What Should You Do When Your Heart Is Heavy?
In my immaturity, I used to think that the goal of life was to make it through mistake-free. I actually have since learned that won’t possible, neither is it healthy to make that your aim. It produces a type of legalism that may end up in unhealthy self-reliance and the shortcoming to process mistakes or outright acts of rebel after they occur in your life. And when you may’t process those things in a healthy way, you’ll drift toward shame and despair.
Without a doubt, you may point to the worst decision you have ever made. Everyone has one. At some point through the course of your life, you hit your low point. You crossed a line that you just never thought you’d cross. You could have even done something that you just used to castigate others for doing.
As a follower of Christ, how do you have to process those mistakes? What do you have to do if you happen to end up within the midst of your biggest sin, mistake, or act of rebel toward God? And what do you have to do if someone loves you sufficient to point it out to you even before you might be willing to confess it to yourself?
In 2 Samuel 11-12, we examine David’s mistakes and the fallout that resulted from them. Generally speaking, David was a godly man. He loved the Lord, sought to honor the Lord together with his life, modeled what it was wish to worship the Lord, and encouraged the people of Israel to do the identical.
At the identical time, David was a person with an obvious weakness for girls. And if we’re being frank, I feel nearly every man I’ve ever met has that very same weakness. We just have not had our biographies printed within the best-selling book of all time as David did.
David caught a glimpse of Bathsheba bathing on a rooftop. His sinful heart longed to take her as his own, despite the fact that she was the wife of one other man. He committed adultery together with her anyway, impregnated her, attempted to disguise his indiscretion, and arranged for Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to be unfairly executed in battle. For a time, he thought he had gotten away with it too until the prophet Nathan was sent to David and confronted him about all of it. God revealed David’s hidden sins, and Nathan addressed these hidden acts head-on.
If you were David, what would you will have done? Would you will have attempted to disclaim it? Would you will have tried to kill the messenger? Would you will have confessed your hidden sins and repented of them? By God’s grace, David confessed and repented after being confronted. And under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration, David wrote Psalm 51 to specific his thankfulness to God for the healing and restoration he experienced, and to assist us in our times of confession, repentance, and restoration.
So what can we do when our sin is exposed, and we won’t bear the burden of it any longer? What can we do if we desire to experience restored fellowship with our Lord after embracing wickedness?
Photo Credit: © Getty Images/Marjan_Apostolovic
