Yesterday I sent up a little telegram to the Lord for a little cool air. About eleven o'clock he sent a special delivery. One man come running by, he says, God got your telegram. Since then I've met people who are not satisfied and say, it's getting too cold. I see they got the doors all bolted down. I just want to tell the rest of you people are not happy with the cool weather. Don't talk to me. You talk to the man that sent it. And I like it. I hope we have another day of it and put a benediction on with a little rain, too. Many years ago, shortly after I was saved, the Lord and His goodness and kindness brought me into a fellowship of believers in Chicago meeting at a Gospel Hall known as Washington Heights Gospel Hall. I hadn't been attending very, very long when one of the Scotsmen or maybe was an Irishman, because they were the predominant ones that attended there, took me to the side and said to me, as best I can remember, he said, young man, how long have you been saved? That's always a very opening question I said well I've been saved about four months he said I want to tell you a little something he said if you want to enjoy your salvation keep sharks accounts with God he says do you know what I'm talking about I says no I don't he says well I'll tell you and he did that's been fifty two years ago I don't know who that brother was But in fifty-two years, I've come to learn a little bit what he had in mind, that this business of keeping short accounts with God means maintaining our walk with God so that we're on a fellowship basis with him. I have a sneaking suspicion. I may be wrong, but I have this kind of a deep down feeling that a lot of the weakness I see and a lot of the coldness I see and a lot of the disgruntleness I see and the discontentment I see and a lot of the overall weakness it seems to be pervading many assemblies and the lethargy is nothing more than the result of a lot of us not knowing what it is to keep short account of God. You know, we wash our clothes in tide and we bathe our bodies with spring, Irish spring, whatever they call it, and we spray with right guard and we chew certs. And I wonder sometimes, brethren, whether we're not keeping the outer man just a little bit in better shape than the inner man. If some of us were to take as many showers and baths as we have spent time and cleansing our souls in our daily walk with God, some of us would not be very presentable. Some of us wouldn't look too good, and some of us certainly wouldn't smell too good either. I'm really concerned about that. In my own life, I realize over so many years that a good deal of time I find myself having to get this old preacher or this old Christian's words into practice and keeping short accounts with God. And I want to talk to you this morning about the effect of sin in a Christian's life and the power of cleansing on the part of God. And I'd like to have you turn, if you will, now to the fifty-first psalm, and we'll draw our lesson from this psalm. Can a Christian sin? It's a testimony of fact. Yes, he can. But a Christian can't sin and break fellowship with God without suffering. And suffering follows sin in a believer's life like night follows day. And I wonder sometimes if this matter of our concern about our personal walk and fellowship with the Lord Jesus has been perhaps overshouted by a wrong conception of what cleansing involves. I don't think that any one of us here today would feel that going into the shower in the morning and walking into the shower at night and washing several times in between those two events was a sign that a person was a poor citizen, was a careless individual. I think on the contrary, it indicates that a person has got considerable concern about his body, about his person. And I feel the same way as I read the scriptures that cleansing was not something in the mind of God, which indicated that there was a diabolical rebellion on the part of his people from God, but rather it was a necessity which his people had to practice. If I understand the Old Testament right, when the priest came into the tabernacle, they had to wash daily thereby, lest they die. Jesus in speaking to Peter said, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me. Jesus speaking in John fifteen says, Now are you clean through the word which I've spoken unto you. Paul says in Ephesians chapter five, he says, Christ loved the church and gave himself forth, that he might sanctify and cleanse it by the washing of water through words. And John, as he nears the end of his tenure, he says, as we contemplate the return of the Lord Jesus, he that hath his hope in himself purifies himself even as he's pure. Brother, I'm not going to avoid anybody here today if you took a shower this morning or took several last week. I'm not going to say that's an indication you're a dirty person. To me, it indicates that you're a careful and a considerate person. And we need to see that cleansing for the believer is just as much a daily necessity as it is for us to cleanse our outer body. And I really wonder sometimes if we understand it that way. In the twenty-third Psalm, David said, He restores my soul. And that's put in between two places where God was leading him. And right in the middle of it, he says, He restores my soul. You say, my, I don't think you'd need restoration when he's being led by God at the beginning and at the end. In the middle, he says, he restores my soul. It shows that even in the midst of walking in fellowship with God, there's a need for constant cleansing and restoration. It isn't something that we let lie dormant. Now, an old country preacher said this. He says, sin will take you further than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay. Now David had sinned. He had sinned horribly. He had sinned hurtfully, hatefully, and hellishly. You know the story as well as it do, but I want to go into this psalm. It's a very beautiful psalm. It's a psalm that's run from the heart of a psalmist. It tells us its innermost feelings as he came face to face with the fact that even he had to keep short accounts with his God. For brevity's sake, I want you to notice verse two. Here we find that the psalmist says, wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity. The first thing that I want us to notice in connection with sin as it touches a believer's life, and every one of us is affected by it one way or another by thought or by deed or whatever it might be. The very first thing is that it gave him a sense of being soiled. Therefore he says, wash me. His first request was to be washed. Now David bathed, no doubt, in a marble bathtub. And he knew what it was to have a clean body. But, you know, David's not talking about his body. Here he's talking about his soul, and his soul felt dirty. One way to tell if you're a Christian, how do you feel after sin touches your life? Do you feel soiled? Do you feel unclean? You know, one thing about a believer, he's very sensitive to the fact of defilement when sin comes into his life. A non-believer is never affected that way. You see, when a Christian sins, he doesn't feel clean. He feels loathsome. When a sinner sins, he leaps into sin and he loves it because it's something that is very compatible to his nature and his disposition. You know, when a pig falls or gets into a mud puddle, it never worries about being dirty, but you take a sheep and put it in the same mud puddle and it's quite disturbed because its nature is contrary to that kind of filth. So I think the first thing that we have to notice is that David had a keen sense of feeling soil. That's the first thing that occurs. Now the second thing is in verse three. He says, My sin is ever before me. Night and day when a Christian sins and is not put away, not dealt with, it has a tendency to of getting etched into his mind and into his memory. Now here again there's a difference between a non-Christian and a Christian. You see, an unsafe person can sin and forget it. A Christian cannot sin and forget it. You know why? The Holy Spirit won't let him. The Holy Spirit will not allow a Christian to forget it. He will not forget it until he is cleansed and forgiven, then it can be forgotten. Now the mind has two compartments. There's what we call the subconscious mind. There is the conscious mind. When sin comes into a believer's life, and it does, it comes into mine, it comes into yours. But when it comes into the believer's life, the conscious mind is aware of it. And if the conscious mind says, well, I'm going to put it out of my mind, I'm going to put it out of my thinking. You know what happens? That sin runs around the back of the house and comes in through the back door and takes up residence in the subconscious mind. And there in the subconscious mind, this unconfessed sin becomes an unwelcome guest in the subconscious mind. And he takes up his residence there as an irritable disposition, oftentimes in physical manifestations like a sore throat, a headache, or maybe you can concentrate on the Word of God. It lives there as an unwelcome and an unwholesome guest. But it does remain in the subconscious mind and it takes up its residence there. Now there's two kinds of wounds that the mind or the human soul is subject to. There is one that is called guilt and the other is called sorrow. Now sorrow is a deep and a bloody wound, but it's a clean wound. And given time it will heal. But guilt is a dirty wound. It's an ugly wound. And no matter how much time is given to a guilt wound, it does not heal without a festering surface which is broken in a ruts and then it is more tender than ever, then there's a superficial healing, and then there's another eruption of the festering sore, and oftentimes I've seen when Christians have maintained an unhealthy situation in their lives that when they hear preaching and teaching, which is disturbing and moves into these areas, they become very upset about it. And they're more anxious to get rid of the voice that is speaking about it than they are to get rid of the thing that's causing the discomfort in the first place. is never healed until it's cleansed. Now the next thing that we notice about sin as it affects the believer is in verse four. He says, Against thee and thee only have I sinned. I think the third thing we see here is that sin, sting, the conscience. David says, Against thee and thee only have I sinned. Now let's just think about that. If I read my Bible right, David had sinned against Bathsheba. He certainly sinned against his own body. He sinned against his wife. He sinned against his children, and he certainly sinned against the kingdom of God. Well, you see, at this point, the stinging impact of his sin was felt where it should be felt, the keenness, and that is as it touched God. A non-Christian may do something which is considered sinful or wrong, and his whole concept is, how can I get away from this, and how can I get rid of this thought and just forget about it? I don't want to get caught. If I've done something, I don't want to get caught. But you know, a Christian can't do that. A Christian is well aware of the fact that God sees, he can't hide it, and he has sinned against his God. There's only one thing that a Christian can do, and that is to bring it out in the open and face up to it. but David had a keen conception of what that sin was as it touched his God. I think this is even true in the case of Joseph. He said, how can I do this thing and sin against God? That's the thing that makes sin so hideous because it really touches our Lord Jesus Christ. Now look at verse eight. He says, make me to hear joy and gladness that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. I see here in the fourth place that it had saddened his heart. And let's look at also verse twelve. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation. I think that the next thing we see is that he had a saddened heart. He had lost the joy of his salvation. Now here again there's a vast difference between a Christian and a non-Christian. A non-Christian can sin. He never loses the joy of salvation for the simple reason he never had it. But you see, a Christian does not maintain the joy of his salvation with unconfessed sin in his life. It has to be dealt with. You know, God never made you and me so we could never sin. But he made every child of his so that if he sinned, he would not be happy until it was confessed. We need to see that. We need to see that we cannot sin in such a manner that we can enjoy the things of God normally. It has to be dealt with. The most miserable man in the world is not an unsaved man who has sinned, yet there are many of them that are miserable. But I say that a Christian who countenances things in his life which should not be there is perhaps the most miserable person in the whole wide world. Now I want to give you a little test that you can run at this very moment. Are you rejoicing with joy unspeakable and full of glory? Are you rejoicing right now? Do you really have the joy of the Lord right now? You say, well, Winston, you're getting a little bit facetious. Here, you're a little bit way off being. You know, we can't be happy all the time. Rather than I didn't say happy. You see, happiness comes from a word that prefixes H-A-P, which means a chance. Happiness is when things fall out in a very nice manner to your benefit, then you say, I'm happy. The happenings are... the kind that makes you happy. If things are not so good, do you say, well, I'm unhappy. These things are more or less the result of circumstantial occasions that crop up in our lives. So I didn't say happiness. I didn't say, are you happy all the time? For a Christian to be happy all the time would be like saying that a person ought to eat ice cream and cake three times a day for the rest of his life. That'd be sickening. God doesn't expect us to be happy all the time. But you see, God is talking about joy, and joy and happiness are not even kissing cousins. They're not even related. They are diametrically opposed to one another, and yet we're more governed by happiness than we are the joy of the Lord. You see, the joy of the Lord, in contrast to happiness is this. Happiness is like a thermometer. It registers the temperature. It does not create it. It does not control it. But joy is like a thermostat. It controls the temperature. Joy is that which God has implanted in the bosom of His children by the Spirit of God so that He can exist in spite of circumstances which are not falling out to His benefit or to His good. Happiness is not dependent upon circumstances that make me feel like jumping up and down for happiness. Nobody can take the joy out of a Christian's heart, not even the poor circumstance. Paul was a prisoner. I read the book of Philippians, and you know that Christians were probably concerned about him, and Paul wrote things that, hey, he says, don't worry about me. He says, man, he says, I'm a prisoner, but he says, the gospel isn't. He said, I am seeing souls saved every single day. He said, it's great. And they brought in a chain congregation. I tell you, that's something, isn't it? We don't have to chain them right now. We've got to keep them awake. When you feed the saints too good, you know this is what happened. But it makes me think of the preacher who got a hold of one of his parishioners, and he said, you know, he says, you haven't been coming out very much. You need to come out more often. He said, you look like you could stand some rest. Well, anyhow. Joy is a far cry from