Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Psalm 16

We’ll read this responsibly next week. This week I’ll just read it myself. Psalm 16.

Preserve me, O God, for in thee do I put my trust. O my soul, thou hast said unto the Lord, thou art my Lord. My goodness extendeth not to thee, but to the saints that are in the earth, and to the excellent, in whom is all my delight. Their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another god. Their drink offerings of blood will I not offer, nor take up their names unto my lips.

The Lord is the portion of my inheritance, and of my cup, thou maintainest my lot. The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places. Yea, I have a goodly heritage. I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel. My reins also instruct me in the night seasons. I have set the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore, my heart is glad and my glory rejoiceth. My flesh also shall rest in hope.

For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life. In thy presence is fullness of joy. At thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore.

Let’s pray. Father God, we thank you for this scripture, for the delightful things that are said here. Help us, Father, to be attentive to the teaching of them today. Help us to teach them according to your spirit. Father, we thank you for the scripture. Make it real to our lives and help us to act in obedience to what you tell us here. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

You notice that in most of your Bibles, there after Psalm 16, there’s the title of the song: “A Michtam of David.” I just thought I’d touch briefly on that. The word Michtam is of unsure translation. Some people think it means a golden psalm of David. Other people read into the word the idea of hidden—that there’s a treasure here hidden within. And other people think it was merely a musical phrase.

It’s interesting to go through some of these titles in the Psalms to try to understand what they are, but sometimes it’s more than a little confusing. In any event, it is a beautiful psalm that we’re going to deal with this morning. Psalm 16, and I think it’s primarily beautiful because it speaks of the Christ, the Messiah, Jesus Christ our Lord. Psalm 15 and 16—we’ve been talking about Psalm 15 for a number of weeks—are linked somewhat.

I’d like to read Psalm 24 quickly and show this transition from 15 to 16.

Psalm 24 reads: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein, for he hath founded it upon the seas and established it upon the floods. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not lifted up his soul into vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.

He shall receive a blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O Jacob. Selah. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, even lift them up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts. He is the King of glory. Selah.”

You’ll notice the same phrasing in the first three or four verses of Psalm 15 is being used in terms of who will ascend to the holy hill of God. And it goes on to answer that question—that the ideal person that is spoken of is the Lord Jesus Christ. Similarly, we talked about that implication in Psalm 15 several weeks ago. And now in Psalm 16, we talk about Jesus Christ himself.

The scripture that was read earlier in Acts 2, as well as in Acts 13, we have both Peter and Paul quoting this psalm, saying that it refers first and foremost to Jesus Christ—specifically, of course, to his resurrection of his body and not seeing corruption. However, Acts 2 quotes this psalm and other verses—three or four verses of this psalm—to relate specifically to Jesus Christ.

So Psalm 16 is first and foremost about Jesus Christ, although it also has application, of course, to David who wrote it, and to us as well. It begins, as many of the Psalms do, with a prayer: “Preserve me, O Lord, for in thee do I put my trust.” We’re not going to deal with that today, nor with verses 2 or 3 primarily. We’ll be dealing with verse 3 in several weeks when we talk about delighting in the saints, and then after that we’ll move on to Psalm 17 and have a lot to say about prayer.

So we’ll skip those verses for today. However, there’s one important thing to recognize here in those first two verses. And that is where he says, “Preserve me, O God, for in thee do I put my trust,” or “O my soul, thou hast said unto the Lord, thou art my Lord.” In the Authorized Version or perhaps in most of your versions, they should make a distinction. Those three terms in verses 1 and 2—God, Lord, and Lord—the Lord in my translation is capitalized, and that’s to show that it’s a specific name of God.

Now the term God in verse 1 is Elohim, which speaks of God as a mighty one or a strong one, and it’s certainly appropriate in our prayers to reference that particular name of God, Elohim, because we’re asking for his protection and his safety. So David uses the term for the strong one. Then in verse 2 there are two different words there, both translated “Lord,” although there’s some distinction like I said here in uppercase and lowercase.

The first Lord—”O my soul, thou hast said unto the Lord,” capital L-O-R-D—is the Jewish word Yahweh or Jehovah that we’re all familiar with. The second word for Lord there is Adonai, which means the sovereign controller, our master, if you will. So the terms here—the terms here are: a strong one is the name for God used in verse 1. In verse 2 you have the term used for Jehovah, and then still in verse 2, we’re talking about our Lord in terms of master or controller or somebody who’s in charge of our lives.

