Psalm 116 • I Love the Lord

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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)

I'm going to ask that you'd take your bibles now and open them to Psalm 116.
Psalm 116.
We've been this summer going through different psalms, and this one contains some of the most precious words for God's people, particularly in times of deep stress.
A number of you know that my family, because of my father's ill health, has been in hospitals a lot lately.
And if you go to hospitals, you recognize that sometimes getting where you want to go can be difficult.
You go to the information desk and you start navigating.
Somebody will give you words like, you know, "You go through that door on the left, then you take two rights, then go down the long hallway.
Then when you come to the flower fountain, you know you're at the elevator.
Then you can go up and see your father."
And, you know, you start out going, "I hope this is the right door.
I hope this is the right hallway."
And, by the way, what is a flower fountain, you know?
[Chuckles]
Until you come to it and with the assurance of you are seeing what has been provided, you know you're in the right place ready to take the elevator to what God has you needing to face.
The psalmist is on a similar journey here in Psalm 116.
He's going down a long, dark hallway to the elevator to the Father.
See if you can follow the journey.
Let's stand together and read Psalm 116.
The psalmist writes, "I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my plea 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 suffered 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, O 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 sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.
O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant, the son of your maidservant.
You have loosed my bonds.
I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on 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!"
Let's pray together.
>>> Heavenly Father, there is no harder time to praise than when the hallways are long and dark.
Thank You for the Word of God which does not deal lightly or sugarcoat the realities of our lives but talks about death pangs and anguish in real terms.
How easy it is to praise You when the sun is shining and the days are sweet.
But You speak of an eternal care which gives us hope and confidence, even in the hard times here, because they are temporal and because You are still near.
Father, we can't be in these numbers without having people in some dark hallways right now.
And so we pray that You would shine the light of Your Word into our hearts, that we might claim the hope and the peace that You intend.
Give us this grace we pray.
For we ask in Jesus' name.
Amen.
>>> Please be seated.
When she was quite a small, a friend of ours fell and was hurt.
In the fall, she hit her chin, and the split was bad enough that she had to get some stitches.
So she went to the emergency room and was pretty anxious.
And the doctor, not quite wanting to do the stitches until she had settled down a little bit, gave her a pill to knock off some of the anxiety, a sedative that was small.
But because he was a tease and thought it would be funny, he said to the little girl, "Now, when I give you this pill, it is going to make you tell us all your deepest, darkest secrets."
[Laughter]
Then he went away for a little bit to let the pill do its work and came back, but when he came back, he hadn't forgot his joke, as he thought it was a joke.
And so he winked at the parents and said to the little girl, "Alright now, tell us your deepest, darkest secret."
And she turned red and began to tremble, and the tears came.
And finally, it burst out, "Jesus loves me.
This I know, for the Bible tells me so."
[Laughter]
Were it only so that in our deepest, darkest moments the thing deepest in us that would burst out would be the love of Jesus.
It has to be hard even for a writer of scripture to talk about the love of God.
And, yet, he does so.
It's the opening words, "I love the Lord."
That may just see so easy to say to you that you don't recognize how strange it is even in the psalms.
Only one other time in the psalms does that phrase appear:  I love the Lord.
It is deeply personal.
The Psalms, of course, are the Hebrews' hymn book.
And so the phrases are so often corporate and formal.
But here there's none of that.
The psalmist just says, "I, I love the Lord."
And the reason that is so special is because the psalmist apparently does know the dark hallways of life when he says that.
The dark hallway, after all, is described in verse 3 early on.
"The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol had hold of me; I suffered distress and anguish."
Sheol is the Place of the Dead.
I was so suffering, I was so much in anguish that it's almost as though death itself had already claimed me.
My heart was torn.
I was struggling so much.
It was as though I were going to die.
This man knows dark hallways.
The question, of course, we have is why would he say, "I love the Lord," in the midst of such a long, dark hallway?
The answer is right at the beginning.
