And please turn with me in God's Word to Psalm 116, Psalm 116, if you open your Bible to about the middle, it should fall in the book of Psalms, and turn to Psalm 116, that psalm we'll consider together this evening, Psalm 116, let's pay careful attention for this is God's own Word. I love the Lord, because He has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. Because He inclined His ear to me, therefore I will call on Him as long as I live. The snares of death encompassed me. The pangs of Sheol laid hold on me. I suffered distress and anguish. Then I called on the name of the Lord. O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul. Gracious is the Lord and righteous. Our God is merciful. The Lord preserves the simple. When I was brought low, He saved me. Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you. For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. I believed. Even when I spoke, I am greatly afflicted. I said in my alarm, all mankind are liars. What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all His people. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints. O Lord, 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 call on the name of the Lord. 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. Praise the Lord. Thus far the reading of God's Word. May He bless it to us. I don't know if you've been watching the Winter Olympics much. I've enjoyed watching them. It's interesting to watch people do on snow and ice, things I couldn't do and never have been able to do. But one thing I've noticed as I've been watching this over and over again is there's a word I keep hearing the announcers using. I don't know if you've noticed this. Maybe it's something that Christians notice as they're watching these things. But the word I keep hearing is redemption. You have a bad skate. The next skate, you're skating for redemption. You have a bad jump. The next jump, you're jumping for redemption. You had a bad Olympics last time around. This Olympics is about redemption. And maybe being a reformed minister, I'm just more likely to be cranky than most people. But I constantly think to myself, this has to be the most overused and underappreciated word. Redemption. Christians know something about what redemption is, what redemption does, what redemption costs. And this psalm that we're going to consider tonight is a psalm that deals with redemption, that thinks about the redemption that God has brought to His people. In a particular way, focuses their attention on the redemption that came from slavery in Egypt. Because you may or may not know that Psalm 116 is part of a collection of psalms that functioned in the life of God's people to remember the redemption God did for His people out of Egypt in Exodus. Psalms 113 through 118 are often called the Psalms of Egyptian praises. Or if you'd rather use the Hebrew word, seeing that one of my Hebrew professors is here tonight, the songs of the Egyptian halal. Halal just means praises. And so these were psalms that began to take shape in the life of God's people that they would use to remind themselves over and over again in the course of the year of the salvation that God had worked for His people. And so in the three great festivals of the year, they would use these psalms to remind themselves of the redemption that God had worked for them, bringing His people out of the land of slavery with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and into the land of promise, that land that flowed with milk and honey. And so it was repeatedly there in the lives of God's people being repeated so they didn't forget these themes of redemption that God had done. And so Psalms 113 through 118 they would use over and over again to remind themselves of that redemption. And these psalms also played an important role in the eating of the Passover meal. It became traditional to use Psalms 113-118 when you sat down to eat the Passover. The family of the group gathered would sing Psalms 113-114 before the meal, and then they would sing Psalms 115-118 after the meal. You might be asking, why is this all important? Are these just nice little details for us to note down? Well, no, they're important not just because of the role these played in the lives of God's people, but they're important for the role they played in the life of our Savior. Because it means that he also used these psalms over and over again to sing praises to God with the covenant community. And we remember that the last supper he celebrated was the Passover supper. He sang these psalms as part of the last thing He did with His disciples before going out to suffer and die on the cross. If you're tempted to think I'm just making that up, read in Matthew and Mark's Gospel. They sing a hymn before they go out to the garden, and the hymn they sung is most likely Psalm 118, the last of the Passover psalms. And so what these psalms do is not only give us a window into redemption for God's people in general, but for our Lord in particular. They open out to us His heart. They open out to us what He was thinking, what He was feeling, what was on His mind, what was on His heart, in a way that we don't have windows into in other places in God's Word. And so we can think of this psalm the way He would have sung it before going out to suffer and die. And to think about how it resonates with his experience as he enters into the experience of his people. Because this psalm, among all of this collection of psalms, is very personal. The other psalms that have come in this sequence, psalms 113, 114, 115, they are all big and sweeping psalms that include the whole covenant community together. Psalm 113 talks about all the