Oh, to be a kid again! It is pretty safe to say that nearly everyone makes this wish at least once. You are full of adulting; the bills keep coming in, the diapers do not end; your body hurts for no discernible reason, and your hair cannot decide whether to thin or go grey. Amid all this, youth looks pretty attractive, when you could sleep long, eat whatever, and had no serious duties. Of course, youth does not live up to all the hype. There is the embarrassing acne, the stress of dating, and nagging parents. In the prime of youth, kids often just want to grow up. And then, there are the regrets. As teens, we did some pretty crazy and bad things: reckless partying, lazy irresponsibility, and brushes with the law. The wild rebellion of youth can leave us with shame, sins we try to forget, and misdeeds we hope will not come back and bite us. Our prodigal moments pierce us with the anxiety of wondering if we can be forgiven. As this same angst hounds the psalmist in Psalm 25, grace supplies us with an amazing comfort in God’s steadfast love.

As is typical, this psalm is credited to David; yet, in the superscription, no musical designation is given, nothing about tune, instruments, or the director. Thus, it makes sense that this psalm presents itself on the whole as a prayer, with no explicit calls to sing or praise. The lack of musical features, however, does not diminish its poetry. Psalm 25 is written in the high form of an alphabetic acrostic, where each verse begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. Twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet for twenty-two verses. This is an elaborate and eloquent poetic form to beautify and to memorialize its content.

David opens his prayer by calling on the name of the Lord. With desperate emotion and dire need, he lifts up his soul, his very self, to the Lord. His whole being reaches out to his God, and he quickly lodges his petition. “Let me not be put to shame.” He needs to be rescued from the painful penalty of shame.

In our present environment, there is no shortage of confusion about shame. But, in Scripture, shame is the sister of guilt, as the two punitive effects of sin entering the world. Guilt relates to the law; it means we deserve judgment as sinners in a state of demerit. Shame, though, expresses the distress at being dishonorable, wrong, and detestable. Shame relates more to others, first to God, and secondly to people—namely, how they esteem us. Adam and Eve sinned, and they felt their shame by realizing their nakedness before God. Shame is being worthless and gross in the eyes of others, being known as a fool, evil, or disgraceful, and so deprived of all respect with its benefits. This shame is a motif undergirding this psalm.

Furthermore, shame has a distinct relationship to faith and hope in Scripture. Faith trusts in the Lord; hope waits for the Lord’s promises. Yet, if God proves unreliable, then, your trusting in him undresses you as a fool, as shameful. It is like someone trusting only in crypto for their retirement; when it goes bust, you look the fool—people laugh at you. Therefore, the psalmist grounds his request not to be shamed in his trusting in God.

Likewise, the foes are wantonly eager to gloat over him. They lust for his faith to be proven a lie and so to ridicule him into the dust as a despicable thing. But David also brings up hope—or waiting on God—and the promise that those who wait upon the Lord will not be shamed. Here, faith and hope are held together in all the ways they are similar. Faith rests in the Lord to act according to his character, and hope rests in God to fulfill his future promises.

The question is, however, what is the issue of shame? Why are his foes eager to gloat over and ridicule David? What is the psalmist seeking from God that if he does not get it, he will be shamed as the fool? Well, the rest of the poem teases this out. After his opening invocation, the psalmist unfurls his wish list. And first up is for God to be his instructor. “Make me to know your ways;” teach me your paths, lead me in truth. The good and upright Yahweh instructs sinners in the way; God guides the humble in justice, he educates the meek in his paths. And all these petitions have the same target; they are a request for godliness. The ways of God include the law and divine imitation. He wants the Lord to show him how to image divine uprightness and to enable him to perform such obedience with devotion. David wants to reflect the moral purity of Yahweh in all of his life.

This is clearly a noble prayer; it should be part of all our prayers. Yet, a request to walk in the divine paths starts to bring into focus the matter of shame. Whatever the yoke of shame is, it is not about health and sickness, nor about war or famine, or even the adversaries primarily. Sure, the enemies play a role, for he says his foes are many and they hate him with a violent hatred. Nevertheless, the field on which the enemies advance is one of morality. The shame has to deal with godliness and guilt. Hence, the next cluster of petitions submitted before God’s throne extends toward pardon. He asks for forgiveness. So, in verse 18, he says, “Forgive all my sins.” And in verse 11, “Pardon my iniquity for it is great.” His faith is trusting in God’s grace to forgive. His hope is waiting to hear that decree of pardon. This plea for mercy gets profoundly expressed with the language of remembrance (v. 6–7). The Lord must remember and not remember.

