"The Path of Life" (Middlebrooks) | Psalm 16

Sanctuary

06.14.2026

Transcript

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A reading from Psalm 16. Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord, You are my Lord. I have no good apart from you. As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight. The sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply. Their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out or take their names on my lips. The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup. You hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance. I bless the Lord, who gives me counsel. 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. Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices. My flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand there are pleasures forevermore. This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated.

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Well, good morning. I add my welcome to Aaron's. My name is Chad Middlebrook. I'm one of the other pastors here on staff. And you were with us last week. We began returning back to our summer series in the Psalms as we started last summer. And we looked at Psalm chapter 2, which closed with a beatitude. Blessed are all who take refuge in the Lord. Now, Psalm 16 that we just heard read really is the inside of that blessing, as it were. What it looks like, what it costs, what it produces in the life of the human soul when the Lord truly does become our refuge and our portion. And so with that, let's pray that that might be true of us more and more this day as we hear the gospel afresh yet again this Lord's day, that we might rest and find refuge in our Savior. Let's pray. Father, we confess that we cannot open your word to ourselves, nor can we turn our own hearts to actually receive this word. And so we ask now by your Holy Spirit that what is proclaimed here would not fall on hard and rocky soil, but would find its way deep within our souls, bearing much fruit. Ford, you feed us now from your word. We pray it in Christ's name. Amen. Well, there's a TV show that's out called Severance, and in it, employees at a corporation called Lumen Industries undergo a surgical procedure that splits their consciousness in two. The version of them at work, known as their innie, has no memory of life outside the workplace. And their outie, which is the version of themselves that goes home, that sleeps, that has relationships, has no understanding of what happens at work. So two selves, one person, completely severed from each other. It's a really haunting premise when you think about it, but what makes it so compelling is not the sci-fi concept of the show, but what it actually reveals about the human condition. These characters, they don't know who they are. They don't know where they belong. And they're searching for meaning in a system that was not designed to give them meaning, and therefore they are slowly coming undone at the seams. Now, as far-fetched and maybe unsettling as this show might sound, I think it really helps us recognize something about the human heart. And that is, if we are honest this morning, many of us live severed lives. We call God our refuge, but yet when the pressure mounts, we discover that we run to something else other than God. We believe the right things here on Sunday morning, but when Tuesday afternoon comes and the anxiety rises and the bad news comes to us, the relationship phrase, what we reach for first, tells us where our trust lies. See, Psalm 16 is a psalm written by David. And it's written under real threat and danger. And it shows us what it looks like when that pressure that we experience in this life drives us to God rather than driving us away from Him. See, David opens, if you look back at verse 1, with a very urgent plea to the Lord. Preserve me, O God, he says, For in you I take refuge. That's a lament. That's a man who is in trouble. We don't know exactly what David is experiencing in this moment, but he is crying out to God. And yet in ten short verses, the Psalm moves from that urgent plea to one of the most exalted declarations of confidence in Scripture. As the Psalm concludes with these words, You make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Notice that movement. The psalm opens with urgent need, but closes with overflowing confidence. What accounts for that? It's not a change in circumstances. What accounts for it is where David looks for his confidence and what he holds as ultimate. So from this Psalm, as you see in your outline, we're going to see that only when the Lord becomes our refuge and our portion can we do three things. Can we release what we've been grasping? Can we rest where we have been placed? And can we rejoice in what is coming? So let's sit just for a moment with that opening lament, those first few words. Preserve me, O God. That's not a polite request. That's urgent. This is a man who sees his danger and also recognizes his human fragility. But notice how he grounds his plea to the Lord, not in his own worthiness, but in who God is. In you, he says, I take refuge. Now that Hebrew word for that phrase take refuge here, it means to run for cover, to press into shelter. David is saying, I'm running to you exactly because of who you are. And I think this matters because it really helps reframe what prayer is and how we come to the Lord in prayer. Because lament is not a failure of faith, it's actually faith in action. Crying out to the very one who can not only hear us, but who can actually help us. When David says, preserve me, he's not doubting God. He's trusting in God's character enough to ask him to do what he has the power to do. See, I think hardship in our lives that has a way of exposing us, exposing where we run to for trust and for refuge. When life presses in, our first instinct, if we're honest, is really to run right to God in confident trust. Our first instinct is to run to what feels tangible, what feels controllable, what feels familiar to us. We run to what we think is going to make the problem go away the fastest. And yet in this Psalm, David names the only true source that can bring refuge and security. I say to the Lord, You are my Lord. I have no good apart from you. That's a pretty stunning confession by