Whom Have I in Heaven But You?

Let’s approach the Lord in prayer before we look to His Word.

Let’s approach the Lord in prayer before we look to His Word.

[PRAYER]

O Sweet and Gracious God, You have placed in the soul of all human beings an incredible desire. A thirst and a hunger for joy, for pleasure, and for happiness. Many search far and wide to satisfy this deep desire. But, You have purposed for us to find this supreme satisfaction for our souls in only one place. You. And You’ve revealed how we can find our ultimate joy, pleasure, and happiness in You through the pages of Scripture. So, we ask, as we open up the Scriptures in a moment that you would reveal to us and teach us to dig our roots deep into You. That we might tap into the heavenly storehouse of priceless treasure. That we might find Jesus Christ, a Treasure worth more than any other. And upon finding Him, we would take delight in Him and know Him more. It’s in His wonderful name I pray. AMEN.

There’s a quote from Jonathan Edwards that I have hanging on my wall in my office. It’s there in the center of all my other quotes and pictures for a reason. It’s a daily reminder to me of where I must set my heart in order to be truly happy in this life. It’s a quote from one of Edwards’ sermons titled “The Christian Pilgrim”. I just want to share the first part of the quote this morning and if I can remember, I will share the rest at the end of the month when we arrive at another Psalm in our series. Here is what Jonathan Edwards reminds me of daily:

God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of Him is our proper happiness; and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.

Asaph, a man appointed by King David to be a worship leader of Israel, and the human author of 12 Psalms, including our Psalm today, , really needed this reminder in his day.

If we were to read through the first half of the Psalm, we’d see an inward conflict going on in the heart of Asaph. Asaph began on a high note in the first verse of the Psalm, declaring God’s goodness to those who have committed themselves to serving Him. But, then in verses 2 and 3, Asaph described his dilemma. He observed how the wicked lived and how they were rewarded for their wickedness and it made him envious. He spends the next sizable chunk of verses, 4 through 12, describing the good fortune of the wicked despite the fact that they didn’t live according to God’s law. He noted that the wicked arrogantly asserted that God didn’t know what they were doing and they continue to increase in their prosperity. All the while, Asaph noticed that the righteous were suffering injustice, they were oppressed, and weren’t being reward for their faithfulness to God.

So, in verses 13 through 16, Asaph expressed his doubts. He questioned whether following God and remaining “pure” was really worth all the hardships he and many other followers of God faced if they couldn’t enjoy life like the wicked. He was about ready to give in to his envious desires and pursue those things that made the wicked so happy in life. In his heart, Asaph wanted their treasures. He wanted that sort of prosperity. And his feet had almost stumbled and his steps had nearly slipped off of that Rock of that glorious profession in verse 1 about God’s goodness.

But, in verses 17 through 20, Asaph’s doubts were settled when he went into the sanctuary of God, where he experienced assurance of God’s justice. He came to understand that he was envying people and their treasures that would one day waste away. And so, in these verses, God seems to have pressed the “reset” button of Asaph’s heart to focus on the only treasure that would satisfy his soul.

Let’s read what happened to Asaph’s heart after it was “reset” in verses 21 through 28.

(ESV)

21  When my soul was embittered,

when I was pricked in heart,

22  I was brutish and ignorant;

I was like a beast toward you.

23  Nevertheless, I am continually with you;

you hold my right hand.

24  You guide me with your counsel,

and afterward you will receive me to glory.

25  Whom have I in heaven but you?

And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.

26  My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

27  For behold, those who are far from you shall perish;

you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.

28  But for me it is good to be near God;

I have made the Lord God my refuge,

that I may tell of all your works.

Asaph’s focus shifted from envying the wicked and their treasures TO desiring and delighting in God as his supreme treasure. He recognized that, although he never acted upon his envy, he had been unfaithful to God in his heart and had set his heart on lesser treasures. Yet, despite his failure and his envy, God had remained faithful to Asaph and had revealed Himself to Asaph as a Treasure more precious than anything else in all of heaven and earth.

That’s a vital lesson we need to come to understand this morning, especially since we are coming to the Lord’s Table in a bit. We have a great need to have our hearts reset and focused on Christ. So, as we stroll through verses 21 to 28, I want to invite all of us to:

Delight chiefly in Jesus Christ, who is unwavering in His faithfulness and incomparable in His preciousness.

Let’s learn first of Christ’s Faithfulness to Us; and then we will examine His Preciousness.

I. Christ’s Faithfulness to Us in Our Failures

Asaph, in verses 21 through 24, confessed his heart failure before God and then Asaph professed that God was faithful to him despite his failure.

