SUNDAY SERMON - How To Pray In Times Of Trouble (Part 1) - Psalm 16
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Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Harmful content
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2
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3
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Summary
As sinners, we do not deserve the privilege of knowing the holy God. And so, your Word, a revelation of who you are, what you have done, and what it is that you require from man as a response of obedience and love and worship, this revelation of your truth comes to us this morning as it always does. It comes as an undeserved gift, it comes as a gift, and we pray that by the power of the Holy Spirit, we might properly equip ourselves to be good stewards of this grace, that we might equip ourselves with spiritual eyes to see and spiritual ears to hear with new hearts that are softened and malleable to your truth.
Transcript
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Hey guys, real quick, before we get started, I have a small request.
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If you've been blessed by our content and you like this show,
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would you take just a brief moment and leave us a five-star review?
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This is quite possibly the most effective thing that you can do
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As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight.
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The sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply.
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Their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out or take their names on my lips.
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The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.
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Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.
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Therefore, my heart is glad and my whole being rejoices.
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For you will not abandon my soul to shield or let your Holy One see corruption.
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Please be seated and join me as I pray for us once more.
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the spiritual eye-opening power of the Holy Spirit with humble hearts,
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we acknowledge, not only acknowledge, but we agree with,
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we give our assent to the testimony of your word,
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namely that each of us have sinned and fallen short of your glory.
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And that by virtue of our own volitional rebellion against you,
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by virtue of the fact that each of us as individuals
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have committed cosmic treason against the king of all kings,
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the king of the universe, we have by our sin forfeited whatever right we may have previously
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possessed in order to be deserving of or entitled to a revelation of your truth, a revelation of you
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and who you are and what you've done. As sinners, we do not deserve the privilege of knowing
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That you might equip us with spiritual eyes to see
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with new hearts that are softened and malleable
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That it wouldn't just be right knowledge for the sake of right knowledge, but that right knowledge of you would serve as the necessary means, as a platform propelling us into right love for you.
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The heart cannot adore what the mind does not know.
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An empty mind lends towards an idolatrous and wandering heart.
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In order for us to have right affection and love for you,
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The main point, I believe, of Psalm chapter 16 is this.
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God promises to preserve all his people, both body and soul,
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through life and death to complete and eternal pleasure.
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God promises to preserve, that is to maintain, to sustain all of his people,
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not some of them, but all who have been born again by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
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all his sons and daughters who have been adopted by the ministry of the Holy Spirit
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God promises without exception to preserve and sustain and hold and keep all of his people
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both physically and spiritually body and soul not only through this life but even through death
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and to carry us all the way to a particular end.
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that is fullness of joy and a full duration of joy.
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can we experience and receive not only our highest joy,
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Not that God is a thing, but out of all things and all people,
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who can provide for us joy, comfort, pleasure, happiness,
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Another way of saying this is that heaven apart from God would be, in a sense, hell.
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The Bible says that what makes hell hell is not the absence of God's presence.
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They think that hell is hell because God is not there.
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But the reality, the frightening reality that makes hell so terrible is not that God is absent,
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But that God is present in hell, but he is only present in his judgment, in his justice, in his wrath.
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Now we know that God is present in hell because David prays elsewhere in the Psalms.
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He says, where can I go that your presence would not be with me?
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If I'm on the ocean or the bottom of the sea, or I'm on the land, or I was in the sky, or even in the earth, or Hades.
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We know that God is in hell because God is omnipresent.
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in the heavenly realms or the earthly planes that God is absent,
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then we must say that in some capacity, God is finite in his presence.
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But if God is infinite, not only in his power, omnipotence,
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meaning there is nowhere where God cannot be found.
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yesterday today and forevermore god never changes the old testament says this the prophet speaking
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on behalf of god god says behold i am the lord i changeth not so that you the sons of jacob
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are not consumed it is to the great and eternal benefit of the people of god that our god is
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immutable, that he never changes, that he will not change his mind. Elsewhere in the scripture,
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the Bible says, God is not a man that he should repent or change his mind. When the scripture
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uses language like this, that God repented of making man when he saw the great evil on the earth.
