And we will read this. I'll read this for you. And then we'll pray. Look into the word of our merciful God. Psalm 103 of David. Bless the Lord, O my soul. and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits, who forgives all your iniquity. who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's. The Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass. He flourishes like a flower of the field, for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments. The Lord has established His throne in the heavens and His kingdom rules over all. Bless the Lord, O you His angels, you mighty ones who do His word, obeying the voice of His word. Bless the Lord, all His hosts, His ministers who do His will. Bless the Lord, all His works, in all places of His dominion. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Let's pray together. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the powerful truth of this psalm that teaches us to find our satisfaction in you and you alone. Lord, we are so quickly drawn away to other loves or other desires that promise to us, that hold out to us the offer of contentment and satisfaction, but Lord, through Psalm 103 this morning, along with David, help us to preach the truth to ourselves, to bless you alone, Lord, and to not forget all of your benefits. Thank you for satisfying us. with good, help us to taste and see that the Lord is good this morning. We pray all these things in Jesus' name, amen. Well, just within the next few months on Easter week, our family will have been here for three years. And many of you know that we lived here for several years before, and then we moved up to Pennsylvania for about three and a half years, and then we moved back. And that experience of us moving from Greenville and then back to Greenville gave us an opportunity to have a slightly different perspective on life since we've come back. You know, up in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where we used to live, whenever Emily and I wanted to go out to eat for a date, we would consider the options of the restaurants available to us, and we could count on one hand the number of restaurants that we had available. Compare that with Greenville, where you could probably go to a different restaurant every night of the week for a whole year, and still not go through all the restaurant options that are available to you in Greenville. The same is true for other kinds of things, like the businesses that we go to, or the education opportunities we have for our children, or the many different churches that you could attend. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. And you would think that living here in Greenville, with all of our opportunities and all of our options, that we'd be more content and more satisfied But often what happens with all of the options and comforts available to us is that we actually become less satisfied. How quickly we forget all the good things God gives us. So what's the solution to a discontent heart? How can we become a people who are grateful, humble, and satisfied instead of discontent, restless, and always anxious to discover the next best thing? Well, the Lord has given to us Psalm 103. Yet we're told here in the title that it's written by David, and in this Psalm, David blesses the Lord for his many benefits. Contentment, we discover, doesn't flow from getting more. It flows from focusing on what we already have in Jesus Christ. And we're going to see this movement from personal praise to universal praise in this psalm. It first begins as David stirs himself up by way of reminder, and by the end, he's calling on all creation to bless the Lord for his many benefits. Verses one to five first show us that contentment flows from personal praise to the Lord. David begins by preaching the truth to himself. And notice how he stirs himself up in verse one. He says, bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. These opening words teach us that praise is the key to being content. Blessing the Lord or praising him is the clear theme of this psalm. It's how David begins, and then if you look at the end of the psalm, you'll notice he says it again in verses 20 through 22. Bless the Lord, bless the Lord, bless the Lord. You'll notice that this is also how Psalm 104 begins and ends in the next psalm. So praising the Lord is important to David. He spends the entirety of these two psalms singing about it. And first, he commands it to himself. These are commands David is giving to himself. He's telling himself that he must praise the Lord. You see, when you preach the truth to yourself, it stokes up the fire in your heart. I love building a fire, setting it all up with the kindling in place, and then placing the logs on top perfectly so that when the kindling ignites, it'll build a roaring, blazing fire. But eventually, the fire starts to die out. You still have very hot embers at the bottom of the fire. But in order for that fire to continue burning, you have to place more logs on top of the fire, arranged carefully, dry logs that will burn well, And then the heat from the embers, as you stir it up, lights the fire again and the logs keep burning. David is tossing the logs onto the fire of his heart and reminding himself of all the benefits that he has in the Lord. so that he would praise him. And this name, Lord, as we've seen over and over again, capital letters, L-O-R-D, is the perfect fitting name to use here