In Search of the Good Life
So at the start this morning I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to take a few seconds and really think about it. Use your imagination and try to picture this. Here’s the question: What is the “good life”?
I want to propose to you that whether you’ve thought about it in detail or not, you have a vision of the good life and it is the most dominant and consistent force for why you do what you do.
The “good life” for each of us is how we envision the ideal picture of human flourishing. It’s what we think when we imagine life lived well. The good life is an image, a picture, that’s held out in front of us as a goal, and believe it or not, everything we love and every action we take is directed toward achieving that goal, because there is where we can be happy. The good life is what we spend our entire lives pursuing.
And Psalm 73 is actually all about that pursuit, and I think there are some lessons here for us.
I think the pursuit of the good life in Psalm 73 teaches us something for our own pursuit, and what I’d like to do this morning is show you three major lessons here that are absolutely necessary. If the pursuit of the good life is like a journey, these are three lessons/milestones that must be part of that journey — and I mean this: we will never experience the good life without these three things.
You can decide later if you agree with that but I’m preaching under that conviction, and I need God’s help. So let’s pray again and get started:
Father in heaven, please do now what only you can. Work in our hearts by the power of your Holy Spirit to make them open and receptive to you. Break the enchantment of our idols. Silence the distractions of our anxieties. Defeat the schemes of our enemy. We are a people in need of change, and in this moment, by your grace, we surrender to your will. We pray: do whatever you want, for your glory. In Jesus’s name, amen.
So, here we go: in Psalm 73, in pursuit of the good life, we learn we must …
1) Recognize our broken perspective (verses 1–15).
Look at verse 1.
Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled,
my steps had nearly slipped.
Remember “The prayers of David are ended,” we saw that last week. This is “A Psalm of Asaph” — and nobody really cares who he is. We can read about Asaph in Kings and Chronicles; he was a Levite, a worship leader, and there are 12 psalms connected to him — but nobody names their kid “Asaph.” By all accounts Asaph is a stand-in for the average Israelite. I’m just gonna call him “the psalmist.” He’s meant to be the everyman — and a lot of us can get where he’s coming from here, because here’s his situation: he knows the truth about God but he doesn’t think it applies to him.
He says “God is good.” He knows that. God is good to Israel. God is good to the pure in heart. All that is true. But it’s not for him, verse 2. He sees himself as an unfortunate exception. He’s an outlier. He’s able to think and say right things about God — he goes to church — but he feels like he’s on the outside looking in … and sometimes we can feel that way.
Sometimes it can feel like everybody else is okay but me. Because we’re too complicated. We’re always kind of on the brink of losing it. Almost stumbled. Nearly slipped. We understand what he’s saying in verse 2.
But he explains in verse 3 that the reason for his struggle was because he was “envious of the arrogant.” He saw the prosperity of the wicked and he wished he had what they did.
And although he’s speaking in past tense about a way he used to be, after verse 3 it’s like he gets swept back up in that whirlwind of complaint. He goes on to describe the wicked in verses 4–12, and what he says is not necessarily untrue, but it is embellished. He’s emotional here. This is what it feels like.
He says the wicked have no pangs until death. Really? They have no trouble at all?
Their car never breaks down. Their kids never get hurt. Their team never loses. Their grass is always green and lush and awesome. They don’t have any of the problems we normal folks do, and they’re wicked. Everything goes right for them, and they hurt people! And worst of all is that they shake their fist at God! They strut around like God does not exist. Verse 12 concludes:
“Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches.”
Things just get better and better for the wicked, but things get worse and worse for the righteous — and the psalmist says it’s not fair.
At His Lowest
And in verse 13 we can track with the spiral that’s happening here. The psalmist says he has lived righteously — he’s kept his heart clean, he’s washed his hands, he’s done what God wanted — but he says, it’s been all in vain.
And this is, I think, his lowest moment. We hear his despair. He says it’s all pointless. The wicked flourish and the righteous suffer and everything is stupid.
This is rock-bottom, but in verse 15 he comes to, and he speaks again as if he’s looking back at the past, and he says: “If I had said, ‘I will speak thus,’ I would have betrayed the generation of your children.”
In other words, in verse 15 the psalmist has found enough footing to look back at his time of struggle, realize he was off, and he’s glad he didn’t express it to everybody. In verse 15 he’s saying: If I had tweeted the stuff that went through my mind in the midst of my struggle I would have messed up a lot of people.
He was on the edge of deconstructing and he says: it’s a good thing he didn’t start a blog about it. Because he would have led others astray. Which means this: he now is admitting that he was not thinking straight. He recognizes that he had a broken perspective.
And this is absolutely necessary in our pursuit of the good life. It’s part of honest self-understanding. Sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes our frame of reality is skewed.
Second Best Place
And get this: if the best place is to not be there — if the best place is to not have a broken perspective, then the second best place is to have a broken perspective and know it. The worst place is to have a broken perspective and be oblivious to it.