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The Bible, when it speaks with these kinds of terms, we must understand this in theological
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terms as the doctrine of analogy. The overarching doctrine here, the overarching banner is the
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doctrine of analogy. Now, underneath this banner of the doctrine of analogy, we have two primary
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categories. One is understanding the physical traits, as it were, of God in analogous terms.
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The theological term that you may not be familiar with, but perhaps some of you have heard it before,
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And the word I actually cannot remember right now
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With educated saints such as you, I knew that somebody would have it.
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On the other side, the other category, underneath this banner of the doctrine of analogy, it's anthropopathic.
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So anthropopathic is tending to speak of God in emotional ways.
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So when the Bible says that God was grieved, or when the Bible says that God was happy,
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We should always understand these kinds of sayings about God as analogous.
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Or God has eyes roaming to and fro over the whole earth as it were.
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Now, these are proper ways to speak about God because God himself speaks of himself in this way.
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So God is speaking to us under the banner of analogy
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who were fond of saying that God is completely other.
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then there's nothing that we can understand of him.
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Certainly, he is infinitely greater than you and I.
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But the mere fact that mankind, according to Scripture, was created in God's image
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tells us that God possesses, as it were, communicable attributes.
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That there are things that we can know about God.
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Now, we'll never know the fullness of the extent of these things,
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but you and I can say, as God says about himself in his word, that God is good.
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And when we say that God is good, we are saying something that is empirically true and proper to say about God.
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And yet the reality still exists that none of us fully understand what God being good really means.
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No eye has seen, no ear has heard what God in his goodness, we might imply, has in store for those who love him.
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And so the fullness of God's goodness, the extent of God's goodness cannot be fully comprehended by you and I because the infinite can never be fully known by the finite.
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Even in heaven, you and I will not enter heaven and automatically achieve or we can say ever achieve a full comprehensive knowledge and understanding of God.
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Because in heaven, our fallenness will be no more.
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Our fallenness will be done away with, but our finitude will remain.
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In heaven, you and I will no longer be fallen creatures, but we will still be creatures.
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Redeemed creatures, justified creatures, sanctified creatures, and in heaven, glorified creatures.
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He speaks to us in his word, in his revelation, underneath the banner of analogy.
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He speaks to us in terms that we can understand, not comprehensively, not the fullness of everything that he is, but we can get a sense of who he is.
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He says that when we say that I have a good dog, what do we mean, my goodness, when we're using the term to describe a pet, such as a dog?
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What we mean is that he doesn't pee in the house.
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But if I were to say that David is a good friend,
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I do not mean that he doesn't pee in the house,
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So the word goodness takes on a much higher meaning
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when it's used to describe a person rather than a dog.
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Imagine everything that you can think in terms of goodness and describing people.
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When you say that a person is good, you mean one thing.
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But when you say that God is good, you mean something entirely more, something infinitely more.
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When we speak of the goodness of God, and yet that word, that term, God is good, still tells us, we cannot comprehend everything,
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Meaning that God is the only being in all of the universe
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but the people, the audience, if you will, of God,
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And that's what I was getting at with this doctrine of analogy,
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the idea that God is immutable, that he never changes.
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He's not just changing his mind or repenting or regretting or being grieved.
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And so what that means, I believe it was Sam Rinehan, a Reformed Baptist theologian.
