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Hey, I want to invite you this morning to Psalm. Chapter 16 is where we’re going to be at together today. And I want you to know we’re going to go through this rather quickly. And I didn’t plan this real well because as we talk about, you know, Harriet moving on and all the little sad feelings with that we’re going to talk about joy today. So maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know, but we’re going to look at the idea of joy as we as we engage Psalm 16. And, you know, for those of you that have been a part of ABC or maybe you’re new here in the summertime, we we take opportunity to just spend some weeks in the Psalms because Psalms are they’re a beautiful it’s the biggest book of the Bible. It’s a really beautiful book. And teaching us what it means to engage God in the different seasons of life that we experience. And each chapter of the Psalms really become unique unto themselves and the different circumstances that are being described. And the one of the things that makes Psalms unique is it’s it’s man’s response to God. Meaning when we we look at the Bible, it’s mostly God sharing with us. You know, what we how we need to respond to him. But the book of Psalms is different. It’s then teaching us, in all that we learn about God, how to respond back and worship to who he is. And so we looked at Psalm 11 last week and learning what it means to take refuge in God.
Today we’re looking at Psalm 16 in regards to joy in the Lord. And then we’re going to move on to to Psalm 102. Psalm 119, and then Psalm 137 and Psalm one 4045 is where we’re going to end. So for those that like to look ahead, that’s where we’re going to be together. But this particular Psalm, if you’ve opened up your Bible to Psalm 16, you’ll notice at the top of it this this psalm is often called the the Michtam of David. And the word michtam has really kind of lost its meaning over time. It’s a little bit speculative as to precisely what it could mean, but most think it carries this idea of an engraving, which is weird and thinking, okay, this is a psalm. How is this engraving? But this, this idea of michtam is really what it what it’s trying to express to us is this is a this is a poem of deep significance. So when you engage this, this is saying, look, this Psalm is kind of this is one of those Psalms that needs to make a core memory in your heart. Right? This this needs to be embedded in your identity, in your relationship with the Lord. So that that thought of this is what David is saying to us. And, and the significance of it is really adds to it. When you think about the the trajectory of David’s life, as he’s likely writing this Psalm.
Most people speculate as to the historical setting to the psalm, because we don’t know the the context of these Psalms kind of give us the idea, but most think that David is likely writing this psalm when King Saul is trying to take David’s life. If you know anything about David, he was anointed as a king. But but before he actually sat on the throne, there was another king who was there. And that king wanted to kill him. And so King Saul is pursuing him in the midst of being pursued. He’s living life like a nomad in and out of the wilderness, hiding in caves. But in the midst of all of that, he’s writing a psalm on joy, which teaches us something important about the idea of joy. That joy shouldn’t be impacted by circumstances. Though we can go through difficult times. It’s not to ignore that, but but rather to recognize that we can find a a more meaningful and lasting joy in our life. And so when you look at when you look at Psalm 16, the very end of the psalm is really what we’re going after here. The last verse that says, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy, and at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. And this is what we ask ourselves. We look at Psalm is like, yes, how do we do that? You know, every season of life, no matter what.
Like, how do I find my soul resting in this place? Good times. Bad that that fullness of joy. You know, that pleasure evermore. How do I discover that? And this is what Psalm 16 is, is working through with us. Because I believe as people, one of the primary reasons we we get lost in the idea of what joy is, is because we too easily place our hope in things that aren’t intended to last, and in so doing, we try to find our identity and purpose in those things. And because that hope doesn’t endure, our joy dies with it. So if we can find a sustaining joy or a sustaining hope in our lives, then we find a sustaining joy for our lives. And therefore it provides this consistency that no matter what’s happening around us, we we know our foundation is there. And this is exactly what Psalm 16 is, is helping us think through. How do we find that that lasting joy? And I want to I want you to know, as we go through this psalm, I’m not going to go through it in order. But you’ll notice as you look at Psalm, it’s broken up in in two verses together. And that’s often how the psalmist speaks, like one verse carries a thought, and the second verse either supports it or is the antithesis, like, have you ever read the Psalms? You’ll notice that these two verses, they work together and on almost all the Psalms, that’s how it’s categorized.
