Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Psalm 19 – Secret Sins and Perseverance

Sermon text today is found in Psalm 19. If you have a handout, it’d be good to follow along in that. I guess I didn’t print up enough. I have an extra right here if somebody would like it, though. Yeah, I do. Actually, I have two. This one I scribbled on a little bit. I’ll be talking just a little bit about the structure of Psalm 19 as we get into this topic today.

So, let’s stand for the reading of God’s word, Psalm 19.

Our subject will be secret sins relative to perseverance and preservation. Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out throughout all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tabernacle for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoices like a strong man to run his race.

Its rising is from one end of heaven and its circuit to the other end. And there is nothing hidden from its heat. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. Moreover, by them your servant is warned, and in keeping them there is great reward. Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and I shall be innocent of great transgression.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you that you are our rock and our redeemer. We thank you that you are the covenant God of Israel, your people. And we come before you today, Father, to give you worship and praise to celebrate in the great salvation provided for us through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, who has transitioned us from curse to blessing by his sacrifice 2,000 years ago on the cross for his people.

Help us, Lord God, to be reinvigorated by this text before us to the end that we would indeed commit ourselves to persevere in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ in obedience to his word. And help us, Lord God, to cry out to you for preservation on the basis of this text. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

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Okay, so we’re talking about perseverance and preservation. We’re talking about the P in TULIP—perseverance of the saints. And it is a call. It’s a command to persevere. But it’s also a recognition that apart from the grace of God, we will not persevere. He must preserve us. And one of the means of our preservation is the means that David avails himself of in Psalm 19. He cries out to God to be preserved even as he commits himself to persevering.

Now, I wanted to mention before we get started that I mentioned last week Norman Shepherd and his excellent set of verses that remind us that perseverance is commanded of us, but it’s also a promise that God will preserve us. And so, I wanted to mention this morning another individual, Steve Wilkins, and the church at Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church in Monroe, Louisiana. And I wanted to just quote from a church document. And they in their church document that’s listed on their website, they say this:

“From before the foundation of the world, God has sovereignly chosen a multitude no man can number for salvation. The basis of his election was solely his grace and mercy, and nothing in the creature. The number of the elect can neither increase nor diminish. All who were chosen by God from the beginning will be surely saved eternally. Not one will be lost.”

Now, that’s a good summation of the Canons of Dort and what they teach about God’s unconditional election of a set number of people and that those people cannot be lost. They will persevere because God will preserve them.

And I mentioned it because in spite of all the hubbub over the Federal Vision and people like Steve Wilkins and Doug Wilson and James B. Jordan and others, you should know and understand, and I’ve said this before, but it’s important that you hear it, that whether you agree or not with some of the things they say, these men are solidly committed to the basic reformed faith and theology once delivered to us. They are in full accord with the Canons of Dort that we’re going over today and statements like this demonstrate that.

So I wanted to put your mind at rest about whatever else it is. It’s not a discussion over whether Dort is correct or not and what it says to us about perseverance. So we’re going to talk about perseverance. The P in TULIP is for perseverance, and for this to happen, God must preserve us.

And we’re going to talk about this in relationship to sin—sins. Now, the I—for those of you that don’t have a handout, I’m sorry. For those of you that do, I think it’s page two that lists again some of the stuff we had in the outline last week, some of the pages from Westminster and Canons of Dort.

But what I’m going to be doing today is talking about small sins, presumptuous sins, relatively sins that are relatively minor and I have to use that in a guarded sense because from one perspective sin is—any sin makes a subject to the eternal damnation of hell. They’re all alike in that sense. But the scriptures differentiate in Psalm 19 certainly between errors and those kind of sins and then presumptuous sins and the scriptures make the same differentiation.

And so today we’re going to talk about the smaller sins that beset us round about. Again, from the Westminster Confession of Faith—although I usually have the handout—we got the paragraph 3 of chapter 17 on the perseverance of the saints.

“Nevertheless, these who are going to persevere may through the temptations of Satan and of the world, the prevalency of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of the means of their preservation fall into grievous sins.”

So, Westminster acknowledges that we fall into sins, and part of it is because of a neglect of the means of salvation. The means of perseverance, the means that God preserves us with. And we’ll talk about that today. The means that David uses to persevere in the faith.

The Canons of Dort say that the regenerate are not, of course—are not entirely free from sin in article one. In article two, we read this:

“Hence, daily sins of weakness…”

Now, that’s the kind we’re going to talk about today. Daily sins of weakness and blemishes cling to even the best works of God’s people. If you come here today thinking, “I got nothing to confess beginning of the service,” you’re wrong. We cannot know—as Calvin I think said—the hundredth part of our sins. It’s the grace of God not to show them all to us at one time because it would completely overwhelm us.

But the Canons are right and the scriptures teach this that we have all kinds of sins of inadvertency and error and even the best of our works there is some degree of sin to them in terms of motivation, purity, etc. We cannot—there is certainly no hint in the scriptures that we can move in terms of sinless perfection and the Canons have it right that we have daily sins of weakness and blemishes cling to even the best works of God’s people.

This gives them continual cause to humble themselves before God. We’ll see David doing that in Psalm 19—to flee for refuge to Christ crucified. He does that. He ends with a crying out to God, his rock and his redeemer—redeemed from sin. He David seeks in this Psalm 19 justification—cleansing definitively from the sins he seeks. The sanctification is being held back from presumptuous sins and he does this on the basis of the redemptive work of the one who is to come, Jesus Christ.

So he clings to Christ crucified and he puts the flesh to death. The flesh is the old man. In Ephesians 4 we’re told to put off the old man and put on the new man. And this is a continuing command. So everything we have still has an element of the flesh, the old man, the fallen Adamic nature. That’s what it means. It doesn’t mean our bodies are bad, but as long as we have this kind of flesh instead of glorified flesh, it’s a reminder of the sinfulness of the fallen Adamic nature and the need to exercise ourselves to persevere in the faith by moving away from the old man and his sin.

