Turn with me to Psalm 16. Psalm 16; the passage is on page 453 in the church Bible in front of you. Psalm 16. We are nearing the end of our Sunday night sermon series in the first book of the Psalms. We’ve looked at different psalms in the first book, that psalms 1 to 41. And tonight we will be in Psalm 16, “Singing of Joy.” Before we read, something to consider.
He was a wildly talented quarterback. He was the number one draft pick of 1993 NFL draft. He was immediately considered to be the face of the New England Patriots franchise. And in his seven years as the starting quarterback, the Patriots made the playoffs four times, they won their division twice, they a Super Bowl appearance in 1997. He was also named to three Pro Bowls. In 1995, he was the youngest quarterback at the age of 22. The youngest quarterback to ever play in this NFL All-Star game. But in 2001, he lost his starting job in the worst possible way. At the height of his career, after he had just signed a mega contract, he was injured in the fourth quarter of a fairly nondescript game early in the season. And with his injury, entered a skinny, unknown, sixth-round draft pick from Michigan named Tom Brady. The injured quarterback’s name was Drew Bledsoe. After recovering from the injury and losing his starting job, Bledsoe got over his self-pity and had great success with other teams until his retirement in 2007. He was driven by his desire for his old team to forever regret benching him. And he ended his career in the top-ten in numerous NFL passing records – completions, yards, touchdown passes. One famous football journalist recently named him “the 30th greatest quarterback in NFL history.” The 30th greatest quarterback.
But as you know, that skinny, unknown, sixth-round draft pick from Michigan, Tom Brady, would go on to lead that 2001 Patriots team to a Super Bowl, to a Super Bowl title; his first of seven Super Bowl victories. And he is widely considered to be the greatest to ever play the game. In a recent interview, Bledsoe admitted that he feels like his career, despite all that he accomplished – all the wins, all the trophies, all the achievements – that he still feels like his career will always be a footnote to Tom Brady’s. Despite “30th greatest quarterback of all time,” NFL records, Super Bowls, Pro Bowls, he still considers himself to be a failure. In other words, he lacks contentment. His legacy to him, his life-defining event will always be to him “the guy benched for Brady.”
Tonight, we’re talking about the battle. We’re talking about the battle on the turf of your heart for contentment, for contentment with your story, for contentment and gratitude and joy. There’s a quote from the author of “Winnie the Pooh,” and he writes – we’re going Tom Brady, Drew Bledsoe, Winnie the Pooh, Piglet – he writes about Piglet and he says, “He had a very small heart but such a large capacity for gratitude.” Such a large capacity for gratitude. Can anyone say that about you? That you have such a large capacity for gratitude. Every so often, I wake up out of my slumber and my eyes are opened and I am amazed at the difference between my receivings and my deservings, this crown that the Lord has given me. And I am such an ungrateful person. I am amazed at the difference between what I have received and what I deserve.
And so we come to a psalm that challenges the person here who looks at their story and feels himself or herself lacking. If you look at your story and you feel yourself lacking, it challenges those of us who are so worried about the life that we don’t have that we lose sight of the life that we have been given, the life that we do have. And it ends with joy. And so this psalm is a map to joy – “Singing of Joy.” And so we’re going to need the Lord’s help before we consider it, so let’s pray together.
Our great God and heavenly Father, we give You thanks for this night and we come under Your Word. We pray that You would come and give Your Word success and that You would work through my lisping and stammering tongue and we pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Psalm 16:
“A Miktam of David.
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 are pleasures forevermore.”
Amen. This is God’s Word.
And so, “Singing of Joy.” Do you have joy tonight? “He had such a small heart, but a large capacity for gratitude.” A large capacity for gratitude. I want to look at three things in this psalm tonight. There is first, a call for security. And then second, a posture of surrender. So a call for security, a posture of surrender, and third, a gratitude. There is this beautiful contentment, contentment that we must gain in this life that produces a song. And so security and surrender and song in order for us to be able to experience the fullness of joy that David lays out for us here. So security and surrender and song.
