Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Reality: Forgive Us Our Debts

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

What if I told you there was a process and no matter how much you blew up your life, if you used this process, there would be a way to come out the other side whole? Well, here it is. It’s what the Bible calls repentance. You say, “You mean just saying I’m sorry?” But that reveals you don’t understand the power of this kind of prayer. This kind of prayer, if you do it in an ongoing way, will finally enable you to change deeply from the inside out.  Looking at Psalm 51, we’ll see 1) what one thing must you stop doing, 2) what two things must you start doing, and 3) where you get the power to do those two things. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on November 2, 2014. Series: The Prayer of Prayers. Scripture: Psalm 51:1-19. 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.

Welcome to Gospel in Life. What we love shapes who we are. So if we want to change, we have to start by changing what we love, what we're passionate about, what delights us. One of the primary ways we can rearrange the things we love most comes through consistent and faithful prayer. Join us today as Dr. Keller looks at how authentic prayer connects us with God and reshapes what we love. Tonight's scripture comes from Psalm 51, verses 1 through 19. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love. According to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart

Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean wash me and I shall be whiter than snow Let me hear joy and gladness Let the bones that you have broken rejoice Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners will return to you.

Deliver me from blood guiltiness, oh God, oh God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. Oh Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise, for you will not delight in sacrifice or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart. Oh God, you will not despise. Do good to Zion in your good pleasure. Build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then will you delight in right sacrifices in burnt offerings and whole

burnt offerings. Then bulls will be offered on your altar. This is the word of the Lord. So this fall we're looking at prayer. And we're doing it by looking at the Lord's Prayer. Each week we're taking one phrase out of the Lord's Prayer and to understand what it means, we're going to some passage else in the Bible to shed light on it so we can use it when we pray. And tonight we're looking at the place in the Lord's Prayer where Jesus tells us to say, forgive us our debts,

or forgive us our trespasses, forgive us our sins. We're looking at Psalm 51, that's what was just read to you, and it's maybe the most famous prayer of confession in the entire Bible. And not only is it famous as a prayer of confession, but the occasion's famous. As many of you know, it rose out of a very famous incident in the life of King David.

David was attracted to another man's wife. And so he had an affair with her, her name was Bathshuba. and in order to get her as his wife he had her husband killed. That is, he had him isolated in battle and it was arranged so he would die in battle. So he had an affair with another man's wife, he had the man killed, and he then was able to take Bathshuba to be his wife and he thought all was well that he had covered his tracks and then the prophet Nathan came to David and told him a story and said there was a rich man

with lots of sheep and there was a poor man with one little lamb and the rich man, when he wanted to have a meal, instead of taking any of his own sheep, And the rich man, when he wanted to have a meal, instead of taking any of his own sheep, took that poor man's little lamb and slew it. What should be done to that rich man? And David said, that man should die.

And Nathan, in one of the most pointed pieces of application at the end of his sermon in the history of the world, said to David, thou art the man. You are the man, that's you. And his life blew up. He was exposed to the world, he was exposed to himself. Now, let me put it to you like this.

What if I told you that there was a process? And no matter how much you blew up your life, if you used this process, there'd be a way to come out the other side, get through it. Or no matter how broken your life is, if you use this process, there was a way for you to come out whole. Would you be interested?

You say, of course I'd be interested. Well, here it is. It's what the Bible calls repentance. And here's how you do it. Psalm 51. And you say repentance, you mean just saying I'm sorry? And when you say that, you have revealed you do not understand the power of this kind of prayer. If you know how to do it.

