Whiter Than Snow E-Book

Paul David Tripp

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

What do you do when you've really blown it? Is sin really as dangerous and is grace really as powerful as the Bible says they are? Is there such a thing as a new beginning? Sin and grace-these are the two themes of our lives. We all blow it and we all need to start over again. In Psalm 51, David tells his story of moral failure, personal awareness, grief, confession, repentance, commitment, and hope. And because David's story is every believer's story, Psalm 51 is every believer's psalm. It tells how we, as broken sinners, can be brutally honest with God and yet stand before him without fear. Whiter Than Snow unpacks this powerful little psalm in fifty-two meditations, reminding readers that by God's grace there is mercy for every wrong and grace for every new beginning. Designed for busy believers, these brief and engaging meditations are made practical by the reflection questions that conclude each chapter.

Leseprobe

Whiter Than Snow: Meditations on Sin and Mercy

Copyright © 2008 by Paul David Tripp

Published by Crossway Booksa publishing ministry of Good News Publishers1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Jessica Dennis

Cover photo: Ilona Wellmann, Trevillion Images

First printing 2008

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked MESSAGE are from The Message. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Scripture references marked NIV are from The Holy Bible: New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture quotations marked AT are the author’s translation.

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-0460-0

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-0461-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tripp, Paul David, 1950–

Whiter than snow : meditations on sin and mercy / Paul David Tripp.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4335-0230-9 (tpb)

1. Miserere—Meditations. I. Title.

BS1430.54.T75          2008

242'.5—dc22

2008004192

VP        18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10  0915  14  13  12  11  10   9  8  7   6  5  4  3   2

I have lived itand I know that it is true—Your mercies are new every morning.

Contents

Preface: Once a Week with Mercy

The Story

meditations

1 Mercy Me: Psalm 51 and Everyday Life

2 On Being Sustained

3 Something in My Hands I Bring

4 Big Grace

5 A Rabbi and Two Imams

6 Accurate Self-assessment

7 Violent Grace

8 Aren’t You Glad You’re Not Like David?

9 No More “If Only”

10 Something Bigger

11 Romans 7

12 Darkness and Light

13 The Dance of Redemption

14 Sin—It’s Everywhere, It’s Everywhere!

15 Sinners and Unafraid

16 The Gospel of Prosperity

17 Somebody Else

18 Unfailing Love

19 The Lord’s Prayer

20 Nathan’s Legacy

21 What in the World Is Hyssop?

22 Moral Vulnerability

23 Everyone’s a Teacher

24 Natal Trauma

25 Wrecking Balls and Restoration

26 When God Is Glad

27 Sin Is a Relationship

28 The Holy of Holies

29 The Terrible Trinity

30 Longing for Jesus

31 Already, Not Yet

32 Your Ultimate Fear

33 Building the Walls

34 Enough

35 What Does It Have to Do with Me?

36 Immanuel

37 Hoping for a Broken Heart

38 Wisdom Is a Person

39 The Hardening of the Heart

40 The Grace of a Clean Heart

41 Righteous Judgment

42 God’s Pleasure

43 Sermon on the Mount

44 Appealing to God’s Glory

45 Sacrifices

46 The Amazing Grace of Self-knowledge

47 Forgiveness

48 Grace That Hides

49 Broken Bones

50 Ready, Willing, and Waiting

51 Reductionism

52 Celebrating Redemption

PrefaceOnce a Week with Mercy

It all started with a sleepless night, a condition that many of us can relate to. But it explodes into a story of lust, adultery, pregnancy, deception, and murder. If the story of David and Bathsheba were a television drama, you wouldn’t watch it, or a paperback, you wouldn’t choose to buy it. Yet, the terrible details of this ugly story splash across the pages of that religious book you and I call the Bible. Why would God preserve such a dark story? Who is the sex and blood of this story going to help anyway?

These are good questions to ask and worthy of answers. First, the New Testament (1 Corinthians 10) tells us that these things were written for our example and our instruction so that we would not fall into the same errors as God’s people of old. Yes, this story is in the Bible because it is meant to be instructive. The details are not there to titillate you, but to help you understand things you need to understand about yourself, God, life in a fallen world, the nature of sin, and the power of God’s transforming grace. Second, the Bible tells us that the people in this story were people just like us. As you read through the Bible, you know that its history is not filled with accounts of noble people who always did the right thing. No, the characters of the Bible, even the ones that we would tend to think of as heroes, were broken and flawed people. They, like us, were all sinners and, like us, all needed to be rescued by God’s grace. “Rescued from what?” you might ask. Just like us, they needed to be rescued from themselves.

Think about David, whose story of temptation and sin is the backdrop of the psalm that provides the content for these meditations. When you read about all the war between nations and bloody power struggles that surrounded David’s reign, it would be tempting to think that David’s biggest enemy was the warring nation around him. But what this story demonstrates is that David carried his most powerful enemy around with him. That enemy lived inside of him. That enemy lives inside us as well. That enemy is called sin.

It would also be tempting to think that the greatest victory in David’s life was his victory over the Philistines with their mighty Goliath. Yet this story, and the psalm that goes with it, points us to the fact that the greatest victory in David’s life was not a victory of war but a victory of grace. It is amazing to watch this hardened adulterer and murderer brought to confession and repentance by the power of God’s grace. And it is incredible that he does not lose his throne and, in fact, becomes a man who is known as “a man after God’s own heart”! The greatest victory in David’s life was not a victory of David’s at all, but, rather, God’s victory of grace over the sin that had captivated David’s heart.

