Psalm 51:17 My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
    a broken and contrite heart
    you, God, will not despise.

This is a very important and very familiar Psalm, and every line of it resonates in my heart as I read it. The circumstances around it are an illustration of Jeremiah’s lament: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9) David was someone who genuinely loved God, who had experienced times of deep worship and who had expressed God’s heart in poetry, and yet he stole another man’s wife and tried to cover it up by having the man killed. That boggles the mind, and yet we could name various other men of God who have dragged His name in the mud by their actions. David wasn’t uniquely sinful! That he was a genuine man of God is demonstrated by his response when Nathan confronted him. He was truly broken, as this verse says, and God accepted that as repentance. He couldn’t undo what he had done, bringing Uriah back to life and restoring Bathsheba to him, and the child he had conceived with Bathsheba was undeniable. A lesser man might have tried to stonewall, insisting that, as king, he had the right to do what he had done. However, David was genuinely broken, and when the child of his adultery died, he didn’t begin to accuse God of injustice. The child, after all, was innocent, and I’m sure, and David was sure, that God accepted him as such. This was a defining time in David’s life, and it removed all vestiges of pride from his heart. He didn’t proclaim his purity in any of his Psalms after this! This is what we need to emulate about David: not his sin, certainly, but his humility before God. He was as aware of God’s grace as anyone can be, I think, and that is how we need to be as well.

I have written numerous times about how God confronted me with my spiritual pride, and I am all too aware of my capacity for deceiving myself. I am deeply grateful that I have never followed through with sinful impulses the way David did, but I know that I have been capable of it, and that’s scary. I have seen that it isn’t the depth of a person’s sin that matters, but rather the depth of their repentance. I don’t want to do something drastic, just so that I will have something to repent of! Actually, I have done countless things that have been in violation of God’s character, and I identify all too well with Romans 7! However, just as Paul rose above that, I too proclaim with joy, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1)

Father, thank You for Your incredible grace. Thank You for loving and using even someone like David, who was an adulterer and murderer. Thank You not only for protecting me from such actions, but for showing me all the countless ways I have ignored You or even actively disobeyed You. May my repentance be genuine and effective so that I may be fully available and useful to You, for Your glory alone. Thank You. Praise God!