This kind of prayer, if you do it in an ongoing way, will finally enable you to change deeply from the inside out. You know how many things are wrong with you? You know they're wrong with you. You don't like when anybody else tells you. In fact, you're really upset when anybody even seems to know. But you know there's things that are wrong with you that you just don't seem to be able to change. It just doesn't get any better. This is the way, if you use this prayer, this kind of prayer, repentance, this is the way, if you

use it in an ongoing way, for you to change from the inside out. And if you're ever in a crisis, and you will be, in which to some degree you are to blame, this is how to put your life back together. Now, there's way too much here to cover. It's a wonderful and long psalm. We could crawl through it for weeks, actually. But what're going to do is mainly look at the first five verses. Not completely,

but mainly the first five verses. And we're going to ask this question. What do you stop doing? What one thing do you stop doing? What two things do you start doing? And then how do you do it? Repentance. What one thing must you stop doing? What two things must you start doing? And then where do you get the power to do those two things? What to stop, what to start, and how to do it. So what's the one thing, and we're going to work backwards actually from verse five down to verse four down to verse one. What is it that we must stop doing? It's in verse five. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Now, the way that comes out in English, it looks like the mother sinned, right? In sin did my mother conceive me. But that's actually not the way the Hebrew works. And it's really, therefore, a misleading translation, though actually it's a literal translation. It's not talking about the mother doing something wrong. It's actually saying it's an iniquity that I was conceived, meaning that this is the element in which I have always lived.

What basically David is saying is at last I see that from the very beginning of my life that from the very beginning of my life I was like this. Derek Kidner, who's a great commentator on the Psalms, in his commentary here on Psalm 51, Derek Kidner says about this verse where he says, in sin did my mother conceive me, which is another way of saying, I was born in sin. I've been sinful from birth, that's what he's saying. I've been sinful from birth.

Sin is the element in which I've lived. I've always been like this, it's just now come out. I've been sinful from birth. Sin is the element in which I've lived. I've always been like this. It's just now come out. It sounds very harsh, does it not? But this is what Derek Hiddner says. He says, this crime of murder, David now sees, was no freak event. It was in character.

An extreme expression of the warped creature he had always been since he was little. You say that's awfully, awfully harsh, but no. No, yeah, is it harsh? Well, it's real. It's realistic. Now whenever we get to this kind of teaching in the Bible, I usually have recourse to St. Augustine's book, the Confessions. In fact, I mention this incident so often that I thought in getting ready to talk to you today, I thought I better go back and reread it and make sure I understood it properly and I went back and it's better than I thought. I don't even ‑‑ and I can't

give you everything I ‑‑ when I was reading it in the last couple of days, can't give you everything I noticed. But St. Augustine in book two, which is like a chapter of the confessions, and you can find this online, by the way, just go look at book two confessions. He talks about the fact that when he was 16 years old, he and a bunch of teenagers broke into a pear orchard that did not belong to them and stole pears. And he's trying to figure out, why did I do that?

And the reason why it's an interesting question, he says, he says, I lusted to steal the pears and I did it, compelled by no hunger, because they ended up throwing it to the hogs, they weren't hungry, nor poverty, nor cared I to enjoy what I stole. So here's the question. I stole the pears, why? Because A, I wasn't hungry and B, I don't like pears. So why did I steal the pears, but why? Because A, I wasn't hungry, and B, I don't like pears. So why did I steal the pears? Why did we steal the pears? And here's what he said. He says, rather

I enjoyed in the theft and the sin itself. My pleasure was not in those pears. It was in the offense itself. And here's the best quote. He says, I liked it because it was forbidden. And what he sees is, is what, he sees that deep in his heart, there is some kind of self-will or self-assertion. He had no interest in the pairs till somebody said, don't have those pairs. Then he was really interested. And what is that?

He said, well, that's just stubbornness, that's just willfulness. But he says, this is deep in the bottom of my heart. This self-assertion, this need to say, nobody tells me how to live my life. And if that's way, way down deep there and it's been there forever, that makes you quite capable of a lot of cruelty. More recently, someone I wrote, read, interesting, a Christian was writing about this very same subject. David sees a family resemblance between the common sins of his youth and murder.

He says, when I look back and I see the kind of person I was even as a child, and now I've murdered, but actually, I'm in character. There's a family resemblance between the kind of what we would consider, oh, juvenile sins and murder. They're not two totally different things. And that's actually what Augustine is saying. And this one book I was reading recently, interesting line, listen to this.

