The true significance of the present is not revealed in the present. Only the lapse of years makes us dispassionate judges of our earlier selves. The text is the utterance of a man who is letting a sorrowful and faultful past come home to his matured judgment to be tried by its higher standards and its clearer discrimination.
I. "Remember not the sins of my youth." The truth assumed in these words is one which concerns the character of God, the truth, namely, that God cannot be passive in any moral relation. For God to remember sin is to assume an active and hostile relation to sin.
II. In answer to such an appeal as this, we are not to expect either that God will shut sin out of His remembrance, or change His attitude towards sin. But His remembrance of the sinner involves all the infinite activity of His love towards the sinner. It is on this relation of God to the sinner that David throws himself.
III. How then, in answer to this prayer, will man stand related to the follies and sins of his past life? (1) He will not be entirely rid of their consequences, especially of their physical consequences. (2) Nor will God cease to use the faultful past in the new man's education. (3) In the heart will come a tranquil rest, founded simply upon the conviction that God has taken the whole sadly confused and stained life into His own hands. (4) With this conviction there will come a turning with fresh zest to redeem the time which remains.
M. R. Vincent, Gates into the Psalm Country,p. 75.
Reference: Psalms 25:8. J. Irons, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. xvi., p. 81.