He says the "because" in verse 1.
"I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.
Because he inclined his ear to me."
The image is of the Father God of the universe bending down and inclining His ear to hear a child.
Some of you have been on a cave tour, Mammoth Cave or Meramec Caverns.
You know, there's that standard moment when the tour guide is taking you through the cave, they say, "We want to show you what absolute darkness looks like."
Right?
And far below the earth, what do they do?
Turn out all the lights, turn out all the flashlights and tell you not to use your cell phone.
You want to find out what absolute darkness looks like and as soon as it's absolutely dark, what do all the five year olds do?
They go, "Mom!"
[Laughter]
And Mom or Dad leans down and says, "I'm right here; I'm still here."
The reason the psalmist loves the Lord in the dark hallway is he knows the Lord's hearing.
He hears our cry and by His word is saying, "I'm still here, even in the dark hallway."
Not only is the Lord's hearing described, but His heart is described as well.
Verse 5, "Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful."
He's righteous.
He's right all the time.
And holy and good.
But before His righteousness is described, we are told that He is gracious.
He cares for those who are not right all the time.
He provides for those who cannot provide for themselves.
He is, after all, merciful.
And that mercy is described in the verses that follow.
Verse 6, "The Lord preserves the simple," those who haven't got it all figured out.
"When I was brought low," when I'd not risen above the crisis, before I had all this fixed and solved, "when I was brought low, he saved me."
It is the great statement of grace.
That when we haven't got life all figured out, when we're a mess, when we have been brought low, when we haven't solved the situation yet that God says, "Before you fixed it, I am loving you; before you've got it straightened out, I care for you."
What would that look like if you weren't looking at a psalm that's thousands of years old but recognize that God is saying, "I care for you, even when you haven't got it figured out, when it's not something you understand, when you've not risen above the problems"?
John Leonard is a friend who wrote recently about his own experience.
He described just a situation in a restaurant where he'd sat down and was getting ready to pray when the waitress came over and said, "When you get our drinks, why don't you think of something I can pray about for you?"
He said, "She just looked frantic."
[Chuckles]
"You don't have to pray for me."
"No, think about it.
What can I pray about for you when you come back?"
He writes, "In a few minutes, she came back, placed our drinks on the table and looked around the diner to make sure no one was looking.
Then she sat down beside me and said, 'I've been on drugs most of my adult life.
I've only been clean for the last six months.
Would you pray that God keeps me clean?'"
And as she said it, her hands were expressive and the sleeve pulled back on her wrist, and he saw the signs of a recently cut wrist.
She saw that he saw it, and she said, "And would you pray that God could keep me happy?"
And he said, "I can pray for that."
Is it right?
Should he pray for that?
Drugs for so long, taking her own life, unhappy.
Of course he should pray for that.
When does the Lord listen?
To the simple who haven't got life figured out, to those who are brought low, they haven't risen above it yet.
It's in the midst of the awful.
It's in the long, dark hallway that we cry out to the Lord and the Bible says, "And He hears our cry."
The reason we can call out to the Lord in our own behalf or the behalf of others is we know it is not a God who is unwilling to be gracious:  He is merciful.
And the mercy is saying, "I will deal with the simple; I will deal with those who are brought low; you don't have to have it figured out; you don't have to have the solush--, you don't have to have it all right.
Just call out to Me."
And even if you're still in the long, dark hallway, God says He will listen, because He inclines His ear and He has the heart to do so.
The psalmist says what the response is.
Verse 7, "Return, O my soul, to your rest."
If God is really here and if He's really caring, then I can be at peace inside, "for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you," says the psalmist.
How has He done that?
How has the Lord dealt bountifully with people, even while they are in the long, dark hallways of life?
Verse 8, "For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling."
Here the psalmist is looking back.
We don't know the crisis.
We don't know the situation.
But he says somewhere there has been a deliverance.
And so, recognizing God's affirmation of having heard his cry, he says, "I, even in the dark hallway, can be at rest, my soul at peace."
