Chapter 1: What does true repentance look like?
As long as you think you deserve forgiveness or you deserve mercy, you haven't really repented. A truly penitent person says, God, I understand. I have no claim at this point. I've forfeited all of my rights. You have every right to destroy me. You have every right to punish me according to the full measure of the law. I ask that you don't.
I plead with you that you won't, but I acknowledge that if you do it, I have no grounds to complain against.
Martin Luther, the famous 16th century reformer, famously said that the Christian life is to be a life of repentance. But do we really confess our sins as often and specifically as we ought? R.C. Sproul will seek to help us on this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind as we continue our study of prayer, focusing today on confession.
Prayer is a significant part of the Christian life, but it is also an area where many of us struggle, so we are taking our time to work through this practical series from Dr. Sproul. Each time I've revisited these messages, I've been helped, so you may wish to return to them again and again.
Chapter 2: How should we approach God in confession?
Request lifetime digital access to the messages and study guide when you donate today at renewingyourmind.org. We'll also send you a copy of the Valley of Vision. All this to thank you for your generosity in supporting Renewing Your Mind and the global outreach of Ligonier Ministries. So what does repentance, true contrition, look like? Here's Dr. Sproul on Psalm 51.
In our last segment of our study of prayer, I made use of this simple acrostic, the word acts, and we looked at these elements, simple elements, that should be included in every prayer. And we spent our time the last time looking at the first one, adoration, and today I want to look particularly at the importance of confession.
It's been said that it's important for the Christian to keep short accounts with God, that even though our sins have been nailed to the cross and Christ has atoned for all of our sins that we've ever committed past, present, and future, nevertheless, in terms of the progress of our sanctification and the development of our continued relationship with God, we are still called to come before Him on a regular basis confessing our sins.
Now, so often, The way in which we confess our sins to God is frankly an insult to His majesty. As I said the last time, if we begin with the proper spirit of adoration, remembering who He is, the holiness of God, that should shape our attitude when we move to that posture of confession that follows from it, so that the spirit of our confession is one that manifests genuine repentance.
And we distinguish in theology between two types of repentance, contrition and attrition. In our church recently, I told the story of the Battle of Bull Run, which was the first major conflict between the forces of the North and the South during the war between the states. It took place just outside the nation's capital in Washington.
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Chapter 3: What are the differences between contrition and attrition?
And when the battle was about to begin, the word spread throughout the city of this encounter that was about to take place, and the women of the aristocracy of Washington got in their coaches and had their horses carry them to the site so that they could be observers and spectators of this battle because the conviction was that this war would be over in a few days.
because the military superiority of the North was so much vastly greater than the South. All of the industrial power that was there in the North, the railroads and the armaments and all the rest, seemed to ensure not only certain victory, but rapid victory. Nobody anticipated that the war would last until 1865 and have a casualty of 600,000 killed in that war.
But what people didn't figure was that two different kinds of wars were being fought. The North was fighting a war of conquest. The South was fighting a war of attrition. And the difference is this. For the North to win the war, they had to conquer the South and occupy their territories. For the South to win what they were fighting for, all they had to do was to repel the invaders
and get the North to lose their will to give up the cause because they had so many casualties so that they would stop invading them because the South had no desire to occupy the North. They just wanted to be free of the North. It was the same type of thing that happened in Vietnam. The Vietnamese were not trying to conquer the Americans.
Chapter 4: How does Psalm 51 exemplify genuine confession?
They were just trying to outlast the Americans until the American people lost their will to keep on fighting. In other words, a war of attrition is called a war of attrition because the war is won when the cost is too great for one side to continue. Now when we translate that to theology and to repentance, what we mean by attrition is
is repentance that is motivated simply by a desire to escape paying the cost for one's sin. So the true confession and true repentance involves a godly sorrow for having offended God, a genuine turning away from our sin, not motivated simply by a ticket out of hell or of a fear of punishment. When you see your little children with their hands in the cookie jar and you catch them there,
and your hands are on your hips, and they see you with that scowl on your face, and they say, oh, you know, mommy or oh, daddy, I'm so sorry. Please don't spank me. What you are seeing there is not genuine contrition. What you are seeing is attrition, a repentance born out of a fear of the punishment or of the consequences.
Now, if we want to understand what this element of prayer is supposed to look like, we have the perfect model, a model inspired by God the Holy Spirit in Psalm 51 in the Old Testament. And this Psalm was written by David. after he was confronted by the prophet Nathan for his sin with Bathsheba. Now let me recapitulate that a little bit. You remember the story of David and Bathsheba.
Chapter 5: What does David's prayer reveal about sin and guilt?
that David was already married. He had more than one wife, and his eye fell upon Bathsheba as she was bathing, and he was smitten with her, and he not only took her to himself, but he conspired with his generals to send her husband, Uriah, who was a loyal soldier to the crown, to David, and he, David, got his generals to put Uriah in the front lines
so that it would be sure that he would be killed in battle, so that then David could have Bathsheba for himself. And remember, when Nathan came to David, he tells this parable of the man who had many sheep, and who saw this poor man who had one ewe lamb that was his sole possession and his pride and joy. He had this ewe lamb stay in his house and eat from his table and so on.