This is a modern Christian writer who says, Christians come to see what a murder has in common with persecuting the fat kid with zits. See, when you're eight years old or you're five years old or you're 16 years old, you persecute the fat kid with zits. Oh, well, you know, that's the way kids are. You see, that's not murder. That's not rape.

Oh, really? Christians have come to see, because they studied Psalm 51 and other parts of the Bible, that there is not a qualitative difference between that and murder. See, we have a tendency to say, well, yes, I'll cheat here and there, and sometimes I can be cruel, and that kind of thing, but that's not murder, it's not this other kind of thing.

Wait, what David is saying, what Augustine is saying, what this guy is saying, is instead of seeing a kind of infinite qualitative difference between you and a murderer, you need to see that it's actually a quantitative difference. It's a matter of degree and it's circumstantial. In the right circumstances, that capacity for cruelty, which comes from that capacity of self-assertion

and self-centeredness in every person's heart. That capacity, if watered properly, can become murder, no matter who you are. So here's a seed that's watered properly and becomes a great big tree. The right fertilizer, the right water, the right soil. And here's another seed that never becomes a tree. But the seeds are the same. They have the same capacity. Just one capacity has been realized more than another. And therefore, what David is saying is we are born in sin. We're born with this self-assertion, this self-centeredness, and he says, I'm actually only acting in character. He's not minimizing it. Oh, no. He's not saying, well, the murder wasn't so bad. What he's saying is I've always been this bad and I never saw it.

Maybe you don't trust Psalm 51. Maybe you would trust BBC. Because BBC this summer ran a really great murder mystery. Was an eight episode murder mystery called Broadchurch. It's actually now being shown as, there's an American version of it called Grace Point. And I promise I'm not telling you, no spoilers. But what it's about is a small town

in which a boy is murdered and there's two detectives. One woman detective, I think in the BBC her name is Ellie, one woman detective who lives in the town and knows everybody in the town and can't figure out how in the world anybody could have killed this boy because she knew everybody in the town. There's nobody in this town that could do that. And there's another guy, the outside guy from outside who is a kind of hard bitten detective, his name is Hardy, his last name is Hardy.

And they have one day, one day they have a real argument and she's basically saying there's like nobody in town that could do such a thing, so I don't get it. And Hardy says, anybody's capable of murder given the right circumstances. See, right out of Psalm 51. Anybody's capable of murder given the right circumstances. And she looks at him and she says, no.

She doesn't believe it. People have a, most people have a moral compass and he looks back and says, moral compass is break. Actually if you do watch the thing you will know that whoever the writer was sides with David in Psalm 51. The whole purpose of the show is to show that anybody is capable of murder given the right circumstances because that's what's in your heart. Why am I pushing this? This is the first point and we're done.

With the first point, not with the sermon. But the reason I'm pushing this is this. Here's the thing you must not do, be in denial about your capacity. Here's a place where God says to Cain in the very beginning of the Bible because Cain is getting very envious and upset and angry at his brother Abel and God says to him, sin is crouching at your door

it's desire is to have you but you must master it. Isn't that amazing? He uses the illustration of sin being a kind of cougar or tiger or animal that's crouching at the door hiding but ready to spring, coiled ready to spring. And this is God's way of saying what David is trying to say to you and here's what I'm trying to say to you. You are much, you are capable of a lot worse than you can admit. You're capable of great cruelty. You're capable of great dishonesty. You're capable of terrible things that right now you would say I'm not like that, I'm not

like that. Get out of denial. Because I doubt very much that maybe anybody in this room, it's not real likely that you will ever be in the proper circumstances, it's unlikely to be in the proper circumstances that what's wrong with you in your heart will lead you to murder. But I can tell you, not impossible, but it's unlikely, but it's quite likely that you are going to do some really bad things in your life that will utterly shock you unless you get a hold of this particular truth from the Bible tonight. So the first thing you have to do is you have to get out of denial. Stop denying what you're capable of. So that's the thing you must stop doing. Here's the thing you must start doing.

