If You Only Knew by Jamie Ivey

Author:Jamie Ivey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Christian Life/Women's Issues
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

Among the changes and fresh motivations that God inspired in me, in the aftermath of this weekend collapse, was a craving for His Word. In particular, I clung to every story in the Bible that told about someone who loved God but messed up big-time.

The truth is, of course, people messing up is pretty much the whole story of the Bible. Everybody in there was a sinful person, like we’re all sinful people, and except for Jesus (because He had no sin and IS GOD), there’s not a single one of them whose sin doesn’t show up somewhere. But I was hunting for the big sinners. Like me. (I realize all our sins are big to God, that there’s no such thing as a little sin. But I was in the middle of trying to rid myself of what, to me, was my own personal “big sin,” and I wanted to see how somebody, anybody, in Scripture had dealt with making the big-sin choices I had made.)

I found him in David.

I was already familiar with his story, of course, as I’m sure you probably are too. But in the midst of my particular season of failing, David’s story became water for my soul. The Bible calls him “a man after [God’s] own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14), who God chose to be king of Israel. He was flawed but amazing, and God would use him for so many great things. He wrote many of the psalms we still read in the Bible, and his love for the Lord was absolutely contagious.

But despite his deep love for God, he made a horrible decision one night. He put himself in a position where the possibility of being lured into sexual temptation could easily happen, and he invited another man’s wife to his room in the palace.

David’s life, going forward, would continually bear some of the scars that resulted from this one night of sin and the other compromises that followed. I’m not trying in any way to minimize the evil of sin and how it hurts, wounds, and impacts everybody and everything in its path. But when brought face-to-face with his failures, David continued crying out to God. Most important, he never stopped loving Him. And as someone dealing with David’s kind of shame and embarrassment over my latest mess-up, the experience of reading again what David did and what God did was healing to my broken heart.

I remember taking his words from Psalm 51 and turning them into my own prayer:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! (Ps. 51:1–2)

I began to pray the same things to God that David expressed here, asking Him to cleanse me from my sin and to have mercy on me because of His enormous love for me. And God was doing that in my world. He was using my transgressions against Him to teach me His unwavering love toward me—just like He did with David after the same sort of sin.

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