After God's own heart.

Yesterday, I read the part where David rapes Bathsheba. There's always talk about infidelity, but when God admonishes David, there's no reference to Bathsheba's sin because she didn't sin.

He did.

And this part of Scripture made me cry. It's a vicious act, and yet, here we have a man after God's own heart. How we want to rake David over the coals until his flesh crackles, and yet, we never smell our own burning.

How easy to think we're absolved from the sins of others, hardly ever aware of the sins we harbor all on our own.

When the prophet Nathan rebukes David for what he did, he speaks of a story. There's one man with too many livestock to count, and next door, there's another man, one who loves his little lamb–the only one he owns–like his own daughter. But when the man with countless livestock has to make dinner, instead of choosing one of the sheep he owns, he takes the other man's precious lamb and kills it to eat.

David is outraged by this story and wants to pummel the lights out of this imaginary man. But what Nathan tells him (and he's too blind to see) is that he is the man who has killed the precious lamb.

And aren't we all?

This is the part that made me cry. How many times do we cover our own sin, our hands too weak and too small to do the job justice?

But when we remove them and allow God to cover the very thing that separates us from Him, we, too, become people after God's own heart.