David. And what makes the contrast that follows it more sharply, more sharper, is when he says, look at what he says in verse 4. The sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply. Notice that language. Those who run after other gods. That's not passive drifting away from God. That is active pursuit of things other than God Himself. And he says that actually bears fruit. And the fruit of that pursuit is sorrow, and it multiplies. David is helping give a theology of understanding the futility of chasing after the idols of this world. Because idols make empty promises about meaning and fulfillment and satisfaction. Now, our idols were probably not the same as what David and people of Israel were, but nonetheless, we have plenty to choose from every day. Just to take a few. How about the idol of approval? See, approval says that if people think well of you enough, then you'll feel valuable. Or achievement. If you can produce enough, then you'll be worthy. Or security. If my account is large enough, then I'll finally feel safe. Or control. If I can manage the variables just right, then I'll be okay. Or comfort. If I can numb the pain long enough, then I'll finally be happy. Or the pursuit of pleasures. If I can just indulge enough, then I'll finally be fulfilled and find joy. They are all the same versions of the same lie. It says that we can build a life apart from Jesus. The deceiving part is that chasing after these idols, it actually works for a season. Approval from others, it feels like oxygen, doesn't it? Achievement. It satisfies until it doesn't. A full bank account really can ease some of the anxiety for a time. That's what makes these things so powerful and so dangerous in our lives. They aren't nothing. They're just never enough. And that gap between what these idols promise and the extent to which they can deliver on that promise, that gap is where the sorrow multiplies in our lives. Augustine spent the first half of his life proving this very fact until he finally came to the conclusion and said, Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. So to what or to whom this morning are you running with your deepest fears? With your failures, with your troubles. In those unguarded moments, right at the beginning, before you go to prayer, before you have time to compose yourself, I'm talking about when the email comes and you initially read it. Or when the doctor comes in with that diagnosis. Or when that relationship just blows up. Where's the first place that you go with your heart? Whatever that thing is, that's your functional God. That's who you are serving. So we may have the right theology, and we may believe every word of verse 2. I have no good apart from you. But our first instincts tell us the truth about where our trust and our security lies. And David says if you're running anywhere other than to God Himself, you're going to experience sorrow. And not only are you going to experience sorrow, that sorrow is going to multiply and multiply. Now that's a severe diagnosis that David gives here. But he doesn't leave us there. Look at verse 4. There's actually an invitation embedded in verse 4. Call in the believer to draw a line in the sand. David says, their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out or take their names on my lips. David is releasing his grip on the idols, vowing not to participate in what the world says brings flourishing in life. And see, in letting go of the inferior thing, David can actually receive the true God. And that invitation extends to us the same way this morning. Loosening our grip on the lesser thing in our lives will actually open us to free us to embrace the true and living God so that we can find satisfaction in the meaning that we are experience, supposed to experience in this life. David says it's only when we release the things that we're grasping other than God can we experience true rest and refuge in Him. But next we learn that the only way that the Lord is when He's our refuge and our portion, can we rest where we've actually been placed by God? There's rich covenant language in verse 5. Look at what he says there. The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup. You hold my lot. Now, for us to feel the weight of this, we have to understand a little bit of Israel's history. If you'll remember, the people of Israel, when they came out of Egypt into the promised land, God provided them with inheritance, with land for the twelve tribes. Each tribe receiving this inheritance, a plot of land, acreage for them to see, to cultivate, to pass on to future generations. All the tribes except for one. The Levites. The Levites, the tribe that was set apart by God as priests in order to lead the people of Israel in worship. And the Levites didn't receive any land from God, and God made it very clear, He said, I am your portion. Now imagine how the Levites probably felt. The other eleven tribes get land to cultivate and use for their flourishing and survival. And yet God says, No, no, you're not going to get land. You get me. Now, if we're honest, we might think that God's giving them a raw end of the deal. But David here actually, who has land, who has a kingdom, he uses this language of the Levites and says, That's what I want. Lord, I want you to be my portion. This isn't resignation. This isn't trying to make a good thing out of a bad situation. This is a man who's tasted enough earthly goods to know they don't satisfy the deepest heart. He's experienced victories. David has crowns, he has a kingdom, he has palaces. And yet he says, My heart's still restless. And yet, he's tasted enough of God to know that his confidence can lie there because he's more than enough. That's what I want, David says. I want you, God. Most of us, I think, think that contentment is when life is going well. When our circumstances all line up, we kind of understand what's happening in our lives. When you get what you wanted, that's not contentment. That's relief. Contentment is much deeper than that. When David says, you hold my lot, he's saying, I don't need to understand every detail about what you're doing, God, in my life. I just need to trust the sovereign one who is actually doing it. That trust is what commitment is actually built upon. The more we go into greater intimacy in our