“Lord, you alone are my inheritance, my cup of blessing. You guard all that is mine. The land you have given me is a pleasant land. What a wonderful inheritance!”
Psalm 16:5-6 NLT
A mixture of allegorical events this morning? What was David thinking about? The Israelites were indeed given a pleasant land by God, and David, as king, would have inherited its domain from the previous king, Saul. There was a time when David could even relax a bit, secure that God was looking out for him – 2 Samuel 7:1, “When King David was settled in his palace and the Lord had given him rest from all the surrounding enemies”. And we can just imagine David getting up in the morning and looking out over the land around him, feeling blessed by God’s provision. It was indeed a “wonderful inheritance” and one promised to Moses during his blazing bush encounter with God. God said to Moses, “So I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into their own fertile and spacious land. It is a land flowing with milk and honey—the land where the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites now live” (Exodus 3:8).
But David also looked to God as his spiritual inheritance. In a sense He was, and is, everyone’s inheritance – well, for believers that is. We have come to know God because of an “inheritance” granted us through His Word, the Bible, and word of mouth by faithful servants who have shared the Gospel with us. David came to know God more directly, through spending long hours with his harp and flute watching his father’s sheep. And praise welled up inside David, as he declared that God was his “cup of blessing”.
Do we pilgrims agree with David, and similarly declare that God has indeed blessed us, and, more, is our “pleasant land”? Do we enjoy our relationship with God? Or is it something we do by rote, going through religious motions on a Sunday, our minds dwelling on the roast dinner cooking in the oven at home? I’m sure that anyone reading this today knows that they are blessed by God and they too find within them a well of praise and worship, even a hint of excitement perhaps, as they drink the cup full of God’s blessings. To a worldly person, they have no idea of the blessings that could be waiting for them if they only opened the door into a relationship with God. The demands placed upon someone today, the busyness, the emotional draining, the struggle to fund their lives – all of this conspires to blind a person’s eyes to the reality that in a corner of their lives is a gateway into a new life. A life with God. An inheritance that is theirs for the asking. The invitation to this new life can often be seen in the wayside pulpits located outside churches, or even on the side of buses. Imagine receiving a letter one day, asking you to collect your inheritance from a lawyer somewhere, but not even bothering to turn up to find out what it is. Such is the response from people today, and in the process they are missing out on the same “cup of blessing” that David enjoyed, a cup that never runs dry.
And of course we remember that the “wonderful inheritance” we enjoy is not just for this life on earth. There will be a day when we find that much of what we glimpsed and yearned for will burst into an amazing panorama of God and all that He is, in a place we call Heaven. We have an “inheritance” that is without end and without limit.
Paul wrote, “Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20). We believers have the potential to do mighty things for God with the resources that He has made available to us in the “pleasant land” located just a prayer away. We might not feel we have much power, as the demands of life drain us. We might not even believe that this verse is meant for us, preferring to think that it is only there for the real saints. But Paul wrote something profound and life changing about the “inheritance” we have available to us. Let us pause and reach out to God today, even daring to believe that His “cup of blessing” is limitless and will never run dry.
Dear Father God. You are the Source of all that is good in the land where You have placed us. Thank You for the many blessings poured out upon us. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 