In Psalm 32:1, we find, “Blessed is the one whose trans­gres­sion is for­given, whose sin is cov­ered.”  Then, in 32:5, David says, “I acknowl­edged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniq­uity; I said, ‘I will con­fess my trans­gres­sions to the Lord,’ and you for­gave the iniq­uity of my sin.”

When I pre­pare my ser­mons, I take a day to sim­ply read through the text I will preach, to pray, through the text, and to make my own obser­va­tions about the text.  The next day I con­sult my com­men­taries and other books in my library to glean insights from godly peo­ple I had not considered.

When I con­sulted my ESV Study Bible last week as I pre­pared to preach Psalm 32, I came across this great insight:  “When God ‘cov­ers’ sin, he gra­ciously blots it out; when man ‘cov­ers’ his sin, he is sin­fully hid­ing it” (ESV SB, 976).  Have you con­sid­ered the dif­fer­ence between you cov­er­ing your sin and God cov­er­ing it for you?  We cover our sin to hide it from God, from oth­ers, even from our­selves.  But God cov­ers our sin to rec­on­cile us to Him­self through Jesus Christ.

Let’s be like David, who learned the bless­ing of being for­given after he learned the pain of try­ing to cover his sin.  Con­fess your sins to God (1 Jn. 1:5–9) and to oth­ers (James 5:16–17) so that you may know what David knew.

This evening we will con­sider the blessed life of the for­given in Psalm 32.  In this Psalm, David states that when he kept silent about his sin, his bones wasted away, but when he con­fessed his sin, God for­gave his iniquity.

Sin is not sim­ply a small mis­take; it is an offense com­mit­ted against God Him­self.  When we rec­og­nize the exceed­ing sin­ful­ness of our sins, we will seek to con­fess them to God, to receive his for­give­ness, and to walk in repen­tance and joy before Him.  We hope to see you tonight at 5!

Ear­lier this week, Justin Tay­lor fea­tured excerpts on his blog from an email con­ver­sa­tion between Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Com­put­ers, and a cus­tomer who argued that he should be able to access pornog­ra­phy freely on Apple com­put­ers like he is able to  on PC’s.  Here is what tran­spired next:

“The CEO of Apple replied to say that he values:

‘Free­dom from pro­grams that steal your pri­vate data. Free­dom from pro­grams that trash your bat­tery. Free­dom from porn. Yep, free­dom. The times they are a changin’ and some tra­di­tional PC folks feel their world is slip­ping away. It is.’

The inter­locuter replied:

“I don’t want ‘free­dom from porn’. Porn is just fine! And I think my wife would agree.”

In the most reveal­ing line, Steve Jobs dis­missed the critic thus:

“You might care more about porn when you have kids.”

Pause for a moment and con­sider what the above emails represent.

The CEO of one of the wealth­i­est, most suc­cess­ful inter­na­tional com­pa­nies, responds to the email of a cus­tomer. Busi­ness pros­pers on the mantra ‘The cus­tomer is always right.’ Busi­ness wants the cus­tomers’ money.

But in this case, over the moral issue of pornog­ra­phy, Jobs is happy to tell cus­tomers to buy a dif­fer­ent prod­uct. He argues that chil­dren and inno­cence ought to be preserved—and that trumps the dollar.

Google (with their motto ‘Don’t be evil’) rake in bil­lions through pornog­ra­phy. Ranks of employ­ees spend their time cat­e­goris­ing and arrang­ing adver­tis­ing for pornog­ra­phy. (I know, I spent some time dis­cussing the dif­fi­cul­ties posed to a Chris­t­ian who worked in their UK HQ.) Pornog­ra­phy is huge busi­ness, yet here is the CEO of Apple telling the pornog­ra­phy busi­nesses to take their dol­lars elsewhere.”

You can read the entire arti­cle here.  I hope and pray for the down­fall of the porn indus­try for the dev­as­ta­tion it causes to women, to chil­dren, to mar­riages, and to the wit­ness of many pro­fess­ing Christians.

If you pro­fess to be a Chris­t­ian and you view pornog­ra­phy of any type, you need to con­fess your sin to God and to Chris­tians who love you enough to hold you account­able.  Then you need to do what­ever it takes to ensure you have no access to pornog­ra­phy.  You need to quit mak­ing excuses and do what­ever is nec­es­sary to walk in obe­di­ence to Jesus.

I don’t know any­thing about Steve Jobs, so I don’t know if he is known by Christ or not.  What I do know is that Steve Jobs knows that pornog­ra­phy is slav­ery, not free­dom, for those who make it and those who view it.  Con­sider Gala­tians 5:1:  “For free­dom Christ has set us free; stand firm there­fore, and do not sub­mit again to a yoke of slavery.”

In yesterday’s mes­sage on Psalm 27 I referred to Ajith Fernando’s book, A Call to Joy and Pain: Embrac­ing Suf­fer­ing in Your Min­istry.  This is one of the best resources I have found on suf­fer­ing and God’s pur­pose for suf­fer­ing in the life of the believer.

The ques­tion many believ­ers seem to ask is, “What will I do if suf­fer­ing comes into my life?”  Accord­ing to Scrip­ture, we should ask, “What will I do when suf­fer­ing comes into my life?”  Suf­fer­ing is inevitable for every per­son, but God intends suf­fer­ing to be used for good in the life of the believer.  As John Piper would say, we should not waste our suf­fer­ing, but allow God to use it to make us more like Jesus.   Rather than run­ning from suf­fer­ing, let’s emm­brace it as a gift of God.