Psalm 51 – Choosing the path to Christ: overcoming shame
On August 5, 2010, a mine collapsed in northern Chile and sealed thirty-three miners half a mile underground. For seventeen days, no one on the surface even knew if they were alive. They were trapped in total darkness, with no way out, and no way to tell anyone what had happened to them.
That’s not a bad picture of what sin does to a person. Today we’re going to walk through one of the most memorable stories in the Bible. A man buried under the weight of what he’d done for about a year before anyone on the outside even knew. Most of us have never slain a giant like Goliath. None of us has been called “a man after God’s own heart” the way David was. But here’s what we do share with him: we’re sinners.
Romans 3:23 says, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
That includes the giant-slayer. And it includes every one of us in this room.
Let’s read the Psalm and pray before we go further.
- 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 bloodguiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.
- O 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, O 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.
[Pray]
At the peak of God’s blessing on his life, David committed adultery with Bathsheba. To cover it up, he had her husband Uriah killed. He used the authority God gave him to deceive the very nation God had entrusted to him.
For about a year, David stayed buried under it, the same way those miners stayed buried under half a mile of rock, with no one on the surface aware of what was really going on inside him. He tried to outrun his own conscience. He said nothing, explained nothing, repented of nothing.
Looking back on that season in Psalm 32, he wrote, “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.” He wasn’t at peace. He was just quiet. There’s a difference.
Then we see in 2 Samuel 12:1–15 the prophet Nathan walked into the palace and told the king a story about a rich man who owned vast flocks, and a poor man who owned one little lamb he loved like a daughter.
When a traveler came through, the rich man didn’t touch his own flock… He took the poor man’s lamb.
David heard the story and exploded in anger:
“As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!” And Nathan looked the king in the eye and said four words that changed everything:
“You are the man.”
In one sentence delivered by a Godly man, The Lord shattered a year of self-deception. Psalm 51 is an experience of the deep shame, brokenness, repentance, cleansing and restoration that can only occur when the walls of sin and shame come crashing down in our lives.
As we walk through this Psalm verse by verse, there something specific to watch for… At many points throughout this Psalm, David stands at a fork in the road. One road is what the Bible calls worldly sorrow… a sorrow that manages, minimizes, and hides. Have you ever been there? Maybe there is a past sin in your life, or even an active one right now, and this is how you’re handling it.
The other is the road of Godly sorrow… a sorrow that runs to God, tells Him the truth, and lets Him do what only He can do. My hope is throughout this message, if you have not already taken this approach that you will see clearly that this is not only what God might be calling you to do right now, but what he calls us all to do repeatedly in our lives.
Staying consistent with our method of unpacking these Psalms let’s walk through this in the same three movements we have been doing throughout this series.
- Pathos
- Processing
- Pointing to Christ
Let’s begin.
PATHOS — In (verses 1–5) we see David feeling the weight and shame of his sin.
Verse 1
“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.”
Notice where David starts. Not with an excuse. Not with “let me explain.” He starts by surrendering and pleading for mercy he doesn’t deserve, which is grounded in God’s character, not his own, because David knows he is unclean. He knows he is unrighteous.
The word “Blot” here pictures a written record, a ledger with a charge on it that needs to be wiped clean.
God says the same thing through Isaiah: “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins” (Isaiah 43:25).
And Peter will later preach, “Repent… that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19).
How often do we feel absolutely broken by our sin and ask the Lord to blot it out?
I am not sure it was really my fault. I can’t help it. Everyone makes mistakes. Or, one that can be tricky, but you hear very often is I fell because of an attack by the enemy.
This is the type of blame shifting we see in the garden, isn’t it? Adam says, Eve made me do it… she is the woman you gave me. And what does Eve say, it was the serpent who deceived me, that’s why I ate.
Brothers and sisters the question is… do we spend more time making excuses for our sin, or, do we plead with The Lord over our sin…!
It’s the same hope we must seek, every time. A debt canceled, not because we earned it, but because God chooses to do it, for His own name’s sake.
Verse 2
“Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!”
In these first two verses, David uses three different words for what he’s done: transgression, iniquity, sin. The point is… David is now letting himself feel the full impact of what he has done… and he is fully admitting his sin to God.
