2 Samuel 12:7-9
And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul; And I gave thee thy master’s house, and thy master’s wives into thy bosom, and gave thee the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would moreover have given unto thee such and such things.  Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the LORD, to do evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon.

We don’t have to take things on our own when God is so willing to bless us in our lives.  And He had already demonstrated that to David.  But isn’t that the essence of sin—taking something we’re not meant to have?  It happened to Adam and Eve in the garden.  They could eat freely of all the trees.  They lacked nothing at all.  And  yet they chose the one tree that was forbidden to them.  David had wives.  He had a whole kingdom.  God had blessed his life in amazing ways.  But he chose what was forbidden.

In our own lives, that is where we can get into trouble.  We have so many blessings from God, yet sometimes we’re still intent on pursuing that one thing that is forbidden.  And maybe, like David, we don’t even quite realize the magnitude of what we’ve done until it is exposed to us by someone else.  “Thou art the man,” is what Nathan says.  David was the one who had done this act he would have so despised if someone else had done the same thing.

We need to be careful.  We need to have an awareness of our tendencies and weaknesses and the areas where we may fall into sin.  We have to be careful of the situations that we put ourselves in and the choices that we make.  But then may we also be correctible.  When we become aware of our sin, it is important to have the proper response to it—to confess, repent, and face the consequences, but then to learn our lesson and not repeat the same thing.

Finally, we can allow these kinds of experiences to change us moving forward.  What must David have been thinking as Nathan is laying out his secret wretched acts so plainly?  He sees that he was in the wrong and that he was not hid.  He understood God’s anger kindled against him, as it mirrored his own anger toward the injustice of the man in Nathan’s parable.  Certainly then sorrow filled his heart as he realized fully what he’d done and then had to bear the consequences.  And those things surely changed him in profound ways.  May the tough lessons in our own lives soften our hearts and make us more sensitive to sin and help us to be self-aware about the kinds of things we are doing.