Step seven: "Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings."

Psalm 51 is basic to the biblical foundation of this step. The introduction to this Psalm sets the context for its writing. Nathan, a prophet of God, went to David, the King of Israel, after David's affair with Bathsheba. David had gained fame and power and wealth. David had not only committed adultery with Bathsheba. When he discovered she was pregnant with his child, David sent her husband, Uriah, into battle, had the troops around him pull back so he would be killed.

David was guilty of lust, intrigue, adultery, treachery and arranging the murder of Uriah. He broke half the ten commandments in one affair. To such serious guilt, this Psalm is addressed.

Nathan then went to David and confronted him with his guilt. There came the awful burst of awareness when David realized what he had done.

David, or whoever actually wrote this about David, was aware that his sin was not simply something involving Bathsheba or her husband or the child conceived out of wedlock. What he did to them was first a sin against God.

When the prodigal son returned home, he said to his father, "I have sinned against heaven and before you." This does not focus first on what moral laws we have broken or what people we have offended, but on the offense to God, the laws of God we have broken.

The psalmist was aware of the inherent weakness we all have. "In sin did my mother conceive me." This is not a moral condemnation of sex, but a commentary on the whole human condition. But even that is no excuse.

His plea talks of "... the bones which thou hast broken." It is not clear that he meant this literally, although serious illness can cause us to take a long look at our life. Maybe he was physically ill. But whatever the circumstances, for him it was a time for self-examination. He knew his physical and/or spiritual condition came as a result of God's punishment for his sin.

He sought to reveal the "inward parts," the muck and mire that is at the bottom of the soul of us all so that he might be cleansed.

Three terms are used for his condition. The first is "transgression," which is a sin of conscious rebellion, the act which violates a known standard, like a private slapping a general. The second word is "iniquity," which is the sin of injustice. That is when the boss recommends a 40 percent raise for himself and five percent for those under him. The third word is "sin," which literally means missing an aimed-at mark. That is like promising ourselves, our family and God that we will spend 10 hours a week with our family, but ending up spending only 30 minutes a week.

So the psalmist pleads for cleansing. There are three words he uses for forgiveness. The first is "blot out," which means to wipe off. It is a term used for the ritual act performed by the priest of washing off into the water curses which he had written on a tablet (Numbers 5:23). It means complete removal of a very damaging entry in God's record book.

The second term is "wash," which refers to the method of washing garments by thorough-going treading with the feet. It is a plea for God to bleach away my sin. Remove the stain of my actions.

The third is "declare me clean," which is a ceremonial term used in the ritual in which the priest pronounces the worshiper clean. The Anchor Bible translates this in its literal meaning:

"Unsin me ... delete all my crimes (vv. 9a, 11b)."

The Psalm writer strikes a bargain with God. If God will forgive him, if God will help him get out from under the load of guilt, he will feel free to do things for God. It does not end with him just feeling bad about what he had done. The best that secular psychology can do is help remove our sense of guilt. Our faith is what moves us to the joy of sharing the good news.

Whether it is grieving over a death or grieving for deeds of the past, bargaining is part of the grief process. "God, if you will grant me this favor, I will do this for you ..." The psalmist is in grief over his sin-filled condition. Therefore he bargains, "Help me get rid of this load of guilt and I am going to tell everyone how good it is to know God forgives, how good it is to walk without being stooped over with guilt."

It is the movement from being the mission field to being the missionary. Our awareness of guilt is the beginning. The end is to be part of the triumphal and joyful community of faith.

The letter to Timothy picks up where the Psalm ends. The New Testament lesson was written by Paul to a young missionary, Timothy. The advice he is giving is how to help those being crushed by their sense of guilt to receive and live this good news.

What would I do if I stopped getting angry all the time? What would I do if I stopped lying to people? How would I start to relate in a decent way to the co-worker who causes me to drool? What would I do with my kids if I stopped yelling at them? What comes after my guilt is removed, my sin taken away, and I am grateful to God? How do I show that?

Paul used the analogy of kitchen plates. He spoke like a man who spent little time in the kitchen, which is to say it is not a very good analogy. What he tried to say was this: The great house is the church, and the Christians are the various utensils. Like a kitchen with different utensils, in the church there are all sorts of conditions of persons. Whatever our place on the shelf, it is for us to make ourselves useful to God.

A plate may look beautiful, but up high on the shelf it is of no practical value. Another plate may have a great deal of practical value, but it never gets cleaned up, so it is not used. It is the cleanliness of the inside and what fills the vessel that determines its value.

Paul also gives the advice that for us to succeed in this mission work, there has to be honesty in asking God to give us strength to do what we ought to do, both in our personal life and in our church life. We are bound for failure if we try to depend on our own power.

Avoid being filled with evil by filling yourself with good. Your life will be filled with some spirit, with some activity. Your mind will be filled with some thoughts. We need God's strength to shun youthful passions and instead seek to fill our thoughts and actions with righteousness, faith, love and peace.

We know that in the church, we have not always reached the high calling to which we have been called. Paul talks about a major reason for that failure. I have heard someone define true community as occurring when the last person you want to attend a meeting shows up first, and if they don't, someone else just like them will.

