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We usually expect personal testimonies to be about conversion experiences. However, testimonies from God’s people about God’s ongoing work in their lives can be very encouraging.
Of all the psalms, Psalm 116 gives us a rare glimpse of such testimony. It’s a psalm, written in the aftermath of a crisis, that is charged with emotion and punctuated with the personal pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’. The panic of his crisis is palpable as is his excitement of his spiritual discovery.
1. A cry for help. The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me, he writes in verse 3; I suffered distress and anguish.
His words awaken us to his dark experience. This is someone caught by the tentacles of death. We’re not told what the situation was but it’s clear the writer was reduced to a state of emotional collapse: I suffered distress and anguish, he says.
What did he do? His anxiety and terror stirred him to pray: Then I called on the name of the Lord: “O Lord, I pray, save my life!” (116:4)
It’s a desperate prayer: ‘Lord, save me!’ We can surmise from the psalm that he had prayed before but never with such passion, urgency and persistence. The tense of the verb indicates that he repeatedly called out to God.
For some reason he found that people he thought he could rely on wouldn’t help him. In verse 11 he says: I said in my consternation, “Everyone is a liar”. Either treacherous individuals had threatened him or friends had deserted him in his hour of need. There’s one thing worse than feeling afraid and that’s feeling afraid alone.
Yet in the midst of his terror and isolation he discovered something else. In verse 10 we read his testimony: I believed, even when I said, “I am greatly afflicted.” In my moment of crisis, he says, I found I not only believed, but also that I could express my distress to God. In my helplessness I discovered what it is to trust God.
2. God’s response (116:5): Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful.
a. Protection. We sense the relief and gratitude that sweeps over the writer as he recalls his narrow escape. The unstated peril has gone away and his understanding of God convinces him that God had stepped in and answered his desperate plea. So, he counsels his racing heart: Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you (v.7).
Clearly his emotions had not yet fully recovered. It takes time for this to happen. But it’s also clear the writer is more composed. In verse 8 he says:
For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.
How often in times of distress are we awakened to a greater understanding of God?
In verse 6 we read: The Lord protects the simple; when I was brought low, he saved me. The writer seems to have got himself into this mess. Simple refers to someone who’s naïve He’d taken people at face value. But God doesn’t chasten him: there’s no ‘serve you right’. Rather, God is his ally against the ruthless and cunning of others who were out to destroy him.
b. God never forgets a promise. In verses 15-16 we read:
Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones. O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant, the child of your serving girl. You have loosed my bonds.
The writer’s friends appear to have failed him. He was unloved and unwanted. But God’s intervention revealed he was valued. He was not worthy of God’s love, but God treated him as a precious son. We’re reminded of Jesus’s words: “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God … Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (Luke 11:6, 7).
c. God delights in our friendship.
For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I walk before the Lord in the land of the living (vv.8-9).
With his words, I walk before the Lord the writer describes living in God’s company. God didn’t deliver him just to satisfy a moral principle; rather he had a personal interest in rescuing him. God wanted to enjoy his friendship – truly one of the great and most encouraging discoveries in the whole of the Bible.
Christianity is not just a matter of how we feel about God but rather how God feels about us. God cares about us and values us. He delights in our friendship. That’s why he stepped in and revealed things the writer would not have otherwise learned.
3. Our response. What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me? (v.12)
a. Grateful acceptance. The song-writer knew how close he’d come to death. He knew God didn’t owe him anything yet he had rescued him. It prompts us to ask the question, ‘How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?’
I will lift up the cup of salvation (v.13a).He isn’t offering anything to God. Rather, he reckons that God having stepped in to rescue him, he will accept the gift. This is one way we can repay the Lord for his goodness to us. Living on the other side of the cross of Jesus Christ, how much more do we have reason to accept gratefully and enthusiastically God’s greatest of all gifts of forgiveness and new life,.
b. Prayer. And I will call on the name of the Lord (v.13b). His earlier cry for help and his gratitude for God’s loving response, made him aware that prayer is not Plan B – when all else failed. Prayer is not just for emergencies but is to be a daily habit. The writer pledged himself to be a man of prayer.
c. Testimony. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people (v.14).
And, I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice 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 (vv.17-19).
The song-writer committed himself to testify about what God had done. He wanted everyone to know what had happened to him.
Some of us will identify with this psalm, because there may have been a moment when you stood at death’s door. Whoever we are, wherever we are, we need to grasp that, according to the Bible, we are all in a life-threatening situation. The deliverance to which this psalm testifies is a model of deliverance that every single human being needs to find. For all of us are in danger. All of us need to be rescued.
On a hillside outside Jerusalem, 2000 years ago, a cross stood silhouetted against an unnatural sky, and a man cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The answer to that question is that in our great need and through that Man, God came to our rescue: He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities (Isaiah 53:5). Like simple-hearted, foolish sheep, we have gone astray, and the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6).
In our helplessness there was nothing we could do for ourselves. The extraordinary news is that God himself stepped in, because he pitied us, and most amazingly of all, because he delights in our friendship.
Prayer. O God, the author and lover of peace, in knowledge of whom stands our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom; defend us your servants in all assaults of our enemies, so that surely trusting in your defense, we may not fear the power of any adversaries, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
© John G. Mason
