You Can Begin Again . . .
After Moral Failure
Psalm 51:1-17
by Jim Westmoreland
Today, we are going to talk about beginning again after moral failure. Our example is King David. David, the shepherd boy, rose to great heights of success and had an affair. His lover became pregnant; he had her husband killed in battle by sending him to the front lines; and it was exposed by the prophet, Nathan. Many people would have said that was the end of David, but it was not. He did begin again.
And how he did it is found in Psalm 51. This is David’s Psalm of confession. A paraphrase of this passage reads, “Be merciful to me O God, and, because of your kind love, wipe away my sin. I acknowledge my crooked ways. They are ever before me. Against you and you only have I sinned. I was born bent toward evil. I am without excuse. You require openness and truth. So, fill me with sincerity. Remove my sin and make me clean. Wash me whiter than snow. Let me hear the music of gladness again. Create a pure heart in me, O God, and place a new loyalty in me. Do not abandon me but give me the joy that comes with your salvation. Spare me, and I will gladly tell others my story.
“I would offer to you sacrifices and burnt offerings, but they will do no good. Instead, I come to you, O God, with a humble spirit and a broken heart. These you will not reject.”
How do you begin again after you have really violated what you believe in and have lost your moral compass? Gerald Mann told a compelling and revealing story about a minister he had know for many years since their seminary days. He says, “He was brilliant. If I made 99, he made 100. If I made 100, he got the bonus question. He was good at everything that he did. He was a wonderful speaker, had a lot of charisma, zoomed to the top of the denominational elite, and pastored a great church. Everything was going well for him, a frequent keynote speaker at meetings within and beyond his denomination. And then, he had an affair, and his world crashed around him, and it was a great scandal and disgrace.”
Mann said that he wrote him a note when he heard about it and said, “I want you to know that, regardless of what you have done, or what you ever will do, I’m your friend, and I wish the best for you.” He said he didn’t hear from him, but he saw him about two years later in an airport. Mann tells, “He came running across the terminal and hugged me, and said, ‘Of all the ministers that I knew, you were the only one who wrote me a letter of encouragement.” Mann replied, “Yeh, we do have a habit of shooting our wounded pretty badly.”
They then went to have coffee, and Mann said, “So tell me how
you had an affair and lost your character and everything.” And
he said, “You got it just backwards. I didn’t have an affair and
lose my character. I lost my character, and I had an affair. You
see, immorality is failing to live up to what we can do. It is not
breaking rules. It is failing to live up to what we were created to
be. Moral failure is breaking relationships. It is a failure to live
up to what we could have been.”
This story is like David’s story. He didn’t have an affair and
lose his character. He lost his character, and he had an affair.
When David was anointed to be king, he had the wind of God in
his sails. When he didn’t go off to war with the troops and do
what he was supposed to do, in the Springtime after he was
successful, God’s wind or power left him. He lost the wind in
his sails.
How did he recover? Many people say that David never really
recovered from his moral disgrace. I do not agree. He had a son
named Solomon who was the wisest man who ever lived.
Where did Solomon, so young, get all of his wisdom? He got it
by sitting at the feet of a broken, old, scarred warrior named
David.
How did David begin again after moral failure? How do we?
Psalm 51 contains the clues. David confessed. By that, I mean,
he owned up to and took responsibility for what he had done.
The fifty-first psalm is filled with this. David owned up to his
mistakes and his sins. He owned up to basically three things.
First, he owned up to what really went wrong. If you read
that Psalm in the beginning, David said, “Against you God and
you only have I sinned.” We might think that he sinned against
Bathsheba and she had nothing to do with it. He sinned against
Uriah, her husband and he was murdered. He sinned against the
nation. But he says, “God, against you and you only have I
sinned.”
He was talking about what really went wrong. And what really
went wrong was that he left God out of the equation of his life.
He began to feed his pride and his need for affirmation and
affection with thoughts of his own design and not God’s. He
began to center his life without reference to God, and we all do
that! Instead of God being at the hub of David’s life, he moved
Him out on the periphery. David didn’t have a mid-life crisis.
He didn’t go middle-aged crazy. He wasn’t joining the spirit of
the age. He had a theological problem. He put God on the
periphery, on the outside. So, how do we begin again after
moral failure? It is a matter of getting God back in the
center of our lives. We must own up to what really went
wrong.
