Monday, May 7th

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Psalm 16:1-11

Keep me safe, O God, for in you I take refuge.

I said to the Lord, “You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing.”

As for the saints who are in the land, they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight.

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.

Lord you have assigned me my portion and my cup; you have made my lot secure.

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.

I will praise the Lord, who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me.

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.

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.

Like almost all students these days, our boys carry backpacks to school with them every day. And their backpacks are filled with enough textbooks, notebooks and various other supplies that they are actually hard for me to lift! But they lug them back and forth to school because they need the stuff that the backpacks carry.

It seems to me that, in a way, we all carry backpacks with us every day. But the backpacks I’m talking about are invisible. And deep within these invisible backpacks we carry the emotional burdens and spiritual resources of our lives.

Our invisible backpacks are where we carry our memories, like photo albums filled with snapshots of our lives – good, bad, happy and sad.

In our backpacks we carry pain, like heavy stones that sometimes weigh us down and sometimes overwhelm us altogether. Some pain we have caused ourselves and some pain has been placed in our backpack by others, but we carry these rocks throughout our lives.

And in our backpacks we also carry spiritual truth and resources that sustain and shape our faith. You could say that in each of our backpacks we carry a Bible, or at least our understanding of the Bible as a guide to our relationship with God.

Among the spiritual resources God provides for our backpacks is grace. Grace is a gift of God’s love and forgiveness that invites us to turn over the heaviest rocks in our backpacks to him.

But sometimes the Bible we carry in our backpacks can become more of a burden than a gift. Sometimes the spiritual truth we carry in our backpacks is like the 100 year old pulpit Bible someone gave me years ago big as a microwave and heavy enough to break your toes if you ever dropped it!. Sometimes the Bible we carry around with us is heavy, intimidating and filled with rules and expectations that we can’t hope to fulfill.

Some of us have come to think of the Bible as more a book of judgment than as a particularly joyful piece of literature. And that’s perfectly understandable because sometimes that’s how we have been taught to think about God’s word. But, while the Bible certainly does include very clear teaching about righteousness as well as sin, the Bible, properly understood, is a book about joy!

Read again the words of Psalm 16:

Keep me safe, O God, for in you I take refuge.

I said to the Lord, “You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing.”

As for the saints who are in the land, they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight.

v.8-9

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…

v.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.

This Psalm tells us we were created by a joyful God who wants us to experience his joy; who wants to fill our backpacks with good things, with pleasure and joy!

The Psalm is telling us that true joy begins with God. The Hebrew word for “joy” carries a meaning of “bright and shining” – like the face of a child right as the birthday cake is brought to the table. Why does the child’s face beam with joy? Because he knows that someone (Mom and Dad, family and friends) has taken delight in him – and celebrates him – and that creates joy.

Did you know that God takes delight in you?

Zephaniah 3:17 says,

The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save.

He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.

I think that many of us carry in our minds an image of a God who is mildly irritated with us most of the time, rather than a God who takes delight in us and who rejoices over us with singing! So let me ask again: Do you know that God takes delight in you?

David is trying to teach us that joy begins when we take delight in the God who takes delight in us!

Ask God to help you trust and sense his delight in you, that you might take your delight in him!

Pastor Brian Coffey