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May 31, 2026

"Pleasures Forevermore" (Psalm 16)

Series: Heidelberg Catechism Scripture: Psalm 16:1–11

Hear now the word of the lord from Psalm 16. 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 from 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 seek 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.
This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated and let's pray as we study God's Word together tonight. Gracious Father, we pray that as we come to the text of your word, these ancient promises written by your servant David, we know that they were inspired by you. We know that they were inspired by you, particularly because he prophesies the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ in this psalm. But we also know that these are inspired because you have inspired all the Scriptures.
And so we pray that as we study the words that your Holy Spirit breathes out, which are inerrant and infallible, which are trustworthy and true. We pray that that same spirit who inspired these words would tonight give us hearts to understand, would give us eyes to see and ears to hear all that is contained in the good news of the Gospel of Jesus. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
We live in a world that is constantly trying to keep us from thinking about eternity, a world that is always trying to distract us from the life to come, from the end of this life, from death, and from whatever is beyond the veil of death. But whenever we think about eternity, I think there is a tendency to potentially think of two things. Regardless of whether you're a Christian or not, regardless of whether you believe the Bible to be true. I think one of the things is to think about. One of the ways that we think about life after this world is to in some ways minimize the goodness of eternity.
We think, you know, whatever happens, then it can't be all that much better than now. And so we'll just shuffle through this life and really try to embrace as much as we possibly can of the goodness that this world has to offer. I don't want to think about tomorrow because I really want to live for today. That's one way to think about eternity. Another way to think about e eternity is to be so overcome with the difficulties of this world and the trials of this life that we minimize the joy that we can experience today as we think only of what's to come.
I just want to get out of this world. I just want to get beyond the difficulties that I'm facing. That's got to be better than today. But whether we minimize the joy that we can experience in eternity or. Or the joy that we experience today in this life as we look forward to eternity, one of the things that our catechism does so well is to connect those threads, to say that we begin.
We begin to experience eternal joy today. And that same joy is what we will experience in perfect blessedness in eternity to come. That's question 58. Even as I already now experience in my heart the beginning of eternal joy, so after this life I will have perfect blessedness such as no eye has seen, nor ear has heard, nor heart has ever imagined, a blessedness in which to praise God eternally. So the blessedness and reward that we have in the future, we're called to have a foretaste of that today.
And this song particularly captures this as our theme for tonight is that the Lord is my blessedness and joy now and forevermore. The Lord is my blessedness and joy now and forevermore. I'm going to look at this text in three parts. First, that the Lord is my refuge. The Lord is my refuge in verses 1 through 4.
Second, the Lord is my portion. Lord is my portion in verses five through eight. And then third, the Lord is my eternal joy. The Lord is my eternal joy in verses nine.

