SPEAKER_01: This morning we continue our summer series through Psalms as we uh look at Psalm 16.
SPEAKER_00: The title of today's sermon is The Path of Life.
SPEAKER_00: So turn with me in your copy of God's Word to Psalm 16.
SPEAKER_01: And a question I have for you this morning is what do you have that death cannot take away from you?
SPEAKER_01: You strip away the house, the career, the retirement account, the health, the family, the reputation, strip away your physical body, your own beating heart.
SPEAKER_01: Take all that away, and what remains?
SPEAKER_01: Now, for most people on this earth, the honest answer is nothing.
SPEAKER_01: I just listed all their hopes and dreams and everything that makes up the sum total of what they are.
SPEAKER_01: And so many in this world don't even ask that question.
SPEAKER_01: So they keep busy, they accumulate, they distract.
SPEAKER_01: And we as God's people are often tempted to do the same as them.
SPEAKER_01: But that's why we gather here every week to calibrate, to ring the bells of the gospel to remind us of who we are in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And Psalm 16 is going to ring those gospel bells for us again this morning.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 16 is a song of a man that asked that question.
SPEAKER_01: David calls it a mikcom, a word whose exact meaning is uncertain, but many commentators, following many rabbi teachers, took to suggest it means a golden psalm, something that's engraved, inscribed, and precious.
SPEAKER_01: Now, whether or not that etymology holds as to what this word means, the description of Psalm 16 fits.
SPEAKER_01: This is a psalm to engrave on our hearts, because it ends in the only place a human life can safely end, where we read in verse 11, You make known to me the path of life.
SPEAKER_01: In your presence there is fullness of joy at your right hand, our pleasures forevermore.
SPEAKER_01: Now this morning we want to take the same path that we take through each psalm, through its three horizons.
SPEAKER_01: First, the historical horizon.
SPEAKER_01: What did David mean?
SPEAKER_01: What did the author mean?
SPEAKER_01: What did it mean to its original audience?
SPEAKER_01: What did it mean when Israel first sang it?
SPEAKER_01: Secondly, what's the Christological horizon?
SPEAKER_01: How does this Psalm belong first and foremost and most truly to our Lord Jesus Christ?
SPEAKER_01: And an interesting thing about Psalm 16 is the apostles themselves force that question on us because both Peter and Paul preached the resurrection from Psalm 16.
SPEAKER_01: And third, the congregational horizon.
SPEAKER_01: How do we, as the church, united to the risen Christ, take this golden psalm that David wrote and put it on our own lips and on our own hearts?
SPEAKER_01: And what does it look like for us as a church to engrave this psalm on our hearts?
SPEAKER_01: So follow along with me in Psalm 16.
SPEAKER_01: Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
SPEAKER_01: I say to the Lord, You are my Lord, I have no good apart from you.
SPEAKER_01: As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight.
SPEAKER_01: The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply, their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out, or take their names on my lips.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup, you hold my lot.
SPEAKER_01: The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.
SPEAKER_01: Indeed I have a beautiful inheritance.
SPEAKER_01: I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel in the night, also my heart instructs me.
SPEAKER_01: I have set the Lord always before me, because he has at my right hand I shall not be shaken.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices, my flesh also dwells secure, for you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one seek corruption.
SPEAKER_01: You make known to me the path of life, in your presence there is fullness of joy, at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
SPEAKER_01: So, firstly, this morning let's start at the historical horizon.
SPEAKER_01: Well we see here what David writes, we see a man whose treasure was God.
SPEAKER_01: The Psalm opens with a brief petition: preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
SPEAKER_01: Now, David is not an obvious crisis here.
SPEAKER_01: And we see there are some psalms that David writes from a point of crisis.
SPEAKER_01: We don't see that here in Psalm 16.
SPEAKER_01: There are no armies, there's no cave, there's no chasing of Saul in the Psalm.