A Call for Security
So first, a call for security. The overwhelming feel of this psalm is joyful. It’s a song of joy. It’s all over the psalm before us. If you look again at the language, verse 2, “I have no good apart from You.” Verse 3, “in the saints is all my delight.” Verse 5, “Yahweh is my chosen portion, my cup. You hold my lot.” Verse 6, “The lines have fallen in pleasant places for me; I have a beautiful inheritance. My heart is glad.” Verse 9, “My whole being rejoices; my flesh dwells secure.” Verse 11, “In Your presence there is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” So there is joy everywhere in this psalm, but that’s not where the psalmist starts. So if you look at verse 1, the psalm begins and the psalmist writes, “Preserve me, O God, for in You I take refuge.” So there is this plea, this call for security; this plea for protection. So he starts in a place of need. He starts in a place of desperation, maybe in a place of tears. So how does the psalmist move from a place of need, a place of desperation, a place of tears, how does he move from that place to contentment, to joy, to gratitude, to songs of joy, to this large capacity for gratitude? And how do you do that tonight?
I think we’re helped later in the Psalms. I love Psalm 126. Psalm 126, the psalmist says, “Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy.” So “Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy. He who goes out weeping bearing the seed for sowing shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.” And so I think that’s what we see David doing here. He’s like the farmer that’s planting and sowing and investing his need and his desperation and his tears. And he takes it, verse 1, to God. And so he doesn’t waste it. He expresses it to God and then he comes home with shouts of joy. He ends the psalm with shouts of joy. So there is a joy, the psalmist is saying, that’s only on the other side of going to a place that you did not want to go. There’s a joy that comes on the other side of going to a place where you may even feel abandoned by God at times, but whatever your disappointment, whatever your place of discouragement, whatever your defeat tonight, you can take that, like the psalmist, to God. He doesn’t resign himself to apathy. He doesn’t waste his need. He doesn’t waste his tears. Verse 1, he takes it to God. And so the psalmist shows us what it looks like to take it to God. Psalm 16 shows us, it takes us by the hand, and gives us a map to joy. So that’s the first thing that we see – this call for security. You have to take your plea, you have to take your need, you have to take your place of desperation, your place of discontentment with your story, you have to take it to God.
A Posture of Surrender
The second thing that we see is this posture of surrender. I think that we see a couple of things here about how to grow our capacity for gratitude. David surrenders and he devotes himself here in the next few verses to God, to God’s people, and then to rejecting God’s enemies or fighting the idols of his heart. So first he devotes himself; he gives himself afresh to God. This is first and primary for David as he pursues contentment and joy. We see this in verse 2 – “I say to the LORD, ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.’” So David gives us this confession of faith. Interestingly, you’ll see that the words for “Lord” here are different. So if you look at verse 2, the first “LORD” is in all caps; it’s in all capital letters – “I say to the LORD.” Then the second is not in all capital letters. Whenever you see that in the Scriptures, the first with all caps is the covenant name of God. And so I say to my covenant God, I say to Yahweh, “You are sovereign. You are my sovereign. You are my King. You are in control of my life. You are on the throne of my life. You are my Lord. You are Lord over my story.” And then he says in the second part of verse 2, “There is no good apart from You. Everything that is good is tied up in and bound up in You.”
So David is saying if you want to have joy, if you want to have songs of joy, it is going to require devotion. It is going to require a fresh devotion to both the sovereignty of God – “You are my LORD” – and the goodness of God in your life and with your story. And so can you see how this grows, this confession, how this grows a capacity for gratitude? “You are my LORD. You are my King. You are my sovereign in all of the tangled threads in my life, in all of the twists and turns, in all of the long nights, in all of the loose ends. You are on the throne of my life and Your hands,” as the Lord of the Rings says, “Your hands are hands for healing. You are good.”
And so first David devotes himself afresh to God, and then he surrenders, he devotes himself afresh in verse 3 to God’s people. “As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones in whom is all my delight.” And I love the language here – “the saints in the land.” So not my idea of the saints, but the flesh and blood saints with idiosyncrasies and needs, who will disappoint you, “the saints in the land.” And David takes great delight in the saints in the land not because they are always delightful. Ralph Davis says here, “The saints do not always act saintly.” They’re not perfect. But David’s love for a perfect God fuels his love for God’s imperfect people. And so we cannot separate God from His people. We cannot separate God from His people anymore than we can separate a man from his wife, a bride from her groom. We cannot delight in one without delighting in the other. We cannot dishonor one without doing dishonor to the other. So David surrenders himself, he devotes himself afresh to God’s people.
