Make My Heart Clean and New

At the top of Psalm 51 there is a short note:
For the choir leader. A song of David,
when Nathan the prophet came to him.

King David had taken Bathsheba, another man's wife, as if she were his own.
Then, to hide it, he had her husband, Uriah, killed in battle.
God sent Nathan to him, and David could not hide anymore.

So David wrote a prayer,
and then he did something odd for a king.
He gave it to the choir.
(Most kings liked songs about how strong and wise they were.
This king had his worst day set to music for everybody to sing.)

That is how David's prayer stopped being only David's.
Anyone who had done wrong and wanted to come back to God
found the words already there,
and they fit a child's mouth as well as a king's:

"Have mercy on me, God,
because your love keeps its promises.
Wipe my wrongs off your page.

I know what I did.
I did wrong to other people,
but most of all I did wrong to you,
and you are right about me.
Wrong has been tangled up in me
since before I was born.

You want truth deep inside me,
so teach me wisdom in the hidden rooms of my heart.
Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
Turn your face away from my wrongs,
and wipe out every one of them."

(In David's day, ink could be scrubbed off a scroll.
David was asking God to scrub his record
until there was nothing left to read.)

"Make a clean heart in me, O God.
Put a new and steady spirit inside me.
Do not send me away from you.
Do not take your Holy Spirit from me.
Give me back the joy of being rescued,
and make me willing to obey."

(The word David used for make is the same word
on the Bible's very first page:
In the beginning God created.
In the Bible, only God ever does that kind of making.
David wanted a new heart, made by God
the way the world was made.)

"Then I will show other wrongdoers the way home,
and they will come back to you.
Open my mouth, Lord,
and I will tell everyone how good you are.
If sheep on the altar could fix this,
I would bring sheep until the altar ran out of room.
But what you want is a heart that is truly sorry.
A heart like that, O God,
you will never turn away."

David could ask for a new heart, but he could not make one.
Only God can make a heart new.
And the choir kept singing his prayer for hundreds of years,
because every new singer needed it too.

Then God answered it himself.
A man with no wrong of his own died on a cross
to wipe other people's wrongs off God's page,
and on the third day he was alive.
One of his friends, Peter, had said three times that he did not know him.
By the lake, the risen man asked Peter three times, "Do you love me?"
Then he gave Peter his sheep to look after.
He did not send Peter away.

A few weeks later, God poured out his Holy Spirit on them,
and Peter opened his mouth in Jerusalem,
and about three thousand people came home to God,
just as David's song said they would.
Jesus had given Peter a clean heart,
and Peter could not stop telling everyone how good God is.