happiness. And the joy that David was lacking was that kind of joy, which is the only thing in the area of rejoicing and in real joy that is affected at all, and that is by sin. It's never affected by adverse circumstances. Verse eight again, he says, Make me to hear joy and gladness that the bones which thou is broken may rejoice. I think the fifth thing we can say is that sin thickens the body. He speaks about bones being broken. Now, he's not speaking about that in a literal way. I'm sure you understand that. He's speaking of it poetically, I'm sure, in a literal sense. He was saying, so to speak, he says, I'm broken down. I'm crushed. You've heard people say, you know, I'm just crushed. It doesn't mean that they got under a steamroller. It just means that Whatever is happening in their life has brought them down to a low estate and they feel literally or poetically that they are crushed. Now, I think that it's foolish to say that all illness is caused by personal sin. Please don't leave this conference this afternoon and say, well, you know, that man's off his rocker. Now, I may be off my rocker. But believe me, I'm not saying that all illness is caused by personal sin. But on the other hand, I think it is more foolish to deny that a lot of present illness among many of God's people is the result of personal sin that has never been dealt with. And you can take your aspirins and your quinines and your haddock all and your foot arches and everything else and it won't do any good because that's not where the rub is. My Bible tells me, he that souls to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption. Now, how do you read that? And Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, says in chapter eleven, he says, For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. In Proverbs, I read this, a merry heart doeth good like medicine. You know, I've seen people that got saved, that were sick with different kinds of illness and When they got saved, they seemed to receive a miraculous kind of cure physically. I believe that a lot of illness is brought on, is self-induced by Christians who are not dealing with a matter of their relationship with God, I say, as far as fellowship goes. Now, don't misunderstand me here. I want to be very careful. Redemption forgiveness is a once-for-all matter. It is never to be repeated. It is in... It is the kind of relationship that is unchanging. It cannot be changed. But fellowship forgiveness is only known and enjoyed as we face up to the things that are going on in our life that need to be dealt with honestly and carefully. The next thing in verse ten, please. He says, Create in me a clean heart. O God, I renew a right spirit within me. I believe that When he says, I create a right, or renew a right spirit within me, it leads me to a sixth observation about sin as it affects a Christian, possibly, that sin, in the life of a believer, very often can sour the spirit. Did you hear me? It can sour the spirit. A person can become censors, cantankerous, and vituperative. He can become very hateful. All the hateful in this world is not relegated to the unconverted. There has been much suffering that has been originated, has been induced, and has been fostered and carried on and preserved by the saints of God. And I can say only one thing. It is contrary to the relationship that we have with God. And I feel, my friend, that if there is a sour spirit in a Christian, it means that he is away from God. Now, how can you detect a sour spirit? Oftentimes, a person with a sour spirit covers it up, covers up the sour spirit by holding to a super high standard of Christianity. which he does not live up to himself, but expects everybody else to. And he walks around constantly looking for those that do not come up to his high standard, and when they don't come up to the standard, then he blows a boom on them. And this is oftentimes the beginning of much heartache and dissension in many fellowships. So you remember how it was in the case of David. had this man come along who had been guilty, according to David, of sheep stealing. And David, you know, rose up in wrath. You know, he turned pink, and then he turned red, and then he turned purple, and then he turned white again. And he says, Well, the man that did this, he said, He shall restore fourfold. Got a boy, David. I like that. You know, David, come on, you're coming on good, David. You better answer, David. And I'll nail these fellows. He stole a poor man's sheep. He says, He'll restore fourfold. Then Nathan spoiled the whole thing. He raised his finger like a sixteen-inch gun, and he says, Thou art the man's end of church. It's all over. David, with a telephone pole in his eye, was trying to pull a speck out of the other man's eye. A sour spirit. a Christian who has a right spirit. Let me tell you something. He may see something among his brethren that ought not to be there, and I'll tell you how it will affect him. You know how to affect him? He does not go running around with a high standard and say, hey, you're way off from God. You better get on target. The way it affects a man who has a right spirit, who's in fellowship with God. Now, get