The Rugged Road To Repentance

It's good to be in the house of the Lord, saying yes to our King, choosing to praise Him today. Come on, let's lift our voice, let's lift our heart, let's sing it together. He's working all things out, working all things out. Yes, I will lift you up in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy. Oh, yes, I will sing all my days. Oh, yes, I will. I've come a long way, the same God that never fails. And I'll fail me now, you won't fail me now. You're waiting, the same God who's every day. He's working all things out, working all things out. Yes, I will lift you up in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy. All my days. Oh, yes, I will for all my days. Oh, yes, I will. I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of holiness. Nothing can stand against. I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of holiness. Nothing can stand against. I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of holiness. Nothing can stand against. I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of holiness. Nothing can stand against. Yes, I will lift you up in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy.

All my days. Oh, yes, I will for all my days. Oh, yes, I will for all my days. Yes, I will. Yeah. Good morning, everyone. Welcome today to this worship service here at Pinnacle Hills. It is with overwhelming gratitude, deep humility, and great joy to be with our Cross Church family again today, preaching God's word. And the great news is that the miracle continues at Cross Church, and we give God the glory again and again and again. In the last two days of the year 2025, I believe deeply that the Lord spoke to me and called me to read through the entire Bible in 90 days. I submitted to that call. I read through the Bible 36 years in a row. in a row, but I've never read through it that rapidly. It was extraordinarily challenging. Deeply rewarding. And very transforming as you read God's Word from Genesis 1-1 to Revelation 22-21 in that short amount of time. I say that because we are a Bible church here at Cross Church. And because we are a Bible church, we believe deeply in the Word of the living God. And that is why last week when I was asked to preach even weeks ago, and last week I preached at our Fayetteville campus, all three services,

and earlier this morning at Springdale and the first Pinnacle Hills service, and this second service today, I was not taken back because I've read through the Bible so long and believe that God is so faithful and great to us, that I was asked last week to do a chapter, Psalm 32 in the Bible, and this week Psalm 51 in the Bible. And they talk about the same story, but you would never in your mind even see that. On the first Psalm last week that we preached, I declared that it was life's greatest joy. To me, that's what that Psalm was about. And David was standing on the other side of going through what is recorded in Psalm 51 in the Scripture. You see, I believe that Psalm 32 addresses life's greatest joy, but Psalm 51, which is addressing the same issue, talks about the rugged road to repentance. Through Psalm 32, we learned last week that life's greatest joy is knowing you're forgiven. Don't ever forget that. Your sins are covered, and you are free. Did you hear me? You are free. And we learned as well last week that we are free from the condemnation of sin.

And we are free from the guilt of sin. And we are free to become all God wants you to be. Oh yes, don't ever forget it. This is an extraordinary book. It is the greatest book of all time. The Bible. The Word of the living God. Yet, from a human perspective, it is really difficult to imagine how this powerful figure in history named David, King David, ended up not doing what he was supposed to be doing as a king, and he stayed behind, and ended up in that situation committing adultery with a woman by the name of Bathsheba, who then conceived with a child. And this same King David then kicked in to his power ability, and he designed to cover up. He lied. He schemed. And he even sent the woman's husband to the front lines in order to be killed. He committed murder! And then of course, when their baby was born, the baby died. It was not until the prophet... came Nathan, and he told the king,

you have sinned against God. And when he said that, that prophet must have been under a mighty anointing of the Lord upon his life, because I'm telling you, immediately, King David was evidently flooded with conviction, and immediately confessed his sin to God. And Nathan told him, God heard you, and you are forgiven. An extraordinary story. But, let me kick that extraordinary into even an extra-extraordinary. This is the same guy in Scripture that Acts 13 verse 22 records these words. I have found David to be a man after My own heart who will carry out all My will. How does that happen? After a man sinned and sinned and sinned and sinned, and God forgave him, and now he's lauded in the New Testament as being like no other man. A man after God's own heart. Willing to carry out. I love what that statement is. All My will.

