00:00: We're in Psalm 116 today.
00:00: Psalm 116, middle of your book, middle of the Bible.
00:07: This is a worship song.
00:07: You know, we read the Bible as God's Word, which it is, but we need to remember that the Psalms was the Old Testament hymnal.
00:19: It's essentially the lyrics to 150 worship songs that God gave his people through the inspired writers.
00:26: And so when we read the Psalms, we're reading a sampling of God saying, you can worship me like this.
00:36: This is a good way to do it.
00:41: Let's pick up in the beginning.
00:41: The psalmist says, I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.
00:52: I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.
00:58: The psalmist, the writer of this worship song is publicly declaring he loves God.
01:04: But not just any God.
01:04: He loves the Lord.
01:07: Most Bibles will have that word Lord in all caps or small caps.
01:12: They're all capital letters, but the L is bigger than the rest of them.
01:15: And that's a code for us.
01:15: That's a way of the translator saying, this word right here translates the Old Testament word, the Hebrew word Yahweh.
01:27: It's the name of God that God revealed to Moses at the burning bush.
01:32: When Moses was being sent by God to rescue the Israelites out of slavery, and he says, well, who do I tell him you are?
01:39: And he says, my name is I Am.
01:42: I Am Who I Am.
01:42: That name, that identity that God revealed to Moses is literally the Lord.
01:51: And it's a strange name because it's not like what we're accustomed to.
01:55: Oh, here's Robert.
01:55: My name's Chad or Susan, whatever.
02:01: But this is a name that has meaning.
02:05: It's a name where God is saying, I'm telling you something about who I am.
02:09: And what God means by the name Yahweh or I Am or Lord is, I'm the very definition of reality.
02:19: Anything you want to compare me to pales.
02:22: It doesn't get the job done.
02:23: I simply am who I am.
02:25: And every effort to define me or to describe me is limited.
02:30: Moses, like the psalmist, discovered something about the Lord.
02:40: That though he is the almighty God of all the universe, the defining standard of reality, God is not distant or aloof.
02:50: But he's personal and involved in the lives of his people.
02:55: Notice the first one.
02:55: He says, I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.
03:02: I love him because he actually bothered to listen to me.
03:05: He cared about me.
03:08: I reached out and he received me.
03:12: The psalmist cried out to God and asked for mercy.
03:16: In other words, he asked for something he didn't deserve.
03:19: He didn't go looking for his paycheck that he spent all week earning.
03:22: He went and said, God, I don't deserve it, but would you have mercy on me?
03:28: Would you treat me better than I deserve?
03:30: Would you not bring down the hammer on me the way that the hammer should be brought down?
03:36: Would you protect me in some sense?
03:41: And God said, yes.
03:43: God said, yeah, I will give you mercy.
03:45: The God of all the universe, the God who created the earth and all that is in it, the creator God who made you is the kind of God who is pleased to give mercy to people.
03:59: And because the psalmist has encountered that kind of God, he can't help but love him.
04:05: We gather week after week as Christians to worship Jesus, to celebrate him and what he's done for us at the cross.
04:11: Week after week, we sing praises.
04:13: And in many of the songs we sing, we declare our love for God, just like the psalmist does here in Psalm 116.
04:20: But I want us to go a little further than that.
04:23: I want us to think about two questions this morning.
04:26: Number one, where in your life have you seen God's goodness meet your need?
04:33: Where have you shared the experience of the psalmist in verse 1?
04:40: Where can you say, I went to God and God was kind.
04:44: God was good to me.
04:46: Second question, how can you repay God for that?
04:51: How can you repay God for the goodness that you have received from him?
04:57: Now, some of you might be a little offended by that question.
05:00: Because it seems wrong to say that we're going to repay God.
05:03: And there's a degree to which that's true.
05:06: We can't repay God.
05:08: And yet there's a sense in which it's a legitimate question.
05:11: And we'll see that as we get there.
05:13: So first question, where in your life have you seen God's goodness meet your need?
05:18: Well, in Christ, God meets my temporal needs.