SPEAKER_01: This is the ordinary daily prayer of a man who knows that he is mortal and keeps himself deliberately under the shelter of his God.
SPEAKER_01: I am in a good season, and I'm going to continue to rest under God's wing.
SPEAKER_01: Then he makes a confession that governs the rest of the psalm and governs all of David's Psalms, governs all of Scripture, governs all things in existence.
SPEAKER_01: David says, I say to the Lord, You are my Lord, I have no good apart from you.
SPEAKER_01: Notice that David does not say, You are my greatest good among many goods.
SPEAKER_01: He says, I have no good apart from you.
SPEAKER_01: This is King David, a man that had far more many blessings than any of us in the room even dare think of.
SPEAKER_01: Think of everything in David's life.
SPEAKER_01: He had a kingdom, a famine, victorious army, music, friendship.
SPEAKER_00: Everything David could want on this earth, he could he could ask for it, and it would probably happen.
SPEAKER_01: But he says, I have no good apart from God.
SPEAKER_01: But all those things that David had in and of themselves aren't bad, but he's saying this is good only as it comes from God's hand and leads me back to God's face.
SPEAKER_01: Cut off from God, none of it is good at all.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, something that that I pray frequently, I actually picked up on it, I think, from from Kent, is that when my family gathers together to pray over our meals, when we have our meal, um, I will thank God for the food.
SPEAKER_01: And we usually call the food out by name.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Lord, for this pizza.
SPEAKER_01: We know this pizza's good.
SPEAKER_01: May taste good, but maybe not healthy.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for thank you for the family.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for fellowship.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for all these things that that we have tonight, and we know that they're good, but they're not as good as Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And may this pizza that we're about to eat, may this fellowship that we're about to enjoy, being together as family, having friends over, may those ordinary casual things point us to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: That's what those things exist for.
SPEAKER_01: You want Papa John's?
SPEAKER_01: Get Papa John's, and may it point you to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: That's what this life does.
SPEAKER_01: God is good.
SPEAKER_01: Everything that we have comes from God and it points us back to Him.
SPEAKER_01: And what we see in verses 3 and 4, we see a confession that flows into two loves and one refusal.
SPEAKER_01: We see David loves God, and we see out of that flows another love.
SPEAKER_01: David loves God's people.
SPEAKER_01: As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones in whom is all my delight.
SPEAKER_01: You cannot delight in the Lord and not delight in his people.
SPEAKER_01: David is a king.
SPEAKER_01: He had ever every um, I wouldn't say right, but he had all the ability to not be with the people.
SPEAKER_01: He could have been the king, sat on his kingly throne, and not been with the people, but he looks at the ordinary, unimpressive Israelites, and yet they fear the Lord, and he calls them the nobility of the land.
SPEAKER_01: He's not looking to his army, he's not looking to his conquerors, he's not looking to his generals, he's looking to the everyday, ordinary Israelite that fears the Lord, and he says, This is the nobility of the land.
SPEAKER_01: These are truly the excellent ones.
SPEAKER_01: A love of God causes David to delight in loving God's people.
SPEAKER_01: And secondly, David refuses the alternative.
SPEAKER_01: The sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply their drink offerings of blood.
SPEAKER_01: I will not pour out or take their names on my lips.
SPEAKER_01: Now, in David's world, this is not some abstract idea.
SPEAKER_01: He was surrounded, and Israel was constantly tempted.
SPEAKER_01: This is why God gave them the Ten Commandments and so many rules.
SPEAKER_01: They were so tempted to follow the worship of the gods around them from all the other peoples.
SPEAKER_01: Canaanite worship surrounded Israel, Baal, Moloch, Kemosh, worship that promised fertility, security, prosperity, but yet it delivered nothing but a multiplied sorrow.
SPEAKER_01: David draws a line in the sand for his people, and he says, I will not even name these false gods in worship.
SPEAKER_01: There's no dual citizenship here amongst God's people.
SPEAKER_01: You cannot worship Yahweh and entertain the gods of the other peoples.