And David does that in Psalm 19. So we want to put the flesh to death to get rid of that stuff and more and more by the spirit of supplication—by the holy exercises of godliness. Prayer. David’s psalm concludes with the prayer but it moves towards the end of that prayer by asking that God would keep him from presumptuous sins and cleanse him from secret sins, identify them to him and that he prays not just that his sins would be forgiven but that he’d be motivated from the heart speaking through the mouth to give praise to God.

So he replaces the old man with the new man and he does this by means of supplication or prayer to God. Prayer is an essential part of perseverance of the saints and the holy exercises of godliness which we’ll talk about today as well.

And again, article three: we could not remain standing in the grace of God if left to our own resources. But God is faithful. So God has to preserve us. Even as we have to focus on and make efforts toward our perseverance, still God has to preserve us.

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Now this idea of minor sins is pointed out for instance in Numbers 15 in verse 22. If you sin unintentionally and do not—so he’s giving directions for sacrificial work, sacrificial system. And he says:

“If you sin unintentionally and do not observe all these commandments which the Lord your God has spoken to Moses, all that the Lord has commanded you by the hand of Moses from the day the Lord gave commandment and onward throughout your generations, then it will be if it is unintentionally committed without the knowledge of the congregation that the whole congregation shall offer one young bull as a burnt offering as a sweet aroma to the Lord, which is with its grain offering and its drink offering according to the ordinance and one kid of the goats is a sin offering. So the priest shall make atonement for the whole congregation of the children of Israel and it shall be forgiven them for it was unintentional.”

So why do I quote this? Because the Bible sets up in the sacrificial system a particular offering required for unintentional sins—sins done without knowledge that they’ve broken the law of God.

You remember at this church’s beginning we liked a lot the story of Josiah and how they found the law in the temple. But they didn’t say, “Great, good. We’re going to make [changes] from now on.” Josiah began by leading the people in repentance because they’d broken a bunch of stuff, a bunch of laws they didn’t even know about, but they’re still guilty before God. They still need atonement for unintentional sin, sins of complete ignorance. That’s what’s being described in Numbers 15.

So, you know, this is what I mean. It’s not just me. The Bible differentiates in Psalm 19, but also in the sacrificial system between kinds of sins and these unintentional sins of the congregation are atoned for and the text goes on—I won’t read it—but it goes on then to talk about the individual that uses the same language. An individual as well as the whole congregation can sin through inadvertency, can sin through neglect or not understanding God’s law and its requirements.

And I’m convinced that there is a whole lot of sinning going on in the Christian world today because of an ignorance of God’s word and we’ll talk about that. But my point is that we’re not off the hook. Just because we search our consciences and nothing comes to mind, we’re not off the hook. David says that the law of God is what gives him knowledge of his sin. You see it?

We don’t want to just rest in the fact that we’re not being convicted about something. This is a strange perspective on sanctification that is, I think, somewhat more prevalent in our day and age than it has been in time past. In our day of tremendous ignorance of the Bible, I was saddened in my 12 to 17 year old Sunday school class today.

I was talking about Gerizim and evil, and I’ll talk about the Lord’s supper a little bit, but you know, 15 minutes on good Bible software or even just looking up in a Bible dictionary, you find out some neat stuff about Deuteronomy 27 and Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim—neat stuff that’ll make your heart praise God, but you’ve got to spend a little bit of time on it.

So I asked the kids, “How many of you have Bible software on your computers at home?” Oh, maybe a third of them. “And how many of you have computer games on your computer at home?” All of them.

And you ask your kids, you know, “Have you used Bible software? Have you studied the Bible this last week? How much time have you put into the Bible this last week and how much time do you put into computer games?” We have an incredible ignorance of the word and we can walk around saying silly things like, “Because my conscience doesn’t convict me about something, I’m okay. I’m clear.”

No. Numbers 15 is a reminder and so is David’s Psalm 19 that no—there’s a bunch of stuff that we are guilty of even if we don’t know it. It doesn’t do us any good not to know the Bible. We’re still guilty of those things and those things are what we want to get rid of as we persevere in the faith.

All right. So, that’s the two kinds of sins and today we’re talking about that. Next week, Pastor Wilson will be bringing the sermon. The week after that, we’ll look at Psalm 51 for a great sin, a monstrous sin by David.

Today, we’re looking at David’s secret sins even from himself. Two weeks, David’s great sin.

By the way, also two weeks from today—Liz Prenice will be after the announcements. I’m saying this now because I won’t be around for announcements. We’re taking off to the coast for 3 days, my wife and I. And then I’m going up to Spokane. Please pray for me this Friday and Saturday. I’ll be with Vos Nixon and the elders of Christ Church in Spokane facilitating a retreat they’re having to sort of map out strategic vision for their church. I thought it might be helpful to them. And so pray for me that I’d be of some use to them perhaps.

But so my week I’ll be out of the office all week and Elder Wilson will be preaching next Sunday. But then the two weeks—today, Liz Prenice after the announcements will show a DVD, I think here in the sanctuary—be the best place for it—of New Hope Uganda, the mission that she’ll be going flying to September 4th. She’s leaving quick.

So, she’ll be showing that and I know some of you are interested in perhaps supporting her or going at least with your prayers. We all want to do at least that much—maybe with your money. So, if you come August 12th, 2 weeks from today after announcement time, Liz will have a time of presenting this and then we’re going to try to think of one other time—we haven’t set the date yet—for her being either at Elder Wilson’s house or my house during an evening session so that some of you that could have an interest could talk about what she’s going to be doing there.

So, I’ll be praying about that and about Liz’s preparation over the next—I guess it’s just three or four weeks. And four or five weeks you’ll be praying for her also. This weekend while I’m going to Spokane, she’s going back to the Midwest to meet with the coordinator for New Hope Uganda to kind of get final briefings and stuff in place for her to leave on September 4th. So, pray for that trip as well.

And while I’m at it, two weeks—Elder Wilson won’t be here cuz he’s taking Laura over to NSA in Moscow. Pray for them, too. Pray for our young people are going off to college, going off to vocation, whatever it is. It’s important that we support our young people with prayer as they take next big steps in their lives.

All right. So this week though: sins of inadvertency.