because it's the name Yahweh, the personal covenant-keeping God of Israel and the personal God of David. And it really, it would be impossible for me to overemphasize the importance of this psalm and the importance of the lesson of contentment it teaches. You see, Psalm 103, and along with Psalm 104, is really at the center of the entire Book 4 collection that we have in the Psalms. Psalms 90 through 106, where we're at right now in the Psalms, are Book 4 in the Psalter. And we don't always have time to step back and look at the whole context of the Psalms, but this Psalm is one where we should at least look at the context of Book 4. You see, if the Psalms are roughly tracing the history of the life of David and then into the history of the life of Israel, as I've argued throughout this series on the Psalms, then book four of the Psalms opens with the intercession of Moses for the nation. who had fallen into sin and was sent into exile. We see that in Psalm 90. Now, Moses wasn't alive when Israel was exiled. I understand that. But the arrangers of the Psalms took the intercession of Moses and placed it here to tell us that the nation of Israel in their time of exile needed a person like Moses to step in the gap and intercede for them because of their sins. And so, we start getting this glimmer of hope that the Lord would provide an answer, would provide an intercessor for Israel and their sins. But as we continue on through book four, we see that the nation is grappling what it looks like for the Lord to truly reign over them. There's some songs of praise for the Lord's reign, but then there's other psalms where the Lord is seeking to reign over his people, but they're struggling with sin. They're still battling back and forth And so we need to get a future look. Psalms 93 through 100 move on from this intercession to focus us on what the reign of the Messiah will look like in the future in spite of the fact that his people are presently failing. They're in exile. They're in sin. their glorious king had not yet come, and they were still in discipline and exile. So we come to our section now, Psalms 101 through 106, the last section of book four, and we're told that two of the Psalms in this section were penned by David, and all of these Psalms really share similar characteristics. I think he could have likely written all of them. But what we find here at the end of book four is that these Psalms were placed to bless the Lord for his reign and for answering the intercession of Moses in Psalm 90 by promising the coming of Jesus Christ and all the benefits he provides. It's been said that Psalms 103 and 104 are twin stars of the first magnitude in the galaxy of the Psalter. This is a big deal. Psalm 103 is close to the climax. If the nation was to be saved, it would only be through Jesus Christ. And more to our point today, if the nation was to be satisfied It would only be through Jesus Christ. You may have cherished Psalm 103 in the past, as many Christians have, because it is so beautiful and it is so personal, but what I want us to realize this morning is that this psalm is not just glorious because it provides personal satisfaction that David sings of here, but because it offers universal satisfaction for all who would come to Christ. God alone is the answer to the hungering of your heart. We need to be satisfied in him. because there is an opposite danger to being satisfied in God and His Son, Jesus Christ. You know, this is a very positive psalm, but we do get a hint of something negative here, an opposite contrast to satisfaction that we don't want to miss. Look at the end of verse two. David stirs himself up, he praises the Lord, and then he says this, bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. Forget not. Forgetting God is a major theme in some of the Psalms, even as we'll see in Psalm 106 just in a few weeks here. That's not by accident. And when people forget God in the Bible, it's not simply due to absentmindedness. or distraction, though that can be the case. No, to forget God in the Bible is to allow your flesh to take a foothold in your heart and to build itself up in pride. Notice what God warned the Israelites against in the book of Deuteronomy. He said, take care, lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping His commandments and His rules and His statutes, which I command you today. Lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and your flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up. and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that He might humble you and test you to do you good in the end, Beware lest you say in your heart, my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth. You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers as it is this day. You see, we are prone to forget the Lord's benefits, not just passively, but actively. As our flesh tempts us and stirs us up to discontent, to dissatisfaction in our pride, and this is why I say this psalm is all about contentment. Our flesh will always make us think that we need more, make us want more, and think that in our pride we can find it. We think that a change in our circumstances will make us happy, or different friends, or a newer car. or a bigger bank account, or being closer to family, or more opportunities for our children, or a more considerate spouse, or whatever it may be for you. Constantly, the heart is searching for something new, a