David is not the only one to spend a year distracting himself or numbing his mind, so that he doesn’t have to truly face his sin, is he? You see can’t truly repent until we recognize the condition we are in…and the good news is David’s heart has been convicted by a word of truth!
He is now ready and willing to own his sin before The Lord.
Verse 3
“For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.”
Remember the fork in the road I told you to look for…
Well, worldly sorrow says: “It’s been a year, let it stay buried.”
Godly sorrow says: “My sin is ever before me, and I won’t look away from it.”
Let’s be honest. If you think of the biggest sin that you have ever dealt with in your life. It is not something you just forget… because God did not design us that way.
On the saturation side of this emotion of shame, we tend to wallow in it, allowing it to shape our identity. Whereas on the suppression side one completely ignores it causing their heart to harden… and to feel nothing.
This is why we do not want to fall into either extreme.
In Christ, we are to remember our sin rightly, so that we stay broken and humble before God… and most importantly in a state of active reliance on him.
Verse 4
“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.”
How do we know when we sin? Because God says clearly tells us what sin is. Regardless of how anyone around us might try to excuse it or make light of it.
God is the one who decides what is sinful and what is righteous. He is inherent, He is blameless, His word is the standard.
You see in this clear fork in the road, David chooses the right direction… Against you, and you only have I sinned.
David isn’t saying Uriah wasn’t wronged, or that Bathsheba wasn’t affected. Clearly, they were. He’s saying that underneath every lateral wrong done to another person, there’s a deeper vertical wrong done to God. Every sin against someone else is, first, rebellion against The Creator.
Worldly sorrow says: “Ok, so I have been caught, but this still isn’t fair. I just wish these consequences would go away.”
Godly sorrow says: “Lord, you were right to expose me. Your judgment is just. Whether you discipline me or restore me, your character stands.”
Paul provides a crystal-clear description of this in 2 Corinthians 7:10, which reads “Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.”
Friends, there are only two options on how to respond to sin, ones leads to life and the other death.
Verse 5
“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
David is saying, I AM A SINNER. Your judgement (as we just read about in verse 4) is completely infallible. My judgement is completely fallible.
To be clear, David isn’t blaming his parents for this… though we do pick some things from our parents both good and bad.
Think of the first time you watched a small child do something wrong, then instinctively lie about it. Nobody taught that child to lie. It came naturally as someone born into sinful flesh.
And let’s focus in for a second on the word: iniquity. Sin means missing the mark. Transgression means crossing a line. However, iniquity is deeper than both.
It’s the crookedness underneath, the reason we miss the mark and cross the line in the first place! David isn’t just confessing an action. He’s confessing a condition.
A condition that everyone one of us has and the reason why every one of us needs a Savior.
Isaiah 53:5 — “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities.”
Christ was crushed for our deceitful, bent human hearts, the very thing David is describing in himself.
Shame and repentance is something Jesus would have never experienced on his own because he had no iniquity of His own to confess. And yet, “the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6).
Jesus took on what was never His, so people like David — people like us — could be made clean.
PROCESSING — THE REQUESTS OF A REPENTANT HEART (verses 6–15)
David has diagnosed the disease with total honesty. Now, starting in verse 6, we see him beginning to process things as asks for a cure.
Verse 6
“Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.”
David is asking God to address the problem at the root. Jesus didn’t come just to pay for what we’ve done. He came to deal with the disposition of hearts.
That’s the new covenant promise: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).
In Christ, this actually happens: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Here’s a picture. You don’t wash the outside of a cup and hand it to a guest while the inside stays dirty. You wash the inside first — that’s what actually matters.
So how is your inner life doing right now? Not your external reputation at work. Not the number of likes you had on your last social media post. Not the number of people inviting you to dinner or attending your study. Your secret heart.
God already knows. And He delights in truth, precisely in that spot.
Verse 7
“Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”
There is hope here! Purge me and I will be clean. And the hope is in taking sin head on… not to go around it as many modern-day churches do to not offend people.
That’s like a firefighter that refuses to use a hose because the water pressure might frighten people! The result is, he never puts out the fire with lifesaving water!
And hyssop is loaded with meaning… It’s the plant used to spread the Passover lamb’s blood on the doorposts in Egypt (Exodus 12:22), and the plant used to cleanse lepers in Leviticus 14.