Then in verse 4, David devotes himself afresh to rejecting God’s enemies, to fighting against the idols of his heart. He considers the alternative to surrendering to God, to surrendering to God’s ways and God’s kingship and God’s goodness and he says in verse 4, “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.” And so David is saying, “Their idolatries I will not participate in. I won’t even say their name on my lips. Their promises I won’t hang onto; I won’t believe what they say because,” he says in verse 7, “I’ll take counsel in the Lord. It’s the Lord who gives me counsel. It’s the Lord who instructs me, not these false gods.” And I want you to think about that line in verse 4 – “the multiplication of sorrows.” Their sorrows are multiplied. The sorrow in this text, in this psalm, is a contrast to joy. It’s a psalm of joy and it’s talking about sorrow. So, “The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply.” In other words, idols always lead to tears. Idols always break your heart. Idols never lead to contentment, to gratitude, to joy.
And this verse may seem like an odd fit to you. It may seem out of place in this psalm that David starts talking about idols, but it’s not. And the reason is because we have been conditioned, and there are so many voices in our life that tell us contentment is found and that joy is found by hanging onto the idols of our hearts, by believing what they say. And so contentment is found, joy is found, we’re told, we’re conditioned that it’s found by getting what you want, by what’s around the corner, by some change in circumstance. But if there’s a lack of joy in your life, money’s not going to produce it. Approval is not going to produce the joy. Achievement and accomplishment is not going to give me contentment, nor is my control over my life, nor is my pursuit at perfection. That’s not going to give me the contentment and the joy. Those things will always break your heart and your contentment and joy will not be found by your striving for those things. It cannot be found by getting what you want. It can only be found by being grateful, by being grateful to God for what you already have. And so you see, only the Gospel can give you a narrative that will compel you to stop striving. Only the Gospel can give you a narrative that will compel you to stop striving and to rest. So let me ask you, “Where is that sense of already loved, already accepted, already worthy going to come from?” because you can’t get it from your idols. Your accomplishments won’t tell you those things. Your money won’t tell you those things. But it has to come from a voice outside of you. But what voice is going to pronounce over you, “Already loved. Already accepted. Already worthy.”
A few weeks ago was one of the most anticipated golf tournaments in years and maybe decades. It was the 150th British Open Championship at the home of golf, the course at St. Andrews in Scotland. And there was great hope for many, and for me as well, that Tiger Woods would be in competition at the end of this tournament. Tiger is 46 years old. He had a near-death car wreck in 2021 where he almost lost his right leg and he’s still trying to regain his health and his strength. But after two days of competition, Tiger was playing mediocre golf at best and he missed the cut. But I don’t know if you saw this, but there was a scene on Friday afternoon as Tiger was finishing up his round and he’s walking to his ball on the 18th hole and there were thousands of people who had been following Tiger in this tournament. And as he’s finishing up, they begin to stand and cheer for him and celebrate him. And Tiger, before he was finished, he was going to his approach shot, Tiger, on the course, began to cry. And Tiger said afterwards, “The warmth and the ovation on the 18th hole got to me.” And in the actual broadcast, one of the analysts said he thought Tiger was crying because he realized at that moment that he was beloved, that he did not have to do anything extraordinary for people to love him, and that that brought the tears.
And the question for us is, “What if we lived out of that posture – Already loved. Already accepted. Already worthy. What if you lived in that certainty?” You see, the Gospel gives you a bigger story, a better story than what your idols could ever promise to you and that’s the place where you live, Christian – a place of fullness; a place of fullness with the story the Lord has given you. Not depravation. Not lacking, but rich. We sing, “Yet how rich is my condition, God and heaven are still my own.” That’s where you live. And then you can say verses 5 and 6. Then you can say, “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.” “He had a very small heart,” remember, “but such a large capacity for gratitude.”
