I’ve never been much for mathematics.  Not my long suite.  Doesn’t add up.  The only ‘D’ grade I ever earned was in junior high algebra.  Pocket calculators and computers save my financial planning career more times than not!

Reading Psalm 51, let’s pay attention to the Lord’s forgiving ways, as King David pours out his guilt-ridden heart to God, whose mercy and love he counts on.  So many verbs keep adding and multiplying–‘Blot out…wash me…cleanse me…purge me…create in me a clean heart…restore me…uphold me…deliver me’.  Sin…subtracted and divided.

Am I the only one who confesses sins to God yet feels like they’re still hanging around my neck?  Give Him my failures only to take them back like a boomerang?  That’s how it feels.  Does forgiveness give me the runaround?

No.  Not at all.  Unless forgiveness depends on me, I and myself.  But that’s not how it is.  It’s all up to Him.  Jesus takes my sin as if in a huge cup, which He feverishly gulps down, good riddance to the last drop.  Gone.

Hope can be found in Psalm 51.  The first half (vs. 1-9) shouts out confession.  Owning up.  Fessing up.  Coming clean with God.  Sin and its synonyms can be found twelve times.  God only once.  Then moving to the second half (vs. 10-19), we find God referenced six times with sin only twice.

What gives?  Think about it.  It’s as if we’ve emptied ourselves of sin by being humble and honest with God.  He empties us of failure, taking all of it on Himself on the cross, and then filling us with Himself with what’s been null and void which now becomes fully His.

This week spend time in Psalm 51.  Allow Jesus to divide and subtract any of sin’s rot and decay, all the while adding and multiplying Himself within our daily lives, making us clean as a whistle.  Free as a bird.  Scrubbed and spotless.  In apple-pie order.  Enjoy?  Why not?

Thank you, Jesus, for new life… forever.  Amen.