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And first of all, I want to talk a little bit about the structure of Psalm 19. And you know, it’s a psalm that most of us are somewhat familiar with. Probably it’s one of the more familiar psalms to us. Uh and it, from one perspective, it has three very easily marked sections, themes to it.

The first theme of course is the wonders of creation of created order and the beauty of that. The second section of the psalm deals with the law of God and the wonderfulness of the law of God. And then the third section deals with man.

And so David says, you know, the creation is wonderful and it’s a glory to walk around in the created world. And God’s law likewise is a wonderful thing. It’s glorious—the Bible is a glorious thing to us. But when we look at the glory of the created order and when we look at the glory of God’s law, if we’ve got our heads on straight and our hearts ready to receive the truth, we feel like worms. A knowledge of our own ungloriousness, our own sinfulness in relationship to the law and to the revelation of God and the created order makes us feel horrible.

And so that’s how the psalm sort of moves generally: a consideration of this beauty of creation, the beauty of the law of God, and then the horribleness of our own propensity to sin, our lives are filled with myriad numbers of sins. And David recognizes that as he meditates on the glory of God’s revelation in the natural order and then in the specific revelation of God in the scriptures.

We recognize then, in light of God’s glory reflected through these wonderful things, we understand our own fallenness from the glory in which we have been created to be in.

I—for some reason this old song from the musical Hair has been kicking around in my head for a month or two. I used to think it. I had a hard time finding the lyrics, but the lyrics are: “Good morning starshine. The earth says hello. You twinkle above us. We twinkle below.”

You know, I lived through that period of time when people were sort of odd and cosmic. And it’s easy to—a lot of the lyrics are nonsense in that song. But you know, that opening lyric? That is a wonderful thing to remember. Good morning starshine. Good morning, sun. You shine above us. The stars twinkle. And we’re supposed to twinkle below. We’re supposed to be, you know, purveyors of the glory of God in our lives. That’s what we’re called to be. Lights in the midst of darkness, right? All you kids remember that verse. How do you put out your light? Grumbling and disputing. We’re supposed to be great shiners of light. We are supposed to twinkle below.

They were right on that. They were wrong in terms of rejecting the merits of Christ to get to that point. But that is an absolute true thing. And David recognizes that and yet sees his horrible sinfulness.

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Now, another way to look at this psalm, and those of you that don’t have the outline—it’s going to be a little tougher to see this—but my friend Jack Phelps, pastor of a church up in Anchorage, gave me a gift a month or so ago, a Bible commentary on the Psalms. And you know, the strength of this particular commentary is his analysis of the meters, the metrical lines, the verses, what some people call strokes—his analysis of the Psalms based on this. And every one of them he lines out that way.

And he points out, I think convincingly, that this Psalm actually has seven parts consisting of three bicola—three lines in each part where you got a back and a forth. So for instance: “The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech. Night unto night reveals knowledge. No speech nor language where the voice is not heard.”—one section. And then we go to the next and it’s the same kind of a thing.

Seeing from this way, there are six sections that are very similar to one another and then the seventh is different from it. And of course, the seventh is very familiar in Christendom. It’s almost become sort of a verse of benediction or certainly we appropriate in the Christian church: “Let the words of my mouth, meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”

Well, if you look and the man in the commentary doesn’t point this out, but if you look at those seven sections, and you take this home and look it over, and you’ll see uh two of these sections have four back and forths, and you’ll see the reason for that: the magnification of the topic. But the point is that it roughly follows, I think, creation. There’s seven sections. And when David does that, we would expect to see something kind of hooked up to creation. And so he begins, of course, with the heavens and the glory of God. Well, this is, you know, clearly Genesis 1 sort of language.

And it seems to, if you look at those seven sections, it seems to mark that way. For our purposes, the section we’re going to look at is the sixth section. The sixth section of course is reminder of day six creation of man, fall of man, and it’s in this sixth section that David bemoans his sinfulness and asks for God to cleanse him from secret sins and keep him back from presumptuous sins.

So the sixth day is the day of application of prayer because of our sinful state. It’s the real, you know, request from God to preserve us even as we seek our to persevere in the faith. And then finally the seventh section is this beautiful concluding section about “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight.” And that’s kind of Lord’s day worship. You know, we’re now cleansed of our sins. We’re on track and we’re praising God and asking him to build us up in positive works.

So, this psalm kind of moves through a series of seven sections that roughly correlate to creation. Now, even if you don’t look at the sections this way, I think there’s a second witness of creation here because we can see in Verse 1: “The heavens declaring the glory of God. The firmament shows his handiwork.” Well, my Bible kids know this. They know that day one is light—glory of God shines forth. Day two is the establishment of the firmament. And in day three, dry land appears. And that’s the next subject in verse 4: “Their line goes out into all the earth.” So that’s day three, the earth comes along.

And then day four is the reflected glory of God in terms of the earth, right? So we got sun, moon, and stars showing the glory of God from day one. And we have here in the fourth section a discussion of the sun and ultimately Jesus—the picture of the warrior Christ who shines over all things. And then this is related to his law. His law then is related to the sinfulness of man and then finally the sinfulness of man is resolved by the seventh section in terms of our prayers being acceptable to God.

So either way you look at it, I think Psalm 19 is a reminder of creation and recreation in Christ. And it’s important for us. It’s important for us as we meditate. You know, God doesn’t write this stuff this way just for no purpose. I don’t understand people who say, “Well, you know, that structural stuff doesn’t really mean much to me.”

Well, what else do you have to understand what the scriptures say except the movement of it? Now, maybe the specific details that we can’t really know—maybe I don’t know. But I think the Lord God wants us to take his word and be dazzled, and move to thanksgiving and praise him for the glory of how he communicates. And I think that ultimately we’re supposed to kind of be the same way.

Effective speech is what the proverbs in one sense is all about. Speech that can break the bone of an enemy. Speech that can encourage people. And I think our speech, you know, here we got David, you know, this is David writing us inspired by the Holy Spirit, but it’s David. This is the way he wrote and sang. It’s not impossible for men to speak beautifully and using creation models, kayistic structures, etc.