servants of the Lord. Psalm 114 talks about all the earth. Psalm 115 talks about all who fear the Lord. But then in 116, in a marvelous way, it moves to an intensely personal story. It's much like we read in Psalm 66, 16, Come and hear all you who fear God, and I will tell you what He has done for my soul. This, in the midst of these big sweeping songs, is a personal story of salvation. You might even say that this psalm is a personal testimony of salvation. That this person is sharing with God's people. So we want to think about that, this personal testimony of salvation. How it teaches us to praise God and how it teaches us to see the life of Christ reflected in this psalm. So in this personal testimony of salvation we see three things. We see terrible distress. We see a trustworthy deliverer, and we see thankful dedication. That's what we see in this personal testimony of salvation. It begins with a testimony of terrible distress. This psalm is not a psalm that is light in the themes that it brings up. There is very much difficulty and darkness for the psalmist. He is in distress. He is in trouble. The exact details of that trouble, those details are not spelled out for us, but we are told two things about them. They are life-threatening in their nature, and he's forced to face them abandoned and alone. That's what makes this distress terrible. He is facing death, and he's facing it alone and abandoned. We see that in verse 3 of this psalm. The snares of death encompassed me, the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me. Death and Sheol in the Old Testament are always pictured to us as grasping enemies. They're always out to come get you and to entangle you like a predator and snare you and draw you back to its lair. And any of us who have been affected by death, whether it's recently or whether it's a long time past, you know that feeling of feeling like death is coming and grabbing your loved one and carrying them away and there's nothing you can do about it. It's always presented to us, death and Sheol, as being predatory, ensnaring. Maybe it's helpful to think of the psalmist describing himself as if he's been wrapped up by a giant python and it's squeezing. And he can't get away. He is suffering in the midst of this great difficulty. He suffers distress and anguish. There's the use of the same verbs both for death in Sheol and for the psalmist here. It reaches out for him. And when he reaches out, what does he find? He doesn't find anything but distress and anguish. He's in trouble. He's in difficulty. He's already in its clutches. And he's feeling his own powerlessness to do anything about it. And it's not just terrible because he's been ensnared by death in this way and can feel himself being dragged away, but in his hour of need, his friends are gone. He finds himself alone. When he says in the second part of verse 10, I am greatly afflicted, I said in my alarm, all mankind are liars. All of his friends have proven faithless. All the people who promised to stand by him through thick and thin, right, to be ride or die, they're all gone. There's nobody there. Everybody who promised him their friendship, promised him their fidelity, they're all gone they're all liars he faces this alone that's what makes this distress that he's picturing so terrible and what makes it somewhat even worse in as we think about this distress as we see it pictured for us in this psalm is it's not being faced by someone who is faithless someone who has rebelled against God and is now getting the just desserts of their rebellion. This is someone who is faithful. This is someone who's been trusting God. This is someone who has put their trust in the Lord and still this is happening to them. The psalmist says that in verse 10. I believed even when I spoke. I had not abandoned the Lord. I had not abandoned my faith. I had not abandoned my trust in my Savior I called to Him, but I still found myself in this situation. That's important for us because when we face terrible distress, it's not a sign that God has abandoned us. You know, sometimes we try to over-exegete providence. We think bad things are happening to us because we must have been bad somehow. In some way, we might not even know that God is visiting us with a punishment that we really deserve. Maybe we've just been blind to it all. You see, the psalmist here is saying, no, I was faithful. I believed. I was clinging to the Lord. This distress did not come on me because of some kind of rebellion. The distress does befall the people who are faithful to God. The people who love Him. We might think of the Apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 4.16, the sad report that he gives, that my first offense, no one came to stand beside me, but all abandoned me. Paul knew what it was to be left alone in his hour of need, to suffer that kind of terrible distress. And of course, our Lord knew what that was like. In a sense, this is a perfect description, isn't it, of what he faced the night after singing this psalm, the night after going out to the garden, being arrested, going out with all of these men who'd promised to be there for him no matter what happened, right? The promise they would be there for him. Mark 14.31, Peter said emphatically, if I must die with you, I will not deny you. And then Mark says, and they all said the same. And when he's arrested, where are they? All mankind are liars. And as He's feeling death coming for Him, already feeling death and Sheol reaching out for Him in the garden, as He's experiencing, Jesus is experiencing that sorrow, what does He do? What do you do if you're in terrible distress? What do you do if you're powerless? What do you