The worst place is to say in verse 13 that everything is pointless and to not know you’re wrong. So in verse 15 the psalmist is at the second best place, and here’s the thing:
when it comes to our growth in self-understanding — when it comes to learning more about how we’re shaped to see reality and how we engage relationships — the more we get honest about ourselves, we cannot be afraid of second best place.
Because when we’re honest about ourselves, we’re going to find areas of brokenness in our stories at a pace that change cannot match. We have to be okay with that. We have to be okay that “he’s still working on me.” We still have room to grow and it won’t happen overnight.
There are times when our perspective is broken, and in pursuit of the good life, the first thing we need to do is to recognize that.
Here’s the second lesson: in pursuit of the good life, we must:
2) Remember that God is real (verses 16–24).
Verse 16,
“But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task.”
Recognizing your broken perspective is a lot to take in. And the hardest part is knowing that you’re not completely off — you’re wrong about some things but not everything. The wicked do prosper and the righteous do suffer — that’s an observation, and it’s one that God’s people have been able to make over centuries, and we could come up with examples today. But if we were to be more precise we’d say: some of the wicked prosper for now, and some of the righteous suffer for now, and there is more to the story.
And to say that there’s more to the story is to say there is another perspective, and that perspective, the one we need, is God’s perspective. And that’s what happens in verse 17.
This whole thing is a mess. It’s overwhelming and confusing and frustrating, and the psalmist is tired of it, verse 17, until I went to the sanctuary of God …
The sanctuary of God is the place of God’s presence. In the Old Testament, remember God was the Holy One of Israel who dwelled in their midst, in the heart of the temple, in his sanctuary, and to be in God’s sanctuary was to be close to God.
So the psalmist, who is a guy like us, when he went close to God that’s when he remembered that God is real.
If distance leads to distortion, closeness leads to clarity. To be close to God, to remember God’s realness, then, moves us beyond shallow acknowledgement and empty words, but this is where we begin to see everything in light of him. Everything in reality, our every way of thinking and seeing and moving, everything now has God always at the center. When we remember that God is real, we remember that he sees it all and we want to know: What does he think? What has he said?
Look: I don’t want to ever think about a single thing until I remember that God is real. Which is why, for me, the first thing I do in the morning is hurry to his Word. I don’t need to know the headlines. I don’t need to check my calendar. I don’t need to peek at my email. I wake up everyday as a broken man prone to broken perspective and I need to hear from God. I need to remember that God is real — so I wanna get in on his praise and open my heart to his will and draw near to his presence and walk in the joy of his salvation.
And when we’re close to him, when we remember him, that’s when we see rightly to repent sincerely and repent sincerely to see rightly. That’s what’s going on in verses 18–21.
Getting Honest with God
When the psalmist remembered God is when he discerned the end of the wicked. He got the fuller story. Truly God will judge the wicked — he won’t let them stand, he’ll make them fall to ruin, he’ll destroy them and sweep them away, and then their present prosperity will seem like a faint dream.
Look at verse 21. This is where he looks back on his broken perspective, and he repents. He’s been honest with himself and now he gets honest with God. Verse 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…”
Y’all ever been honest with God like that?
God, I was an idiot. God, I was wrong, and I was stubborn about it. My heart was so closed off to you that I was like a beast. I was acting like an animal.
I can assure you: you will never be able to get honest with God like this unless you know that he loves you.
When God comes to us and asks us, like he asked Adam, “Where are you?” — which, by the way, God does that. If we’re attentive to God’s presence, if we’re aware of his realness, everyday he asks us, “Where are you?” And when he wants to know where we are, we don’t have to hide.
We don’t have to hide from God because our guilt and our shame has been overcome. That’s the difference Jesus makes. Jesus took our fear and guilt and shame upon himself, and when he died on the cross in our place, he put to death everything that keeps us from God. Everything about our lives that would make us want to hide from God, Jesus took that. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). God is now our Father, and he loves us. We can be honest with him.
And that’s when we break through to hope.
The End of the Story
Yeah, I was wrong. I’ve been a mess. But verse 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.”
Held. Guided. Received.
There’s a contrast here to the wicked described in the previous verses. Everybody look at verse 17. See that last word there, “end.” Well in the Hebrew that word “end” in verse 17 and the word “afterward” in verse 24 sound the same. So the psalmist is saying: in the end, the wicked are destroyed, but in the end, I am received to glory.
This is the right perspective. And he doesn’t just see the fuller story, he sees the end of the story.
In the book The Pilgrim’s Progress (which a few of us have been reading this summer) there’s this scene when Christian is at this place called the Palace Beautiful and he talking with some other pilgrims about how he became Christian. He tells them about how he was converted and became a new person, and they ask him if he ever has to deal with his old way of seeing. Are there times when he still has to bear with his broken perspective?
And he says, All the time.
