The text this evening is Psalm 116, and we will stand for the reading of God's word. Let us hear now the living and abiding word of God. I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my supplications. Because he has inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call upon him as long as I live. The pains of death surrounded me, and the pangs of Sheol laid hold of me. I found trouble and sorrow. Then I called upon the name of the Lord, O Lord, I implore you, deliver my soul. Gracious is the Lord and righteous. Yes, our God is merciful. The Lord preserves the simple. I was brought low and he saved me. Return to your rest, O my soul, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you. For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from falling. I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. I believed, therefore I spoke. I am greatly afflicted. I said in my haste, all men are liars. What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits toward me? I will take up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord now in the presence of all his people. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. Oh Lord, truly, 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 will call upon the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord now in the presence of all his people, in the courts of the Lord's house, in the midst of you, oh Jerusalem. Praise the Lord. This is the very word of God. Amen. You may be seated. Let us go to the Lord in prayer now. Oh God and Father, we ask that you would open this word to us, that the words of this Psalm that are expressed by the psalmist would become the words of our heart as well, that we could resonate and say these very same words from our own hearts. We ask that you would teach us and bless us this evening. We pray in the name of Christ. Amen. Well, this evening, Get the privilege to look at Psalm 116 together. And this is one of my favorite Psalms in the book of Psalms. Perhaps you can tell me one of your favorites afterwards. I'd love to hear what your favorite Psalms are. And it's one of my favorites because it so powerfully expresses what God has done to redeem us and what our response should be. It's a Psalm of personal testimony. You think of the testimonies that sometimes people bring out and share, and they say, here's how the Lord has saved me. And it's an important story to them because it changed their lives. And so it is with Psalm 116. The psalmist is saying, this is why I love God. This is what he has done for me. Charles Spurgeon, he summarizes the theme of the psalm. He says, the theme of Psalm 116 is personal love fostered by personal redemption. He's saying that personal love for God is fostered by personal redemption of the psalmist. And so this is a psalm that is something that we should take on individually. We talk about corporate psalms, the we psalms, and then we talk about the individual psalms. And this is especially a individual psalm, something that each of us should take on as our heart expression. It's a psalm that explains why we love God. And it's good for us to be able to answer that question if someone was to ask you, why do you love God? How would you answer? What would you say to why you love God? You could say, well, because we're supposed to, but hopefully you can say more than that because of what God has done for you. 1 John 4, 19 says, we love him because he first loved us, right? That's why we love God, because he first loved us. And what I want to focus on this evening is how bountiful God's redemption of us is. Not only in the fact that we at some point received the new birth and we became Christians, of course that's the starting point for all the other blessings that flow in our lives, but how in every day and in every way the Lord is caring for us and blessing us and redeeming us and delivering us, that God is a bountiful God to his people. Now in verse seven, the psalmist comforts himself and exhorts himself. He says, return to your rest, oh my soul, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you. Not only is the psalm a personal psalm, but it's an example of where the psalmist exhorts himself. We'll go into that a little bit more here once we get to verse seven, but it's a reminder of how we need to proclaim the goodness of God to ourselves every day. Now I take it for granted here that Christians are those who love God. Christians are lovers of God. And we saw last month when we looked at Psalm 63, I was alluding to 2 Timothy chapter three, where it contrasts those who are lovers of pleasure with those who are lovers of God. So those are two different lifestyles. And the lovers of pleasure are also lovers of self. So you have this box over here, lovers of self, lovers of pleasure, and over here you have lovers of God. And so that tells us that basic to being a Christian is being one who loves the Lord. So as we spend our time in Psalm 116, we'll cover this Psalm under two headings, very simple. Number one, what God has done for us. And then number two, what our response to that love of God is. What is the response of our hearts? Now, I want to apply this Psalm to us because There are times where we lose touch with the goodness of God. There's times where we can't quite resonate with that statement. The Lord has dealt bountifully with you. There are seasons where it's harder to say that. Sometimes it's because of the sorrows that overwhelm us. Our cup can feel largely empty. And so we don't taste the goodness of God. We're not feeling it at that point. That is a reality for us. at times, and