There's two parts to repentance here. They're both equally important. I'm going to say them together right now. And even though they're equally important, some of you will notice I'm going to take a lot longer on the second one. It's because the first one is, even though they're equally important, some of you will notice, I'm going to take a lot longer on the second one, it's because the first one is, even though it's important and crucial, it's not a foreign concept. I think it will grasp it pretty quickly. But the second one is a foreign concept to most of us. And even though I wouldn't say it's more important, I must say that it is more difficult to grasp. And only if you have the two together will you have life changing

repentance. See, there's a kind of repentance. It looks like repentance. You're crying and you're weeping and you're upset and you're angry at yourself and you're remorseful and you're saying and you may even say I'm so sorry for what I've done. I'm so sorry. And when it's all done, you're worse than you were before. You're just more angry, more upset, more angry at yourself, more angry at life, hard, and you don't change. And that's what most people understand as repentance. And then there's a kind of repentance unto life. There's a repentance that is life changing, character forming, and freedom engendering. That is to say, it brings freedom from the

and freedom engendering. That is to say, it brings freedom from the past so you don't feel tied to the past no matter what you've done, not tied through guilt. And it brings freedom in the present. It means that you're actually able to change and not do the things that you tend to do wrong. Life changing, character forming, freedom engendering, repentance as opposed to what we usually experience, which is a kind of toxic remorse that makes us very upset and afterwards no better off. What are the two things that you've got to do in order to make sure that you have repentance unto life, repentance that changes you? Here are the two things. The first one gets short shrift, the second one longer shrift. The two things are this, you have to have a, put it this way, a full clean confession of sin and a deep heart renunciation of sin. A full clean confession

of sin, but beyond that, a deep heart renunciation of sin. Okay? The first one, what do I mean by full clean confession? Well, let's take a look at these two are both in verse four. But it's ‑‑ we're going to move through verse four from the end of it to the beginning of the first four. Verse four, second part. I have done what is evil in your sight so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgments. What is he saying here? I call this a full, clean confession because he is not blame shifting. He is taking full responsibility without qualification.

Full responsibility without excuse. Full responsibility without blame shifting. See, first of all he says, you are just in your judgment. He says, I deserve anything you give me. And notice he also says, I have done evil. Not lapses, not mistakes were made. He's not blaming his upbringing,

he's not blaming his environment. He could blame a lot of those things, and he did originally. He probably, like a lot of powerful men get into these kind of crazy affairs and afterwards they say, well I felt like I sacrificed so much nobody sees what I have to go through

and you know what, I deserve this. It's kind of self feeling sorry for yourself. But he's not doing that now. There's all sorts of ways of blame shifting. You can minimize. Well, you know, it shouldn't have bothered her as much as that. I'm sorry for what I did, but she's awfully, awfully sensitive. There's relativize.

You say, well, who's to say what I did. If you say what is wrong, fine, but you know but a lot of people don't see it as wrong. It says I have done evil in your sight. I'm not going by community standards. I'm not saying it can't be wrong if it feels so right. In your sight. So I'm not relativizing it. I'm not minimizing it.

I'm not making excuses. I'm not going to say, well, you know, if you had my mother, you'd do things like this too. No. And therefore, point one, like I said, it wasn't going to take long on us, but you have to see. Real repentance begins when blame shifting ends. When you pray to God, is it more like a chat or are you really connecting with him in a deep and meaningful

way? We'd like to help you establish a stronger, deeper, and more personal prayer life. Tim Keller's book, Prayer Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, offers biblical guidance as well as specific ways to pray in certain situations, such as dealing with grief, loss, love, and forgiveness. In the book, Dr. Keller helps you learn how to make your prayers more personal and powerful through a regular practice of prayer. Prayer, experiencing awe and intimacy with God, is our thanks for your gift to help us

reach more people with the life-changing power of the gospel. Request your copy today at GospelAndLife.com slash give. That's GospelAndLife.com slash give. That's gospelandlife.com slash give. Now, here's Tim Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. There's a kind, I told you there's a kind of remorse, a kind of sorry and I'm so upset and so unhappy and you're weeping and you're miserable,

and yet in the midst of it, there's also, instead of just taking full responsibility, you're blaming other people and you're blaming your circumstances and you're so angry at this and that You're not really repenting you're complaining you're just complaining about how bad you feel that's it and Maybe you have contributed to it, but you're also angry at everybody else around you remember some years ago I can't remember how old it was I think was a teenager

