Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Confession

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

When you know you’ve screwed up, when you know you’ve failed, how do you get up again in such a way that you have more joy and power than before?  There’s a secret basis of confession: it’s a secret only because most of us don’t know about it. And it’s a crucial missing piece in most people’s thinking. Let’s look at what Psalm 32 says about 1) the need for confession, 2) the way of confession, and 3) the secret basis of confession. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on May 12, 2002. Series: Psalms: Disciples of Grace. Scripture: Psalm 32:1-11. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

The book of Psalms gives voice to the full range of human emotions. You'll find joy, sorrow, doubt, fear, praise, and lament in its pages. Join us today as Tim Keller shows us how the Psalms can help us grow into the people God designed us to be. This is Psalm 31 verses 1 through 11. 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 was 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 will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will counsel you with my eye upon you. Be not like a horse or a mule without understanding,

which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you. Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the Lord. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy all you upright in heart. This is God's word. Doing a series of studies on spiritual disciplines.

Looking at the book of Psalms and what we're doing is we're looking each week at another very, very practical, how do I say this, a practical spiritual competency that you must engage in if you're going to grow into the person that God wants you to be. And therefore, actually, these studies are, there are some constraints in a worship service and a sermon. They can only be so practical. You don't have overheads. You can't, you know, stop for questions at every place. But I'm trying not so much to be inspirational or even convicting as to be practical in these studies.

And what the psalm that was just read brings us to a spiritual discipline that virtually every single, well, every branch of Christianity, every tradition of Christianity understands as a basic spiritual competency. And that is the spiritual competency of forgiveness, of confession and forgiveness. See verse 5, it said, I did not cover my iniquity and I said I will confess my transgressions. And that's what this is about. Now I'm going to use the word repent and confess as synonyms, but generally speaking the word repent doesn't show up. The word confess is in here, and we're talking about confession.

And let me give it to you in non-technical terms. When you know you've screwed up, when you know you've failed, you know it's your fault, how do you get up again after you've fallen in such a way that you have more joy and power than before? How do you get up not broken and crippled and actually in worse shape than before, but better? How do you do that? So let's take a look at what this passage says about the discipline of confession.

We'll see what this very well-known Psalm says about the need for confession, the way of confession, and the secret basis of confession. It's a secret only because most of us don't know about it, but that's why I still call it the secret because it's such a crucial missing piece in most people's thinking. The need for confession, the way of confession, and the secret of confession. Now first of all, the need. We can't ignore this. It's easy to run too fast into the middle of the psalm and ignore the first part. Blessed is the one who's forgiven.

Now, we always have to say this every time we get to this word blessed, because blessed in English just means inspired or lifted up, but in both the Hebrew word that's rendered blessed in the Bible and the Greek word that's rendered blessed in the Bible, there's something much more profound. To be blessed means complete wellness of being, profound fulfillment, right? I say that all the time, okay? But look who it comes to. Who is it for? The forgiven. Now, what this means is, David is saying that the most fulfilled life belongs to people who have been deeply forgiven. Jesus talks about this. Jesus says one of the most remarkable things in the Bible, I think. One of the most remarkable because it's so counterintuitive. In Luke chapter 7, he meets a religious leader, Simon, who's

very cordial but kind of distant and remote. And then he meets in the same place a woman, a woman of the street, but a woman who is filled with passion and compassion and washes Jesus' feet with her tears and her hair. And Simon, of course, the religious leader is very taken aback by the unseemliness of this emotional display. And Jesus in one of the great rebukes in world history turns to him and says, Simon, can I tell you why she is a more passionate and compassionate and loving person than you? The one who is forgiven little, he says, loves little. He says, the one who's forgiven little loves little. And what he's saying is, the most loving people, the most compassionate people, and what David here is saying, is the happiest, most blessed and fulfilled people

are the people who've been the most forgiven. And put it this way, there's three kinds of people in the world, according to the Bible, according to this text here. There's the people who feel they're too good to need to be deeply forgiven. They say, well, you know, I'm not perfect, but you know, I occasionally need to be forgiven. There's some people who feel they're too good to be deeply forgiven. There's other people who feel they're too bad

