Soul Survivor - Devotions From 'The Flood'Sample

MAGNIFICENT KINDNESS

When you know you’ve messed up, how do you respond? Most of us follow the example of Adam and Eve and point the finger at someone else and then hide away from God, feeling ashamed and aware we’re not worthy to come into God’s presence. In this Psalm we see a far better example of what we should do from King David who was called ‘a man after God’s heart’.

David had messed up big time. He had slept with another man’s wife, got her pregnant, tried to get her husband to sleep with her to cover his mistake, and when he wouldn’t, he had him killed. When the prophet Nathan came to confront David for his sin, this Psalm shows us how David responded. He didn’t try and wriggle out of what he’d done, blaming other people and making excuses for his behaviour – instead he called on God’s mercy. He knew he couldn’t make things right, he couldn’t cleanse himself and wash away his own sin. His only hope was to ask God for His grace and mercy. He knew the truth that if God cleansed him, he would be clean (v7).

You can hear anguish in David’s voice and the cry of his heart as he asks God to make him pure and holy again. He cries out to God to give him a pure heart, to restore him, to welcome him into His presence again. This is how we should respond when we get things wrong. Our sin might not seem as dramatic as David’s but that doesn’t mean we don’t need cleansing. We don’t try and ‘make it up to God’ or hide away until we think He’s forgotten what we’ve done. We ask for His forgiveness, we rejoice in His mercy, we ask Him to make us whole and to help us keep going and do better next time.

The song ‘Purify’ reflects this desire to have a pure heart, to allow God to have His way in our hearts, to wait on His Holy Spirit to convict us of our sin as Nathan convicted David. It’s the Holy Spirit who helps us to see the places where we have let God down, where we need to have our heart and our minds renewed and changed to be more like Jesus. We come to that place of surrender, asking God to have His way, even if that is painful for us, because we want to be more like Him in every way.