And it’s important here to recognize that what’s going on here is that David is saying unto the Lord, unto Jehovah, unto the covenant God of Israel. The name Jehovah was the special name of God that he gave to his covenant people. So he’s saying that the covenant God of Israel, Yahweh himself, is my controller, my sovereign, my master. Okay? And so there is an implication in the name. It’s quite important to recognize his application then to Jesus Christ, then to David, and to us is that our Lord, our sovereign, our master in this world and the world to come should be Jehovah, the covenant Lord of Israel and of the whole world.

And that’s the primary implication, and we’re going to talk about some of the ramifications of that first for Jesus, then in terms of application to David, and then to ourselves.

In verse 4, one of the first things we recognize about Jesus—recognizing that this psalm has primary application to Jesus Christ—verse 4 says: “Their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another god. Their drink offerings of blood will I not offer, nor take up their names unto my lips.” And the first thing that’s important there about the person who claims Jehovah God is his Lord or sovereign is that person will abstain from communion with evil people in their actions.

And so we know that Jesus Christ, as our Lord, had no communion with sin or with idolatry. He had one God, and that was the covenant God of Israel, Jehovah. He had one Lord only, and he also kept himself free from those who had strong idolatrous tendencies toward other lords. You notice that Jesus Christ, for instance, in his earthly ministry, treated the Pharisees, by and large, with a lot of contempt. He didn’t have a lot of time to spend with those people because they were devoted to multiple gods. They espoused a belief in Jehovah God, and yet they also, by their indications and by their actions, showed that their real god was also tradition. And so they are idolators, when Jesus Christ had nothing to do with them. He said he came to heal the sick, and not those who believe themselves to be well. And so he made a distinction in his ministry between idolators—those given over to communion with sin—and those who recognized their spiritual poverty before him and wanted what he had to offer.

In verses 5 and 6, we read: “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and of my cup. Thou hast maintained my lot. The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places. Yea, I have a goodly heritage.” We see here that the person this psalm is talking about—whose sovereign or whose lord is Jehovah—this person understands that his primary inheritance is Jehovah God himself. It says, as I read this here, “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and of my cup.” God himself is the inheritance of the godly. It goes on, of course, to speak about how “thou maintainest my lot.” The word there for lot, by the way, is an interesting one. The term came to be used for land or parcels of land, primarily because when the nation of Israel moved into Canaan, their boundaries—as it were, whose land would belong to each different tribe—was determined by lot. And so the idea of lot there talks about the physical land as well.

And of course, the lines there speak about those same sort of physical dimensions. So verses 5 and 6 teach us that the person who delights in Jehovah the Lord will also have an inheritance, as primarily God himself, but also a physical inheritance as well. And Jesus Christ, after he completed his ministry, the scriptures tell us that God then gave him control over the entire earth: “I’ll give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” But Jesus Christ inherited that from his Father.

In verse 7, we read: “I will bless the Lord who hath given me counsel.” Jesus received counsel from Jehovah God, from the covenant God of Israel. In Psalm 40:7 and 8, we read the following. And again, this has primary reference to Jesus Christ.

“Then said I, Lo, I come in the volume of the book. It is written of me. I delight to do thy will, O my God. Yea, thy law is within my heart.”

This verse is quoted in Hebrews in the 10th chapter, verses 5-7.

“Wherefore when he, Jesus Christ, cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not, but a body thou hast prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I am come in the volume of the book. It is written of me to do thy will, O God.”

So we know that this refers to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, when he came, received his counsel from the word of God, from God’s law. And we know that Jesus Christ walked in perfect obedience to that law, as he became our righteousness for us.

In verse 7b, we read: “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.” The word there for reins literally is the word for kidneys. It has to do with the heart of a person or what drives a person. And there are many references throughout the Psalms talking about how David is affected in both reins and heart—the central part of his being—and then the action of that being takes place. And we see there, of course, that this is from Psalm 40, and the quotation in Hebrews 10 tells us that Jesus had within his heart the law of God hidden. So Jesus meditated upon God’s instruction in his reins, in his heart, which would instruct him in the night seasons from the law of God.

Matthew 15 is one of many occurrences where, after Jesus feeds the five thousand, he goes off by himself for a time of prayer and quiet meditation upon God and upon his law. So we know that Jesus meditated upon God’s instruction in the night and other times of his life.