Sometimes you’ll see it in threes. But but these Psalms chunk together. So I just want to look at chunks as we bounce through this psalm and understanding this idea of joy. And let me give you a point, number one, and we’ll work through this together. How do we find lasting joy? Number one is this find the enduring hope. Find the enduring hope. And that word, the word the should be capitalized here. It’s the enduring hope, the that one thing that sustains from which we orient all things for us in life. And it’s it’s not an idea, but we know in Christianity, rather it is a person. Our foundation is is in Jesus. And one of the things that helps us remind us of this is as David’s talking about this, David is really giving a prophetic idea in this verse, and David would often do this. David became this representative of the ultimate messianic king who would come. So David was a king. Perhaps Israel might thought he could even be the Messiah. But David’s life met an end. And so they were looking for a future messianic hope, right? A messiah, a perfect Messiah who would ultimately redeem them. And so when David write these Psalms as kings of Israel, it was a foreshadowing of a true king who would ultimately come. And in so doing, you would find these prophetic statements in David’s Psalms.
So much so that when you read the New Testament, one of the things I love about the New Testament is the New Testament. Authors are constantly quoting from the Old Testament to help you see God’s faithful hand fulfilling what he’s promised to you and me. And one of the things you can learn to do in your own study of the Bible, if you really want to enrich it more than just more than just read to read. When you get through sections of the Bible and you see that they’re quoting the Old Testament, is to go back to that section of the Old Testament and discover why they’re quoting it and what what meaning it adds to the New Testament. And Psalm 16 is one of those Psalms they quote in the New Testament. In fact, the most quoted book of the Old Testament in the New Testament is the Book of Psalms. In Psalm 16 is is quoted in two new, two unique places. It’s it’s in acts chapter two, and it’s again in acts chapter 13. And both of these passages are in your notes. But in acts chapter two, when you study acts two, what you what you find is the Holy Spirit of God has now come upon his people. Chapter one The Spirit descends on the people, indwells the people of God to do the work of God in this world. And then when you get to chapter two, Peter shares the first sermon to the church, now empowered by the Spirit of God.
And when he’s laying that foundation for them and all their to be because of who God is. That that that passage that Peter turns to is Psalm chapter 16 and verse ten. He’s saying this, this represents the core of who we are, because everything we do on a basis as a church is rooted not only in the identity of Jesus, but the resurrection of Christ for you and for me. So finding a hope that endures is critical for us. And in order to discover a joy that lasts. And what Peter is saying to the early church is our basis is built in the resurrection of Jesus. This becomes that pinnacle moment for us and everything that we move in for our foundation, because we know no matter what happens to us in the circumstances of life, that there is an enduring hope that transcends it all, that gives us joy as God’s people, knowing it can never be taken away. And so in verse nine and ten, therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices. David says, my flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your Holy One see corruption. And David is prophetically foreshadowing the Messiah who would not decay in the grave. And so Peter’s quoting this and saying, this is what Jesus has done. And then when you get to acts 13, Paul is called out on the first missionary journey with Barnabas.
And as he goes beyond Jerusalem to the to the rest of the world. The foundational message Paul gives is then again from Psalm 16 saying, this is our basis for orienting ourselves, knowing that we’re going to walk a road that sometimes has some adversity, but we will be a people filled with joy because we know no matter what life throws at us, that we have something that transcends and sustains it all. It’s not found in the tangible things of life because those things will pass away, but it’s found in something greater, something more meaningful, something more enduring, something that is everlasting, and it’s found in the Lord. So finding that enduring hope becomes critical for, for, for you and for me, so that we can get to number two, which is this rest in him, rest in him. And David is really saying it like this for us that we we let who Christ is shape us, right? Rather than say to God, God, this is what I want, or you need to participate in what my kingdom is about. It’s it’s saying, God, I want to live for your kingdom and glory. So, Lord, direct my heart and what it looks like to belong to you. In fact, Psalm 34 or 37 verse four says it like this delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. And it’s not saying, manipulate God so you can get what you want, but rather what it’s helping us understand is as you delight in God, the desires of your heart change and your desires really align with his desires.
