IBS Application for Psalms 32:1-4

“Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah”

From David’s own experience, it would seem that silence before the Lord when a response is required is a path to suffering. But in confession and repentance, there is blessing and respite from the pain and weight of sin. This makes sense, and I will attempt to explain why using my own experience with this issue.

I have attempted to keep sins hidden from those around me, the Lord included, that I was ashamed to admit out loud, partly because I feel in those moments as though admitting them would make them true of me, despite the fact that they were already true, and that even if ordinary people couldn’t see them, God could. One of these sins was pride. Not regular pride, but what could be called “inverted pride.” In my inverted pride, I knew that I was inadequate in my own strength, and I hated that about myself. In fact, I still do. You may think that this isn’t pride, because I recognized my own failure, but what I did with this acknowledgement makes it prideful.

I don’t always take my own weakness before the Lord and ask for His grace and strength. In fact, I have an incredibly hard time doing so, because I feel as though I have to be good enough and sufficient in my own power, as incredibly inferior as it is when compared to the power of my Father in heaven. So I try to be good enough, and inevitably come up short, even though Christ has paid the price for my sins and been good enough and strong enough to shoulder my burden for me, which is incredibly prideful; I essentially tell Him that His work on the cross wasn’t good enough when I try to do good on my own. On top of all of this, I don’t listen to the Spirit’s conviction of my pride and self-condemn when I fail.

This cycle of pride doesn’t stop itself on it’s own. It has only been because God lays His hand upon my heavily, as He did with David, that I come to realize that I was being prideful in the first place. Often times, He’ll simply give me over to the consequences of my actions and let me see the depth of my failure. But He never fails to still shower me with grace in these times, as He never lets me fall too far into the depths, but just enough for me to realize that I need to turn to Him and ask for forgiveness. And of course, He is always willing to forgive me, and recenter me in His will.

I still struggle with this sometimes, but God has begun to show me more and more just how much I need Him, and I feel more free of my pride than I have ever before. His grace and strength are made perfect in weakness, and I can testify to this. But as I have not yet been able to completely be rid of this problem, and likely have more sins that I have to confess, I have to continue to seek forgiveness of them. My application for this IBS will be to pray for the next three days at the beginning of each day that God would lay His hand upon me in the same ways He already has for my pride and my self-condemnation, so that I may continue to be made free of not only those sins, but those sins that I am unaware of, and seek forgiveness for those sins when they are brought to the surface.