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  • Writer's picturePastor Matt

You Are the Man!

You may listen to this devotion in audio form via podcast here.


Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.

-Psalm 51:1


According to the inscription on this psalm, David wrote it after he was confronted by Nathan about his sin in the incident with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11-12). Nathan tells a parable about a rich man who steals a poor man’s only lamb to feed a guest, instead of using one of his own. This prompts David’s anger, who says that the rich man must die. Nathan confronts him with the accusation, “You are the man!” and David immediately responds with, “I have sinned against the LORD.”


Confessing sin is not very popular these days. Don’t get me wrong—we often don’t mind talking about sin, so long as it is someone else’s. We like talking about a movie star’s indiscretions or a politician’s lies. We’ll gossip about an acquaintance’s adultery or a co-worker’s cheating. We also don’t mind talking about sin in the abstract. I’ve noticed that for conservatives this often takes the form of worries about declining morals in society. For liberals, these things are usually couched in the language of social justice. But at such a general level, this kind of critique is not very effective. In order to do its work, God’s Word has to become personal.


You are the man!


You are the man. You are the woman. You are the sinner. And so am I.


The point of all this talk of sin is not to make us feel bad. We don’t confess sin in worship so that the worship leader can point their finger at each of us. In my experience as a pastor, I have found that people do that to themselves quite enough. We don’t confess sin to beat ourselves up, or to grovel before God, or to make us realize that we’re terrible people.


No. One reason we confess is because doing so is an act of hope. Eugene Peterson writes that when you really get to know this story, the sentence, “I have sinned against the Lord,” is full of hope. It is full of hope because it is full of God.”


Look at all of the forward-looking, hopeful language in Psalm 51: Have mercy. Blot out. Cleanse me. Create in me a pure heart. Give me a new and right Spirit. Keep me close to your presence. Keep your Spirit in me. This is a psalm and a prayer that does not wallow in past sin but points us forward to God’s grace and continuing presence in our lives.


But maybe the biggest reason we confess is to get ourselves into the best position to hear the Gospel—the good news—that the Word is dying to extend to us. And that is that you are no longer the man, the woman, the sinner. In Jesus Christ, you are the saint. In Jesus Christ, your sin is forgotten. In Jesus Christ, you are made whole.


At the very moment we recognize that we cannot escape our sin—in fact, at the moment we realize that we cannot do anything about it, when we confess it—we are assured that God in Jesus Christ has! Thanks be to God!


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