And he gives you those desires because your heart is delighted in him. So you become more like him. Seeing this world from from his perspective, he’s changing you. And that’s what resting in him looks like for us. If I gave you an example from the New Testament, we’ll look at the next verse in a minute. But if you remember the story of job, the accusation that Satan made against job job, Satan comes before God and says, job only follows you because what he gets. Let me take what he has and we’ll see if God if job really praises you. God. And so Satan does this. And really it becomes this lesson for us for examining what is the basis for who you are, right? Do you follow God just so simply you can get things from him? Job is teaching us that the true prize of life is not the things of this world, because they can come and go. The true prize in life is God Himself. And David says this. And in verses one and two, and again in five and six, look at this. He says, reserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord, you are my Lord. I have no good part from you. The Lord is my chosen portion, my cup.
You hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Indeed. I have a beautiful inheritance. What job is saying is certainly God. You’ve given me good things, and that’s great. There’s a part of that to these verses, but there’s so much more to that, to these verses. Because what job is saying is, yes, I’ve got good things, but the greatest thing I have is you, God. In a relationship. You yourself, Lord, belong to me. And he refers to it in verse five. And I just want to hone in on this for a minute. He says, you’re my portion, my cup and my lot. And point number two, you have some extra verses there if you want to look these up later. But these words that David is choosing is particularly important to understanding how he is seeing his relationship to the Lord and the joy he’s receiving in that. The idea of of portion is, is saying in Israel’s day, the 12 tribes were all assigned a portion. When they went into the Promised Land, they were given a portion of the land. But there was one tribe who wasn’t given the land. They were the Levites. And the Levites depended upon the the Lord to provide for them through God’s people. As God worked in his through the people. The people provide for the Levites to continue to do the work of the ministry. And so for them they look to the Lord himself as their portion, because they didn’t have those earthly possessions.
Questions. And this is what David is saying, really, for all of us, that that healthy relationship with the Lord is about this God. You are my portion. Not only that, he refers to him as His cup, and the idea of a cup is to recognize whatever goes in that cup belongs to you. This is your lot to drink. This is. This is yours to participate in. This is your cup, right? And so David is saying to, to, to God that, Lord, that that is where I draw my source from, that you are my portion, that you alone, not the things that I have. God. But but who you are is where I find my identity and purpose and resting in that. And you, God, he goes on and says, are my lot. And so, in a sense, what David is saying is, God, you are. You are everything to me. My inheritance, my, my daily joy, and the one in whom holds my future. And I don’t need earthly treasures because I ultimately have you. So in order to find joy for us, it’s finding the enduring hope. It’s then not only finding him, but then learning what it means to find myself in him. Not because I’m coming to God and asking God to participate in what I want, but rather I’m losing myself in order to embrace who he is. So the point three we do not stray from him.
We do not stray from him. You see, in verse seven David says, like this I bless the Lord, who gives me counsel in the light in the night. Also my heart instructs me, I have set the Lord always before me because he is at my right hand. I shall not be shaken. It’s almost like this declarative statement David is giving because he knows our hearts can wane, and there are things in life that tempt us and can pull us away from this identity of where true joy is discovered. And David is giving this declarative statement over his life, though he he hasn’t certainly completed his life. And he’s just really saying, this is who I want to be enduring as throughout all of my days because I know life can try to shake me, but I refuse to let that happen. And it’s the same for you and for me. That when life tries to shake us up, that we say, you know, out of all the things that be thrown to me, the way I come back to the center of who I am is to find the center of who he is. And then from there, I’m able to move because I’m walking with him. And so resting in the Lord becomes critical. And then and then reminding ourselves not to stray from this. But this is the the defining place for me, because the the alternative for that, especially presented in our own country, is a is really a path of self-centeredness in our society.