“When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you. [Then here comes Asaph’s assurance and peace] Nevertheless, [What a wonderful word!] Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory.”

Asaph took a hard and honest look at himself and saw how foolish he had been. His envy had driven him to bitterness. And although he never confessed that he physically acted upon these desires that were in his heart, they were in his heart nonetheless. Although Asaph was a saint, he essentially claims to be a sinner who had failed to be truly faithful to God. His actions may have looked alright on the outside to anyone who passed him by, but inside his heart toward God had been full of faults.

Thankfully for Asaph, God used his failures for his good. And thankfully for us, the Lord does the same. He allows us to mess up, to fail, to fall down in our walk with Him in order for us to understand some essential truths about ourselves and about Christ.

1. Failures reveal our absolute need for Christ (v. 21–22)

One essential truth that our failures reveal to us is our absolute need for Christ. God teaches us valuable lessons when we fail Him. One lesson He teaches us is that we aren’t “there” yet. We aren’t perfect! I mean, look at Asaph. He had an extremely high position. He was basically a worship leader for the people of Israel. Yet, just because Asaph had a prominent spiritual position didn’t mean he was immune from sin and failure. He came to understand, in these two verses, that he was far from perfect!

We need that sort of awareness when we fall short in our faithfulness to God. We certainly need to come to realize that we will and do fail God. The Bible says, “Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” () and “Pride goes before destruction” (). That was the apostle Peter’s problem if you recall. How many times had Peter been confident in his abilities? The greatest example of his pride was when Jesus prophesied concerning His death how all His disciples would fall away and scatter. And what does Peter say? “Surely not I, Lord! Even though all these guys might fall away and fail you, I won’t!” And then Jesus responded, “Tonight, you, Peter, will deny me three times.” And again, Peter boasted, “Even if I have to die with you, I won’t deny you! I’ll stay faithful till the end!” ( JES Translation). Well, we know how that turned out…

We all have a bit of Peter in us. Maybe some have more than others! Just because we are disciples, followers, believers in Christ does not mean we can’t stumble and sin. The Christian life is a continual process of losing our footing, stumbling, and falling down. But why do we fall? It’s not so that we can learn to pick ourselves back up again! No, it’s so that we learn to stop trusting in our own deceitful hearts and place our trust totally in Christ’s power and righteousness. So that we wouldn’t be so confident in our grip on Christ and instead learn to depend upon His strong grip on us. We fail so that we can come to know that we aren’t as strong as we thought we were.

We have a very great need, an absolute need for Jesus Christ.

2. Failures reveal Christ’s love to us (v. 23–24)

But, there’s a second lesson that failures teach us. Failures reveal Christ’s love to us.

“Nevertheless,” Asaph wrote. In other words, “Despite my failure to be totally faithful to You God, nevertheless I am continually with You; You hold my right hand.”

Asaph had just confessed how he was ignorant and like a beast before God. He had essentially said he had been an “idiot”! And Asaph was right. He had been an idiot. Sin makes us stupid. If I were to add a 7th ingredient to Thomas Watson’s ingredients of True Repentance that Don showed us a couple weeks ago, I would slip in “Admit the stupidity of sin” right before “Confession of Sin”!

But how wonderful is this word “nevertheless”? This is a word to cling to when we fall short of the glory of God.

“Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.”

God held onto Asaph’s hand, even when Asaph wasn’t holding onto God’s. He was starting to wander off, indeed his heart had wandered off even if his feet hadn’t yet! Nevertheless God’s love is seen in that Asaph wasn’t abandoned for his unfaithfulness.

This is the very spirit of the Gospel. This is how salvation comes to mankind. We were once dead in our trespasses and sins, living in them, following the course of our flesh, the world, and the devil without a care in the world. We were by nature children of wrath. Nevertheless, or as Paul puts it, BUT GOD. God showed Himself to be rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even in our disobedience and utter sinfulness, He made us to be alive together with Christ– by grace we have been saved…

In spite of our sin, God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die in our place, taking the punishment we deserved, and gives to us eternal life when we believe, when we by grace through faith trust in Him for salvation. It’s Christ’s gracious love that puts us on the Path of Life. But it’s also Christ’s gracious love and faithfulness that upholds us and grants us communion with Him even when we fail in our faithfulness to Him, much like Asaph and Peter.

