SPEAKER_00: We'll be in Psalm 116 as we already read earlier this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Now, there is a tradition in uh Jewish practice that goes back centuries to before even the birth of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: At the Passover meal, the family would sing what is called the Halel, which is Psalms 113 through 118.
SPEAKER_00: They sang the first half before the meal, and they sang the second half at the end.
SPEAKER_00: And we read in Matthew's gospel that Matthew tells us that on the night of his betrayal, after Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper with his disciples, Matthew says, when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.
SPEAKER_00: It is almost certainly sure that the second half of the halel is what Jesus would have sung.
SPEAKER_00: And right at the heart of that is Psalm 116, which means that on the ninth that he was betrayed with the cross looming before him, Jesus of Nazareth opened his mouth and sang the words of Psalm 116.
SPEAKER_00: So let that carry weight as we turn to Psalm 116 and let's read this through the lens of Jesus Christ singing this as he's facing the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Follow along with me in your copy of God's word.
SPEAKER_00: I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy, because he inclined his ear to me.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore I will call on him as long as I live.
SPEAKER_00: The snares of death encompassed me, the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me.
SPEAKER_00: I suffered distress and anguish.
SPEAKER_00: Then I called on the name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul.
SPEAKER_00: Gracious is the Lord and righteous our God is merciful.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord preserves the simple.
SPEAKER_00: When I was brought low, he saved me.
SPEAKER_00: Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.
SPEAKER_00: For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.
SPEAKER_00: I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.
SPEAKER_00: I believed even when I spoke.
SPEAKER_00: I am greatly afflicted.
SPEAKER_00: I said in my alarm, All mankind are liars.
SPEAKER_00: What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?
SPEAKER_00: I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.
SPEAKER_00: Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.
SPEAKER_00: O Lord, I am your servant, I am your servant, the son of your maidservant.
SPEAKER_00: You have loosed my bonds.
SPEAKER_00: I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people, in the courts of the house of the Lord, in your midst, O Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: Praise the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Think about what Jesus was singing as he was singing this hymn.
SPEAKER_00: He sang about the snares of death encompassing him.
SPEAKER_00: He sang about the pangs of Sheol laying hold of him.
SPEAKER_00: He sang about calling on the name of the Lord from the depths of distress.
SPEAKER_00: He sang about the cup of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: And then he went to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed, Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.
SPEAKER_00: When we read Psalm 116, we're not reading just another religious poem.
SPEAKER_00: We are reading the song that Jesus very likely sang the night before he died.
SPEAKER_00: And we cannot understand any of the Psalms, much less Psalm 116, unless we read them rightly through the lens of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: What's the Christological meaning of this psalm?
SPEAKER_00: The psalms are not merely just ancient devotions that we apply to ourselves, they are in the fullest and deepest sense the voice of the true King, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what the psalmist experienced in the shadow, Jesus fulfilled in substance.
SPEAKER_00: And here's the point of the gospel that's the same story told to us throughout all of Scripture, and in the Psalms, it shows up in this way.
SPEAKER_00: Because Christ fulfilled it, we get to sing it too.
SPEAKER_00: You have no right in and of your own accord to sing Psalm 116.
SPEAKER_00: You can't do it.
SPEAKER_00: You have no access or right to it except through Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And so because Christ has come and he sang and he fulfilled what this psalm is talking about, we inherit the ability to sing this psalm and to mean it.
SPEAKER_00: Not as the primary voice, but we are the echo of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: The psalm that was his becomes ours by union with him.
SPEAKER_00: For those of us in Christ who have professed with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believed in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we are adopted as sons and daughters of the Most High God through the work of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, what Christ sings, we by inheritance get to sing and reflect on his work, magnify his work, and give him all the praise, honor, and glory due to his name as we continue on this earth to be sanctified and as we eagerly await, as Paul says, our final adoption, our final glorification, where we stand before God, and for those of us in Christ, he looks on us and he sees the righteousness of Christ because he perfectly lived out Psalm 116.
SPEAKER_00: But until that time, today, and tomorrow, and the next day, we remain in a state of sanctification.
SPEAKER_00: We're being worked on by the Holy Spirit, being made to be more like Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So in our study of Psalm 116 this morning, that's our aim, to be sanctified by it.