Kind of the the juxtaposed position is to say, well, whatever makes you happy, you do you because, well, you’re the center of the universe and whatever you think and however you feel that ultimately matters the most. So the center of life should start with you. You looking deeper within you. And you know that lie has been around from from the from the beginning. I mean, even in the early church, there was a man named Augustine or Augustine who who talked about this as being the the way we would curve inward. We have this tendency to curve inward as people. And the problem with that is we become isolated. We we we we involve ourselves in comparison in the end, end up frustrated because we weren’t made for us. Right. And we follow that that kind of path in life. It it leads us to to pursue our relationships simply for a transactional basis. Right. I’ll have friendship, but it’s really it’s really about what I can get from it. And because I have this need to feel like I’m important. And so I treat everyone just for simply satisfying my ego, you know, my self-centeredness. And so it’s purely transactional. And so I, I don’t need you again. Then I can just discard you. And I have to develop new relationships so that I continue with that transaction to feel to feel significant.
And and then it brings us this place where we have difficulty empathizing with people because, well, we we want to think about self and what we want more than, than the need. And I’ve got to fill my own inadequacies up. And, and then the result of that it leads to pride and insecurity. Or we could say pride or insecurity. Often both. But but rather we’re always comparing ourselves to people and might think we’re better than someone else or or the insecurity because someone else out of my self-centeredness, someone else may may look better to me. And so I don’t know who I am, because the only thing basis I have for feeling valuable is within me. And since someone might look better at doing it than I do than I, I feel like I’m less than. And so our identity in Jesus becomes this place of knowing who I am because of who Christ is. And therefore when I move in this world, my interaction and relationship is not about primarily what I can get from it. There are there are times in life where I need encouraged, but rather my relationships in this world will become this basis for pouring out of me the richness that I have in Jesus. That as I find my joy in everything, that I am in him because of everything that he’s done for me and my life is surrendered to him, then I have the opportunity to pour that out.
This is why in Christianity Jesus is calling Matthew 16, verse 24. It says this if anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Jesus is saying, in order to really find the depth of who he is and discover the joy of which he has for you, you’ve got to find the death of you, the end of yourself. And just saying, Lord, I trust you with me more than I trust myself. And the Bible says in that that’s where the journey of true joy and life begins. And as your life is filled up in Jesus, let me give you this last point. This is what happens. You develop community around him. You develop community around him. And we should really say healthy community around him because all of us have community in some way, but not always healthy. And what we want to do is develop community around him. Now, let me just tell you, this is really not a way to find joy, but this is saying the result of discovering joy in your life. You should find your life enriching deeper in healthy community. So if you say this morning, how do I really know that I’m walking in this joy? I would say it like this you develop and have healthy community around you. Now, if you’re new to ABC, let me just tell you, healthy community takes time, right? But you understand the wealth of which Jesus has poured in you is intended to be poured out of you, and you don’t really need somebody to tell you that because you’ve experienced who Christ is.
But but it is important to remind ourselves that. That we then should attach ourselves to community. And let me just say, if you’re new to a church, that’s not easy to do. And so it’s important to take risk to do that, especially if you’re an introvert and introverted people. I can tell you to develop healthy community. And you could come tell me I tried, right? Or you did once. And I just tell you, community is not something that develops once, you know. And if you think about developing healthy community, you know, just you showed up to church as developing healthy community. Can I tell you, it’s great that you come into a room and you get to see faces of people that are a part of community, but to let that community go deeper requires you to get more face to face interacting with people. That’s why we provide opportunities for us to gather together. By the way, I forgot to mention, if you want to be in healthy community today at 6:00 at Olympic Park, we’re going to have ice cream and celebrate Harriet. So you can do that. Right? So but but you’ve got to show up and show up and show up and and in doing that, God enriches the depth of relationship and naturally begins to build healthy community around us.