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who said this he said that in the gospel it's not that God changes his disposition toward us
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when God saves someone by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone he is not changing
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God is not changing toward us rather God is changing us toward him think of the sun Charles
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Spurgeon said the same sun that hardens the clay it melts the wax well think about God as the
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sun, S-U-N, the sun in the sky. There were certain things that we could leave for a whole day out in
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the sun, and they would become putrid. They would decay. They would devolve. But there are other
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things, such as a flower planted in the ground, that with the sunlight, it begins to blossom
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of Jesus Christ received through faith, he changes you. He changes you. And that's why the Bible
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speaks that in Christ, we are a new creation. There's something about us in conversion,
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in salvation that undergoes change. So we go from being a meatloaf, for lack of a better example,
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to a tulip meaning if God is the sun and you and I are a meatloaf and we're left outside all day
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for 12 hours in the scorching heat of Texas in July if we're a meatloaf by the end of the day
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who wants to eat that right the experience of the meatloaf is not going to be positive
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as it receives the light and heat of the sun all day long.
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But the flower, the flower experiences something entirely different.
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It's not as though the flower is in the presence of one sun
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and the meatloaf is in the presence of another.
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It's the same sun, but that sun in its effects, as it were,
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on different objects, different variables, it has different effects.
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And so what God does in the gospel is he changes us.
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He clothes us in the righteousness of his own son.
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He causes us to become a new creation in Christ Jesus.
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He gives us hearts that are no longer like stone, Ezekiel chapter 36,
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but rather hearts of flesh that are softened and malleable and receptive to his word.
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God changes his people in such a way to where when we spend eternity with God in heaven, we'll be like the tulip, like the flower in the presence of the sun.
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Completely and slowly and eternally devolving, decaying, rotting, becoming putrid.
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so God promises to deliver not all people but his people both in body and soul that does not mean
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that we will not undergo physical death but it does mean that this body not a different one not
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a new one but this physical body that we have in this life according to scripture is promised to
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be resurrected and glorified. And so God is going to ultimately, in an ultimate sense,
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in the eternal sense, he has promised to preserve all of his people, not only in spirit or soul,
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but even in body forever through all of eternity and to bring us to eternal and perfect or complete
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pleasure, eternal and perfect joy. Our joy will be at its highest and our joy will have an
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everlasting duration. But how does he do this? According to Psalm 16, there's four primary
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things that we see about God, who he is, that give us the answer for his methods, how he will
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fulfill this promise of everlasting preservation, of bringing us through life and death in body
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and in soul to eternal and perfect pleasure and joy. How will he do this? He will do this by being
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for us a safe refuge, our supreme treasure, our sovereign Lord, and our sure counselor.
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I used four S's alliteration in order to help us remember.
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Now certainly there's more that we can glean from the text,
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As I preach through this text, we must understand
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There are too many Christians today that believe, they give credence, they give their affirmation, their acknowledgement, their assent to the fact that God is sovereign.
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But what they struggle to believe at a heart level is that God in his sovereignty is being sovereign for them.
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the reason why you and i so often struggle to trust god is not always because we don't believe
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the the mere existence or the mere reality of his attributes or his perfections our hang-up
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our struggle our hindrance to trust god is not always rooted in the fact that we don't really
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believe he's sovereign or we don't really believe he's merciful or we don't really believe he's
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kind. It's that we don't really believe he's sovereign, merciful, and kind for us. That God
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will be kind to me. It is so easy, I think, at least at a personal level, I'll speak for myself,
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it is so easy for me as a Christian to have so much more faith in the character and goodness
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of God for others than it is to believe in his character and goodness for me.
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i i have very little trouble believing the gospel for others for the proverbial someone somewhere
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out there even on my worst days if you ask me is there a god in heaven who is thrice holy
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but also a merciful god who has promised to save his elect people through the personal work of his
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son Jesus, by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone? I'll say yes, there is. But on my
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worst day, if you ask me, and are you included among those elect? Are you a beneficiary of his
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goodness, his kindness, his salvation, and forgiveness of sin? On my worst days, I'll struggle
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at times to say yes. It's not just believing who God is that is the challenge. When it comes to
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trusting the Lord, often the greatest challenge is believing in who God is and that he will be
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this God for me. I think of Galatians where Paul says, he says that Jesus gave himself up for me.