You’ll never get David’s story or the expansive helpfulness of Psalm 51 if you stand apart from the story and say to yourself, “I am so glad that I am not like David!” To say that completely misses the point. This story is in the Bible precisely because David’s story is your story. No, I don’t mean that you are an adulterer and a murderer. What I mean is that, like David, you are a sinner. There are times when you let yourself be ruled by your self-focused desires rather than by God’s clear commands. There are times when you love something in the creation more than you love the Creator. There are times when you willingly step over God’s boundaries in pursuit of what you want. There are times when your little kingdom of one means more to you than his transcendent kingdom of glory. There are times when you work hard to deny what you have done or to cover your tracks in fear of being caught.

David’s story is our story, so Psalm 51 is our psalm as well. This psalm of moral failure, personal awareness, grief, confession, repentance, commitment, and hope wraps its arms around the experience of each one of us. These themes are in each of our lives. But the dominant theme of Psalm 51 is not sin. The dominant theme of Psalm 51 is grace. There would be no Psalm 51 if a God of boundless love hadn’t sent Nathan to David as an instrument of rescuing mercy and restoring grace.

Psalm 51 is about how God meets us in our moments of deepest failure and transforms us by his grace. It is about how broken sinners can be brutally honest with God and yet stand before him without fear. All of the themes of sin, grace, and redemption are compacted into this powerful little psalm.

Come and look at yourself in the mirror of Psalm 51. Stop and look at the picture of your Lord that is painted by the words of this psalm. Let your ears hear the music of grace that is so beautifully played here. Take just one day a week and let yourself be transformed by the mercy that is not only the hope of this psalm but of your life and mine as well. And take time each week to celebrate the grace that is the greatest victory in your life as well.

Permit me to introduce the tool that you have in your hands. This is not the classic devotional that you are probably used to. Generally, those devotionals do a careful exegesis of a passage of the Bible and then draw out personal applications for you. This set of biblical meditations was put together in a very different way. Let me use a musical illustration. I have approached Psalm 51 like a piece of sheet music. The key signature, the time signature, the notes, and the dynamic markings that are on the page are there because that is precisely what the Great Composer designed to be there. This devotional book is not my attempt to help you to understand each note on the page. No, this book is more like jazz. While endeavoring to stay inside God’s key signature and time signature, I have attempted to introduce to you creative, practical, everyday-life riffs on the themes that make up the music of grace of this wonderful psalm.

Think about it. This is exactly how you live your life as a Christian. God hasn’t given you in the Bible the exact notes to play in every situation of your life. No, in the Bible, he gives you a divinely inspired musical structure (the history, command, principles, and perspectives that flow out of the narrative of Scripture) and invites you to improvise harmoniously with him. In this way, the life of a believer is more like jazz than it is like playing off sheet music. So, what you have in your hands is devotional jazz, designed to help you improvise more harmoniously with the Great Composer.

Because this psalm speaks into a dark moment of a child of God in the middle of the difficulties and temptations of life in a fallen world, it is brimming with themes that touch all of our lives. But the thing that is most engaging and exciting about this psalm is that no psalm plays the notes of God’s grace better. The music of grace is meant to score the life of every believer. May it be so for you, and may this book contribute to making sweet improvisational music with your Redeemer right where you live every day.

The Story

The Story of David and Bathsheba

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.

It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness.) Then she returned to her house. And the woman conceived, and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant.”

So David sent word to Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” And Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab was doing and how the people were doing and how the war was going. Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and wash your feet.” And Uriah went out of the king’s house, and there followed him a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the door of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord, and did not go down to his house. When they told David, “Uriah did not go down to his house,” David said to Uriah, “Have you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house?” Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field. Shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife? As you live, and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing.” Then David said to Uriah, “Remain here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back.” So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day and the next. And David invited him, and he ate in his presence and drank, so that he made him drunk. And in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord, but he did not go down to his house.

In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote, “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, that he may be struck down, and die.” And as Joab was besieging the city, he assigned Uriah to the place where he knew there were valiant men. And the men of the city came out and fought with Joab, and some of the servants of David among the people fell. Uriah the Hittite also died. Then Joab sent and told David all the news about the fighting. And he instructed the messenger, “When you have finished telling all the news about the fighting to the king, then, if the king’s anger rises, and if he says to you, ‘Why did you go so near the city to fight? Did you not know that they would shoot from the wall? Who killed Abimelech the son of Jerubbesheth? Did not a woman cast an upper millstone on him from the wall, so that he died at Thebez? Why did you go so near the wall?’ then you shall say, ‘Your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.’”

So the messenger went and came and told David all that Joab had sent him to tell. The messenger said to David, “The men gained an advantage over us and came out against us in the field, but we drove them back to the entrance of the gate. Then the archers shot at your servants from the wall. Some of the king’s servants are dead, and your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.” David said to the messenger, “Thus shall you say to Joab, ‘Do not let this matter trouble you, for the sword devours now one and now another. Strengthen your attack against the city and overthrow it.’ And encourage him.”

When the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she lamented over her husband. And when the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD.