I have sinned against the LORD

These were the words of David immediately after Nathan busted David for having an affair with a married woman and having her husband killed when that woman became pregnant with David's love child. Strange really. He did not say, “I have sinned against Bathsheba, whose life I have disrupted and whose unborn child I have endangered”. He did not say “I have sinned against Uriah the Hittite who was one of my closest friends and stood by me when most everyone around was trying to kill me and I was relegated to living in caves.” Nope. “I have sinned against the LORD” were his words.

I can only imagine the horror David felt as he was being outed for his sins. It is a horror that we ALL can identify with at some level. The horror of getting caught. Oh we usually try to mask the horror and try to paint a happy face on it and call it repentance, but really, it is horror. It should not be confused with remorse or true repentance, since none (or at best little) of those feelings were present after the commission of those things you now stand accused of. Let there be no mistake, like David, your horror is of being caught, busted. The root of David's sin is that David, as we all of us tend to do, began to be contemptuous of God. He started down a path of not caring about what God wanted. He got comfortable with being “away” from God. David stopped seeing God as his savior, provider and protector. He stopped acknowledging God as his strength and started to ignore God's laws.

This does not happen over night, but it is a slow gradual descent, until one day, someone, perhaps a friend (or a prophet) says “you are that man”. Then it hits us like a ton of bricks how foolish we had been. Let us repent now for the contempt of God that creeps into our lives like weeds in a garden and guard our hearts against such situations that would draw us away from God. Let us again become sensitive to the Holy Spirit and be steadfast in our devotion to God and not entertain thoughts or actions of contempt for God, His will or His desires for us.

May we never again need to utter the words “I have sinned against the LORD”.