Whenever we go camping, our sons end up sleeping together.
Inevitably, our one son, Joshua, ends up with all the blankets.
We've given him his own blanket and used king sized blankets. Apart
from placing him in a separate bed-which rarely is an option-he
simply ends up with them all. We pity whichever other son has to
sleep with him. That son looks forward to a night of desperately
trying to cover some chilled part of his body with a lone corner of
a blanket that Joshua somehow overlooked throughout the night.
Have you ever had to sleep someplace where the covers just
weren't big enough? You know what that's like. You get into bed,
pull the covers up to your neck and realize that your ankles and
feet are sticking out. So, you pull the covers down over your feet
to try and cover them, and far too much of your upper body is still
left out in the cold. So, you flip the blanket around so that the
corners are at your feet and head, but in the process you realize
that your body simply isn't diamond shaped. You've been there,
right?
That's the kind of picture that is alluded to in Psalm 32.
In verse 5, David says that in the midst of his confession and
repentance, he stopped covering up his iniquity. David knew that
God knows all things-even the things that we never speak of, even
to ourselves. God knows all those things. So for us to try and
cover them up...well, its about as fruitful as trying to cover our
bodies with a blanket that is just too small-there's always
something poking out of it. A part of confession and repentance is
coming to a point where we realize that we are unable to cover
ourselves before God.
This past week, as I listened to Michael Vick's confession
of illegal activity, one of the statements he made jumped out
at me. He said, 'I will redeem myself.' Now I realize that in the
context of what he was talking about, Vick meant that he would
redeem himself from the ignominy that he has placed himself into
with his actions. I'm sure that Vick didn't have any eternal
implications in his statement.
And yet, his statement sums up all our attempts to redeem
ourselves. We try to reverse the effects of sin in our own life and
its effect in the lives of others. Some of these efforts are both
appropriate and necessary. But it is an important distinction to
make that these efforts are not what redeem us.
We see from
verses 1 & 2 in Psalm 32 that the only way that our sins
can be fully covered-covered so that nothing sticks out of the
edges-is for God to cover our sins. We receive forgiveness from
Him. He acquits us of any guilty thought, deed, or desire. And it
changes us so that we become people within whom there is no
deceit.
This is the question we wrestle with throughout this week as we
consider our need for confession: Am I attempting to redeem myself?
Or am I bringing my sins before God, confessing them, and relying
on nothing-not even my confession-nothing other than God's grace to
procure my forgiveness. I don't redeem myself. God redeems me
through His grace.