As is so common with me, I have
thought of four or five different places, this is during the past
week, four or five different scriptures from which I desired
to preach, and for lack of a better way to put it, I'd get excited
about one, and then I'd find another, and I'd think, well,
I'll go with this one, then I'll go with that one. And sure enough, last
night, as I was actually writing a Happy New Year post on Facebook,
and I was reminded of this verse of scripture in Psalm 16, verse
11, you have made known to me the path of life. You will fill
me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your
right hand. And so for the last time this
week I said, I guess I'll preach on that one then. So that's what
we're going to look at this morning. Messianic Psalms. We hear people
speak of the Psalms and say there are Messianic Psalms, well in
truth all of the Psalms are at least to some degree Messianic
Psalms. You say, what do you mean by
Messianic Psalms? Well, Psalms about the Messiah,
Psalms about Christ. To my knowledge, there is not
one Psalm in which there is not some reference or application
to the Lord Jesus Christ. Some are more obviously that
way than others. For example, You know, one way
you can note the messianic nature of these psalms is when you find
some portion of the psalm quoted by Christ and applied to himself,
or quoted by one of the apostles, and actually, as it were, put
in the mouth of Christ. And in Psalm 22, for example,
it starts off with these words, My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me? Well, do you remember those words?
They were spoken by the Lord Himself on the cross. And therefore,
we look at Psalm 22, with this in mind, this is a psalm of Christ. It's about His sufferings, and
that's how we read Psalm 22. Well, in this psalm, we have
a portion of Scripture which is quoted in the New Testament
and applied to Christ. If you look here at verses 8
through 11, Says, I have set the Lord always before me, because
He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart
is glad, and my tongue rejoices. My body also will rest secure,
because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you
let your Holy One see decay. And if you look over at Acts
chapter 2, just turn over there a minute.
Now here is a record of the first full-blown declaration of the
gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Peter is preaching on the day
of Pentecost. The Spirit of God has just come
upon them in an extraordinary measure. enabled them to preach
in languages that they have never learned in the normal way. People
were hearing of the wonderful works of God in their own language,
and they were there from all over the world. And in Acts chapter
2 here, Acts 2 in verse 25, here's part of Peter's message, David
said about him, And he's talking about the Lord
Jesus Christ. So David said about Christ, I saw the Lord always
before me, because he is at my right hand. I will not be shaken. Therefore, my heart is glad and
my tongue rejoices. My body also will live in hope,
because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you
let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the
paths of life. You will fill me with joy in
your presence. And so what has the Apostle Peter
done? He's taken this portion from Psalm chapter 16, and he
has said, this is about the Lord Jesus Christ. These are the words
of Christ, recorded some thousand years ahead of time. David, Peter went on to say,
died. And they buried him. And his
body did see decay. So he couldn't have been talking
about him. David couldn't have been talking about himself when
he wrote this. He was talking about the Lord Jesus Christ.
So by this portion, as we enter this psalm, we enter in, as it
were, through the door of this portion of Scripture and realize
this psalm is Christ speaking. First and foremost. This is His
Word. run through this psalm, applying
it to Christ, and then we'll take just a few minutes toward
the end and see then how it applies to us. Verse 1, keep me safe,
O God, for in You I take refuge. Now, our Lord, if nothing else
can be said about our Lord, He was a man of prayer. Often, He
prayed through the night. He would pray when everyone else
had lost the will and the power to pray. The Spirit was willing,
but the flesh was weak. Our Lord understands that about
us. We can't stay up all night and pray, unless there's maybe
some particular burden upon our heart, but our Lord evidently
did this kind of thing regularly. He would spend the day healing,
preaching, teaching, And then he'd spend the night by himself
somewhere, communing with God. And so, here, this psalm is a
prayer, and here's our Lord's words, keep me safe, O God, for
in you I take refuge. Now, our Lord Jesus Christ is
God in human flesh, but he lived his life here entirely as a man. That is, he did not exercise
his divine powers and rights in his own behalf. Our Lord could
have, in a sense, put a divine bubble around Him and nothing
could have touched Him. But if He did that, He couldn't
have been our Savior. He must be tried in every point
just like we are in order to be a faithful high priest. He
must be made like unto His brethren in every sense of the word. The
only thing that we experience that Christ never did experience
was actual desire for sin. He didn't have that. But everything else he experienced.