05:25: And I think we've all seen that to some degree or another.
05:29: God meets my temporal needs.
05:32: For the writer of Psalm 116, his situation was a health issue.
05:37: He was on the brink of death.
05:38: Verse 3, the snares of death encompassed me.
05:41: The pangs of Sheol, or the grave, laid hold of me.
05:46: I suffered distress and anguish.
05:48: This guy was on the verge of death.
05:51: But he recovered and he lived through it.
05:53: Some of you have yourselves been there.
05:57: Or maybe a dear to you loved one was on the brink and lived through it.
06:03: Some of you can personally identify with his, the psalmist's experience of God's merciful healing.
06:10: Maybe you've even experienced supernatural healing.
06:12: Or perhaps God's goodness has met your temporal need in some other way.
06:18: Maybe God provided a home or a church or food and clothes and a warm bed.
06:23: Or maybe you needed employment and God gave you that.
06:26: Maybe it was a spouse.
06:29: But every good thing in your life is a gift from God.
06:35: God meets our temporal needs.
06:39: In Christ, God also meets our spiritual needs.
06:42: God meets my spiritual need and yours in Christ.
06:46: That's important to recognize that it's in Christ.
06:49: It's not just that we are made to be religious beings and we need to go out there and choose a religion and do religious stuff and spiritual things.
06:57: And that will help.
06:58: But rather, it's in Christ.
06:59: It's only through faith in Jesus.
07:02: By relationship with Jesus.
07:05: Dependent on faith that God is the one meeting our spiritual needs.
07:08: Ephesians chapter 2 verses 1 and 2 paint a very bleak picture of our spiritual status apart from Jesus.
07:14: As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of the world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air.
07:27: In other words, every single human being since the first human beings, Adam and Eve, everyone since then has been spiritually dead by default.
07:36: We're spiritually stillborn with no desire to please God.
07:40: No responsiveness in ourselves toward God and his ways.
07:43: We're not even able to please God.
07:48: We are spiritually dead.
07:50: No.
07:50: He says you used to live in this way.
07:53: He's not talking about physical dead.
07:54: Oh, you're all physically incapable.
07:55: No.
07:56: He's saying spiritually you don't relate to God and you cannot relate to God rightly.
08:02: You can't.
08:03: That's our default status.
08:05: But then in that same passage in Ephesians chapter 2, we read, But God, being rich in mercy, there it is again, that mercy thing from verse 1, the God who has plenty of mercy to give out, but God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
08:31: By grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
08:39: Now, we could dig in and do a whole sermon series on what that means and what that looks like and how that applies, but God in his mercy meets our spiritual needs, needs that we could never meet on our own, needs we don't even begin to recognize until God begins doing a work in our life.
08:58: Most folks aren't even aware of how much isn't the way it should be in their lives until God begins to do something in us.
09:11: So if God meets our temporal needs, the things of this life, this earth, and God meets our spiritual needs, what then?
09:20: How do we rightly respond to that?
09:23: How do we repay him for that?
09:24: I like the way that different translations put this issue in Psalm 16.
09:29: Some say, what shall I render?
09:31: And others say, how can I repay?
09:34: If God is good to us, if God is gracious to us, meeting temporal and spiritual needs, what is our proper response?
09:40: Look at verse 12.
09:43: What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?
09:48: Or the older NIV translation says, how can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?
09:55: I like render because it's saying, what do I give him in response to all his goodness toward me?
10:02: He has been so good to me.
10:04: How do I respond?
10:06: Now, the older NIV says repay, which I like the simplicity of that language.
10:10: I'm going to go ahead and use that for the sermon.
10:12: But repay, while a legitimate translation of that word kind of misses something.
10:17: Because if I repay something, I've gotten it for me, ultimately.
10:22: I've provided what I'm now getting, right?
10:27: We don't repay God in quite that way.
10:31: But we can rightly respond.
10:33: The question of how we can repay God for his goodness to us is both a legitimate question and a good question.
10:40: It's a scriptural question.
10:41: It's right here in verse 12.
