AP

Psalm 66:18-20  If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened; but God has surely listened and has heard my prayer.  Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me! 

This psalm is a psalm of unrestrained praise to a faithful prayer-hearing, prayer-answering God.  The writer wants ‘all the earth’ to join him and to ‘shout with joy’ (1, 8) to this ‘awesome’ God (3, 5) for his matchless ‘glory’ and ‘power’ (2-7).  Yes, God has taken his people through ‘testing’ and ‘refining’ experiences that were very painful and perplexing (10-12); but even through all these he ‘preserved’ them and brought them to ‘a place of abundance’ (9, 12).  He ends the psalm by acknowledging the basis for his unshakeable confidence in this God: his covenant ‘love’.

He writes: “Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me!”.  The full meaning of the Hebrew word translated ‘love’ can be seen by comparing other translations: ‘mercy’ (KJV, NKJV); ‘lovingkindness’ (ASV, NASB); ‘steadfast love’ (ESV).  It is a love that is based on grace alone.  It is God’s unconditional love that is expressed supremely in the gift of his Son for sinners (John 3:16).  It is what keeps us going when our own attempts at godliness let us down miserably!

But there is a tension here. In spite of God’s gracious, unconditional commitment to us, there is something that can sabotage our fellowship with him: cherishing sin in our hearts.  Presuming upon God’s grace/mercy/love while cherishing sin in our hearts is a dangerous and deceptive hope.  It is the illusion of ‘cheap grace’.  We can ‘cherish sin in our hearts’: by holding on to something we know is wrong, or continuing in some activity or practice that God’s Word declares to be wrong while at the same time hoping God’s ‘love’ will somehow compensate for it, or by just condoning it by using cliches like ‘to err is human’ or ‘everybody’s doing it’ (cf 1 John 1:8-10).

The apostle Peter encourages all the husbands reading his letter to be considerate and respectful to their wives “so that nothing will hinder your prayers”, and for everyone to be “clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray” (1 Peter 3:7; 4:7).  The health and effectiveness of our prayer life is not unrelated to the effort we put into “throw[ing] off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles” (Hebrews 12:1b).  Our fallen nature always has a propensity to depend on ‘cheap grace’, so after five chapters of expounding on the importance of ‘grace alone’ in our correct understanding of the of the Gospel, the apostle Paul asks the rhetorical question, “What shall we say, then?  Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?”, and because of our innate propensity to ‘get the bull by the tail’ he quickly adds, “By no means!  We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Romans 6:1-2)  Even way back in Psalm 19, David had prayed: “Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me.  Then I will be blameless, innocent of great transgression” (verse 13).

– Bruce Christian