I made a major mistake I was we were in the forest and I was and at one point I was trying to get a log out of my way. And I picked up the log, but instead of picking it up all the way I just picked up one end of it. The other end was on the ground. And so I threw it, I thought. I was trying to push it out of my way. So I pushed it. So I just did this and the log just came right down on my feet. Because it was on the ground and I thought I was pushing it away but it actually just fell. Because I didn't take the whole weight of the log on myself, I couldn't get the whole weight of the log off. Because I didn't take the whole weight on, I couldn't get the whole weight off. And if you don't take full responsibility for what you've done, without any excuses to say,

well, yes, this happened, that happened, and that might have been the occasion for the sin, but it wasn't the cause of what I did wrong. What the cause of what I did was wrong. I did it. Lots of things led to it, but, you know, that's the occasion. It's not the cause. I'm the cause. I did it.

And only when you take full responsibility without blame shifting, without minimizing, without relativizing in any of those ways, when you confess does it come off. So first, full clean confession, because life giving repentance begins when blame shifting totally ends. But secondly, deep heart, renunciation. Now this takes a little bit longer to talk about. It's only because we don't know much about this. In fact, when you first read what David says here, at first sight, it actually takes you aback. And that is what he says at the beginning of verse four. He says to God, against you, you only have I sinned.

What? You, you only. Now first of all, let me show you that this is the heart is involved. You know why? Because he doesn't just say, against you I have sinned, he says against you, you. Now you know in Semitic languages,

the doubling of the subject indicates passion, longing, and love. So David doesn't mourn over his dead son just by saying, Absalom, my son. He says, Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son. When you see that doubling, its intensity of emotion, longing and love, you don't just see Jesus on the cross saying, my God. He says, my God, my God. We're going to get back to that. And so here, David is not just saying, against you have I sinned. That's a formal statement. It's a statement of fact, but when he says against you, you only have I sinned, his heart's breaking. There's love he's expressing to God.

Now what do you think of this word only? At first sight, it's shocking, it doesn't seem to make sense because you could say, wait a minute, first of all, he sinned against this woman, Bashuva, because she was a woman in a patriarchal society and he was the king and there was nothing he could do about it. She could do about it. There's actually almost no indication of blame in the accounts about all this given to her.

He sinned against her by abusing power. He sinned against the man, the husband, by having him killed. And he sinned against his entire people because they put him in ‑‑ they crowned him as king in order to uphold the law and now he's not doing it. So he's betrayed their trust. So he sinned against all kinds of people. So how can he say against you, you only have I sinned? And the answer is this is Semitic hyperbole. He doesn't mean it literally, just any more than when Jesus said if you want to be my disciple you have to hate your father and mother. That's Semitic hyperbole, it's a metaphor. Just like if I say it's raining cats and dogs it doesn't

really mean it's actually cats and dogs coming down, it's a metaphor, it's a hyperbole. And if you say I want you to hate your father or mother to be my disciple, what he means is allegiance to me must be so much greater than allegiance to anyone else that it looks like hate in comparison to your love for me. It's a powerful hyperbole. That's what he's saying here. Here's what he means. Yes, of course I have sinned against all these people, But it's because more fundamentally I sinned against you.