Verse 8: “I have set the Lord always before me.” Jesus had Jehovah God always before him, and then he said what he did on the basis of what God had told him to do—God the Father.

In Isaiah 11:2, we read: “And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” This is referring to the Messiah to come. And we know that Spirit rested upon Jesus Christ. Jesus said in John 7:16 that “the doctrine that I teach is not mine, but his that sent me.” In 8:28 he says: “I do nothing of myself. As my Father hath taught me, so I speak all these things I say to you. I do nothing of myself.” Jesus had Jehovah Lord in all his thoughts and all that he did. He also said in another portion of scripture: “I do always those things that please him,” the Father. So Jesus, as this psalm tells us, had God before him at all times and directing everything that he did.

In verses 8b, 9, and 10, we read: “Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore, my heart is glad and my glory rejoiceth. My flesh also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption.”

We know from this that Jehovah’s presence at Jesus’s right hand was his security. And therefore he trusted in Jehovah God for his well-being, physically and spiritually as well. This, of course, is linked to 8a because it says, “Because God is at my right hand, therefore I shall not be moved.” Because he had made Jehovah Lord the master of all that he did in his ministry on earth, so he had confidence in him to do everything—to protect Jesus in everything that he did.

In 1 Peter 2:23, by the way, this verse is so important if you’re going to understand what’s taught in Matthew, in 1 Peter 2 and other portions, in terms of submission of wives to husbands and other types of submission. It gives the example for that submission in Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 2:23, talking about Christ: “Who when he was reviled, reviled not again. When he suffered, he threatened not, but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously.” Jesus was submissive to the plan of death because he had committed himself to Jehovah God, to his Father, who he knew judged righteously. He trusted in his Father for his resurrection of his body and for the resurrection of his soul as well, because he knew that Jehovah God was his Lord and that he judges righteously.

So we see this has primary reference to Jesus Christ himself. It also has reference, of course, to the man who wrote it—to David, who wrote the psalm. David, in the same manner as Jesus Christ, then had Jehovah God, the covenant God of Israel, as his sovereign Lord. David had no communion, or he forsook communion, with the ungodly.

Psalm 1, as we talked about before, gives the pattern for the rest of the Psalms, and it talks about the two ways of life—the two kinds of people: the covenant keepers and covenant breakers. Those people who are involved in worship of God and who are moving toward God, and those people who are moving away from God. And so throughout the Psalms, David’s life showed that he shone or forsook communion with evil and with idolatry.

David’s inheritance was God himself. In 1 Samuel 26:19, when David is fleeing from Saul and Saul comes upon him, David talks about the fact that—well, let’s just read it.

1 Samuel 26:19. Here David is running for his life. He has spared Saul’s life at this time. They are close enough where they can talk to each other. However, now Saul is close to David, and it says that Saul knew David’s voice in verse 17. And then in verse 19, David says this to Saul:

“Now therefore, I pray thee, let my lord the king hear the words of his servant. If the Lord hath stirred thee up against me, let him accept an offering. But if they be the children of men, in other words, who hath stirred up Saul against David, cursed be they before the Lord, for they have driven me out this day from abiding in the inheritance of the Lord, saying, ‘Go serve other gods.’”

There was an attempt on the part of those who were against David, including Saul, to deny David his physical heritage—his place of inheritance in the land of Israel—to drive him out of that inheritance. And so David had to recognize the same thing that Abram recognized when God made his covenant with Abram. And when God revealed himself to Abram after Abram’s tithing to Melchizedek, what did God tell Abram? He said: “I am thy exceeding great reward and a shield unto thee.” God told Abram, as he began to initiate covenant relationships with him, that he was going to be his reward himself—God himself.

Now, God blessed Abram with much land and with other sorts of physical blessings. But the important thing that Abram understood was that God himself was his inheritance and his exceeding great reward. The same thing is true of the Levites. When the nation of Israel goes into the land to take it after they spent time in Egypt, the Levites were not given a physical place in the land. Why? Because God wanted them to understand that he himself was their inheritance, and he wanted them to understand that God himself was his inheritance, and not the land, as this object lesson to them.

And David had to recognize the same thing. He had to flee from the land that God had told him was his tribe to live in. He had to recognize that God himself was his heritage in the first and foremost sense. We know, however, that David also received after these troubles a great kingdom to rule over, and he did receive a physical inheritance from the Lord as well. And it was from his line, of course, that Jesus Christ came to occupy the throne that God had given to him.

