Psalm 51:9
Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.

When David took another man’s wife and had her husband killed in battle, he thought he’d gotten away with something.  No one else knew what he had done.  But then came the realization that his deed was no secret in the eyes of his Lord.  Perhaps he thought back on those things he had done, replaying them in his mind and then imagining God seeing them, too.  And the truth is that God sees every single thing that we do, every evil deed, every wrong choice, every sin, whether anyone else ever knows about it or not.

And so isn’t this what we want when we’ve sinned?  When we can feel that guilt and shame and regret so strongly?  Isn’t this why we try to hide and cover up what we’ve done?  We want it to go away and be gone for good.  We want no remembrance of it and no evidence that it ever happened.  Many times we probably wish we could go back in time and make a better choice, go somewhere different, stop ourselves from committing that sin.  But there is no undoing it, and all we are left with is the shameful aftermath.

But then when we bring it before the Lord and confess it before Him, this is exactly what He does.  He takes it away so completely that it’s like we never did that regrettable deed.  He looks upon that sin no longer.  It’s blotted out from our account, erased from the list of all the things we have done.  Christ’s blood covers over it and wipes it away.  By His mercy, He no longer holds us accountable for it.  His grace casts it away far from us, and He remembers it no more.

We’ve all done things we regret in our lives.  There’s no avoiding that since we live in a sinful world.  And we’ll probably do more things we regret at some point in our future.  But our merciful God is still there to blot them all out, and He will never throw them back in our faces, for they are gone for good.  So let us release ourselves from the shame and the guilt of our sinful acts and rest in the complete forgiveness that our gracious God gives to us through His Son.