SPEAKER_01: Verses five and six gives us what I would call a drumbeat that we hear echoed throughout all of Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: Every tribe, that is, except one, one tribe did not get land.
SPEAKER_01: It's the tribe of the Levites.
SPEAKER_01: To the Levites, the Lord said, You shall have no inheritance in the land.
SPEAKER_01: I am your portion and your inheritance among the people of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: So while everyone else got acreage, the priests coming from the tribe of Levi, they got God.
SPEAKER_01: Now here is David, not a Levite.
SPEAKER_01: Remember, David's not from the tribe of Levi.
SPEAKER_01: David's from the tribe of Judah.
SPEAKER_01: He's a king with royal estates.
SPEAKER_01: So he has everything that he wants.
SPEAKER_01: He has the land, and yet he takes upon himself the Levi's privilege that has no land.
SPEAKER_01: Do you see what he's saying here?
SPEAKER_01: I've got the land, but I want the promise and the privilege of the ones who weren't given the land but were given God.
SPEAKER_01: I want my portion to be in God.
SPEAKER_01: He's saying, my real inheritance was never the land.
SPEAKER_01: My portion is not measured in acres.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord Himself is my allotment, my cup, my estate.
SPEAKER_01: And when I survey my inheritance, the boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places.
SPEAKER_01: And not to jump ahead of ourselves, but to go ahead and make a Christological and congregational connection there, Jesus tells us, I go before you to prepare a place for you.
SPEAKER_01: What David's saying here is connected to those of us who are in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: We don't build a treasure here.
SPEAKER_01: Christ buys and builds a treasure for us in eternity.
SPEAKER_01: David is content, not because his circumstances were easy, they usually rarely were easy.
SPEAKER_01: David had a lot of strife, but his portion is unending, because his portion is in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: David was not alone in this confession.
SPEAKER_01: We see Asaph, his chief musician, reached the same place through a much harder road.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 73.
SPEAKER_01: Asaph nearly lost his faith, envying the prosperity of the wicked.
SPEAKER_01: Does that sound familiar in our own day?
SPEAKER_01: Until he went to the sanctuary and he came out singing David's tune, Whom have I in heaven but you?
SPEAKER_01: And there is nothing on this earth that I desire besides you.
SPEAKER_01: My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
SPEAKER_01: Same word that Asaf uses in Psalm 73, portion.
SPEAKER_01: This is the message of the entire Bible.
SPEAKER_01: God Himself is the treasure.
SPEAKER_01: The Old Testament repeats it over and over and over again.
SPEAKER_01: God Himself is our treasure.
SPEAKER_01: And then something marvelously wonderful happens.
SPEAKER_01: God Himself shows up in the form of a man, God the Son, Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And then the same message continues.
SPEAKER_01: God Himself is our treasure.
SPEAKER_01: Like the story of the gospel, like the whole Bible itself, the message of the psalm this morning is to look to Christ as your treasure.
SPEAKER_01: And in verses 7 through 11, we see David's confidence in making God his treasure leads to not fearing what normal man fears.
SPEAKER_01: The final movement of the Psalm turns towards night, turns toward death.
SPEAKER_01: I bless the Lord who gives me counsel.
SPEAKER_01: In the night also my heart instructs me.
SPEAKER_01: I have set the Lord always before me because he has at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.
SPEAKER_01: And then David says, Therefore, my heart is glad, my whole being rejoice, my flesh also dwells secure, for you will not abandon my soul to shield, or let your holy one see corruption.
SPEAKER_01: My question to you is what did David mean?
SPEAKER_01: At minimum, he was confident that God would not hand him over to the grave prematurely.
SPEAKER_01: That this covenant God would preserve him.
SPEAKER_01: But surely he saw more.
SPEAKER_01: So what does he mean here that you will not let your holy one see corruption?
SPEAKER_00: Well, David knew that if the Lord is my inheritance, and the Lord does not die, then my inheritance outlasts my funeral.