to be deeply forgiven. And then there are those who know they need it and they've got it. And if you need, know you need it and you've got it, you are the happiest people in the world. You are the people who, because love, Jesus says, is just a function of knowing you need it and have gotten it. If you have too high a view of yourself, as it were, to think you really need to be deeply forgiven, or if you have too low a view of yourself to really think you can be deeply forgiven, you're not going to be, Jesus says, filled with passion and compassion. But the one who's forgiven little loves little. And if you don't love much, if you're not a passionate, happy, compassionate, loving, giving person, you haven't been forgiven

enough. It's a remarkable thing. So blessed is the one. The happiest people in the world are the ones who not only know they need to be deeply forgiven, but they've got it. Now some people, of course, right away might say, and rightly so, it makes sense to say, but isn't all this talk about guilt and confession obsolete?

Here you're coming to us, New York City, telling us how to confess our sins so we can get rid of our guilt when everybody I know, a lot of people would say this to me, and they'd say, guilt's not the problem it was for your generation. Why? Well, because in traditional society, traditional cultures, more traditional cultures, morality was put on people. And you said, well, now you've got to live up. Your role was given to you. And you say, well, now this is where you have to fit in and you have to live up. Of course, people like that.

Of course, societies like that are filled with guilt. People who aren't living up to this or that role. But today is different. Today everyone gets to choose who they want to be. You create your own identity. You're the one who decides what's right or wrong for you. We're not going to have the same problems with guilt. It's not that simple.

Notice verse one says, not only blessed is one whose transgression is forgiven, but whose sin is covered. And when the psalmist, who's David here, by the way, when David says, talks about the need for covering, he is deliberately making a reference to Genesis 3, to that original account. Here's what we read in Genesis 3. Remember, the man, the woman, Adam and Eve, were naked and unashamed. Then we read, and when they ate of the tree.

See, when they broke God's, violated God's word and will, when they ate of the tree, they realized they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together to make coverings for themselves. There is a deep need from the very beginning, the Bible says, for covering. We need to be covered. We cannot stand to be uncovered. It's endemic to all generations, all cultures, everywhere. And you know, there's nobody who has proven this better, I think, than Jean-Paul Sartre in his work, Being and Nothingness, where he has this very famous illustration. Get it out again, okay? The illustration is, he says, imagine yourself in a room

and you see a keyhole and you see light through the keyhole and when you get down and you look through the keyhole, you see people doing things and they don't know you're watching. Wow. There's nothing more empowering and satisfying to be the unviewed viewer. To be able to see everything and they don't know you're watching. You can see them, they can't see you. You know, one-way mirror.

You can see them, they can see you. Now you've got power. You're in the driver's seat. And suddenly, in this illustration, Sarja says, suddenly as you're looking through the keyhole and feeling really good, you suddenly hear a noise and you look behind you and you see another keyhole and you see a little eye through that keyhole and you realize that your unviewed viewing is being viewed by an unviewed viewer. You are now the object, not the subject, and you're dehumanized and it's

unbearable. Why? Because what Sartre says is, and don't forget, well I'll get to this in a second, what Sartre says is there's nothing more dehumanizing than to be out of control with what people see of you. We need to control how people see us. We need to control what people see. For someone to have access, for it to be uncovered, for someone to have complete access to what you're thinking and what you're doing and how you're living, complete access, without you knowing it or without you being in any control of it, is utterly dehumanizing. We cannot bear it. Why? That's an interesting illustration, isn't it? Sartre, and of course Sartre is an existentialist. Sartre, of course,

does not believe in moral absolutes, of course he doesn't believe that we're supposed to live up to somebody else's standards for us, of course not. And yet he says it is absolutely endemic to every human being to desperately want to be covered. We do not want people to see who we are. Why? We don't want people to see what we do, how we think. Why? And what Sartre is saying is because if anybody has that kind of access to us, they will see things of which we are ashamed. We will do things, we will say things, we will think things of which we are deeply ashamed and we cannot bear to have other people looking at it. To be able to look inside to catch us. Why would that be? Well, here's why. It's stupid, frankly, sorry, it's stupid

