Grace Baptist Church, Nokomis, IL.

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Last Sunday night, one of the most popular tv shows aired its final episode of the season. Anybody know what show I’m talking about? The Walking Dead. Just the name of that show gives me the heebie jeebies. I mean, if dead people started getting up and walking around, nevermind the whole zombie thing, even if these walking dead people were mostly peaceful, I’d still be freaking out!

I mean, wouldn’t you? The idea of a dead person, lacking awareness, lacking morality, lacking a meaningful future, walking around, that’s just a little freaky, right?

And yet, when you think about it, every one of us were at some time just like that. We lacked an awareness of God. We lacked morality, in terms of obeying God. We lacked a meaningful future, because we can only be saved through faith in Jesus Christ. We were the walking dead.

The Bible says in Ephesians 2:4-5, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses and sins, made us alive together with Christ.” We live, because He lives. Because Jesus died on a cross and rose from the grave, we can be reborn, so that we can live a new life in Christ.

Read Psalm 16

There are two ways to understand this psalm.

The first is that in its historical context, David was confident in God that God would preserve his life, and that God would save David even when he walked through the valley of the shadow of death.

David constantly had threats all around him. People ranging from kings, to his enemies, to sometimes his own family, wanted to kill David for various reasons. Before he was king, he was constantly running from King Saul, who wanted to kill him because he was jealous of him. And then, as king, David was constantly at war with the nations around him, not because he wanted war, but because the surrounding nations were wicked. And to top it all off, David’s own son, Absalom, rose up against him and sought to kill him and all of David’s other sons because he wanted to become king, instead of David’s oldest son, and instead of Solomon, who was prophesied to become the king. And David certainly could have cried out to God, “Where are you? All these people want to kill me! Why don’t you just come down here and take them out!”

And David did cry out that way sometimes. In fact, if you read just the first two verses of the next psalm, Psalm 17, you read this.

In other words, “God, come down here and take them out!”

Do you ever pray like that? “God, come down here and save me from this mess.” “God, come down here and help me with my finances.” “God, come down here and take care of all these people who are making my life a living Hell.”

It’s not wrong to pray like that. In fact, it shows that you recognize that God is the only one who can deliver you. But as you pray that way, trust that God will deliver you. Trust that God will handle the situation according to His strength and wisdom, which may not always be the way you want Him to act.

We don’t know exactly what David was in the midst of when he wrote the psalm, but even in the midst of it, David was sure that God would preserve his life. It’s a picture of how our hearts should be. You see, God delights in us when recognize that there is no good in us (v. 2).

Without God in our lives, there is no good in us. We are full of sin. We are the walking dead.

And since there is no good in us, we naturally chase after other gods (v. 4). God has placed eternity in our hearts, so that we long to know Him. But instead of humbling ourselves before the one true God, we often chase after other gods because we think they will satisfy us. We run after fame. We run after money. We run after a stable job, or we pursue what we consider a noble cause, or we run after a high from drugs, or a high from video games, or knowledge, or whatever your god of choice may be. All of these things, when sought after for pleasure instead of seeking after God, will only lead to more sorrow.

In fact, it says that these sorrows will be multiplied. It’s saying that if you keep putting your hope in things other than the one true God, sorrow will just pile up, and the pile will get larger and larger, and you’ll have piles of piles, until you have so many piles of sorrows that life just seems unbearable.

Do you ever feel that way? There’s a better way! Don’t delight in the things of this world! Delight yourself in God.

The psalm directs us to do that in two ways. First, God delights in us when we choose Him (v. 5). You see, there’s a choice to be made. Every one of us needs to decide who we will follow. Who we will trust. David said, “I choose the Lord! I will follow the Lord! I will trust Him, because He holds my lot. He holds my future. He holds my life in the palm of His hand.”