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It's very personal language. I believe it's Galatians 2 or perhaps Galatians chapter 3,
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He says, I believe, I'm convinced, I'm persuaded
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He doesn't just say, I believe that the Son of God
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in some sense we need to get back to to to some of the the old children's classics
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jesus loves me this i know why because you've had some kind of mystical personal experience with him
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a dream or a vision no jesus loves me this i know for the bible tells me so
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and it's enough the bible tells me so that the bible is it's sufficient that in god's word
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he tells me that he loves me now you might be saying joel where in the bible does it say
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god loves joel the bible tells me that god loves me individually by the internal witness of the
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Holy Spirit that cries out, Abba, Father. The Bible, working in conjunction with the Spirit
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in the power, in the method of illumination, tells us as individuals that God not only exists
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and loves someone, but that God loves us. We find that in the Word, but you will never find,
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You can read the Bible all day long like the Pharisees
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who relentlessly and incessantly searched the scriptures
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and yet they never saw Christ in the scriptures.
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And yet the reality is that we can read the scripture
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But it is only when the reading of the scripture
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The Holy Spirit inspired the authors of Scripture
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so that they did, in fact, write not the word of man, but the word of God.
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But the Holy Spirit is still working in Scripture today,
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but now illuminating the word for the readers of Scripture.
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And when we read the Scripture with the eyes and ears and hearts
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We see that God and his character, all of his attributes, the fact that he is a safe refuge, supreme treasure, sovereign Lord, and sure counselor, that he is not merely those things for someone.
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He's crying out to God, and he says, preserve me, O God.
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David is pleading with the Lord to preserve him through some kind of trial, tribulation, or threat.
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We haven't seen exactly what this tribulation or threat is,
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but we'll find further on through the psalm what it is.
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At this point, all we know in the first half of the first verse of our text
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And because in our psalm we find from the very outset
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we know that this particular psalm is a prayer.
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See, the first thing we discover in Psalm chapter 16 is this.
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David only uses four words, preserve me, O God,
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The remainder of David's prayer is reserved for declaring who God is,
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what God has done, and what God promises to do.
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The very first half of the first verse of our psalm today
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now what does praise have to do with petitions this is a key principle that we find in prayer
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praise for who god is what god has done and what god promises to do is the whole entire basis
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the whole foundation it is the grounds for why we have any confidence to make our petitions to begin
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with. We only petition God for something because we believe in who God is. There's no point in
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crying out and pleading to the Lord, preserve me, oh God, if he is not for us a safe refuge,
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supreme treasure, sovereign Lord, and sure counselor. Now, if you're getting nervous,
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I should have said this at the very beginning. I'm not just deciding it now. I promise you may
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not believe me, but I decided this on Tuesday of last week as I was preparing my notes.
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This is going to be a two-part sermon. So take a deep breath and a sigh of relief because if you're
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looking at the notes and you're doing the math of what percentage we've gotten through so far
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and the time on the clock, that's a frightening thing. I understand. You might be thinking
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I love it because I usually am a man of many words.
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But the beauty in preaching the Bible is, well, we'll just pick up where we left off.
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You know, the alternative is I've got to preach through this portion of the Bible so that I can do what?
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So we'll just preach through this portion longer.
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So Psalm 16, this is going to be a two-part mini-series within our larger series,
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the Psalter, as we're working through the Psalms.
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So let's just look at a few of God's attributes.
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Let's try to work through probably not all of verses 1 through 7,
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but at least half of this, where we begin to get the sense of what it means
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for God to be a safe refuge, a supreme treasure, a sovereign Lord,
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In your notes, I've written this, Psalm 16, 1a, that is the first half of the verse, that's where we find the petition.
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That's where we see the plea, preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
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See, so the first half of Psalm 16, 1 is the plea, preserve me, O God.
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The second half is that we see precisely why David has enough confidence in God's ability
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and willingness to preserve him to make that plea in the first place.
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See, David does not merely acknowledge that God is a refuge.
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David proves that God is the refuge, the ultimate refuge,
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by committing to trust in God for safety above all other natural means of safety.