So, there’s a beauty to this to the word of God. And I, for one, in my study of Psalm 19 this last week, I was blessed. You know, my socks were blessed by the glory of the way this thing is written and the movement of it. And in terms of perseverance and preservation, it reminds us that while we feel very much in day six, a lot of the time the Lord God is moving us to Sabbath rest in Christ, to day seven and acceptance with him through the merits of our rock and our redeemer the way the psalm ends.

So there’s a beauty to it.

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One last comment before we get into the specifics of the text and that is this: three “greats” that I mention here. I want to kind of make you understand what’s happening there. There the same Hebrew word is used three times in verses 10 through 13. In verse 10 we read: “More to be desired than much great gold, much fine gold, great gold; sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. Moreover, by them your servant is warned. By keeping them there is great reward.” Much reward—same Hebrew word.

So there is, you know, uh there is much gold related to the much reward for understanding and keeping the word of God. So the word of God gives us—it is the reflected glory of God like gold is and it brings us great reward. And then finally he says: “Keep me back from presumptuous sins. In verse 13 then I shall be blameless and I shall be innocent of great transgression.” So you know, the three “greats” ends with the third one, which isn’t so great—it’s “great transgression”—but the point is that I think the best way to translate this phrase “great transgression” is “much transgression” like there’s much great gold—there’s lots of rewards from studying the word of God—there’s a great transgression. But the idea is: keep me back from presumptuous sins and I’ll be free from a whole bunch of sins—from great transgressions.

So, that by way of introducing the text to us.

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And I want to focus particularly now on the transitional verse in verse 11. So, we’ve said that Psalm 19 has three major sections, seven minor ones. We can say the topic of sin is found in minor section number six. Whichever way you divide out the flow—the seven topic analysis, theme or structure of the psalm—it’s in that sixth slot, which is where it belongs. It always belongs there in that sixth slot. And the world was made in seven days. And so God is encouraging us that though we find lots of sin in our lives, He’s encouraging us because that’s day six, but there’s a day seven coming when the Lord God will make every thought of our heart and every word that we speak acceptable in his sight and that’s in eternity.

But we can we can appropriate some of that in this life as well.

All right, let’s now talk about the transitional nature of verse 11, the secondary means of perseverance.

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So verse 11: you know, we have this wonderful depiction of creation and law and then verse 11 starts to transition to the final section. “Whereby by them your servant is warned.” Now who’s warned? Your servant is warned. What we read about here is the servant of God. This is David. And so these texts apply to us only in in the perspective that we’re servants of God.

So what I’m saying here in terms of perseverance is for the servants of God. And if you don’t want to do the rest of this stuff in this verse and you don’t want to persevere, then you’re not a servant of God. And I don’t care how much you say you are. If you don’t put your hand to perseverance, you’re not servants of God. Are warned by the law of God. In keeping these laws, there is great reward.

So this is the transitional verse to then him talking about sins. So the law of God is a warning to us and on the other hand it’s a blessing to us in keeping them there is great reward.

So first of all, in relationship to this then, the secondary means of perseverance: man’s relationship to creation and Bible. I’ve mentioned that already. But as we see the beauty of the creation and the beauty of God’s word, it should lead us to, you know, seek out our sins that are besetting us and to persevere in the faith of Christ in the obedience of it by looking at what it reveals about our sins.

So in the presence of divine truth, the psalmist marvels at the number and heinousness of his own sins. This is what it leads him to. He understands by the light—you know, if you go into a dust room and you got a bright light, you see dust bunnies where you didn’t know they were before. Well, you multiply that times a thousand times and you got the light of God’s word shedding light on our own sinfulness. And that’s what David says here: “By them your servant is warned.”

So, he marvels at the numbers of his sins. As one commentator says: “That he best knows himself who best knows the word. But even such a person will be in a maze of wonder as to what he does not know rather than on the mount of congratulation as to what he does know.”

This is why I’m so, you know, discouraged when the kids here are saying they’re not studying their Bibles or reading their Bibles much. You don’t know yourself. If you don’t read the word of God, meditate on it, study it a little bit, you don’t know yourself. You don’t know what laws you’re breaking and what laws you’re not breaking. And if you do study on it, you won’t put yourself up on the mount of congratulation so often as we do typically. You’ll recognize that you’re in that labyrinth of sins that easily beset you.

And then you’ll make use of that secondary means of perseverance: prayer to God to keep us from these secret sins and certainly from presumptuous ones.

So, you know, the relationship to the word is quite important here. This transitional verse shows us then the incredible pastoral importance of theonimy. Yeah, I’m using the old word because it’s theocracy. We tend to think in terms of civil government. Theonomy just means God’s law and the importance of God’s law cannot be overstated for the Christian. There are lots of reasons for that, but in terms of Psalm 19, it’s the way David discovers his sins. A knowledge of the word is what leads him to a knowledge of his own sinfulness.

Now, if you don’t love the law of God, and if you just think Leviticus 19 is pretty irrelevant, the book of Deuteronomy with its Ten Commandment sermons—that’s old-fashioned stuff. We don’t care about those case laws. We don’t care about that stuff, folks. People that believe that are walking around in utter ignorance of who they are and how they shame God by their actions. No wonder the church is so ineffectual, growing in ineffectualness in our country when it rejects the law of God.

It’s not like the law of God is supposed to be some great, you know, Christian coalition, you know, political action deal. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about to be effective, Christians have to be growing in sanctification with the blessings of God upon them. And Christians are for the most part in this nation walking around with the curses of God on them. And they don’t even know it because they’ve rejected God’s word.

God’s word is of tremendous pastoral importance to us, the law of God. We do not know who we are until we examine this wonderful law of the Lord.

By the way, did you notice the kind of nice transition there? If you look at verse 7: “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul.” So the law converts us. It turns us around away from our sin. It makes wise. It gives us wisdom then of ourselves and of our world. It turns us. It grows us and matures us. And then it causes to rejoice. “The statute of the Lord [rejoices] the heart.”