SPEAKER_00: But we're going to enter Psalm 116 through the door that Christ has opened for us.
SPEAKER_00: We had to hear it first as Christ's song, is the song of Jesus, and then let us learn how to make this our own through Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So, firstly, this morning we see in verses 1 through 4 the cry from the pit.
SPEAKER_00: The psalm opens with, I love the Lord, and we notice immediately this is not a vague sentimental love of someone who has had a pleasant experience religiously.
SPEAKER_00: This is the love of someone who was drowning and was pulled to the shore.
SPEAKER_00: I love the Lord because he has heard my voice.
SPEAKER_00: This love is specific.
SPEAKER_00: It was born from a specific rescue.
SPEAKER_00: Now, gratitude is most often based on a reflection of the action performed that earned the gratitude.
SPEAKER_00: There is a kind of gratitude that is polite and thin.
SPEAKER_00: That kind of gratitude that you feel if somebody holds the door open for you.
SPEAKER_00: You say thanks and you never think about it again.
SPEAKER_00: That's appropriate.
SPEAKER_00: If you were to be super weird and be overly grateful for someone simply holding the door open for you, like that crosses like a line.
SPEAKER_00: Like all I did was hold open the door.
SPEAKER_00: You can go away now.
SPEAKER_00: That's really weird.
SPEAKER_00: The amount of gratitude that you have for me opening the door.
SPEAKER_00: And then there's a type of gratitude that you feel all the way into the marrow of your bones.
SPEAKER_00: The kind that you feel when something deeply meaningful was done for you.
SPEAKER_00: Most of us in this room can have uh uh tons of testimonies to that.
SPEAKER_00: One I've experienced in the past year was uh August 4th, the last night of my brother's life here on this earth.
SPEAKER_00: Several months prior, uh, when he knew that he likely wouldn't survive his cancer battle, he talked to me about end-of-life care.
SPEAKER_00: Since I'm a hospice physician, that's what I do for a living.
SPEAKER_00: I keep people comfortable on their deathbed.
SPEAKER_00: We had a very brief conversation about it, but in that conversation, I assured him that I would make sure that he was well taken care of when the time came.
SPEAKER_00: So his last night alive, I alone stayed with him in the ICU so that his wife could get some much needed rest.
SPEAKER_00: And all night I took watch over him, made sure that he had the appropriate medications, that he was comfortable.
SPEAKER_00: And the nurse that he had that night was so kind, was so gentle, was so caring, was so responsive.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm I work in healthcare.
SPEAKER_00: I've seen fantastic nurses and I've seen bad nurses, and it was just kind of a roll of the dice.
SPEAKER_00: What kind of nurse am I gonna get tonight?
SPEAKER_00: Because I can't give them the meds, that's illegal, but for me to kind of be like, hey, we we need some more medications, we need we need some care.
SPEAKER_00: And she was so good to me, and she was so good to him.
SPEAKER_00: And because of her, I was able to fulfill my brother's, my promise to my brother, that on his last night of life, he was able to be peaceful and comfortable, and I was able to be by his side, and he peacefully passed away shortly after sunrise the next morning.
SPEAKER_00: My gratitude to this nurse was felt deep into my bones.
SPEAKER_00: In the midst of mourning, and my brother's uh body is still lying in the same hospital room.
SPEAKER_00: I've got to go to this nurse and just express gratitude.
SPEAKER_00: She was just showing up for her job, but she did it with such tenderness and grace and mercy.
SPEAKER_00: And what she did, she did so well that meant so much to me that this gratitude just welled up outside of my heart.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm still extremely gracious, uh thankful for her in that moment.
SPEAKER_00: That's a sense of gratitude that you feel and that you never forget.
SPEAKER_00: And that's the gratitude that we feel in this psalm.
SPEAKER_00: A deep sense of gratitude for what the Lord has done.
SPEAKER_00: This psalm comes from an intense scene.
SPEAKER_00: If we look at verse three, the snares of death encompassed me, the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me.
SPEAKER_00: This image is very vivid.
SPEAKER_00: Death as a hunter has spread his nets, and the psalmist has walked right into them.