The second thing that David did was own up to what he
really needed. If you read verses 6-15 is Psalm 51, David asked
for four things. He asked for God to give him sincerity, no
more deception. He asked for God to give him joy, no more
sadness. He asked for God to cleanse him, and then he asked
God to give him a new kind of loyalty. Like the old black
preacher used to say it, “He didn’t need simonizin’; he needed
revolutionizin’! He didn’t need a wax job; he needed an
overhaul!”
How many in our community have experienced sexual abuse,
emotional abuse or physical abuse from someone who was
supposed to love them and protect them? The stories of the
moral failure of parents, clergy and teachers keep coming
(today’s paper), and they cannot be justified or rationalized.
One woman told her story, saying, “My daddy was one of the
long-time leaders of our church, was on the school board, one of
the respected civic leaders in the community. When I was
twelve years old, he started sexually molesting me. He molested
me until I was sixteen years old when I eloped and ran away. I
got into drugs and alcohol. I had multiple marriages. I always
shunned the family. I was always the black sheep. I had only
brothers, and I never told my brothers, and I never told my
mother what my father had done to me.
“And then, he came down with cancer. And my family begged
me to come and to try to reconcile with him. And they never
knew the deep dark secret.” She said, “when I got there, he had
withered to just about 100 pounds and hospice had been called
in.” She said “when I got there, I went in with every intention
of saying to him, ‘You have created a cancer in my soul that has
eaten at me for all of these years, and you deserve what you
get.’” She said that was the feeling that I had. Everyone left the
room and she was in there with him when, in a whisper, he
asked her if she could ever forgive for what he had done. She
said she turned and walked out of the room. She said, “When I
got by myself, I began to weep and I said, ‘O God, forgive me. I
cannot forgive him.’” Then she said, “Something miraculous
happened at that moment.” She said, “I began to sob and weep,
and all of my hatred and bitterness for my father went away. I
said, ‘God, forgive me. I cannot forgive him.’ What I really
needed was a whole new set of working parts that only God
could give me.”
So, how do you begin again when you have failed morally?
Own up to what really went wrong, a breech in your relationship
with God. Own up to what you really, really need, which is for
God to give you what you cannot get for yourself. David asked
for sincerity, loyalty, cleansing a new spirit, a new heart. He
understood that he didn’t need to refine his outward character.
He needed a whole new set of insides and only God could give
him that.
Finally, he owned up to the only thing that he could really do
which was to rely on God’s grace. I love those last two verses
where he says, “I would offer sacrifices and burnt offerings but
they will do no good. David was saying, “I can’t work myself
out of what I’ve done. It’s done. I can’t redo it. I can’t work
and become perfect and try harder. That will never get me there.
All I have to rely on is your grace.
Only a humble heart and a broken spirit will do any good.
David did the only thing that he could do. He relied upon the
grace of God. He surrendered himself naked, without pretense
or excuse, helpless, and he said, Do for me what I cannot do for
myself.
There is a subtle pride and not-so-subtle determination in many of us that says when we do something wrong that we can fix it, we can go do something better, we can keep the rules, we can say or do something that will make things all right. But the fact is that the only thing any of us has to rely on is the grace of God.
Gordan McDonald, who built a great church in Massachusetts, at the height of his career, had an affair. He confessed to his wife. He confessed to the church, resigned and submitted himself to spiritual counseling and restoration. Five years later, he came back to pastor that church, a new person in his family and in his church family. And he wrote a book called, Rebuilding Our Broken World. And in that, he says that in the depths of his despair he realized that there was nothing that he could do to atone for what he had done. It was already done and he couldn’t fix it. He said, Then I discovered for the first time the grace of God. And the grace of God means that He is the only one left who will provide you with a tomorrow, giving you a tomorrow.
What do we do when we have failed morally? We own up to what really went wrong, a broken relationship with God. We own up to what we really need, which is not a little refinement and a little polish on the outside, but a whole new set of inner parts. And, we own up to the only thing that we can do, which is surrender ourselves to God’s grace. If you have never read the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the basis for all the twelve-step groups that are now available, you should read them. And, when you do, you will see that Psalm 51 could be the hymn of the first three steps. I can’t. He can. And, I’ll let Him.
So, if we haven’t failed morally, we may. And, when we do,
own up to what we really have done wrong and what is going
on and own up to what we need. And own up to the only
person who can do you any good, which is God and God’s
grace. Amen.
Century Christian Church, October 21, 2007 - Sermon by Jim Westmoreland
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