do if you're being dragged away by forces beyond your control? You do what the psalmist did. You do what our Lord did. You call out to God. That's what the psalmist does in the midst of his distress. He turns from that terrible distress to his trustworthy deliverer. Right? When we are powerless against the things that grip us in this life, we turn to the one who has power over them. And we seek his help. That's what the psalmist does in verse 4. He was being grabbed. He reaches out and finds nothing but distress and anguish. Then I called on the name of the Lord. Then I called on the name of the Lord. Whenever the name of the Lord is used in the Old Testament, it often wants to bring our minds to those two great features of our God. The two great ways He's revealed Himself to His people. That He is the great Creator who made everything and sustains it all by His power. And He's the great Redeemer who saves His people in their hour of need. He's a gracious Redeemer. He's a powerful Creator. That's what it is to call upon the name of the Lord. To be in the midst of distress, to feel that power grabbing you that you can't resist, and to remember there's a power on high above it all. There is one who is more powerful than everything that afflicts us in this world. And the psalmist said, I called on his name. And said, O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul. This is one who realizes his own helplessness, his own absolute dependence on his God, and who calls out to God for help. And when he calls, what does he find? Notice that in verses 5 and 6. What does the psalmist say about the Lord to whom he calls? Gracious is the Lord and righteous. Our God is merciful. He's reminded of the grace of God, that God is always gracious to those who belong to him, that God is righteous, his way is always right, he's innocent in all that he does, that He is merciful, He's compassionate on those who are suffering. That He's a God who preserves the simple. The Lord preserves the simple. It's a very humble statement for the psalmist to call himself simple. In wisdom literature, the simple person is the one who's always walking around just about to fall into falling. If no one helps him, if no one watches over him, he's going to walk right into it. He needs to be rescued from himself. And the psalmist calls himself here simple. It says the Lord preserves the simple. When I was brought low, he saved me. He's the deliverer of his people. And the psalmist says, And not only did I find salvation, I found salvation from him that is complete and total. It lacks nothing. we see that in verse 8. It's that celebration of deliverance. You have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. He breaks apart the bonds of death. I'm delivered from death. He dries my tears. I'm not even crying about it anymore. He puts my feet, stands me back upright, and gives me a place to walk. A place to live, a place to thrive in the land of the living. His salvation is complete and it's total. And while all mankind are liars, here is one who is always faithful. Who is always faithful to his people. He always proves true to his promises. And that's why the psalmist's hope is not just for now, but for the future. Notice how he begins this psalm at the beginning of Psalm 116. I love the Lord because He has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. Because He inclined His ear to me, therefore I will call on Him as long as I live. He heard me this time. He will hear me again. And that's so important for us because we don't just go through one distress in life. It might be kind of nice if that's the way things work. We can sort of steal our minds and say, okay, this is my one distress. I've got to face it, and then when I'm through it, I'll be okay. But what is true as we walk this pilgrim path in this life, we're bearing a cross, and that means suffering all kinds of difficulties in this world. And sometimes we feel when we're in really low points in life that we're just facing one distress after another. That we go from one difficult situation to another difficult situation. No sooner has the Lord lifted us out of one than we're back down into another. And what the psalmist says is what I found from the Lord is He's always there when you call. He saved me once, He'll save me again. And what I have to never forget in my own mind is His past deliverance is a present encouragement. Because the one who has been a Savior will always be a Savior. He's a trustworthy deliverer. It's easy to lose sight of that in this life. It's easy to lose sight of that in the face of distress and difficulty. That's why we need to be reminded of that truth. In a sense, the psalmist even has to remind himself of that truth in verse 7. Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you. We have a God who hears and will always hear. And His past deliverance gives us present comfort and hope for the future. God is a Savior. He doesn't stop being a Savior. He delivers and will continue to deliver His people. And why? Why can we be so sure? Well, I think there's a beautiful clue for us given in a verse that's very precious to most of us. Verse 15, what does the psalmist know? What gives him hope? What gives him assurance for the future? Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. Many of us in the midst of death and difficulty go to this word. It's a comfort to us to know that the death of his saints is precious in the sight of our God. But this is a verse worth meditating over. That word that's translated here, saints, really is a word that means those who have shown covenant love. Those who have shown steadfast love. Those who have shown covenant loyalty. It's a form of a word that we use when we talk about God's covenant loyalty. These are people who have been faithful to God. These are people who have shown their covenant love to God, their loyalty to Him. That's who the psalmist is talking about in verse 15. Those are the saints. The ones who are faithful to the covenant of our God. And their lives are precious to Him. Their death is costly for God. He puts a value on their death. A precious value on them. I liked one translation that suggested this verse we could say, The death of the devout costs the Lord dear. We can sometimes think that God is so high and lifted up because of some of the things we confess about the impassibility of our God that He's not affected by what happens to us. He continues big and high in the heavens, and when death rips our families apart, rips us apart, that He somehow doesn't feel it the way we feel it. It somehow doesn't matter to Him as much as it matters to us, and maybe that's even a source of difficulty for us in our grief. How could God let this happen? I thought He loved us. I thought He cared for us. What this psalm reminds us is that He does. That your death is costly to Him. That it costs the Lord to lose those who are devoted to Him. He bears that. And He puts such a value on it that He's willing to give His Son so that they can be recalled from death in Him. That's the price He puts on the death of His saints, that He's willing to give His only beloved Son to buy them back. He's willing to give His Son, and Christ was willing to come and to do it. Even though what that meant for Him was that He would not be delivered from death. That He would be delivered up. The death would carry Him away. That's the cost He was willing to bear because of the value He puts on our deaths. So does that mean Jesus could not sing this psalm with any comfort? No, Jesus could sing this psalm knowing His Father. Knowing that, as one commentator put it, it is no trifling matter with God to suffer His own to be torn away from Him by death. That's not a trifling matter with God, the death of His people. And Christ could go to His death knowing that His death was precious in the sight of His Father. Precious like no death has ever been in the sight of His Father. Because here was a covenant servant who was perfect in His faithfulness. Not merely faithful the way we're faithful, where we are able to please God because of His grace, because of His mercy, because of the gift of faith, because of the intercession of Christ, because of the power of His Spirit. Here was one in the Lord Jesus Christ who was perfectly faithful as a covenant servant. And if our deaths are precious in His sight, how much more are the death of His Son? Isn't that the glory of what we confess, that this death of the Son of God was of infinite value, sufficient to cover over the sins of the whole world and 10,000 worlds beside. His death was precious in his father's sight. And he knew his father would not let it go. That he would raise him up from death. That he would bring him back to the land of the living. That he would deliver him from death, his eyes from tears, his feet from stumbling, and that he would walk before his Father in the land of the living. Our Lord could take comfort from this psalm because he knew better than anyone else that his Father was gracious and merciful, righteous in all his ways, that he preserves those he loves and calls them back from death. That was his hope, because he knew his father was always a trustworthy deliverer. And he went to his death so that he could be, for us, a trustworthy deliverer. And so what can we do to thank God for that kind of salvation? If we really understand what God has done for us in Christ, if we really understand what the psalmist is celebrating in this passage, it should call us to ask the question we see in verse 12. what shall I render to the Lord for all of his benefits to me? That God would do all this for me? That my death would be a cost to him? Sufficient for him to be willing to send his son to deliver me from death? How can we repay God for such a great salvation? Well, the short answer is you can't. We can't pay him back for what he's done. But he doesn't ask us to pay him back. He asks us to follow his word. And what does the psalmist say that we can do? The first thing we can do is praise him for this great salvation. We can become so used to talking about ourselves as Christians, as saved people, talk about salvation, talk about what Christ has done, and lose the significance of it in our minds. To lose a sense of just how precious that is. Just how costly it is. Just how valuable it is for us. And praising God keeps us from forgetting. Israel learned that in their life. You need to keep reminding yourself of God's redemption. Because otherwise you might be tempted to forget. And your soul will become restless. You'll forget that He's a deliverer and you'll wonder whether He'll deliver you this time. then we have to say, return on my soul to your rest. The Lord has dealt bountifully with you. And to continue to remind ourselves through the salvation, through praising God for this great salvation, to know that the cup of foaming wine of his wrath, which we should have drunk, which Christ drank for us, has become for us the cup of salvation. The cup that overflows with his goodness. And we're to do what the psalmist tells us to do in verse 13, lift up that cup. Lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. Don't forget to praise his name for the wonderful salvation that he has worked. We're to praise his name and we're to praise his name with one another. It's another thing we see in this psalm. We're not just to do