Prayer: Dear Heavenly Father, our sins against you, in thoughts, words, and actions, dirty us in your sight, make us feel guilty, and make us unfit for heaven. Come to us today in the blood of Christ through baptism, and wash away our sins from your sight, and take away our guilt. Through Christ's washing, assure that heaven is ours once more! Amen

Text: 2 Samuel 22:21 (King David of Israel says):  The LORD has dealt with me according to my sinlessness; according to the cleanness of my hands he has rewarded me.

Who doesn't like feeling clean? That "just-got-out-of-the-shower-after-a-hard-day's-work" kind of clean. Being clean feels good. When your hands are caked in dirt or grease, or your body is tired and sweaty, it is nice to know that a hot shower and a bar of soap can wash it all away. Wouldn't it be great if it were this easy to cleanse our hearts, minds and souls by simply taking a shower with a little soap?  But we cannot cleanse our hearts, minds, and souls so easily. We all have sins which trouble us from long ago. We have sinned this week, and they trouble us now. Maybe this sin is as simple as speaking behind a friend's back. Maybe it is, as the saying goes, a dirty little secret: a thought, perhaps, which creeps into your mind, a thought which is too embarrassing to admit to. It is not so easy to cleanse this type of dirt. No matter how hard we scrub, our souls never seem to come clean like hands under a faucet. Yet when God washes you clean…

Did you know this is why God sent his Son into the world as a man? God saw we needed soul cleansing, to remove the sin and guilt which troubles us. He saw we needed a soul cleansing to remove the sin from his sight, sins which would otherwise condemn us. He saw that there was nothing we could do to cleanse ourselves. He needed to do the cleansing. He sent his Son to do this! ! As 1 John 1:7 reminds us: "The Blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin."

This is why God wants us to come to church regularly. (And it is not to prove how holy we are.) God draws us here to wash us clean of our recurring failures, our embarrassing thoughts, with the blood of Christ. It is God who does the cleansing we crave, a soul-cleansing wash with extra strength spiritual detergent. If the church is preaching faithfully about Jesus the only Savior of sinners, and his soul cleansing blood, we should be able to leave the church service, with our souls feeling like they have just gotten out of the shower. Ahhhhh! When God washes you clean, you are clean indeed!

There is not one of us here today that doesn't need this cleansing. There is not one. Again, we don't come to church because we are such angel goody two shoes. We come here because we know our need: we sin and need to be cleansed, yes, purified by the blood of Christ. For this reason, only He can cleanse our souls after a long week of sins, great or small ones, secret or public ones.

Who then are those who God does cleanse when they come to church? Is it that whoever walks through our doors automatically receives soul cleansing from Christ? Christ cleansing blood comes to each one who has been led by God to confess his sins to Him, (which simply means to admit them, and be sorry about them). God comes to the repentant heart and says "The blood of my Son has washed your sins and guilt down the drain." In his sight, God sees you--the one who has confessed his sins and calls upon Christ--as completely purified in Christ. He sees you as sinless. He wants you to see yourself that way through Christ. If God, the Almighty maker of heaven and earth, has washed your sins and guilt away, who are you to hold on to them and torture yourself with guilt over them when he does not? Instead we should say as King David does this morning: "The LORD has dealt with me according to my sinlessness; according to the cleanness of my hands he has rewarded me" (1 Samuel 22:21).

When you depend on and believe in Christ's blood, shed on the cross to cleanse you, you can say these things, as David does: "In Christ, I am sinless in God's sight! In Christ, my hands are clean in God's sight. In Christ, God has rewarded me with heaven." When God washes you clean you are clean indeed!

Sadly, if we reject Christ, like our sinful hearts want to do, it is like turning off God's shower head of forgiveness. We have to find some other way to get clean. We can try to justify our actions. Justifying our actions is a way we use to feel less guilty about what we have done. For example: "Oh, I know I said some awful things to him. I shouldn't have. But you know, he deserved it." Or, "I know I shouldn't be thinking these things about her; but man, she looks good! Anyway, I am just admiring beauty; it is natural; I can't help myself."  We can also try to cleanse ourselves by doing something nice for someone, especially someone we cut down or let down in the past. We like to believe: "This should help me feel better about myself." When WE try to wash ourselves clean like this, with weak excuses for our actions, or good deeds, INSTEAD of relying on the blood of Christ, we are not any cleaner than before. Without faith in Christ who brings us soul-cleansing forgiveness, God still holds our sins against us.