Grace, mercy, and love. That's who God is. Did you hear me? Or some of you today think you have out-sinned God's grace. You have not out-sinned God's grace. And some of you think that you have out-sinned God's mercy. There is no way God would ever have mercy on you. And I'm telling you, you have not out-sinned God's mercy. And there may be some today that say I have out-sinned God's love. There's no way God would ever love me. I'm here today to declare to you in the name of Jesus, God loves you, and God is committed to have a relationship with you. But oh, my soul, what David had to go through to get right with God. I call it the rugged road to repentance. We're going to read together the first five verses of Psalm 51. I would like for you, if you would, would you stand in honor of God's Word with me for a moment as we read from the Bible. The Scripture says, be gracious to me, God,

according to your faithful love, according to your abundant compassion. Blot out my rebellion. Completely wash away my guilt. And cleanse me from my sin. For I am conscious of my rebellion, and my sin is always before me. Key verse here. Against you, you alone, I have sinned and done this evil in your sight. So you are right when you pass sentence. You are blameless when you judge. Indeed, I was guilty when I was born. I was sinful when my mother conceived me. Father, in the name of Jesus today, I pray that the Spirit of the Lord would make this passage come alive today. And may all of us be willing to get on the rugged road of repentance to become all we need to become in Jesus. And we pray this in Your name, Amen. extensively and deeply Psalm 51, you discover a lot of things. But it's the last two weeks I have baptized my life again in Psalm 51. The Lord showed me something that I had never noticed before. There is a progression in the book of Psalm, chapter 51, that all of us need to pay attention to. And I'm going to teach you this progression this morning. Because there is a progression on the road

to repentance. And it all begins with the reality of the high price of sin. We have to start there. The high price of sin. It doesn't matter if it's little sins as you might categorize, or some of those big ones like you try to think you've avoided. But sin is sin. And it all offends a holy God. David appeals. He knows he needs it. He begs God to be gracious to him in verse 1. And to demonstrate his faithful love according to God's compassion. He knew he would need the 100% compassion of God to come back to God. And then he asked God for three things. You need to get these in your text. Look at this. First of all, he asked him to blot out my rebellion. He knew he was rebellious. That word blot out is the Hebrew word makah, which means utterly wipe it away. Erase it completely. And obliterate my sin from my memory. That's what it means to have our sins blotted out. How many of us would like to have the obliteration of our sin out of our minds? The dumb things we've done in life. The mistakes we've made in life. From the small to the large. David asked God, blot it out of my memory. And then he asked God, wash away my guilt. The removal of the stain of sin is only washed away by Jesus himself. And then he pleaded with God to cleanse me from my sin, meaning totally forgive me from my sin. And only God can cleanse the state of our sin and the stain of our sin. And he is the only one who can

ultimately set us free. In verse number three, you see David's sin became public. So David declared to God, because at this side he knew that people knew. He knew that God knew, obviously. I cannot run away from what I've done. My sin is obvious. That's different than you and me trying to hide our sins or manage our sins where nobody ever finds them out, we think. But then verse four, absolutely one of the most dynamic verses in all of the Holy Scripture about the power of sin. It's amazing. Against you! Against you! You alone I have sinned. That's who he's talking to. He's talking about God. He's not talking to Bathsheba. He's not talking to Nathan. He's not talking to his men. He's not talking to his armies. He's talking to God. And I've done this evil in your sight. Every sin we commit in life is a sin against God. Don't ever forget that. And then David admitted his guilt in verse five. He knew he was a sinner by his nature. And this is a reference to what we would call theologically original sin. That we were born as sinners. Conceived in my mother's womb. So, he said not only are we born as sinners, we know that ultimately we are going to be sinful by our choices. No one had to teach any of our children or any of our grandchildren how to sin. They got it by themselves. And the truth is about us.

I want you to get something today and I want you to really try to remember this for the rest of your life. Real repentance begins when you realize every sin offends a holy God. If you're ever going to get on the road to repentance and further it. And this road to repentance has to be traveled on again and again and again and again and again by all of us who profess Jesus as Lord. We need to understand the deep offense to a holy God. This is why the sin has such a high price. And I also want you to remember what we learn in this story. Our sins can be blotted out. They can be washed away. They can be cleansed. However, there are still consequences of our sins. The great news today, our sins could be blotted out. Praise the Lord. Our sins could be washed away by the blood of Jesus. Thank you, God. There will be moments when we can be cleansed and we feel it. And praise God for that. However, consequences of sins become a reality. David's life. He got it all right with God,

but he still had a baby. And that baby died. And God was so gracious and so loving and so merciful to him and to Bathsheba, that in time, they had another son together when she was his wife. And when that happened, that son's name was named Solomon, who became the successor to King David. So this first incredible matter of concern is the high price of sin. The great Adrian Rogers used to say it like this. Sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay. This is the reality of the high price of sin. But oh, that's just the first step. And we're going to step another way here. Because when that happens, you see something happen in the text. There becomes this relentlessness from David. This relentless passion to be clean before God. Clean before God. I'm sure many of you have worked outside and you got all nasty and dirty. Or you came in from a long run or a long walk,