SPEAKER_00: He is caught, he cannot free himself.
SPEAKER_00: Sheol, the realm of the dead, is not merely approaching, it's already laid its hands on him.
SPEAKER_00: He is a man being dragged under.
SPEAKER_00: This is no place that he willingly ventured, but yet a tragedy that's been set upon him that is out of his control.
SPEAKER_00: And we don't like it when we're not in control.
SPEAKER_00: Now we don't know exactly what the original psalmist faced.
SPEAKER_00: It might have been severe illness, it might have been a near-death experience in battle, or some opposition that brought him to the very edge of his grave, or an oncoming battle that seemed too much.
SPEAKER_00: But we do know that in verse 4, there is nothing left but prayer.
SPEAKER_00: Then I called on the name of the Lord, O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul.
SPEAKER_00: When all human options have expired, one option always remains for God's people, calling on the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Now, read this again through the lens of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: The night he sang this psalm, where was he going?
SPEAKER_00: He was going to Gethsemane, where he would sweat drops of blood in agony.
SPEAKER_00: He was going to Golgotha, where he would be crucified, abandoned, swallowed up by death.
SPEAKER_00: The writer of Hebrews tells us in chapter 5, verse 7, that in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save them from death.
SPEAKER_00: The eternal Son of God, in the fullness of his humanity, cried out from within the snares of death.
SPEAKER_00: And we need to understand this about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: He was not acting.
SPEAKER_00: He was not going through the motions.
SPEAKER_00: He was not simply reciting religious poetry.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus isn't looking at his watch and he's like, I guess it's about that time.
SPEAKER_00: I've got an appointment I've got to get to.
SPEAKER_00: I've got to go die on the cross and then be resurrected, and then I get to go back in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's going to be a rough week.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is not acting this out because the time has been set for him to act it out.
SPEAKER_00: He is in agony because of the weight of the cross.
SPEAKER_00: And the Father hears him.
SPEAKER_00: But the answer from the Father was not exemption from death.
SPEAKER_00: The answer from the Father was resurrection through death.
SPEAKER_00: The cup was not removed from Christ as he prayed.
SPEAKER_00: Father, if there be a way, remove this cup from me.
SPEAKER_00: That cup was not removed from him.
SPEAKER_00: The cup was drunk.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus Christ drank it all.
SPEAKER_00: And then it was set down empty.
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, the character of God, he saves the helpless in verses five through nine.
SPEAKER_00: Here is a remarkable thing about suffering.
SPEAKER_00: And we've walked through some suffering with several members in this congregation.
SPEAKER_00: Suffering produces good theology.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist has been through the furnace and come out on the other side with a clearer vision of who God is than he had before.
SPEAKER_00: Gracious is the Lord and righteous our God is merciful.
SPEAKER_00: This is not a creed that he memorized in school.
SPEAKER_00: This is a confession extracted from his own experience of being in the pit, of being in the furnace, of suffering and watching God come down into it.
SPEAKER_00: Now note especially verse 6 the Lord preserves the simple.
SPEAKER_00: Now the word simple here doesn't mean foolish.
SPEAKER_00: It means naive, vulnerable, guileless, the one who has no sophisticated defense strategy, no elite network to call in favors, no reserves of personal power to draw on, no control over the situation.
SPEAKER_00: The simple one is the one who is entirely dependent.
SPEAKER_00: And the psalmist says that is who God saves, not the strong, not the impressive, not the self-sufficient, the helpless, someone like a child, which reminds us that's what Jesus told us.
SPEAKER_00: We need to have faith like a child.
SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the great recurring themes in Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: God does not save a people who have it figured out.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't save a people who are almost there.
SPEAKER_00: They just need a little nudge to get across.
SPEAKER_00: God is in the business of saving people who are, by all measurable accounts, finished with no hope, no ability of their own accord to save themselves, no ability to even come close to any kind of deliverance.
SPEAKER_00: He parted the sea for slaves that had nowhere to go.
SPEAKER_00: He feeds a widow down to her last handful of flour.
SPEAKER_00: He fed the five thousand.
SPEAKER_00: It was just a basket full of food.
SPEAKER_00: He raised the dead.