In fact, go back to the story of Peter. Did his story end with his unfaithfulness? Did Jesus just say, “You know what Peter, three times you denied me. I’m done with you.”? After Christ’s resurrection we see something quite different took place between Jesus and Peter. We see Christ’s great love bestowed upon Peter when their relationship was restored. To us, Peter would have been a lost cause, someone not worth our time or forgiveness maybe. But, we are all like Peter before Christ, people who continually fail again and again to please Him and be like Him. And yet, Christ’s faithfulness doesn’t falter, even when ours does. “If we are faithless, He remains faithful.”

It was a bright Sunday morning in 18th century London, but Robert Robinson’s mood was anything but sunny. All along the street there were people hurrying to church, but in the midst of the crowd Robinson was a lonely man. The sound of church bells reminded him of years past when his faith in God was strong and the church was an integral part of his life. It had been years since he set foot in a church—years of wandering, disillusionment, and gradual defection from the God he once loved. That love for God—once fiery and passionate—had slowly burned out within him, leaving him dark and cold inside.

Robinson heard the clip-clop, clip-clop of a horse-drawn cab approaching behind him. Turning, he lifted his hand to hail the driver. But then he saw that the cab was occupied by a young woman dressed in finery for the Lord’s Day. He waved the driver on, but the woman in the carriage ordered the carriage to be stopped.

“Sir, I’d be happy to share this carriage with you,” she said to Robinson. “Are you going to church?” Robinson was about to decline, then he paused. “Yes,” he said at last. “I am going to church.” He stepped into the carriage and sat down beside the young woman.

As the carriage rolled forward Robert Robinson and the woman exchanged introductions. There was a flash of recognition in her eyes when he stated his name. “That’s an interesting coincidence,” she said, reaching into her purse. She withdrew a small book of inspirational verse, opened it to a ribbon-bookmark, and handed the book to him. “I was just reading a verse by a poet named Robert Robinson. Could it be…?”

He took the book, nodding. “Yes, I wrote these words years ago.”

“Oh, how wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Imagine! I’m sharing a carriage with the author of these very lines!”

But Robinson barely heard her. He was absorbed in the words he was reading. They were words that would one day be set to music and become a great hymn of the faith, familiar to generations of Christians:

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, Tune my heart to sing Thy grace’ Streams of mercy, never ceasing, Call for songs of loudest praise.

His eyes slipped to the bottom of the page where he read:

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it— Prone to leave the God I love; Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, Seal it for Thy courts above.

He could barely read the last few lines through the tears that brimmed in his eyes. “I wrote these words—and I’ve lived these words. ‘Prone to wander…prone to leave the God I love.’”

The woman suddenly understood. “You also wrote, ‘Here’s my heart, O take and seal it.’ You can offer your heart again to God, Mr. Robinson. It’s not too late.”

And it wasn’t too late for Robert Robinson. In that moment he turned his heart back to God.

Like Robinson and Peter and Asaph we are “prone to wander”. But, Christ is faithful to us anyway. It’s in our wanderings that we need to sing to Christ with Robinson:

Let thy goodness, like a fetter,

bind my wandering heart to thee:

prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,

prone to leave the God I love;

here's my heart, O take and seal it;

seal it for thy courts above.

Failures reveal our need for Christ as well as Christ’s love to us.

II. Christ’s Incomparable Preciousness

Having reflected on God’s goodness to him, Asaph came to the realization that he had misplaced his desires when he had looked upon the prosperity of the wicked and envied what they had. And so in verses 25 through 28 there’s an evident change that has taken place in his heart. He came to believe that he wouldn’t be truly satisfied with the trinkets of the wicked. They were fleeting pleasures. That’s when his heart turned back to God and Asaph delighted in God as a Treasure that couldn’t be matched by anything else seen or unseen.

You know, that is exactly who Jesus Christ is to those who have been saved and are still being saved today. He is a Treasure beyond comparison. Incomparable in His preciousness. And these last few verses, I think, help us comprehend three facets of Christ’s preciousness to us.

1. Christ: Our chief portion (v.25–26)

The first facet is in verses 25 and 26 where Asaph exclaims:

“Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

There are many blessings from God that Asaph could have written down that he had delighted in. But the chief blessing to Asaph, and really the only one he wrote in these verses, was God Himself.

While God’s blessings to us are innumerable and precious, we shouldn’t miss delighting in the most supreme Blessing and Treasure: Christ. That is the desire of a Christian. To prefer Christ before all other things in heaven and on earth because Christ is the Christian’s chief portion. Or to put it another way, Christ is our chief blessing.

Let me ask you this: Why do you want to go to heaven? Is it because there will be no more sickness, tears, pain, sorrows, sin, or death? Is it because you’ll have a glorified body better than your present body now? Is it because you wish to have coffee with Moses, Elijah, David, or Paul? OR to meet up with loved ones that have gone before you? Is it because you wish to walk the streets of gold and gaze upon the angels? Those things are all reasons to want to go to heaven.