And that means he experienced danger. How many times do we
read that the people were angry, particularly the religious leaders,
and they took up stones to stone him. And by one means or another
he would escape. On one occasion it said he just
walked right through the midst of them and nobody did anything.
Another time it said he just kind of hid himself. He saw what
was coming up, you know, as they were getting, you know, looking
around, you know, I might maybe heard somebody mutter that we
can't let this guy live and they start looking for rocks and he
makes an exit. But here's what our Lord is saying.
He prays to God and says, keep me safe. Keep me safe. I take refuge in you. Christ is our refuge. But Christ's
refuge is God Himself. In all His time on earth, our
Lord Jesus trusted God to protect Him. Now we learned a good lesson
from this, couldn't we? If God in flesh trusts Himself
to His Father, God the Father, can't we do the same? if one
who had all power to take care of himself nonetheless laid aside
his own abilities to care for himself and thought it was a
better idea to entrust himself into the care of the Father?
Shouldn't we? Shouldn't we take refuge in Him?
We have dangers. There are dangers to our bodies,
dangers to our souls, and the fact of the matter is we're not
up to handling any of them. Should we not follow the practice
of our Lord Jesus Christ and take refuge in God? Hide in Him. The atheistic world who wants
to mock faith in God, they say, well, your religion is just a
crutch. Well, my religion isn't a crutch, but my God sure is.
In fact, He's more than a crutch. He's my refuge. He's my hiding
place. He's my defense. He is my life. He is my strength. He is my peace. He's everything. I don't just
lean on Him, He carries me. He doesn't just help me, He does the work. Verse 2, I
said to the Lord, You are my Lord. Now, note here, the first
time the word Lord appears, it's all capital letters, that means
I said to Jehovah, in the letter, You are my Lord, Adonai. My Lord, my Master. my king."
And wrapped up in that concept of a lord, the way they used
it back then, the lord of a realm or whatever,
he was not only the authority, also laid upon him was the responsibility
of the welfare of his realm. In the days, in the medieval
days, you know, you'd have the king And under the king was the
lords. You know, the nation would be
divided up into sections, and over each of those sections was
a lord. And the lord had the responsibility of the protection
of that area, and the protection of the people in it. And so when
he says, I said to Jehovah, you are my lord, he means you are
the one who is in authority over me, and you are the one who cares
for me. And he says, apart from you,
I have nothing good. Now our Lord, according to the
Philippians chapter 2, it says he made himself of no reputation,
and in that whole passage there's a place where it uses the word
emptied. He emptied himself. Charles Wesley
referred to that in that song, Ain't Can It Be. He said, emptied
himself of all but love. And the Lord emptied himself
and therefore made himself subject to the goodness of his father
to take care of him. And so he says to Jehovah, you're
my Lord, you're my defense, you're my authority, and you are my
provider. I don't have anything good unless
you give it to me. Oh, that we would recognize that.