then sometimes it's because of our sinful discontentment and lack of gratitude that we're unhappy with our circumstances, and we think it rather unjust that we're in our situation. We're mad that God has put us in this situation. We want him to fix it. We're not going to praise him until he fixes it. Well, that's of course the wrong attitude to have, but it is a temptation. I'm sure you can relate to that. And the problem there is that reality doesn't match what we think the goodness of God looks like. We think if God is good, these 10 things will be fixed in my life, then God will be good. But that's of course not how it works. God's goodness is manifested sometimes in unexpected ways to us. So we need to have a sight, have a vision of the goodness of God. And Psalm 116 helps us to reorient our thinking in that regard. So we're gonna begin as we go through the first part of how God has been good to us, what he has done for us. And let's read verses one through two. It begins with these words. I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my supplications. Because he has inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call upon him as long as I live. This is just one of two Psalms in the entire book of Psalms where the Psalmist says, I love the Lord. It's a little interesting to me that there's so few references to it. There's lots of praise to God and thanksgiving to God, but love for God is actually not an extremely prominently stated thing in the Psalms. And yet it's a very foundational thing to the Christian life. Now, as we look at verse one, when the Psalmist says, I love the Lord, I want to ask you the question, do you resonate with this? Can you say, yes, I love the Lord. Now you might immediately be thinking, well, I don't love the Lord as I should. And my love is weaker than I wish it was. And if you think that way, that's actually a good sign because it reminds you of the fact that you know that the one you should love the most is the Lord. Though you fall short of loving him with your heart, soul, mind, and strength. But even though our love for God is not where it should be or where we want it to be, nonetheless, every true believer will be marked out by a commitment to love God. And it will be shown in their affections, the things that they speak about and the things that they do. Their love for God will be growing. And 1 John 4, it says, he who does not love does not know God, for God is love. John is sometimes applying that to loving others. That's a big point for John, but it also applies to loving God. That's assumed in what John is saying. Now, why is it that we love God? Well, the psalmist, he explains why. He gives a because in the first verse. He says, I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my supplications. This is another way of saying, I love the Lord because he saved me. That's what he's gonna go on to say in the next few verses is that God delivered him out of his desperate condition. So if somebody asks you, why do you love the Lord? I think one of the first things you should say is because he saved me, because he loved me, because he mercifully delivered me from my sins and from death and from so many of the afflictions of my life. When we cried out to him, he answered. He delivered us from our terrible condition. And what a mercy it is that God stoops down to hear our weak cries, that anyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved, the Bible says. And yet how small and how weak our cries to God are, if you think about how big and great God is and then how small we are, we're so weak, but we're crying out to God, we're saying, Lord, save me, deliver me, help me. We're like blind Bartimaeus, just blind, unable to even see where we're going, but we say, Lord Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me, save me, Lord. Basil of Caesarea, one of the early church fathers, he commented on God's graciousness to stoop down and listen to us. And he drew out this picture. He said, it is as if when some sick person is not able to speak clearly because of his great weakness, a kind physician brings his ear close, should learn through the nearness what was necessary for the sick person. So what he's saying is what God is doing is like a good physician, he comes close to us. We can barely get our voice out because we're so weak in our condition, but God leans down and he hears, he inclines his ear to our cry. He listens to our poor, weak cries and he answers. And this encourages and produces within us a love for God. Not just at the beginning of our Christian life, but all throughout it, of course, because we have to keep calling on the Lord. So we go on to verses three through four, and the psalmist describes, here's what God did. When I called out to him, here's what he did to help me. Verse three, it says, the pains of death surrounded me and the pangs of shale made hold of me. I found trouble and sorrow. Then I called upon the name of the Lord. Oh Lord, I implore you, deliver my soul. One of the themes that you'll find throughout Psalm 116 in a few instances is the theme of deliverance from death. It's mentioned three or four times in the Psalm. God delivering us from death. And you'll also see in verse 9 that the psalmist says, I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. So there's an emphasis here upon how God raises us up, how God delivers us from death, which means this psalm, I think, anticipates the doctrine of resurrection, even if it doesn't explicitly state it. Now, you noticed in our scripture reading, Paul quoted Psalm 116. He says we have the same