SPEAKER_00: But here's the problem.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible tells us plainly.
SPEAKER_00: David dies.
SPEAKER_01: Then David slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David.
SPEAKER_01: His body went into a tomb, and his flesh most certainly saw corruption.
SPEAKER_01: And his tomb was a known landmark in Jerusalem for a thousand years.
SPEAKER_01: So either verse 10 is just a feel-good exaggeration, or David was speaking of something or someone beyond himself.
SPEAKER_01: And that question hangs over the Israelites for a millennium, and then on the day of Pentecost, it gets answered in a sermon by Peter.
SPEAKER_01: Secondly, the Christological horizon, every psalm belongs to Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Fifty days after the crucifixion, Peter stands up in Jerusalem within walking distance of David's tomb.
SPEAKER_01: And he quotes David.
SPEAKER_01: Turn with me to Acts chapter 2.
SPEAKER_00: And we're going to start in verse 22 through 36.
SPEAKER_01: So this is Peter's sermon, and you're going to hear him quote out of Psalm 16, beginning in verse 22.
SPEAKER_01: Men of Israel, hear these words.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know.
SPEAKER_01: This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.
SPEAKER_01: God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.
SPEAKER_01: For David says concerning him, I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced, my flesh also will dwell in hope.
SPEAKER_01: For you will not abandon my soul to Hades or let your holy one see corruption.
SPEAKER_01: You have made known to me the paths of life, and you will make me full of gladness with your presence.
SPEAKER_01: Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David, that he both died and was buried.
SPEAKER_01: He's answering the question, the question we just asked, Peter's answering it.
SPEAKER_01: Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption.
SPEAKER_01: This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses.
SPEAKER_01: Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing.
SPEAKER_01: For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.
SPEAKER_01: Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus, whom you crucified.
SPEAKER_01: The best commentary on the Bible is the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: Peter is telling us here, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, what David was talking about in Psalm 16.
SPEAKER_01: David's flesh did not dwell secure.
SPEAKER_01: David's body did see corruption.
SPEAKER_01: So what was David talking about?
SPEAKER_01: Peter answers it.
SPEAKER_01: David was a prophet.
SPEAKER_01: Paul preaches the identical argument in Poseidon Antioch.
SPEAKER_01: David fell asleep and saw corruption.
SPEAKER_01: But he whom God raised up did not see corruption.
SPEAKER_01: Acts chapter 13.
SPEAKER_01: Peter and Paul are in agreement.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 16 finds its deepest, truest voice, not in David, but in David's greater son.
SPEAKER_01: This is not a clever reinterpretation after the fact.
SPEAKER_01: It is the Psalm's own inner logic and foretaste of the things to come written from David's perspective.
SPEAKER_01: The confidence of verse 10 was always too big for David.
SPEAKER_01: It was written by the Holy Spirit for the mouth of Jesus Christ the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: So let's read through some of these verses again and this time apply it to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 2, I have no good apart from you.
SPEAKER_01: Only one man ever said this with total truthfulness.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus' entire life was undivided devotion to his Father.
SPEAKER_01: He said in John 4 34, My food is to do the will of him who sent me.
SPEAKER_01: Where David's devotion was real but flawed, Jesus' was flawless.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 3 As for the saints in the land, in whom is all my delight, hear the Lord Jesus delighting in his people, not because we are impressive.
SPEAKER_01: But because the Father gave us to him.
SPEAKER_01: Hebrews 2:11, he is not ashamed to call them brothers.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is not ashamed this very moment to call you brother or sister.
SPEAKER_01: The eternal son looks to his blood-bought church in all of her weakness, and he calls her his delight.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 4, the sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply.
SPEAKER_01: I will not take their names on my lips.
SPEAKER_01: Christ faced this choice in the wilderness.
SPEAKER_01: The devil offered him the kingdoms of the world for one act of alternative worship, one bent knee to another God, where Israel failed before him in the wilderness for 40 years.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus stood firm for 40 days.