to say, well, you traditional people have problems with guilt and shame, but you see, we create our own standards. But what Sartre is pointing out is we don't live up to our own standards either. Sure, here's a traditional society and they say, meaning in life is to live according to the given standards. And here is our modern Western society, meaning in life is for you to work out your own standards, but you don't live up to your own standards either. You're never the person you say you wanna be.

You're never the person you aspire to be. You're never the person you claim to be, never. And that means everybody's got a problem with guilt and shame. Everybody desperately needs to be covered. Everybody desperately wants to be covered. Has to be covered. Has to keep people from seeing who we really are. And when we're exposed, we're filled with guilt and shame. And that's true no matter who you are, doesn't matter what your century, doesn't matter what your culture. That's why Franz Kafka says actually about modern people

today. He's talking about the 20th century, but it's also true the 21st century. He says, the state we find ourselves in today is we feel sinful, quite independent of guilt. We are sinful, quite independent of guilt. We are sinful, quite independent of guilt. And that's in his diaries. And if all the commentators say, it's a brilliant thing,

what he's saying is we don't have the concept of guilt. We don't have the concept. We laugh, we're sophisticated. We laugh at this whole idea of guilt. And yet we still sense there's something wrong with us. You know, you may laugh, I don't believe in heaven or hell or the moral law, I don't believe in sin. You know that there's a voice that in yourself, your own heart,

there's a voice that's always there calling you an idiot, calling you a fool, calling you a failure. So the point is, and now you see, why this is such an enormous promise. Because why is it that we're always spinning? Why is it that we're always putting up a front? Why is it we can't take criticism? Why are some... Let me...

As gently as I can say this, why are some of you just really almost killing yourself with work? Because you really want to be successful. Or, why are some of you almost killing yourself by not eating? Because you desperately want us to be thin. You're covering. It's cover. It's a way of hiding. It's a way of trying to cover yourself and deal with the fact that deep down all of us know there's something wrong with us. All of us. It doesn't matter what the culture of the century.

And therefore, don't you see how wonderful it would be to be a kind of person who says, blessed is the one who God has covered. I don't have to cover myself anymore. Wouldn't it be amazing? Wouldn't it be incredible rest? Wouldn't it be incredible peace? If you knew that you didn't have to do any more covering, you didn't have to defend yourself, you didn't have to

spin, you didn't have to overwork, you didn't have to under eat, you didn't have to worry about what the mirror said, you didn't have to work so incredibly hard so people thought you were as sophisticated and as savvy and as suave and as together as you'd like them to think, but you're not. You wouldn't be scared about being exposed. Wouldn't it be great if God could cover you? What does that mean? Well, let's go on. To be forgiven, to have God cover you, to be accepted by Him, that would be a life. That would be blessedness. So there's the need. Next, the way.

Now there's four things here. Well, there's actually going to be five, but under this heading, there's four things, four basic things that you have to do if you're going to confess, and if you're going to get anywhere near this life of blessedness that is held out for people who know how to confess when they've done something wrong, how to deal with guilt, how to deal

with shame, how to deal with the sense that you failed. How do you confess? And by the way, these four things I'm going to talk about, well, they're mainly thinking about God, but especially as I get near the end of them, you also have sometimes to confess a sin, something you've done wrong to somebody else. And so basically what I'm about to tell you about really fits both confessing to God and confessing to others. On occasion, I go back and forth between them, but you'll see they fit for both kinds of confession.