Christians don’t have joy because they don’t have a joy in God’s word. They’re not converted. They’re not turned. They’re not wise. And as a result, no joy. And so we try to kick up artificial ways of making ourselves happy and joyful. When God says the way to do it is to know the Bible, including his laws, including Leviticus 19, including Exodus 20-23, including the major section of Deuteronomy—a sermon on the Ten Commandments. That’s the way we’re going to know who we are. We’re going to be converted. We’re going to be made wise. And that’s what will lead to our rejoicing.

“Commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.” How do we get to be the supervisors, the lights of God over overseeing, supervising, looking over the world and changing it? You don’t get enlightened eyes as the moon is the eyes of God, so to speak. We’re the eyes of God looking over the world and changing it. That’s the culmination of an application and joy in the law of God. That’s the way it moves: conversion, maturation, joy, and dominion then over the world, enlightening the eyes so that our eyes can oversee and govern.

There’s I cannot stress enough the need to know our Bibles. Not enough to let pastor, elders, mom or dad do it. Young people, you’ve got to read your Bibles. You’ve got to know who you are. You’ve got to let that searing light of God’s word bring home conviction to your soul.

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There’s an obvious need here for humility, introspection, meditation, and community. If you’re humble before God, you’re going to look at his law and try to find out how you’ve fallen short. Pride says, “I’m okay. I’m doing great. I’m a theonomist. I’m a reconstructionist. I’m a theocrat. I’m dominion guy. I go to a great church. We got great Sunday school programs. We got great confessions.” You know, that’s good enough for me. I’m part of that. Well, it isn’t. That’s pride.

Humility says we got to humble ourselves, know the word of God, because we should know that we’ve got to be converted every day. There’s stuff we got to put off every day. The commandment in the New Testament: put off the old man, put on the new. You can’t do it without knowing the word of God. And that requires humility on our parts to read our Bibles in a way that will bring home conviction from God to us.

There’s a need for introspection. Now, not morbid introspection. You know, I mentioned a book here on the outline by Obadiah Sedgwick, “Anatomy of Secret Sins.” We have it in our library and you know, Puritan work 1600s and they’re all good and they’re good and useful. But you know if you read Puritans too much you really start to doubt your salvation and the idea of introspection that today’s text calls for doesn’t ever get to that place of joy too very much.

So Puritans a little—it seems to me at least some of the Puritan writings including Sedgwick’s work is a little overbalanced in terms of introspection. But you know I don’t know hardly anybody in my personal spirit relationships in this church and other churches. I don’t know hardly anybody that is in danger of that ditch of too much morbid introspection about their sin. I don’t think we’ve got to worry about that. Now, if you start overbalancing that way, I’ll come and talk to you if I see it.

But I don’t think that’s the problem. Our problem is the other direction, is it not? “Oh, here’s assurance forgiveness. What should I confess? Can’t think of anything to confess.” David would add “etc.” to the end of his prayer of confession. And so should we. I did this morning having studied this stuff out: “Lord God please, you know, forgive me for this and this. This week, etc., and all the other things that I did that I don’t know about, all the ways in which even my best works were blemished by improper motivations, improper speech to one another, etc.” As David understood it, we will—we need to have an introspection of who we are based on the word of God.

Meditation. You got to chew the Bible that’s been delightful teaching these kids from Deuteronomy in the Sunday school class this year. A lot of material and I’ve typically have kind of gone too long and they’re probably bored with it. But I personally have just delighted in chewing the word of God and meditating over some of these, you know, there’s ten commandments, 10 sections in that sermon and several of them begin with weird laws.

There’s the muzzle, you know, there’s the kid—”don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk. It starts the fourth commandment. There’s “don’t have two different kinds of seed in your vineyard. [Seventh commandment, there’s] “don’t muzzle the ox that’s treading out the grain.” Tenth commandment.

But if you think about those things and chew on them, particularly enlightened by the scriptures, Paul tells us how to do it when he says God doesn’t care about ox. You think that’s what you’re supposed to do, is it? You’re not letting your ox eat and never trample out your grain, are you? Don’t be stupid. He says you’re supposed to know that’s a symbol at the head of this sermon section by Moses on covetousness. And what it means is don’t be so covetous that you don’t give your pastor and the elders of the church the tithe. Don’t covet God’s money so much that you don’t tithe. That’s the beginning of covet. And the tenth commandment ends with that whole thing: give God his tithe and rejoice in the giving of it.

So covetousness is picture but it’s a little case law. Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk. And then he talks about the Sabbath. The Sabbath is a nurturing ordinance. If you read that section and walk away saying, “Well, I don’t care about Sabbath. I’ll go to church. That’s as far as my Sabbath goes. I don’t know what to do about that.” But if you read that introspectively, meditating on what it means—what it means is that the Lord’s day is something that’s supposed to bring great life to you. It’s a nurture. It’s mother’s milk. The Sabbath is mother’s milk.

And they were warned not to take mother’s milk and kill their children with it by either not giving it to them. Be one way to kill them—starving to death—or by turning the Sabbath into a drudgery. You see, so these commandments require meditation. They’re they’re structured that way.

Two seeds. Don’t plant your vineyard with two kinds of—”Don’t have a garment of linen and wool.” And we think, “Well, gee whiz, what kind of—what do I got on here? Does God care about shirts?” No, he doesn’t. Because both in Leviticus 19 and in Deuteronomy in the seventh commandment section—”don’t commit adultery”—those commandments are immediately followed by commandments relative to sexual sin: marriage, betrothal, what happens if you have sex outside of marriage to a particular kind of person? That’s what it’s about. It’s about adulterating, weakening, adding draws to your family, to the community, to the church of Jesus Christ through sexual sin. That’s what it means. It doesn’t mean you can’t have a garment with two different kinds of material in it.

You see, we just—so what do we do? Typically, we just make fun of those laws. We forget them. We don’t care about them. But if we think about them and meditate on them, then we see the importance of sexual purity. We know that we can adulterate our marriage relationship just through evil thoughts, committing adultery with other women in our minds. We can adulterate the marriage relationship and weaken it. You see, it begins to take on a whole other task when we meditate on it. And the light of God’s word starts to wash over us. Oh, okay. I didn’t realize it was this kind of thing, you see.

