Pursuing God as an act of Praise (Psalm 16:7-8)

I preached on Psalm 16 a week ago. Post preaching I found myself meditating on verse 8 of the psalm:

“I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.”

The theology of the psalm, the assumed knowledge about God is that he is the good master even over every part of the authors' life (v2). This leads the author to make a resolve to bless God (v7). Blessing God in this case, as one author puts it, is not just being in awe and wonder of God’s personhood. It is that and more. It is also the desire to give to God something more than laudatory praise, the desire to heap good and benefit on the one blessed. In other words, the author, being aware of God’s involvement in ordering and directing the affairs of his life (V5-6), strongly desires to give back to God, to bless God, not that God lacks anything, but to proclaim so to speak with the desires of his heart what fortune God means to him.

Verse 8 is one way he has resolved to praise God. The author has “set the Lord always before his eyes”. He has resolved to pursue God, not sometimes but always. Even in the face of any hardship that may come (V1), he has determined for his life one priority that being devotion, to be after God’s own heart at all times. Like the man in Jesus’ kingdom parable who found a hidden treasure and in joy went and sold everything he had to buy that field that had the hidden treasure, David has also found God to be his treasure and the only source for all other good things (V2) and he has set the course of his life to lead him to his beautiful inheritance.

You do not need to have been a Christian for too long to know how hard it is to keep this kind of devotion. We often fall on either side of the horse. If we are not neglecting God because things are going just according to our plans and enjoying life so much that his role in our happiness is obscured; we are questioning his character when things go south. Where then does David have courage and the confidence to write so boldly that he pursues God in this way? This question leads us to what sets this type of pursuing God as an act of worship as opposed to an act of religion.

Religious pursuits of God go as far as our will, energy, and power go. But David’s pursuit of God goes far beyond his strength can take him. “Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken”. David’s confidence and courage rest on the powerful one in his midst. God’s support and protection are David’s basis for his confidence to keep pursuing God. This is a dependent pursuit that acknowledges our fragility and God’s robustness. David is like a child who so desires to gift their parents a Christmas gift and yet is dependent on them as well to provide the money to buy the gift. The childlike pursuit of God is the only pursuit of God that is pleasing to Him and restful for us.

This is important for us to remember for many reasons. But for one, it is important because when we lose focus and tire to keep pursuing God, we often beat ourselves up. It is true, losing sight of God often gets us in the woods and so we hurt. And often this will be how we learn the lesson of taking seriously our devotion to God. However, even when we lose sight and fall short, we must not beat ourselves up as if it were a competition and have let team-God down. But we must pick ourselves up, dust-up in his strength and loving hands not as those competing but as those practicing. The Christian life is all about trying over and over and over again knowing every time we fall, we fall into the safety net, the loving hands of our heavenly Father. This is what sets this psalm apart from other lamentation psalms. It starts as one but quickly turns into the prayer of trust. Even as David was experiencing some form of hardship, whether as a result of his sin or by some misfortune, he did not forget the good Lord on his right hand, on whose strength he finds the courage to stand, to trust, and to hope.