10:44: And I want to challenge us to think about three biblically appropriate ways to repay God for his goodness to us.
10:51: First is this.
10:53: The first answer is negative.
10:55: Not as though God is needy.
10:59: Nothing we ever offer to God meets a need.
11:01: We don't even have anything which we did not first receive from him.
11:08: Acts 17.25 says this.
11:10: And he, God, and he is not served by human hands as if he needed anything.
11:17: Because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.
11:22: Now, if you take just that first clause, God is not served by human hands.
11:26: That's a false statement.
11:27: God is served by people.
11:28: So you have to read the next part in.
11:32: God is not served by human hands as if he needed anything.
11:36: God is not served by us in any way that meets a need that God has.
11:41: Because God has no needs.
11:42: And in fact, everything that we can do and everything that we actually do to serve him is simply using his stuff.
11:51: Right?
11:51: Father's Day, my kids buy me a tie using my money.
11:58: They didn't meet a need.
12:01: Right?
12:01: That was my money.
12:04: They took from me to give back to me.
12:08: Didn't meet a need.
12:09: The reason that we can't serve God in a need-meeting way is because everything we ever encounter or touch in this world belongs to God.
12:26: Psalm chapter 24, verses 1 and 2 says, The earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and all who live in it.
12:34: For he founded upon the seas and established it upon the waters.
12:40: Imagine if my children when they were young were afraid I was going to starve to death.
12:44: Daddy needs to eat or he'll die.
12:47: And so they go to the refrigerator and they get a yogurt and they wrap it up and give it to me.
12:50: Well, first of all, that was mine.
12:53: Second of all, I'm not going to starve to death.
12:55: I can take care of that issue on my own.
12:57: I don't need my kids to feed me lest I die.
13:00: Right?
13:01: Now, it's fine if they want to present me with yogurt.
13:05: But I don't need them to do that.
13:10: Nor does God need us to do anything for him.
13:13: He wants us to do things.
13:16: He calls us to do things.
13:18: But he doesn't need us to do things.
13:20: I have a brother in Christ elsewhere in the state who often will say things like, God needs us to, and then he'll say some biblical thing that we're rightly called to do.
13:31: And it drives me nuts because I can't seem to break him of the habit of saying God needs us to.
13:36: God wants us to.
13:37: God calls us to.
13:38: God commands us to.
13:40: But God does not need us to.
13:44: We don't serve God as though God is needy.
13:48: I like the way that Romans chapter 11 puts it.
13:55: At the end of Romans 11 in the doxology.
13:58: Who has ever given to God that God should repay him?
14:03: For from him and through him and to him are all things.
14:06: To him be the glory forever.
14:08: Amen.
14:10: Nobody's ever given to God in a way that God is in our debt.
14:13: As you and I answer the psalmist's question from verse 12, how can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?
14:20: Our answer can never be as though God needed anything from me.
14:26: Second answer is positive.
14:29: We repay God with worship.
14:33: Second answer is positive with worship.
14:35: Worship is always an appropriate response to God's mercy.
14:38: In fact, magnifying God's glory is at the heart of God's motivation for giving us grace to begin with.
14:48: You realize that God gives us grace.
14:51: And you probably realize that that's an expression of love and kindness of God, which it is.
14:56: But do you know, do you recognize that God has said, part of my motivation is my glory?
15:02: Look at Ephesians chapter 1, verses 5 and 6.
15:05: It says this.
15:07: In love, he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ.
15:14: In accordance with his pleasure and will, to the praise of his glorious grace.
15:21: Verses 12 and 14, each repeat the refrain, to the praise of his glory.
15:27: So God's advanced plan to forgive us through Jesus, to adopt us as sons and daughters of God, that this plan is God's pleasure, it's his will, and it produces praise.
15:42: We look at this and say, how glorious and gracious is God?
15:47: And we praise him for it.
15:48: And God's like, well, that's how this is supposed to work.
15:50: Yes.
15:51: Responding to God's grace with worship and praise is appropriate.