Private property. I, you know, I listened to an article last night. I listened to an article last night called “The Pollution Within.” You know, I get these magazine articles on tape and the guy, he works for the National Geographic, and they paid $15,000 to have his blood tested for, I think it was 300 known bad chemical compounds that are in the atmosphere and in the world.

And for instance, he has a lot more flame retardant molecules in his blood than he should. Why? Well, he flies a lot and planes are just completely coated with, you know, you don’t want the C seat burning up when you crash or something. So, there’s a benefit, but the end result is just through exposure to that stuff, we’re building up levels of this in our blood—pollution within. It’s kind of spooky, you know.

He was amazed how much stuff he had floating in his body. In the womb, you get pollutants from your mom through the placenta. Then you get pollutants in your body from mother’s milk and then you get it in your environment through various ways.

Well, the same thing’s true, in a much more important sense. We live in a world in which the pollution, the sinful pollution of the world is part of who we are and part of our makeup. And we didn’t even know we picked it up from the world.

Right now, we’ve got our own little subculture. This Christian subculture. All right, you are big on private property. Every time I read a voter’s guide about taxation or something, I always ring the bell for private property and how important it is. Well, that’s true. But if you read the law of God, if you read the commandment against theft, you know, it starts talking about how if his servant runs away, you can’t send him back to his master.

And then it says if somebody’s going to walk through your vineyard or through your field, they can pluck off heads of grain like Jesus and the disciples did, and that’s okay. Hey. And then they say, “Well, you know, you can’t you can’t take the last little bit of your olives and your grapes and your wheat out of the field. You got to leave that for other people.” In the commandment against stealing, God puts restrictions on private property. And we should understand this. We shouldn’t go off willy-nilly and one little truth of Christianity about private property and its importance in spite of all the world around us.

And our in our reaction to that, we build reactions that are unbiblical or in the absorption of the Christian culture. Private property is great. I should do whatever I want to with my property. That’s it. Stay off. No. Bible says it’s not that simple.

Now, you don’t get to any of those things if you don’t not just read, but meditate. You know, today’s sermon is basically a just call to the basic Christian disciplines. Read your Bible. Meditate. Chew over what you read. Do it introspectively. Do it looking for how God will help you to put off the old man and put on the new man. Do it introspectively. Do it meditatively. Study the Bible.

If you just read through it all the time, that’s great. But if you don’t have a little guideline from our Sunday school curriculum, all kinds of easy, I spent 15 minutes studying Ebal and Gerizim and came away praising God for what he has revealed in that and how what a wonderful picture it is to us. You see, you got to study it a little bit. Got to chew on it.

And as David does, you got to cry out to God for him to preserve us even as we’re seeking to persevere in the faith.

So, we have an obvious need for humility, introspection, meditation, and community.

1 John 1:7 says: “If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his son cleanses us from all sin.”

How do we get [to] see the light of God’s word? One of the first things it tells us is live in community and in community—if we’re in biblical Christian community who are obeying Leviticus 19, who are telling us things about us that are wrong rather than gossiping about us—then we’re going to have fellowship. The light will increase and God will cleanse more of our sins.

Community is absolutely essential. I can’t believe that for 20—I don’t know however long—I’ve been around 20, 25 years I have been preaching, saying, exhorting, and admonishing people to get counsel from important people in their lives when they make major decisions. And we still don’t do it. Some people do, but I over and over again, I’m just astonished.

And you know, I don’t want to yell at anybody. I’m sure I’m the same way. But the Bible says that we have absolute need of community. 1 John says that’s part of the way God preserves us is community. The light of God’s word—it’s easy for us to blot it out if we can’t see our sin or don’t want to see it. But God says, “No, don’t do that.”

So, there’s an obvious need for meditation, contemplation, prayer, cuz we don’t know the hundredth part of our sin.

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Proverbs 19:27. Now, see, you got to study this stuff because even your translations will lead you astray, perhaps. Here’s what it says in the King James: “Cease, my son, to hear the instruction that causes to err from the words of knowledge.”

So, King James translates this in a way that says that, you know, there’s pollution, pollutants in the system. The pollution within you comes from outside of you. You listen to that iPod all day long and you’re going to get, you know, it’s like sitting in a soup of anti—you know, flame retardant material and it’s going to absorb into your skin. And if you’re always listening to the counsel of the world, you’re going to—you’re going to—same word “error” that David talks about his sin as being error. The same is going to happen to you. That’s true. And we know that from Psalm 1, the importance of not walking in the counsel of the ungodly.

But the text actually says, I think New King James and the other translation says this: “Cease listening to instruction, my son, and you will stray from the words of knowledge. You can’t know yourself if you cease listening to instruction.”

Now, it doesn’t say reading. It says listening. So, you know, part of that’s your Bible. That’s what David was talking about. But we listen to instruction from other people. And that’s part of the means. That’s part of the tools of perseverance that if we ignore, we end up in monstrous sins. We’ll talk about in two weeks in Psalm 51.

Perseverance relies upon preservation. David prays that God would keep him from temptation. Don’t let the sins exercise dominion over me.

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After this transitional verse—”Your servant is warned”—”Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” That’s should be our commitment to persevere but it relies upon God hearing that prayer and cleansing us.

To cleanse means to pour out and it means to be judicially cleansed but more than that it means to get sin out of our lives, to pour them out, get them away from us, you see. So God wants is to pray that we would be not just forgiven but cleansed. Get the thing out of us, move ahead with a different direction.

So that’s what David prays for. He acknowledges we can’t understand our sins. The word of God will teach it to us, but still we need to cry out to God to cleanse us from secret faults.

And then he prays secondarily: “Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins”—high-handed sins. We’ll talk about these in two weeks. So he prays that God would prevent him from doing the terrible things that you’d think we’re all supposed to be able not to do. But David is humble. He knows his propensity. He knows “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love.” And he knows that apart from, you know, the preventing grace, the grace of God, he will always go to those presumptuous, high-handed sins against God.