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He doesn't just say, preserve me, O God, because you are a rock or a tower,
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No, he says, preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
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So he doesn't just say, God, please preserve me because I acknowledge,
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But there is a sense in which we don't earn our salvation.
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We are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
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But the fatherly pleasure of God for his sons and daughters in this life
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What I mean by that is this, that a person can never lose what they did not earn.
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So I believe in the doctrine of the eternal security of the believer, that Jesus has promised never to leave us or forsake us.
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Once saved, always saved. Better put, if saved, always saved.
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Some people, it's not that they lost their salvation, it's the sheer fact that they never had it to begin with.
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The apostate, the person who ultimately drifts away from the gospel, who ultimately rejects Jesus, is the person who never really accepted Jesus to begin with.
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And so none of what I'm about to say is meant to be received as a contradiction to the doctrine of the eternal security of the believer, the security of salvation.
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But for those who are saved, although you cannot forfeit your salvation, if you've truly been saved by grace through faith in Christ,
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there is a sense of being under God's fatherly pleasure or under God's fatherly displeasure.
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Meaning in both cases, we have an adopted son or daughter.
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In both cases, we have someone who is regenerate.
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But you can be underneath, as a genuine, bona fide child of God,
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Listen, one of the ways that God preserves us is by granting us faith to believe that he is a refuge.
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You can be genuinely born again, and you can go throughout a great deal, a large portion of your life, feeling vulnerable, feeling insecure, feeling as though you have no safety.
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because you're not, as David is, taking refuge in God.
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See, God is a refuge, but that's not what David says.
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He doesn't say, preserve me, O God, because you are a refuge.
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No, he's saying, preserve me, O God, because in you, I personally,
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I'm going to take upon me the onus of taking refuge in you.
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God is our shield, our protector, our refuge, our safety.
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But experiencing the joy and peace of that reality of who God is,
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is something that only comes when we trust him and go to him.
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So you can be a Christian and salute the power, the preserving power of God,
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but not experience the peace that comes by God being a refuge
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if you don't actually run to Him and find safety under His wings.
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but it's precisely because they're running for refuge to idols rather than God.
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they're trusting in idols rather than trusting in the rock see the reason why idols produce
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anxiety i preached this a few weeks ago saint augustine said that that anxiety and anger and
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turmoil and all these kinds of human problem emotions it's like the smoke that rises from
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the sacrifices that we make on the altars to our idols and the reason why anxiety comes about and
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we'll see this later in the text later in the text David actually says this he says the sorrows of
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those who run after another god shall multiply right when you run after idols when you run after
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other gods when you ultimately take refuge in something or someone else other than god the only
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true and ultimate refuge, your sorrows are multiplied. The smoke rising from the altar
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that you build to that idol, it billows, it increases, it grows, that anxiety grows and
00:41:40.260
multiplies. Why? Because you're putting your hope in something that ultimately it can be shaken.
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And that's what we see later in the psalm. David says, well, after he's spent a very thorough
00:41:55.840
Prayer, praising the character of God and the goodness of God.
00:42:01.040
After he makes the petition in the first half of verse 1,
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he praises God for who he is in the next seven verses.
00:42:07.580
And then it's only later in the psalm that David says,
00:42:22.780
He's not saying, I will not be shaken because I'm unshakable.
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because I'm immutable, because I'm invulnerable.
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because I've taken refuge in God and God cannot be shaken.
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I will not be shaken because I've built my house
00:42:43.400
of the foundation that I've put my hope and trust in.
00:43:06.800
See, even in the first sentence of David's prayer,
00:43:09.120
he's already trusting that God will answer favorably
00:43:20.860
In other words, David is declaring the character of God
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Throughout Psalm chapter 16, verse 1 through 7,
00:43:38.300
If you want to pray in ways that are pleasing to the Lord,
00:43:41.280
if you want to follow the mold provided for us in Scripture
00:44:56.820
pleasing to God, without faith it's impossible to
00:45:18.140
And that's why he bolsters his faith. The weapon that he uses to increase his faith is praise.
