[Steve Myers] You are guilty. Sometimes when we read through the Bible, we recognize our sins and our faults, we feel the weight of sin that just seems to bear down on us, and we feel guilty. And at times in our lives – maybe you feel like, maybe I feel like – “How do I get rid of it? It doesn’t seem that I can overcome this burden that just seems to be weighing me down. I know God forgives sin. I know the Bible’s very plain about that. But what about this guilt that sometimes seems to remain, even though I repent, I want to change, and yet I still have this nagging weight that seems to never go away?”
Well, there’s an interesting passage in Psalm 51. You may recognize Psalm 51 as that prayer of David after his whole situation with Bathsheba and the death of Uriah. And Psalm 51 – it’s a psalm of repentance. And David says something interesting. He talks about how God can clean him up, God can wash him, wash that sin away. He can be purged clean, which is kind of a reminder of the sin that sometimes we’ve got to go to God and be forgiven of. But he says something a little bit more that is easy to read over, and yet I think it is so significant.
In verse 14 in Psalm 51 – here’s what he says: “Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, the God of my salvation, and my tongue shall sing aloud of Your righteousness” (Psalm 51:14).
And I think, when we feel guilty, when we feel weighed down, and we have repented, and we have changed, God says not only does He forgive sin, but God can remove guilt. God can deliver us from the guilt and free us from that. So not only, like Psalm 103 says, He removes our sin from east to west (Psalm 103:12), He covers that guilt too, and He makes a way that that guilt can be removed. And so, I think it’s an important thing that when we feel that, we can go to God and, like David, we can ask Him to deliver us from the guilt, and then He says that He will. And we can be free from it, so that we can, like he says here, “sing aloud of God’s righteousness”. Because we’ve got such an awesome God that He even removes guilt.
