God's forgiveness. He visited Rome, the holy city of Roman Catholicism, seeking peace with God. He went through all the ritual and self denial and sacrifice prescribed by the church for obtaining God's favour. One of these rituals was to ascend on your knees a set of stairs known as Pilate's staircase. These were believed to have been the steps upon which Jesus stood when tried by Pilate, miraculously transported to Rome from Jerusalem.

Half way up, whilst he was grovelling in feigned penitence, painfully dragging himself up on his knees, he was suddenly struck by the text, "The just shall live by faith." He was amazed at the depth of superstition he had allowed himself to plunge into. Shuddering and ashamed, he rose and went on his way.

Now at this stage, Martin Luther already knew the gospel of grace. He had already given many lectures on Romans and the Psalms. He had read Psalm 32, and Psalm 51. But he had slipped back into his old way of thinking. Sometimes a truth must be presented to us many times before it has its full effect. Being good little evangelicals, we've had justification by faith rammed down our throats more times than hot dinners (to mix a metaphor). We don't fall into this trap of legalism do we? Or do we? Do we still have our own Pilate's staircases we try to climb in order to please God? Perhaps it hits us more at the emotional level than the intellectual level. Ever have that nagging feeling that if only we could keep up our prayer times, pray better and more often, that we'd be much more secure in our relationship with God? Or what about preaching, reading the bible three times a day, witnessing? How often do we believe in our mind that these things are the fruit of salvation, whilst deep down, in our heart, we react emotionally as if they were the root? We get depressed because we don't measure up to the kind of performance Christianity that we promote.

It works the other way round, too. When God in his grace does wonderful things for others through us, how often we become inflated with pride. We cease to be depressed over our own sinfulness, not because God's grace has dealt with our sins, but because we think we're okay now. We're not so bad after all. We think we're more acceptable in God's sight because last night we witnessed to two rival graffitti gangs, a Buddhist Monk and a supreme court judge.

But what does David say? Look back at verse 12. "Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me, THEN, THEN I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you." Get the order right. Forgiveness, Joy, Witness. Witness comes as a result of the joy of salvation. The joy of salvation comes from knowing our sins are forgiven. Psalm 32 says, "Happy is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy is the one to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity."

I'm sorry if I'm labouring the point, but I want to make it quite clear. There is only one sacrifice that God wants as a pre-requisite to forgiveness. That is the admission that we have no sacrifice worthy to bring - that we are totally spiritually bankrupt. Verse 17 - "the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart - these O God, you will not despise."

Even when we get that straight, we're not necessarily out of the woods yet. Because we can then begin to think that this confession and repentance and broken spirit are the grounds of our salvation. And we ask ourselves, but am I REALLY sorry? Am I REALLY REALLY sorry? Let me give you three reasons why the depth of our confession and repentence is not what saves us.

1. It is only God's Spirit working in us that produces that sorrow at our sins and that recognition of our spiritual poverty in the first place.

2. We can never be contrite and sorrowful enough, never be as penitent as we ought.

3. Who is it that is broken in spirit, with a lowly and humble heart? (Matt 11:29) Whose spirit was broken in the garden of Gethsemane and on the Cross? (Matt 27:46), not in contrition for his own sin (for he had none), but for ours. In this, as in everything, Jesus Christ is our substitute. He is the prefect penitent.

Do you think God will reject you because you can't feel as sorry for your sins as you should? He won't you know. Trust that Jesus has both lived and died in your place to make you acceptable to God.

Having said all that, there does remain a place for sacrifice in the believer's life. There are two types of sacrifice in Psalm 51. One is the sacrifice to take away sins. Christ has done that for us. The other is the sacrifice of Thanksgiving and Dedication, in verse 19. One is offered under obligation, the other is freely given, in response to God's salvation. It is the same as the praise and witness of verses 14 & 15.

Our sacrifice for sins has been provided by Jesus, and now that we are right with God through faith in his blood, we are set free to bring to him the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving which the New Testament interprets as a life lived in worship to God. Remember Romans 12 verse 1. And Hebrews 13:15,16, which says

"Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise - the fruit of lips that confess his name. ANd do noot forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased."

Why is he pleased with such sacrifices? Is it because they make us acceptable to him? No, but because they come from the joy of knowing that God has saved us.

Notice also that the context for these sacrifices is the church of God. That's another sermon in itself, but let me close with a quote from Martin Luther, who said,

"Since God has saved us, let us so order our works that they may be acceptable to him. Are you rich? Let your goods administer to the necessities of the poor! Are you poor? Let your services be acceptable to the rich! If your labour is useful to yourself alone, the service you pretend to render unto God is a lie."

Let us trust that God has accepted us in Christ. Let's stop trying to offer our own sacrifices to appease him and earn his forgiveness. And let's offer the thanksgiving sacrifice of godly lives and brotherly love, because Jesus has saved us.

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