WWUTT 1194 He Has Dealt Bountifully With You? (Psalm 116, 117, 118)

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You can probably remember a time in your life when things were really hard and the Lord lifted you out of that.

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Well, hold on to that memory and the promises of God in His Word, for life will get hard again when we understand the text.

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You're listening to When We Understand The Text, committed to the sound teaching of the Word of God. Find videos and more at our website, www .tt

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.com. Now here's our host, Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky. In our study of the

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Psalms, we're right in the middle of what is called the Egyptian Hallel. If you want to open up your

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Bible, join with me in Psalm 116. That's where we'll begin today. Last week, we started in 113 and we read three

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Psalms from 113 to 118. This is referred to as the Egyptian Hallel because it's these songs that are mostly associated with Passover, the songs that the children of Israel would sing in praise to God because He had freed them from slavery in Egypt.

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In Matthew 26, when Jesus and His disciples finished the Last Supper and then went out to the

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Garden of Gethsemane, it says they sang a hymn as they went. And it was likely from the

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Egyptian Hallel that they were singing. So we've got three more of these Psalms. We'll look at 116, 117, and 118 today.

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And then guess what? Next week, we get into Psalm 119. But let's start here in Psalm 116.

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I'll read all 19 verses. I love the Lord because He has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.

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Because He inclined His ear to me, therefore I will call on Him as long as I live.

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The snares of death encompassed me. The pangs of Sheol laid hold on me.

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I suffered distress and anguish. Then I called on the name of the

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Lord, O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul. Gracious is the

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Lord and righteous. Our God is merciful. The Lord preserves the simple.

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When I was brought low, He saved me. Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the

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Lord has dealt bountifully with me. For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.

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I will walk with the Lord in the land of the living. I believed even when

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I spoke, I am greatly afflicted. I said in my alarm, all mankind are liars.

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What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the

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Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all His people. Precious in the sight of the

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Lord is the death of His saints. O Lord, I am your servant. I am your servant, the son of your maidservant.

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You have loosed my bonds. I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the

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Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all His people, in the courts of the house of the

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Lord, in your midst, O Jerusalem. Praise the Lord.

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And by the way, that word hallelujah means exactly that. It means praise the Lord. So in Hebrew right here at the end of Psalm 116, we would have read the word hallelujah.

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That's exactly the word that the Jews were using when Jesus came into Jerusalem in the triumphal entry.

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They were singing hallelujah. And this is called the Egyptian Hallel, which is the beginning of hallelujah.

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All right. So we come back here to Psalm 116, starting in verse one, I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.

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Now, one of my favorite psalms is Psalm one or sorry, I was about to say

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Psalm 113. It's Psalm 13. And this is one of my most recommended psalms as well, whenever somebody is going through grief or struggling and they're wondering what to pray, particularly that I'm so grieved in my heart right now,

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I don't even know what words should be coming out of my mouth. And I will recommend to them to look at Psalm 13.

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And the last two verses of Psalm 13, whenever I read Psalm 116, it sounds to me like an exposition of the last two verses of Psalm 13.

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It's just like expounding upon that concept. And then you get Psalm 116.

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But let me read for you here, Psalm 13. How long, oh, Lord, will you forget me forever?

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How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?

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How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, oh,

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Lord, my God, light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest my enemy say

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I have prevailed over him, lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

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And here are the last two verses, but I have trusted in your steadfast love.

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My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the

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Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. Does that not sound a lot like what we're reading here in Psalm 116?

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Only longer. So I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.

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That's the way we begin Psalm 116. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore

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I will call on him as long as I live. So you have the voice of a person here who is committing their entire way unto the

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Lord. No matter what happens, they are so committed to God because of his goodness toward them that whether things are great or whether things are bad,

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I am going to commit my entire way unto the Lord. This is a person who is fully devoted to living their lives fully unto

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God and singing praise unto his name in good or in bad once again, because the

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Lord has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. So what you're getting here is kind of the idea that this person, the psalmist here, has gone through something really bad and the

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Lord has lifted them out of it. So now they're experiencing goodness and peace. They remember where they were when they were low that the

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Lord has lifted them up. And so I'm praising God's name now and knowing when I come into that low place again, the

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Lord is going to be the one who will lift me up. I will trust in his name. He has dealt bountifully with me.

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Therefore, I will call on him as long as I live. The snares of death encompassed me.

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The pangs of Sheol or the grave laid hold on me. I suffered distress and anguish.

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Then I called on the name of the Lord. Oh, Lord, I pray deliver my soul.

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Something similar happened to Jonah when he was in the belly of a big fish.

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And a lot of theologians have interpreted that story in Jonah as Jonah actually having been dead.

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I think that would make the most sense, really, because how else could Jonah survive in the belly of a big fish?

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It's not like you can hang out in a fish and breathe air. So it's likely that Jonah had died.