SPEAKER_00: And then comes verse 7, which is one of the most beautiful transitions in all the Psalms.
SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite verses.
SPEAKER_00: Return, O my soul, to your rest.
SPEAKER_00: The same soul that is ensnared in the nets of death is now called back to rest.
SPEAKER_00: The turbulent soul finds its Sabbath in the God who delivers.
SPEAKER_00: And we know that Jesus Christ is the better Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: He is the better rest for a weary soul.
SPEAKER_00: In Christ, we who are in Christ have an eternal rest waiting for us.
SPEAKER_00: But in the here and the now, that process of sanctification is the constant reminding of our soul: return to your rest, O my soul.
SPEAKER_00: Christ saved you.
SPEAKER_00: There's no baton.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus did all the work.
SPEAKER_00: We have salvation through Christ.
SPEAKER_00: There's no leg of the race that God's depending on you to run for your salvation.
SPEAKER_00: He did all the work.
SPEAKER_00: He lived the perfect life.
SPEAKER_00: He suffered and bled and died and took the wrath of God onto himself so that we don't have to.
SPEAKER_00: He conquered sin and death by his physical death and physical resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: And in all of this, his righteousness is now able to be imputated on, put onto his people.
SPEAKER_00: Oh my soul, return to your rest in Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: He bought it for you and he freely gives it to you.
SPEAKER_00: Every day we have to remind our souls, return to your rest in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: God, you wake up in the morning, and God's not standing there saying, Hey, you got a task of things you got to get to today to earn my favor.
SPEAKER_00: And he graciously sends the Holy Spirit to continue to sanctify you in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And his ear is always near.
SPEAKER_00: Like I said last week, sometimes we don't feel like that.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we feel I have not been as close to God as I should be.
SPEAKER_00: I haven't read the word like I should be.
SPEAKER_00: I haven't been praying like I should be.
SPEAKER_00: And I've been sinning a little bit more than I all.
SPEAKER_00: Can you identify with that?
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: Lots of head nods.
SPEAKER_00: And we instinctively feel that the more we do that, that God is just like, you know what, I'm going to take a step back.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to take another step.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to take a step back.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just going to kind of withdraw myself from you.
SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing: if you are in Christ, God will never do that.
SPEAKER_00: Because He sees the righteousness of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: His ear is always near.
SPEAKER_00: So when you find yourself in that moment, you say, return, O my soul, to your rest.
SPEAKER_00: We need to regularly remind ourselves of this.
SPEAKER_00: Do not be conformed to this world.
SPEAKER_00: Do not let anxiety and worry and doubt overcome you.
SPEAKER_00: Do not listen to the accusations or the temptations of the evil one.
SPEAKER_00: Do not entertain the flesh that seeks sin.
SPEAKER_00: These are all waves.
SPEAKER_00: These are all waves around you that toss to and fro in a storm that the cross and the resurrection of Christ has rebuked and made it as smooth as glass.
SPEAKER_00: So again, return, O my soul, to your rest.
SPEAKER_00: Now the section ends in verse 9 with resurrection language.
SPEAKER_00: I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.
SPEAKER_00: And this is intentional for Christ to sing.
SPEAKER_00: The one who is nearly in the land of the dead now walks in the land of the living.
SPEAKER_00: And if you're continuing to follow this Christological thread, we know where this leads.
SPEAKER_00: Resurrection Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: The tomb is empty.
SPEAKER_00: He walks in the land of the living.
SPEAKER_00: His is the first resurrection, and it is the guarantee of ours.
SPEAKER_00: We will follow him in a resurrection like his.
SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, faithful faith speaking in the dark, verses 10 and 11.
SPEAKER_00: 11.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a strange pivot in the psalm.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist has just been celebrating his deliverance, and now suddenly he is remembering the darkness that he was in during that time.
SPEAKER_00: Kind of like we're going back and forth.
SPEAKER_00: We're watching a tennis match.
SPEAKER_00: You know, our heads are just kind of on a swivel, going back and forth.
SPEAKER_00: You know, good things, bad things.
SPEAKER_00: I believed even when I spoke, I am greatly afflicted.
SPEAKER_00: So what's he saying?