SPEAKER_01: You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.
SPEAKER_01: He quotes to Satan in Matthew 4:10.
SPEAKER_01: He refused the drink offering of the idols, and instead, later in Gethsemane, he took the cup of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: In verse 5, the Lord is my chosen portion of my cup.
SPEAKER_01: The cup of the Father held out to Jesus was a cup of wrath against our sin.
SPEAKER_01: My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not as I will, but your will be done.
SPEAKER_01: And then he took the cup and he drank it all of it.
SPEAKER_01: And he could do it because even in the darkness the Father was his portion.
SPEAKER_01: His lines had fallen in pleasant places, even through the valley of the shadow of death.
SPEAKER_01: In verse 10, you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one seek corruption.
SPEAKER_01: The 1689 Baptist Confession puts it this way: the Lord Jesus was crucified and died and remain in the state of the dead, yet saw no corruption.
SPEAKER_01: Think of what this means.
SPEAKER_01: On Friday evening, they laid his body in Joseph's tomb.
SPEAKER_01: Real death.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus died.
SPEAKER_01: His physical body died, his soul separated from his body, and his body laid cold in the grave.
SPEAKER_01: And yet, the ancient process of decay, which is claimed every son of Adam since the first death, from Abel on until now, was not permitted to touch him.
SPEAKER_01: His flesh dwelt secure.
SPEAKER_01: Sheol could only hold him for a Sabbath, but it could not keep him because it was not possible for him to be held by it.
SPEAKER_01: That's what Peter just said.
SPEAKER_01: Well, he said it 2,000 years ago.
SPEAKER_01: We just read it.
SPEAKER_01: On the third day, on that first resurrection Sunday, the Father made known to him the path of life, up out of the tomb, through the ascension, to the right hand of the majesty on high, where there is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore.
SPEAKER_01: That's where Christ is now.
SPEAKER_01: This is the gospel hidden in a thousand-year-old song for God's people.
SPEAKER_01: We've not really read Psalm 16 until we have heard Christ singing it.
SPEAKER_01: Our confidence is in him, and that translates to our third horizon: singing the psalm in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: This is what it means for us as a church.
SPEAKER_01: If Psalm 16 first belongs to Jesus, does it still belong to us?
SPEAKER_01: We answer this question every week.
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, because Jesus has these Psalms.
SPEAKER_01: They are now given to His people precisely because it belongs to Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Union with Christ is the hinge on which everything turns on.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible tells us that everything that Christ has becomes ours by our inheritance in him.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know what that means?
SPEAKER_01: That means that when Christ inherits all this goodness from his Father, he has bought this, we join with Christ in this inheritance from the Father.
SPEAKER_01: What this means for God's people is that when we get to heaven, I tell you this all the time, and I love, I haven't said it in a long time.
SPEAKER_01: So maybe you're hearing it for the first time.
SPEAKER_01: We need to be reminded.
SPEAKER_01: When we get to heaven, when you leave this earth and go to be with Christ, you will not feel out of place.
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever been somewhere where you feel out of place?
SPEAKER_01: Like this place is more uppity than I'm used to.
SPEAKER_01: I'm just from a small town in East Texas.
SPEAKER_01: I didn't know this kind of money existed.
SPEAKER_01: You know, like if you were to like like showing up uh like to the White House and like gym shorts and a tank top, you're gonna be like, this is awkward.
SPEAKER_01: Like I didn't, I didn't dress for the occasion.
SPEAKER_01: I didn't, I didn't plan well.
SPEAKER_01: Um, this feels awkward.
SPEAKER_01: We've all been in situation, maybe not that one, maybe not at the White House and gym shorts and tank, but we've all been in a situation where you're like, I'm kind of, I kind of don't belong here.
SPEAKER_01: Like this is awkward.