relationship with the Lord, the more contentment will follow. David extends this metaphor even further in verse 6. He says, The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance. So David is surveying his life, looking at his calling, his circumstances, and he says, This is good. Not because every circumstance is enjoyable, but because of the one who has drawn the lines, he knows is wise, he's trustworthy, and he only does good in the life of his people. And ultimately, the inheritance that David calls beautiful is not any of his possessions, it's not any of his land, it is God Himself. That's what makes it beautiful. He has the Lord as his portion. I think this is a word for those of us who struggle with comparison. Because it's easy for us to look at others who appear to have a better lot than we've been given. That person has a better vocation than I have. They have a better family than I have, a better marriage, a better medical report, a better story about how their children turned out. And some of us might even say a better, more certain and alive faith than we experience ourselves. And we quietly resent our own portion that God has graciously gifted to us. But this psalm is inviting us to experience radical reorientation with what God has entrusted to us. Is there an area of your life right now where you're quietly resenting what God has given to you? Wanting something that someone else has? What does that resentment tell you about where you're placing your worth and your security? Okay, so David calls us to experience this kind of contentment in the Lord, but how does that happen? How does contentment move from a truth that we confess here on Sunday morning to where it actually doesn't collapse at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday morning? When that anxiety creeps in. The comparison game starts to happen, and resentment rises. Well, David gives us the answer in verse 7. I bless the Lord who gives me counsel. In the night also my heart instructs me. That's language of intimacy that David is speaking here. Even in the dark, when his anxious thoughts come, when the darkness closes in on David, David says, God instructs me. He counsels my soul. His heart has been so shaped by the Lord that something is at work even in those unguarded hours as David is resting and sleeping. Paul says it this way in Philippians 4. I have learned, in whatever situation I am, to be content. Not born with it, learned. Contentment is not a personality trait that some of us have and others of us don't. It's not a spiritual gift that God distributes differently to other people. It's a habit that is formed repeatedly as we bring our circumstances before the Lord, asking him to speak into them by his word and through prayer and dependence upon him, so that his voice becomes the loudest voice that we hear, not the voice of our fears. See, the heart that knows his voice in the darkness is a heart that has learned to listen to his voice in the daylight. And see, when this practice of repeatedly trusting the Lord with our circumstances, when that becomes a pattern of our life, then we can discover the third truth and promise in this psalm. Which is when only when the Lord is our refuge and portion can we rejoice where we've been placed. So verse 8, David says, I've set the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. That's an active verb there. David doesn't stumble into this confidence. This is intentional, disciplined, daily orientation before the Lord. Night counsel produces in a heart, so that in his heart, so the orientation towards the Lord brings stability. And so that David can say, I shall not be shaken. He's not trusting in his own strength. He knows that he stands on the Lord Himself and the promises of His Word. So that's the destination. But how do we get there? Well, David gives us the roadmap. His own life helps to give us the shape of it. How do we find this contentment? How do we find our confidence in the Lord? It looks like the regular study of God's Word, just like the man in Psalm 1. Meditating on God's law day and night. It looks like consistent prayer and communion with the Lord. This very psalm is a prayer of Of David, that is honest, that is direct. It also looks like community among the brothers and sisters in the faith. Being known by others and knowing others. That's what he says in verse 3. The saints in the land, that's in whom I take delight, David says. And then it looks like corporate worship. What we're doing right now this morning, rehearsing together what is true about God, so that when our hearts are tempted to grow cold, we can be reminded of his promises. These practices, all taken together, are the means by which we set the Lord before us every day. They're not the path to earning God's favor. They're the ordinary channels through which God reshapes our gaze and our loves back upon himself. And then what do we see the result from this in verse 9? My heart is glad, my whole being rejoices, my flesh also dwells secure. And then we arrive at verse 10. Something extraordinary happens in verse 10. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption. Remember, David wrote this song. David who died, David who was buried in the tomb. So what does he mean here that my soul will not see corruption? Either David's wrong or he's pointing to somewhere else. And if we go to the New Testament, if you remember Peter standing before a Jerusalem crowd at Pentecost, tells us exactly how this is fulfilled. We don't have to wonder, and I love this when the scriptures in the New Testament fulfill the old, you don't have to guess. He quotes this exact verse and makes the fulfillment explicit. Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried. His tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, and his flesh did not see corruption. And then Paul does the same thing in Acts 13. In the synagogue at Antioch, he quotes verse 10 and connects it to Jesus. He whom God raised up did not see corruption. The Holy One that David was referring to, that Paul is referring to, is the Lord Jesus himself, the greater David that was promised to come. The resurrection is the event that this psalm has always been pointing to. David was prophetically pointing beyond himself in his own experience to Jesus in the New Testament, just lifts that veil, and we see Christ being the fulfillment. And so every refuge that this psalm points to, every contentment that it promises us, and every unshakable confidence that it describes, it rises and falls on whether the fact that Jesus is raised from the dead, and he is. The tomb is empty. And that changes everything in how we see our circumstances this morning. Some of you may have been following the story of Ben Sass, who is the former U.S. Senator and University President of Florida. Just before this past Christmas, he was announced that he had been diagnosed with metastasized stage four pancreatic cancer, terminal illness, given weeks, a few months to live. And in an interview, right after the diagnosis came out, his words were quite direct, and he said this advanced pancreatic cancer is nasty stuff. It's a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week. We all do. And Sass grieved openly and honestly as continued to, using his platform to voice where he's finding his refuge and his trust in the midst of this terrible diagnosis. Grieving that he's not going to be around for his teenage son's pivotal moments. Grieving that he won't be able to walk his daughters down the aisle when they get married. He hasn't pretended that this pain isn't real and excruciating. And yet, when asked about his fear of death, this is what he said. I believe in the resurrection, and I believe in a restoration of this world. So I do not feel great fear about my own death. And then he adds these words. That's not just positive thinking. That is a man who has found somewhere solid to stand. And that is the person and work of Jesus Christ alone. And David named it 3,000 years before Ben Sass did, when he said, In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Not a portion of joy, fullness. Not pleasures that run out, but pleasures forevermore. Do you feel the contrast? Because every earthly pleasure that you and I go after and we grasp with our hands is going to disappoint us. And that sorrow is going to compound. But God Himself, enjoyed as our portion, as our refuge, as our inheritance, never diminishes. Because he's inexhaustible. And in Christ, who bore our corruption, who faced death in place of sinners, who rose so that his inheritance now becomes ours because we're united to him. That's what awaits us. That's what we get to enjoy even now in this life and fully in the life to come. His righteousness covers our corruption. His resurrection secures our very future, and his inheritance by grace is ours. Rejoicing in what is coming does not mean that we're always going to enjoy and love our circumstances. David opened this psalm with a lament, asking for the Lord to preserve him because he didn't like what he was walking through. But this is the beauty of the Psalms. Because the Psalms actually don't call us to clean up and be polished before we come before the Lord. These Psalms actually give words to our ache, to our fears, to our grieving, to our loss, to our mourning when we don't have words to use. And God's choice to breathe those words into Scripture itself is a permission slip for us to come unedited, raw as we can, because He can take it. The resurrection hope of verse 10 does not erase the reality of suffering and the things that we experience in this broken and fallen world. We are free to grieve, free to mourn, free to honestly come before the Lord without shame and say, This life is hard. I don't like what I'm going through right now. We are free to come before the Lord with that posture. But what we're not free to do as believers in Christ is we're not free to despair. Because the resurrection is not a metaphor. Christ did not see corruption. The grave is empty. And because he lives, we have a future that no circumstance can actually touch, no enemy can steal from us, and no death can take. And so the gladness of verse 9 is not a feeling that we have to muster up and perform on our own. It's a reality that we stand on even when, and especially when, the ground beneath us seems like it's shaking and crumbling. This is why as believers we can hold both grief and hope together. We grieve as those with hope. Because we know that the pathway of life leads to somewhere certain and it leads to eternity with Christ. Okay, remember the characters from Severance from the beginning. They underwent a procedure to divide themselves in order to wall off the parts that were too difficult, too complex, and too hard to integrate. They thought it was going to actually bring relief. But what it brought was deeper fragmentation and a self that they didn't know who it was or where they belonged. And that's our search, too. We tend to sever, we tend to compartmentalize our lives. We bring one version of ourself here on Sunday morning and another version on Monday morning. But Psalm 16 shows us the only path to wholeness and security. When the Lord becomes our actual refuge, not a theological concept, but the place where our hearts genuinely run, then and only then can we release our grasp on the things of this world and find true joy, true freedom, and true contentment in Christ alone. So we don't have to grasp any longer. We don't have to perform. We don't have to despair because Christ has completed everything we've left undone. And in him the path of life is open. The presence of God is your inheritance, and the pleasures are forevermore. The Lord is my chosen portion in my cup. You hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance. May this become the deepest reality for every single one of us in here. Not because our circumstances are always easy or that we enjoy them, but because God is good and his son is ruling and reigning on his throne now, and he's coming again. Let's pray. And Lord Jesus, you are our portion. And indeed we have nothing good apart from you. And so would you help us to receive whatever this week holds? The hard, the mundane, the unexpected, knowing that the lines have fallen in pleasant places for us, and that fullness of joy is where we're headed. Father, don't let us slip into what we've just heard to be removed from our minds and our hearts. Would you keep our feet on the path of life? Trusting in your goodness, trusting in your promises. And we ask this for our good and your glory in Christ's name. Amen.