Sermon Tone Analysis

Have you every thought about wisdom?

What it is, how to get it, why its important, what does it look like in everyday life?

Have you ever received wisdom and not acted on it?

- that wisdom becomes even more valuable to us because we know first hand of what the consequences of ignoring wisdom (bible calls it Folly).

I want to lead us into investigating the wisdom found in Psalm 32.

As we look at, I want us to bring out our imaginations to see, feel and touch the wisdom that God has for us through his servant David.

At its most basic meaning, wisdom is seeing things God’s way and living in that.

Wisdom is not gained simply by reading wise things, however.

It comes as we live those truths and it becomes a part of us.

We have to continually call out for wisdom and once we receive it to live it, otherwise we become hypocrites who receive the Word of God and do not do it, like seeing ourselves in a mirror and walking away from it forgetting what we look like.

Psalm 32 on gives us an aspect of wisdom that is concerned with a posture before a Holy God and how that relates to the feelings, emotions and outlook we have on our own lives.

This wisdom deals with the issue of Confession.

This is wisdom that we as a body and even more so as a culture needs to embrace.

Confession must be present in the Christian life, of course unless you have never sinned, so I guess this message is not for Pastor Mark because we all know that he never sins, right?

Wrong.

We all need confession, but this is certainly not encouraged by our culture.

When was the last time you saw true confession and admission of wrong in a movie or on the nightly news?

The culture around us very much values the idea of never being wrong and detests even more that there is truth that fall short of on our own.

As we go through what David has written, I want us to see that God through David is *calling us to confess our sins and enjoy the blessed thanksgiving of union with God*.

The structure that he uses is *declaring a truth*, *rehearsing past experience*, and *exhorting as to how we should live*.

If you would, ask the Holy Spirit with me, even right now before we get into this Psalm where you are in these verses.

I’ll ask us to think about that at the end again, but let’s get into this Psalm.

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*II.

State of Blessing (1-2)*

            David opens this Psalm with a statement of truth.

This is especially common through the Psalms because one aspect of living by faith is indeed knowing the truth.

David writes, “*Blessed is he… and blessed is the man* (1-2)”  He is relating to us how we or anyone who wants blessing can receive it.

David draws a connection between the forgiveness of sins and blessing.

To have our transgressions forgiven and our sin not count against us blesses us immensely.

Think back to the time in your own walk of faith to when you came to Christ and first realized that you were forgiven of your sins and how blessed you felt at that moment, how free and wonderful a time that was.

You were experiencing the truth of these verses.

David here says that sin is in some way connected to this sense of blessedness.

*/            The forgiveness of sins does bring blessing, but David pauses to remember back to a time in his life when this was not what he was experiencing… \\ \\ /*

* *

*III.

Rehearsing the past (3-7)*

            He writes, “*When I kept silent*…” There was a time, David says that he kept silent about his sin.

Maybe this was his infamous sin with Bastheba and Uriah, but it could have been any time he sinned.

He was like us; we don’t just have one memory of sin in past.

What David needed to do is implicit in the statement of his keeping silent.

He needed to acknowledge his sin, but he wasn’t about to say anything.

He did not want to admit what he had done was wrong.

He stubbornly remained on his course.

In today’s language he might have said something like, “I wasn’t that wrong, you just don’t understand”.

Or maybe like many today he filled his life with other things so that he would not have to think about needing to confess anything before God.

At any rate he remained silent – the wrong choice!

This silence led David into some specific feelings and he uses some powerful imagery to convey them.

He writes in verse 3 and 4, “…*my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.”*

David was experiencing a deep, deep inward pain – a choking off of the soul.

He felt like his bones were decaying, turning to powder and all he could do was moan all day long.

Because he was silent, God’s hand was heavy upon him.

Can you hear the weightiness of this?

Of course God doesn’t really have hands as we know them, but this word picture is of God-sized hands pushing down upon him.

Like a old junker being crushed down to a cube, David felt the pressure of God on all sides.

David says it was not only when the sun was shining, but both day and night – it was incessant pressure upon him.

The hand of God is not something you want against you.

We’re told in 2 Samuel 6 that when the Philistines had the Ark of the Covenant, that God’s hand was against them and they had rat infestations and outbreaks of tumors.

And if pain within and pressure from above wasn’t enough, he was loosing strength.

It was being sapped from him as in the heat of summer.

This imagery reminds me of a time when I 10 or 12 and liked to play basketball on the church parking lot.

This was out in the country and whenever it rained really hard the worms in the earth would escape the soaked ground and climb out on the pavement where the basketball hoop was.

After the rain stopped, they remained and when the sun came out, they were literally toast.

They were dried out by the heat and all that remained was a crust of what they had been.

In order to play basketball, I either had to avoiding dribbling or remove each and every one before I played.

David in remaining silent was feeling his life energy leaving him, becoming like those dried worms.

He still had to be king during this whole experience, however.

He still had responsibilities and decisions that needed to be made.

He was experiencing the foolishness of remaining silent about the sin that was within.

I wonder if anyone here can relate to how David felt.

Maybe there was a time in the past that you remained silent about sin and you felt the pain within, the pressure from above, and the loss of life-energy.

In short you felt like the dried up worms.

Maybe you can testify this morning that you are experiencing this right now.

Maybe there is a longstanding hatred for a boss at work – /dried up worms/.

Maybe you have not been honest in your business dealings – /dried up worms/.

Maybe there are judgmental thoughts about a neighbor over how they live – /dried up worms/.

Maybe there is something you said or did that hurt your husband or wife greatly and you refuse to admit guilt – /dried up worms/.

Maybe there is something you said about someone else in this congregation that you know was not glorying to Christ – /dried up worms/.

Now it’s possible to have the feelings of pain, pressure and loss of strength apart from unconfessed sin.

I don’t want us to think that every time we fill this way it is because of some deep-seeded sin.

In fact, David writes about a different source of the same torment in the preceding Psalm (31:9-11).

The differences there is that when he was feeling the same way, it was because of an outside source – his enemies were all around him and lies were being spread about him.

He called on the Lord and knew that he could trust the Lord to save him no matter what he felt.

The question is raised then, What hope is there when the only one you know you can turn to is the very one that you are refusing to talk to and whose hand is against you?

Friends, you can’t get away from God!

You only have two options.

1) Continue as present or 2) Stop being silent.

Can I ask us this morning what are we to do?

~*pause~*

            What did David do?

He shares with us what happened next.

“T*hen I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity.

I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’ – and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” *  Like a tree finally giving in to hurricane-force winds, David breaks.

Your Bibles have selah’s that surround this verse because it is the climax of the song David writes.

They are there to highlight this section.

Please hear what David is saying.

This is what the whole Psalm hinges on.

*David confesses*.

We read that David remembered the truth of vs 1&2.

Men are blessed who are forgiven, have their sin covered and sin not counting against them.

He entrusts himself to God.