A Gratitude that Produces a Song
And this is the third thing to see here. To experience the fullness of joy that David lays out for us – security, surrender, and then a gratitude; a beautiful contentment that we must gain in this life that produces a song. And so here in verses 5 and 6, David compares the Lord to his land and to his portion of the Promised Land. If you look back at the book of Joshua that we just finished studying, you’ll see a lot of these same words. One verse to write down is Joshua 17:14. That’s a verse that uses the word “lot” and “portion” and “inheritance” in talking about the land; the same words that we see here in this psalm. And if you think about the land, they were an agricultural economy so their life and their support and their security was all bound up in the land. But for an Israelite, their land wasn’t just their life and their support, but it was their heritage. It was their inheritance. It was what they would pass onto their children. It all came from the land. So David is saying, as one minister said, “What the land is to you, the Lord is to me.” What the land is to you – “The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot” – what the land is to you, Israelites, the Lord is to me.
And then in verse 6, he starts talking about these lines – “pleasant places” and “beautiful inheritance.” So David is practicing, he’s practicing gratitude. It’s like this is another way of saying, “My God has been good to me. God has been good to me.” Some of you have heard me tell this story before, but I grew up in a home with two brothers and so especially at Christmas every year, my mom always talked a big game about how the three brothers would get an equal amount of presents. You know you wake up as a child and you’re comparing to everyone else, so she always would say that whatever the budget was or the cap, there was an equal amount for me and both of my brothers. And I still remember, though, the first Christmas that I brought my new bride to Starkville. And the presents came on Christmas morning and there were an equal amount of presents. And then I remember, for my new bride Lauren, the presents just kept coming. And so whatever the cap was, Lauren quadrupled the cap! It was a time when I learned that my parents had forgotten about me; they had fallen for my wife! But I remember the posture of my wife. I remember the posture of her heart. “You guys have done too much. Y’all are being too good to me. Stop, stop being so kind to me!”
I think the question for us as we think about verses 5 and 6, “Is that the posture of your heart towards Jesus tonight?” “You have been so faithful to me. You have been so good to me. You have been so good to pursue me and to keep me.” Is that the posture of your heart towards Jesus? You are engraved on His heart. You are unsnatchable from His hand. You are betrothed to Him. You are beloved by Him. You are kept by Him. You are the apple of His eye. He rejoices over you with singing. You have the ear of your Abba Father. You have the prayers of Christ. You have the Spirit helping you in weakness. You have the great cloud of witnesses cheering you on. Your hairs are numbered. Your citizenship is in heaven. You have been loved well. Christian, can you read verses 5 and 6, can you look out over the landscape of your life and can you say, “Pleasant places, beautiful inheritance; the Lord has been faithful to me.” Learning to say that is the battle. Learning to say that after everything that has happened to you – “pleasant places; beautiful inheritance” – learning to say that and truly mean it, it flows out of a heart that has a large capacity for gratitude.
And so for you and for me, contentment doesn’t come from getting what you think you want; it comes from learning. It comes from learning to be grateful for what you already have. “He had a small heart but a large capacity for gratitude.” Before it’s a feeling, gratitude is often a choice. That’s why throughout the Scriptures, Old Testament and New Testament, it is a command. Dozens of times in the Psalms – Psalm 105, “O give thanks to the Lord; call upon His name.” Psalm 9, “I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart.” Psalm 30, “O Lord, my God, I will give thanks to You forever.” And in the New Testament, Colossians 3, “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts and be thankful.” And so you have to practice, practice, practice gratitude, this habit of gratitude, because we all know the language that is common to us – complaint and discontentment and self-pity and cynicism. And so you have to cultivate, like a new muscle, that habit of gratitude even in the shadowlands. And that is where you become a grateful person. And it’s a great sacrifice to express thanksgiving, gratitude, in loneliness and in loss. And the Scriptures actually call it a sacrifice. Psalm 116, “a sacrifice of thanksgiving.” We read in Psalm 116 verse 17, “I am greatly afflicted, but I will offer to You my sacrifice, my sacrifice of thanksgiving.”
Some of you know the story of Fanny Crosby. When she was a very young girl, she lost her eyesight because of a doctor’s medical error. She had an infection in her eyes, inflammation of the eyes, and a doctor mistakenly treated it wrongly and further hurt the very sensitive tissue, permanently leaving her blind. A little girl, she had every reason to default to self-pity and cynicism and anger. Instead, she wrote over 8,000 hymns. And in her autobiography she said, “I could not have written as many hymns had I been distracted by all that the rest of you see, and so I choose to thank God.”