16:00: But it's not necessarily just an individual thing.
16:04: Yes, it's individual.
16:05: You should individually, personally praise God for his goodness toward you.
16:09: But it's also corporate.
16:11: Psalm 116 is about a single individual who has experienced God's mercy.
16:16: But as a psalm, God's saying, y'all can worship me like this.
16:20: Each one of you can do this.
16:22: And the personal experience of God's mercy becomes an opportunity for others to join in and praise God as well.
16:29: Look at verses 14 and 17 through 19.
16:33: He says, I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.
16:38: I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the Lord.
16:43: I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people, in the courts of the house of the Lord, in your midst, O Jerusalem.
16:53: Praise the Lord.
16:54: The psalmist pledges to worship God, not just in some private, personal, individualistic sense, but in the context of the public gathering of God's people.
17:05: In other words, he's saying, I'm going to do it with other people joining me for God's goodness.
17:09: I heard from our sister, Brenda, this week, who's been in a health rehabilitation facility, that she was going to get to go home on Friday.
17:20: Earlier than expected.
17:21: Earlier than her plan.
17:24: And she was so excited.
17:26: And I was excited for her.
17:28: And I delighted that she shared with me so that I could celebrate with her.
17:31: And we had some back and forth, you know, some different texting.
17:35: And I actually talked to her on the phone at one point.
17:37: And I love to send these animated gifs or gifs, depending on how you want to pronounce it.
17:42: And I sent Kurt the Frog going, yay!
17:46: You know, a few other related ones.
17:48: And it was a chance for us to worship God together and say, he is healing.
17:53: He is getting you out of this place that you don't want to be and providing.
17:58: Yes!
17:59: Praise God.
17:59: And we did it together.
18:00: I wasn't the receiver of that benefit.
18:05: But I got to join my sister in praising God for it.
18:09: We celebrate together.
18:11: What happens to one of God's people is a matter of significance and importance for all of God's people.
18:17: 1 Corinthians 12.26, speaking of individual Christians as part of a single body, says, If one part suffers, every part suffers with it.
18:28: If one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
18:34: When a Christian receives mercy from God, that mercy is truly a gift to the whole body.
18:38: And the entire congregation can legitimately take part in giving God thanks for his goodness.
18:44: Worshiping God for his goodness must be both an individual and a corporate response.
18:51: How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?
18:58: Verse 12.
18:58: With worship.
19:00: Personally and together with my brothers and sisters in Christ.
19:03: Now the final answer of three answers to this morning's question of how we can properly render to God for his goodness to us, how we can properly repay God for his goodness to us, is perhaps the least obvious.
19:17: We can repay God for his goodness to us by our continual dependence on God.
19:25: Look at verse 13.
19:30: The psalmist says, I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.
19:38: The first answer the psalmist gives for how to properly repay God for all his goodness is to lift up the cup of salvation and to call upon the name of the Lord.
19:48: Now let's start with the second half of that.
19:50: Calling on the name of the Lord is an oft-repeated theme in the Old Testament, going back all the way to the first pages of God's word, Genesis chapter 4.
19:57: And it means to seek God's favor, to ask God for something.
20:01: And it's exactly what the psalmist had already done earlier in the psalm that resulted in God's mercy.
20:07: Think about verse 4.
20:08: I called on the name of the Lord.
20:10: O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul.
20:14: I called on the name of the Lord.
20:16: I asked God for something.
20:17: Deliver my soul.
20:19: And we know from verse 1 that God did that.
20:23: Now, when we look at verse 13, knowing that the second half of the verse is a commitment to seeking God's provision is key to properly interpreting the first half.
20:35: This lifting up the cup of salvation, that's a little confusing at first glance.
20:38: But if we know what the second half is about, we can start to figure this out.
20:41: The first part of verse 13 talks about lifting up the cup of salvation.
20:46: And some scholars are like, well, maybe they're talking about some kind of Old Testament era sacrifice.
20:51: The problem is there is no such thing in the Old Testament.
20:54: There is no cup of salvation, Old Testament specified sacrifice.