00:45:27.380
So he's already got some faith, just like you and I. If you're a Christian, you have some faith.
00:45:32.020
If you had no faith, you wouldn't be born again. If you had no faith, you wouldn't belong to Christ
00:45:36.700
because we're saved through faith. So if you're saved, it's because you have faith.
00:45:42.020
but the problem is that even in this life in having faith often as jesus chastised the disciples
00:45:50.820
we have little faith little faith now the reality is in terms of salvation it's not the size or the
00:45:58.480
degree of our faith that saves us but rather the object of our faith so a little faith placed in
00:46:04.360
jesus is still saving whereas a mountain of faith placed in some other gospel is still damning
00:46:12.220
Having a lot of faith in the wrong thing or the wrong person will send you to hell.
00:46:16.940
Having a little bit of faith in Jesus, his person and his work, will get you to heaven.
00:46:23.460
But having a little faith in the person of Jesus, although sufficient for justification,
00:46:28.400
for salvation, as I was saying earlier, may still leave you with much anxiety and turmoil in this life.
00:46:35.640
And so David approaches the throne of God in prayer, making a petition.
00:46:39.320
The petition signifies that he already has at least some degree of faith to begin with.
00:46:47.940
Take whatever faith he has and begin to multiply it, increase it through the weapon of praise.
00:46:58.400
And as I said at the beginning, the key is, this is who you are for me.
00:47:04.360
Psalm 16, verse 2 says, I say to the Lord, you are my Lord.
00:47:16.060
He's saying apart from you, if there were no God, there would be no good in this world.
00:47:23.980
There would be no pleasure, no comfort, no happiness.
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You are the source of all that is good, the source of my happiness and joy.
00:47:47.480
He is the joy in our joys and the source of all joy.
00:47:51.700
And all other goods in this life are only truly good because, not just because they come from God,
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See, all the goods that we experience in this life,
00:48:27.920
He's praising, he begins to praise the people of God.
00:48:34.620
And you're like, wait a second, that doesn't sound good.
00:48:39.480
All my delight is in the people of God rather than in God himself.
00:48:43.240
No, what David's saying, because notice that comes on the heels of Psalm 16 too.
00:48:49.920
He's already given the fine print, the conditional statement.
00:49:00.980
So when David says, I love the people of God, I love the saints,
00:49:08.160
they're the best people in all the land, and in them is all my delight,
00:49:14.540
We know he's not finding delight in the people of God
00:49:17.860
as a substitute for finding delight in God himself
00:49:27.540
See, the saints are a great example of something in this life that is good,
00:49:37.200
The people of God are good, but they're only good because God is good.
00:49:43.300
Feasting and choice meat and wine is good, but it's only good because God is good.
00:49:48.260
A sunrise and a sunset is good, but it's only good because God is good.
00:50:38.720
that all these other good things that he provides
00:50:51.920
That means those who are trusting in other things beside God.
00:51:06.660
Nature and beauty, aesthetic beauty in this world can be an idol.
00:51:10.680
And if you're running after those things as God,
00:51:14.320
notice the result is not that you delight in it.
00:51:19.360
No, the result is actually that your sorrow is multiplied.
00:51:23.780
When you trust in good things, ultimately, it multiplies sorrow.
00:51:29.240
But when you trust in God, ultimately, God himself multiplies joy.
00:51:34.940
And all those other good things that he gives to us are joyous.
00:51:44.980
Psalm 16, verse 3 says, as for the saints, this is where we're already going.
00:51:49.360
In the land, they are the excellent ones in whom is all my delight.
00:51:53.180
David confirms his belief in God's goodness by what he says about God's people.
00:51:59.420
It's not contradicting that God is the true ultimate source of goodness.
00:52:07.740
And because I truly believe God is good, I also, by default, believe that his people are good.
