GOD'S LOVE AND THE BROKEN HEART

One of the scariest things God has told me in His word is this, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, who can understand it?" Jeremiah 17:9 This was the prophet's assessment of the society he was commissioned by God to speak to for Him, but its no less true today of every human heart. Jesus said it isn't what you eat that defiles your spirit but what comes out of your mouth. It originates in your heart. The Bible is peppered throughout with similar statements about my heart. In the Bible, the word "heart" rarely refers to the blood pump in our chest, it refers to the seat of emotions, the place where we weigh information, debate alternatives and make decisions. It is the place where love is born and grows. It is also the birthplace of anger, greed, lust, hate, jealousy and that whole dark-side family.
David knew both sides of his heart very well. He seems to have had a difficult time with forgiveness and leaned more toward revenge and retribution, even with his own offspring. He grieved over the death of Absalom, after the fact, but doesn't seem to have made any effort to communicate a father's love to him. I always have to be very careful to not judge David by my own standard of morality because God has forever put him in the company of the faithful at Hebrews 11:32. That indicates to me that I don't have all the information God has. If God has forgiven and blessed David, I have no right to condemn him. He only affirms the truth of Jeremiah's statement about the human heart.
David's humble song of repentance is my prayer too. Near the end of it he wrote, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." Psalm 51:17 Getting there took nearly a year for David. He lived all those days with his back to God, going his own way, listening to the dark side of his heart. This was new territory for David, a place of separation from the God he had loved and praised all his life. I seriously doubt he wrote any songs of praise to God during that time. God waited patiently for David to reach the point of honest repentance on his own. It didn't happen. So, out his great love for David, God sent the prophet Nathan to confront him directly, VERY directly. Finally his heart was broken and he turned back to face God in the transparent way God honors.
Yesterday we saw that God chose David because he was a man "after God's own heart". Sin didn't change that because God always knew David's heart and how he would respond to His grace. But He had to get David to the point of absolute, honest repentance or his sin would multiply in his heart and he would be in danger of living out the rest of his life from that dark side.
What a Father our God is. His grace is always greater than our sin, all of it. He will never quit working to get us to that same transparency before Him because He loves us in spite of what we do. That love is the only power that can free us from the control of the enemy who works tirelessly to drag us away from our Father's house. A broken and contrite heart may not be an easy road sometimes but it is the only way to hear joy again and sing HALLELUJAH!

"THERE IS NO GOD!" REALLY!?

I have found it curiously interesting that Psalms 53 and 14 are virtually verbatim. As I have studied the seventy plus Psalms that David authored I have seen many of his characteristic phrases repeated, but as far as I have seen so far, these two are the only instance where he reproduced the same song. Maybe he felt the worshipers didn't get the message the first time and was compelled to make the point again. Or, possibly something was happening at the time that he felt a strong motivation to call attention to the message of this song. He makes his point at the beginning, "The fool says in his heart 'There is no God'". Psalm 53:1 ESV
Being a careful student of Jewish history, the Apostle Paul quotes this Psalm at Romans 3:10, stitching it together with about seven others to make the same point to his own generation, "None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one." All of that seems to be the result of an assumption that 'There is no God', so there are no rules, life is to be lived as you wish!
I wonder if this is how God sees his human family, ignorant, obstinate, self serving and totally oblivious to who He is. David's original assessment covers a lot of ground all the way down to Paul and the church at Rome, and even to the present day. When we compare the Biblical record with the archeological record, humans seem to have always worshiped some kind of god of their own making. Yahweh warned his own people repeatedly that creating their own gods or worshiping the gods created by other nations would only lead to their destruction. They failed to listen and now the nation of Israel still fights for its survival in the midst of constant war with one neighbor or another.
Have we really learned nothing in all the centuries between David and Paul? The brother did not mince his words when he quoted David's strong assessment of the human family that ignores God. It's still true, only "the fool says in his heart, there is no God!" But Paul uses David's words to make an even stronger point.
He follows up the Psalms quotes with an affirmation that "the law" was incapable of producing justification even for the Jews who believed in it. In spite of the rules God had given them to live by, the huge truth remained that, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God", both Jew and Gentile.
Now get this, regardless of the law and its requirements, all are now "justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Romans 3:24
THAT is how God sees the human family, at least that is His intent for all of us, but the choice is still up to me. I can go on living like a fool, or I can move into God's house, be adopted into His forever family and have a life that every breathing member of the human race should want more than their next breath.
David also wrote: "Behold, God is my helper; the Lord is the upholder of my life!" Psalm 54:4 HALLELUJAH!