Psalm 16 for the best life

Yeah. Welcome to treasures in the storm. My name is Cindy schmidle er and today we’re gonna look at psalm 16. I’m gonna read the last verse too because that’s gonna be our theme today. We’re gonna read the whole thing. I’m gonna share some things with you Just how to get our complete joy. But verse 11 says you make known to me the path of life, you will fill me with joy in your presence with eternal pleasures at your right hand and that’s our goal. Today I call it the best life. And so I’m gonna pray for us and then we’re going to dig into the scriptures and I’ll share some ways to get there along with a testimony about what it looks like. Let me pray for us. Dear Heavenly father. Lord, I thank you for that. You care about our joy Lord. And our joy is found in you father. Help us teach us, guide us, instruct us, show us how to get there Lord, because we want to get there. We want that complete lighthearted freedom that we can have in you. But so often Lord, we let the things of life that come at us all day. I can be full of you in the morning Lord. But by lunchtime I have the pressures of the world and my own flesh on me and so we need you Lord. My audience needs you father. When you speak into our life. Stay, we trust you Lord, We trust you in jesus name. So today I want you to go ahead and get your bibles and get to some 16 pen and paper. Why? Because God is going to be speaking to to us. We expect and anticipate that he’s gonna do that. So get ready. Let’s get our seatbelt on and let’s get going. So psalm 16 begins with and I’m gonna read it and you put your listening ears on for each word that God is gonna speak to you through this song. It says keep me safe. My God. For in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord, you are my Lord. Apart from you, I have no good thing I say of the holy people who are in the land. They are the noble ones in whom is all of my delight. Those who run after other gods will suffer more and more. I will pour out libations of blood to get such Gods blood to such Gods, I will not take up their names on my lips. Lord! You alone are my portion and my cup. You make 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 at night. Even at night, my heart instructs me. I keep my eyes always on the Lord with him and my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices my body also rest secure because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead. Nor will you let your faithful one see decay. You make known to me the path of life. You will fill me with joy in your presence, eternal pleasures at your right hand, Wow! There’s so many things for us in that so many promises of God for us. He says in verse 11, you have made this is the highlight. This is what you want to highlight. You have made known to me the path of life in your presence. There is fullness of joy. How do we get fullness of joy in his presence? There’s so much that has to be taken off of us in in a single day to get that fullness of joy. And he wants that for us every single day, authentic joy. I’m not talking made up or drummed up. But the real joy that comes from the Lord. It’s it’s a gift of God. And it’s authentic. And so we ask him for it from this psalm. We say, Lord, please. You have said, as I walk with you and I have no other gods before me. I don’t search out anything but you that you will give me that fullness of joy. You know what? It’s got to be fought for audience, my friends. It has to be fought for and it has to be fought for relentlessly because and constantly because we are always pursued by our flesh and by the devil all day long. The something else is speaking to us. So we have to attack known sin relentlessly. I like that word, relentless. That means just constantly nonstop. We get on that thing. We need to learn the secret of gutsy guilt, you know, really throwing off the bad guilt and the good guilt getting us cleaned off so that we don’t do not sin the battles of fight to see God for who he really is. Let me say that again. The battle that we face is a fight to see God for who he really is, to know that he is supreme and his supremacy is good and that he loves us. That’s that solid foundation that we talked about. We need to meditate on the word of God, day and night as the bible said. You know, we fill our mouth with his word and we chew on it and it’s sweeter than honey in the honeycomb when we do. That’s why we memorize scripture. That’s what we put scripture on and we memorize it. We want to feed it to ourselves. We need to pray earnestly for a heart that’s toward God, not towards selfish desires, you know, as paul said, why do I do what I do not want to do? Because my flesh is warring against the spirit there in opposition to one another. And so we need to get our heart towards God, keep ourselves towards God and we need to learn to preach to ourselves rather than to listen to ourselves. I find when I’m listening to myself, there’s a lot of worry in it. There’s a lot of trying to control my circumstances in it. But when I preached myself, I put on the pipe the power of God. I remind myself who God is. I remind myself how close he is to me, I remind myself how he’s taking care of me. That brings me a flood of overwhelming um peace, that peace that passes all understanding. And it’s so important to spend time with people who know and love, jesus, when I spend time with people who don’t and I am called to be in the world. So there’s