SPEAKER_00: He's saying, even in the worst of it, when I was confessing my affliction, when I could see no way out, I still believed in my God, my refuge in my fortress.
SPEAKER_00: So faith is not the absence of pain.
SPEAKER_00: Faith is not the ability to feel good about situational things.
SPEAKER_00: Faith is the refusal to let our circumstances have the final word over how we believe and look to and know the true God works and exists in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: The apostle Paul quotes this verse directly, 2 Corinthians 4 13.
SPEAKER_00: He is in the middle of describing his own suffering as the apostle, beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, facing death regularly.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, I believed and so I spoke.
SPEAKER_00: We also believe, and so we also speak.
SPEAKER_00: Paul saw that his own experience was a continuation of the psalmist.
SPEAKER_00: Faith that does not fall silent in the dark, that does not pan out whenever we have suffering, but keeps speaking to what it knows to be true even in the face of uncertainty.
SPEAKER_00: There is a kind of faith that only works when the weather's good.
SPEAKER_00: Fair weather faith says all the right things when life is comfortable, when the bank account is full, when the health is good.
SPEAKER_00: This is the danger of the prosperity gospel, that Christ is away to good things.
SPEAKER_00: But when the snares of death close in, fair weather faith evaporates.
SPEAKER_00: The psalmist is describing something else, a faith that is grounded not in circumstances, but a faith that is grounded in the character of God and in his steadfast love.
SPEAKER_00: He is true to his word.
SPEAKER_00: Every promise that he has delivered, he has or will fulfill.
SPEAKER_00: And those of us in Christ have no circumstance that can rightfully shake our faith in him.
SPEAKER_00: We have no reason to ever doubt the goodness of God.
SPEAKER_00: And then he adds, I said in my alarm, all mankind are liars.
SPEAKER_00: Kind of strange in the severity of his suffering.
SPEAKER_00: But what he's saying here makes actual complete sense.
SPEAKER_00: It should, it's the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: What he's saying here, when viewed rightly, makes complete sense.
SPEAKER_00: Every human source of help proved inadequate.
SPEAKER_00: Let me say that again.
SPEAKER_00: Every human source of help proved inadequate.
SPEAKER_00: Every person that he leaned on was inadequate, gave way.
SPEAKER_00: Every promise that was not God's promise eventually bent or broke.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, everything that was not God was completely and utterly inadequate.
SPEAKER_00: And so it will be for you, dear brother and sister.
SPEAKER_00: Everything other than God will always be inadequate for your soul to find rest.
SPEAKER_00: What did Peter say to Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: The end of John chapter 6.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus started preaching and he started preaching some pretty difficult things.
SPEAKER_00: And all these people that had started following him after he fed the 5,000, he had all these followers, and then he started preaching some hard things.
SPEAKER_00: So these thousands of people that were at one moment interested in Jesus so easily fell off that we go from the beginning of chapter six, where Jesus has thousands of followers, to the end of chapter six, he's back down to 12.
SPEAKER_00: Terrible evangelistic uh uh strategy there on Jesus' part.
SPEAKER_00: What does Jesus say?
SPEAKER_00: He asks Peter, he says, Are you gonna leave me too?
SPEAKER_00: And Peter, and we know Peter's gonna do some bad things later, especially on the night that Jesus was betrayed, but Peter said one of the best things in Scripture in response to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And he said, To whom shall we go?
SPEAKER_00: You have the words of eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: That's my argument to you here.
SPEAKER_00: Where else will you go?
SPEAKER_00: Nothing will satisfy your soul's needed rest but God.
SPEAKER_00: Everything else will be inadequate.
SPEAKER_00: Good things will be inadequate.
SPEAKER_00: Your friends will be inadequate, your family will be inadequate, your church will be inadequate.
SPEAKER_00: It's all good things, but they won't give you rest for your soul.
SPEAKER_00: Only God can give you rest for your soul.
SPEAKER_00: Read this as Jesus' Psalm.
SPEAKER_00: On the night before his death, every human being in his inner circle failed him.
SPEAKER_00: Judas sold him out for 30 pieces of silver.
SPEAKER_00: Peter denies him three times before the sun rises.
SPEAKER_00: The rest scattered to the four winds in the garden.
