How to Love the Lord

Lord Jesus, we come before you tonight longing to hear your voice, your voice which guides us and directs us, your voice which gives us life, your voice which tells us of mercy unthinkable, your voice which declares to us your will. We pray O Lord that as we hear your Word, we would have hearts to respond. I pray Lord that you would preach a better sermon as we so often pray to your people tonight then what is before me. I pray that in Christ’s name. Amen.

We are continuing our series in the Hallel Psalms, the Hallelujah Psalms, we’ll be in Psalm 116 this evening, Psalm 116. Hear the Word of the Lord as I read.

I love the Lord because He heard my voice and my pleas for mercy, because He inclined His ear to me therefore, I will call on him as long as I live. The snares of death encompassed me, the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me. I suffer distress and anguish then I called on the name of the Lord, O Lord I pray deliver my soul, gracious is the Lord and righteous. Our God is merciful. The Lord preserves the simple. When I was brought low, He saved me. Return oh my soul to your rest for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you, for you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. I believed even when I spoke, I am greatly afflicted. I said in my alarm all mankind are liars. What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me. I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people, precious in the site of the Lord is the death of his saints. Oh Lord I am your servant, I am your servant, the son of your maid servant. You have loosed my bonds. I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call in the name of the Lord, I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people in the courts of the house of the Lord in your midst, O Jerusalem. Praise the Lord.

Well, if I were to say to you in thinking and preparing for this sermon that the Lord laid it on my heart not to preach, but just to have a time of testimony there would probably be two reactions in this room. Some of you would immediately get excited, you might be even making your way down here right now, just give me open mic testimony to talk about what the Lord means to me and some of you would immediately get nervous. Nervous probably about what others might say knowing those times can get a little bit unwieldy, but perhaps even nervous about what you might say. What would you say in your testimony? Perhaps you would even be tempted to anxiously type and ChatGPT how to give a good testimony and see what comes up. Any one of you can type that, I’m curious as to what it would say. But breathe a sigh of relief because rather than giving a testimony we are going to hear a testimony, not from one another, but from the psalmist. It’s a testimony of deliverance and praise. And the goal tonight brothers and sisters if that we would come to adopt psalm 116 more fully as our testimony. Psalm 116 is a psalm of thanksgiving and gratitude, it’s a personal testimony, but it is intended to become a public testimony and that is the testimony of the people of God, shaping their life and their worship, to be a story of deliverance and a story of praise. And so in the first part of this sermon we will look at psalmist deliverance and then we will look at the psalmist’s praise as a response to his deliverance. So simple outline this evening, deliverance and then praise.

We can see in verse 1 he begins on a high note. What does he say, “I love the Lord”, I love the Lord, it’s almost an announcement of sorts. I taught a Sunday school class when I was a rolling elder back at Mitchell Road Presbyterian Church in Greenville and it was a little bit, if you remember the age and stage communities that we had here some years ago, it was a bit of a combo class between Bruce’s community and what was Bernie’s community so 60s, 70s, large class, just a cast of Godly characters and saints in that class and they loved Michelle and me very well. I taught them for 10 years and we had an older lady in that class and her name was Joyce Ballinger and she is with the Lord now, but Joyce would often stand up just about every Sunday morning and she would just say, “I’m sorry Derek I’ve gotta just, I’ve gotta give just a word of testimony about how good the Lord is to me and how much I love the Lord.” She always was giving a testimony, just about every Sunday. Sometimes I wondered if I was gonna get to actually teach the Sunday school lesson she was so ramped up, but we loved Joyce, she was such a special person and you know her frequent testimonies were just such a blessing to that Sunday school community and once they inspired us and maybe you read the psalm and you think, ya know I love the Lord. This is a call for us to love the Lord and in her testimony as well, it challenged us to love the Lord more deeply. So maybe you’re here this evening and you could say, well I could pretty much go with the psalmist here, just walk in and say, I love the Lord, let me at Him. Or maybe you’re here and it could be that you would say honestly, I don’t know that I can say that. Or probably more likely you’re here and you would say I love the Lord, but not like I really want to. Well, this psalm directs us, it gives us some ought to, but it really helps us with our want to. And so what we see here in the beginning of this psalm is that this is expression is not just an emotion or a feeling, no it’s deeper than that. He immediately gives us a reason why he loves the Lord. I love the Lord, but why? He says I love the Lord because he heard my pleas for mercy, because he inclines his ear to me. And so the psalmist deliverance begins with one simple fact and that fact is God listens. God listens. Because he inclined his ear to me.