But this rich and powerful fellow came in and confiscated the poor man's lone lamb. And when David heard that, he was furious. And he said to Nathan, not in my kingdom. He said, I won't put up with that sort of thing. And he goes on this tirade about the injustice of this rich and powerful man who had confiscated the ewe lamb of the poor man.
And that's when Nathan turned to David and said, David, thou art the man. And suddenly David was wakened to the reality of his guilt and to the seriousness of his crime. Let me just stop there for a second and say this. David is not at all atypical in that regard.
Chapter 6: Why is acknowledging our sinful nature important?
We have an uncanny ability as fallen human beings to rationalize our sins, to explain our sins to ourself, to stop the accusing voice of our own conscience. And it takes something like the prophetic insight of a Nathan to awaken us out of our dogmatic slumbers at this point.
And so when David had that experience, his remorse was genuine, and his prayer of confession has become a model for Christians ever since. So let's look at this prayer in brief in Psalm 51. where David begins by crying out to God saying, have mercy upon me, O God, according to your loving kindness and according to the multitude of your tender mercies. Let me just stop at that point.
When David cries out to God, he does not ask God for justice because he clearly understands that he's guilty. Rather, he throws himself on the mercy of the court. There is nothing in this Psalm where David is saying, Lord, I'm sorry, but. Lord, you have to understand that this was not a good day. I had things on my mind. I was under a lot of pressure.
There's none of that appeal to mitigating circumstances that would excuse his sin. David knows that he's guilty. David makes no attempt to justify what he does.
Chapter 7: How can we apply David's model of confession in our prayers?
Instead, he just cries out to God for God's mercy. Deal with me according to your chesed, that is your mercy, your tender mercy, your loyal love, because that's the only hope I have. And then he goes on to say, blot out my transgressions. I love that image that he uses there because it is such an appropriate one and is one that all people of all time can relate to.
You think of Lady Macbeth, who after she's involved in this fiendish murder, and she has the blood on her hands, and she can't wash the blood from her hands, and she cries out in frustration, out, out, dammit, spot. And the reason she wants to get rid of that blood stain from her hands is because it's haunting her, like the telltale heart in one of Poe's mystery stories. And the idea is...
that she can't stand the physical reminder of the guilt of her actions. And so, like Lady Macbeth, David cries out and saying, Lord, blot it out. Erase it. My sin is ever before me, and I can't stand to see it. It's haunting me. Make it go away. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin, for I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.
Chapter 8: What is the significance of a contrite heart in prayer?
Here's where he's saying, it's always right there in front of me. Wherever I go, however I turn, I see my guilt. And so, God, I'm dirty. I need to be washed. I need to be cleaned. And I'm asking you to blot these things out. to erase them from your memory.
Now one of the things that the Bible speaks of, again using metaphors, of God's forgiveness is this, that God says, as far as the east is from the west, so far have I removed your transgressions from you. In Isaiah he says, come let us reason together. Though your sins be as scarlet, what? they shall be white as snow. Though they be as crimson, they shall be as wool."
Again, Isaiah is saying that God has the ability, the power, and the spirit to change that bloody stain on our hands and make it absolutely white. and He removes our transgressions from us, and He remembers them against us no more. Now again, that doesn't mean when God forgets our sin that He has a memory lapse. Obviously, God is omniscient and He always knows whatever it is that we've ever done.
But when He says He will not remember them, He means He will not remember them against us ever again. Once they are forgiven, they're removed from the record, they're blotted out as it were, and He makes us clean in His sight.
Now that's important for us to understand because not only on a vertical level are we to understand what confessing our sins means and what repentance means and what forgiveness means, but also on a horizontal level. When you say to somebody that you forgive them, That means you hold it against them no more. You don't ever bring it up again.
It's put into the sea of forgetfulness, so that the next time they do the same thing, you don't say that's two, you say that's one, if you really forgave them the first time. because that's the way God deals with us. And so when we come before Him in prayer, we are to come in this spirit that David illustrates for us. Now, he says something strange here in verse 4.
Against you and you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight. If this prayer were not inspired by the Holy Ghost, I would be inclined to question David's reasoning here, because in reality, David sinned against a whole lot more people than God. He sinned against his wife. He sinned against his own family. He sinned against Bathsheba. He sinned against Uriah.
He sinned against his generals. He sinned against every private in his army that was loyal to him because he violated the trust of his soldiers. He sinned against the whole nation because he was the king, and as the king, he was entrusted with leadership and was supposed to mirror and reflect the justice of God to his people, and he didn't do that. I mean, he violated everybody in town.
So why does he say it's against thee and thee only that I have sinned? Well, in the ultimate sense, sin is an offense against God. It is His law that is being violated, and the Bible tells us where there is no law, there is no transgressor. And when we break God's law, We are violating him because he is the law giver.
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