It may help you to recognize that even though we don't see the particular crisis of the psalmist, we know that what he must be thinking about to some extent.
He says in verse 7, "We will return to rest."
Do you remember what God called Canaan to the people of Israel, when they had been laboring in slavery for four hundred years in Egypt?
He said, "I will take My people to Sabbath land."
What does Sabbath mean?
Rest.
I will take My people to rest.
It may help you to know that this particular psalm, 116, was one of four psalms that the Israelites read during their Passover celebrations for thousands of years as they thought back to God's release from slavery that had lasted for four hundred years.
God will give us rest.
He has delivered us, our eyes from crying, our feet from stumbling.
He has given ourselves life in the land of the living.
The reason they read this psalm was they recognized God had showed Himself faithfully, at least corporately.
That they could repeat over and over again, "He hears."
It may not be the timing that we understand.
It may not be the way that we understand.
But He hears.
He inclines His ear, and He has a heart that is gracious, even when we have rebelled, even when we've turned away from Him.
He will hear us, and He will do what is best even in this long, dark hallway.
As you think of what that may mean, it strikes us as quite hard at times to recognize that God would hear, but the grace keeps being pushed by the psalmist.
One of the most remarkable statements is verse 10.
The psalmist, who has said, "The Lord has delivered me," nonetheless says, verse 10, "I believed, even when I spoke:  'I am greatly afflicted.'"
Do you hear the words?
I believed, but coming out of my mouth was, "But, God, it hurts."
I believe You, but I'm so greatly afflicted.
How can I deal with this?
How can I deal with You?
And the desperation of, "I believe, but help me," is so much in my mind echoing that of Mark 9.
Remember the man who came to Jesus with a son that was not well?
And he wanted Jesus to help.
And Jesus said, "Do you believe?"
And the man said, "I believe."
But what?
"Help my unbelief."
God, I do believe, but I hurt so much; I'm afflicted.
And the despair even turns to doubt as you look at verse 11.
"I said in my alarm, 'All mankind are liars.'"
There's no rest.
There's no assurance.
People tell me about God and His care.
And at some point I got to the state of just saying, "It's all a lie."
The hurt is too much.
The affliction is too great.
It's not real.
And it's in the midst of that despair, of that doubt, that the psalmist says God inclined His ear and opened His heart and heard the cry.
What amazing grace.
"I love the Lord," says the psalmist.
Despite my doubt, my desperation, my lack of understanding, I couldn't make sense of it and couldn't rise above it, and He heard me and helped me.
I love the Lord.
If it weren't on the pages of scripture written thousands of years ago, what would it look like you, for you today?
What would real life look like to know even in the dark hallway God is listening and working in such a way that we can trust Him?
"Christianity Today" this past month recorded the story of Tara Edelschick, not a name that I knew but an amazing story.
They wrote this, she first telling her own story, "The message of my childhood was clear and insistent:  You work, you play and you love hard, but at all times stay in control, because something scary is waiting to take you down.
I heeded that message," she said.
"I went to a great college.
I found the perfect job.
I chose a wonderful husband.
Weaker souls might need a god, but I needed no such crutch.
I was in control.
That belief," she wrote, "was obliterated when my husband of five years died from complications of routine surgery.
Ten days later," she said she gave birth to her first daughter, stillborn.
"I had a choice," she wrote.
"Did I still want to go it alone, trying desperately to keep all the balls in the air, or did I want to admit that Jesus had offered Himself so that I didn't have to be alone, to admit that I had little control but was infinitely loved?"
She said, "I had to admit that what I had fought so long I was actually hungry for.
I was hungry for Jesus, for the Jesus who hung out with whores, who wept with His friend when he died, who claimed to be the way, the truth and the life.
I didn't have to find Him or to explain Him or even make sense out of Him.
I just had to say yes to Him."
And she did.
Years later, she remarried.
She started a life and family again.