and you act like you're going to hug your spouse, and they say, ugh, get in the shower. You know what? When you're dirty like that, you really develop a passion. I need to become clean. It's much greater in your spiritual life. It should be. That we want to be clean with God. We want to be right with God. In verses 6 through 10, he says that God gives us wisdom within our hearts. In verse 7, he even mentions the word hyssop there, which is a plant or a shrub that they used in the Passover to take it and put it in the blood and then take the blood and put it over the door of their dwelling place, and then the death angel passed over the blood. And he said, however you do it, Lord, please pass over me. He's crying out to God, wanting to be clean before God by washing him and making him as white as snow. Verse 8, he mentions the emphasis of Psalm 32 and a couple of verses showing how sin negatively affects our bodies and affects our lives. And I talked about that quite a little bit last week when I was preaching through Psalm 32 because there's more verses on it. But it's only the blood, according to verse 9, that washes away sin and blots out all of our guilt. I want to make it clear today, and I hope it's clear by the time you leave, there is nothing you can do to blot out your sins. Not one thing you can do to blot out your sins. There's not one act you can take to blot your sins out. There's not one song this congregation can sing that will blot out your sins. And there's not one sermon you will ever hear or that I will ever preach that has the

power to blot out your sins. But only Jesus, only Jesus, only Jesus through His atoning blood has the power to wash away your sin and make you clean before God. Only Jesus. And that happened on the cross of Jesus Christ. And this is one of the great reasons we are cross church, because we believe the cross is the hope of the world. And David cries out to God in verse 10, look at it, God create in me a clean heart and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Jesus suffered, Jesus paid it all for our sins, and only the righteousness of Jesus Christ comes upon us where God can look at us when He's covered us with His righteousness and He listens to us when we talk to Him. Oh listen, the road to repentance, it starts about this high cost of sin. It continues through this relentless passion, God I want to be clean, I want to be clean, I want to be clean, I want to be clean. But it goes up another notch in the third level. And I want you to see it today, it is the renewing work of the Holy Spirit to restore the joy of your salvation, which is revival. That powerful presence of the Spirit of God that comes upon your life in seasons of your life. But David knew he needed the renewing work of the Spirit of God in his life to restore to him the joy of his salvation. In verse 10, it talks about how David is seeking this new and continuous spiritual transformation. Verse 11, David is appealing to God for the Holy Spirit to help him and to keep him together. And oh, look at verses 12 and 13, read them with me. Restore the joy of your salvation to me and sustain me by giving me a willing spirit. And then something's going to happen. Look what he says happens. I will teach the rebellious your ways God and sinners will return to you. In other words, he knew God could not use him until God restored to him

the joy of his salvation. So David, please with God, bring back the joy. Bring back the joy. You do remember what the joy of salvation is like, don't you? Perhaps you haven't been, you haven't revisited your salvation experience that may have happened 50 years ago, 25 years ago, or longer, but I'm telling you there was a level of joy in you that wasn't normal. And the longer we live life, and the longer we walk with God, we end up taking the things of God for granted. And when that happens, the joy leaves us. And the joy has to be restored periodically in our lives. I believe in an ongoing manner. I don't think it's a once, oh, I got the, my joy, my salvation came back. I'm sorry, none of us are that good. We need God again, and again, and again. So I ask you today, do you need to ask the Holy Spirit to restore the joy of your salvation today? I thought about it early this morning in the Scripture in Revelation 2 when the Apostle John on the Isle of Patmos, he just praised the church at Ephesus again, and again, and again. And he told them, but I got a real problem with where you are. God said this to him, you've abandoned your first love. You left your first love. You don't love me the way you used to love me. Any of you ever heard that from your spouse? Why don't you love me like you used to love me? Oh, it's much deeper in the spiritual life, much deeper. We need to come back to our first love today, and we need to come back to the restoring of the joy of our salvation today. Because the progression is to continue the high cost of sin, the relentless passion to