00:52:22.720
He's saying, because I believe that God is good,
00:52:41.720
See, David confirms his belief in the goodness of God
00:52:46.620
It is the saints who provide David with comfort and joy.
00:52:50.400
This does not mean that David delights in God's people
00:53:22.020
this is totally what your typical extrovert would say.
00:53:27.920
because when I'm surrounded by a sea of people,
00:53:35.880
It's almost like David is confessing in some sense
00:53:45.600
What he enjoys most about people is their love for God.
00:53:49.560
This is the true source of sweetness in human friendship.
00:53:57.540
the premise of friendship, the contents of friendship.
00:54:07.440
I think C.S. Lewis actually sums it up quite nicely
00:54:10.760
when he says, friendship is born at that moment
00:54:19.680
He furthermore says, what draws people to be friends
00:54:27.320
See, the essence of friendship is not two people
00:54:29.940
standing parallel and gazing into each other face to face,
00:54:40.540
cherishing each other. That is a part of friendship, and certainly we see that aspect
00:54:45.760
of friendship in marriage. There's a face-to-face aspect of relationship. But the ultimate
00:54:54.760
foundation of long-lasting and heart-delighting friendship is not face-to-face. It is first and
00:55:05.100
foremost predominantly shoulder to shoulder it's not standing and looking at each other
00:55:11.980
enjoying each other it's standing side by side and cherishing and enjoying something else
00:55:19.220
the same thing what you too you you see this too you you cherish this too you recognize this truth
00:55:29.140
also i thought i was the only one think about some of the closest friendships you've ever had
00:55:43.920
There was something about his world that he created.
00:55:59.640
And then all of a sudden, when God in his providence introduced you to someone else
00:56:04.740
who saw that same reality, who saw that same truth, who prioritized that same value,
00:56:12.860
wasn't there just kind of like this moment of relief?
00:56:15.440
Like, finally, I found, and you might even say this, I found my people.
00:56:26.380
The church of God is the place where surely it swarms with many faults, as Calvin said.
00:56:33.400
You know, certainly there's a lot of heartache in the church, and it's riddled with sin,
00:56:38.140
because in this life we still wrestle with sin.
00:56:40.780
But as Charles Spurgeon said, on earth, the church is the sweetest place I know.
00:56:47.720
It's riddled with sin, there are problems, there's betrayal, there's heartache, there's pain.
00:56:59.120
the church of God is the sweetest place I know.
00:57:18.600
you too. Finally, I've found someone who gets it. Finally, I've found someone that we can bond
00:57:27.040
over the reality that we see and savor the same truth. This will be our final point for today,
00:57:36.340
and we'll pick back up. But this is Psalm 16, verse 4. This is kind of the other side of the
00:57:42.860
coin now. David delights in the people of God. But on the other side of the equation, Psalm 16,
00:57:48.860
4, he says, the sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply. This is the sorrows
00:57:56.640
being multiplied in the lives of idolaters, the pagans. So David says in verse 3, the people of
00:58:04.620
God, the saints, they're the excellent ones. And they're the ones that I gain great joy in.
00:58:13.720
So the people of God, they're the ones that I gain so much joy by being around.
00:58:17.880
But notice, David, if he was an extrovert, going back to my previous point,
00:58:21.680
if he was an extrovert, if he was the type of person who gets his energy, his life by being around others,
00:58:26.940
he's not an extrovert in the terms that we see many extroverts today.
00:58:31.420
There are extroverts that I've met, I don't know about you, but they can, I mean,
00:58:34.940
If I just painted a portrait of a person on a wall and it was convincing enough to where they thought it was a real person, they could get energy from a hologram, from an illustration of a person, right?
00:58:50.460
So they're not actually delighting in someone because of who that person is.
00:58:54.540
They're delighting in someone because they like to air their own opinions and just be heard.
00:59:08.300
And they're just glad that someone's going to listen.
00:59:10.140
They don't care if it's helpful for the person.
00:59:11.700
They don't care if the person goes away being energized.