SPEAKER_00: He asked them to watch and pray with him, and they fell asleep three times.
SPEAKER_00: All mankind are liars, and they will let you down.
SPEAKER_00: Not in a cynical, embittered sense, but in the sense that no human being can bear the weight of what only the Son of God can carry.
SPEAKER_00: He alone can fill our need.
SPEAKER_00: And he was alone in his hour of greatest need.
SPEAKER_00: And he believed in the Father anyway.
SPEAKER_00: This is why Scripture says that Jesus can identify with our weaknesses.
SPEAKER_00: He's not some distant figure who says things but doesn't really know about the things that we experience, the weakness, the loneliness.
SPEAKER_00: But he can because he experienced it.
SPEAKER_00: And fourthly, the question that defines gratitude in verses 12 through 19.
SPEAKER_00: The Psalm pivots in verse 12 with the question, what shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?
SPEAKER_00: This is the question of a heart that's so overwhelmed by grace, it's scrambling for ways to respond.
SPEAKER_00: You cannot repay God.
SPEAKER_00: The question itself is just absurd, but it is the right question to ask.
SPEAKER_00: Because asking it orients us correctly before God.
SPEAKER_00: We are the recipients, he is the giver.
SPEAKER_00: Everything flows from him to you, and your only response is thanksgiving.
SPEAKER_00: And what does the psalmist do?
SPEAKER_00: He lifts up the cup of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: I will lift up the cup of salvation and call the name of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Now, at the Passover meal, um, this was the fourth and final cup in the Passover meal.
SPEAKER_00: It's called the cup of completion or the cup of praise.
SPEAKER_00: The meal is done.
SPEAKER_00: The redemption is remembered and celebrated.
SPEAKER_00: The cup is lifted.
SPEAKER_00: Now stop and feel the weight of what Jesus was doing when he sang these words at the Last Supper.
SPEAKER_00: He was about to go to Gethsemane and he was about to pray.
SPEAKER_00: Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, the cup of God's wrath, the cup of judgment on the entirety of God's people that we deserve to drink, and he would drink it for us.
SPEAKER_00: He would drain it to the bottom.
SPEAKER_00: He would die under the full weight of the judgment of God for the sin of his people.
SPEAKER_00: And because Jesus drank this cup and suffered under it, we as his people now get to lift it up.
SPEAKER_00: The cup of the Lord's Supper is the cup of salvation precisely because it is the cup that was drunk by Jesus Christ Himself.
SPEAKER_00: Every time when we celebrate the Lord's Supper together and we take that cup into our hands, we are standing in the story of Psalm 116.
SPEAKER_00: We were ensnared.
SPEAKER_00: We were being dragged under.
SPEAKER_00: We were caught in the net of sin and death, and there was nothing we could do about it.
SPEAKER_00: And the Messiah drank the cup that we deserved so that we now don't have to drink that cup.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, we take this cup of wrath and we now lift it up as a cup of eternal salvation.
SPEAKER_00: And now comes a striking verse in the Psalm, verse 15.
SPEAKER_00: And I read this at uh Miss Marilyn Van Arsdal's graveside service.
SPEAKER_00: Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.
SPEAKER_00: Now, why would death be precious to God?
SPEAKER_00: The most common reading is that God values his saints so highly that he does not regard their deaths as cheap or insignificant.
SPEAKER_00: Their lives matter to him, he does not lightly let them pass.
SPEAKER_00: But when we read it in Christological terms through that lens of Christ, if the death of God's saints is precious, how infinitely precious beyond all calculation is the death of God's own Son.
SPEAKER_00: The death of Jesus was not a tragedy that God suffered with resignation.
SPEAKER_00: It was the most costly, the most weighty, the most supremely precious moment and the event of history in all the universe.
SPEAKER_00: No death has ever mattered to God the Father more than the death of his own beloved Son.
SPEAKER_00: It was the act by which everything broken, everything that fell, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, and then we saw all the consequences of that, everything that was broken from that would now be set right.
SPEAKER_00: God did not look away from the cross, he watched it with the full weight of an eternal and infinitely deep love that was purchasing redemption for his people at the highest possible price.