Not because we need to find ourselves feeling adequate because we lack, but rather because we get a place to pour out the richness that Jesus has poured into me. Now, for some of us, we may not understand what that richness is like entirely and healthy community helps. But but for God’s people to move forward, it calls us into healthy community. And I need to do this really fast. But you see Paul saying this in verse three and four, he talks about healthy community in one way, right? The saints in the land are the excellent ones in whom is all my delight. But then there’s unhealthy community. He says, the sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply. All right. We can create idols out of anything. And he’s just saying, look, there’s two roads to walk. But one of the things that made the early church so powerful, and their ability to minister in this world, was the depth of healthy community. In acts chapter two, verse 42, it says they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and the fellowship and the breaking of bread and prayers and saying, this church found the beauty in Jesus so empowering for them that you couldn’t you couldn’t separate them. They just knew, I’m in Jesus. Therefore, I want to see my community just succeeding. And you couldn’t keep them apart from each other. They wanted to belong to something greater than what God was going to do in in each of them as they ministered for him.
And so this is important for all of us to think about. And sometimes I say this as a church, like one, one thing that I want to see here at ABC and I gotta, I gotta provide a caveat here. So please give me a minute to, I want to say this and I’ll fix it. Okay. I appreciate clicks. It sounds weird for a second. I know, because clicks can be unhealthy a lot of times, right? But what? Here’s what I mean by that. I really want to find you. To find a tribe within our tribe. Right. And what I mean is people that, you know, have your back, that you get to sit and walk with Jesus together. And when you get to a certain size, it just comes to a place where you can’t you can’t do that at a depth when you’re a big crowd. So it’s critical. And we can we certainly need to be encouraging each other right now. So please don’t hear me saying we shouldn’t do that. But it’s also good to find people within our congregation and say, you know what? For this season, this is my group and I’m going to encourage this group in Jesus together. Now here’s where clicks are not healthy. Sometimes you can become so insular that you stop being invitational, and that’s not honoring to the Lord, right? For us, we want to develop community.
You got to show up to have that and just start spending time together. And that that naturally becomes a part of of what you what you become. But but we also have to always be invitational people around us saying, look, this what Jesus is doing in us, he wants to continue to do outside of us. And so while you get this tribe to run with beautiful, beautiful thing, you also need to within that tribe, say, and guys, we got to keep thinking outwardly like, who else can we bring in and encourage and just see growing in Jesus and and find what it means to walk joyfully with him? I need to close with this. C.s. Lewis, this is really fast. C.s. Lewis was a man who thought about joy in such a way that it really was. It was eye opening. He he used Joy as an apologetic. Not to say I’m sorry, but a defense to Christianity. And he saw joy as this place to really help people understand who God was, because he said this on his own faith journey. C.s. Lewis remarked that there was this desire in him to see joyful things, to experience good things, and for good to win over the bad things. And he thought to himself, how else could that exist within me, lest there be a divine creator who wrote that in me? A moral lawgiver. And he said, he acknowledged, that if I just came into existence like I just evolved into existence, I wouldn’t care about things like that.
This world would be dog eat dog. And I really wouldn’t have a concern for any sort of morality, because there’s no divine judge to give, that there’s no moral lawgiver. But the idea of joy reminded him, there must be a creator. And thinking about that, he goes on and encourages the church. He says, if it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak, we are half hearted creatures, fooling around when infinite joy is offered to us, we are far too easily pleased. I mean, he’s saying stop! Stop seeing the circumstances of life as the ultimate joy. We we, we look at the things in life and fail to see the ultimate joy giver, which is God Himself as our prize. And he goes on and says, if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. Guys, can I tell you that’s all of us this morning. We can experience certain delights in life, but you are made for a deeper joy. And that deeper joy is only found in the one who endures, and that is Jesus. And our church exists so that we as people can have a life giving relationship with Jesus. If you don’t know how to do that, be happy to encourage you this morning. Please come see me after the service.