Now, how does God prevent it? Well, sometimes he just takes away the temptation. Gee, I’m alone. I’m alone with a bunch of liquor and I’m prone to drink too much liquor. I better pray. And maybe God answers the prayer by sending somebody to be with you or by having you go see a movie instead of being alone with something that’s of temptation to you. So God can answer those prayers first of all by taking away a specific temptation.

Or he can get us through the temptation and not give in to sinful drunkenness in spite of our propensity. The grace of God, the arming of the Holy Spirit for this combat is what David is praying for. And that’s part of the perseverance of God’s people.

Perseverance relies upon preservation. God prevents temptation and gives us victory over the temptation. 1 Corinthians 10 says that no matter what temptation’s overtaken us, God with the temptation will provide the means of escape.

And then—preservation relies on the word, reading, meditation, study, and prayer. Not talked about this already but you know one illustration of this—one final illustration and we’ll close with this. I’ll come back to this in two weeks but one of the illustrations of this: turn to Leviticus 19 as an example.

You know, David—I’ve got you know it’s good to think about secret sins—things we keep secret from other people, etc. I’ve listed a bunch of categories for you there. But what David’s talking about are secret sins that are secret even to us. We don’t know what they are.

And how is God going to prevent us from engaging in these secret sins? Well, he’s going to use the word of God to show us these things.

In Leviticus 19, we have a one-chapter summation of the Ten Commandments. Now, it’s not like—it’s not like Deuteronomy where he goes right through the Ten Commandments. It’s a topical sermon, we could say, that doesn’t follow the order of the Ten Commandments. And yet, that’s what it’s about.

So, if you look at Leviticus 19, you know, what does he start with? What would you start a sermon on the Ten Commandments with? Well, here’s God’s divine scripted sermon and he says: “Speak to the congregation. Be holy if I the Lord your God I’m holy.” That’s a summary statement. Beginning he’s going to talk about holiness. How does he say it? “The first commandment: you shall fear every man his mother and his father and keep my Sabbath. I am the Lord your God.”

Let’s just stop right there. Children, you are supposed to obey your parents. You know that right? Mom says do this and maybe you don’t do it the first time. On no, I’m serious. Do it. And you do it fine. And you think, “Good for me. I’m obeying mom.” People, my neighbors, my ungodly neighbors, they yell at their mothers. Not me. I’m obeying my mom. Are you reverencing your mother? It doesn’t say obey here. It gives a much broader term. It says that obedience is a small little sliver of what God’s law requires from you. But do you reverence your mother? Do you worship her? I mean, it’s almost that strong a word here. You treat her and your father with reverence, respect, deference. You see, that’s what’s required of the law of God.

That’s how it starts. You want to be holy, you want to persevere, begin with persevering relative to your parents.

And then the next one is “keep my Sabbaths.” Well, I go to church most every Sunday. I keep going. No, God says Nehemiah says summary statement of the Sabbath much more comprehensive than that. This is the Lord’s day. Day is not an hour and a half. It’s a day. And we can have all kinds of implications for that. What are we doing on the Lord’s day? Are we reverencing that day? Are we reverencing our father for the day?

Now, there’s two tiny little commandments, two, you know, I don’t know how in the Hebrew, I don’t know, maybe eight words or something. And yet, there’s enough there to reflect on this week to where we can see, as David saw, that we have secret sins in our lives. He’ll reveal to us as we think about these things.

Don’t, you know, don’t say, “Well, I’m okay. I don’t want to think about it too much.” Don’t do that. David says the way to persevere is to persevere at the knowledge of the word prayerfully before God, humbly before God, asking him to show us our sins. And on the basis of that, then he will indeed.

David’s prayer is not a loser’s prayer. David’s prayer is a victor’s prayer. At the end: “Let the words of my mouth and meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight.” He conquers. He knows that the God he cries out to for preservation will indeed preserve it. He’ll keep them. He’s a rock—my sure defense. He’s a redeemer. He’s redeemed us from our sins and misery. And he’ll make even our tongues—what’s the hardest thing the Bible says to use in holiness? Our tongues.

And at the end, he’s praying confidently that the words of his mouth—even—and not just his tongue. We know that even harder is our thought—”the meditation of my heart”—acceptable in your sight. There’s the goal. David is persevering toward that kind of goal in his life. And he’s confident that the Lord God will assist him as he grows in that grace.

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Heidelberg Catechism says: “There’s what is the only comfort in life and in death?” is the first question. You’ve heard me give you the long answer many times. What’s question number two?

You know it’s interesting. I had forgotten what the answer to question number two is. Question number two is: “What must thou know to live and die happily in this comfort?”

First: “How great my sins and misery are.”

Today’s text informs us of the greatness of our sins and misery.

Second: “How I am redeemed from all my sins and misery.”

At the end of the day, we can have hope for the future. We’re convicted to the end that God is going to take away the old man and give us the new man successively, progressively, little bits by little bits. He doesn’t overwhelm us. He treats us tenderly as the father should. He doesn’t show us the bright light of all our sins, but he moves us ahead as we make use of his means—prayer and the word. He shows us those things. And he shows us we’ve been redeemed from all my sins and misery—my rock, my redeemer.

And I’d forgotten the third part. And the third part is what David says in the last verse. I should have remembered it. The third thing is: “How I should be thankful to God or express thanksgiving to God for such redemption.”

That’s what today is. Today is the time to rejoice.

Yeah, we should all feel pretty guilty now that we have a lot of secret sins and we don’t know our Bibles and we don’t pray that the Lord God would cause us to persevere. We don’t ask him to show us our sins very often and if we do, we neglect the very means of the word by which he will normally do that. Yeah, that’s what we feel convicted for.

But we also recognize that as we are the servants of God, we are the servants who come to this place today to be encouraged to do that, to leave here with a commitment to do that. Don’t walk up to the front and give your money to God if at the same time you’re not also committing yourselves to a healthy introspection and knowledge of God’s word to glorify your father more as his lights in the world.

If you’re not willing to make that commitment, don’t come forward today. Don’t do it. We should commit ourselves to that.

But we do that in the context of knowing not just how great my sins and misery are, but how God has redeemed us from all those sins and misery. You see, an increasing knowledge of our sinfulness means an increasing apprehension and understanding and thanksgiving to God for grace. We understand grace a lot more when we understand how filthy our sins are and how shot through with sin all of our lives are.

