Christ Our Anchor (Psalm 16)

Sermon for MHBC (16 January 2022). You can watch or listen on Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, or our website. Live at 11:00am on Sundays. Also available as a podcast here or by searching “Monument Heights Baptist Church” in your favorite podcast app.

Do you want stability in this life? Do you want assurance in the face of suffering and death? Do you want pleasure and happiness in an anxious and excessive world? How can we find those things?

If you were a Christian in the first three hundred years after Jesus’s resurrection, you often faced severe persecution. In the Roman Empire, death was feared very much like our culture. Romans built their graveyards underground. These are called catacombs. Romans wouldn’t go down there; they didn’t want to think about death. They would send slaves down there. Christians soon found that they could meet there without opposition. Of course, Christians didn’t fear death because Jesus conquered death. Christians also buried their dead there. They would sometimes draw symbols on the walls. One especially common symbol for early Christians was an anchor. The anchor was meaningful because it represented Christ’s ability to anchor them in the midst of persecution. Michael Card says, “The first century symbol wasn’t the cross; it was the anchor. If I’m a first century Christian and I’m hiding in the catacombs and three of my best friends have just been thrown to the lions or burned at the stake, or crucified and set ablaze as torches at one of [Emperor] Nero’s garden parties, the symbol that most encourages me in my faith is the anchor. When I see it, I’m reminded that Jesus is my anchor.” This psalm tells us that Christ anchors our life.

One helpful practice in personal Bible reading is to ask: Where does this passage make me uncomfortable? Where am I being challenged? If we are reading Scripture and finding ourselves often saying, “Yes, I do that,” or “Yep, I agree; no challenge here,” or “So-and-so should really hear this passage,” then we are either not reading Scripture carefully enough or we are not paying enough attention to our own heart because we are blinded by pride.

As I read this passage, I think it’s a gut-punch from the very beginning. “Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” Here’s why it’s a gut-punch. I don’t take refuge in God. I find my refuge in good health or stable finances or family or my job or in my own ability to reason. All of these represent false refuges. They all represent ways I try to anchor my life from getting swept away by the storms of life.

Some may find refuge in alcohol or drugs. The fantasy worlds of television can be a refuge. Or any of the examples I just gave such as health, family, self-reliance, or stable finances may be areas where you, too, seek refuge.

How many of you have prayed a prayer that God didn’t answer? Were you mad at God? Disappointed? I’ve been angry about unanswered prayers. I’ve been rebellious. I’ve quit praying because it seems pointless. I’ve quit reading Scripture because I’m cynical. Do you see that all of that is a failure to take refuge in God?

The typical human response is to seek refuge elsewhere. It is not typical for us to take refuge in the Lord, even though we were made to do nothing else. Look at v. 4.* Idolatry is more enticing than worshiping the living God. We are more passionate and energized in our idol worship than in our worship of the Lord. We would rather chase false gods than take refuge in the living God. Don’t we see this all the time in our church?

Andreas von Karlstadt wrote: “Love of God is a strong and intense longing for God; the soul does not find itself in this state, nor is it inclined to this.” In other words, our natural tendency is not to love God, but to love other things. That should be a gut-punch for all of us this morning because it’s true of all of us whether we recognize it or not. We seldom delight ourselves in the Lord as we should; we anchor our lives in all sorts of things outside of Jesus.

And that’s precisely the problem when we come to this psalm. Notice the first several verses. Verse 1: “in you I take refuge.” Verse 2: “I have no good apart from you.” Verse 3: “I delight in your people.” Verse 5: “The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup.” My food and my drink. Everything I need for survival. Verse 6: “I have a beautiful inheritance.” That inheritance is God himself. Derek Kidner writes in his commentary on the psalms: “Almost every verse in this half of the psalm speaks of some aspect of single-mindedness: i.e. of throwing in one’s lot with God in the realms of one’s security.” Single-mindedness. Focus. Betting on the Lord entirely. Now how many of us have such focus?

While this isn’t natural, we were made for nothing less. Listen to what Augustine writes in the first paragraph of his Confessions. “Yet to praise you is the desire of every human being.” Humans “long to extol you.” You give “us delight in glorifying you, because you made us with yourself as our goal, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”^[1]

Do you see the problem? We were made to find our refuge in the Lord, but our corrupt nature compels us to search everywhere else.

So what do we do? Now as always, this isn’t a psalm telling us to try harder. We must listen for the voice of Christ. Only he can speak these words without falsehood. Only Christ lives in perfect communion with the Father. Only Christ has the single-mindedness we see in this psalm. And it is only by looking to Christ and depending on him that you and I have any hope of sharing in the focused life depicted in this psalm.

It is not just Jesus’s death that wins our salvation. It is his obedient life—his perfect love of God and neighbor. Whereas Adam sought to find refuge elsewhere in the garden, Jesus constantly rests in the Father. And he did this for us. Christ already possessed eternal life, but he came to fulfill the law so that you and I might have eternal life, so that you and I would no longer be guilty of Adam’s failure.

This means that Christ didn’t just set us free from eternal death, but he set us free from a life looking for refuge everywhere else. Look how Paul explains it in Galatians 4:3–5:

³ And that’s the way it was with us before Christ came. We were like children; we were slaves to the basic spiritual principles of this world. ⁴ But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law. ⁵ God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children.

So we were slaves to these basic principles of this world, but Jesus who was born under the law frees us from it. Look how Paul concludes this argument.

⁸ Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. ⁹ But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more? ¹⁰ You observe days and months and seasons and years!

Here’s his point. We are compelled to look for refuge in all the wrong places. And this is especially true of religious people who think that my observing religious days as in v. 10 or keeping some religious rules, we will please God. We make themselves and our efforts a refuge. But remember only one has pleased God. That is Jesus Christ. He is our obedience and righteousness. Where are you tempted to run for refuge?

The remedy to our problem—that we seek refuge in the wrong places—is to depend on Christ. This is the very meaning of refuge isn’t it? We can’t do it for ourselves. The answer is not that you and I need to change our life and start following rules. The answer is not to try really really hard to love God. The answer is that you and I need to give up our self-reliance and go to Christ, our only refuge, the anchor for our life. Calvin once wrote: “[W]hen we come before God, we must lay aside all presumption…. [O]ur obedience in itself is nothing and is not worthy of any reward.” Everything about the gospel runs up against our pride because it tells us we can’t do it.

Listen carefully. If you wish to find stability in this life, if you desire assurance in the face of suffering and death, if you want pleasure and happiness in an anxious and excessive world, you will only find it in Christ who both lived and died for us. He alone is our refuge. He alone will anchor our life. That’s because, as we see in v. 10, death could not hold him. He is alive. Only in him will we be able to say with v. 11: “in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Chris Rice wrote a hymn that summarizes this well. Here’s the first verse:

Weak and wounded sinner // Lost and left to die
O, raise your head // for love is passing by
Come to Jesus // Come to Jesus // Come to Jesus and live!

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[1] Confessions, trans. Sarah Ruden, 1.1.