20:58: Rather, the psalmist is giving us a picture of holding up a cup that has been emptied.
21:06: Holding it up to receive a refill.
21:07: You ever go to a restaurant and you're sitting there having your meal and you're sipping your water or your Coke or whatever.
21:15: And it's running low.
21:17: And then you see the waiter or waitress walk by and you hold up your cup.
21:20: Right?
21:21: What you're signaling is, I've consumed this.
21:25: May I please have some more?
21:26: That's the picture that we see at the beginning of verse 13.
21:34: We see this idea, this explanation confirmed earlier back in verse 2.
21:40: He said, because he turned his ear to me, I will call on him as long as I live.
21:46: Because God gave me mercy before, my response is I'm going to keep seeking mercy my whole life long.
21:53: He did it this time.
21:54: I'm going to keep doing it.
21:56: God has been kind.
22:00: What I've learned is keep looking to God to be kind to me.
22:06: Verse 13, the point is having received God's past deliverance, a.k.a.
22:06: the cup of salvation.
22:14: He's going to seek God's deliverance again in the future.
22:19: James Montgomery Boyce puts it succinctly.
22:22: He says it like this.
22:23: This is a profound insight.
22:25: The only way we can repay God from whom everything comes is by taking even more from him.
22:34: You honor God by taking from him.
22:40: What better way to repay the Lord for his goodness to us than by our continual dependence on him?
22:47: God doesn't give us grace and mercy like, yeah, I know you're messed up.
22:52: I know you need some work and need some help.
22:54: But I'm going to help you get on your own two feet so I can be done with you.
22:58: Right?
22:58: This is not a welfare to work kind of political solution where we just need some help and then we can be independent of God.
23:05: But no.
23:06: God means for us to depend on him.
23:08: We are never going to be self-sufficient.
23:12: Nor does God want us to be self-sufficient.
23:15: God who is himself all-sufficient made us insufficient so that we can receive from him all that we need.
23:25: Anything contrary to that is a repeat of the first failure in scripture.
23:35: At the very beginning of God's word in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were provided everything they needed by God.
23:40: God said, help yourself.
23:42: Enjoy.
23:43: One thing's off-limits.
23:44: That's not good for you.
23:46: But everything else, take and eat.
23:48: And they said, this thing that's off-limits, I think that's going to make me more like God.
23:55: I think that's going to make me so I don't need God to tell me what's good and bad.
23:58: And I can know right and wrong for myself in a different way.
24:01: And they rebelled.
24:06: This first sin was nothing less than a declaration of independence from God.
24:13: God is the all-sufficient one.
24:15: From him and through him and to him are all things.
24:18: God isn't needy.
24:19: We are.
24:20: And so we honor God rightly by embracing his sufficiency and our own neediness.
24:27: I love the way that the Lord's Prayer says, give us this day our daily bread.
24:33: It does two things.
24:34: It says, we need what you have to give.
24:38: Please give it.
24:40: And it says, daily.
24:43: Unless you're French, living in France, you probably don't go out and buy bread every day.
24:52: Right?
24:52: You buy bread for maybe a week at a time.
24:55: But the prayer is, I need new bread on a daily basis.
25:00: I need to be dependent on you every single day.
25:03: God, I want you to provide.
25:04: But I want you to provide in a way that keeps me coming to you for provision.
25:07: Don't let me think I've got it together on my own.
25:11: Don't provide so much so that I don't recognize that I need to keep depending on you.
25:16: Provide in a way that keeps me close to you.
25:19: We honor God by seeing him as able to provide.
25:23: We honor God by coming to him, expecting him, trusting him to meet our needs.
25:29: And we honor God's past grace, not by avoiding it in the future.
25:34: Oh, God provided now, but now I'm going to take care of myself.
25:36: Rather, we honor God's past grace by returning to him again and again and again.
25:42: If you go to a restaurant and have the greatest meal, how do you represent that you've had a great meal?
25:55: Typically, a couple of things.
25:57: You either tell people about it, maybe on a Yelp review, maybe telling your friends about it.
