“You Are My Lord” Psalm 16 (Sermon Recap)

Without Jesus there is little reason to trust God with your life. But because of what Jesus represents, namely the victory of God over everything – every evil, every sin, every difficulty, we now have every reason to trust God and believe in him by first believing in Jesus.

But what happens after you've trusted in Jesus? What happens next after you say, "You are my Lord" (Ps 16:2)? Psalm 16 offers us at least four answers.

The first answer is in the last part of Ps 16:2, and it is foundational to all the other answers offered in this psalm. When God becomes your God, you will feel the full goodness of the Lord. To say that the Lord is good is to say that all of life is meant to show his goodness. But even more, as this verse points out, it's to say that any time spent without the Lord is not good. Good does not exist apart from the Lord. Any consideration of something good begins and ends with God. As D.A. Carson puts it in For The Love of God: Vol 1, "In comparison with knowledge of our Maker and Redeemer, nothing else is worth very much, whether in this life or in the life to come. Apart from the Lord, we 'have no good thing.'"

Sadly, we so very often try to find good from things apart from the Lord. We do so because those things (things like sex or power or money or attention) seem to hold some promise of good for us. The Bible however confronts us with a much different reality - nothing can give us good unless it first comes through God. We cannot experience true and full goodness unless we are living in a relationship with God as our Lord. Everything else we might run after will only bring sorrows (Ps 16:4).

Secondly, when God becomes your God, you will feel the full delight with the Lord. There is first the delight of being with other people who also have made God their God (Ps 16:3). This is the delight of being in community with people who hold in common a serious commitment to God as their Lord. The real source of this delight however is the Lord himself (Ps 16:11). We should not overlook the bold claim made in Ps 16:11. This verse is telling us that with God there is complete, full, maximum joy! There are eternal things to enjoy with God. The joys we experience now all eventually end, whether it is the short term joy of meal that ends with the completion of that meal or the longer term joy of a relationship that ends with the death of one of the partners in the relationship. With God however such endings do not exist. Having God be your God means that there are things we will able to enjoy and delight in with him forever.

Thirdly, when God becomes your God, you will feel full security because of the Lord (Ps 16:8-10). When the Lord becomes your Lord, you gain the sound confidence of knowing that God has you and that there is nothing that can take away his presence in your life. You are safe in life and you are safe even in death.

How can we know this for sure? For this answer we look in the New Testament. Peter and Paul both quoted from Ps 16:8-10 and tied this passage to the resurrection of Jesus. God raising Jesus from the dead was his promise to us that just as he did not leave Jesus in the grave but raised him from the dead, so also will he raise all his people from the dead. Jesus' resurrection is a promise to all those who've made the Lord their God that they also will be set free from death spiritually and physically. Spiritual freedom means that we never need to fear that we will be apart from God. He will always keep us safe and secure with him. Physical freedom means that our very bodies will be kept safe from the power of death and in fact be made brand new.

God did not abandon Jesus, and now through Jesus and our relationship with God, neither will we who have believed in Jesus.

Fourthly and last, when God becomes your God, you will feel full satisfaction with the Lord (Ps 16:5-6). To be satisfied with the Lord is to say that the Lord is who you choose for yourself. And once you have him, you are fully satisfied. Being in the same space with God is a satisfying and pleasant experience. To have God as your God is to always have enough. What he has given you has "fallen into pleasant places." You have a "beautiful inheritance." You have God!

For truly, there is there is nothing in this world, nothing in this universe, more important than having God be your God. Clearly this can't be in just name only. For God to really be your God, and for you to then experience the goodness and delight and security and satisfaction that is only found in him, you have to set him before you as it says in v.8. Your heart must be open to his counsel and instruction. This means shaping your life in such a way that it is clear that that God is indeed God over your life.

How can you be sure that you are in fact shaping your life in this way? Hebrews 12:2 tells us about the necessity of looking to Jesus, who sits at the right hand of the throne of God. In looking to Jesus, in depending on the power of his death to kill all the wrongness we have within us and living in the power of his resurrection to keep all that wrongness forever dead within us, we will go in the right direction, we will have God be truly our God, and we will experience the full richness of all of what that means.