Psalm 38 - Sin's Burden Lifted

Psalm 38 is a penitential psalm. These are psalms of repentance and were included in the liturgy of the Old Testament in order to teach God's people the importance of repentance in their lives and in their worship. As Christians we are a people who repent and believe habitually, as a matter of course, but also genuinely as God does his work of grace in us to rid us of sin.

In this psalm David describes what appears to be a physical illness from which he is suffering. There is disagreement about whether David is describing an actual physical malady or just using the metaphor of physical suffering to describe the distress he is enduring. Either way, David is miserable as his sin festers. Sin is like a cancer in the soul. It destroys. It brings us down. It ruins us. It makes us miserable.

And so we find it true of ourselves as Christians that we can never be happy in our sins, but that conscience and the word of God will make us miserable until such time as we turn to God for healing. Better to be made miserable by God who loves us and is using that misery to rid us of the cancer of sin than to just be made ruined and miserable by the sin itself, with no hope for a cure.

But repentance is not the only thing we find in this psalm. We also find Christ. When we read this psalm looking for him, placing it in his mouth, we see how wonderfully it fits there, pointing to the redemption, our redemption, which he purchased for us at Calvary.

1 Peter 3:18>>For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, 

This is the sermon I preached from Psalm 38 at the Winnsboro Reformed Church. You will find the audio at the link below. Just click and it will open up a new browser in your window where you can stream the MP3 recording of the sermon. I hope you will listen and be blessed.

Click here: Psalm 38 - Sin's Burden Lifted

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