That’s the secondary blessings. The primary understanding is that God himself is his inheritance. David received his counsel from the word of God. I could use a lot of scriptures here, but I suppose Psalm 119 is one of the best ones. In that psalm, David said: “I’ll delight myself in thy statutes. I will never forget thy word. Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy statutes, and I shall keep it unto the end.”

David’s counsel for everything that he did in life came from the word of God. That’s found throughout the scriptures, but primarily in Psalm 119 and many references to that. Jesus wanted to know God’s statutes for his counsel. He’d act according to those statutes. David, in the same way that Jesus meditated upon God’s word in his night watches. So David meditated upon God’s word in his night watches. David meditated upon God’s word and its application to his life in the night time and in the daytime as well.

David’s thoughts were on God in much of what he did. Of course, he was not perfect like Jesus Christ was. He didn’t obey completely. But God tells us of David in the book of Acts that God himself says that David was a man after his own heart, who will do all my will. So we know that David not only heard the counsel from the word of God but took the word of God and put it into practice. Jehovah God was his Lord and his sovereign throughout much of what he did.

David’s security is the same as what we saw about Jesus Christ in his earthly ministry. So David’s security lay in the knowledge of the presence of Jehovah. And so David understood that he was safe both spiritually and physically. We talked about Psalm 4, for instance, apparently written when David was fleeing from Saul. He said: “I will both lay me down in peace and sleep, for the Lord maketh me dwell in safety.”

David understood that God was with him, and so he could lay down in peace and sleep because he recognized Jehovah God was standing watch over him, even though the king of the nation in which he lived was after him to kill him.

Well, that’s interesting. But so what? Does that have any relevance to our life today? Well, it certainly does. Of course, we know that we’re to image God, first and foremost, because we’re his creatures. We’re in covenant relationship to him. We’re to image God. And that means we’re reflecting the image of Jesus Christ, of course, and strive much as possible to walk in the way that he has instructed us to walk, both by the scriptures and also by the Gospel accounts of him, and also by Psalm 16 and what he tells us about Jesus.

We also have the example of David. As we said, God said that David was a man after his own heart—probably one of the foremost saints in terms of God’s reckoning of those things. But we should see David as a godly example to us. We have a covenant relationship with God with stipulations, and therefore we should recognize that the basis for our action is the fact that Jehovah is our sovereign, the covenant God of Israel is our Lord and our sovereign. We should move to act in obedience to him by looking at these things that were true of Jesus and David and then acting in obedience to those things ourselves.

So we also, as Jesus and David did, should keep ourselves from evil influences as individuals and as a church. We should keep ourselves away from temptations that would cause us to go after other gods. We should keep ourselves away from those people who are committed to idolatrous acts and sort of sinful relationships. We don’t have communion with sin. It’s been said by a man that it’s not safe to dine at the devil’s table, though the spoon be ever so long.

We should keep ourselves away from those sort of temptations that would cause us to come under the influence of evil men and evil doings. There are a lot of examples of that. I suppose books have a tremendous influence. We’ve talked about the importance of the word of God and how God has chosen to use words as a vehicle to communicate it to us. Books have powerful influences over us, and we should be very careful about the sort of books we read. To read dirty books or that sort of thing is a tremendous problem—can present tremendous problems in our lives—and we should shun those things with everything that we have and keep away from us.

Poison on the lips quickly becomes poison in the stomach, which can pervert all our lives. Christ himself came to defeat the works of the devil, and therefore we should have no communion with those works of the devil that are manifest in our society. It’s the difficult thing to do today. We have to strive to do those things.

Joseph, when he was under great temptation in Egypt from a lady who wanted to seduce him—what did he do? Did he just say, “Well, I can take this, and I can stand in the midst of this temptation. I know that God can keep me safe”? No, he ran from that temptation. There are temptations that we should be running from today as a church, as individuals. And if we don’t run from those temptations or get rid of whatever those evil influences are in terms of books or films or whatever else, it’s going to have a bad effect on us.

I’d encourage you all—if you have those sort of things in your home today, go home and get rid of them immediately. We should model ourselves after Jesus and David and keep ourselves from evil influences and communion with the devil or with his sins.