1. The Lord Is My Refuge (Psalm 16:1-4)

So let's start with this section of the Scripture text for tonight in verses 1 through 4. The Lord is my refuge, as David writes in verse one, Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. Now, much like we read this morning about Paul and Barnabas in Lystra, Psalm 16 and really the early Psalms. The the first book of Psalms focuses a lot on the experience of the believer in terms of distress and trouble that we face from the wicked. If you sort of think about the first set of Psalms, this is David in First Samuel, where he is constantly on the run Especially from Saul, who is trying to persecute him.
And so there's always these enemies around David in these Psalms. And here it's no different. Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. It's a prayer of preservation. Now, in the Psalms, whenever we come across this word refuge, which is a lot, this is one of the words in the Scriptures that should bring great, soaring joy in the heart of believers.
This is a part of the taste of eternal joy that we begin to experience now as we start to wrap our minds around the fact that whatever we face in this world, whatever trials, difficulties, enemies that come against us, that we are protected by God as our refuge, nothing can get to us that our loving heavenly Father does not permit to come to us. And in the midst of this world of trials and trouble, we are protected, preserved, and sheltered in the Lord as our refuge. The Lord is my refuge, but he's not only a protector and a defender, he is also the source of all the good. He's not just sort of protecting us from evil. He is also the one who provides us with good.
So verse two, I say to the Lord, you are my Lord. I have no good apart from you. Now, what we just sang in Psalm 103 in the first four singing verses, that really represents the first 12 verses of the Psalm itself. But that psalm is so good to emphasize the goodness that we have that comes from God. It says, forget not all his grace or the ESV has, forget not all his benefits.
That he forgives sins, that he heals diseases, that he redeems us from the pit, that he crowns us with love, that he fills our life with good, that he defends us from oppressors, that he. That he patiently teaches us his ways. We do not taste a drop of good in this world except what we receive from his hand. And remember, that was a part of our sermon text this morning, part of the way that Paul appealed to those in Lystra to say, don't worship us. I bring you better news of a living God, the One who has provided you with good food, food to eat, and has given you joy and pleasure in life, that one that you only dimly experience in this world.
He has given you so much better things by sending His Son into this world. And therefore, in verses three through four, David talks here about the blessedness of the godly ones who trust the Lord. As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones in whom is all my delight. But the contrast are the fate of the wicked, 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.
It's a warning to those who reject the Lord. If there is no good except from the Lord, then if you forsake the Lord, you are putting yourself only to taste of the pain and the sorrows and the miseries of this life. That's what Jeremiah says. The Lord says to the prophet Jeremiah, he says, my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and they have hewn for themselves broken cisterns that do not hold water.
When you try to go apart from the Lord to dig your own cisterns, find your own joy in this world, it only amounts to brokenness the that cannot hold the water of life that you have forsaken in the Lord God. So my questions tonight are, where do you face trouble this week? The Lord is your preserver, and he is your refuge. Where do you stand in need this week? Understand, there is no good apart from the Lord.
What guilty burdens do you bear? The Scriptures promise that the Lord removes our sins as far as the east is from the west. Such a fascinating verse written in a time when human beings did not know the full structure of the earth in the way that we do now. Where north eventually comes over the North Pole and becomes south, the east never, never go so far as to come around and to become west. And that's how far the Lord removes our sins from us.
Where then do you need his mercy and his grace? The Lord never deals with us as our wickedness demands. In other words, whatever need you have come with tonight, and we prayed for a few of them earlier this evening. Whatever need you have come with tonight can be met by bringing these things to the Lord in prayer.
But this does not mean that our relationship with God is transactional, as though we came to him as the big vending machine in the sky. That we have a need, we put in our quarter, out comes the blessing that we need. It's not like that at all. The Lord indeed is our refuge. The Lord indeed is the One who provides for us.