The four things you've got to do. The first is, confession will not work. You're not going to get blessedness and all that, unless first you can distinguish between true guilt and false guilt. The first thing you've got to do with guilt is decide if it's true, if it's false, or to what degree it's true or false. I mean, this is...you can't function in the world without the ability to tell the difference. See, verse 5, I acknowledge my sin to you. In Psalm 51, 6, it's, pardon me, David, the psalmist says to God, against you and you only have I sinned. And that raises a lot of eyebrows because people say, he killed somebody and stole his

wife and he's saying to God, only against you have I sinned? The point is, David has found the way to judge between true guilt and false guilt, which is the mind of God, the heart of God, the will of God disclosed in the Scripture. See, I think it's unreasonable for anybody to insist on the one hand that all guilt is true guilt. We all know people who get unnecessarily disproportionately guilty over every little thing. So we all know that not all guilt is true guilt. There's some guilt that you need to try to resist. You need to try to get rid of. You need to try to say, I'm not going to give into it. There's some guilt that you need to kick.

Because there's some guilt that's false guilt. But it's just as unreasonable to insist that all guilt is false guilt. It's unreasonable to imagine that all guilt feelings are true, because we know plenty of people that overdo it. But it's also unreasonable to think all guilt feelings are false. Oh, I know there's people who are very glib. In a place like New York, there's people who are always saying, well, now look, you know, basically, everybody has to decide what's right or wrong for you.

So there really is no true guilt feelings because everybody has to decide what's right or wrong for you. Of course, that's too glib, that's too pat of an answer. Would you say that to Hitler? You know, that was just, Hitler just felt that this was the right thing to do. You know, that's a kill, millions of people. But a thousand years from now, it'll be a better world. I mean, maybe he sincerely believed that.

Maybe he had a few guilt feelings. Well, he should have given in to those guilt feelings. He should have felt those guilt feelings. In other words, everybody knows that some guilt feelings are true. They're right. And other guilt feelings are wrong, they're false. How are you going to tell the difference? What I cannot figure out is how anybody can get through life without a straight edge.

There's got to be a standard by which if I bring my guilt feelings to this straight edge and I say there's nothing in there that says this is wrong, then I kick it. I don't care what my parents say, I don't care what my culture says, I don't care what my friends say, I'm not guilty. Because the straight edge says I'm not.

But if I bring my guilt feelings to the straight edge and it says yes I am guilty, I don't care what my parents say, I don't care what my friends say, then I am. Now, you've gotta have that. A lot of people say, well you have to make up your mind in your own heart what's right or wrong for you.

What are you gonna do when your conscience is killing you then? Jiminy Cricket says, always let your conscience be your guide. There's a lot of people in mental institutions who are there because they have. I know, you know, you don't want, it's funny, but you also know it's not. That's why you did just the right thing. You laughed a little. Always let your conscience be your guide. But you did just the right thing. You laughed a little. I always let your conscience be your guide, but you see the Bible has an answer for that. First, John, if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts. You've got to have a straight edge, and David's got it. He says, I acknowledge my sin as sin to you. I don't look to any

other standard. So the first thing you've got to do in confession is you've got to have the use…you have to use…have the intellectual discernment to go to the Scripture, and it's not…this is not a pat answer because it's not always easy. It takes all of your intellectual and communal…usually you have to do it with friends, you have to do it with people who are students, you have to talk to pastors, scholars, other people. But so it's not an easy thing. But the first thing you've got to do is you've got to go to the scripture to find out whether or to what degree my guilt feelings are true or false.

So first, you have to distinguish between true and false guilt. Secondly, you've got to distinguish between grief and self-pity. This month, we're excited to let you know about a brand new resource based on Tim Keller's best love books. Go Forward in Love, a year of daily readings from Timothy Keller, features a short passage each day from one of Dr. Keller's books to use for daily reflection. Each day's reading offers deep insight, biblical wisdom, and spiritual encouragement. The

passages are meant to lead you into worship, help you reflect on God's attributes, and encourage you to live more missionally. Go Forward in Love is our thanks when you give to Gospel in Life in November. To receive your copy, just visit gospelinlife.com slash give. That's gospelonlife.com slash give. And thank you for your generosity, which helps us share the love of Christ with more people. Oh, my, my, my, my. Listen, I cannot tell you how many people think that they have confessed and confessed and they don't change. They've repented and they repented and there's no