spirit of faith as, quote, I believed and therefore I spoke. And if you've ever looked at that quote in 2 Corinthians 4, it might've been a little curious because all he quotes of the psalm is I believed and therefore I spoke. And you're thinking, what does that mean? But what's the next line of the psalm? I think Paul wants us to recall the rest of the psalm. I believed and therefore I spoke. I am greatly afflicted. So Paul is drawing on a Psalm that deals with affliction and it deals with deliverance from death. And what else does he talk about in 2 Corinthians 4? He talks about how God will raise us up with Jesus and how these eternal things will be ours in Christ. And so it makes good sense that he quotes Psalm 116 and applies it to our own faith in the Lord Jesus and the deliverance the Lord Jesus brings us. Now, as we go on here, it's also important here to read Psalm 116 in light of its connection to the Lord Jesus Christ. We should not forget that the Psalms were Jesus's prayers. We often, I think, forget about this, but these were the kinds of things that Jesus would have sung and prayed. So we can even read Psalm 116 in light of our Lord Jesus and his life. And one of the reasons I would point this out is that Psalm 113 to Psalm 118 are part of a group of Psalms called the Hallel Psalms. And they're called the Hallel Psalms because the word hallelujah is repeated many times in the Hallel Psalms. And whenever you say the word hallelujah, let's not forget what we're saying. It's not just some random Christian lingo that somebody made up. It is a Hebrew phrase. So whenever you say hallelujah, you are speaking Hebrew. Did you know that? You know how to speak a little bit of Hebrew. And what you're saying in Hebrew when you say hallelujah is praise the Lord. That's all it means. Halle is praise. And then Yah is just that shortened and intimate form of the word Yahweh, the Lord. Praise the Lord. Psalm 113 to 118 are significant because as the Hillel Psalms, they were used by God's people, at least going back to the time of Christ, to be sung and prayed during the Feast of Passover and Pentecost and the Feast of Tabernacles. It's well known that these would be the Psalms that they would review, pray, and sing. Now the relevance of this is that our Lord Jesus might have sung this Psalm on the night of his betrayal and before he went to the Garden of Gethsemane. Now I say might, because I don't know which of the Hallel Psalms they were covering at that point. But in Mark 14 verse 26, it says that after the Lord's Supper, when they had sung a hymn, they went out into the Mount of Olives. And they were likely singing the Hallel Psalms. Whether it was 116, I don't know. But if you think about the content of 116, you can see how it would have been fitting for our Lord Jesus to have this in his mind as he was going through the suffering, as he's in the Garden of Gethsemane, how fitting it would be to say that the pains of death surrounded me, the pains of Sheol laid hold on me, I found trouble and sorrow. That's of course exactly what our Lord Jesus was going through. And while Jesus did eventually die, he was delivered from death. He can then take on the words of Psalm 116 and say, you've delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears and my feet from falling. I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living because Jesus's resurrection makes for the land of the living. That is how it is ultimately enabled. And I point that background out to us just to remind us that we must always read and connect the Psalms to Jesus and what he has done for us. That's really what makes sense of these Psalms ultimately. Now, as we go on here, the psalmist in verse seven, he describes the greatness of God's redemption in that exhortation he brings. He says, return to your rest, O my soul, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you. It's one of those examples, brothers and sisters, of how we need to take our souls in hand and preach to them and declare to our own souls, the Lord has dealt bountifully with you. We need to comfort ourselves. Now, this doesn't diminish the fact that we benefit very much from others delivering the word of God, Sometimes we're in such bad shape that we don't even feel like we can do that. The words just don't work very well, even as we're self-exhorting, we need others to do it. But it is something that we should grow in the discipline of, which is to exhort ourselves with the truth of God. And we need to say, just as the psalmist does, that God has been good to you, but he's been abundantly good to you. He has dealt bountifully with you in so many ways. Now, what are some of the benefits that are listed in the Psalm? What are some of the bounty of God's redemption? Well, just to quickly list them, there's answered prayer. Heard my voice in supplications. Deliverance from death. Deliverance from tears and sorrows. Preservation from stumbling. Freedom from slavery. He says, you've loosed my bonds. These are just some of the many benefits that you can remember. And if you've been calling on the Lord for many years in your Christian life, how many answered prayers could you list if you could remember them all? How big would that book be? How many sins forgiven? How often have you been preserved from falling into temptation because God preserved you? How many tears and sorrows has the Lord applied the healing balm of his spirit to over all those years as you've called upon him to give you comfort and hope? How many enslaving lusts has the Lord freed you from? It's good for us to count all of our