Forgiven Sinners with Backbone Text: Psalm 38:1-8
Introduction: The Honesty of the Justified
We live in an age that is terrified of honest weakness. Our culture, and sadly, much of the church, oscillates between two extremes. On one side, you have the triumphant, plastic-smile Christianity that pretends everything is fine, where struggles are airbrushed out of the family photo. On the other, you have a therapeutic, victim-culture Christianity, where every feeling is validated and sin is reframed as trauma. Both are lies. Both are cowardly. Both are utterly foreign to the world of the Psalms.
The Psalms are the prayer book of the saints, and they teach us how to pray with what I would call sanctified guts. They teach us how to have a backbone in our prayers, even when we are flat on our back. And this psalm, Psalm 38, is a master class in this kind of prayer. It is raw, it is visceral, it is unflinching in its description of sin and suffering. David is not holding anything back. He is sick, he is in pain, his friends have abandoned him, and he knows precisely why. It is because of his sin, his folly.
But we must not mistake this for the groveling of a man who is unsure of his standing with God. This is not the despairing cry of a man trying to earn his way back into God’s favor. Quite the opposite. This is the prayer of a justified man. This is the honest confession of a son to his Father. Only a man who knows he is fundamentally secure in God’s love can afford to be this honest about how bad things are. Only a forgiven sinner can have this kind of backbone. An unjustified man has to pretend. He has to spin-doctor his sins. He has to blame-shift. But a man who has been declared righteous in Christ is free to call a thing what it is. He can look at the stinking wounds of his own folly and say, "Yes, that is what I did," without being crushed by it, because he knows that the final verdict is not "condemned" but "forgiven." This psalm is a memorial, a psalm "to bring to remembrance," not to remind God of David's sin, but to remind himself of the reality of sin's consequences and the greater reality of God's grace.
So as we walk through this, do not hear it as the whine of a victim. Hear it as the report of a soldier, wounded in a battle he foolishly started, reporting honestly to his commanding officer, who is also his Father.
The Text
O Yahweh, reprove me not in Your wrath, And discipline me not in Your burning anger.
For Your arrows have pressed deep into me, And Your hand has pressed down upon me.
There is no soundness in my flesh because of Your indignation; There is no health in my bones because of my sin.
For my iniquities go over my head; As a heavy burden they weigh too much for me.
My wounds stink and rot Because of my folly.
I am bent over and greatly bowed down; I go mourning all day long.
For my loins are filled with burning, And there is no soundness in my flesh.
I am faint and badly crushed; I groan because of the agitation of my heart.
(Psalm 38:1-8 LSB)
Discipline, Not Wrath (vv. 1-2)
David begins by pleading with God about the nature of his suffering.
"O Yahweh, reprove me not in Your wrath, And discipline me not in Your burning anger. For Your arrows have pressed deep into me, And Your hand has pressed down upon me." (Psalm 38:1-2)
Notice what David does not ask. He does not ask God to stop reproving him. He does not ask God to stop disciplining him. He knows he needs it. He is a son, not a bastard, and the author of Hebrews tells us that the Lord disciplines those He loves (Heb. 12:6). A true believer, a forgiven sinner with backbone, does not despise the chastening of the Lord. He understands that God's discipline is restorative, not punitive. It is correction, not condemnation.
What David pleads for is that the discipline would not be administered in wrath or burning anger. He is distinguishing between two kinds of divine anger. There is the wrath of condemnation, the final, judicial wrath of God poured out on His enemies at the final judgment. And then there is the fatherly displeasure, the corrective anger that a loving father has toward an errant son. David is saying, "Father, correct me. Rebuke me. But do it as my Father, not as my Judge. Let this be discipline, not damnation." For the believer in Christ, this prayer is already answered. All the damning wrath of God was exhausted on the cross. God will never deal with His children in punitive wrath. When we sin, He deals with us in love, and that love often takes the form of a sharp, painful, fatherly discipline.
David feels the sting of this discipline acutely. He describes it as God's arrows piercing him and God's hand pressing down on him. This is not the language of a deist. God is not distant. His hand is directly involved in David’s suffering. This is a profound comfort, even when the hand is heavy. It is far better to be under the heavy hand of a loving God than to be abandoned to the meaningless chaos of a godless universe. David knows who is in charge of his misery, and so he knows where to direct his appeal.
The Connection Between Sin and Suffering (vv. 3-4)
David is under no illusions about the source of his troubles. He connects the dots with brutal honesty.
"There is no soundness in my flesh because of Your indignation; There is no health in my bones because of my sin. For my iniquities go over my head; As a heavy burden they weigh too much for me." (Psalm 38:3-4 LSB)
Here David makes a direct link between his physical ailment ("no soundness in my flesh") and God's indignation, and between his skeletal pain ("no health in my bones") and his own sin. Our modern sensibilities recoil at this. We have been taught to separate the spiritual from the physical. If someone is sick, we attribute it to germs, genetics, or bad luck. And while not all sickness is the direct result of a specific sin, we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The Bible is clear that we live in an integrated world. Sin has consequences, and sometimes those consequences are physical.