gonna be times that I’m not. But when I, when I go out in those situations I’m prayed up, I put the armor of God and how did I do that? I’m there for a purpose. I’m not there. Just hang I have a purpose there when I’m around the Godly people, those are the people that can feed me. They can feed my soul. They’re the only ones that can bring me encouragement. Real encouragement and those people are, it’s wonderful and I need to be around them often to get fed because God said, don’t forsake fellowship in with one another. You need to spend time saturated with those people who can help you and help you see God in your own fight and we need to be patient in the night of God’s seeming absence, when you can’t feel him, when it feels like he’s sleeping in the stern of your boat and the waves are crashing into your boat. That’s when we need to be patient and we need to call upon him and we need to ask him to show himself when we don’t feel him. We also need to do some very basic things that are so important uh because it helps keep the devil away and it helps us with our own fleshly desires. And that’s to get enough sleep and to exercise and eat properly when we do that. When we’re feeding the temple that God has given us how we’re supposed to, we’re going to feel better, We’re going to be much more able to do those hard things that God is calling us to. And I like this, it says make a proper use of God’s revelation in nature. Take time to take a walk in the woods. I remember being in um Manhattan in new york and first time seeing those tall skyscrapers. And one thing I realized that there was, I didn’t see creation anywhere. There was not, it was just big cement buildings and they were so tall, I couldn’t see the sky. And I thought that is so I don’t know how people do that. They must have to get out into the parks so that they can experience God, not that he’s not all over. But there’s something about nature that just screams God is real and that he he’s a spectacularly loving God, something about nature that does that in the area that we live now. There is um these ducks that I’d never seen before, they’re beautiful, they’re brown and they have these redheads and there’s some white and black on them, just gorgeous and they make a squeaky noise, really loud squeaky noise. I call them squeaker ducks. There there is a name for him and my husband john knows the name, I do not know the name, but I’m telling you in the morning when I’m walking and I hear him, I just experienced God. I’m like Lord, you have brought your ducks again, You bring them every day. That’s what God does. And then it’s important to read books about God and biographies and people that God has used, where you can experience how he has used them. That’s a good picture. Just like the scriptures of people’s lives are good and us understanding how God works in a life and I have my book um tragedy turned upside down is a great book because it’s biography of exactly that God working in life in my life through the hard things. One of my favorite books is a book by a W Tozer. It’s called Knowing God. It’s it’s phenomenal because and it’s deep, there’s a lot to it. Like I could spend a whole year on the page. I could just take it and highlighted and think about and that’s the way I like to read a book. I want to be able to meditate and I want to get everything I can out of that book. Another book is jerry bridges trusting God. That’s an excellent book on what it looks like to trust God, uh, Charles Spurgeon. I read all of his stuff is just so great, so phenomenal. Just a um, a great patriarch of ours and another little book called practicing the presence of God by Brother Lawrence is a great book and just your intimacy with God and you want to do the hard things for the sake of others, not just yourself. And we talk about this often hardest, hard. It’s not bad as my husband always says. So we got to discipline ourselves to do the hard things and maybe you haven’t been for a long time, Maybe you haven’t been in the word and you need to get in, you need to get back to jesus and so initially it’s gonna be hard for you, but it’s not too hard and you can do it, you gotta get your time and you gotta get up and you want to do it when you’re fresh before you’ve had any of the world get on you and so get out of bed and do it. You will be so blessed in the end when you do that. I have a book, it’s like a coffee table book, although it’s not very pretty. it’s all black and I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s written by a navy seal and he basically challenges you in the hardest things. Like he says, when you don’t feel like getting up to go for a run, that’s when you go for the run and then the next day you don’t, you can take off and things like that, he says, you know, or if you see your disciplining yourself and you’re eating, you want to eat better and you go and you see all these donuts at the store, you don’t get a donut, he says and so you just talk to yourself, that’s not for me, I’m not supposed to have that. And I think that’s so good, I need more of that in my life. We’re called to pour ourselves out for those God puts in front of us and it’s not too hard and he will help you to do it. So be willing to pour yourself out. I remember time years ago when the Lord um had asked john and I to go to africa and I don’t even camp and africa is as far and this is gonna be like inner city areas of africa if they have such a thing. And I remember