freedom because they said, I feel so bad about my sin. There's a difference between grief, which is real confession or repentance, and self-pity. What do I mean? Look at here. In the end of verse 5, it says, I'll confess my transgressions to the Lord. And what did he confess? And what does he get forgiveness for? For the iniquity of my sin. Now, look at that. Isn't that kind of redundant? Isn't iniquity sin? Isn't sin iniquity? Isn't transgression sin? So what is it saying? It says, he confessed the sin-ness of my sin. Well, that's just redundant, isn't it? Isn't that kind of unnecessary? No. It's an important

point. Here's why. Look down a little further. After the confession is over and is successful, he senses God saying something to him. And the God is saying, aha, he says down in verse eight and nine, he says, I will now guide you. I will counsel you with my eye upon you. That doesn't just mean he's, by the way, looking at him. God is saying, I want to counsel you eye to eye, face to face. I want to guide you personally. I don't want you to act like a horse or a mule without understanding which must be curbed with a bitten bridle or will not stay near you. Now, think about this. The mule. He's moving along and he wants to go left. Next thing he gets a kick. Ouch. Alright so he veers this way. But he'd really like

to go left again because there's stuff over there he'd like to eat. So he goes left. Kick. Ouch. Alright. So he moves back. Well you know what he's still, you know I'd really like to go over here. And finally he gets a really bad kick and he really gets his, you know, the bit comes up in his mouth and, oh, I got the picture. Doesn't go left anymore. Why? Why? You see, he's sorry for the pain of his sin. He's sorry for the kick from his sin. He's sorry for the consequence of his sin because he's a mule. He's a horse. He doesn't understand the heart of the master and therefore he changes. See, he's changed. But it's not because he sees the sinness of the sin, the grievousness of the sin. He only sees the

consequences of the sin. He changes out of self-pity. And yet, it won't be long before he'll be going left again because the pain, you know, your memory starts to fade. When I first started counseling as a young minister when I ran into several of these situations so I'll just put them all together into one guy even though it's I'm thinking of one in particular, but there was a there was a whole bunch of husbands by the way who never want to talk to their wives about their relationship and They never wanted to go to counseling and talk about never want to work on their relationship communication I'll cut that out until they said till their wife said I'm to leave you. Next thing you know, I get a phone call,

preacher, we need counseling. Okay, so then they come. And what's the problem? Well, the wife says, he's cold and indifferent. And of course, everybody in the church knew he was cold and indifferent. We knew he has a harshness about him. There was a kind of a selfishness about him, a haughtiness about him, yes, you know, he doesn't, and so on. And so he says, oh, I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry. Please don't leave me. What do you want me to do? Well, she says, if you would start doing this and this and this and this, that would be better. Then you wouldn't be so cold and indifferent if you could talk to me like this, if you

did this and this. Absolutely I will. For six months things went well. Until he began to realize that he probably wasn't going to leave him. And the embarrassment and the humiliation and the inconvenience wasn't going to happen. Right back to his old ways. Until he says, I'm going to leave you again. Then they'd be back in the office. I won't say how the story ended because they all end in different ways. But here's what I came to understand. He was the mule. He was sorry, he said, but only for the consequence of his sin. In other words, he was sorry for himself. He wasn't sorry for the sin. He didn't see the sin as a grievous thing, a sin that was hurting the person who loved him, the thing that was hurting the people around him. He didn't see the sin as something in itself was bad. He didn't see the sinness

of his sin. He just saw the danger of his sin, the inconvenience of his sin, the impracticality of his sin. As a result, he didn't change. He was constantly confessing it whenever it looked like it was going to get him in trouble. And he never changed. And as a result, he wasn't confessing. He said he was confessing, but he wasn't. He wasn't repenting. He said he was repenting, but he wasn't. He was wallowing in self-pity at certain times. Do you know the difference? Can you see that difference? So first, you have to discern the difference between true and false guilt. Second, you have to discern the difference between—I'm trying to be as practical as I can—between