different change. Perhaps this will make me satisfied. David knows what that is like. David knows the danger and has fallen prey to it personally himself, hasn't he? And so David calls us back to the one who alone can satisfy, teaching us that the Lord's goodness is the source of our satisfaction. To help him not forget all the benefits of the Lord, he lists five specific benefits, and they're all stated as participles, which basically helps us to focus first on the person who provides the benefits, and then the benefits that flow from them. The focus is not so much on the benefits as the benefactor. So let's consider these five benefits together and discover how God satisfies us in His goodness. First, the Lord is the one, in verse 3, who forgives all your iniquity. The main reason for praising the Lord in this psalm is all about forgiveness. We'll see that as we work our way down through verses eight through 13. But for now, I want you to notice just one simple thing. The forgiveness of the Lord is the first benefit that anchors and feeds all the others. It is the forgiveness of the Lord that enables all the rest of the benefits of the psalm. And so the second benefit is this. He is the one who heals all your diseases. God has the ability to heal all our diseases in this life, if He so chooses, and He will in the next when He resurrects us. But the divine prerogative is His. God will always forgive us from sin, but He may not always heal us in this life. David knew this to be true. For example, remember when David sinned with Bathsheba, there was a child that came from that relationship that eventually got sick and died. So David knew that the Lord didn't always heal in this life. He knew that the Lord can heal however and whenever he wants, and we should not put him in a box. We do not demand that he heals, but we do not deny that he can whenever he chooses. One of the most astonishing examples I've ever seen of this psalm and this truth is in the story of a pastor named Dwayne Miller. He's a preacher in the 1990s whose vocal cords were almost completely damaged due to a bout with the flu and some complications there. And I've done my best to try to ferret out if this story was true or real. And to the best of my knowledge, this is an accurate story. After visiting dozens of specialists and hours of tests, Pastor Miller had to leave the ministry due to losing his voice. Yet a few years later, there was a Sunday school class from a church he knew that requested that he would come to teach, and his voice had basically been reduced to nothing but just a low, raspy whisper. He just sounded like this when he talked. So they said, well, we'll mic you, we really wanna hear you teach on this, and so there's a recording of the Sunday school class that's still available today online, and you can listen to him as he's teaching, and he comes to Psalm 103, and he's saying the exact same things I'm saying to you this morning. God can heal in his time and his way if he so desires. We can't put him in a box, we shouldn't deny that he heals, and we shouldn't demand that he heals. And as Pastor Miller comes to the third benefit of the Lord in the psalm, he reads verse four, who redeems your life from the pit. And on the word pit, his voice begins to loosen. And then in a few sentences, it returns completely. In the midst of his lesson on Psalm 103, the Lord heals him. And he's left speechless, ironically. Eventually the people in the class break out spontaneously in singing the doxology of praise to God. It really is an astonishing miracle that God worked. Because the same Lord who heals all our diseases is the same Lord who redeems your life from the pit. To redeem simply means to be bought out of something. So this is saying the Lord buys us out of deadly circumstances. The pit is another word for being near death's door. Pastor Miller confessed at times he struggled with suicide due to depression of losing his voice, and David faced many life-threatening circumstances as well. This verse tells us that the Lord redeems us out of all of those things and ultimately out of the pit of eternal death itself. That's what the Lord does for you. Not just the diseases in this life, but in the next life when he raises us from the dead. And because the Lord redeems us in this life and the next, we find the next benefit. He is the one who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy. It's the fourth benefit in this psalm. And it's a picture of the beauty of God's steadfast love and his forgiveness to his children. all throughout their lives, in this life, and then into the next. Every day he crowns us with his steadfast love and mercy. Every day he keeps his promises to faithfully love us, and at the same time, in mercy, he withholds from us the punishment that you and I deserve. What a beautiful crown, then, that the Lord places on believers every day of our lives. His steadfast love and mercy. And David wraps up all of these benefits into one broad net in this final benefit, and then he hangs it up to show us all just how satisfying the Lord is. Notice it in verse five. Who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagles. He is the one. who satisfies you with good. Isn't that what you want? Yes, it is. And everything that the Lord has done for us, these benefits he lists, are the things that satisfy us. They are the good things God has put in our life. And there is a little word that's left