Psalm 34:17, “The Lord hears the cries of the righteous and he delivers them all from their troubles. God listens to his people.” Such a simple yet profound realization, God listens to the cries of his people. He is not off in the distance, inattentive or aloof, but he is more like a parent who hears the voice of a child. You ever been with a mom and she is in a room, her child’s in another room and you hear that thud, that boom, and then you hear the cry, ahhhh, ya know, and then the mom immediately says, I know that cry and there she goes, that’s my child, I know that cry. Ya know some translations even say, because he bends down to listen. Like an adult who bends down and gets on the level of a child to make sure they can hear them, and they can understand them, God stoops as it were, down to his people in order to listen, to hear us. He says he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy, we see this exultation, therefore I will call on the name of the Lord as long as I live. And so, the story of the psalmist deliverance is his love for God and his life of continual prayer is motivated by what, by God’s mercy. So, note this as you think about your own love for the Lord, when you think about the psalmist’s love for the Lord, note this, it is not a self-generated action. In other words, he does not come by way of him going down and digging down into his heart, and he’s left me see if I can find some spark of love for the Lord. It is not a self-generated action, but what is it, no it is a responsive action. That’s love for God.

1 John 4. We love because He first loved us. And that’s this psalmist, he is overcome, he’s, he’s overwhelmed as it were by God’s mercy and by God’s saving character and that is what psalm 116 holds out to us. You might be tempted to think that it holds out the psalmist’s love for God, in a sense it does, but what it actually holds out to us is why the psalmist loves God. And it’s his mercy and his saving character. It’s further highlighted in the psalmist’s distress in verse 3. He says the snares of death encompassed me, the pangs of sheol lay hold on me. I suffer distress and anguish. We find the psalmist here reflecting on a desperate situation, we’re not exactly sure what it was, but no doubt a life threatening situation. And now keep in mind for the sake of context that the people of God they would recite this, they would sing this. In other words, the language of distress and anguish throughout the psalms is the language of the people of God. They remembered, they reflected upon it even as they were in distress, even as Jesus did on the night that he was betrayed. He sang this psalm and that’s sobering to think of distress and anguish. Why is that part of language of the people of God. It’s sobering in one sense, but what I wanna tell you is that it’s comforting. The stress and anguish are part of the language of the people of God and that tells us even as we think of our own lives and our own distress and our own suffering, that it’s nothing new to God’s people when we are going through it. And that is a sobering, but a comforting reminder because it means that God is not aloof in our times of distress and desperation. How do I know that? Because it’s in the Bible. Because it’s written about so frequently. Because the psalmist expresses it so often. And it’s a reminder to you and to me and part of the message is at least He did not abandon the psalmist; He did not abandon Christ when sang this psalm and He would not abandon us as well. So we see the extremity of the situation in these verses. The snares of death he says, they encompass me. The pangs of sheol laid hold of me. He speaks of being surrounded, being in the grip of something and that is death itself or even the prospect of death.

Commentators note that death and sheol are pictured in scripture as aggressive, they are clutching like a boa constrictor around its prey, having caught its prey. You ever see those photos online that caption, “Man eaten by gigantic snake?” I never know whether to believe those or not, but they’re pretty scary to me, I don’t wanna go to the Amazon jungle because of that. But that’s the picture we have here. Having caught his prey, squeezing it. Are these enemies, it is a sickness, what is it? We don’t know, but whatever it is, is closing in on him, gripping him as it were with no earthly solution and that’s what the psalmist was experiencing. Brothers and sisters we can find ourselves in similar places in our lives, maybe not one to one, but encircled as it were by trouble or by opposition or by fear or by anxiety or by grief and whether that comes by way of circumstance or whether that comes by way of some spiritual kind of distress, we can often feel that closing in on us and the question is, what should we do when we find ourselves in that situation? Well, what does the psalmist do? He calls on the name of the Lord.

