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The sermon presents Psalm 17:15 as the believer’s confident expectation of beholding God’s face and awakening in Christ’s likeness. Heaven is portrayed as the fulfillment of every holy longing, bringing complete satisfaction to the whole person through resurrection and glorification. Earthly prosperity and mortality are temporary, while Christ’s final judgment will divide humanity into the righteous and the wicked. Sinners are therefore urged to cast themselves on Christ and His promise, trusting Him alone for mercy and salvation.
Theological center: Salvation is found by faith in Christ, whose saving work culminates in resurrection, glorification, the vision of God, and final blessedness.
Applications: Live for future glory · Cast yourself on Christ · Come to Christ for mercy · Consider eternal satisfaction
Primary texts: Psalm 17:15 · Matthew 25:34
“As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied, when I awake with thy likeness.” Psalm 17:15 IT would be difficult to say to which the Gospel owes most to its friends or to its enemies. It is true that by the help of God, its friends have done much for it. They have preached it in foreign lands, they have dared death, they have laughed to scorn the terrors of the grave, they have ventured all things for Christ, and so have glorified the doctrine they believed. But the enemies of Christ, unwittingly, have done no little, for when they have persecuted Christ’s servants, they have scattered them abroad, so that they have gone everywhere preaching the Word. Yea, when they have trampled upon the Gospel, like a certain herb we read of in medicine, it has grown all the faster, and if we refer to the pages of sacred writ, how very many precious portions of it do we owe, under God, to the enemies of the cross of Christ! Jesus Christ would never have preached many of His discourses had not His foes compelled Him to answer them. Had they not brought objections, we should not have heard the sweet sentences in which He replied. So with the book of Psalms—had not David been sorely tried by enemies, had not the foemen shot their arrows at him, had they not attempted to malign and blast his character, had they not deeply distressed him and made him cry out in misery, we should have missed many of those precious experiential utterances we here find, much of that holy song which he penned after his deliverance and very much of that glorious statement of his trust in the infallible God We should have lost all this had it not been wrung from him by the iron hand of anguish. Had it not been for David’s enemies, he would not have penned his Psalms. But when hunted like a partridge on the mountains, when driven like the timid roe before the hunter’s dogs, he waited for a while, bathed his sides in the brooks of Siloa and panting on the hilltop a little, he breathed the air of heaven and stood and rested his weary limbs. Then was it that he gave honor to God. Then it was he shouted aloud to that mighty JEHOVAH, who for him had gotten the victory. This sentence follows a description of the great troubles which the wicked bring upon the righteous, wherein he consoles himself with the hope of future bliss. “As for me,” says the patriarch, casting his eyes aloft—“As for me,” said the hunted chieftain of the caves of Engedi—“As for me,” says the once shepherd boy, who was soon to wear a royal diadem—“As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness; I s…