26:01: You share it with others.
26:04: And you go back, right?
26:05: If you go to a restaurant and you have a terrible experience, man, that food was awful.
26:10: You don't go back.
26:12: But if it was good, then, oh, that was the greatest meal.
26:15: You go back.
26:17: When Jocelyn was little, toddler age, we were on a family vacation out to Vermont.
26:23: We went to the beach.
26:25: And I was out in the water playing with her.
26:30: And I had the idea of tossing her up into the air.
26:33: So we're at the beach.
26:34: And you can see this was not a little toss.
26:38: My sister was on the beach, and she caught this picture.
26:42: I literally threw her as high as I possibly could.
26:46: Now, I didn't start like that.
26:47: It was, you know, little tosses.
26:48: And she loved it.
26:50: And so I higher and higher.
26:51: And I was literally throwing her as high as I possibly could.
26:55: And she loved it.
26:59: She was thrilled.
27:00: And do you know what she did?
27:03: She did the best thing a dad can hear in that moment, which is, again.
27:10: Right?
27:11: Again.
27:12: I had to throw that girl up in the air until my arms were giving out, and I couldn't do it safely anymore.
27:17: And I loved every second of it.
27:22: We enjoyed that father-daughter moment together.
27:26: She repaid what I was doing by saying, again, daddy.
27:31: Again, daddy.
27:32: That's how you and I need to respond to God's goodness.
27:38: We hold up the empty cup and we say, that was great.
27:41: May I have another?
27:43: Do it again.
27:45: Do it again.
27:46: Do it again.
27:47: I want you, as you head into Thanksgiving, to join me in echoing the psalmist saying, God has been good.
27:59: I'm going to recognize that by coming to him with open hands saying, God, do it again.
28:04: Do it again, Father.
28:06: Do it again.
28:10: You've probably heard the name John Newton.
28:13: He was a slaver.
28:15: He was somebody that stole people from their homes in Africa and forced them into the American slave trade.
28:24: But God got a hold of his heart and radically transformed him.
28:27: He's the author of the perhaps most famous hymn in Christendom, Amazing Grace.
28:32: There's another song that he wrote, another hymn that was drawing from this very passage.
28:38: And it's called, What Shall I Render?
28:41: And the lyrics go like this.
28:43: For mercies, countless as the sands, which daily I receive.
28:51: From Jesus, my Redeemer's hands.
28:53: My soul, what canst thou give?
29:00: Alas, from such a heart as mine.
29:05: What can I bring him forth?
29:08: My best is stained and dyed with sin.
29:12: My all is nothing worth.
29:13: Yet this acknowledgement I'll make.
29:17: For all he has bestowed.
29:20: Salvation's sacred cup I'll take and call upon my God.
29:26: The best returns for one like me, so wretched and so poor, is from his gifts to draw a plea and ask him for still more.
29:37: I cannot serve him as I ought.
29:41: No works have I to boast.
29:43: Yet would I glory in the thought that I shall owe him most.
29:52: Newton got it.
29:55: God has been so good.
29:57: I couldn't possibly repay him.
29:59: The best way I can honor him and repay him is just keep coming back to him for more grace.
30:09: We properly repay the Lord for his goodness to us by our continual dependence on him.
30:18: We need his grace every day.
30:22: And there's no better way to honor him than by holding up our hands in simple faith and say, Again, Father.
30:30: Again.
30:32: Let's pray.
30:33: Father, we come to you with praise on our lips.
30:37: Even as we close in song, we ask for the grace of your spirit moving our hearts and our minds to really mean what we sing.
30:45: To not be distracted, but to give you the glory.
30:48: Help us to sing out from hearts that recognize just how merciful you've been.
30:54: How gracious and good you are to us day after day.
30:58: And may we hold up our hands looking for more grace.
31:03: Looking for more goodness from our Father.
31:07: Who has transformed us from enemies into sons and daughters.
31:12: Who will enjoy him forever.
31:14: We pray these things in Jesus' name.
31:17: Amen.