this by ourselves as individual acts of worship. We praise him with one another. It's important in this psalm to get that. Verse 14 says, I will pay all my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people. That's repeated in verse 18. And verse 19 goes on, In the courts of the house of the Lord, in your midst, O Jerusalem, praise the Lord. It's important not just that we praise God, but that we praise him together. Church has a function in the life of God's people. It functions in many ways. One of the important ways it functions is so that we can sing of the faith and the love that we have for the God who's delivered us in the midst of the congregation to remind those who are struggling what kind of God we have. We live life together as a people of God. And that means that there are going to be times when some of us are riding high in faith and love, clearly seeing the God who's delivered us, rejoicing and filled with a sense of His presence and Spirit, and there are going to be times where others of us will have none of that assurance. We'll be as low as we've ever been. We'll be feeling like we're hanging on to God by our fingernails. And what does praise do within the great congregation? It kindles faith and love in the people who need it. That's why the psalmist is saying, and the psalms say over and over again, Come, let me tell you what God has done for me. Because when I tell you what he's done for me, it'll encourage your soul. It'll help kindle the fire that is waning in you. And that's a wonderful privilege that we have as God's people to help one another. To help one another in the midst of difficulty. One commentator put it in a beautiful way. The fire of faith and love put in the midst of God's people will kindle others and help the fire to blaze all the longer and better for it. When your fellow Christian is feeling like a smoldering wick, it can often be the burning branch of your faith and love that will encourage them. Say, let me tell you what God has done for me and remind you that God is a trustworthy deliverer who can deliver from distress. It's important that we come and encourage each other with these words and that we come together to hear the Lord speak to us. Because He has a personal testimony of salvation for us as well. The Lord Jesus Christ, and His is the most glorious of them all. I am the first and the last. Behold, I was dead, but I live. And I hold the keys of death and Hades in my hand. There's no better testimony than Christ's testimony. There's no brighter brand of fire, of faith and love that can be kindled, that can kindle God's people like that of our Lord Jesus Christ. His trust, His power, His unfailing commitment to His Father in the sure knowledge that His Father would deliver Him from death. And who has been raised to the heavenly glory, who is walking in the land of the living like no one else is walking. True resurrected humanity alive who can testify to God's people. And that happens in a particular and glorious way in church. And we hear the word of Christ speaking to us. And hear our Lord assuring us, I was in terrible distress, and my Father is a trustworthy deliverer. And I know what you're suffering, and I have the power to save you from it. There's nothing that God's people can do in those circumstances but offer themselves in praise to God to come together, to share and mutually encourage and comfort one another with these words, and then to commit ourselves as living sacrifices to our God. Not because we can earn anything from Him or those sacrifices do Him some good. It's because we desire to give ourselves in thankfulness to Him. That's what the psalmist says, having received this life back from death, how could I do anything but use it for God? That God has loosed the cords of death from me, how could I use this life then for any other purpose but in his service? We see that in verses 16 and 17. I am your servant. I am your servant, the son of your maidservant. You have loosened my bonds. I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving. That's what we do when we live lives that are pleasing to God. When we seek to go out and do those things we know He loves. Being sorry for our sins. Putting our faith and trust in His Son. And seeking to live a life of service to Him. Obeying His law out of gratitude for all that God has done for us. So that with our mouths and with our lives, we say what the psalmist says in verse 1, I love the Lord. because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. May the Holy Spirit help us to show this thankful dedication to our God and our Savior, Jesus Christ, who has rescued us from our terrible distress, because he is a trustworthy deliverer. May we put our trust in him. Amen. Let us pray together. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for this word. We thank you for this psalm. We thank you for the window it gives us into our Lord's life. We thank you that he can sing this psalm knowing that you were a trustworthy deliverer for him. We thank you that he now lives and reigns forever at your right hand, testimony to the fact that you are a trustworthy deliverer. And because you delivered him in ages past, we can have good hope that you will deliver us with him in the age to come. May that encourage us as we live this life that we are afflicted by terrible distress. that we might remember the great salvation that you have worked for us by your Son and commit our lives to you in thankful dedication. May we have that same certainty and commitment the Apostle Paul had, that you will rescue us from every evil deed and bring us safely into your heavenly kingdom. That you be the glory forever and ever. Amen.