Verse 4. Then I called on the name of the Lord, oh Lord I pray deliver my soul. Commentators note that calling on the Lord is an echo throughout this psalm. Verse 2, verse 4, verse 13, verse 17 and the language here denotes a continual dynamic, not a one-time event, but I kept calling on the Lord. A further note that calling on the name of the Lord is often the turning point for God’s people. It’s when I called on the name of the Lord and he says, “Deliver my soul.” Deliver my soul is an interesting cry because what is at the forefront here is this immediate situation or this circumstance, some physical threat, and certainly this prayer carries the notion of crying for some temporal deliverance or relief, but ultimately, it’s his soul’s preservation and deliverance that’s in view. He says, “Deliver my soul.” And so this cry takes on broader implications as he begins to reflect on God’s merciful saving character. You see that more fully in verses 5 and 6. He says, “Gracious is the Lord and righteous, our God is merciful, the Lord preserves the simple and when I was brought low He saved me.” And so he recalls God’s mercy and grace and righteousness in delivering him. And he says the Lord preserves the simple.

Now the psalmist here is not referring to himself in a flattering way, he’s pointing to God’s preservation of the weak and whether that’s born of a naivete or just one who is easily overcome by wicked men, the psalmist is pointing to God’s unmerited compassion and favor, to those who left to themselves or left to their enemies would surely perish. The Lord preserves the simple and he says when he was brought low that is when God saves him. That’s when God saved him. Joel talked about Tim McGraw last week, I’ll keep the country music theme going, just to tell you that famous philosopher Garth Brooks once sang, “I’ve Got Friends in Low Places”, well so does the psalmist and the friend the psalmist has is a merciful God in the low place. So this text should speak to us in our lowest moments that it is there that we can experience the grace of God. We often do not want to be brought down low, but here’s the encouragement, God often meets us in the depths, exactly in that place, and that’s what the psalmist says, “When I was brought low, the Lord saved me, he swept in.”

Some years ago while white water rafting, maybe in my early 20s, I volunteered to be the guide that sits on the back of the raft, ya know, we would sit up high with a paddle and just sort of steering our way through the river and we had a guide in front of us in another raft and it was Chattooga River, if you’re familiar with that. We were going down this rapid area and we swept over toward a tree and the guy in front of me, there was a tree limb that was hanging out over the river and he didn’t want to get hit by the tree limb so he just grabbed that tree limb, as he went by he bent it back, and I could see what was coming next. So I’m super high and he lets go of that tree limb and it just pops back and I tried to duck down to get underneath it, but all that did was just line it up with my forehead and I mean that thing just walloped me right in the forehead and out of the raft I went, into the rapids and I don’t know if I had a concussion, I was very woozy and it was dangerous actually. This was the 90s and we didn’t wear helmets and things like that. I didn’t have a helmet on, and I could hear some people in the raft saying, “Grab him, grab him, grab him.” They knew I was gonna be in trouble and a friend of mine who must have been not even 150 pounds, he just reached down in some kind of fever pitch of adrenaline, he just grabbed the back of my life vest and just yanked me off into the raft, pulled me out of the rapids just like that. He just swept in, probably saved my life. When you think about that and the psalmist being in the raging waters of his own tears or grief or whatever it may be, his own fears, it is in that moment that God just reaches down, and he grabs him and plucks him out. Do you know what that is? The Lord saves us when we’re brought low. Recalling this he begins to construct himself, now this is important, so he’s recalling this event and now he’s going to begin to talk to himself in the present. He says, “Return oh my soul to your rest for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.” So, he’s reminding himself of what the Lord has done for him, he’s instructing his soul in the present. And here’s something instructive for us in that, ya know, sometimes we need to speak to our soul. We all have an inner dialogue. You might be an external processor, an internal processor, an external processor you’re talking to yourself all the time, internal processors there’s something going on inside, but we all have an inner dialogue and the question is what is your inner dialogue saying to you? Is it talking to you or are you talking to your soul? And sometimes we need to speak to our soul, the voice of fear, the voice of doubt, the voice of unbelief, listen, not with the message about ourselves, but with the message about God, about His deliverance and about His saving character and that’s what the psalmist does, he begins to speak to his soul. He reminds himself that the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.