My sin against you was so foundational and so profound, none of the other sins would have happened if I hadn't sinned against you. And in that sense, it's my sin against you, which is the actual reality here. Now, what he's saying is that under every sin, there's a sin. Or you might say under all your sins,

your individual behavioral active sins, there's always a sin against God under the sins against other people. Paul, pardon me, Martin Luther in his commentary on the Ten Commandments, or actually in his catechism, I think, he's looking at the Ten Commandments and he points something out. The first commandment is, have no other gods before me.

And the other commandments, especially near the end, they get into things like don't kill, don't steal, don't commit adultery, don't lie. He says you never break the other commandments unless you first break the first one. The sin underneath all other sins is you're putting something in the place of God You're rejecting him. You're trampling on him You're being ungrateful for him. So for example if you lie now think about this This is what David is saying. He says underneath all these other sins

There's the most profound causal the cause of it all is a sin against you So there's a sin under causal, the cause of it all, is a sin against you. So there's a sin under the sin and the sin is always directly against God. So let's take Martin Luther's theory and apply it. Why do you lie if you lie? Why do you lie if you lie? You say, well, you know, I'm not perfect. I know. But I mean, what's the actual motivational structure? Martin Luther would say you wouldn't lie unless first of all you put yourself in the place of God. You've decided how to live your life instead of listening to what he says you should do under those circumstances by looking at his law. But more than that, you probably also put something else in the

place of God. Are you lying to save your reputation? Then what people think of you is more important than what God thinks about you. You've put human opinion in the place of God. Are you lying in order to make more money in something? Well, in that case, the money's more important than God, see? And that means this. When he says against you, you only have I sinned, he is saying there's one level of the sin, the objective level, I broke the rule, I admit it, I take my punishment, but that's not enough to really change the heart.

You have to look underneath and say, but the real reason, the real heinousness, the real awfulness behind what I did up here was how I treated you. I've dishonored you. I haven't loved you. Let me give you two quick illustrations. The reason I'm pressing this and the reason why this is so important is because this is what actually changes you. Remember I told you that there's a kind of remorse that most of us go through, it seems like we're repenting and we're upset and we weep and we feel real bad and we admit that we've done wrong and we say we're sorry for what we've done and afterwards we're still the same. One reason is we don't take full responsibility. In other words, repentance begins where blame shifting ends. But here, you have to see that your main sin is always against God

and your main sin is not just against his law but his love. That you haven't just broken his word but you've actually trampled on his heart. And only when your heart breaks to know that you have broken his heart, does that actually begin to change you. Some years ago, I remember counseling a couple of people in my church in Virginia, they were married and having marital problems and largely because the man was prone to anger and abusive language, not physical abuse, but very abusive language. And his wife dragged him into council with a pastor and I basically had to lean on him and he said, well, you're right, I guess you're right. But it was very clear he felt like she was being too sensitive and I'm really no different than other guys. So he tried

to put a lid on it but he never did. He said I'm sorry but he never changed. Finally one night he calls me up and she left. She was gone. And he comes to see me in tears saying I'm really sorry. I really, really see that I've done wrong. I've got to stop. I've got such a bad mouth on me. I've got to stop it. I know I hurt her. I will change the way in which I speak. You've got such a bad mouth on me, I've got to stop it, I know I hurt her, I will change the way in which I speak, you've got to call her and tell her. So all I did was I called her and told her, why don't you come and the three of us will meet. I didn't say, oh, yeah, I'm sure he's changed. I said, let's come and let's hear him. And she listened to him and he says, I really am sorry, I'm really changed, I really repent. And so she

says, okay, let's go, I'll come back. And she came back. And for about a month he was fine and then he went right back to it and then she left for good. Why? He was sorry for the consequences of the sin. He wasn't sorry for the sin. Do you know the difference between self-pity and repentance? This is everything.