King David, as we just read, said of himself: I AM sinless in God's sight. My hands ARE clean of sin in Christ, and God has rewarded me, (and the reward he is talking about, above all other things, is heaven itself). Without his Savior, David could not have said this at all. Instead, he would have had to say this: "I am an adulterer. I am a murderer. I have no reward except hell itself, because I have sinned against God."  If you think that Christ came because we are so holy, think again. God gave us Christ because we are not holy at all, like David's life proves.

For instance, King David was an adulterer. It happened one night as he went for a walk on the flat roof of his palace. As he walked around, he spied a woman named Bathsheeba, bathing. She was beautiful! David's heart filled with lust for her. She, of course, was not his wife. Even more, she was the wife of another man. Nevertheless, he sent for her. He lay with her. She became pregnant. And David, he became an adulterer. This certainly is not the picture of someone who is holy and clean is it?

But there is more. David also became a murderer. After he found out that Bathsheeba had become pregnant, he tried to hatch a plan to conceal his part in it. Now Bathsheeba's husband was not at home when David made his advances upon her. In fact, Bathsheeba's husband Uriah, was a soldier in David's army, and was fighting on the front lines. So David, in order to cover his tracks, calls Uriah home from the fighting. When Uriah comes to King David, David said to him, "Go down to your house and wash your feet" (2 Samuel 11:8). David, of course, was hoping that Uriah, once he came home for the night, would sleep with his wife. Then Bathsheeba could tell Uriah it was his baby.

Uriah was apparently a man of high honor. He did not feel right about sleeping in his own bed when his fellow soldiers were on the battlefield. He did not go home, but slept outside. He did not go home the next night either despite David's efforts. David was forced to return Uriah to the battlefield.

Then David hatched another plan: He sent a directive to the battlefield, to His commander-in-chief. "Put Uriah on the front-line, and where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die" (2 Samuel 11:15). This plan worked. Uriah was killed. But King David, having orchestrated Uriah's death, became a murderer, in addition to being an adulterer. His hands were stained with Uriah's blood. Without Christ's cleansing blood, how hard would David have had to scrub to cleanse his soul from these ruthless crimes! It would be impossible. His hands would have been forever stained with Uriah's blood. He would have an eternity in punishment to torment himself about it.

But David did have a Savior who had cleansed him after he repented. As He expresses his sorrow about his sins against Bathsheeba and Uriah in Psalm 32: "Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said: "I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD" and you forgave me the guilt of my sin." David here acknowledges his awful sins. David knew his life was filled with sin. He knew he was a guilty man. He had wronged God. He had broken his commandments. But when God washes you clean…!

Now the million-dollar question to you is this: Are you cleansed of your sins in the blood of Christ? Has God washed YOU clean? Can YOU say, like David, "I am sinless; my hands are clean; God has rewarded me;I am ready to enter heaven!"  Before you answer this question, let me ask you another: Have you been baptized into Christ, and believe in Christ, through that baptismal faith? If you can say "Yes, I am and yes, I do," then God HAS washed you clean and you ARE ready to enter the holy gates of paradise right now! Baptism brings YOU today and each day the one thing that washed King David of sin long ago: the blood of Jesus. Do you want to be confident of your sinlessness in God's sight? Then remember that He has baptized you. Since you are baptized, you are his child, clean, holy and pure in His sight.

The importance of baptism is seen in Christ's word to reluctant Peter, as Christ came to wash his feet on the night of his betrayal: "Unless I wash you, you can have no part of me." But when we are washed, we do have part of him! What a blessing, then, this baptismal washing in Christ is, for child and adult! As Peter says in Acts, chapter two: "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. This promise is for you and your children..."

We all need to be cleansed by God just as badly as King David did, an adulterer and murderer! Although we may not have actually committed the physical acts of murder or adultery, we murder our brother whenever we wish something bad to happen to him: someone at work we believe needs to be put in his place; someone in our extended family who rubs us the wrong way; someone we hold a grudge against, and we just want to make them pay. We become adulterers simply when we lust after a man or woman, even in passing. In God's sight, the thought is equal to the deed! Who can say our hearts are free of these sins!

Again, this is why baptism is such a great blessing to our souls! Heaven is reserved only for those without any sin in God's sight. Only God can wash us clean! As St. Paul testifies: "He saved us not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit who he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior." Today his washing has come to us through Christ's blood! When God washes us clean like this, it is like stepping out of a refreshing shower after a long day's work. We know what that feels like. It feels like: AHHHHHHHH!
                                                                                            Amen!

        Pastor Matthew W. Crick
        Eleventh Sunday After Trinity
        3 September 2000