David knows there’s no forgiveness without the shedding of blood. He’s not asking to feel better. He’s asking for atonement and saying “treat me like the unclean man I actually am.”
“Whiter than snow” echoes Isaiah 1:18 — “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”
David’s not seeking a partial cleaning. He is asking for a complete removal of guilt. That’s exactly what Christ’s finished work accomplishes, a full and final forgiveness for everyone who repents and trusts Him.
So, let me ask you because I don’t want to assume this of everyone that is here. Have you repented of you sins, and asked for forgiveness, and submitted your life to Christ?
Verse 8
“Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice.”
Now beginning with this verse, the progression in David’s processing is distinctively marked by 6 distinct points of note, all of which I am going to very intentionally point out as we continue to work through this movement, starting with the broken boneswe see here in verse 8.
Now I know what you are thinking and the panic some of you are feeling, he’s still got 6 points? We are going to be here until dinner… have no fear, we will move through these points thoroughly, but swiftly… 😊
This bone imagery represents David’s inner strength which had been crushed under by the weight of his sin, but also likely refers to him feeling physically sick over what he has done.
Imagine not only waking up every day with another man’s wife… but another man’s wife who you had killed. David couldn’t hear joy and gladness, he didn’t feel well.
I would imagine that in this room right now, there is someone if not multiple people who are in a place right now where because of your sin you are unable to experience joy and gladness and you just don’t feel right. When we are in sin, we are too busy wondering… who knows my secret, my hypocrisy.
But David knows the same God who broke him, the one who knows it all, is the only one who can restore him.
And here, for the first time in the Psalm, David starts picturing what restoration will feel like. The same picture that is in store for you, and for me when we turn away from our sin and toward God.
Not only can you wash me and cleanse me, Lord.., you can make me no longer physically sick over my sin.
David is recognizing he is operating without joy and that he needs to be restored spiritually, mentally and physically.
So, again this is the first marker in David’s processing and progression: broken bones.
Verse 9
“Hide your face from my sin, and blot out all my iniquities.”
Why this again you might ask? Sounds a lot like verse 1 doesn’t it?
Well, because David is going deeper in reflection now and this Bathsheba scenario wasn’t his only sin. Voddie Baucham said, “David realizes he did this thing because he is a sinner, He is not a sinner because he did this one thing.”
This wasn’t his only sin. You don’t start out there.
Now in addition to his admittance, he is asking God to stop looking at his sin at all.
Spurgeon said, “Only a child of God cares for the eyes of God.”
Wheras worldly sorrow would deny God’s gaze, or look to avoid it.
Now, we get to the crescendo of this Psalm. This famous phase.
Verse 10
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
David makes it clear that he doesn’t just want forgiveness. He want’s God. He wants to restore his relationship with God! He is truly asking to be made into a man after God’s own heart.
Have you ever corrected your child for something serious, and you really had to discipline them. What do they want afterwards… they want you. They want a hug; they want your love.
Daivd also asks for an undivided spirit that is no longer split between loyalty to God and loyalty to his own appetites. That’s right thinking that leads to right action.
So, the second marker to take note of is: a clean heart.
Verse 11
“Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.”
If we notice David’s the language about God’s face through this psalm.
Verse 4: “I have done evil in your sight.”
Verse 9: “Hide your face from my sin.”
Verse 11: “Cast me not away” which is really, “don’t hide your face from me.”
When we put this all together David is praying: “Hide your face from my sin, but don’t hide your face from me.”
Which is what our God does… He deals decisively with sin but never abandons the sinner.
Also, let’s notice which road this is. Worldly sorrow, when it’s ashamed, runs from God. It wants distance and silence.
Godly sorrow stays in the room. It keeps asking God not to leave, even in the middle of its shame.
To be clear, David isn’t worried here about losing his salvation. He’s talking about the felt reality of fellowship with God. The indwelling presence of his Spirit.
Communion, not standing.
Verse 12
“Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.”
Think of when you were first saved, that unmistakable joy of knowing your sins were washed away. That desire to be in His presence, in His word each day. The zeal that comes with being purified and redeemed.
This is a joy that those around you can’t help but recognize is different. It’s like a magnet that draws others in because it’s the opposite of the false happiness they see in the world.
David also asks for help with self-discipline, that’s something we should all be asking for help with isn’t it… a willing spirit to resist temptation going forward, so that this joy that arrives because of authenticity would remain.