We should also recognize that our inheritance is God himself. Several years ago, when I began to understand that money was not in and of itself an evil thing, and that possessions were not evil, and that God promised to bless those who keep covenant with him by physical blessings—and so to leave an inheritance for their children—I began to get somewhat convicted about the fact that I haven’t really provided that sort of inheritance for my children yet. And I had a man over at the house one night. Some of you know him—Harry Bower. He’s moved away since then. But I was talking to Harry about that. I knew Harry was real sharp in monetary affairs and had done well in that way and reaped God’s blessings by applying his laws to economics.

I asked him about that and told him I was somewhat convicted. And he said, “Well, you know, I’ve been in countries”—he was talking about Germany and Russia. “I’ve been in countries. Well, you can have a great inheritance you build up for your children. A man can come to the door of that house, of that estate, and put a gun to your head and say, ‘It’s ours now. Get out of here.’ They can take away that inheritance from you. But,” he said, “the important thing to leave your children is what’s between your two ears. That’s the important inheritance to leave your children—to teach them the ways of God and his application of all things.”

Well, that’s true. But probably what this scripture tells us, even above that, is that the important thing to teach our children is that God himself is our heritage and our inheritance. Our children should rejoice in the fact that’s an inheritance that no man can take away from them. People can take away possessions. They can take away our soundness of mind through various physical deprivations. But they can’t take away our inheritance in God if we remain covenantally faithful to him and have been called and elected to him.

We should take great comfort and joy in that God himself is our inheritance. And we shouldn’t allow the heritage that God gives us—the blessings, the physical blessings that he will give to us—let those things detract from understanding that God himself, the person of God, is to be our great reward in which we delight most of all. We shouldn’t delight in our things so much as it keeps us from delighting in the Lord.

So we should recognize he is our great inheritance. We’ve been called to be a royal priesthood. We’ve been called—in other words, called and set apart to God—the way the Levites were, and they were told that God himself was their inheritance to teach it to them. He took away all land from them. To us today, we have land. We have other inheritances from God. But he wants us to recognize that our primary reward is God himself. I can’t stress that too much.

I was watching a cartoon show that we taped for our kids a couple of weeks ago—on the town that forgot Christmas. And the mayor in the comedy in the cartoon show is like a lot of mayors today. They thought that if they got rid of the nativity scene or a portion of it—in this case, the little wooden baby—they could stop Christmas somehow. And there are mayors in our nation today that try to remove nativity scenes from the municipalities—think they can get rid of Christmas somehow. Well, they can’t stop Christmas because Christmas is a historical remembrance that Jesus Christ came and had his finished work done on the cross and was resurrected by God. That’s our inheritance, and they can’t take that away from us.

Our counsel, as David’s was and as Jesus’s was, should come from the law of God. And we’ve talked about that a lot—about how the law of God should dictate our relationship to our children, for instance, and how we raise them and what we do with them. The law of God should dictate our relationship to our jobs, to our economics, to our politics, and everything else. We’ve talked about that a lot, and that’s good, and I’m really pleased that as we read through Psalm 16, I’m convinced this is, by far and away, the—what am I trying to say here?

I’ve been associated with various groups of Christians, of various churches, before, as all of us have been. And I am tremendously—I take tremendous delight in the fact that this church has tried to apply this, we’ve tried to apply the counsel of God to everything that we see and do. And as we read through Psalm 16, a lot of these things ring true of our fellowship, our congregation, and I rejoice in that.

We’ve stressed the importance of God’s law to everything in life. We also have to stress the importance of understanding and knowing that law. Right? It’s not enough to know that God’s law should speak to our economics, to our employment, our occupations, or to our children. If we don’t study the word of God, how are we going to know what that law says in order to apply it?

God has given us the Ten Commandments, but he’s given us a lot more in the scriptures. Sixty-six books help us understand the ramifications of those things in every area of life. We know that there are people who believe wrongly that it’s one of the laws of God to read one’s Bible every day. There’s no verse that tells us that. There’s no law of God that says we must read the scriptures. On the other hand, we can become lax in the other way, and we can ignore God’s scriptures for extended periods of time. And then how do we know the law of God and how it applies? We can’t.

So it’s important that we both read and study the word of God so that we can be like David and Jesus and take our counsel from the word of God for everything that we say and do. I would again strongly encourage you to make a statement in your own mind today that you’re going to read your scriptures more and study them more and their application to what you’re doing. Just a few minutes spent in the scriptures can have tremendous benefits for us, and it’s important to keep in them, recognizing that it’s going to give us the counsel for all of our lives.