2. The Lord Is My Portion (Psalm 16:5-8)

But the second section reminds us the goodness of God that we experience in this world is something that encompasses every facet of every circumstance of our life. The Lord is my portion. That's the second section. The Lord is my portion in verses five through eight. Now, in this section there's kind of two subsections.
There's two main ideas that David wants to communicate to us. First, David says that he is blessed by to walk through all circumstances with the Lord. Wherever he is, the Lord is with him. So verse 5, the Lord is my chosen portion and my cup. You hold my lot.
Now, that language of chosen portion, the chosen portion, he's not actually saying, although it might sound like this, the Lord is the portion that I have chosen for myself. It's actually the opposite. And that's important for understanding what he's saying here. He's saying, the Lord is the portion that was chosen for me. He is my lot, or, you hold my lot, because what he is getting here.
And this becomes very clear in verse six, the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Indeed. I have a beautiful inheritance. What's the portion? What's the lot?
What are the lines? He's talking about the boundary markers, the lines that divide up the inheritance of the promised land that is apportioned to God's people. Now, even as king, the king could not go through the land and say, I like that piece of land. I will choose that for myself. That is my chosen portion.
Indeed, there was a King Ahab who wanted a chosen portion, a portion that was chosen for someone else. And he said, give me that piece of land. And when that was refused to him, his wife Jezebel crafted a plan to condemn the man who possessed that land as his inheritance, as blaspheming so that that man could be murdered and King Ahab could go and take the land for himself. And that was great wickedness. And he was punished.
He and Jezebel were punished for that. But here we're talking about what we receive from the Lord. We read also about this word for my cup. Alan Ross, in his commentary, says, the cup is the symbol of your destiny. It represents your portion in life, what you were given to drink, as it were.
What David is saying here is, he's saying, in my circumstances, in the situation that I have not necessarily chosen for myself what I have inherited, what I've received, where I find myself just because of where my life has ended up in all of this. The Lord is my portion. The Lord is my lot. Whatever I am experiencing, as difficult as it may be, it comes to me by the Lord's will. It comes to me in the Lord's power.
It comes to me filtered through the Lord's love for me. Even when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, he is with me as my portion and my cup and my lot. And even when my lot is difficult, I can still say that the lines have fallen from me in Pleasant places. Whatever my inheritance may look like today, I know that if it comes from the Lord, it is a beautiful inheritance.
The second thing that David talks about, the second subsection of this section of the text, David says that he is blessed by the Lord's wisdom and presence in his life. So it's not only the Lord's that he's blessed to walk with the Lord in all the circumstances of his life, but he's also blessed by the Lord's wisdom and presence in his life. And so in verse seven, he says, I bless the Lord who gives me counsel in the night. Also, my heart instructs me. Now, don't misunderstand what he's saying there.
He's not saying that the Lord is giving me counsel. And in the night I search my heart for my. You know, search my feelings to find out what's really true in the depths of my soul. He's not saying that again. Alan Ross, in his Commentary on Psalms, he talks about the fact that throughout the Psalms, you will repeatedly find the reference to the night.
The experience that saints have in the night is a time of meditation, meditation on the word of God. And as a time of prayer, probably you've woken up at times in the middle of the night, and there's an issue on your mind that is hanging there that you can't get off your mind. There's something that's swirling around in your mind. And the idea that David is getting at here is he's saying he's being blessed. When he wakes up on his bed in the middle of the night and he can't get back to sleep, he's blessed because the Lord is there to counsel him, to guide him, to bring in his heart, to mind the Scriptures and to lead him to pray and to put all of these things upon the Lord.
He's not talking about waking up and being consumed by the anxiety of worry, even if our experience often begins that way in the night. But he's talking about working through this toward a resolved sense of trust after putting all of it before the Lord to say, lord, I do not know what you are going to do, but I know that you will work this out best. I remember there was a time in my life where I was going through a very difficult, painful moment in college. And I remember talking with someone, and as I've been praying through this, just swimming in this, it became clear to me, I said to this person, I said, you know what? It's become clear to me that if I could see what the Lord is doing in all of eternity that I would be cheering him on in the midst of the pain that I'm suffering.
If I could see what he is doing with this, I'd say, don't let up, don't stop, because I want to get where you intend to take me. And that's what David is wrestling with in the midst of the night with the Lord, who gives him counsel on his bed in the night, in the depths of his heart, as he ponders the word of God in prayer. And so in verse 8 he says, I have set the Lord always before me because he is at my right hand. I shall not be shaken. There is great confidence.
So I want to ask you in this first of all, are you content with your portion, your lot in life? Are you content in your marriage? Are you content with your children? Are you content with your extended family? Are you content with your home, your work and your health?
Are you content in the midst of the trials that you endure? Now, I'm not asking if you like every aspect of all of those things. I'm asking if you are content.
This psalm reminds us that our lives are not made up of circumstances. That is, we do not judge the quality of our life based on the circumstances that we experience, rather by the power and presence of the Lord and His wisdom by which he guides us in the midst of those difficult circumstances. And in the midst of this, I want to ask, are you content? Do you bless the Lord who gives you counsel? Are you not shaken because the Lord is at your right hand?
The second question I want to ask is this. What worries and anxieties are you carrying that you should be carrying to the Lord? Cast all your anxieties, Cast all your cares upon the Lord, for He cares for you. When you wake up in the middle of the night, are you trying to solve those problems? Are you trying to cut through those anxieties in your own strength?
Or are you crying out to the Lord and continually giving it back to him, knowing that what he will do will be right? What blessedness it is to trust in the Lord.
But in the third section, as we move into this third section now, we know that the blessedness that we experience is not only now, it is for always. Again, our theme tonight is that the Lord is my blessedness and joy. And so far we have seen the way. The Lord is my blessedness and joy now. But in this next section it turns to forevermore.