That our God is our Lord. And He is our Lord because He
is our authority. That's one sense of the word
Lord. And we bow to Him as Lord. And if we are believers, we bow
to Him gladly as Lord. But there's more to this word
than Lord, for it includes the concept of protection. He is
my protection. And He is my provider. You and I have nothing good except
what comes from him. That's why it is vain for a man
to seek his good by the efforts of his own hands. Now, of course,
people do that, and they do that because they don't have a good
understanding of what good is. They think that if they pile
up some money or, you know, get this or that convenience or a
nice house, big car, whatever it is, they think they're providing
good things for themselves. Well, I like such things. No question about that. But you
know something? Your house can protect you from
some things, but eventually there's something going to come to you
that it can't protect you from. Your car can take you places,
but there are places you want to go it can't take you. All the good that a man thinks
to draw to himself by the efforts of his own hand shall in the
end be just like sand and just fall through his fingers and
be nothing. The only real good that you and I ever have is that
which God gives us. It is real good. It's eternal
good. The Lord goes on to say, as for
the saints who are in the land, they are the glorious ones in
whom is all my delight. Ponder on this a minute. Here
is the Lord of glory, Jesus Christ, who is called the Holy One of
God. Now the word saint and the phrase
holy one all mean the same thing. A saint is a holy one. And so
here is the Holy One of God, who knows what it is, not only
to be holy, but to actually, if we can put it this way, experience
the fullness and perfection of holiness. He's God. And yet, when He comes here into
the earth, and lives in this wretched, corrupt place, He sees
God's saints, those chosen by the Father, loved by God, and
given to Christ. And He looks on this world and
you can imagine it's just, it's got to look awful to Him. He
created it good and now He comes back and it's a total wreck.
And yet, in His view of things, as He looks over this corrupt
and fallen world, He sees these bright spots, these radiant people, He sees us. And He takes delight
in what He sees. You say, I don't even take delight
in me. How can He take delight in me? That's my point. Isn't that amazing? That when
God comes into this world in human flesh, the Holy One of
God is here. He looks out on the world and
He sees us as bright spots in this dark world. He says, these are the glorious
ones in whom is all my delight. I'm not saying this to exalt
us, because we're unworthy of exaltation. I'm saying this to
exalt the grace of our Lord, that He came into this world
because of us. He came into this world because
by His grace He looks on us and sees beauty. Yes, it's beauty
He gave us, but He still sees it. And He takes delight in His
people. I'm not very happy with me. I
don't find very much delight in myself. And you probably have
the same feelings about yourself. But wonder of wonders, the Holy
One counts us to be saints, counts us to be bright spots, and is
delighted with what He sees. Our Lord Jesus came to this world
and He waited, as it were, among the mess of the world, and even
though His disciples sometimes caused Him to groan within Himself
for their lack of faith, yet He took delight in them. He enjoyed being around them
for all their weaknesses and failures. Now, if the Lord of
glory, if the Holy One of Israel sees the saints as the bright
ones here, and takes delight in them, how much more should
we be that way? You know, it's one thing to have
the grace to forgive, that is, not take vengeance against offenses. And that's good, that's the way
we should do it. But do you realize that the grace of God calls us
to something more with regard to our brothers and sisters in
Christ? that in this world we are to look upon our brothers
and sisters as the bright spots in this world. They are to be
our delight. Have you ever been away? You
know, out of town or whatever, and unexpectedly you run into
family or some close friend? Now, it's not like you were miserable
before you saw them. You were doing okay. Folks were
treating you reasonably well, but then all at once, in the
midst of all those strangers, there's somebody you know. A
smile comes across your face, and it's like that person suddenly
made all the world around you to be better. Brethren, that's
how we should see each other in this world. We should count
being among the saints of God the most blessed times we have.
We should count them the only reason for being willing to stay here.
You know, Paul said, I desire to depart and be with Christ.
That'd be a whole lot better, but I'll stay here because of
you. In order that I might do more
for you, be more of a blessing to you. Why? Because he loved
them and he counted them to be the radiant ones of the world.