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And yet the Lord preserved his soul. And when he came to the shores upon which the fish would vomit him out, then the

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Lord gave him life again. And so this is like Christ saying that no sign will be given to this generation except for the sign of Jonah.

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He was referring to himself being buried in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights and then coming back to life again.

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So just as what had happened to Jonah would also happen to the Lord Christ. All of these things pointing to Christ.

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So listen to Jonah's prayer unto the Lord. When he was in the belly of this fish,

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I called out to the Lord out of my distress. And he answered me out of the belly of Sheol.

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I cried and you heard my voice for you cast me into the deep into the heart of the seas and the flood surrounded me.

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All your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight.

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Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple. The waters closed in over me.

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So to take my life, the deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains.

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I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever. Yet you brought up my life from the pit.

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Oh, Lord, my God, when my life was fainting away. I remembered the

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Lord and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.

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But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you what

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I have vowed. I will pay salvation belongs to the Lord.

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We see a lot of similar themes there between Jonah's prayer and what we read here in Psalm 116.

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I called on the name of the Lord. Oh, Lord, I pray deliver my soul.

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We continue on here with verses five through seven. Gracious is the Lord and righteous.

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Our God is merciful. The Lord preserves the simple. When I was brought low, he saved me.

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Return, oh, my soul to your rest. For the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.

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Whenever I read in the Psalms, the psalmist preaching to his own soul.

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I remember these words from Dr. Martin Lloyd -Jones. He said, have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?

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Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they are talking to you.

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They bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking who is talking to you.

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Yourself is talking to you. Now, this man's treatment, of course, he's he's preaching on Psalm 42, where it says, why are you downcast?

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Oh, my soul, why are you in turmoil within me? That's the song that Martin Lloyd -Jones is preaching from.

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But it applies here as well in Psalm 116. This man's treatment was this.

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Jones says instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself.

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Why are you cast down? Oh, my soul, he says his soul had been depressing him, crushing him.

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So he stands up and says, self, listen for a moment. I will speak to you.

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That's a good practice. That's a really good practice. And that's something that I've tried to discipline myself with when

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I wake up in the morning and I have a dream in my mind that I really don't like. I was I was probably even dreaming about something that if I dwell on that during the day, it's going to cause me temptation and sin.

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And so if that's the kind of dream that I had, then when I wake up, I'm going to be preaching to myself. I'm going to be taking the words of God, saying to myself, don't be thinking this way.

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Don't dwell on those thoughts. They bring you no joy. Meditate upon the Lord.

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Look upon him. Think of his goodness that he has given to you and the calling that he has laid upon you that you would walk in righteousness and in his statutes and following after the

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Lord Christ. So sometimes when battling against my own temptations, I have to preach to myself.

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What a wonderful discipline. And I so love that Dr. Martin Lloyd -Jones had preached that so long ago.

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Here you have the psalmist reminding his own soul of the goodness of God that has been shown to him so that when those times come upon him again, whenever he faces that turmoil, he will not forget what

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God has done. Verses eight and nine for you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.

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I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. This is yet again the psalmist saying how he is committing his whole way unto

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God, walking in his statutes. I believed even when I spoke, I am greatly afflicted.

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I said in my alarm, all mankind are liars, similar to something we've been studying this past week in Romans chapter three, is it not?

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Here, the psalmist is reminding himself to place his trust in God. The Lord is trustworthy.

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Mankind is not. What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?

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I will lift up the cup of salvation. You had the reference to salvation that Jonah had made in his prayer.

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And here, very similar thing. I lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. In the

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Psalms, we've read about the cup of God's wrath. But here, the psalmist is saying, I'm lifting up the cup of salvation.

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I know the Lord will save me, so fill my cup with your goodness. I will pay my vows to the

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Lord in the presence of all his people that they may see the testimony that the

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Lord has brought about in my life. Verse 15, now precious in the sight of the

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Lord is the death of his saints. And you're talking about now a person who has committed their life unto

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God and dies, still praising the Lord, still serving him, still walking in his way.

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So from the moment of redemption to the moment of death, this person had committed their way unto

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Christ. That's kind of the picture, the journey that we see over the course of this psalm. O Lord, I am your servant.

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I am your servant, the son of your maidservant. You have loosed my bonds. Now, as we've been going through this section of Psalms, yeah, the

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Egyptian Hallel, of course, we've talked about this being in reference to the children of Israel being freed from slavery in Egypt.

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For us, for the church, this is our freedom from slavery to sin and to death.

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And so as we look at Israel as kind of a type of those who are freed from slavery to their captors, so we also have been freed from slavery to sin.

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And we, as we call upon the name of the Lord, can rejoice in our bonds having been loosed by the freedom that has been given to us in Christ.