3. The Lord Is My Eternal Joy (Psalm 16:9-11)

So third, the Lord is my eternal joy in verses 9 through 11, verse 9 is connecting us with what has come Before, David is glad because he rejoices and rejoices because he dwells secure. So he says, therefore my heart is glad and my whole being rejoices. My flesh also dwells secure. He's come through. Remember, this started with his need for the Lord to be his refuge in the midst of enemies coming against him.
Well, now he's meditating on the goodness of the Lord. And he has come to this perfect confidence of the strength of the Lord as his refuge in the middle of all of this. And so he will not be shaken. His flesh dwells secure. His heart is glad.
His whole being rejoices. If the Lord is for us, in other words, he's asking, who can come against us? But now we experience this primarily in the temporary difficulties and trials that we have. That is, again, as our catechism says, even as I now experience in my heart the beginning of eternal joy. Now, why is it the beginning of eternal joy?
Because what we experience now, as good as it is, as blessed as it is, it is always tempered by the pains and the difficulties and the distresses and anxieties that we face in life. It will not always be this way. At some point, the trials and the pain will go away, and what will remain will only be that eternal blessedness and joy. And the promise we have here is in verse 10. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your Holy One see corruption.
Now, this, the New Testament tells us, is, is a prophecy that predicted the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Peter cites this day, this sermon on the day of Pentecost, in Acts, chapter 2, verses 25 through 28. Paul in a text we just looked at a few weeks ago, Paul cites this text in Acts 13, verse 35. This is one of those Old Testament texts that we looked at on Easter Sunday, the promise that the Holy One of God will not see corruption. And what the apostles, both Peter and Paul, do, is they reason.
And they say, well, David is the one who wrote this, but he could not have spoken about himself because his tomb is still here to this day. He's still in his tomb. His. His body has seen corruption. So he's not talking about himself.
He must be talking about another. And indeed, he was talking about Messiah. He was talking about the Son of God who died and was buried, and yet no corruption saw him. The Lord did not abandon him to the grave, but raised him up on the third day. But here's what's very important.
Even though the Scriptures teach us that this promise is about the resurrection of Christ, the promises that we have in Scripture tell us that the resurrection was not only for Christ, as First Corinthians 15 tells us, that if Christ has been raised as the first fruits, we also will be raised up with him. So this is first and primarily and foremost a prophecy about Jesus. But this is also a prophecy that is about us. Secondarily, it is not that our bodies will not see corruption at all. It is that we will not be left to corruption as much as our bodies decay and rot in the grave.
Even so, the Scriptures tell us that our bodies are united to Jesus even in the grave, that we are part of the body of Christ even when our bodies are resting in the grave, so that when Jesus returns, he will raise up our bodies to resurrection glory that will be like his.
What a promise we have. And again, the promise is, as the Catechism says, that what we begin to enjoy now, so after this life, I will have perfect blessedness such as no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has ever imagined a blessedness in which to praise God eternally. And with that in view, David turns to verse 11. He says, you make known to me the path of life. This language of the path of life is often used in the Bible to talk about the way we should live today.
And that's what he has in mind. But notice that the path does not come to an end at the end of our experience in this life. It doesn't come to an end at death, because at death we pass beyond this world into our eternal experience, where in the Lord's presence, there will be fullness of joy. The path that we are walking today, believer, is the path that will lead us right into the presence of God, the very presence of God, where there will be fullness of joy. Now, earlier, David said in verse eight that when he's tossing and turning in the middle of the night, the Lord is at my right hand.
Therefore I shall not be shaken. Again. The primary blessedness that we have in this life is the joy that we experience in the midst of our trials. But one day, when we are in the presence of the Lord. Look at verse 11.
Now, David is not talking about what's at his right hand, the Lord at his right hand. He's talking about being at the Lord's right hand. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. When the difficulties and the trials fade away, all that will remain will be joy and blessedness and pleasures forevermore. Now, as we think about how to apply this again, I want to draw to connect the thread we Experience joy now in this world.
