My church is going through a series on the Life of David right now.  For whatever reason I never picked up on this until yesterday and I found it wildly ironic.

 The Title of the series is something along the lines of:

The Life of David:
Humility. Integrity.  Faith

 Where is the irony?

 I made this realization as the pastor was recapping the scriptures from last week, providing the context for the scriptures he would cover today.  He was speaking about David and Bathsheba and Uriah. 

 Humility, Integrity, Faith?  Are you kidding me?  He got lazy, slept with a woman, got her pregnant, tried to cover it up, and when all else failed…he killed her husband!  How is that for holy???

 Maybe those qualities are easy to see in some of the other popular David stories: fighting Goliath and not killing Saul while in the cave.  They are fitting for certain parts of his life, but certainly not His entire life.  Can they?  Seriously, what is it about David that he is still labeled as a man after God’s own heart, even after the incredible moral failures described in scripture?  I think of others in the bible that, at pivotal points, proves themselves to be a disappointment to God and to people, yet God continues to use and do great things to and through them.

 Does this then mean that for me, and for all of us, even in the aftermath of moral failures, repetitive (or not so repetitive) sin, God can still use us to Glorify His Name?  It doesn’t make sense. 

 It’s a little comforting to know that it doesn’t make sense. 

 After thinking over those three terms and the life of David, I followed the Pastor’s leading to Psalm 51 where I found this prayer of David:

“Create in me a pure heart, O God;
And renew a steadfast spirit in me.
Do not cast from me your presence
Or take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.”
(Psalm 51:10-12)

 As the service moved into communion, my heart stayed on these words.  I wanted to scream them as loud as I possibly could.  As if volume was suddenly a direct correlation to how much I really meant it.  

 ”grant me a willing spirit”.  A spirit willing to fight my flesh and my ridiculous propensity to sin, to fight for God and to know Him more, to fight as if I believed that I can actually win over the battle before me.

AFTERTHOUGHT:  I should have included this in the blog at first…

the beautiful thing about God is His grace, especially as seen through His work on the cross.  Because of What God did we can overcome and not be tainted by our fallen nature.  We truely can be redeemed, renewed, and restored.  We can be men and women after God’s own heart.  What can’t happen is for us to out-sin the work that God has already finished through Christ.  We struggle, we fall, we stumble, but at the end of the Day Christ died for us.  Even in the middle of our deepest, darkest moments, God still found us to be worth Jesus to Him.