This means everything here. In self-pity and repentance? This is everything. This means everything here. In self-pity, you're loving yourself. In self-pity, you're saying, oh, this sin got me into trouble. That's why I'm so upset. But you actually, you're sorry for the consequence of the sin, but you don't hate or be sorry for the sin because that takes love. If he loved his wife, he would have seen what it was doing to her. All he was bothered about was what the sin was doing to him. It was

putting him through the shame of his wife leaving him. It was putting him through the incredible trauma of a separation and divorce. In other words, he was sorry for the consequence of the sin, not sorry for the sin because he was loving himself, not loving her. If his heart had really been engaged with her and he really saw what his sin was doing to her, he would have hated the sin and it would have changed him. What happened was there was external force put upon him. So he was, without changing his heart, he just complied, he just stopped it. But he hadn't actually changed.

In other words, remember how I said, you might, one way to put it is, life-giving repentance begins where blame shifting ends. Also, life-giving repentance begins where self-pity ends. Self-pity looks like repentance, it's not. It's self-absorption. It's exactly the kind of self-absorption that Augustine said is at the heart of sin. It's just, it looks like repentance against sin,

it's not. It's just being upset with yourself and upset with what's happening and upset for yourself. If you see that you haven't just broken God's law but broken his heart, If you see that you haven't just broken God's law but broken his heart, that you've dishonored and grieved him, and that that's the primary sin, then you begin to change. And actually, David's doing that. I told you I was, I mean, little later on he says, restore unto me the joy of my salvation, and oh, is that key. Look at what he means. Listen carefully, listen. He says I lost the joy

of my salvation. I remember what it was like one time to be happy in you. You saved me, David is saying. When I was in the wilderness and Saul was trying to kill me, you saved me. Salvation. And then there was this and that problem and you saved me. And then these things went wrong and you always brought me through and you saved me. And I had a joy in you. And I knew you loved me and I had a joy in you. But I lost that joy. And therefore here's what he's saying. Before I committed physical adultery, I committed spiritual adultery. Why did I need her? Why did I want her caresses if I really had your caresses? Why would I need her affirmation if I knew your affirmation?

Why is there this sucking, this great suction coming out of my heart? Why the vacuum there? Because I lost you. And when all the stuff you've done for me, David is saying, when I look at your infinite love and all that you've done for me, for me to do this,

the reason I did this was I forgot you. I rejected you. I was ungrateful for you. Do you see? And only when you see that your sin has grieved and dishonored God do you come to hate the sin itself. Not just hate what the sin has done to you, but hate the sin and then it loses its power over you. You change. And here's why. Last point. Where do you get the power to do this?

In the very first verse it says, have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgression. And when he uses the word steadfast love, that's the Hebrew word ksev. And Derek Kidner, the Hebrew word ksev means steadfast love, it means undeserved and unconditional. And see, because it's undeserved, it's unconditional. Because you don't earn it, you can't unearn it. And that means it does two things to you at once. On the one hand, it humbles you into the dust and says you're totally unworthy, absolutely undeserving.

On the other hand, it says, however, it's unconditional. God loves you no matter what. And so there's this mixture. In fact, Derek Kidner says what you see all through this sermon, I mean this Psalm, he says is on the one hand, David senses his complete unworthiness, on the other hand, a confidence that he still belongs. Now if you only feel unworthy and not confident

in God's love, then repentance will not work on you. You'll just be beating yourself up, then repentance will not work on you. You'll just be beating yourself up, hoping that maybe God will have mercy. On the other hand, if you have confidence, but not a deep sense of unworthiness like that, husband, you'll just feel self-pity, and you won't change.

Only if you are absolutely, absolutely humbled into the dust, and you say, I'm completely unworthy, at the same time, completely confident confident. Now David had that. He had that. Why? Because he just had that. All he knew was that the grace of God was both undeserved and yet at the same time unconditional. So that meant he was a sinner and he didn't deserve anything and yet he was absolutely confident. Now I'm glad that David had that confidence, but we have something better. Not just a bare confidence, a promise,

that though you're unworthy, God loves you, we've got something better. You know, when David's son died, his little boy died, the little boy who was born to him and Bathsheba died, he thought, oh, this is my son paying for my sins. And Nathan said, no, your sin has been taken away. God has other reasons why it was wise to take this child away. But it wasn't to pay for your sins. And we know that's true. You know why? David's son didn't die for his sins. God's son died