out of here in our translations, inexplicably, that really helps us. It's a beautiful picture. It means an ornament or a piece of jewelry. Verse five is saying that the good works that God does in our lives satisfies us like a woman who is pleased with her jewelry. God's goodness is the adornment of the saints. When our life is adorned by the goodness of God, this verse says something happens in our hearts. God's goodness strengthens us every day, so that our strength is fresh and vigorous, like those who wait upon the Lord and renew their strength, mounting up with wings as eagles, like the righteous, who Psalm 92 tells us they still bear fruit. In old age, they are ever full of sap and green to declare that the Lord is upright. He is my rock. and there is no unrighteousness in Him? Are you worn and weary this morning? Are you overcome with anxiety, with stress and fear? Could it be that you are looking for your satisfaction in all the wrong places? So often our default mode in life is to go through relying on our own strength and pride, striving for our own way, and we rarely stop to have this conversation David is having with himself internally. And look at the assumptions and motivations that drive the discontent in our lives. We so often assume things will satisfy us when they won't. But if you look to Jesus, the Son of David, He will renew your strength. He is the vine, and we are the branches. In Him we bear much fruit if we abide in Him. And we shouldn't be mistaken. God does give us good gifts to enjoy, doesn't He? But we are to be truly satisfied when we look first to the giver and not to the gifts for that satisfaction. This is where contentment starts. And when we, like David, praise the goodness of the Lord and find our satisfaction in Him, then we're in a position to pour out from the overflow of our hearts into the lives of others and call other people to find their contentment in Jesus Christ. We want to share this delight with others. So notice second, the second section of the psalm reminds us that contentment flows from gathered praise to the Lord. Now that David has stirred himself up by way of reminder, he now calls his fellow Israelites, the faithful, to come worship the Lord with him. And this is what we get to do every single Sunday, isn't it? We get to gather together with God's people and celebrate the benefits of the Lord that he has worked in our lives every single week. David tells the citizens of his kingdom, his fellow Israelites, to praise the Lord for his harmonized forgiveness. He's going to start using terms like us and our to bring them into this. I said earlier that this psalm is really focused on praising the Lord for His forgiveness. The first benefit we receive and the blessings that all flow from it is the benefit of forgiveness. And David is going to focus on God's forgiveness of Israel here. But he's going to answer a question. How can a righteous and just God be so full of mercy and forgiveness? How can He forgive our sins? How does He harmonize His righteous character with His merciful character? And to do this, David tells a story from the life of Israel. It's clear from verses six to seven that David has in mind an example of the Lord's righteousness and mercy that he worked in the life of Israel. And these words are so familiar to us that we may just read over it and miss the point. Look at verse six. He says, the Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. And what's the example? He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel. When did God do this? What example is David thinking of? We get the answer in verse 8. David is quoting the exact words that God gave to Moses when he revealed himself to him on Mount Sinai. And what was going on in the life of Israel at this point? We talked about this in our elder group this morning and we kind of paused and we're trying to remember what was happening when God revealed himself like this to Moses. It was on the heels of the golden calf incident. When Moses was on the mountain, he tarries too long for their liking, and so they tell Aaron to make them a god who will go before them, and they say, this golden calf, this is the one that brought you up out of Egypt? I mean, it's like the ultimate betrayal of God after everything he had done for them in the Exodus. And against the backdrop of this massive human failure, the Lord passed before Moses and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation. It is a story that reveals the perfect harmony of the Lord's forgiveness with His righteousness. Yes, He disciplines His children, but He does not condemn us. In that story, there are 3,000 men who, when confronted about the golden calf, refuse to humble themselves, refuse to repent, and so the Lord puts them to death. But the ones who fear the Lord The ones who humble themselves and repent, they find mercy and forgiveness. It's this story that moves David to rehearse that perfect harmony of the Lord's righteousness and justice with his forgiveness and his mercy. And so he puts them together and he continues in verse nine. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever, He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. And it's in these words that we realize how unlike us the Lord is. The word chide has the idea of debating finer points of a law, like tit for tat. When we truly repent, the Lord truly forgives. He doesn't bear grudges. He doesn't hold the details of our failures against us. And more than that, He repays us with mercy and not vengeance. He doesn't keep His anger forever. And that's not the natural inclination of our flesh, is it? Instead, when someone wrongs us, we want to keep a record of their faults. We want to exact vengeance, but if God treated us that way, we would truly be hopeless. I remember one preacher saying, if we all got what we deserved, we would all be hanging from a cross. So praise the Lord. Praise the Lord that he does not deal with us according to our iniquities. Jesus hung on the cross so that justice could be satisfied, and Jesus hung on the cross so that you and I could experience God's mercy and forgiveness, his steadfast love. So why? Why? Why would God do this for us? Because of who he is. because of his never-ending love. God truly loves us unlike any other, so David tells us to praise the Lord for his unending love that anchors his forgiveness. And he's going to give us two comparisons from nature. They show us the limitless height of God's love, first in verse 11. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him. Can you clasp the stars in your hands? No. They're too far to reach. And so great is God's love for you that no matter how high you reach, no matter how far you travel, you'll never be able to find the limit of it. In the same way, and out of that limitless love, he has removed your sins from you so that they will never touch you again. Verse 12, as far as the east, is from the West, so far does He remove our transgressions from us. Your sin is forgiven. It will never touch you. Can you span the gap between the East and the West, grasping the sunrise and the sunset with your fingers? No. Never in a million years and never again will your sins touch you, crossing God's unlimited span of forgiveness. This forgiveness flowing from the unending love of God is now brought home to us tenderly with the compassion of a family. Why would the Lord treat you and me this way? Because he knows you like a father knows his children. He understands you. So we read in verses 13 and 14, as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him, for he knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. You know, one of the reasons parents love their children most is because parents know their children the best. I can go down through each of my children, all four of them, and tell you about their different personalities and their interests. I can tell you about their physical strengths and weaknesses. I can tell you what they love to do and their mannerisms. Every single one is so, so different. There's a deep compassion that wells up in your heart as a parent for your child when you think of their frailties and their weaknesses and you know them the best. So it is with the Lord. And with us as His children, He knows how much we have to grow. And these words here, that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, echo the creation story, how God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, that our Creator, He knows our blueprint. He knows you by name. Every hair on your head is numbered. He knows your personality. He knows your temperament. He knows your weaknesses. He knows the tailor-made temptations that may not tempt someone else, but they'll tempt you. And He knows what will threaten to drag you into sin. He knows it all, and He loves you still. He loves you more. And think of this in a group setting. David talks about now to all the Israelites how he knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. Every single one of us. Every single one. He knows us well and he loves us all the same. So you can know that he will pour his benefits out on you. He won't hold them back. He won't doubt your repentance when you come to him in sincere faith. So praise him for it. Praise him together with God's people. Contentment not only flows from personal praise to the Lord, but in gathered praise to the Lord. He will pour out his benefits on us. And so now in the final section of the psalm, David turns his focus not just from the personal and the corporate, but to the universal. God can satisfy the needs of every living thing. And so we should praise him. Contentment flows from universal praise to the Lord. And this final section begins by way of contrast. This is a largely positive psalm, but once again, we get another hint at a negative here in verse 14. You know, David just concluded that we are dust, and now he's gonna talk about our frailties, that we can't even begin to compare with the Lord. There's no comparison. We're fleeting, frail, our existence in life is short. And so, David pulls out an illustration, a picture that is used in scripture often to illustrate our fleeting frailty. Notice it in verse 15. As for man, his days are like grass. He flourishes like a flower of the field, for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. Notice now, David is just talking about all of humanity. He says, for all of us share this common weakness, this common frailty. As of man, his days are like grass. Before God, our lives are like grass or a wildflower that will soon pop up here in spring, and then it's going to wither away in the summer heat and then fade in the fall. We're just like that before the Lord. Notice especially the description at the end of verse 16. The wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. What does that mean? It simply means we are