Matins Devotion: August 11, 2025

Psalm 51

A boy grows up in a Lutheran family, going to his Lutheran church every Sunday, singing the same liturgy week after week. Every service, he pulls his hymnal out of the pew, even though he doesn’t really need it for the order of service. For about as long as he can remember, he’s had the words memorized. 

The boy grows up and becomes restless. In his college years, he surrenders to his lust, to drunkenness and selfishness. He strays from church, strays from living the way His God commands him to. As he drifts, he gets angry at his parents because he perceives the disappointment they feel in him, so he stays away even longer. As he enters adulthood, he tells himself that church never really mattered to him, that it was never anything more than a weekly exercise in going through the motions.

Then one day, as an old man, he gets sick and his strength fails. His doctors can’t help him. His wisdom can’t help him. And so, desperate, he wanders into a Lutheran church because that’s the kind of church he went to growing up. And though he’s worried that he won’t know what’s going on, it turns out the church is using the same liturgy he used growing up. And after the pastor preaches and tells the congregation to rise, the man finds his lips moving on their own. He doesn’t have to think about what comes next. He knows it all, the same words he sang countless times as a child, words he often sang without thinking. But now, as he sings them, he thinks about them: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation and uphold me with Thy free Spirit.”

And there, in those words, the man finds peace. Through the words of King David, written after his adultery and murder, the man also cries out for forgiveness. He cries out for God to pull him out of the darkness of his own creation, to draw him near, to tell him that He never stopped loving him and never stopped looking for him in his decades of wandering. There, in those words, the seed that was planted seventy or so years earlier blossoms. And the man believes what he’d been confessing all that time, believes what he forgot so long ago. He believes that Jesus Christ, the One who died for him upon the cross, has indeed covered Him in the blood that makes every sinful heart clean. The man who thought he didn’t need Jesus comes home to Jesus through the words of the king whose throne Jesus completed.

This is why the liturgy matters. This is why it’s worth singing the same things every week. This is why we should sing the words of Psalm 51 forever, until the day our Lord melts the earth and brings us into the tear-free kingdom of His arms.