SPEAKER_00: And so when we as God's people follow Jesus in death, physical death, we know that in Christ, precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his sins.
SPEAKER_00: Death has no hold over us in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Death, do you want to come take me?
SPEAKER_00: I just get to go be with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You have no power here.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 16, O Lord, I'm your servant.
SPEAKER_00: You have loosed my bonds.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a paradox.
SPEAKER_00: I'm your servant, but I'm free.
SPEAKER_00: But the psalmist has been delivered from the bonds of death, and his response is to offer himself as a servant.
SPEAKER_00: We have to know that the bonds of death are something you cannot get out of on your own accord.
SPEAKER_00: The bonds of sin are bonds that you're born into.
SPEAKER_00: And those are chains you cannot remove on your own.
SPEAKER_00: But God can.
SPEAKER_00: And he is grateful to God for what he has done.
SPEAKER_00: He's not in servitude, he is in a grateful posturing of submittering himself to God.
SPEAKER_00: The freed man gives himself back to the freedom giver, to God.
SPEAKER_00: Freedom from one kind of bondage issues a result that ends in a glad submission to God.
SPEAKER_00: This is the pattern of the Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: We were slaves to sin, slaves to death, caught in nets that we could not escape.
SPEAKER_00: Christ loose our bonds and now, freed, we now offer our lives back to the one who freed us, not from compulsion, but out of love.
SPEAKER_00: I am your servant.
SPEAKER_00: You have loosed my bonds.
SPEAKER_00: And then the psalm ends in the most fitting way possible: public worship.
SPEAKER_00: What we're gathered together to do this morning, gathering together as the people of God, I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people, in the courts of the house of the Lord, in your midst, O Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: Praise the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: You know, I was kind of bummed out this morning sitting here because normally I sit here.
SPEAKER_00: No, y'all good, you're good.
SPEAKER_00: Y'all are good.
SPEAKER_00: But what I do when I sit here is when I, y'all, y'all know this.
SPEAKER_00: When I sing, I look around and I look at you guys.
SPEAKER_00: And I love to see you all singing.
SPEAKER_00: And I try to make eye contact with you as we sing together.
SPEAKER_00: And we're publicly worshiping together.
SPEAKER_00: What a friend we have in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not singing this privately.
SPEAKER_00: I'm looking across to JD, and JD and I are singing it to each other.
SPEAKER_00: JD, I'm reminding you what a friend we have in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And he's singing it back to me.
SPEAKER_00: That's what public worship is about.
SPEAKER_00: Us as a people of God, it's not a private time.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, again, we don't, we're not, none of you have blinders on.
SPEAKER_00: And like, this is my private time.
SPEAKER_00: Don't met, don't get in, this is my box.
SPEAKER_00: I'm here to privately worship the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: That's what you do at home.
SPEAKER_00: Here we publicly worship together, and ironically, that's how the psalm ends.
SPEAKER_00: God, you've done all this for me.
SPEAKER_00: What am I gonna do?
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to go to your people and publicly declare your goodness and your greatness.
SPEAKER_00: I will worship you in the courts of praise.
SPEAKER_00: This is super important because the journey of this psalm is not a private one.
SPEAKER_00: It begins in private agony.
SPEAKER_00: And some of you have private agony.
SPEAKER_00: We all have things that we deal with that other people don't comprehend or understand, but they can come along beside us.
SPEAKER_00: But some of us in this room have suffering that other people in this room don't have.
SPEAKER_00: That's a private agony.
SPEAKER_00: But it ends in a public praise.
SPEAKER_00: The one who is alone in the pit with every human helper, unreliable, is now gathered with all God's people in the courts of the house of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Rescued souls are not rescued to keep it to themselves.
SPEAKER_00: We are rescued to the people of God.
SPEAKER_00: We are adopted as sons and daughters of the Most High God, and we become a family.
SPEAKER_00: The writer in Hebrews in chapter 2 quotes Psalm 22 to describe Jesus leading his people in praise.
SPEAKER_00: I will tell of your name to my brothers in the midst of the congregation.
SPEAKER_00: I will sing your praise.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus Christ, the great high priest, is the one who gathers his redeemed people and leads them in doxology before the Father.