Verse 8. “For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.” He says, “I will walk before the Lord and the land of the living.” Now notice as he’s reflecting on this event, but he is also in a present tense he is sort of talking to himself. There’s something of a now but not yet dynamic to his deliverance here. I mean, he has been delivered, you’ve delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. He is being delivered, return oh my soul to you rest. He will be delivered; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. And so we see this paradox of the psalmist, the now but not yet. We find ourselves in similar places so it is with us we have been delivered from death and Christ, we are being delivered, we are being saved, the Lord is working in us as we speak to ourselves, and we will be delivered. So, we find the psalmist in this paradox just like us and we see this further in verses 10 and 11. The psalmist is recalling his dismay. He says, “I believed even when I spoke I am greatly afflicted, I said in my alarm all mankind are liars.” You know I read that some churches use this psalm in a service of thanksgiving after a woman has given birth. That may seem a bit out of left field to you, but if you think about it, it’s kind of perfect because what are women likely to cry out in the midst of childbirth, well I imagine it’s something like, all men are liars, would be something that would be fitting. I can hear it right now. The point is that affliction can bring us to many various utterances in our dismay. There’s many things that we can cry out, even my sweet wife uttered some strong rebukes of me once during the pangs of childbirth, I remember that. You know Michelle, they weren’t too bad, but I wanna caution here though because there’s not a consensus that hyperbole is in view here. In fact, the NIV reads quite differently from the ESV. It says this, “I believed when I said I am greatly afflicted in my alarm, said all men are liars.” And so he believed when he said he was greatly afflicted and when he said all men are liars, it’s kind of a Romans 3, “Let God be true, every man a lair” sort of effect. In other words, emphasizing God’s trustworthiness over and against human unreliability in that sense. There’s not time to dive into that deeper, but however you take it, the testimony of the psalmist is that he sees God’s mercy in preserving him and keeping him and there’s something of a deliverance of his soul in that alone in that God has kept him faithful even in the midst of his distress and even in the midst of his dismay, even in the face of liars or the dismay of his circumstances, God has kept him faithful. And remember that cry, deliver my soul. And so we see the psalmist’s deliverance and his spiritual preservation that God does now allow the darkness of the veil of tears to fully and finally overtake him or undo him. And so brothers and sisters, we can cry even in great distress, Lord deliver my soul, do not allow this veil of tears to fully and finally undo me or overtake me. And here’s the sweet promise to you and to me, the sweet promise is God listens. He hears the cries of his people; He will keep our feet from stumbling come what may.

The great promise echoed in Psalm 55:22 to those who are burdened. And your call of Psalm 55. One of the reasons I love it is because he’s going through it and saying, “Ya know if it were enemies that were afflicting me I would be fine, but here’s the problem, it’s my friends, it’s my close companions.” Here’s what 55:22 says, it says “Cast your burden on the Lord and He will sustain you. He will never permit the righteous to be moved” and so we see something of the psalmist’s deliverance in this, that God has kept him all these years and that’s something that you can pray because the tension at times we’ll pay for a deliverance from a temporal situation and we’re not guaranteed that God is going to immediately lift the veil of tears from us, but what we can pray is, even as I walk through this oh Lord Jesus, deliver my soul, do not let me be swept away and the good news is God hears our cries and he will keep us until the end. And so, having seen his deliverance both circumstantial and spiritual, there’s something for Him to do in the here and now and that is to praise. What’s the psalmist’s response to his deliverance and again thinking about your testimony, what’s your response to your deliverance in Christ, it is to praise.

The psalmist tells us, “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living” in verses 8 and 9. It’s interesting that the NIV says, “You have delivered me that I might walk before the Lord in the land of the living” or “so that I might walk before the Lord in the land of the living.” So, it’s not just a future tense, but also a present tense as well. And so you might ask me, well what does that look like in the present? Here’s a better question, where is the land of the living in the here and the now? And here’s the glorious thing, in verses 12 through 18 they tell us. It’s in the congregation of the people of God. The land of the living is in the house of God, it’s in the courts of the Lord, so what’s He going to do, now that He’s been delivered what’s He going to do, He is going to go to church. How’s that for a Super Bowl lad. You know, you just won the Super Bowl, you say, you’ve just been delivered, you’re going to Disney World, no I’m going to church, that’s the psalmist. He’s not going to Disney World, he’s going to church and that might seem a little anticlimactic to you and to me, but it’s only anticlimactic if we fail to grasp the meaning of what we are doing in church together as the people of God.