SPEAKER_01: When you get to heaven, there will be none of that.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, when you get to heaven, we know from what scripture teaches us about God and about Christ, what he's done for us, how he views his people, what Christ has bought for his people, and how he's given it to his people.
SPEAKER_01: I can assure you from what scripture says, you have never felt more at home than you will when you open your eyes for the first time in eternity.
SPEAKER_01: Y'all are awfully quiet on that one.
unknown: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: When you open your eyes in glory, you will immediately feel a natural belonging because of the inheritance that Christ has bought for you.
SPEAKER_01: It is yours by right, not because of you, but because of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It's a free gift of God, it's grace, but now in Christ it's your right.
SPEAKER_00: Where was I?
SPEAKER_00: I don't, uh that was a that was a tangent, so I lost my place.
SPEAKER_01: Bear with me for a second.
SPEAKER_01: So we see how Peter, the same praeter, preached Psalm 16 at Pentecost.
SPEAKER_01: He describes the Christians as uh uh estate: God has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.
SPEAKER_01: 1 Peter 1, 3 through 4.
SPEAKER_01: That's Psalm 16 vocabulary.
SPEAKER_01: Inheritance kept secure.
SPEAKER_01: Now spoken over every believer, because Christ's flesh dwelt secure, your inheritance also dwells secure, waiting for you.
SPEAKER_01: So three applications from this for us as the church.
SPEAKER_01: Number one, make David's confession your own.
SPEAKER_01: I have no good apart from you.
SPEAKER_01: My question is, is God your only good or merely your helpful supplement?
SPEAKER_01: Much modern religion treats God as an app that we install in our lives to improve a life that we're building upon ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: A little piece here, some guidance there.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I got this.
SPEAKER_01: I just could use a little bit of spirituality in my life.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 16 will not tolerate that.
SPEAKER_01: Either the Lord is your portion or something else is.
SPEAKER_01: If you don't know this about me or my my thoughts, then um you haven't been paying attention.
SPEAKER_01: So you should know this, but I'm gonna intentionally pull out the soapbox to make a point.
SPEAKER_01: We see how popular these little Jesus action figures have become.
SPEAKER_00: These are not Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus is not a good luck charm.
SPEAKER_01: And I've heard, well, well, it's a good reminder.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, do I need an action figure of my wife?
SPEAKER_01: Oh, what?
SPEAKER_01: Am I married?
SPEAKER_01: Am I I I forgot I was married until I saw the action figure of my wife sitting on my car dashboard.
SPEAKER_01: I'm so glad I have that to remember what's her name.
SPEAKER_01: If you need, if you need a little Jesus to remind you about Jesus, you need to get saved.
SPEAKER_01: You need to make Jay, you need to make Jesus Christ your Lord and your Savior.
SPEAKER_01: Because those who make God their portion do not need a little reminder that He exists.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know where that comes from?
SPEAKER_01: That is a direct take from the Hindu religion.
SPEAKER_01: Let's take our little gods and let's put them in a little figure and let's put them on the shelf, and they're gonna bless our house and be a good luck charm.
SPEAKER_01: It's Hinduism, and we've converted it to Christianity, and we have this little Jesus, and it's so demeaning to who Jesus is.
SPEAKER_01: When Jesus returns, trumpets will sound like we can't even imagine.
SPEAKER_01: An army of angelic hosts are going to descend with him.
SPEAKER_00: The ground will shake, and the dead will rise, and those who are not in Christ will tremble in fear as he descends.
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be a scene that we can't even begin to wrap our minds around.
SPEAKER_01: The church will be infused with this overpowering joy and blessedness and radiance as we go to be with our Lord.
SPEAKER_00: You can't you can't depict that.
SPEAKER_00: For your life.
SPEAKER_01: Everything that you have that is good comes from the Lord and is to be used to point you back to Him.
SPEAKER_01: Be careful not to belittle what the Lord has done for you or to mock your inheritance in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: If we understood 0.0001% of what the Lord has in store for us, we would not be able to control our joy as it overflows our hearts to all of those around us.