First, he begs that the Lord remember his compassion and steadfast love. Out of all the infinitely wonderful qualities of Yahweh, none is more delicious to sinners. Toward wretched rebels, stiff-necked and arrogant, the Lord has pity and mercy; he is tender-hearted and lenient. He is also loving and reliable; he is steadfast with his grace to us who are wayward and weak. We deserve judgment without mercy, wrath without tempering, but the Lord is compassionate and loving towards us not to treat us as our sins deserve. So, the psalmist pleads for the Lord to remember his steadfast compassion.

Yet, as the Lord remembers his own beautiful mercy, he must forget the psalmist’s ugliness. “Do not remember the sins and transgressions of my youth.” David is haunted by the foolish rebellions of his younger years. Adolescence is such a double-edged season of life. On one edge, this is the blessing of vigor, beauty, and limitless potential. But the other edge wastes all the energy of youth in reckless abandonment: sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, disowning parents, arrogant activism, fomenting riots, casting off the Word of God, and dreaming up new heresies. Sure, some people still suffer from the impurity of youth into their fifties, but teenagers are pros at staining life with wickedness.

Think back to your youth, to the disgraceful deeds that foul your resume. And what do these immature transgressions share? They are regrets that we cannot forget. We try; we suppress them, deny them, blame them on others. But, like a foolish post on social media, it is there forever. As the juvenile sins plague the memory of David, he asks God to do what he cannot. Forget them. Do not remember my wicked deeds, but erase them from the divine memory bank. He even has a third play on remembering. For the sake of your goodness, remember me! “Remember not my sin, but remember me.”

In his justice, the Lord does not separate the sin from the sinner; he judges us as our sins deserve. But, in his love, the Lord makes the most gracious distinction: he remembers us for good, while forgetting our sin. The beauties of God’s amazing forgiveness are displayed before us in this psalm, and the psalmist begs that this lovely mercy would cover him. And he needs the pardon of the Lord soon, for the pangs of sin are pressing in upon him.

First, there are the personal or internal distresses. As he weeps, “I am lonely and afflicted” (v. 16), the anguishes of his heart swell and expand. Trouble and torment hound and plague him. He cannot get away or escape his soreness; nothing spares him a moment of relief. Secondly, there are outside opponents. Many are the haters who surround and resist him. And they hate with a violent hatred. This is not some passive-aggressive or gas-lighting contempt that is sneaky and devious, but it is brash and loud abuse—a punch in the face, yelling profanities, and public degradation.

Moreover, what do these sufferings share in common? They all resemble the curses of the covenant. Under the law, these are the wages of sin. The psalmist prays to be forgiven for he is in the throes of the punishments for transgressions. Likewise, the sharp end of such afflictions narrows to shame, as he is alone (v. 16). He has been quarantined away from human society, from the covenant community. This is what shame does; it separates, banishes, and excludes. Being unworthy and despicable, the community excommunicates you. You are not invited to parties, you are dropped from group texts and kicked out of associations. Neighbors would look at you, your family would disown you, parents would erase you from the will.

And this is the last piece to the puzzle: What was the issue of shame that he prayed to be rescued from? We find him confessing his sin, suffering curses, and being socially banned. These add up to an unforgiving community. The psalmist did sin; the crimes of his youth are known, and his afflictions testify to his guilt. The neighbors and friends scoff at him as unforgivable. David trusts in the Lord to forgive, but others say it will never happen. The psalmist is shamed as unredeemable, unforgivable, as beyond reach of the Lord’s compassion. And with the burden of the psalmist’s prayer being unearthed, we are set up for the solution, which we will discover in the next installment on Psalm 25.

©Zach Keele. All Rights Reserved.

You can find the whole series here.

RESOURCES

• Subscribe To The Heidelblog!
• Download the HeidelApp on Apple App Store or Google Play
• Browse the Heidelshop!
• The Heidelblog Resource Page
• Heidelmedia Resources
• The Ecumenical Creeds
• The Reformed Confessions
• The Heidelberg Catechism
• Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008)
• Why I Am A Christian
• The Heidelberg Catechism: A Historical, Theological, & Pastoral Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2025)
• What Must A Christian Believe?
• Heidelblog Contributors
• Saturday Psalm Series
• Support Heidelmedia: use the donate button or send a check to:

Heidelberg Reformation Association
1637 E. Valley Parkway #391
Escondido CA 92027
USA
The HRA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization

Post authored by:

• Zach Keele

  

  Rev. Zachary Keele grew up on a ranch in a small town named Crawford, Colorado. He attended Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and received his Master of Divinity from Westminster Seminary California. He has served as the pastor of Escondido OPC since 2006.

  More by Zach Keele ›