blessings, but if we start counting, we will find that our memory falls short of keeping track of them all. We sometimes forget very recent things. Like we can forget where we put our wallet or our keys in the morning, like the same day, we forget that quick. So how much more could we forget the bountiful dealings of God? It's very easy for us. And so if you find yourself forgetting, you're thinking, I don't quite remember. I can't think of hundreds of them at this point. Just remind yourself of what the Bible says. The Lord has dealt bountifully Psalm 40, David says, many, O Lord, my God, are your wonderful works, which you have done, and your thoughts toward us cannot be recounted to you in order. If I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be numbered. So that's part of our confession as we say, Lord, you have been so good, I can't even number all the instances in which you have been good to me. So that's a sketch here of how God had shown his goodness to the psalmist. And now we go on to the response of the redeemed. Verses 12 through 19, especially focuses here upon the psalmist saying, here's how I respond to the love of God. And we begin with verse 12 in that section. What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits toward me? It's a good question to ask ourselves frequently, brothers and sisters, is what shall I render to the Lord? If God has been so good to me, how can I love him? How can I serve him? How can I serve his people? This should of course be the driving motivation of our Christian lives is God has been so good to me. Oh, there is so much that I would love to do for him. This motivation of heart love that would drive us. Now in asking that question, what shall I render to the Lord? There is a right and wrong way to read this, I believe. And we must first be honest in that we can't repay the Lord. We do not have the ability to pay back God for the greatness of his gifts to us. His salvation is a gift. It's freely received by faith. We've been given so much that there's no possible way that we could pay it all back. And we all know how annoying it is when you give someone a gift and they feel indebted to repay you. You thought about this gift and you put money into it and you gave it to them and you're thinking, oh, this is gonna so bless them and it's gonna bless me with joy. And then they somehow feel like they need to pay you back for it. Like, no, no, I'm gonna get you the next time. I'm gonna get you a gift of the same value. And we think it's a gift. You can't pay it back and I don't want you to pay it back. It kind of saps the joy of the gift giving when people think, that they're indebted to you. It's not a debt, it's a gift. Now in a much greater sense with God's redemption, he has bestowed the free gift of his salvation, the free gift of his son upon us. And so we're not thinking in terms of repayment, in terms of the debt. As Romans 11, 35 says, who has first given to him and it shall be repaid to him. We can't pay our redemption back, that's not really the idea of this passage. Calvin comments on this and points out that we can't pay back. He says, God's bounty towards us merits the more praise that he expects no recompense from us nor can receive any for he stands in need of nothing. And we are poor and destitute of all things. So he doesn't need anything and we don't have anything really to give ultimately that's gonna pay him back. Imagine a father who bestows an inheritance $10 million upon his five-year-old son. And his five-year-old son says, dad, I have this dollar bill. Could I pay you back for what you just gave me with my dollar bill? Ridiculous, the values are completely off. And so when we ask the question, what shall I render to the Lord? We're not thinking in terms of repaying a debt. What we are thinking in terms of is gratitude. Gratitude for the abundant goodness of God and gratitude and love are the great motivations. Now the three responses of the Christian who has been redeemed, we could summarize in three things. Number one is love, which we've already seen in the Psalm, I love the Lord. Number one is love. Number two is praise and thanksgiving. And number three is vow keeping. So vow keeping is the third one here. And since we've already talked about love somewhat, I'm gonna focus next, just move right on to praise and thanksgiving because that's what the psalmist does here in this last portion. Now look at verse 13, you'll see the response. He says, what shall I render to the Lord for all of his benefits towards me? Answer, verse 13, I will take up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord. Now, what is the Psalmist saying he's doing here literally? What cup of salvation is he talking about? What cups were available in the old covenant that he could take up? Well, part of the background here may be some of the sacrificial offerings of the old covenant. There were drink offerings that were given to the Lord. And in a few cases, the sacrificer would give the drink offering to the Lord, but also drink of a part of it. And perhaps in the context of that offering, might lift up the cup with a sense of gratitude and say this is the redemption of the Lord for me is the forgiveness of sins and he would then drink of the cup. So when he calls it the cup of salvation he's saying this is a picture of how God saves me. Now, in addition to that sacrificial background, I think that part of it is also a little bit like our toast. You know, we have these celebrations, you have a wedding or another big celebration in honor of somebody and everybody gets the cups out and they