The Lord goes on to say now in verse 4, "...the sorrows of those
will increase who run after other gods. I will not pour out their
libations of blood, or take up their names on my lips." Our
Lord Jesus Christ came into this world and He knew this, anybody
who ran after other gods, no matter what name they put on
that god. Because see, when our Lord was here, He confronted
many who were running after a false god under the true name. They
said that they were worshipping the God of Abraham, they said
they were worshipping Jehovah, they said that they were calling
upon Adonai, their Lord. They weren't. They had an idol
in their minds, a false god made up in their own minds, and he
says of them, their sorrows will increase, and boy they did. They put him to death, they rejected
the true God when he showed up, and what happened? God brought
upon them such destruction as is a nation, as no nation has
ever experienced before. I was reading a little bit about
it the other day. When the Romans came in there,
unspeakable brutality. Crucified thousands of them. I won't even go into detail about
other things. We don't even need to think in
those, it's just awful. Their sorrows increased. They
ran after other gods and the Lord Jesus said, I will not pour
out their libations of blood or take up their names on my
lips. He said, I'm not going to participate with them. You
know, that's what made him mad. If he'd have come and just joined
with them, they would have tolerated him being top dog among them. But they didn't like it that
he would not associate with them. He didn't come in and try to
be a part of them or participate in what they were doing. And
likewise, you and I should recognize in this world that the sorrows
of those will increase who run after other gods, other Christs.
And we must... even as we're friends with them
in life, and work with them, and maybe socialize with them,
that's all well and good. But we're not going to participate
in their worship if they are worshiping a false god or worshiping
the true God falsely. Either way is idolatry. We cannot
participate in their false worship. That's not arrogance on our part.
We're doing that because we believe God is worthy of such devotion
on our parts. And we believe that if we were
to do that, to pollute the worship of the living God with false
worship, or drag in false gods, it would cause our sorrows to
increase and we don't want to do that. Now it may look like
self-righteousness to them, but that's not what it is. We're
not saying, stand by yourselves, don't come near me because I'm
holier than thou. It's very simply, we're saying
this, here is the Holy One, we're going to pursue Him and Him alone,
and that's not the direction we see you going. So I'm sorry,
we can't go with you. Verse 5, Lord, you have assigned
me my portion in my cup, you have made my lot secure, the
boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, surely
I have a delightful inheritance. Our Lord Jesus came into this
world and he endured suffering from the moment he showed up.
And the suffering only increased as he grew and wisdom and stature
and favor with God and men. And it reached its peak there
on Calvary, great suffering. And yet he says this, Jehovah,
you have assigned me my portion and my cup. In Gethsemane, the night before
our Lord was crucified, He said, Father, if there be any other way, if this cup can pass from me,
the cup of what? The cup of bearing the sin of
his people. The cup of having our sins laid
upon him and then receiving within himself all the punishment that
God would inflict on any man who bore such sin. He said, if
this cup can pass from me, nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will. And our Lord said, you've assigned
me my portion of my cup. Now that is submission. Brethren,
let us think as our Lord did. Whatever we receive, it is the
portion and the cup which God has assigned for us. And I'm
not saying that we are to be uncaring about what that cup
entails. I'm not saying that there's anything
wrong with preferring that that cup be full of pleasant things,
and that we pray for that. But let us also recognize this,
as did our Lord. God above has assigned us our
portion and our cup. And therefore, the Lord goes
on to say, you have made my lot secure. Let us also with the
Lord realize that even if that portion and that cup involves
great suffering and great loss, nonetheless, our lot is secure. Paul put it this way, we must
go through many troubles to enter the kingdom of God. Our portion
in our cup may involve a lot of troubles, but our lot is secure. He goes on to say the boundary
lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. What he's talking about
is his inheritance. And he's saying, when the portion
of land given to me has been drawn out, it was drawn out on
a very good place. Remember Abraham and Lot had
a disagreement. The shepherds weren't getting
along because there's just too many of them for the amount of grazing
land they had. So Abraham gets with Lot, and
he says, Lot, I suppose they went up someplace kind of high
so they could see quite a panorama. He says, you choose what direction
you want to go. Whichever direction you want, I'll take the other. And so Lot, it says, he looked
at the well-watered plains of Jordan, and he decided to set
up his household there. And I imagine for a while Lot
said, the boundary lines have fallen out for me in pleasant
places. But you know what happened? He pitched a tent in the well-watered
plains of Jordan. And that became but a stepping
stone to having a house in the city of Sodom. Looks like his
allotment didn't fall in such a pleasant place after all, did
it? But Abraham was willing to accept whatever God apportioned
him. And though it was not what the
world would count the better portion, Abraham's lot was in
pleasant places. He says, surely I have a delightful
inheritance. Our Lord looked at the suffering
which he must face, and though he prayed, if there's any way
this cup can pass from me except I drink it, he went on to say,
nevertheless, not my will but thine, and the reason he could
say that was because he believed the promises of God made to him
that if he suffered this, if he went through this passage,
the portioning cup that God had ordained for him, it would end
in a delightful inheritance. And it did. He is at the right
hand of the Father, owner of everything, ruler of all. And we are in Him, brethren.