for his sins. When David said, cast me not away from thy presence, God didn't die for his sins. God's son died for his sins. When David said, cast me not away from thy presence, God didn't, you know why? Because on the cross, Jesus was cast away from God's presence. When Jesus Christ said, my God, my God, what is he saying, my God, my God, why have you cast me away from my presence? Everything that David says here, don't do to me,

which God didn't do to him, God didn't do to him because God did it to his own son in David's place, in my place, in your place. And this is the secret. Do you know how you can really change? It's not enough just to say, God's the loving God and I've broken his heart. And just thinking about that moves you so that you don't, so your sin loses its attractive power over you. No, that's too abstract. Here, Jesus Christ was on the cross looking down at all of us, not only at the people he could visually see, but all of us, everybody in this room. He looked out at all these people, down the corridors of

time and he saw us denying and betraying and over and over making promises that we broke to him and yet as Charles Spurgeon says, the greatest act of love in the history of the world, Jesus Christ stayed. He stayed on the cross. He saw what we were like and he stayed. Remember he said to Peter, I could call 10,000 angels like that and it would be all over but he didn't do it. Now when you see Jesus Christ dying for you like that and you know the reason he died was because of what you do every day, the sins that you do every day, think of this illustration. What if your spouse, your dearest friend was shot dead by an arrow? Horrible. And then the person

said here's the arrow, maybe you want to take it home as a keepsake. What would you say? You would say, I never want to see that thing again. I don't want to take it home and put it on my wall. I want somebody to burn it into ash. When you see Jesus dying on the cross for you, being cast out of God's When you see Jesus dying on the cross for you, being cast out of God's presence for you, taking all that for you in spite of unsung deserving, then you look at what you have done. You got a bad habit, you get angry, you use abusive language, you don't tell the truth,

you're selfish instead of serving people, you tell a half truth instead of a whole truth, you see, You pay back instead of forgiving. Every one of those sins are arrows. They've gone into Jesus. And if you know what he really has done for you to the degree you know it, to that degree you say I want nothing to do. That's renunciation. You're not confessing the sins, you're renouncing it. I want nothing to do with it. Get it away. Be gone. And then you change. But only if your heart is that engaged. And only if you see what Jesus Christ has done for you on the cross. I don't care

whether you're at this end of the spectrum or that end of the spectrum. At this end of the spectrum you're too confident. You don't admit how bad you are. I would say most people in the world right now who are listening to what I'm saying would say, gosh, this is kind of pessimistic about human nature. Yes, of course it is. But I want you to know there are things in your life right now unless you get on top of they are going to hurt you. Sin is crouching at your door. It's desire is to have you. There's stuff in your life that will hurt you unless you hurt it. Be killing your indwelling sin or your indwelling sin will be killing you. But on the other end of the spectrum

there's people here who might be really really upset because you feel like I've done some terrible things. I just don't think God could possibly forgive me. Please remember that place in the Westminster Confession, the Presbyterian Confession that sums up biblical teaching by saying, just as there is no sin so small, but it deserves damnation, so there is no sin so great that it can bring damnation on those who truly repent. There is no sin so great that it can bring damnation on those who truly repent. Go and learn what this means.

The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin. Let us pray. Our Father, we thank you for the fact that now as we take up the Lord's Supper, we can actually do this. We can take up your casev, your steadfast love. It humbles us and affirms us at the same time. And it helps us not only confess our sins, but renounce and get freedom from those things

in our lives that need to change. We pray that you would help us do that. Now through your Holy Spirit, thinking about what Jesus Christ did on the cross for us. In his name we pray. Amen. Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you'd like to see more people encouraged by the Gospel Center teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership

allows us to reach people all over the world with the life-giving power of Christ's love. To learn more, just visit gospelinlife.com slash partner. That website again is gospelinlife.com slash partner. Today's sermon was recorded in 2014. 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.