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I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the

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Lord. And that's the same thing that we've been called to, to offer praises and thanksgiving unto our

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God. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people in the courts of the house of the

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Lord in your midst. Oh, Jerusalem, praise the Lord. Now, this is

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Psalm 117. So this is the shortest Psalm and the shortest chapter in the

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Bible. We're looking at that this week. Next week, we're going to look at the longest chapter in the Bible, of course,

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Psalm 119. So here we are with these two verses in Psalm 117, praise the

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Lord all nations extol him all peoples for great is his steadfast love toward us and the faithfulness of the

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Lord endures forever. Praise the Lord ends the same way that Psalm 116 ended this

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Psalm. In particular, you had the reference to the house of the Lord and Jerusalem and the people of God at the end of Psalm 116.

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But here you have Psalm 117. It's almost like you could take this Psalm and tack it on to the end of Psalm 116.

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So those who are Gentiles, those who are from the other nations could likewise pray this

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Psalm and all of it applies to them as well. So I think that Psalm 117 in that sense serves as an addendum, an inclusive

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Psalm that welcomes the nations who fear God to likewise praise his name.

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Praise the Lord. Everybody extol him all peoples for great is his steadfast love toward us and the faithfulness of the

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Lord endures forever. Praise the Lord there. I even got to read that Psalm twice.

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Okay, let's do Psalm 118 here. Starting in verse one. Oh, give thanks to the

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Lord for he is good for his steadfast love endures forever.

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Let Israel say his steadfast love endures forever. Let the house of Aaron say his steadfast love endures forever.

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Let those who fear the Lord say his steadfast love endures forever. Now, you've probably been to a concert before where the artist up on stage is doing kind of a call and response.

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He'll sing a phrase. The audience repeats something back to him, you know, something like that. That's what this is right here.

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And this is exactly the way that they would sing this or perform this among the people of Israel. You would say, let

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Israel say, and then Israel, the ten northern kingdoms would reply.

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His steadfast love endures forever. Let the house of Aaron say, and then those who were descended from Aaron, his steadfast love endures forever.

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Let those who fear the Lord say, and then it's everybody. His steadfast love endures forever out of my distress.

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I called on the Lord. The Lord answered me and set me free. We saw that in Psalm 116 as well.

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The Lord is on my side. I will not fear. What can man do to me?

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The apostle Paul saying the same thing in Romans eight. The Lord is on my side as my helper.

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I shall look in triumph on those who hate me. It is better to take refuge in the

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Lord than to trust in man. We had that in Psalm 116. All mankind are liars.

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So I'm going to trust in the Lord. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.

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That was verse nine verse 10. Now all nations surround me in the name of the Lord. I cut them off.

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They surround me, surrounded me on every side in the name of the Lord.

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I cut them off. They surrounded me like bees. They went out like a fire among thorns in the name of the

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Lord. I cut them off. I was pushed hard so that I was falling. But the

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Lord helped me. The Lord is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation.

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Glad songs of salvation are in the tents of the righteous. The right hand of the Lord does valiantly.

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The right hand of the Lord exalts. The right hand of the Lord does valiantly. I shall not die, but I shall live and recount the deeds of the

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Lord. The Lord has disciplined me severely, but he has not given me over to death.

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Open to me the gates of righteousness that I may enter through them and give thanks to the

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Lord. This is the gate of the Lord. The righteous shall enter through it.

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I thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

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This is the Lord's doing. It is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day that the

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Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Just a couple of notes here. So in Psalm 116, we had a reference there to the people shouting the praises of Christ when he came in the triumphal entry.

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Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. In Psalm 118, we have a statement that Jesus teaches in the temple the very next day on Monday, where he talks about the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

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So here in the Egyptian Hallel during Passover week, we saw these Psalms referenced quite a few times in the book of Matthew.

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And then, of course, we've got that verse in 24, very popular song that I think you probably grew up singing.

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This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

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Now, as I mentioned that Jesus and his disciples were singing a song as they went to the garden of Gethsemane, and it was likely from the

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Egyptian Hallel. Wouldn't it have been interesting with Jesus knowing that he's about to go into the garden?

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His soul is very vexed. He knows that he is about to be led away, tried and crucified.

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He's about to endure the wrath of God on the cross. And yet would he have been singing with his disciples as they went to the garden?

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This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.

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It's in Hebrews chapter 12 that we read to look to Jesus, the founder and the perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

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And we've had the reference to God's right hand that lifts up and delivers. Save us, we pray,

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O Lord. O Lord, we pray, give us success. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the

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Lord. We bless you from the house of the Lord. The Lord is God, and he has made his light to shine upon us.

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Bind the festal sacrifice with cords up to the horns of the altar.

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You are my God, and I will give thanks to you. You are my

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God. I will extol you. O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.

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The love of God has been demonstrated for us through the giving of his son, Jesus Christ, on the cross for our sins.

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The love of God that has been given to us by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ will never be taken from us.

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He will be faithful to us to the very end. So endure and walk in the way of Christ.

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Commit your life to Christ your whole life long. In Jesus' name, amen.

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Thank you for listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website www .wutt

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.com and click on the Give tab in the top right corner of the page. Join us again tomorrow as we continue our