David does not generalize. He says "my sin." He owns it. This is not some abstract doctrine for him. He is experiencing the harvest of his own sowing. And he describes the spiritual reality behind the physical symptoms. His iniquities are like a flood going over his head, drowning him. They are a crushing weight, too heavy to bear. This is what sin does. It is a burden. It is a debt. And we cannot carry it ourselves. This is the very feeling that drives a man to the cross. The man who feels he can manage his sin, who thinks it's just a minor administrative problem, has not yet understood its weight. David feels the full, crushing load of it, and it is breaking him.
This honesty is the beginning of health. You cannot be healed of a disease you refuse to diagnose. David’s diagnosis is clear: the root of the problem is his sin. He is not blaming God, his upbringing, or his circumstances. He is looking in the mirror, and because he is a man after God's own heart, he tells the truth about what he sees.
The Foul Stench of Folly (vv. 5-6)
David continues his graphic self-assessment, moving from the internal weight of sin to its external, ugly results.
"My wounds stink and rot Because of my folly. I am bent over and greatly bowed down; I go mourning all day long." (Psalm 38:5-6 LSB)
The language here is intentionally offensive. "My wounds stink and rot." The Hebrew suggests festering sores, putrefying and giving off a foul odor. Sin is not glamorous. It is not sophisticated. It is ugly, and it decays. When you leave sin unconfessed, it begins to rot in your soul, and that spiritual gangrene often manifests itself outwardly. David is not just talking about physical sores here; he is describing the putrefaction of his own choices.
And he assigns the cause with precision: "Because of my folly." He doesn't say "because of my mistake" or "my lapse in judgment." He calls it what God calls it: foolishness. Sin is, at its root, cosmic stupidity. It is choosing a broken cistern over the fountain of living waters. It is trading a glorious inheritance for a bowl of rancid porridge. It is an act of profound folly, and David owns it completely.
The result of this folly is a life bent out of shape. "I am bent over and greatly bowed down." Sin literally de-forms us. It twists us away from the upright posture of true humanity made in God's image. He is not standing tall in righteousness but is stooped under the shame and consequences of his sin. His life has become a funeral procession: "I go mourning all day long." There is no joy here. God is a good Father, and He will not let you have both your sin and your joy. He disciplines us by robbing us of our joy, so that we will come to our senses and return to Him, the only source of true joy.
The Internal Fire and the Groaning Heart (vv. 7-8)
The description of his misery concludes with an internal and external summary of his condition.
"For my loins are filled with burning, And there is no soundness in my flesh. I am faint and badly crushed; I groan because of the agitation of my heart." (Psalm 38:7-8 LSB)
The "burning" in his loins could refer to a fever, an inflammation, or the burning shame of his particular sin, perhaps a sexual sin that has brought this ruin upon him. Whatever the specific cause, it is an internal fire, a deep-seated affliction. He repeats the phrase from verse 3, "there is no soundness in my flesh," driving the point home. He is comprehensively sick, inside and out.
His condition has left him utterly spent. "I am faint and badly crushed." The word for crushed here is the same word used for grinding grain or spices. He feels pulverized by his circumstances, broken into little pieces. And the outward expression of this internal state is groaning. This is not articulate speech; it is the raw, animal sound of deep distress. It comes from the "agitation of my heart," or as some translations put it, the "disquiet" or "roaring" of his heart. His heart is in turmoil, a chaotic sea, and the groans are the waves crashing on the shore.
Conclusion: The Foundation for Hope
Now, why is this litany of misery in our Bibles? Why should we sing such a sorrowful song? Because this raw honesty is the necessary prelude to deliverance. This is what godly sorrow looks like. It is not the worldly sorrow that leads to death, which is just self-pity. This is the godly sorrow that leads to repentance and life. David is not wallowing; he is clearing the ground. He is ripping out all the weeds of self-justification and excuse-making so that the grace of God has a clear place to land.
A man who prays like this is a man who is about to be helped. God resists the proud, but He gives grace to the humble. And this is the language of profound humility. It is the prayer of a man who has been completely broken of his self-reliance. He has been crushed, and now he is ready to be remade.
This is where the backbone comes in. It takes courage to be this honest. It takes a firm belief in the covenant-keeping love of God to lay yourself this bare before Him. David knows that his Father's discipline is a sign of His love, not His rejection. He knows that underneath the heavy hand of discipline are the everlasting arms. And so he can be brutally honest about the stench of his sin, because he knows that the blood of the coming Messiah is a cleansing flood that can wash away any stain and heal any wound.
For us, who live on this side of the cross, this is even more true. We can look at the foulest parts of our lives, the most shameful moments of our folly, and confess them with this kind of brutal honesty, because we know that Jesus Christ has already borne the wrath. He took the arrows. The full weight of God's indignation crushed Him, so that we might only ever feel the corrective, loving hand of our Father. Therefore, we do not have to pretend. We can be forgiven sinners with backbone, confessing our sins honestly because we are secure in His unshakeable grace.