SPEAKER_00: The praise does not originate with us.
SPEAKER_00: Christ sings it first, and we follow.
SPEAKER_00: So, as we conclude, there is a question that may perplex us if we're being thoughtful about reading this psalm.
SPEAKER_00: How do I pray these words when they are not my experience?
SPEAKER_00: And I would just say the older you get, the more the psalms become your experience.
SPEAKER_00: I will say when my daughter was diagnosed with cancer, my psalm was Psalm 91.
SPEAKER_00: That's all I had.
SPEAKER_00: You know, when suffering hits, for those of us who have had deep suffering, when suffering hits, you're not prepared for it.
SPEAKER_00: Like you kind of think like when people go through suffering, like, oh, they're being chiseled.
SPEAKER_00: It must be great.
SPEAKER_00: No, it's awful.
SPEAKER_00: It's terrible.
SPEAKER_00: All I had was Psalm 91.
SPEAKER_00: This is what I went to every day when I was completely out of control, out of my mind, anxious, worried, uh, just over the top.
SPEAKER_00: He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
SPEAKER_00: I will say to the Lord, my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust.
SPEAKER_00: That's all I had.
SPEAKER_00: And then after two years of experience, I have learned to go to Psalm 116.
SPEAKER_00: Return, O my soul, to your rest.
SPEAKER_00: Life experience will teach you the Psalms as we go through life together.
SPEAKER_00: What if I've never faced a near-death crisis or a severe illness?
SPEAKER_00: What if I've never felt ensnared by the net of death or the pangs of Sheol?
SPEAKER_00: Am I simply acting out when I read these verses or if I sing them or I pray them?
SPEAKER_00: Here's the answer to that.
SPEAKER_00: These words belong to Christ before they belong to us.
SPEAKER_00: He prayed them from the depth of his heart with an actual agony, an actual abandonment, an actual death.
SPEAKER_00: And he fulfilled the psalm with his own body.
SPEAKER_00: And now, because of us being united to Christ, his story becomes our story.
SPEAKER_00: His cry in the darkness was offered on our behalf.
SPEAKER_00: His walk in the land of the living paves the path that you and I will follow him in and walk in, and that you now walk if you are in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: You were ensnared, maybe not by physical illness, maybe not by enemy soldiers, but by sin and by death, by a relentless pull of a world that's not as it should be, continues to live in the fallen state.
SPEAKER_00: The snares of death are not only a biological moment, they are every way that the power of death reaches back for you as a living person and tries to drain the life away through addiction, through shame, through anxiety, through despair, all the broken places that never seemed to heal.
SPEAKER_00: Into that ensnaring is where Jesus came roaring in like a lion.
SPEAKER_00: He did not stay at a safe distance and offer helpful advice.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't get a megaphone from heaven and say, hang in there.
SPEAKER_00: You're almost done, you got it, you can do it.
SPEAKER_00: He's not air support.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus came down and fought the war for us.
SPEAKER_00: He cried out, O Lord, deliver my soul.
SPEAKER_00: And the Father answered his prayer with an empty tomb on the third day.
SPEAKER_00: And because of that, and only because of that, you and I can lift up the cup of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: Because of that, we can say, I love the Lord because he has heard my voice.
SPEAKER_00: Because of that, your walk in the land of the living is not an accident and it's not a temporary reprieve.
SPEAKER_00: It is the gift of eternal life that Christ has poured into you.
SPEAKER_00: And get this because of Christ, all of you who are in Christ now rightfully deserve it.
SPEAKER_00: So what shall you render to the Lord for all his benefits to you?
SPEAKER_00: Nothing sufficient, nothing that even begins to balance the ledger.
SPEAKER_00: We can never pay him back for his goodness to us.
SPEAKER_00: But we can do what the psalmist did.
SPEAKER_00: We can lift the cup, we can walk before the Lord in the land of the living, and we can join our voices with the church's cry on this earth.
SPEAKER_00: Praise the Lord and return, oh my soul, to your rest.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we thank you for Christ bearing this cup for us so that we as your people don't have to.
SPEAKER_00: Father, my prayer in this morning is that saints were sanctified, but if any in here need Christ, they still sit under the cup of