real grief over, in other words, sorrow for sin and sorry for yourself. Thirdly, you need to change perspectives. And you see that in the very word confess. I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. Look up the word confession in a Bible dictionary or something like that, and they will tell you that the word confess means to say the same thing. In the Greek anyway, the Greek word for confess is homologane, which means

to say the same thing, but it certainly means more than just to mimic verbally. No, what it really means is to come alongside and see things from the perspective of the person you've wronged. So the third thing you've got to do when you're confessing to God or the person next to you, you have to do the emotional work. Now, in a way, you've started doing that when you make the distinction between grief and self-pity, when you realize I'll never change unless I sense the iniquity of my sin rather than the danger to me of my sin.

So you've started to do it, but let me continue. You've got to change perspective. What this means is you've got to, as much as you possibly can, it's an act of radical imagination. Put yourself in the shoes of the person you've wronged. That's a little, I don't know how many times I've heard people say this, well, if I've offended you, I'm sorry. If, think of it, listen to that. If I've offended you, I'm sorry. What that means is

I don't want to go to the trouble of admitting I've offended you exactly. I don't want to go to the trouble of putting myself in your shoes and imagining what it must be like. I don't want to do that. All I want is I don't want anybody to have to say to me, you didn't apologize. I'm going to do what I have to do just so nobody can say. In other words, the person is working out of self-pity. But if in a sense you go and say this, I can hardly imagine though I've tried how you must have felt because of what I did and therefore I am truly sorry. And you'll heal that relationship because you're really doing home alone game.

You're not just saying, I'm sorry, you're confessing, you're standing in their shoes. And that's just as important. Now you say, how do you do that with God? It's not impossible. You have to say, oh Lord, I can hardly imagine what it's like to create somebody and then sustain them every minute of their lives, keeping their heart pumping, keeping their lungs, you know, breathing. I can hardly imagine what it's like to give everything to somebody and be ignored day in and day out and to have promises broken over and over and over and over and over again, I can hardly imagine, but I'm trying and I'm truly sorry.

And if you're willing to change perspectives, you'll start to heal that relationship too. Then fourth, okay, you have to discern the difference between true and false guilt. You have to discern the difference between grief and self-pity. You have to change perspectives and finally, you have to take full responsibility. Verse 5b, and I did not cover my iniquity. What does that mean? What does it mean? At least it means this. I didn't cover my tail.

It means at least that. It means full disclosure, and it means taking responsibility without excuses. Please think of this. You have not really confessed sin when you say, I did it, but they did it to me too. I did it, but you were just as bad, if not worse. That's not a confession. You say, well, what if it was only 20% me and it was really 80% the other person?

Admit you're 20% without excuses and shut up about the other 80%. It's not your job. You have to take full responsibility or the relationship with God won't heal, or your own psychological blessedness won't come in, or your relationship with the other person you're talking to won't heal. You have to take full responsibility. You know, really, repentance and confession starts when blame shifting ends.

It starts when self-centeredness ends. It starts when self-pity ends. So there are the four things. There's another one I have to finish with. But do you wonder why so many people seem like they're crying and they're confessing and they're so sorry? And within sometimes minutes or hours, certainly with days or weeks, there's no difference. They haven't changed. They haven't grown. There's no relief. There's no blessedness.

It's because you're not doing it like this. There are certain skill competencies you must do. And there they are, but there's really one to go. Because finally I said there's a secret here. Now what I mean by a secret, I mean this. What's the basis for this confession of forgiveness? How can God forgive us when we confess? Look at this amazing statement. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and he did. He didn't say, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and he did. He didn't say, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and God thought about it. It happened.