We'll never go through suffering like he went through, but we'll
go through some. Our portion and our cup will
contain things that we don't want to receive and that we don't
want to drink. But we rest assured that the
boundary lines have fallen for me and for us in pleasant places,
and we have a delightful inheritance. And once we have put our time
in as it were here, we go and receive that inheritance. We go to live in that pleasant
place. Our Lord goes on to say, I will
praise Jehovah who counsels me. Even at night, my heart instructs
me. I said our Lord prayed often
through the night. I guess one reason that nighttime
for him was a good time to commune with his father is because at
that time everybody else was asleep and left him alone. To
be honest, it's hard to commune with God in the daytime affairs of life. I mean, we can only put our mind
on one thing at a time. So if we're working, we're probably
not communing with God, at least not consciously so. When you're
mowing the grass, well, that's not too hard, so maybe you got
some cerebral power left that you can commune with God some
even as you mow the grass. But you see my point. It has
become my practice as much as I can do it. If I wake up in
the middle of the night and realize it's going to be
a little while before I get back to sleep, I will lay there. And
I say, according to my abilities, which aren't much, but still,
I lay there and try to ponder on the things of God and commune
with Him. I remember in my first year of
Bible school, a fellow was talking about praying. And he says, and
people say, well, I feel so embarrassed. Sometimes I'm praying and I just
fall asleep. And he said, well, can you think of a better way
to fall asleep? Now think of it. Do you think
the Lord's insulted that you fall asleep while praying? What
else would you want to be doing when you fall asleep? In fact, I believe you'll find
this in your experience often if you're lying awake at night.
It's because your mind is filled with concerns. And if you lift your heart in
prayer, Maybe those concerns will go away and you'll relax
and fall asleep. God counsels us in the dark times. When we think we should be asleep,
sometimes that's the best time to go to God's school and learn. So instead of saying to yourself
in the middle of the night when you wake up, I got work to do
tomorrow, I need rest. Why am I awake and begin to grumble
and not know about you? The more I fret about not sleeping,
the harder it is to go to sleep. Just accept it. God woke you
up for something. Talk to him and listen to him. See if maybe in those times as
you begin to pour out your heart to Him, He will pour out His
heart to you and remind you of what you've heard read and what
you've heard spoken. And those hours awake in the
darkness may prove to you to be the most cherished times of
your day. He says now I have set the Lord
always before me because he is at my right hand I will not be
shaken therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices my
body also will rest secure because you will not abandon me to the
grave nor will you let your Holy One see decay. Now see here's
our Lord Jesus living the life we should live and living the
life we try to live we just never do it as well as he did it. But he said, I always set Jehovah
before me. What does he mean by that? He
said, that's what I focus on. I focus on God. Now our Lord
had other things to do. His father was a carpenter and
he learned how to do that work. And until he was 30 years old,
he wasn't just sitting around doing nothing, waiting until
he was 30 years old so he could go out and preach. He lived the
life of a man, of a grown man taking on those responsibilities.
So he likewise evidently was a carpenter. That word actually
doesn't just mean carpenter in the way that you and I think
of a carpenter. It just meant a maker. He made
things. Whether it was a house, whether
it was out of wood, it didn't matter. He's just a maker of
things. I suppose that's pretty easy considering he was the maker
of heavens and earth. He could probably make a house if he wanted
to or a rocking chair or something. But even as he did that, he set God
before him at all times. That was the focus of his thoughts.
