In Psalm 51 David cried out to God - begging for God's mercy - begging for God to blot out his transgressions - begging for a clean heart and a right spirit, and even begging that the  bones that God had broken would rejoice. David was a broken man - laid bare and crying out before God. And 4 days after I'd crushed my bride and broken her heart - I found myself instinctively praying the same exact things.

So I searched, I found the passage - I read it - and I read it again, scarcely able to comprehend how precisely this Psalm expressed my heart at that moment. Through tears my eyes moved back up the page and I saw that it was a Psalm of David - but then I saw this note - that he'd written Psalm 51 after his affair with Bathsheba... I that's when I knew - for the first time - that my heart was responding as a man after God's own heart.  I knew that for the first time I was truly contrite and filled with remorse over my sin. I was the man of Psalm 51, but I didn't necessarily want to stay that man. And that's where 52 comes in.

David wrote Psalm 51 - and he also wrote psalm 52. Now Psalm 52 is not chronologically next in David's life after Psalm 51, but for some divinely ordained reason, it directly follows it. And the conclusion of Psalm 52 is where I want to be. It is where I want to dwell. In Psalm 52 two men are presented - the first, the evil man, in my eyes this man clearly represents my addiction, he is boastful, destructive, deceitful, loves evil more than good, and most definitively, he is a liar. But psalm 52 says that God will break this man down forever.

Contrasted with this evil man exists the trusting man. The man who has gone through the pain, the man who has faced the broken bones, the man who has been purged and washed. And this man - in psalm 52:8-9, this man is like a luxurious olive tree in the house of God,

he trusts in the steadfast love of God forever and forever.

He thanks God forever because he knows that God has done it. What a beautiful picture. And this is where I am, trusting in the everlasting love of God because God has done it - God has sustained me - God has given me a message and a calling. I am dependent on this dream - and others are dependent on my dream as well.

No longer am I that evil man. No longer am I lost and flailing as I search for God. The desperation that permeated me as the man in Psalm 51 gave me immense passion for, and a renewed attitude toward my beloved. No longer was this something I could do as I felt like it, no longer was this something that was merely a part of my life. I knew that the desperation and the brokenness I felt had to become all encompassing. And that desperation has changed my life. I have been redeemed.

And my mission is to bring broken people from the place of Psalm 51 to the peace of Psalm 52.