we went to africa because the Lord had called us to and one of the areas that we went when we were there is called cabrera And I think it’s a mile by a mile. There’s a million people living in this area and they live in dirt little huts and there’s no running water, there’s no toilets, none of that. And I remember going to visit the people there and in the center of it, they made a little church the AIDS epidemic at that time, 99% of the people in this area were dying of AIDS and so there were a lot of Children who were abandoned. They actually lived in the center in this church and I remember going a guide took us there to go and experience and I remember we had walked over this, this little creek of the blackest, smelliest water you’ve ever seen to get in there and we get in and it felt like I was in a a prairie dog exhibit because of all the dirt little huts that the people had. And I remember we were walking on these paths and there were some dead, they looked like a little wives. I grew up near lake michigan and we had a little wives and they looked like dead little fish, lots of them and they had been dead for five days at least very dead and I remember the woman who was taking us through say that’s gonna make a nice stew for somebody tonight and things like that. One thing I noticed while I was there is the people were so full of joy, they couldn’t wait to take us into their little hut and show us. And the other thing is it was so immaculately clean in there. The women actually made irons by putting coal into these little metal things to iron their clothes. And in the church, the women were just praising God in that little church, in the center of this place, this place where I wanted to hold my nose because the stench was so bad and I think Lord God, but yet these people were happier than my people back home in the States. The people back home in the States. I’m hearing story after story that they’re suicidal and that they have depression and we have everything, everything. And so sometimes I’ve heard missionaries from poor countries come to our country to evangelize us, why? Because we don’t need God and they desperately do need God. And it was so good for me to go and have that experience and be able to enjoy those people as they took me into their places and they were so excited about it. And I think to myself when God wants you to go somewhere, his plan, his purpose for that, he wanted to open my eyes and my eyes needed to be open and through that I became so much more grateful and so much more um evangelistic, let’s say and so much more Hopeful for people who are suffering. And so today I hope psalm 16 really speaks to you as it did me. I hope as you go back and look at that at psalm 16. All the things that it says about the Lord that there’s apart from him, there’s not any good thing. Um our hope, our happiness and our delight comes from being about those people who are like us and knowing jesus, that’s where that comes. That’s where our encouragement. The Lord is our portion in our cup. He’s made a lot secure. Our boundary lines are in pleasanton places. Surely goodness and mercy is gonna follow us all the days of our lives because of God in the center of it. So I want to leave you with 1st 11 again, you fill me with joy and I want us to be thinking about that joy that God wants us to have comes in his presence and so I’d like to pray for us. Lord. We just come before you father. There are so many needs around us. Lord needs everywhere, everywhere I go, there’s needs father. I pray God today for my audience that’s struggling that you you say in Matthew that we shouldn’t worry about what we wear or what we eat because you’re going to take care of us, Help us to be still about that help us to be full of love for others in the midst of our stuff Lord because we know you want to take care of us and we’re trusting you for that because you are trustworthy God. We want to bring you glory through this Lord and I want my audience to know you better because they have spent time In Psalm 16 and I’m trusting you lord and they’re trusting you and we pray that in Jesus name. Thank you so much for joining me today in my show. Yeah, Hello, my name is Cindy schmidle er and I have something very special that I want to share with you today. This is a book that I’ve written called tragedy turned upside down. This is a book full of hope and help if you need some strength today, I call it God vitamins if you need some real uh inoculation of the Lord and faith and belief in your life. This book is for you. My readers have said they devour it. They sit in one sitting to finish it. They have laughed, they have cried. Most of them have taken notes on it because there’s so many good foundational truths in it that you will want to write down and keep for the storms of your life mostly. You’re gonna take this book and you’ll want to share it with others that are struggling to. So at your earliest convenience, I’d say, pick it up, read it, you will be blessed, blessed, blessed when you read this and share it with those that are struggling right now. Maybe even if they’re not struggling. Somebody who needs to know, maybe they don’t have faith and you want them to have faith. You want them to know who jesus is. This book is for you those words that you you just can’t bring to say to a friend or relative. This book is full of all the things that you had hoped to say to them, so pick it up at your earliest convenience.