And he says, because the Lord is at his right hand. Now later
he says, he was at the right hand of the Lord. But when it
talks about the Lord being at your right hand, that means ready,
willing, and able to come to your defense. He says, therefore
I'll not be shaken. Shaken doesn't mean that he never
experienced the fear within himself. I guarantee you in Gethsemane
there was fear. You say, oh, the Lord's too courageous for
fear. He was looking into the mouth of hell. I think that's
good reason for fear, don't you? So to be shaken here doesn't
mean that he didn't tremble, as it were. The word is used
not only to mean to be shaken, but shaken to the point of falling
down. Now, once in a while, we get a little tremor here, don't
we? You're sitting in your house and you feel a little bit like
that, maybe a little something rattles. Well, the house was
shaken in one sense of the word, but he didn't fall down. There's
not even any crack. Now, you have a big enough earthquake,
it'll bring the house down, and that's what's meant here by shaking.
So the Lord says, I'm not shaking. I don't fall down. And my heart
is glad and my tongue rejoices, and even though I know I'm going
to die, He says, my body also will rest secure, because you'll
not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One
see decay. And our Lord Jesus, though He
faced Oh, suffering you and I will
never face because he's faced it. Nonetheless, he faced it
with joy. He faced it with joy. He rejoiced
in the Lord because he knew this, God would not abandon him to
the grave. His body would not suffer decay
and it didn't. Such was the nature of his suffering
that he put away the sin that he bore. And even though his
body lay dead, there was no sentence of death upon it anymore. And
it lay there in hope that in just a day or two, God would
raise him from the dead. And indeed he did. You and I
can take this same confidence in all parts except that you
will not let your Holy One, and we are God's Holy Ones, we're
His saints, you will not let your Holy One see decay. We do
see decay. But here's, even though we see
that, our body can rest secure even if it turns into so much
rich dirt because God won't abandon us to the grave. We may spend
a long time there. Our bodies may lay there. Some
of the saints have been laying in the ground now for thousands
of years. But they are not abandoned in the grave. God knows where
they are. And when the Lord Jesus Christ comes again, He's going
to gather together, I suppose, all those molecules that made
up that person, bring them back together. But those molecules
are going to be transformed. It's going to be recreation.
It's going to be new creation. It's going to be a glorified
body that they get. I know as time goes by and we
get closer and closer to what statistics say will be the end
of our lives, it can cause us some fear and anxiety. We've
never seen the other side, have we? And contrary to the books
being written, nobody else has seen it and been able to come
back and tell us about it. I don't know what those people
are experiencing, but they aren't going to heaven, I know that.
Paul said he went there and he couldn't describe the things
he heard, much less the things he saw. So these people that
go somewhere, you know, the whole beyond and back thing, and they
come back and tell you everything they saw and heard, I don't know
where they went, but they didn't go where Paul went. So we don't know what it's like
over there. We don't know what it's like to die. We've seen
people die and we go to the funeral home and we see them lying there
in the box, you know, You may have reached out and touched
them and then, you know, I generally don't because it's kind of creepy. They're cold. The body is hard. And they shut that lid. I don't
know about you, but I get claustrophobic if I was put in a box like that.
And we can't divorce ourselves from our bodies, you know. We
just, we look at that and we think about being buried in the
ground and we think, oh, that's got to be awful. Of course, we
know this, that we won't be there when that happens. As you approach the grave, as
you approach the time when God is going to let your body die, don't worry about it. Your body
will be put in the grave, but God is not going to abandon it
there. He's simply setting it aside
for storage until such time as He shall return and glorify that
body to be like the body of the Lord Jesus Christ. You will raise
just as He did. And in the meantime, you'll be
with Him. I tell you by the authority of
Scripture, Death will have no ill effect on you. It won't. Now the process of
dying may be very tough to go through. You may die of a horrible
disease that brings you much pain. Or you may instantly go
out of here in a car accident. Or one of those heart attacks
that just, you're walking along and all of a sudden you hit the
floor and it's over. I don't know how you'll leave this world. But
David said, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow
of death, I will fear no evil. Why? Because there is no evil
in death for the believer. We won't be abandoned. Our spirit,
which has been born again, shall go to God. and our bodies shall
await the time of their resurrection. Now verse 11, and we'll be done.