become clean. The deep prayer, God bring joy to me in my salvation again, and then he said, all that leads to this moment where I am released to live my life and to worship broken and humble before God. Look at verse 17 in the Scripture. The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. You will not despise a broken and humbled heart, God. Powerful words. He wants to be saved from his guilt, and he wants the whole body of Christ to sing about God's righteousness, opening our lips and praising God in verse 14 and 15. But David knew that God did not want his rituals and his repentance in verse 16, but God wanted his repentance in verse 16. Let me say it maybe where it can help you a little more personally. God wants our godly repentance, not our religious performance. The church of America today is known for its performance, not for its repentance. And that's a problem. God wants us to be on the road to repentance on a continual and in a continual basis in our lives. You see, David even wanted Jerusalem to stand up strong as the people of God to one day worship God. But he reveals exactly what God wants from us, and when we have walked the rugged road to repentance, look at this, and I want you to get this this morning. We have a spirit that is broken, not prideful, and a heart that is humble, not arrogant. He's your spirit. broken yet? Or is it always still about you? Or is it humble? Is your heart arrogant, prideful? It's not on me, it's not me that did that, somebody else did that. Always taking up for me. I said this about the Church of America recently, just like I did a moment ago, but I say it in a different way. The Church of America today knows a whole lot more about pride and arrogance, more than it knows about humility and humbling ourselves before God. Oh, I'm telling you

this rugged road of repentance, it calls us, it calls us to God deeply today. I said this many years ago, and I say it again today because those who were here probably need to hear it again, and those who are new maybe have never heard it, and of all people that need to hear it, I need to hear it, so I'm going to say it. When God walks on the platform, when pride walks on the platform, God walks off. When pride ever walks on this platform, God walks off. It's true about your marriage. It's true about your family. It's true about your job and your influence for Christ at work. When our pride is so strong, God says, you don't need me. That's where David was when he committed his sin to Bathsheba. He thought he was untouchable. God used that experience in his life to break him into becoming a man after God's own heart. In simple, understandable terms, I'm going to give you a prayer for us today, and it's the kind of prayer we need because in a few moments we're going to go through an experience called communion. It's also called the Lord's Supper, and here is the prayer. It comes right out of Psalm 51. I've condensed everything I've said to you to this. Wash me. Anybody want to be washed? Cleanse me. Anybody want to be cleansed? Change me. That's where you come to having your joy restored to your salvation. And use me. That's when you're really ready to walk out here and help transgressors to find their way and to help people to follow God in their lives. In this time of invitation, Psalm 51 leads us ultimately to one thing, the cross of Jesus Christ, because Christ alone is the perfect and once and for all sacrifice for our sins. You believe that this morning? And we need to be saved if we've never been saved. I know what a crowd this size with this many people in this room and all who are listening on livestream today or will listen to this message sometime in the next part of the future of their lives. I am completely aware that many of you have never ever had a life-changing experience where Jesus Christ has entered your life, taken away your sins, and come to live within you forever, giving you the promise of heaven. But I got to talk about that because that's what we're all about. And anyone today who would like to be saved,

in a moment there will be men and women who will join me up in the front of this church. And if you would like to give your life to Jesus Christ, you would like to nail down your salvation, I pray you would come today and do that because Christ loves you. And if God turned David upside down, he could turn you upside down. God is able. Some of you need to follow the Lord in baptism, make it public, stop holding back. If you're gonna follow Jesus, follow Jesus, follow him through baptism. And follow him for the rest of your life. Whatever the cost, whatever the cost, Jesus is worth following. And I'm telling you, when we go through this today in just a moment, in order to do this in an honorable way, listen, we need to get to the road of repentance real quick right here today. Each of us in an honorable way. Father, I pray now in Jesus' name as our men and women come today to receive people, I pray for people to come and be saved, changed by the power of God's grace. I pray for that man this morning, that woman this morning, that teenager this morning who feels they have out sinned God's love. May they know that God loves them

and may they come immediately today. May your spirit draw them to one of these men or women and may they discover life and life evermore. And I prayed this morning also that this altar would be filled with many Christian men and women who will come and say, Lord, I need the joy of my salvation today. Before I ever take this Lord's Supper this morning, this communion, we need deeply to have the joy of our salvation returned. Please God, give me the joy again. I pray that you will come and pray. And if you're here today and you need somebody to pray for you because you have a special need in your life, one of these men or women will pray for you. So as our singers begin to sing, I'm going to ask you to stand all over the audience. And as you stand right now, I want you to begin to come. So stand with me now all across the room and would you begin to come even now as our singers sing and we join them, make your way.