It doesn’t do any good, of course, just to read and study. It really helps if we do, as David did and Jesus did, meditate on the word of God and its application. If we believe that God’s word should form our counsel for economics, for civil engineering, for the civil magistrate, the government, and all that entails—these are naughty issues to understand how those things apply. You know, remember Ron Johnson? When he was with us, he always wanted to know, “Well, how do we do this in terms of power plants and hydroelectric dams? Where the government—it seems like almost essential that the government takes over this thing and provides a base of funding and everything. He couldn’t understand how that could apply.”

Ron was really struggling with it, and as a result, he would meditate on these scriptures of God and try to come up with a solution to those things. And God, in blessing him, will take him to an employment position where he’s at a firm now that begins to apply some of these principles in terms of private ownership of land coming together cooperatively for power plants.

Anyway, I’m trying to stress here that it’s important to study the word of God and it’s important to meditate on the word of God—turn it over in your mind, think about its application to management, for instance, or labor union issues. But it helps to meditate upon the word of God to understand those things.

We should meditate on Jehovah’s word for all our ways, as well as David and Jesus did. We should also recognize that Jehovah is our Lord in everything that we say and do. It’s application then from reading God’s word, taking the counsel from God’s word, meditating on God’s word, and then acting in obedience to it. That’s the third part of that trilogy there.

And again, I’m really pleased that in this church we’ve done that and tried to make that our standard—the word of God our standard—for our worship service. But not just our worship service, for our jobs and everything else as well. We haven’t arrived by any stretch of the imagination. But when it comes to an issue that is topical and important, and we know the word of God would have us do something about it—such as, what do we do about the poor in society?—what this church does is we’ve got men now in this church studying the word of God and studying the works of other people who have studied the word of God, trying to apply it.

We don’t want to run off and do something just because it’s an important issue. We should act somehow. We want to understand what the word of God says about it. We want to take our counsel from the word of God, meditate upon it, and then have it determine everything that we do in terms of that thing. And I’m real pleased that’s the approach of this church.

And finally, our security should rest upon the basis of God’s presence. And therefore, we should be able, for ourselves, and teach our children, encourage each other, not to fear—not to fear for our physical safety or our spiritual safety—because we have God’s presence with us.

You notice that linkage, though? In verse 8: “I have set the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.” And he goes on to talk about the resurrection. Then if we don’t have God at our right hand, if we’re not reading the scriptures and not letting ourselves be reformed by those scriptures in everything that we say and do, that security of being not moved won’t be there. But if we have God at our right hand, if we’re searching those scriptures and making application to our lives, then we should have the same security—understanding of security—of God’s blessing as David and as Christ had.

So I’d encourage you all to use that as the basis for your children’s security as well—to teach them that if they put God at their right hand, if they put him as the Lord and master of everything they put their hand to do, they will have that same security and rest in Jesus Christ, both physically and spiritually.

Psalm 16 ends with a great verse of blessing that applies, of course, primarily to Jesus Christ—as secondary application to David—but also has application to ourselves. And if we understand what the rest of this psalm teaches us and act in obedience to the covenantally faithful God, Jehovah, then we’ll read this verse as well.

Verse 11 says: “Thou wilt show me the path of life. In thy presence is fullness of joy. At thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore.”

The verse in scripture that teaches us that if we delight ourselves in God, he’ll give us the desires of our heart. If we delight or bend ourselves to understanding God as our sovereign Master, our sovereign Lord of everything that we do, we’ll have pleasures forevermore at the right hand of God. This great verse of blessing will apply to us as well.

I pray that it does so with us as a church.

Let’s pray. Father God, we thank you for ourselves. We thank you that you have told us by your name, Jehovah, that you’re covenantally faithful to us. Father, help us be covenantally faithful to you, who have called us, who have forgiven our sins in Jesus Christ, who renewed us and given us the gift of the Holy Spirit on the basis of his work. We thank you for that life, Lord God.

Help us to image Jesus in everything that we do, understanding the ramifications of this song to our life, to our minds, to our hearts, to our hands, and help us act in obedience to them. We thank you, Almighty God, for the many blessings that this psalm talks to. And we thank you, Lord God, for this church and for the people in it that they’re moving to conform themselves to the image of Christ. We thank you, Lord God, for the blessings that you promise to us on the basis of that.

In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.