You have made known to me the path of life. You will fill me
with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right
hand. The Bible says there is a way
that seemeth right unto a man, but the ends thereof are death. Everybody comes into this world
thinking he knows the way of life. But those who are the objects
of God's grace, he makes known to them the way of life. And what is that way of life?
Our Lord Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the
path of life because He is our life and He is the way into the
presence of God where there is eternal life forevermore. He's
also the way of life in this, and I don't want to miss this
application to us, even this sort of life that we're living
now, this walking death that we call life, and the way in
which we live it. The real path of life is shown
to us in Christ. If we would truly live, if we
would have in this world a life worth living, Christ has shown
us how to do that. And it's to live in absolute
submission to God. It's to live in love, to live
in truth, to live in peace. That's life. Men think, humans think, that
a great life is to be defined in terms of how much wealth we
can amass, or how much influence, or how much fame, that kind of
thing. That's not life. And even those who have gained
a substantial part of that will admit it never satisfied them. Here is satisfying life to live
like Christ. And then the Lord goes on to
say, you will fill me with joy in your presence. And the Lord
right now is full of joy in the presence of his father. And you
and I who are in him will likewise be filled with joy in the presence
of God. Even now, when we come and meet
like this, we have a joy within our souls as we come as much
as possible in this world, we come into God's presence. That is the greatest joy a believer
has. Herein will our joy be made full
to see Him, to draw near Him, to be in His presence. And the closest to that that
we get in this life is when two or three of us are gathered in
his name and he is there with us. We don't see him with these
eyes, but is it not true, brothers and sisters, when the gospel
is preached and the Holy Spirit has come and made it powerful
to your heart, you feel as though in some respects you're in the
presence of God, you're in heaven itself. That's why I don't think we need
to do any of this, trying to bribe people in coming to church.
If you don't like what's going on here, you've got a much greater
problem than whether or not you're in church. This is the closest
to heaven you can find on the earth when the saints gather.
All right, last part. Eternal pleasures at your right
hand. You can tell a whole lot about
the state of a person's soul by how he describes heaven. Think
about the Muslims. 72 virgins. That's what those guys
think heaven is. They think their pleasure is
multiple women. That's really what it comes down
to. And that tells you they don't
understand what heaven is about at all, do they? They don't understand
what eternal pleasures are about. And then you have the American
version of Christianity in which pleasures are to be found in
the so-called successful life, which many preachers hold out
to be what God will give you. If you just live right, everything
will go right. Well, tell that to the Lord Jesus Christ. He
lived perfectly and things didn't go so well for Him in terms of
amassing wealth and achieving popularity. The more He made
the truth known to the people, the more they left Him. Until
finally, everybody was against Him and they crucified Him. Now,
pleasures at His right hand. What pleasures do we have? The
pleasure of Him. Is Christ pleasing to you? We have friends on earth, those
that we love. They're persons are pleasure
and it's just good to be around them. We like to visit with them. And so we can say these are our
pleasures. And they are, but then they aren't
eternal, are they? They grow old and die and they're
gone. Christ is our pleasure. And the more we think on him
in this world, the more we experience that pleasure here, and the day
will come when He will come. We'll see Him as He is, and the
sight of Him as He is will make us like Him, that is, to be like
Him. And having been made perfect,
we will be able to enter into the perfection of those pleasures. I don't know how to describe
them, so I won't even try. But I know this, the pleasures
we have in knowing Christ will be as great as Christ himself
is.