And after bearing two sons and adopting a third child who would have been the age of the one that she lost, she discovered that one of her Christian friends in another state had encouraged her community group, her prayer group, to be praying for Tara those years ago.
The woman didn't even know Tara.
She had just heard about her circumstance.
She'd lost her husband.
She'd lost a child.
And so this, this woman prayed in her prayer group for Tara.
Lost track of her, didn't know about her, moved to England.
Years later came back and through a mutual friend asked, "What happened to Tara?"
The answer:  "She got married."
"Who did she marry?"
"Jeff Barneson."
"You're kidding," said the friend.
"Jeff was in the community group that was praying for her."
When Tara heard that story, she was amazed.
Her husband had been praying for her before he even knew her and didn't know that he was doing so until the friend returned from England years later and told the connection.
Tara went to work the next day and told her friends at work, "My husband was praying for me in this prayer group before he even knew me."
"Wait," said one of the friends.
"Were you the one that lost the husband and the child?"
"Yes."
Said the friend, "I was in that prayer group, too."
And then another friend at the lunch table said, "I was in that prayer group, too."
And then a third friend at the table said, "I was in the prayer group, too."
Tara writes her story.
You will understand.
"I spent the rest of the day crying."
[Laughter]
"I had just learned that my husband had been praying for me before he knew me.
Now I learned that three of the five women who were in my present prayer group today had been praying for me before they knew me.
Piecing it all together, I wept and wept, unable to imagine the grace of it all.
I was an agnostic widow living in New Jersey.
A group of Christians praying in Massachusetts had been praying for me.
They not only prayed me into the kingdom of God, but God arrange for them to include my husband and my now best friends who pray with me every week."
She concludes, "These days, I am in awe of how little we control, how ugly life can be and of the beauty that seeks us out in the midst of all the horror."
Listen, we can't be in these numbers without some of you knowing right now the long, dark hallways.
And it may be true of her life that this miraculous thing happened.
And you may say, "I would love to see it in mine."
What you and I want to know is:  Is there any evidence, is there any evidence that this God who helped such a person is around, is available to help me now?
And, of course, the psalmist is helping us understand even by the way that he's put this psalm together:  God has given our souls rest.
He uses it in the language of the Hebrew Sabbath in the sense of God has given His people rest.
He did it long ago.
But beyond that, he talks about his own experience.
Remember, he says, "God, you delivered my soul from death," verse 8, "my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling."
Yes, there has been a temporal deliverance of some sort.
But the psalmist still lives in this broken, difficult world.
He knows that more pain will come.
He knows that difficulty will come.
When we say, "Baby, the rain must fall," we know that is not just song lyrics; that is the reality of existence in this fallen creation.
You cannot escape it.
Your life may have gone along with such blessed tranquility, but I will tell you:  You cannot exist in this world without pain at some point reaching out and grabbing you and saying, "This is a long, dark hallway; where did God go?"
And we look back and we say, "He has preserved a people and from that people came a Messiah.
And that Messiah has such power to take the sin of the world upon Himself that even death itself was defeated."
So much so that the psalmist writing centuries early says, "God has given us hope.
He has released my soul from death."
There is something more than the temporal world, more than the temporal creation, and God is working it.
He is bringing about our desperation, even working beyond our doubts, so that we will trust Him in the dark and the awful moments, because the temporal is not the final story.
It is the eternal for which He is preparing us.
And so He tells us, "Yes, at times you will see My hand and My heart so clearly."
More times for most of us, we look back and it's somehow seeing, you know what?
When I went through that long, dark hallway, I didn't know God was anywhere to be found, but some point, somehow, I got to the flower fountain, to the place where things began to bloom again, where life began to start again.
And my soul found rest at some point.
And that's when I recognized the working of God.
But it, that may not even happen in this life.
At which point we look back and we say, "But He has redeemed my soul from death."
How does He do that?
No more precious words are in all the scriptures than verse 15, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.