The end result of that is not depression. The end result of that is great joy because Christ has redeemed us from all our sins and misery. And then as our heart meditates on these things and our mouths give him praise and thanksgiving, then we express that thanksgiving to God for such great redemption.

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Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for today. We thank you for this tremendous model of David seeking your preservation, Father, knowing that apart from you, he’ll go into horrible sin and yet also persevering to seek out his own sins by your grace, by the grace of your Holy Spirit.

We thank you for the Holy Spirit, who arms us with this combat against ourselves, against the world, the flesh, but against our own evil hearts as well. Show us, Lord God, today. May you bring to mind to those gathered here today secret sins in which we have sinned against you and that you’re shining a light on and give us, Lord God, a commitment to turn from those sins and to seek your grace that we not enter into them more.

We thank you for the great warning that David gives us in this text that unless we do that, we’re going to do horrible things, engage in monstrous sins. So keep us, Lord God, back from them by a careful, attentive attentiveness and meditation on your word and to a commitment, Lord God, to persevere in the faith, knowing that you are preserving us. Thank you, Father, for your great gospel of Jesus Christ who redeems us from all these sins and misery.

In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

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In David’s Psalm 19, it ends with a designation of God. He refers to God as O Lord. Lord is the covenant name—Yahweh, the covenant name with his people. My strength. The word literally means rock here. God is a strong rock for us and my redeemer. And so it’s people that recognize the Lord God as their covenant God who are—is their redeemer. That’s the people to whom God is a strong preserver.

I mentioned Ebal and Gerizim. Deuteronomy—after the Ten Commandments in the sanction section of the book—they were to go up and set up as the tribes come into the promised land. Half of them would go up on Mount Ebal and shout out the curses of God’s law and then the other half would assemble on Gerizim and shout the blessings. So the people of God are in between. We’re always like two paths are presented before us.

And that’s obvious. What isn’t so obvious is that Ebal, which is the place of curse, is in the north and Gerizim is in the south, the place of blessing. That’s significant because in the Bible orientation directions mean things and judgment—God comes from the north. I was telling the kids in Sunday school class. It’s kind of like in the winter when that jet stream takes that Alaska air and then swoops down from the north into us and we have these really cold weeks here in Oregon.

Well, God’s judgment is north wind, so to speak. And so, that’s where the judgment’s coming from that’ll bring curses to us. Now, the other thing they were supposed to do in addition to reciting the curses and blessings was they were supposed to set up an altar at Ebal, not Gerizim down where blessing is. But up in the north where the curse is coming and the curses are being shouted out, Joshua is to set up an altar and they did and animals were sacrificed there.

So what is it a picture of? Well, it’s a picture that is God’s judgment comes to us with curse, the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ that we celebrate here turns that curse of God into blessing and establishment for us because we’re south of that, south of those sacrifices. So it’s a wonderful picture of the turning—not just away—but of God’s presence from curse to blessing for his people.

Now in between those—in between those two places—was Shechem, the city. And so you had Ebal (curse), Shechem (a city), and Gerizim (blessing). Shechem is a famous city. It’s where the Shechemites were. And remember they had their way with Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, and then his sons killed him. Well the Shechemites are God’s enemies ultimately and while his sons did it improperly, they were killed off.

And so Shechem in the presence of God with us—this table is a representation that God is indeed a rock, a strong one, our defender as well as our redeemer. And he’ll deal with all of our enemies in a peremptory fashion. So it’s a place of victory. The Lord’s supper is a place where the sacrifice of Christ on evil has turned curse into a blessing and establishment.

Shechem was also the place where Abram first came into the promised land. As he comes from Haran from the north, he comes into the land and the first city he goes to is Shechem. So, it’s the beginning of the establishment of God’s promised land and his people in peace because of the transition from curse to blessing based on the sacrifice of Christ.

Beautiful picture. And then later in the book of Joshua, Shechem is referred to as the center of the land. It’s at the very middle of the promised land and the designation is sort of like where heaven and earth come together at the center—the navel of the world could be described this way. And so Shechem, that place of establishment, is also the place that’s kind of the center of everything else: the first [entry] of the promised land, the center of the promised land. It’s a picture of where we live and the place where God defeats his enemies, has turned curse into blessing because of the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is our covenant God.

One final part of this story on that mount where the sacrifice was to be offered, they were also to put up a whitewashed stone with the words of God’s law on it. And so God’s law is in the presence of his people. And they recognize that as they’re moved from curse to blessing, it isn’t being relieved from the requirements of the law, but being instead saved to the end of keeping that law. And that law is in the shouted tribes from Gerizim—the obedience to that is our relationship to blessing.

So, as we come to this table and we see our covenant God, we’re reminded of his covenant law. That law is our rock, our strong place. And as well, through God’s obedience to that law, he has attained our redemption through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We come to this table as people that have been transitioned from curse to blessing because of the covenant-keeping God and the obedience of Jesus Christ to his law and the obedience of the Father to pour our curse on breakers of that law so that we might receive the blessings of those who have been moved to obedience through the work of our Savior.

Praise God for this table and for what it pictures to us.

We read in the gospel selection that Jesus took bread and then he gave thanks for it. Let’s praise God.

Father, we do praise your holy name for the wonderful blessings that have come to us through the merits of Jesus Christ. We thank you for his body given on the cross for us 2,000 years ago, turning your curse to blessing. And we thank you that he didn’t avert your presence from us, but rather he mediated that presence into blessing toward us.

We thank you for including us in Shechem, in the place where God’s people are gathered at the center of the world, Lord God, at this table to receive the blessing of assurance of incorporation into his body, the church. Thank you for this bread, Lord God. Give us strength. Be our rock, Lord God, to the end that we would indeed continue to persevere in the faith through your preservation of us, seeking to put off the old man and live increasingly as those who delightfully are moved in wisdom and obedience to reflect your glory and thus exercise dominion in our world.

We ask this through the mighty and powerful name of the Lord Jesus Christ, our redeemer. Amen.