forgotten. We're no longer remembered. Just this week, Emily told me that her dad had found some documents that told of the history of his great-grandfather, who lived in England back in the 1800s. And we were fascinated. How far back can you go in your family tree, to your grandparents, your great-grandparents? Most of us only know or remember the history of about two or three generations. Then the rest is forgotten. Our history books just record a slice of the story of people's lives. So many more people, their stories are forgotten. And we might be discouraged by this. Until we understand the point of the psalmist, he is saying this. You don't need to fear fleeting man. You don't need to seek your satisfaction at the end of the day in living up to a perfect image before other people, because at the end of the day, your satisfaction and your salvation does not rest in man. It rests in the eternal love of the Lord. Look at verse 17. Notice the contrast. but the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him. The fear of man brings a snare, but he who puts his trust in the Lord shall be safe. And so we continue in verse 17, he says, and his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant. And remember to do his commandments. And these verses are not saying that somehow we can earn our favor with God. Instead, the first call is to fear Him, to trust in Him, to find our righteousness in Him. And from that trust, from that faith, flows a life of dependence and obedience to the Lord. Not perfect, right? but a desire and a hunger to walk in a way that's pleasing to the Lord. And what a relief this is to know. You know, so much of our inward thinking, where David starts here at the beginning of the psalm, when he preaches to himself, so much of what we think about in our minds is caught up in the fear of man. You constantly wonder what others think of you, and you try to find your satisfaction in other people's view of you, but that will never work. Instead, look to the eternally steadfast love of the Lord that never passes away. While all people will wither and fade away like grass and flowers of the field, the Lord remains forever. He loves you. And at the end of the day, that's the only estimation that truly matters. So no one can compare with our eternally steadfast, loving Lord. And because that's true, we can't even begin to adequately praise Him. The Lord deserves all the praise that creation can heap up to his name. And so David expands the praise of the Lord at the end of this psalm to focus on some of the mightiest creatures of the universe, angels. There's supposed to be weight and gravity to this call. Notice verse 20. Bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word. And I skipped verse 19. Let me go back and hit that. It establishes the Lord's reign over all. This universality of His reign. The Lord has established His throne in the heavens and His kingdom rules over all. Now David's moving to focus on the angels in verse 20. As they bless Him. But it's not just some angels. It's all the angels, the hosts of heaven. It's a divine crescendo here. So he goes into verse 21. It simply means the angels who serve before his throne, all of them. And then he caps it off with this divine crescendo in verse 22. in all places of His dominion. You know, the praise that the Lord deserves for His goodness and all the benefits He gives to us is far more than we can ever offer Him. It is. But we can begin by praising Him ourselves. And that's where David brings us back to. Personal praise to the Lord. Notice the very last phrase of this psalm. Bless the Lord, O my soul. David brings us back to the heart of this psalm. Personal contentment. and satisfaction in all the benefits the Lord provides. The way we cultivate our contentment in Christ is by stirring our hearts up by way of reminder of all the good things He has done for us. As the song simply says, count your many blessings. See what God has done. So it might seem like a strange application to simply say, praise the Lord, praise the Lord, praise the Lord. But what you will find when you preach the truth to yourself and call yourself to bless the Lord for His many benefits is that God uses our praise to Him to increase our satisfaction in Him. As we count our many blessings, we see what God has done, we become satisfied in God. Do you want that? Do you want to be satisfied in Jesus Christ? Then bless the Lord, oh my soul, and forget not all his benefits. Let's pray together. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the powerful, powerful words of this psalm. Thank you so much for your Holy Spirit who helps us to appreciate and be strengthened by the goodness that we've read about here. Your forgiveness, how you heal us, how you deliver us from the pit, how you crown us with steadfast love and mercy that pursues us all the days of our lives. And then for eternity, when we're secure in your steadfast love and we praise and worship you. I pray, Lord, help us to praise you now so that we might grow in our contentment and our satisfaction. We wrestle with our flesh, Lord. It loves to work its way into our lives and our hearts and our minds and tempt us and trick us into thinking that other things will satisfy. Dear God, I pray, help us to run back to this psalm time and time again, and remember how good you are. Help us to be a people content and satisfied in all your many benefits, we pray. In Jesus' name, amen.