SPEAKER_01: We have no idea what's in store for us in glory.
SPEAKER_01: But the early church knew this to be true.
SPEAKER_01: In A.D.
SPEAKER_01: 155, the aged bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, he was a disciple of the Apostle John.
SPEAKER_01: He walked with John.
SPEAKER_01: He was dragged into the arena and he was offered mercy.
SPEAKER_01: He was offered his life if he would simply swear by Caesar and curse Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Take another name on your lips.
SPEAKER_01: Take the name of Christ off your lips and put Caesar on your lips.
SPEAKER_01: Pour out this one offering to another God, and we shall set you free.
SPEAKER_01: And Polycarp's answer was this eighty-six years I have served him, and he has done me no wrong.
SPEAKER_01: How can I blaspheme my king who saved me?
SPEAKER_00: And then he was burned at the stake.
SPEAKER_00: And he lost nothing.
SPEAKER_01: And that day he gained everything.
SPEAKER_01: Because his portion was in something that the flames could not reach.
SPEAKER_01: And ask yourselves this morning, what would it cost the world to take away your good?
SPEAKER_01: If your treasure can be repossessed, foreclosed, diagnosed, or buried, my friend, you've got too small of a treasure.
SPEAKER_01: Say with David and say in Christ, I have no good apart from God, and that is a treasure that cannot be taken away from you.
SPEAKER_01: And notice this confession has a corporate shape.
SPEAKER_01: David delighted with the saints in the land.
SPEAKER_01: If Christ is your portion, then Christ's people becomes your delight.
SPEAKER_01: In an individualized society, the world has privatized faith.
SPEAKER_01: Psalm 16 calls you to look around this room and see in these ordinary brothers and sisters the excellent ones that David is talking about.
SPEAKER_01: David was the king.
SPEAKER_01: And yet he called them the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight.
SPEAKER_01: It is inconsistent to say you love Christ, but you don't love being with his people.
SPEAKER_01: There is a joy and a pleasure that unites brothers and sisters in Christ that we don't experience with the unbeliever.
SPEAKER_01: Because we are united in the fact that God is our portion.
SPEAKER_01: Secondly, learn contentment with your lot.
SPEAKER_01: David said the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.
SPEAKER_01: This is a hard thing to say, honestly.
SPEAKER_01: Some of us can look at our boundary lines.
SPEAKER_01: What are they?
SPEAKER_01: Your health, your marriage, your singleness, your finances, your children, your family, your limitations, your job situation, your house.
SPEAKER_00: And pleasant places may not be a phrase that comes to mind.
SPEAKER_00: How could David say it?
SPEAKER_01: Not because his circumstances were pleasant.
SPEAKER_01: Many of the Psalms that he wrote, he wrote while he was running for his life.
SPEAKER_01: He could say it because verse 5 comes before verse 6, the Lord was his portion, and therefore whatever lines the Lord draws enclosed a good inheritance because they enclosed him.
SPEAKER_01: The Puritan pastor Jeremiah Burroughs preached to the congregations battered by the plague, by poverty, by civil war in the 1640s.
SPEAKER_01: And he called this a rare jewel of Christian contentment.
SPEAKER_01: And he defined contentment not as liking your circumstances, but as freely submitting to and delighting in God's wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.
SPEAKER_01: Notice God's disposal.
SPEAKER_00: That is verse 5.
SPEAKER_00: You hold my lot.
SPEAKER_01: See all these comforts that we have.
SPEAKER_00: And just without knowing it say, This is my portion.
SPEAKER_01: Who had literally nothing but God.
SPEAKER_01: What else could be my portion?
SPEAKER_01: I have no home, I have no food, I have no health.
SPEAKER_01: Just gonna lay on my deathbed and die, and God is my portion.
SPEAKER_01: Your lot is not held by the economy, by your medical chart, or by blind chance.
SPEAKER_01: It is held in the same nail-scarp hands that hold you.