There’s a risk in a minister using an illustration like Fanny Crosby – 8,000 hymns; expressions of gratitude with blindness. There’s a risk, and that is that you will think that gratitude is reserved for the elite; that it’s reserved for the spiritually elite. But I can tell you, and I know the other ministers can as well, that Sunday after Sunday when you’re standing up front and you look out and you know the stories and you can see singing through tears and you see sacrifices of thanksgiving, you see singing through loss, singing through cancer, singing through infertility, and singing through Parkinsons, singing through loneliness. And in this church you will see courageous men and women very quietly, making quiet choices that almost no one notices to be grateful, sacrifices of thanksgiving. “He had a very small heart but such a large capacity for gratitude.”
One more thing before we close. You might be able to fight through the joyless parts of your life right now – your discontentments with your story, the places of ingratitude in your heart. You can fight through those places but you might think that you cannot do that with death, that you can’t be joyful with death because death always wins. And I want you to notice what David says in verses 9 and 10. David says, “Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol,” the place of the dead, “or let your holy one see corruption.” This is the promise that David has. David is not saying, “I will pass through death,” but he is saying, “The Lord won’t abandon me. I won’t be alone in the valley of the shadow of death.”
But if you turn with me to Acts chapter 2, this is Peter in Jerusalem at Pentecost. He preaches a sermon to thousands of people and in that sermon he quotes our psalm. He quotes Psalm 16. You know it’s always nice as a young minister on a Saturday afternoon when you’re trying to write your conclusion to your sermon and you remember that a New Testament apostle preaches on your sermon and it’s recorded in the New Testament! And what we find is that this song of joy in Psalm 16 belongs supremely to David’s Greater Son. It belongs to the Lord Jesus. So Peter preached words that interpret for us the meaning of Psalm 16, and this is what Peter says.
Acts chapter 2, beginning in verse 23:
“This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. For David says concerning him” – and then this is our psalm –
“‘I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken;
therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; my flesh also will dwell in hope.
For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption. You have made known to me the paths of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’”
And so David says at this point in the psalm, at this point in the psalm – sorry, Peter says at this point in the psalm that David stops talking about himself and he’s talking about his Greater Son. He’s talking about Jesus. And you get this if you look at the pronouns throughout this psalm. So you see the first person possessive pronouns all throughout – “I say to the LORD, You are my Lord; the Lord is my chosen portion. My cup; my lot, fallen for me. He instructs me. I have set the Lord always before me. I shall not be shaken. You will not abandon my soul or let” – and then look at verse 10 – “or let Your holy one see corruption.” And so what David is doing, although David’s body eventually was buried and did see corruption, Peter says, and Paul says the same in Acts 13, that David foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of Jesus, that Jesus was the one who was not abandoned to the place of the dead, whose body did not see corruption. And so here Peter explains that it’s not merely David but Jesus, that Jesus is the ultimate singer of this song.
And you see, death is a horrible sorrow; death is a horrible sorrow, and it’s an enemy, but more than that it’s an enemy whose death is approaching. And so Psalm 16 invites all whose story is in the shadowlands, all who are fighting for contentment, fighting for joy, practicing gratitude in the midst of the valley of the shadow of death. Psalm 16 invites us to a new vision. But because Jesus, Jesus’ resurrection tells us that He swallowed up death forever, as one prayer book writes, that “He drank death’s reservoir dry.” That is why we can sing for joy. “The wages of sin is death,” but those wages were paid when the lines fell for Jesus in unpleasant places. And they fell for Jesus in unpleasant places on the cross because of, among other things, our ingratitude, our discontentment, our lack of joy. The lines fell for Him in unpleasant places. Such a crown, for such an ungrateful person.
What would it mean for your heart, what would it mean for your contentment, your gratitude, your joy tonight to know Jesus, to know that Jesus looks out over us and that He could say, as it were, verse 2? He could say, “As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones in whom is all My delight.” They are the excellent ones in whom is all My delight. See, this is His song, and because it is His song, He is our God, we are His people, we can sing this tonight. We can sing Psalm 16, this song of joy, and that’s an invitation for us all.
Let me pray for us. Let’s pray.
Our God of all grace, we thank You for this psalm and for the ways that it disrupts us in our lives. We do pray that You would help us tonight, that You would give us a posture of contentment and gratitude, that You would help us to sing for joy. And we pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.