it down straight. Number one, it causes him to feel godly sorrow. It drives him to his knees. He doesn't go around trying to bat the other man to his knees. He falls to his own knees. Secondly, it causes him to indulge in intercession. And last of all, I believe it is exercise in a shepherd-like contact with a person to see restoration. I'm trying to see. I got my watch here. I got one of these things that it takes a fellow with a college degree to read this dumb thing. According to this, John, I've got eighteen more minutes. No, no. No, our movement, all right. I went to a conference in Kansas City many years ago, and there was a preacher there. I don't remember him. I think his name, I think it was Robert Halliday. And he was talking about foot washing. I'll never forget it. He told about a brother who... had a Bible under his arm, and he was rushing out of the building, and he had his face set in a granite-like stance, and somebody says, Where are you going? He says, Footwashing. Boy, you could tell that the guy who was going to have his feet washed was in for trouble. There's a brother who asked the question, Where are you going? He said, Well, he says, Did you bring your towel? He says, I got my Bible. He says, I know you got the basin already, but did you bring your towel? A man stopped. Now, what do you mean by that dumb remark? Well, he says, you know, brothers, you go and wash a person's feet, and they get all wet. You don't dry, and he goes out and starts walking around. They can get dirtier than ever. He says, well, what do you suppose that towel means? He says, brother, he says, that towel represents the spirit wherewith the Lord Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. It isn't sometimes what we do as the way we do it. Brethren, I preached the gospel so many times, I'm sure. I preached it in a bad attitude, a bad spirit. I preached like maybe I was ready to consign people to hell. I think I've done a lot of work for God that when I meet him at the judgment seat of Christ, he says, Len, you had a right motive, all right. I'll give you a G on that, but you sure didn't handle it very well. Nobody... realizes more than I do at this late date. One dear old sister came to me years ago, I thought the way to be faithful with God was to be obnoxious. I thought the way to be true to God was to insult people. I thought the way to be honest in a day of declension and apostasy was to make people go out of the meeting with their heads hanging down between their knees. One day I was speaking on a subbing, a lady came to me, she says, Brother Len, she said, you know. You have scrubbed us and scrubbed us till we don't have any skin left. I said, my wife, I said, you see what the world's coming to? He says, brother, you better listen to her. Didn't be good. Oh, listen. Is there anyone here today that didn't wash their hands at least, that didn't shower? Oh, you say, man, we wouldn't be caught dead coming here. Well, when you die, they'll wash you again. They wash you when you got born. They wash you when you die again. I think it'd be nice to get a few licks in before we meet the Lord. I got washed thoroughly at the bath of regeneration, and I'm going to be really fixed up before I meet my Lord, and I'm going to be like him. But in between, he says, there's time to get to the labor and do a little foot washing. Let me get to the final thing, and that is three words to cleansing. I've got six minutes, haven't I? Over there, I'm determined I'm going to quit on time. There's three words to restoration. Number one is confidence. Look at it in verse one. David says, Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness, according unto thy multitude of tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. The first thing I want you to notice is the confidence of David. Now you know David had been a great sinner, but David knew that he had a great lover in God. He was a great repentant. He was called a man after God's own heart. And I tell you, when I look at some of the things that David did, I wonder how in the world that God ever hung a title like that on him. He didn't call him a man after God's own heart because he was sinless. But he's a man after God's own heart because it's very sensitive what touched his God. What affected his fellowship? And brethren, I tell you something. We can come to this conference and we can listen to all kinds of sermons and we can say that's good and we can laugh. I recognize that as a good Joe. And we can go home and we won't be changed one bit. Unless we spend some time in the presence of God introspectively looking at our lives, I need to do it. I'll tell you, brethren, I'm concerned about what I see outside. I'm not concerned what I see in the conference. I'm concerned when I walk into some town and there's a little assembly there. And I tell you, they're hurting. And there's a lot of pain and there's a lot of weakness. There's a lot of consternation. There's a lot of cries for help. And I'm asking my heart this afternoon, and I trust you will too, I'm asking it like this, Lord, is it something in my life that ought to be dealt with before you can come out? and bless