Psalm 116 English Standard Version I Love the LORD 116 I love the LORD, because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. 2 Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live. 3 The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish. 4 Then I called on the name of the LORD: “O LORD, I pray, deliver my soul!” 5 Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; our God is merciful. 6 The LORD preserves the simple; when I was brought low, he saved me. 7 Return, O my soul, to your rest; for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you. 8 For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling; 9 I will walk before the LORD in the land of the living. 10 I believed, even when I spoke: “I am greatly afflicted”; 11 I said in my alarm, “All mankind are liars.” 12 What shall I render to the LORD for all his benefits to me? 13 I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD, 14 I will pay my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people. 15 Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints. 16 O LORD, I am your servant; I am your servant, the son of your maidservant. You have loosed my bonds. 17 I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the LORD. 18 I will pay my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people, 19 in the courts of the house of the LORD, in your midst, O Jerusalem. Praise the LORD! The LORD is worthy to be praised because He hears the prayers of His people and answers them. He is full of mercy as we do not deserve this kind of attention from Him, but He loves to incline His ear towards us and to deliver us from every kind of trouble--especially trouble that we think puts us at risk of death. The LORD is able to save us from the most impossible of situations and can save our souls. No one else can claim that. All other gods that people worship are cheap imitations and lies because the LORD is the one who is Mighty to Save. The LORD is both gracious and merciful in the way that He cares for the lowly and "simple" (yet aren't we all "lowly" and "simple" compared to God? I think that is David's point as He was probably rich and powerful as King of Israel at the time he wrote this, and yet he was nothing when compared to God). Because the LORD provides sure salvation for our soul, then we can have rest and peace as we put our full faith and trust in Him. The LORD reverses our situation and takes us from death to life, mourning to joy and laughter, and stumbling and falling like a man in a drunken stupor to walking with sure and steady footing. He has taken us from Sheol (the Grave and the place of the dead) to "The Land of the Living" (Paradise/Heaven). Almost every line of this psalm points to the eternal life and salvation that only the LORD can bring. David was in a situation where He could do nothing to relieve the pain and suffering that he was in, and he could certainly do nothing to save himself in a spiritual sense. Whether the anguish he was feeling was physical, emotional, or spiritual or some combination thereof, he was a point in his life where he felt like all men where liars and none of them could be trusted, yet he knew God was true even if all men were liars (see Romans 3:4). What then is a sufficient offering of thanksgiving to give to the LORD, especially for those of us that realize how much He sacrificed for us to secure our salvation and all the blessings of God that come along with it? David can think of nothing more than to praise the LORD and tell everyone how great He is for what He has done. There is no way that we can pay Him back. To even imagine that we could is to cheapen what He has done. It is of immeasurable worth and value. With that said, He is worthy of all the offerings that we make, and we live lives of obedience as His humble servants. We have been bought with a price and we are not our own, therefore we honor God with our bodies and live our lives as living sacrifices unto Him. (See 1 Corinthians 6:20 and Romans 12:1-2). While we do not engage in human sacrifice as the pagans, should we die in a way that brings glory and honor to the LORD (especially because of belonging to Him), then that is something that also pleases the LORD. Yet, as I mentioned from 1 Corinthians 6 and Romans 12, we are to live each and every moment of every day putting the old man (the flesh) to death and letting the Spirit of God live in and through us. We do not do this perfectly now, but it is God's goal to make us perfectly like Jesus and to perfectly glorify the Father in all that we are and all that we. Whether in life or in death we have assurance of our salvation and live and die in a way that Christ will be glorified (see Phillipians 1:20). We are but lowly servants in the household of God--like the child of a slave who had no rights or privileges and was born into slavery, but God in His great mercy has adopted us and made us His children making us co-heirs with His Son and giving us rights and privileges that come with being a child of the King. Would such a person who had been set free from the bondage of slavery not willingly serve the one that set Him free and still call him Master out of love for what He had done? Would there not be a debt of love and gratitude that could never be repaid? The world sees our actions and believes that we are trying to pay off a debt on a balance sheet to make our good deeds outweigh our bad--that can never happen. We are rotten to the core unless God changes us from the inside out, and even then, as long as we live in these bodies, we will battle with sin, the flesh, and the devil. But Jesus paid it all with His penal substitutionary atonement. Our debt was paid in full when He said, "It is finished." It is forgiven and better yet, forgotten. The record of our sin is blotted out by the blood of Jesus so that all the LORD sees on the Day of Judgment is that our names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life--the list of names of all those that the Son has given His righteousness and eternal life to. That's all that God needs to see. We have much to be thankful for and we will sing His praises through all eternity, but we need not wait to get to heaven to praise him. That is just one of the reasons that we gather on a weekly basis for corporate worship, and we also worship as we gather together in small groups and as friends and families and as individuals on an even more regular basis. Worship is not something we schedule to take place within the four walls of a building where we gather with a congregation. The world wants us to think about it that way, but worship is the way in which we live our lives that shows the immeasurable worth of the one whom we worship (the word worship comes from the root word "worth"). How you live your life will tell what kind of God you believe in (if you believe in God at all). If, like David, and Paul that I have quoted today, you believe that God has made the ultimate sacrifice to save you who was not worthy of such acts of grace and mercy, you will have no problem living obedient lives as His humble servants and praising Him with words, songs, and lifestyle and actions. We will shout His name from the mountains and the rooftops to let the whole word know "Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised!" for whom He is, what He has done and the salvation that He has provided. However, if we treat God like a genie in a bottle that we manipulate and control to accomplish our every desire, then we will worship ourselves and will live lives that gratify our fleshly desires. I'm going to include a link to a sermon that I know I've shared on Facebook before, and many of you may have seen it before, but I think it fits with today's passage. It's long, but I'd like to ask you watch it once more. It probably will offend you, but please watch it anyways because the evangelist speaks hard words about how many of us claim to be one thing and our lives tell the world that we are altogether something else, because if we had truly experienced the thing that we claim, we could not help but have a radical transformation in our lives like David had described here. This was not the message that the evangelist intended to speak, but it was the message that the LORD told him that he had to speak given what had been said and done right before he got up to speak. Do you love to go to the house of the LORD to engage in corporate worship, or do you easily make excuses? We are commanded not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together and even more so as we see the Day of the Lord approaching. What better way for Jesus to find us when He returns for His people than for us to be gathered in worship? We can't lock ourselves in monasteries and convents and fail to be salt and light, but we should always be living lives inside the four walls of what we call our churches and houses of worship and in our homes and in the workplace and marketplace. We should be the same people in our "private" and our "public" lives because in all places and in all things, Jesus is Lord over all areas of our lives, and we desire to live in such a way to serve our Master and bring Him much glory. Comments are closed.
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Daniel WestfallI will mostly use this space for recording my "journal" from my daily devotions as I hope to encourage others to read the Bible along with me and to leave a legacy for others. Archives
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