Why does God care who I sleep with? by Sam Allberry

Author:Sam Allberry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784985110
Publisher: The Good Book Company

What we need to do

Look at the first couple of lines of David’s Psalm:

Have mercy on me, O God,

according to your unfailing love;

according to your great compassion

blot out my transgressions.

Wash away all my iniquity

and cleanse me from my sin. Psalm 51 v 1-2

David has failed spectacularly. He knows he has failed God. But he also knows that the best place to go when you’ve failed God is to God himself. It would have been easy for David (as it is for us) to think, I’ve really blown it. I can’t possibly go anywhere near God now. There’s a sense in which that should be true: we’re really not people who should have any business with a God who claims to be good.

But David has already learnt something about God, and it’s right there in those opening lines. David is not crying out to God in utter desperation, thinking that even an outside chance that God would listen to him is better than nothing. No, David calls out to God based on what he knows God is like. David asks for mercy: for God to blot out and wash away all his wrongdoing. He asks God to treat him as if he had never done the things which he has done. But he asks God to do this not as a favour to a king but according to God’s own ways—according to God’s own “unfailing love” and “great compassion”. These are words God has used to describe himself at key moments throughout the Old Testament. God advertises himself to be “the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34 v 6). This is God’s favourite way to speak of himself; it’s his pinned tweet. It is at the very heart of who God is to be compassionate, gracious, loving and faithful.

David has learned this along the way. So he comes to God and asks for what is seemingly impossible because God has shown himself to be the kind of God who does impossibly kind things for people who don’t deserve them at all.

We tend to think that if God loves us, it has to be because we have made ourselves worthy of his love. But this is not the case. God loves us because of what he’s like more than because of what we’re like.[32] He loves us because he is utterly loving, not because we’re utterly loveable.

David knew this, and we can know it too. None of us deserve God’s love. But all of us can receive it. If David could, then we can. We’re not so good that we don’t need to come to God asking for mercy. And we’re not so bad that we can’t. Whatever we’ve done, whatever we’ve viewed, whatever we’ve thought. No amount of sexual sin is enough to mean you can’t turn to God.

That God is like this is what makes Christianity good news. A God like this is one we can be honest with about our failings.

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