This is the third marker in the progression: restored joy.
Verse 13
“Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.”
Brothers and sisters, the enemy’s strategy against us is simple. Encourage us to be self-centered and temp us to sin, try to keep us in unconfessed sin, steal our joy, make us paralyzed, and render us ineffective. Because if we are ineffective, then no gospel is shared, no sinners are encouraged.
Now that David has confessed, been cleansed, and had his desires realigned, he can be used again by The Lord.
A classic comparison in Scripture of the two roads and end results they had on fruitfulness for the Kingdom are Judas and Peter.
Path one: Judas. Three years with Jesus, then guilt with no repentance. He threw the silver back and hanged himself (Matthew 27).
Path two: Peter. He denied Jesus three times in one night. On the shore in John 21, Jesus asks him three times, “Do you love me?”, and restores him. That same Peter stands up at Pentecost and three thousand people are saved.
Both failed. Both guilty. Two different roads… one man ran away from God with his shame, the other ran toward Him with it. The one that ran toward him became an instrument used by him to save thousands.
This is the value of sharing our testimonies to teach other sinners about the victory they can have in the Lord. When we share our testimonies, we are no longer saturating or suppressing the shame around our sin. Instead, we are openly sharing about the sin that we once struggled with so that others might see the power of Christ in our lives to overcome it.
Revelation 12:11, says “And they have defeated him by the blood of the Lamb and by their testimony.”
That’s how we are to: teach sinners, which is our 4th marker.
Verse 14
“Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.”
Here, for the first time in all of his processing, David gets hyper specific and names the deepest sin in his heart: bloodguiltiness. He’s thinking about Uriah.
God’s mercy doesn’t diminish his justice. God remains righteous and just, even when He forgives. David will be forgiven, but his baby with Bathsheba will not live.
And yet, notice what David says he’ll do in response… sing of God’s righteousness.
Paul writes in Romans 3 that God is shown to be both “just and the justifier” of the one who trusts in Jesus.
This is the fifth marker: singing of God’s righteousness.
Verse 15
“O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.”
Think of a time when you praised The Lord fresh off of a season where you were struggling with sin, and He lifts that burden from you. The depth of that praise hits different, doesn’t it?
It’s a reminder of the opportunity to give Him our full heart of praise without any other thought distracting our minds. You don’t go through the motions, or half-heartedly sing that song… taking for granted the opportunity to show thanksgiving and gratitude for the one who freed you from slavery.
Your posture changes, your mind is locked-in, your lips are open…
You see He restores us so that we would praise Him, and lead others to praise Him, and so that He would receive the maximum amount of Glory, just as it should be.
This is the sixth and final marker: declaring God’s praise.
Do you see the whole arc of progression here? Broken bones. Clean heart. Restored joy. Teaching sinners. Singing God’s righteousness. Declaring God’s praise.That’s not a random string of emotions.
That’s the shape of real repentance… brokenness leading to cleansing, cleansing leading to joy, joy overflowing into mission, a mission focused on worship of the one true God of the universe.
Maybe you’re only at the first stop right now… broken, aware of your sin, unable to picture anything past the weight of it, take heart!
David couldn’t see verse 15 from where he sat in verse 8 either. The same God who broke him walked him, one honest request at a time, all the way to a mouth that couldn’t stop praising.
POINTING TO CHRIST (verses 16–19)
Now at last we come to the verses everything in this psalm that point forward to Christ.
Verses 16–17
“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, O God, you will not despise.”
Here the psalm shifts from what God has done to what God delights in. David isn’t rejecting the sacrificial system because He knows God commanded it.
He’s rejecting the idea that religious activity can substitute for real repentance.
Think of Saul, David’s predecessor, another picture of the worldly-sorrow road.
In 1 Samuel 15, Saul disobeys God, then tries to cover it with sacrifices. When Samuel confronts him, Saul says, “I have sinned… but please honor me now before the elders of my people” (1 Samuel 15:30).
That’s worldly sorrow in one sentence — a quick admission of guilt, immediately followed by a scramble to protect his image.
Samuel’s answer: “To obey is better than sacrifice.” David has learned that lesson. He isn’t asking God to help him save face. He knows he can’t fix himself with religion, and he isn’t even trying.