start dinging it with the spoon and somebody says, I wanna say a toast to so-and-so and they lift it up and everybody lifts and then they drink in honor of and in appreciation for that person. or that couple, and there's something of the same idea here, the same kind of spirit of, I'm gonna lift up the cup of salvation, I'm gonna take it in hand, and I'm gonna drink it, and I'm gonna drink it in honor and appreciation of God's great redemption of me. Now, if there's any way that we can most literally fulfill Psalm 116, I trust that you're seeing the potential application here, the Lord's Supper, right? We have in the Lord's Supper the cup. We take up the cup of the new covenant in Christ's blood. And when we take that cup, we are holding the cup of salvation. Not because Christ is literally assumed into the elements, but because it represents his redemption for us. And so every time that we take the Lord's Supper, maybe we take it with that sense that Psalm 116 has is, what shall I render to the Lord for all of his benefits towards me? And so that's the sense of praise and thanksgiving. And taking the cup of salvation is one way, there's many others to show forth the praises of the Lord. Now, thirdly, the third point of this response is vow keeping. Notice in verses 14, And verse 18, he says the exact same thing. I will pay my vows to the Lord now in the presence of all his people. What vows does the psalmist have in mind here? What is he speaking about? Well, there were times in the Old Testament where you could take special vows. You could vow something unto God. You could make a special obligation. And then there were some, like the Nazarites, who were put under the Nazarite vow, and they had a lifelong commitment to serve the Lord in a certain way. And we have often said in our congregation that you need to be very careful with taking vows. You don't take vows lightly. They are serious obligations. You should only do them a few times in your life. And many people in the Bible have been guilty of making sinful and foolish vows. You might think of Jephthah with his rash vow when he told the Lord he was going to sacrifice whatever came out the door first thing. That was a foolish vow. Led to the death of his daughter by most interpretations, very bad. 1 Samuel 14, Saul makes this ridiculous, this vow that he binds all of his soldiers to. And he says, nobody can eat until we kill the Philistines, defeat the Philistines. And then everybody's like famished and they can't fight. And it's a very foolish vow that is made. So we know that there's such a thing as foolish vow making. But this Psalm here, when it says, I will pay my vows to the Lord, I don't think that the Psalmist is speaking of a highly specific obligation that was a one-time kind of thing, I think this is the kind of vows that all of us commit ourselves to as followers of the Lord. There is a sense in which all of us have covenant commitments to God that we must keep if we're Christians. And whether or not you've joined our church, or any other church where people go up and they take the membership vows like we saw this morning, even if you didn't say them as vows, you're bound to keep these covenant commitments to God if you're a follower of Christ. If he has redeemed you and he has become your Lord, you have to do what he says, you have to follow him, you have to live for him. That's a commitment whether or not you said it as a vow or not. And I think that's really what the psalmist has in mind as he's saying, okay, I've been redeemed, I love the Lord, I'm praising the Lord, and now I'm gonna live for the Lord all my life. I'm gonna keep my vows, I'm gonna keep my covenant commitments to the Lord, and I'm gonna do it in the presence of all his people. He envisions this as a covenant community context. It's another example of why as Christians we're to be part of the covenant community. We pay our vows to the Lord, not on a desert island, but in the presence of all his people. And so we all then must follow through on these covenant commitments that we believe the Bible, we believe in the one true God, we believe we're sinners in need of Jesus and we have committed ourselves to turning away from our sin and following Jesus all of our days. That is the sense that I think that this vow keeping has in Psalm 116. And so the redeemed saint is one who has been delivered from sin and death. They've committed themselves to follow God. It's not an optional commitment. They have this commitment because they've been mercifully delivered. And as Jesus said, he who has forgiven much will love much. And I think we see that in Psalm 116, that same principle. I love the Lord so much because he has been merciful to me. So my friends, may it be the cry of our hearts this evening, that each of us can join the psalmist, that we can say these words from the heart. I love the Lord because he has heard my voice, my supplications, because he has inclined his ear to me. Therefore, I will call upon him as long as I live. Amen. Let us pray. Our God and Father, we do confess, express our love to you this evening, that you have been good to us. We thank you that you have heard the voice of our cries. You have been answering our prayers time and time again. We ask that you would fill our hearts with love for you and through that love that we would be motivated to praise and thanksgiving. We would be motivated to serve you with all of our hearts We pray that if we have lost touch with your goodness, that you would remind us this evening of your bountiful dealings to us. We pray this in the name of Christ, amen.