me. Paula Holliday used to say, you know, God can use a cracked vessel, but he can't use a dirty one. The easiest thing in the world to do is to get clean. I know it's painful sometimes. My wife used to haul the kids howling and screaming to the bathroom, and they yell in there like tigers. Then twelve years later, you couldn't get them out of the bathroom. I don't know which was worse. And I tell you one of the things, we need to recognize that we are enduring a lot of misery when we could enjoy the joy of His forgiveness. David had confidence. I want to tell you this afternoon, if there's been something in your life, Christian brother or sister, that's been lying there dormant, has been soiling your conscience, has been making you feel guilty and afraid and ashamed, has taken the joy and the song out of your testimony. I want to urge you today to get before the face of your God. Don't be afraid to come. He'll not treat you like my mother did when I used to refrain from coming in when she'd call me. She'd call, and I wouldn't come, but she'd call about the seventh or eighth time. She had a certain pitch. I knew that I had to come then. And I'd get up to the door and I'd say, Ma, and she had her hands like this. As he's not going to hit me, she says, you get in here. She says, Ma, you wouldn't hit a kid, would you? She says, you get in here. And then, you know, when I thought she wasn't expecting, I made a dart for the door, and she got in one or two good licks. You know, God isn't going to whip you. Friend, you're your own worst enemy when you stay away from God. You're hurting yourself. You're hurting your wife. You're hurting your husband. You're hurting your children. Think of the kids in the homes today whose parents are so far from God, and yet they come and sit at the worship meeting at the table. They break bread. They've been baptized. They've been fumigated. And they're driving their kids right out in the world, right onto the arms of the devil. I'll tell you some of this. Our orthodoxy has been pickled in vinegar, as I said last night. And then it's confession. If we confess our sins, He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He says, I acknowledge my transgressions. Let me just say briefly about the confession. It doesn't mean to admit. It means to call it what God does. When you call sin what God calls it, don't say, well, I goose today. Say, oh, God, I... I was a real pain in the neck to my wife. I gave her a rough time. I was a stumbling block to my kids. Oh, God help. I'll tell you, friends, I believe if we ever got back to that sort of thing, we'd see some blessings. And then there's cleansing. And he says, and I'm going to go out, and I'm going to teach sinners your way. Lord, I'm going to go out. I'm going to tell the people that I meet that you're a God that forgives and cleanses. That's what I'm going to do, says David. One little thing, maybe take me a few seconds to say this. Tom and I had some meetings in Detroit, Michigan many years ago. I tell you, brethren, we preached five weeks and never saw one soul saved. I tell you, in five weeks today, the preacher would have been in his sixth engagement. You know what I mean? You don't know what I mean. You're a modern generation. I tell you, we preached five weeks. There wasn't a ripple on the water. And the sinners were there. The kids of the Christians are sitting there, great big kids in their teens, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years of age, sitting there, heard the gospel, knew it as well as we did, sitting there with their chin sticking on their head. You can't save me. Tom said, well, brethren, he says, we're going to quit. The brethren says, don't quit. Tom says, we're going to quit. He says, we've been here five weeks. There hasn't been anything done. He says, I know sinners are here, but he says, nothing's being done. He says, we're going to quit. And that night we had a prayer meeting generally before and after the gospel meeting. And as we're in the prayer meeting before the gospel meeting, and it had come to what seemed to be a close, one of the men began sobbing. And I saw him walk over on his knees to another brother and put his arms over shoulder. He says, Fred, he says, I've held a grudge against you. He says, for fifteen years. And I got a boy out there that's not saved. And it may be because I'm not forgiving you, God isn't about to forgive my son. He says, will you forgive me? And that man says, I'll forgive you. He says, I want you to forgive me. And I want to tell you, I never saw anything like it. There were brethren all over that place underneath, getting things straightened up with one another and with God. And we saw one of the biggest harvests of souls we'd ever seen in all of our time together, almost fifty-something saved. After that, we were there for another four weeks. Brethren, there's not a crime to take a shower. It's not a crime to use spring water. Whatever you call it, fresh spring or spring fresh. I think it's a shame if we don't use things like that. And I know that my God is willing for you and I to come to him that he can do some changing and cleansing and restoration in our life.