O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant, the son of your maidservant.
You have loosed my bonds."
I know they just seem kind of distant and remote.
"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of one of His saints."
What you have to recognize is this:  If this was one of the four psalms used in the Passover services of the Jews for a thousand years plus more, then the person we know who read these words at the Last Supper was Jesus.
Now read them again.
What if Jesus were saying this in your hearing?
"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.
O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant, the son of your maidservant.
You have loosed my bonds.
I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving."
How precious are you.
You get to say the words that Jesus said.
"You have loosed my bonds."
We know that God was going to loose the bonds of death, but in to do so, He had to loose the bonds of sin, that Christ had to take upon Himself the guilt upon His body that you and I deserved, so that ultimately sin would be defeated and death itself.
It was Jesus who said, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is one of his saints.
O Lord, I am the Son of your handmaid."
And it should just ring in our ears that in the nativity marr--, narratives where Mary is speaking to the angel after the announcement of the news that she will bear the Son of God that she says, "O Lord, I am your handmaid."
And now Jesus reads it at the Last Supper.
"I am the Son of your handmaid.
And I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving."
If you and I get to read that and know precious in the Lord is the death of one of His saints, we know that we are as precious to God as Jesus, which is the point.
This is not the final chapter.
This world is not the final story.
We take hope and our hearts are at peace because we know in the long, dark hallways, yes, many times we look back and we say, "He rescued me."
But what we can say with assurance is, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of one of His saints."
I may have those markers of God's goodness and His salvation at different parts of my life, but ultimately I stand at the elevator to go to my Father.
And there I need to know what you need to know:  Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of one of His saints.
There are moments that nothing will mean more to you.
You know, I'm learning what it means to be a pastor.
For thirty years I've been a teacher and now pastoring.
At times I wonder how much of me to share with you.
How much of my family's experience is just kind of maudlin or will appear to be self centered.
But so much what I want you to know is these are not just words on a page to me:  This is life, this is breath, this is hope, these words.
And I could not think of it any more clearly this week than when I had to write to my brother, some of you remember, mentally handicapped, in prison, about the soon death of my father.
I didn't know it when I planned weeks and weeks ago this particular psalm would be the psalm that I would be preaching on you as I'm now preparing for the death of my father and preparing my handicapped brother for the same.
So I wrote to him this week.
"Jeff, while I was in Australia, I got the word that you have also now received about Dad.
His lung cancer has returned but moved to his brain.
This is a great sadness for our family to know that we will be missing Dad soon, but we at the same time are so thankful that he loves the Lord.
It's so important for you and for me to know that the Bible promises that Dad will no longer be sick when he is with Jesus and that when Jesus comes back, we will be reunited with Dad and granddaddy and grandmother and all our loved ones.
There can be some hard things for us to face in this broken world, but everybody with Jesus will be made whole in body and mind and soul."
Do you know how important it is for me to be able to say to my mentally handicapped brother, "Everyone with Jesus will be whole in body and in mind and in soul"?
"That is something to look forward to when we have completed the purposes for which God put us here.
As Dad completes his purpose of being a good Dad for our family and showing us his love and respect for God's grace, I take great joy and satisfaction in knowing that he will soon be with Jesus and feeling much better.
We will all miss him, but we know that Dad will be completely healed in heaven.
And when we see him again, all troubles and sickness and sins will be wiped away.
We'll be together forever."
That is why the Bible says, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of one of His saints."
I love the Lord.
And I want you to.
I want you to know that these are not just dry words on a dusty page.
This is the promise of God who loves us enough to incline His ear to little children who haven't got it all figured out, who haven't risen above it, who have some long, dark hallways to walk.
But when they walk, they know the heart of a God who sent His Son so that we could be made right and whole and healed and together forever.
I love the Lord.
And I want you to.
Trust Him.
This is not the last chapter.
Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of one of His saints.
He will receive him.
As you trust in Him, turn your heart to Him.