Do not denigrate the possibility of joy in this life. Don't go around like a glum, glowering believer saying, I can't wait to get out of here. Now we should wait, or we should be eager to experience the next life. But God has work for us to do. God has a joy for us to experience, to begin to experience today.
But also, don't be so consumed with the goodness of this life that you fail to look forward to the eternal, the fullness of the blessedness and joy for all of eternity. Again, what we begin to experience of eternal joy now, we will then experience with perfect blessedness for all eternity. You see, sometimes I think we are tempted to look forward to heaven because we will simply have better circumstances. When we think about heaven, if we think about it at all, we are thinking, boy, that's going to be a really nice place to live. I won't face all of these trials, but don't miss what the blessedness is.
It's being at the right hand in the presence of God himself. If God were not in heaven, the perfections of heaven would be far worse than hell. Let me give you an illustration. Some of you are old enough to remember a shopping mall. When I was a child, the shopping malls were the places to go.
I remember one time, sometime the first day of summer, I remember we got out at noon and somehow I ended up at the food court, which was really cool to be at, at the mall in my town of Hastings, Nebraska. I. I mean, this place was hopping. I remember people all over the place and they were buying things and they were eating food, and it was the last day of school. And so everyone was having the best time of their lives. It was a party place.
I mean, it was just the best earthly circumstances that you could experience. Well, as many shopping malls have done, that one, for a variety of reasons, slowly deteriorated over time. And I remember going back in college to visit that shopping mall, and I remember walking around it and it was a tomb. Everyone had moved out of it. The only real use for it was the mall.
Walkers were still allowed to sort of make their way around it for exercise. That was really the only function and use of the mall at that point. I was in the exact same place that had been such a wonderful place of joy. So I thought in my childhood.
But because the people were gone, that place was a miserable place. Well, again, the joy that we experience in this life, we might have fun following sports or following earthly achievements or following earthly pleasures. And that's Going to be fun for a while, but that's going to fade out. If we think that the blessedness of the next life will just be better pleasures, better things to do, better enjoyments, better amusements, better entertainment, then we are missing the point. The eternal joy that we experience the beginning of now, and what we will experience for all of eternity will be the presence of God.
God is with us now, at our right hand. And God will be with us. We will be at his right hand for all of eternity. Heaven will not be, praise the Lord, an abandoned mall.
And so John Owen, in a book that I love, a book called the Glory of Christ, says that our main job in this world is to learn how to appreciate the joy that we will experience for all of eternity. He writes, no man shall ever behold the glory of Christ by sight hereafter, that is, in eternity, who does not now in some measure behold that glory by faith here in this world. Here's what he means. The way that we enjoy Jesus in this life, the way that we behold his glory, the greatest blessedness that we will have is to behold the glory of God and the way that we do this now, as we experience his refuge and protection and blessings through trials and persecution, through the trouble of the wicked, this way we are learning what it will be to experience the perfection of those blessedness and eternity to come. If we live for the pleasures of this world, those pleasures will not be enjoyable in the life to come.
But if we learn to begin to experience the eternal joy now, then eternity will fill with unending, unimaginable, unexpressible blessedness and joy for all of eternity. So are you more satisfied this morning in your circumstances or in your Savior?
Are you learning from the sorrows that the wicked endure when they ignore the Lord, not just because their circumstances turn sour, but because they miss the joy of the Lord? Learn, therefore, godliness with contentment, which is great gain. Learn to cast your cares on the Lord, because he cares for you when you wake up anxious in the night. Learn to rejoice in the Lord's wisdom and joy today that you might rejoice in the fullness of his joy and blessedness for all of eternity. Pray.
Heavenly Father, we do pray for the experience of the joy and blessedness in Christ that we have by your spirit. Give us Jesus, we pray, and help us to know him now, the beginnings of that eternal joy, the down payment of the experience of your spirit that we might enjoy what no eye has seen seen, nor ear heard, nor heart imagined. For all of eternity we pray this in Christ's name, amen.

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Jun 28

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