Create in me a pure heart, O God,
    and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me from your presence
    or take your Holy Spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation
    and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
    so that sinners will turn back to you.
14 Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God,
    you who are God my Savior,
    and my tongue will sing of your righteousness.
15 Open my lips, Lord,
    and my mouth will declare your praise.
16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;
    you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
17 My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
    a broken and contrite heart
    you, God, will not despise.

18 May it please you to prosper Zion,
    to build up the walls of Jerusalem.
19 Then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous,
    in burnt offerings offered whole;
    then bulls will be offered on your altar. (NIV)

This beautiful psalm of contrition and confession, one with which we all can identify, seems to take on even greater wonder in the light of the great Easter events.

As we noted previously, David did not seek to justify his sin. He didn’t deny it, nor did he blame anyone else. He owned up. He came clean. He confessed. I remember someone saying, ‘The only way sin can leave the body is through the mouth, as we confess it!

”Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.” (Proverbs 28:13)

That was David’s experience.

In a recent edition of ‘The Plough’, Graham Tomlin wrote an excellent article about the conversion of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. In it, drawing on Pascal’s transformation, he highlighted a number of characteristics of genuine Christianity, as opposed to merely ‘cultural’ faith. One of these is this awareness of personal guilt and shame:

”Yet there is another part of Pascal’s encounter that is a mark of all true Christian experience: Pascal describes experiencing his own shame. “I have cut myself off from him, shunned him, denied him, crucified him.”

Amidst the ecstasy of encountering divine love comes this profound sense of inadequacy, of ignominy – not to put too fine a point on it, of sin. Pascal is aware of the abyss within his own soul, the shallowness of his life, the way he has ignored the God on whom his life depends, and how he has wasted God’s gifts.

Some time ago I listened to a conversation between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim fundamentalist turned hardcore atheist. She had recently announced her conversion to Christianity. Dawkins assumed that her conversion was to a genteel cultural Christianity like his, but as she told her story it gradually dawned on him that something deeper had taken place. Hirsi Ali described an episode of prolonged suicidal depression, which no psychological treatment or scientific reasoning had helped. A therapist diagnosed her problem not as mental or physical but spiritual, suggesting she might even try praying. When she did, she began, mysteriously, to encounter the same God that Pascal had.

Reluctantly, he had to admit that it sounded like she was a proper Christian. The nub of the issue for Dawkins was his objection to the idea of sin. It was, he said, “obvious nonsense…. The idea that humanity is born in sin, and has to be cured of sin by Jesus being crucified … is a morally very unpleasant idea.”

Of course it’s unpleasant. Crucifixions were. From the perspective of those who have no sense whatsoever that they need saving, it is distasteful, embarrassing, not the kind of thing that you bring up in Oxford Senior Common Rooms. I too find unpleasant the notion that I am sinful, stubborn, deeply flawed, in desperate need of forgiveness and healing. I would much rather think I am fine as I am. Yet there are many things that are unpleasant but necessary. Like surgery. Or changing dirty diapers. Or having to admit addiction.

And that was ultimately the difference between Dawkins and Hirsi Ali. They were each as clever as the other; they had both read the same books; they knew the same people. Yet Hirsi Ali, like Pascal, had been to a place where she knew she needed help, a help that no human being could provide, whereas Dawkins, it seems, had not.

This is the second factor that marks out real from cultural Christianity. The cultural Christian has little sense of having a spiritual sickness that needs healing, has not looked into the abyss, or owned his part in the darkness of humanity, and has no notion of needing any kind of salvation. True faith involves a searing honesty about the despair that lurks in our own hearts, the self-centeredness that plagues our lives, our society, and our politics. It knows we cannot solve it ourselves.’