Honest With God: Finding Healing and Wholeness Through the PsalmsНамуна

Jonathan was spiraling. During his first semester in college, he’d become overwhelmed by the course load in his demanding major. To cope, he’d started using illegal drugs. His relationship with his parents was already estranged, but this pushed things beyond the breaking point.

At one dark moment, he called out to God for help. He searched online for a local church near his school. Our church was the first church to appear. So, he attended the following Sunday. As I was preaching through the Sermon on the Mount, I invited the whole congregation to stand and recite the Lord’s Prayer with me from Matthew 6. When we reached Matthew 6:12 NLT, where Jesus teaches them to say, “forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us,” Jonathan later told me that he meant those words for the first time. He felt a weight lift from him and a sense of cleanliness enter his life.

We met together a month later, and I encouraged him to share his testimony, take several steps of obedience, and continue talking to his dad.

Several months later, I had the privilege of baptizing Jonathan with his dad in attendance, who had flown in to witness the baptism and solidify their reconciliation.

King David understood the importance of a fresh start. After his devastating moral failure with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband, David didn't just ask God for forgiveness – he asked for something more: "Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me." (Psalm 51:10 NIV)

David doesn't ask God to improve his heart or renovate his spirit. He asks for complete recreation – a heart transplant, a spiritual do-over. He understands that his sin has corrupted him so profoundly that only divine intervention can cleanse him.

Earlier in the same psalm, David pleads, "Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow." (Psalm 51:7 NIV) Hyssop was a plant used in purification ceremonies, but David is asking for something more thorough than ritual cleansing. He wants to be made whiter than snow – not just clean, but pristine, spotless, radiant.

This passage includes audacious language for someone who had committed adultery and murder. Yet David believed in a God whose cleansing power was greater than any stain, whose creativity was sufficient to recreate what sin had corrupted.

You might feel too stained for cleansing, too broken for repair, too far gone for redemption. But the God who created the universe from nothing can make a pure heart from the mess you're carrying.

David's prayer can be your prayer today: "Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me."

Tomorrow, I look forward to sharing with you about the freedom that God offers beyond our own sense of condemnation.