But, now let me ask you this: Would you still want to go to heaven if Christ were not there? Our answer to that question reveals much about our hearts and their desires. Do we just want the good stuff Christ can give us? OR do we chiefly want Him. Oh, yes, give us those good blessings and let us meet up with the saints in heaven. But they all pale in comparison to the beauty, the grandeur, the preciousness of Jesus Christ. Those things are but shadows but Christ is the Sun.

What about on earth. Would you rather have very little and encounter many hardships in life yet have the gracious presence of Christ? OR would you rather live for an eternity here on earth will all the prosperity you can imagine and yet not have Christ?

The apostle Paul answered with the former. Whatever honor he had in this world, whatever riches he possessed, whatever gain he had… He said he counted it as loss for the sake of Christ. “Indeed,” Paul wrote to the Philippians, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, trash, literally a pile of dung, in order that I may gain Christ” That’s what Paul professed.

Isaac Watts put it this way when turning into a hymn for worship:

Were I in heaven without my God,

‘Twould be no joy to me,

And while this earth is my abode,

I long for none but Thee

Delight in Jesus Christ as your chief portion above all other treasures you may come across and even any He may bless you with.

2. Christ: Our chief peace (v. 27–28a&b)

The second facet of Christ’s preciousness to us is seen in verse 27 and in the first part of 28:

“For behold, those who are far from you shall perish; you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you. But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge…”

We should delight in Christ because He is our chief peace. Asaph took a look at the wicked and caught a glimpse of their future. Their location was “far from the Lord” and the result is that they will get no peace. They will perish, Asaph said.

That was all of us at one point, you know. We were lawbreakers and thieves; stealing the glory that God deserved for ourselves. In God’s eyes, we were wicked. God promises death and judgment to the wicked. There truly is no rest for the wicked. No peace can be had for them expect through one way. The wicked must be justified by faith. Then, and only then, can the wicked have peace with God. A peace that comes only through the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s Paul’s argument in the first verse of .

The wicked are given peace in Christ. No longer are we estranged from God and called wicked destined for punishment. Instead, we are adopted as sons and daughters. That’s only accomplished through Jesus Christ. By believing that His work on the cross was for your wickedness; to cleanse you and remove all the stains of sin. Jesus allows us to draw near to God. To experience all the blessings we never would have received apart from Him. In Christ we have an eternal peace.

Maybe some of you are still far off from God. Heed Asaph’s warning in verse 27. But look also at that first half of verse 28. It was good to him to be near God. Asaph made God his refuge. You can be near God too. Run to Christ this day for His peaceful refuge. Repent and believe the Gospel and Christ will be your chief peace too.

3. Christ: Our chief praise (v. 28c)

Finally, I want to draw our attention briefly at a third facet of Christ’s preciousness. Or rather this is more a result of Christ’s preciousness, I should say. Verse 28:

“But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works.”

As Asaph experienced God’s blessings, namely God Himself, and as he was delighting in God as his chief treasure and satisfaction of his soul, he desired to praise God.

That is the result of treasuring Christ, of delighting chiefly in Him above all other things. He is so precious to us, His work is so wonderful to us, and His faithfulness is so good to us that we must tell of His works. We love who Christ is to us so much that we want others to love Him for who He is too. And so we sing songs and hymns that reflect His beauty. We pray continually with prayers of praise and thanksgiving for His atoning work, His glorious resurrection, and interceding work on our behalf at the right hand of God the Father. We share our testimonies with anyone and everyone who will listen in hope that someone will come to know what we know. So they would become worshippers of Jesus like us….

Christ must be our chief praise. How could He not?

Conclusion

How rich a treasure we possess in Jesus Christ our Lord

His blood our ransom and defense; His glory our reward.

The sum of all created things are worthless in compare.

For our inheritance is Him whose praise angels declare.

We have a faithful Friend when we fail to be faithful; and we desperately need Him as our friend! We have a Savior who loves us literally to death, Who clasps our hand in His and guides us safely home to glory.

Whom have we in heaven but Him? Is there anything on earth we could desire worth more than Jesus? To gain Christ is to gain everything.

As we come to the Table, let us:

Delight chiefly in Jesus Christ, who is unwavering in His faithfulness and incomparable in His preciousness.

1. What is it chiefly that makes you desire to go to heaven?

2. What has helped you the most to treasure Christ above all else?

3. What has hindered you the most in treasuring Christ above all else?

4. How can you, or anyone, draw near to God? Why is it “good” () to be near God?