It's immediate. It's automatic, actually. I confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgive the iniquity of my sin. How can God do that? And we have to go back up to the top where it says, blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered, blessed is the one against whom the Lord counts no iniquity. Now there it is. Listen carefully. That is an amazing statement. God forgives us because he doesn't count what we've done against us. It would be a

little bit like this. Imagine you got a terrible grade. You just, you know, you got, you've got a D on a test in a class. And the next day, the professor comes in and says, you know what, I'm not gonna count that test toward your final grade. The next test and the next test and the paper, but that test does not count toward your final grade at all.

My gosh, salvation. But that's exactly what David's talking about here. David is saying that when I confess my sin and God forgives my sin, He covers it because, here's how He covers it, He doesn't count it against us. Our sin has nothing to do with our final grade. Our sin has nothing to do with our final grade. Our sin has nothing to do with our final reception. How is that possible? How could he do that? Well, here's the answer. It's a hint even in verse 7 where David says, you are my hiding place. You preserve me from trouble. You surround me with shouts of deliverance. Think about this. Look at this. You know what's so interesting here? Everybody knows they

need to be covered. And David had some sense in which God himself was going to be the covering. There was some way in which I can hide in God. Well, that's odd. How can you hide in God when your big problem is you need to hide from God, that's odd. How can you hide in God when your big problem is you need to hide from God because of your sin? How can you hide from God in God? How could God himself be the thing that covers me? Well, of course, the answer is this. You know why crucifixion was such a horrible, horrible form of execution? Do you know why crucifixion was the worst kind of execution? Because you were stripped naked and your arms were tied or nailed open so you couldn't even

do this. It was the ultimate keyhole, you know. You didn't die fast, you died slow, and you didn't die privately, you died publicly. And what that meant was you were utterly naked, utterly exposed. You died of exposure, literally. But people came, they mocked, it's the ultimate keyhole, it was the ultimate dehumanization. It was the ultimate.

Why did Jesus do it? He was stripped so you could be clothed. Second Corinthians 521 says, God made him to be sin, who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in him, which means God counted Jesus as a sinner so he didn't have to count us as sinners. He treated Jesus. He gave Jesus a status that he didn't deserve so he could give us a status that we don't deserve.

And what that means is when you say, Father, accept me because of what Jesus has done, you are forgiven permanently. Your sins are not counted against you. Your sins are not counted against you. There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Romans 8 verse 1. And here's why this is the most important thing to keep in mind practically. If you don't understand this, if you don't understand the basis for

your forgiveness, you're going to turn the act of forgiveness into a way of trying to warrant God's mercy. You're going to say, oh Lord, have mercy on me because look at how sorry I am. Look how bad I feel. Look at how much I'm weeping. Look at just how submitted I am and surrendered my heart is. And what you're going to say, and you're going to try to use your confession not simply to reconnect with the God who's already forgiven you in Christ,

not simply to get his eye back, to get his relationship back. See, verse 8? In other words, if you don't understand that you're permanently and completely forgiven in Christ, and what you do when you confess is you just simply reconnect to the God who has forgiven you, if you think you've got to earn or merit your forgiveness by really having these horribly bad feelings about your sin, you're going to be on a merry-go-round, you'll never get off. Because you know, if you look close enough at any of your repentance, at any of your

sorrow for sin, you'll always find bad motives, you'll always find imperfection. That's the reason why George Whitefield once said, my repentance needs to be repented of. I cannot repent except I sin. What does that mean? You know what he means. He says, here's sin A, so I'm going to repent of sin A, but sin B is the repentance itself because I'm never pure in my motives.

I'm never completely free of self-pity. I never completely am able to change perspectives. You say, well my goodness, then why confess? If you're already forgiven, why confess? And the answer is to get that relationship, to get that fellowship, to get the intimacy back, eye to eye, no longer a horse or a mule, living like I should live because I love him, because he loves me, because of what he's done for me. And when you have that, and only when you have that, this is the final skill for confession. You need to distinguish between true and false guilt.

You need to distinguish between grief and self-pity. You need to change perspective. You need to take responsibility. You need to change your hiding place. Why do you think David says in verse 7, you're my hiding place? you are the one that surrounds me with songs of deliverance, you are the thing that is my real security because something else was.