SPEAKER_01: Contentment is not a resignation.
SPEAKER_01: Contentment is a trust in the knowledge of who holds your lot.
SPEAKER_01: If you are in Christ, you are proceeding forward on a timeline under the sovereign hand of God.
SPEAKER_01: If you don't have what you think you should have, or you're not where you think you should be, then know that God directs your steps and he is more trustworthy than we are.
SPEAKER_01: We should practice being content in the place that God has us.
SPEAKER_01: And the more that you make him your portion, the easier that becomes.
SPEAKER_01: For then anything and everything that lies before you, your response becomes, I am satisfied, because God is my portion.
SPEAKER_01: And thirdly, face death with your eyes on the risen Christ.
SPEAKER_01: The psalm takes us at the end to where it began: the question of death.
SPEAKER_01: Christian, because you are united in Christ, Psalm 9 through 11 are now true of you, not as poetry, but as a covenant fact.
SPEAKER_01: Your body will go into the ground, as David's did.
SPEAKER_01: But it goes to the ground as a seed in the field, waiting to come back up.
SPEAKER_01: Because he lives, you also will live.
SPEAKER_01: John 14, 19.
SPEAKER_01: The path of life that Jesus walked out of the tomb is the path that he will walk you down on the last day.
SPEAKER_01: This is not a theory.
SPEAKER_01: This is how our fathers, uh in or our forefathers in Christianity actually uh lived in the faith and how they actually died.
SPEAKER_01: John Owen, the great 17th-century theologian, lay dying in August of 1683.
SPEAKER_01: A friend came to him to tell him that his final book, Meditations on the Glory of Christ, had gone to the printer.
SPEAKER_01: Owen replied that he was glad to hear it, but that the long wished for day had come at last, in which he would see that glory in another manner that he had ever been capable of in this world.
SPEAKER_01: Do you hear Psalm 16 in that?
SPEAKER_01: In your presence there is fullness of joy.
SPEAKER_01: Owen wasn't gritting his teeth on his deathbed, he was leaning toward it.
SPEAKER_01: He welcomed death because his portion lay on the other side of it.
SPEAKER_01: That's the birthright of every believer, and it is an offer this morning to every unbeliever.
SPEAKER_01: Friend, if you are outside of Christ, the psalm has a word for you too, and it's verse 4: the sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply.
SPEAKER_01: Every idol under delivers, including yourself, in this life, and it will abandon you entirely at the grave.
SPEAKER_01: But the Holy One who saw no corruption stands ready to receive all who take refuge in him.
SPEAKER_01: Come to him, make his father your portion, trade your multiplying sorrows for a fullness of joy in Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: How do you do that?
SPEAKER_01: You place your faith in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Romans 10 9 says, If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
SPEAKER_01: So here we are at Psalm 16.
SPEAKER_01: A king in ancient Israel confessed that God himself, not the land, not the throne, was his inheritance, and even Sheol could not confiscate it.
SPEAKER_01: A greater king took up that song, Christ came, sang it perfectly, carried it through to Gethsemane's cup and Joseph's tomb, and proved it true on the third day when in the flesh, which dealt secure, he rose incorruptible.
SPEAKER_01: And now here we sit, a congregation united in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: You, you take this same song on your lips, preserved by God, delighting in the saints, refusing the idols, content with our lot, glad at the grave's edge.
SPEAKER_01: And we say, You make known to me the path of life, in your presence there is fullness of joy, at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
SPEAKER_01: That path has already been walked.
SPEAKER_01: The tomb on that path is already empty, and the destination is not a hope so, it is a risen, reigning Christ that is guaranteed.
SPEAKER_01: What do you have that death cannot take from you?
SPEAKER_01: If Christ is your portion, then I would answer everything that matters.
SPEAKER_01: And it actually does one thing better for the believer death.
SPEAKER_01: Death takes nothing from us.
SPEAKER_01: It's actually the transport by which we get to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: As Paul said, for me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray together.