He says in verse 12, “What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits to me, what shall I give to the Lord in thanksgiving, now that he has delivered me in light of my deliverance how can I praise Him, what will I do.” He’s going to do three things. He says I will lift up the cup of salvation, I will call on the name of the Lord, and I will pay my vows in the congregation. All in the presence of God’s people repeated in various ways in verses 17 and 18. The cup of salvation is harkening back to a drink offering of the people of God giving thanks to God, their deliverance from Egypt and in that sense they are celebrating a temporal deliverance we might say, but as we all know it’s pointing to an ultimate deliverance that is coming with the messiah. So, there are two cups in scripture, the cup of salvation and the cup of wrath and as we think about our ultimate deliverance from sin, death, and hell and we think about this cup here in psalm 116, our mind rightfully goes to Christ who sung this psalm on the night of Gethsemane. The one who drank the cup of wrath. What we deserve in order that He might offer to us the cup of salvation what we do not deserve. So, Derek Kidner suggest the cup of salvation represents not, you think of worship, but not man’s gift to God, but actually God’s gift to man and some commentators write that a better translation is this, I will take hold of the cup of salvation. And so, the action is in the receiving more than in the lifting and so the question for you and for me is how do we do that in the here and now today. We take hold of the cup by faith. We are to say, listen the Lord has dealt bountifully with me, when did He deal bountifully with you, where did He deal bountifully with you, how did He deal bountifully with you, He did so in Christ. So no matter what our circumstance that we are in, we look to Christ and we say and we understand that the Lord has dealt bountifully with me and so knowing that I’m going to show up to worship ready to listen and take hold of the cup of salvation, ready to stand in the midst of God’s people. You know we do this when we receive communion, we did it this morning church of God. So, we take hold of the cup by faith, we receive all that God is for us in Christ. That’s number one and we do it in the congregation of God’s people. Again, we’re walking in the land of the living here. Second, we take hold of the cup by calling on the name of the Lord. We take hold of the cup by faith; we take hold of the cup by calling on the name of the Lord. He says, I will call on the name of the Lord, not just in a posture of petition this time, but in a posture of praise to God so profession and affirmation. I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving, he says, and call on the name of the Lord. So, in one sense this is praise. When we affirm what is true about God, when we recount his saving character, when we say the Lord is gracious, righteous and merciful, recounting his saving character and his marvelous deeds as an act of praise in the assembly church of God, this is what we are doing, affirming our faith, and in that sense we are a witness to one another in the congregation and listen, when we do this we uphold our brothers and sisters who have been brought low.

You ever enter the worship service not ready to worship? And it’s the voice of your brothers and sisters speaking what is true to you, building you up, upholding you. I’ve gotta confess, sometimes when I’m sitting up there on Sunday morning I’ll just stop singing and listen to you all sing because it’s a wonderful ministry. So this is the psalmist, this is the people of God proclaiming the righteousness of God, the salvation of God, the mercy of God calling on His name in praise and finally the third thing he says, “I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all His people, in the courts of the house of the Lord in your midst oh Jerusalem.” And how the picture is of the psalmist presenting himself to God, honoring his promises, again as a response to God’s mercy, offering the whole of his life to God. He said, “Oh Lord I am your servant, I am your servant, the son of your maid servants, you’ve loosed my bond so what’s He going to do.” He’s going to offer himself to God, his deliverance leads him to give himself as a living sacrifice to the Lord.

Romans 12:2. “I appeal to you therefore brothers by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, this is your spiritual act of worship.” And so, brothers and sisters, this is our life in the body, faith, repentance, and obedience as an offering to the Lord in light of His mercy and His deliverance for us. And so, here’s what I want you to see in adopting this as your testimony. It’s a personal testimony, yes, but it is intended to find public expression with you and with me, one of deliverance and praise, a psalm of thanksgiving, your testimony, my testimony. So rather than scribbling in ChatGPT, we should turn to psalm 116. “And having been delivered we are to walk before the Lord in the land of the living.” That’s the charge. One final encouragement and reminder. There’s a present reality to this, but there’s also a future reality to keep in view. It is perhaps best captured in verse 15. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” And we see this as we look toward the future, it’s a reminder that God is mindful of the death of his saints, they are precious to Him. In other words, their death is weighty to Him, but as much as it is weighty, they are welcomed, they are welcomed to a land where no eye has seen, no ear has heard, the Lord has prepared for those who love Him, and that’s the land of the living. So Christ Covenant let’s reflect on our past deliverance in Christ, let’s meet our situation in our life, our circumstances, our sin, let’s reflect on our past deliverance in Christ, and let’s stand in the congregation ready to praise, ready to lift up the cup of salvation, to receive all that God is for us in Christ and let’s look for our deliverance in hope and say with the psalmist, I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, we do thank you for this blessed scripture, not only how it inspires us, but how it guides us, how it instructs us as your Word. We thank you Lord that you meet us where we are, whether we are brought low we can cry to you to deliver our soul knowing that you will keep us and you will preserve us until the end, that we might walk before you in your presence and one day before your face with all the people of God. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.