This song grew out of a season when the Psalms had become especially important to me. I was doing something I called “Psalm surfing” – leading worship by opening the Psalms and improvising lines, turning them into songs that existed only for that moment and then were gone. But this was a psalm that refused to stay ephemeral. It became a song.

Psalm 51 is a song of confession. David wrote it after a season in his life when he had accumulated great power and wealth, and behaved terribly. This was his response: raw, honest, and utterly dependent on the mercy of God.

And so it becomes something we can use too. Whether we think of our sins as small or great, we all have to go to the same place – to the cross. David didn’t know about Christ and the cross when he wrote this, because Christ had not yet come. But we know now that forgiveness is offered through the shed blood of Jesus. We can be washed clean, just as David was. We can have a new heart created within us.

And we can have the song back on our lips. When sin snatches the song away, praise and thanks can return, simply through the grace of God.