And this is the reason why a lot of people will say to me, I've tried to confess, I've tried to confess over and over again and I still don't feel forgiven. I never forgot, it was actually in the early days of Redeemer, talking to a woman who really was mentally in complete disarray because she felt she'd let her parents down in one area. And she says, I've asked God's forgiveness and they have forgiven me. And my parents have forgiven me, but I can't forgive myself. And I went around and around for a long time trying to figure it out, so I began

to realize something. Maybe her parents had forgiven her. Maybe God had forgiven her. She couldn't forgive herself. When you can't get over your guilt, even though you've confessed to God, there's a higher God. When somebody says, I can't forgive myself, what they really mean is confessed to God, there's a higher God. When somebody says, I can't forgive myself, what they really mean is my real God, my real salvation, my real significance, the real God that I worship.

I have broken that God's will and it won't forgive me. The God in her mind, in spite of the fact that they're parents that we forgive you, the God in her mind was, I have to be the woman my parents originally wanted me to be. They forgive me, but I'm disappointing to them. And so she's made the expectations of her parents the thing that gave her significance. And when you cannot overcome guilt, and you confess to a priest, and you confess to a pastor, and you confess to God, and you can't overcome guilt. You say, I just can't forgive myself. That's not it. That's not it. The real thing that you're hiding in, the real thing that is your significance and your righteousness will not forgive you and you'll never overcome your guilt

unless you change your hiding place. Which means unless you repent of a lack of joy you have in Jesus, unless you repent of a lack of joy you have in Jesus, unless you repent of a lack of joy you have in what he's done. In other words, if you cannot overcome guilt, repent. Not of feeling guilty, but of, in a sense, but of the fact that you're not really hiding in him, you're not really resting in him. If you do these five things, if you learn how to confess like this, eventually confession will not be what it is for most of us, which is an episodic, traumatic

experience. It'll be something you do every day with joy. It'll be something...the more accepted I know I am in Jesus Christ, the easier it is for me to admit when I'm doing something wrong. Because my identity is not being a virtuous person, a together person, a moral person. My identity is in his love for me, which ironically means the more accepted I feel, the easier it is for me to see my sin. I don't screen it out.

I don't deny it. I don't repress it. I see it. Which means I'm the opposite of what Sartre says the average person is. You will be the opposite. You don't repress it. I see it. Which means I'm the opposite of what Sartre says the average person is. You will be the opposite. You don't mind being seen. You don't mind being exposed. You're quick and able to admit where you're wrong and you don't like exposing others. Let me ask you these two final questions to know whether you have the blessedness of a person who

knows how to confess and repent with joy. Number one, are you a safe person to confess to? Are you a safe person to be weak in front of? Do people find it easy to let you know about their weaknesses? Are you afraid because you're a harsh judgmental person? You're covering yourself by uncovering others. Get the joy that you get in Jesus through confession. On the other hand, are you the kind of person who finds that you have enough gladness and joy

to take criticism graciously? Are you a safe person to criticize? You notice there's some people that you can't tell them anything that's wrong that you're concerned about because they either blow up or they melt down. They either get angry at you or else they feel like they're the worst people in the world and they turn into a puddle and you say, oh, forget it. I didn't mean it.

Are you a safe person to criticize? Are you a safe person to give a confession to? Are you a safe person to receive a confession from? Do you have the blessedness of the one who doesn't have to cover anymore? God covers you. Let us pray. Thank you, Father, for showing us how we can have a blessedness, a fulfillment that comes from knowing that we are permanently forgiven in your Son, and therefore we are covered. We don't have to cover ourselves. Make us not like the people who love to expose others and hate to be exposed. Let us be the kind of persons who don't mind being exposed and confessing and repenting

and don't need to uncover and expose others. We pray that you'd make us people like that. In Jesus' name we ask it. Amen. Amen. Your partnership helps more people discover the hope and joy of Christ's love. Just visit GospelInLife.com slash partner to learn more. Today's sermon was preached in 2002. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017, while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.