00:59:19.520
It's like when you get done with that conversation,
00:59:27.780
it's like did you just get younger I feel like like you just shaved 10 years off of your like
00:59:32.600
like some kind of vampire situation like I think you just regressed time for yourself and I feel
00:59:38.000
like I just gained 40 years I feel like I'm literally about to die and you're walking away
00:59:42.380
smiling you know with a with a skip in your step that's not loving people see notice David he's a
00:59:49.100
people person it might be possible especially when we look at other other things that the
00:59:53.900
Bible describes about David, it does seem as though he's an extrovert. But he's a Christian
00:59:58.180
extrovert. He's a Christian extrovert. He doesn't take pleasure in people just in general. Because
0.99
01:00:06.260
he says, I take no pleasure in what? Idolaters. I take no pleasure in people who are not God's
01:00:14.480
people. And the people who run after other gods. They themselves, by virtue of their idolatry,
01:00:21.800
by virtue of them choosing to run after other gods
01:00:30.460
we get a sense and implication from verse four.
01:00:45.200
just in the sense of just this general extrovert
01:00:53.480
I glean delight and joy and pleasure from people,
01:01:04.180
The people who, like me in the beginning of my prayer,
01:01:18.580
They're the ones I can count on in times where I feel vulnerable,
01:01:23.300
when I feel insecure, in times where I'm in peril or danger or turmoil.
01:01:28.260
They're the ones I can count on to preach to my soul
01:01:31.540
and point me ultimately towards Christ, who is the refuge and safe place.
01:02:40.100
That's what's causing them to go after the idol
01:02:41.960
in the first place, and when they go after the idol, the sorrow that they already had
01:02:46.180
will be increased. It'll be multiplied. In real terms, the way that I could explain
01:02:52.120
how, right, because you might be asking, well, how is sorrow multiplied by running after
01:02:56.900
idols? This is how. You run after an idol in the first place because you have lack.
01:03:01.980
You have some kind of need, some kind of want, some kind of problem, but when you run after
01:03:08.100
an idol to solve a problem, what you're ultimately doing is you're erecting a foundation, you're
01:03:16.080
erecting some kind of structure, some kind of hope, some kind of faith on sand, on sinking
01:03:23.400
sand, on an unsure foundation. And then what it ultimately does, the final result, is that it
01:03:29.340
fails. And when it fails, it doesn't just lend you right back to where you started, where now I have
01:03:35.720
to fix this problem again. No, it creates more problems. Think of a line, for example.
01:03:43.180
See, when you tell a line, what usually happens? In order to bolster that lie, to keep it going,
01:03:50.100
you're almost always required to tell more than just the original lie. It demands a continued,
01:04:11.580
and we go to an idol rather than going to Christ,
01:04:21.060
and we go right back to the same problem we had.
01:04:36.600
In committing, I mean, think about just the 10 commandments
01:04:38.980
that we read in the beginning of our Lord's Day service
01:04:42.360
Have you noticed that in many ways, they're connected?
01:04:49.740
you have to usually break three or four others?
01:04:56.440
I mean, really, it's the first and second and third and fourth commandment.
01:05:06.160
and thou shalt remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
01:05:12.540
what we're doing is we're erecting altars to false gods
01:05:20.940
And when we erect one altar in order to prop it up,
01:05:24.600
In order to keep the deception, the delusion, the idolatry going,
01:05:28.860
it requires that we break other commandments and run after more and more gods.
01:05:37.020
It begins to continually siphon away from Christ into idols.
01:05:48.080
Our original sorrows that cause us to go to idols are multiplied in idolatry.
01:05:53.220
we'll stop there and Lord willing by God's grace we'll pick back up with Psalm 16 verse 5 next
01:06:00.800
Lord's Day thanks so much for listening but real quick before you go do us a small favor take a
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moment and leave us a five-star review if you enjoyed the show this is undoubtedly the best
01:06:12.380
way that you can help us get this biblically faithful content to as many people as possible