Special Tests for Special Purposes – Part 8

There is a prayer at the end of Psalm 19: 12-13 it says, “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of great transgression.” I have come to see that secret faults are not secrets that we keep from other people, much less from God. They are secrets to us, faults in our own character that we do not recognize.

David describes them as presumptuous sins, sins that we commit when we presume that our conduct is acceptable to God, when in fact it offends Him. Very often God will not reveal such sins to us until we deliberately choose to humble ourselves and invite God to search our character and to lay bare our inmost motives. Once we clear that what we are passing through really is a test from God, we need to make sure that “all our bases are covered” (to borrow a phrase from baseball.)

Repentance is perhaps the basic Christian doctrine which is least emphasized by contemporary preachers. Only believe is a sweet sounding message but it is not scriptural to the end of the New Testament, the message is, “first repent then believe.”