Who will you choose? If you keep choosing yourself, or your career, or your friends, or even your family over the Lord, then you’ve told God, “I don’t really want you as my Lord. I want you as my back-up plan.” God is not interested in being your back-up plan. He wants to be your life. Because when you choose to make God our life, you’ve chosen the better life. And God wants the very best for you. That doesn’t mean you turn your back on your friends and family, but rather that as you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, you also love your neighbor as yourself, truly love them, because only as we know who we are in Christ can we truly love the people around us, forgiving them as Christ has have forgiven us and shown us His love. God delights in us when we choose Him.

Second, God delights in us when we delight in Him (v. 11). If I were to delight myself primarily in friends, or in my family, or even in my ravishing good looks, these things might make me happy in the short term, but ultimately I’m just piling up the sorrows. Because at the end of your life, if your joy was in anything other than Christ, you will have nothing. But if your joy was in Christ, then you will have everything. So the next time you feel overwhelmed with sorrow, don’t look at your circumstances, but look at yourself, and ask, “Am I finding my joy in Christ?”

Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying it’s wrong to be sad about things. What I’m saying is that though the sorrow may last for the night, joy comes with the morning. We don’t mourn as those who have no hope. When you have hope in Christ, even your mourning is a joy because you know that in Jesus Christ, this light momentary affliction is preparing you for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. Because when we find our joy in Christ, we can be confident, as David was confident, that the Lord will not abandon us (v. 10a).

Some of your Bibles may say, “You will not abandon my soul to Hell.” And sometimes the word sheol is simply translated “the grave,” saying that when we die, our bodies go into the ground. And honestly, I don’t know what the right translation of the word is in this verse in terms of how David used it, but I think what this verse is getting at is that when we trust in God, God will be faithful. He’s not going to leave you or forsake you. And even when death comes knocking on your door, or when you just feel like dying because of the life just seems unbearable, if you trust in God, God will lift you up.

I think all of this was in the mind of David as he wrote this psalm.

But as I already mentioned, there’s a deeper meaning, an ultimate meaning, to this psalm.

The second way to understand it is that Jesus would rise from death, and that He delights in us as we delight in Him. This psalm isn’t really about us. It’s about Jesus (v. 7-8). Who did this, ultimately? David tried, but David failed. David committed adultery with Bathsheba. And David had an innocent man killed so that he could marry Bathsheba. While David sought to bless the Lord, he could not do so perfectly.

But Jesus always blessed His Father in Heaven.

And Jesus could always listen to His heart, because His heart was pure. Undefiled. Led by the Spirit of God. And while David was given the title “holy one” because he was king of Israel, Jesus Christ is truly the Holy One, the only Holy One, who could die in our place, so that his sacrifice could be payment for our sin. So when it says in verse 10, “You will not abandon my soul in sheol,” Jesus was saying, “I may die, I may go to the grave, but I’m not going to stay there. I’m going to rise again! I’m going to live.”

And because He lives, everything that David wrote is true of David as well. And it’s true of us.

Although David could not be perfect in himself, although we can be perfect in ourselves, we can be perfect in Christ. Although David deserved Hell because of his sin, although we deserve Hell because of our sin, we can receive Heaven through faith in Christ. And because Christ rose, we too can rise from being one of the walking dead.

And one thing I find extremely comforting from this psalm is that even though there is no good in me, because of my sin, Jesus died and rose again, and therefore Jesus delights in me because of what He did (v. 3). Jesus is telling that to me! Jesus is telling that to you, if you trust in Him. Although Jesus is perfect in every way, and although Jesus went to the cross because of our sin, Jesus delights in us when we trust in Him because we’ve been washed. We’ve been cleansed. We’ve been reborn because He rose victoriously over our sin. Over the grave. Over sheol.

And so we cry out with David what he wrote in verse 1 (v. 1). Preserve me, O God. In other words, help me. Save me. Don’t let me die. And the answer to this prayer is Jesus. He died, that we might not die. And He lives, that we might live in Him.