And they say, Well, are there any moments when “those things are vanquished which at other times are your Perplexity?” — How do you overcome the broken perspective so engrained in your mind in order for you to see rightly?
And Christian says, The times are more seldom than I’d like, “but they are to me Golden Hours.” And one way he says he gets there, to those Golden Hours, to that right perspective, is “when my thoughts wax warm about whither I am going, that will do it.”
In other words, Christian sees rightly when he thinks about the end of the story. Hey, don’t forget where we’re going.
In Psalm 73, like Christian, the psalmist knows where all this is headed:
I am held by God; I am guided by God; I will be received by God. I know the end of the story!
And we remember the end of the story because we see rightly, because we’ve been honest with God, because we remember that God is real.
That’s our second lesson here in pursuit of the good life. Here’s the third lesson. We learn we must:
3) Reorder our heart’s affections (verses 25–28).
The psalmist is now faced with ultimate reality, and in verses 25–28, he sees things as clearly as they could be seen this side of heaven. Derek Kidner, one of my favorite commentators on the Psalms, says that this passage is “unsurpassed, brief as it is, in the record of man’s response to God.” The psalmist is here in a “Golden Hour” and the affections of his heart are put in order.
Another word for our affections is our loves. Love is the action of the heart. We love from our hearts, and the ancients of church history would tell us that our fundamental problem as sinners is that our hearts are flawed — we have what’s called “disordered affections” — which means we tend to love the wrong things in the wrong way. In other words, we love lesser things more than God.
But that’s not what’s going on here. What we see happening in verse 25 is what Saint Augustine in the fourth century called a well-ordered heart — it’s “to love the right thing, to the right degree, in the right way, and with the right kind of love.”
The psalmist says to God, Whom have I in heaven but you? There is nothing on earth I desire besides you.
This is a man whose searching has stopped. He has found his ultimate goal — what Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century describes as “that goal we pursue that so fulfills our desire as to leave nothing else to be desired.”
No more idols — they will not do. All the substitutes are seen for the sham they are. Give me God, he says. Give me God. I want him. Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also, the body they may kill, give me God.
Give me God, says the worthy disciple, not because he loves father or mother or son or daughter less, but because he loves God more. More than his comfort, more than his career, more than his capabilities — he loves God more, with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might … which he knows is feeble.
God, whom have I in heaven but you? … And one of the kids got poop everywhere, and another kid found a dead mouse outside and brought it in the kitchen, and the basement is leaking again, and I didn’t sleep well last night — can God be this for us in real life? Yes. And he must be, because real life is all we have here. That’s the honesty of verse 26.
My flesh and my heart may fail — and it will: I’m a broken man, I get it wrong sometimes, I will probably die one day — but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. God is my everything, truly.
What do I have that I did not receive from him, including my very life? If then I received even my very life from him how could I not love him more than life itself? For what is life without him? What good would life be apart from his presence?
For behold, verse 27, those who are far from you shall perish; you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.
Hell is that, Moses knew, which is why he said, God, if you don’t go with us, don’t let us go. True life is to be with God, and everlasting life is to be with God forever. Many people spend everything they’ve got running from him, in search of the good life. All those things about the wicked that I envied, none of those things really matter. That’s not what I want. But for me it is good to be near God. Or another way to say it, verse 28, “But for me the nearness of God is my good…”
The nearness of God is the good life.
And God is not merely one piece of the puzzle; it’s not a bunch of stuff which also includes God; Jesus is not the chaplain of the American Dream.
God is the Ultimate Good and to have him leaves nothing else to be desired, but now all other things are subordinate to him and desired for his sake. Augustine put it like this: “He loves God too little, who loves anything together with God, which he loves not for God’s sake.”
See, this is a reordering of our heart’s affections.
God is first and highest, and everything else is directed toward him. The good life is to have God, and to have all other things Godward.
That is the true ideal picture of human flourishing.
That is the goal.
And that’s actually what you’re looking for.
That’s what we really want.
And I’m not telling you this as a law for you to attain. Reordering your heart’s affections does not mean “try harder, do better, improve your life” — No — it means come rest. Rest. Find in God your refuge, the end of your searching.
The nearness of God is our good.
And so in the pursuit of him, we recognize our broken perspective, we remember that God is real, and we reorder the affections of our heart to put him first … and we hope for the day when our experience of his presence is uninterrupted and unending. Not just a Golden Hour, but a Golden Eternity.
And that’s what brings us to this Table.
The Table
This is a table of fellowship. We come here to remember that Jesus died for us, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, to be with God forever.
There is a bigger feast that awaits us, and this little meal points us there. If ever we should lose our way, if ever we might deny his grace, this table reminds us of the price he paid for us to be with God. This table reminds us where we’re going.
So if you trust in Jesus this morning, if the nearness of God is your good, come eat and drink with us. If you don’t yet trust in Jesus, you must be exhausted. Trust him today.
