Psalm 19:12-13 (NIV) But who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults. Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. Then I will be blameless, innocent of great transgression.

As people living in this world, we have a lot of challenges and things that are against us. But one of our biggest problems lies within each of us. I'm talking about our sinful nature. From birth, we are wired to do wrong things. For example, you don’t have to teach a two-year old to not share his toys. He is amazingly born with that ability on his own. If you want a toddler to know how to share, you must teach him to do that over and over again with perhaps discipline accompanying your teaching until that child gets it. As we grow older, we continue to struggle with doing wrong things and then adding doing wrong things that we are not even aware of.

We need to remember that we serve a holy God whose is more holy and perfect than we can ever imagine. The fact that we can approach Him as we are speaks to the powerful and miraculous sacrifice that Jesus made on the Cross of Calvary that was so effective in fulfilling the requirement of judgement for all our faults and sins that the veil in the Temple separating everyone from the presence of God was torn from top to bottom. But even with that, we still must worship the Lord with reverence and awe (Hebrews 12:28) and look to live according to His commands with His help.

In the prayer that the Lord taught to the disciples, Jesus laid out a pattern of prayer that includes asking for forgiveness for our sins. It is a good practice to do that because God’s standards are so beyond us that we can even sin against Him with our thoughts. But something that perhaps we don’t do and that we should include is the category of wrongdoing that David writes about above, which is asking the Lord to forgive our hidden faults and sins. That can mean either things that we have done that are wrong but that we aren’t aware of, or things that we did and then either forgot about them or hid them from others and then from even ourselves. We just left them there unaddressed and unconfessed and then moved on. But David wanted to be so right with God that he was concerned about anything that would be a stain against his relationship with the God that he loved so much. I also want to be completely clear in my conscience with God. I now ask Him to forgive my transgressions and to make known to me things that I am not aware of that He has taken note of so that I can make it right with Him. Until I know, I pray what David prayed, “Forgive my hidden faults.” If we all do that, then as David said and declared, we will be blameless. The blood of Jesus has made that possible and we should take full advantage of that incredible grace and mercy that has been extended to all of us.

Pastor Joey Vazquez