There’s something even more staggering here. David’s sins were adultery and murder. Under the Law, there was no sacrifice prescribed for either one and the penalty for both was death. David had no lawful offering available to him. No lamb, no bull, nothing that could satisfy the Law’s demand. Humanly speaking, he wasn’t just guilty. He was hopeless.
So what is a broken spirit? Not low self-esteem. Not a somber personality. It’s pride that has been shattered… pride that no longer argues, excuses, or compares. It simply says: Lord, you’re right, I’m wrong, have mercy. “Contrite” literally means crushed, ground down… someone who has finally stopped resisting God.
So here is the picture… David, standing under a law with no sacrifice for his sin, brings God the only thing he has left: a broken and contrite heart.
Centuries later, Hebrews tells us why that had to be enough: “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). Every lamb, every bull, every drop of blood on every altar was never actually able to remove sin. It could only point forward where Jesus at the cross, where justice and mercy don’t compete. They meet.
Every verb David cried out in this psalm — cleanse, wash, purge, create, renew, restore, uphold, deliver… finds its yes in Jesus Christ. He is our Passover Lamb, His blood applied once for all, not by a branch of hyssop, but on a cross (1 Corinthians 5:7). He takes out the heart of stone and gives the heart of flesh. He restores the joy of salvation. And He sends broken, restored sinners out to declare His praise to a watching world.
Verses 18-19
- “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.”
Wait.. what? I thought David just said that God would not be please with burnt offerings…
You see, reformation is not so much about changing our actions as it is about changing our thinking and our attitudes.
Before when these sacrifices were being offered, they were empty and meaningless. When he was singing songs of praise and his heart was not in it, it was empty and meaningless because he was separated from God… HE WAS JUST GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS.
But now… now that he has repented, now that he has been cleansed, these sacrifices have meaning again, they bring peace between He and Yahweh because his heart is right within him and the actions are now rightly following suit.
This reformation in his thinking, in his attitude, it changes everything. When we genuinely repent, we can now again look at everything we have been doing through fresh new eyes and we realize we should never just go through the motions.
CLOSING
Finally, we started with Romans 3:23 recognizing all have sinned, all fall short. Not a comfortable place to start, and it wasn’t meant to be.
But it’s not where the story ends, and it’s not where Psalm 51 ends either. David went from “have mercy on me, a sinner” to “my mouth will declare your praise”, and the only bridge between those two places is grace, purchased at the cross, offered to anyone who brings God exactly what David brought Him: a broken and contrite heart.
Remember those miners. After sixty-nine days, rescuers finally reached them and one by one, each man was sealed into a narrow capsule and pulled a half mile straight up into the sunlight, into a crowd that had waited months to see them again. That’s what verse 15 sounds like. That’s a mouth that can’t stop declaring praise.
Maybe you’re still buried right now… managing it, minimizing it, hoping it quietly goes away. It won’t. That’s the worldly-sorrow road, and Judas and Saul both show us where it ends.
But it can be dealt with, completely.
You know, as I set out to prepare for this sermon, I felt called to fast. When I started my fast, there was nothing specific I felt I needed to repent for… (maybe this is you right now). However, as I continued in my fast the Lord led me to 1 Peter 3:7, “Husbands live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.”
I realized, at times I have unrealistic expectations for my wife. I was being unreasonable with her and not always living in an understanding way. I needed to repent, and so I asked her for forgiveness and repented as we prayed together.
Today, choose to walk the godly-sorrow road, the one that runs straight to God instead of away from Him. Ask the Lord to search your heart and show you anything that you might need to bring to him… and then bring it to him.
Name it. Let Him break what needs to be broken so He can pull you back up into the light, just like those miners.
Even if you’re a believer who’s already been pulled up more than once, but you’ve wandered back toward the dark and the joy is gone, and His fellowship feels distant.
Psalm 51 is your prayer too. Ask Him to restore the joy of your salvation. He delights to do it.
Okay, before I close in prayer, we are going to have one more worship song and the elders are going to be positioned around the room. We would invite you to join them in prayer if you feel so called and if the Lord moves you to do so.
As a closing prayer, I thought we would take Psalm 51 and pray it back to The Lord, in such a way that we would apply it to our congregation of believers.
So, let’s do it.