Traumatic Grace
Have you ever been exposed? Has someone ever ripped the bandaid off something you were trying to keep secret? You thought you were in the clear. You thought no one would ever know. But then, without warning and without time to react, you were stripped of your lie, and you knew you just got caught.
David was the King of Israel, and his men were out at battle. David took the wife of one of the men out fighting and slept with her. He might have gotten away with it, but she got pregnant. So he had her husband brought back from the battlefield. But being such a stand-up guy, he wouldn’t sleep with his wife while his fellow soldiers were still out fighting. Feeling like he had no choice, David sent Uriah to the front lines and essentially had him killed. God sent a prophet to David, who told him a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s lamb. In outrage, David said, “The man who has done this deserves to die!” Then the prophet said, “You are the man!” Talk about being exposed. This is the trauma of grace. God turned the lights on in David’s darkness.
We all know the feeling of being exposed. We all know what it is like to get caught in a lie. But the question of Psalm 51 goes deeper: How should we respond when that happens? What do we do when God rips the bandaid off our facade and exposes us as the sinners we are?
We could run for cover. We could make excuses. We could pretend to make amends by promising, “We will never do it again.” We could squirm with self-pity and play the victim card. But all of these fall short of true repentance. Sometimes, getting exposed is the opportunity we need to make a decisive and lasting change. The trauma of having the lights turned on in our darkness is our chance to come clean, walk out of the darkness, and get the healing that, deep down, we all really want. Psalm 51 is David’s response to getting exposed.
I call what happened to David, and what must happen to us, traumatic grace. It is grace because it saves us, but it is traumatic because, in the moment, it feels like we are being crushed. Traumatic grace is like the heat necessary to bend metal. God must torch us to change us. Traumatic grace is like the surgeon’s knife which cuts us. God must cut us before He can heal us. When God turns the lights on in our darkness, it is traumatic, but it is grace because His light is a healing light.
The Plan
Psalm 51 is a roadmap showing us how we must respond to God’s traumatic grace if we want to be healed. We are all in one of these four places. We are: hiding in sin, exposed in sin, repenting of sin, or ignorant of sin. We all spend our whole lives in one of those four locations. So, Psalm 51 has a message for all of us. There are six steps on this roadmap of true repentance. Over the next few weeks, we will plan to cover these steps.
Step One: True Repentance Appeals to God’s Mercy
Psalm 51:1-2: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!”
We see in verses 1 and 2 that David is crying out to God for Him to be merciful. He has a particular basis for this request: “according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy…” In other words, he is saying, “God, I know that you are merciful, so please show me mercy. I know that you are gracious, so please show me grace.”
When we ask for forgiveness, we typically appeal to some reason. Have you ever heard any of these reasons before? “I am sorry, but I didn’t mean to hurt you.” “I am sorry, but it really isn’t as bad as you think it is.” “I am really sorry, but I had no other choice.” Or here is my favorite: “I am sorry, but I only did it because of what you did first.” Typically, when we try to apologize, we almost always have some reason that we appeal to. Think about it like this:
The Basis For Our Appeal
We live in the age of credit. When you go to make a major purchase, they run your credit. They want to know if you are reliable. All of us carry this little score around, and when we go to buy a car or a house or something, we attempt to make the purchase on the basis of our credit score. We ground our appeal on our past credit history. Many of us treat God that way. When we mess up, we think, “Well, I’ve done pretty well in the past, so if I ask God for forgiveness, I am sure to get approved.” Or we think, “I keep messing up; there is no way that God is going to show me mercy. I don’t have enough credit with Him.”
False Repentance
False repentance appeals to excuses. That might work with other people, but it won’t work with God. He sees right through us. He won’t give out His grace on the basis of our worthiness; He only gives out His grace on the basis of His graciousness. Grace, by its very nature, cannot be deserved. This means you can’t be worthy of it and you can’t be unworthy of it—it is a gift, not a wage.
The Blood Of Jesus
This point, in particular, speaks to us when we are exposed in our sin. This sets the trajectory of our gut reaction to having the lights turned on in our darkness. Rather than going to God with our excuses, let’s go to Him with the blood of Jesus. The blood of Jesus is the only credit that God will accept. When we appeal for mercy on the basis of Jesus Christ, God won’t turn us away. Let’s base our appeal for forgiveness on God’s character and not our own.