Some think that their job is to purge the community of all errors in thinking. Some think there has to be someone in opposition or something is wrong. I remember my father telling me that in every church there needed to be an "SOB," and my father designated himself to fill that role. I trust that now he is singing with the angels, that he has mellowed.

Contrary to such thinking, what the gospel says is: "Having nothing to do with stupid, senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, forebearing, correcting his opponents with gentleness."

Most arguments reflect our willingness to have God remove someone else's shortcomings. Whether we are right or wrong, most arguments reflect our willingness to have God correct someone else's failures. However good our intentions, Paul has other advice. We do not win people to the way of Christ by winning an argument between us and them.

I believe the style of "invitational evangelism" is more appropriate. We do not club people over the head with the truth, nor badger them into repentance. We wait for God to let the person hear. Since we do not know when God is going to do that, we may freely and frequently invite folks to accept a new way of life, but leave them with the free choice to accept or reject this.

"God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth, and they may escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will."

There is an interesting note at the end of this passage. Paul lifted up the promise that "They may escape from the snare of the devil. The Lord may grant them a change of heart and show them the truth, and thus they may come to their senses ..." The Greek word for change of heart literally means "to become sober again" or "come to one's senses." We have been in the therapy business from the start!

It is to such a new life that we issue the invitation. People may have trouble listening because they are so aware of their sins that they cannot believe that God will really forgive them and give them a new life. Others cannot enter a new life of faith because they may not be willing to admit before God their true nature.

The gospel tells us about Jesus talking to a group of folks like that. The Pharisees were a group of religious people who were certain of their own goodness. The self-pronounced righteous were often in conflict with Christ.

This passage finds Christ talking bluntly. It does not sound like gentle Jesus, meek and mild. It is more like the voice David must have heard when Nathan confronted him with the sins of his passion.

There are seven "woes" with which Christ confronted them. The word translated "woe" is more an expression of sorrow and lamentation than of threat and fury. "You sorry creatures, trapped in your illusions of righteousness. I want you to really see yourself." It is like a doctor pleading with a patient to give up a deadly habit or have a life-saving operation.

The passage we heard had the last three "woes." The cleansing of cups and of hands before eating was an important ceremony with the Jews, not on grounds of hygiene or physical cleanliness, but because of the danger of ceremonial impurity.

Jesus said that if you were as careful to see that the contents of vessels were derived in honorable and just ways, you would not have to worry very much about the ceremonial cleanliness of the outside of the cup. You worry about how to knot your tie and fluff your hair. Better for you to worry about how you earned the money to buy the tie and get your hair done.

The next "woe" had to do with graves. They did not have graveyards laid out as we do. The commonest place for tombs was by the roadside. They considered walking over a grave caused a person to be polluted, and in order to enter the temple this had to be avoided.

At the time Jesus spoke, the roads were crowded with pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem for the Passover. Before the Passover, graves were chalked off and the stones whitewashed so the pilgrims going to the city might not inadvertently walk over them. These tombs would literally have glittered in the sun, having just been whitewashed.

For a person to become unclean on the way to the Passover Feast would be like spilling grape juice all over the new outfit just as you were on the way out the door for an Easter service. We all try to look good going to church. We are sparkling clean. But what about the inside? Are we just like those whitewashed tombs, just full of dead bones inside? Are we like T.S. Eliot's hollow man?

The seventh woe finds Jesus speaking to those who get tied up in the "if only's" of life. "If only I had lived in the brave days of the past, I would not have done the evil that my ancestors did. If only I were there, how much better I would have been than my fathers. They were the ones who killed the special messengers of God. We don't do that." This is the spirit of self-righteousness that Jesus rejects.

They honored those whom their ancestors ignored and sometimes slayed. Abel is the first one killed in the Bible. In the Jewish ordering of the books of the Bible, Zechariah is the last (2 Chronicles 24:20-21). Zechariah was a faithful priest of God who was murdered within the court of the temple when he tried to call the people to obey the commandments of God.

We can honor those messengers by raising memorials to their greatness, like the Lincoln Memorial or the King Center. Christ said that monuments can be a superficial way of showing honor. True honor is shown by living in the spirit of the prophets and carrying into practice their teachings. It is nice to fantasize about how good we would be if we lived in pre-Civil War days when slavery still existed in this state. But living in a past we never knew can cause us to miss the opportunities of the present which is where God is claiming us.

Like much of what appears in the Bible, humility is not popular today. We do not like to hear the woes of our condition. We are taught to admire rugged independence, an upwardly mobile ambition, the ability to stand up for ourselves. Humility brings reminders of feeling bad about ourselves, embarrassing moments that made us feel small, the terribly awkward time at the junior high dance.
Christian humility really has nothing to do with putting down ourselves or being put down by others. Humility has to do with understanding our worth before God. Humility has to do with the reality of our condition and the need for a power higher than our own. That is what the Scripture speaks to in ways people often do not like: the truth about our human condition.

Robert Burns talked about the gift to see ourselves as others see us. What we work on the hardest is for others to see us as we see ourselves.

What we should let God do for us is to help us see ourselves as we really are, not as others see us or as we see ourselves, but to see ourselves as God sees us - all the sins and all the promise of salvation.

That is what these passages of Scripture are about. They help us see where we are on our journey of life and faith, so that in spirit and in truth we will be led to humbly ask God to remove all our shortcomings.