Text: Psalm 41:12-13
Theme: BECAUSE OF MY INTEGRITY
Psalm 41 (in its entirety)
Old Testament: Isaiah 25:6–9
Epistle: 1 Corinthians 15:1–11
Gospel: Mark 16:1–8
(A) In the Name of the Father…Amen.
(B) Psalm 41:12-13 serves as our sermon text for this morning, which reads
as follows:
Psalm 41:12–13 (NASB95)
12 As for me, You uphold me in my integrity, And You set me in Your
presence forever.
13 Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, From everlasting to everlasting.
Amen and Amen.
(C) Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus
Christ! Amen.
(D) Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, let us pray:
Gracious and Almighty God, on this Resurrection Sunday, we come before You
with hearts brimming with joy and gratitude, celebrating the victory of
Your Son, Jesus Christ, over death.
As the Apostle Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15, it is the good news of
Jesus’ death for our sins, His burial, and His resurrection on the third
day, according to the Scriptures, that stands as the cornerstone of our
faith.
Lord, we are humbled by the depth of Your love and the power of Your grace
that brought Jesus from death to life, ensuring our own resurrection and
eternal life in Him.
You have fulfilled Your Word and demonstrated Your faithfulness through the
ages, from the witnesses who first saw the risen Lord to all of us gathered
here today, united in the joy of His resurrection. Amen.
(E) Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.
Introduction
(A) David prayed to the Lord of hosts in Psalm 41, “You have upheld me
because of my integrity, and set me in Your presence forever. Blessed be
the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting! Amen and
Amen.”
(1) Integrity means “whole and undivided.”
(A) Integrity indicates original, unblemished condition.
(1) Because integrity means “whole, original, and unblemished,” the word
also can be used to indicate beautiful qualities such as:
(a) honesty,
(b) faithfulness,
(c) purity,
(d) reliability,
(e) uprightness,
(f) honor,
(g) incorruptibility,
(h) forthrightness,
(i) and other noble virtues.
(B) “Because of my integrity.”
(1) David wrote those words, but NOT because he wanted to sing and pray
them all by himself.
(a) David wrote Psalm 41 because he wanted you and I to sing and pray
together with him.
(b) He wanted YOU and I to say to God in sincerity and truth,:
(1) “You have upheld me[, O Lord,] because of my integrity.”
(2) Can you bring yourself to do that?
(C) God, the living God, provided that David’s words be written into His
Holy Scriptures.
(1) David’s words are in the Scriptures because the Lord your God wants you
also to pray with all honesty:
(a) “You have upheld me[, O Lord,] because of my integrity.”
(b) Can you do it?
(D) Can you honestly join with David in saying to God:
(1) “You have upheld me[, O Lord,] because of my integrity”?
(a) The answer is YES!
(b) Yes because you are the baptized child of Christ and because Christ is
risen!
(c) He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
(d) The resurrection of our Lord has guaranteed that your answer is indeed
YES, even though you might feel tempted to think that your answer should be
NO.
(E) “Because of my integrity.”
(1) Everybody wants to have integrity, but nobody actually has it—at least,
not in the original, main sense of the word.
(a) Our loss of integrity was originally Adam and Eve’s fault and only
later became ours.
(2) Integrity means “whole and undivided.”
(a) Integrity indicates an original, unblemished condition.
(b) Integrity also can be used to indicate such beautiful qualities as
honesty, faithfulness, and purity.
(c) We all want to be described with such wonderful words and, to a certain
extent, we all can be—but only to a certain extent.
(F) Do you ever hesitate to pray to the Lord:
(1) “You have upheld me because of my integrity”?
(a) Perhaps you do not think all the qualities of integrity rightly
describe you; at least, not all of the time.
(b) Perhaps you can see a different set of qualities at work inside
yourself:
(1) NOT whole and undivided, but sometimes doubleminded (James 1:8) and
other times doubtful (Matthew 14:31).
(2) NOT in original, unblemished condition, but chipped or broken, stained
with sin, hampered by the memory of wrongdoing, and marked with regret.
(3) Honest, but not always;
(4) true and faithful, but only when no temptation is present;
(5) mostly reliable and fairly honorable and hopefully incorruptible, but
nobody’s perfect!
(G) Such realizations might make it feel a little brazen or dishonest for
us to pray David’s words:
(1) “You have upheld me because of my integrity.”
(a) We all want to have integrity.
(b) In most cases, any of us would gladly describe ourselves as having
integrity, but we probably would NOT want to talk that way in the presence
of God for He knows our hearts (Luke 16:15).
(c) He knows where the integrity falls apart.
(d) Perhaps it is wisest and best to mumble Psalm 41 when it states, “You
have upheld me because of my integrity,” or to pray those words with the
thought that they probably refer to someone else but NOT so much to you or
me.
(H) Why then did David write these words in Psalm 41?
(1) David wrote Psalm 41 because he wanted us to sing and pray together
with him.
(2) David’s words are in the Scriptures because the Lord our God also wants
us to pray those words together with David.
(2) “You have upheld me because of my integrity.”
(A) Throughout the season of Lent, the sermons and our worship services
have focused upon Psalm 41.
(B) There have been two points of emphasis as we focused on Psalm 41:
(1) In one way or another, all of God’s Psalms—including Psalm 41—speak
about our Lord and His work of salvation on our behalf (Luke 24:44).
(a) That is why God included the Psalms in His Scriptures;
(b) They all “bear witness,” said Jesus, “about Me” (John 5:39).
(2) Because the Psalms are about Jesus, they are also about you.
(a) You are, after all, the baptized of Christ.
(b) When you were baptized:
(1) you miraculously entered into Christ’s holy body (Romans 12:5; 1
Corinthians 1:30) just as surely as He entered yours (John 14:20; Galatians
2:20).
(2) And Christ is risen! (He is risen, indeed!) Alleluia!
(3) You and your risen Christ are now joined together as one flesh (1
Corinthians 6:17; Ephesians 5:32).
(4) “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew
19:6).
(C) What does our union with Christ indicate?
(1) It indicates that, when Jesus of Nazareth died upon His cross, you and
I and all the baptized of Christ died there with Him.
(a) Baptism is why Paul could say, and why we each can say with Paul:
(1) “I have been crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20).
(b) In addition to that, Baptism also indicates that, when Jesus rose from
the dead, God the Father also:
(1) “raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in
Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6).
(2) At your Baptism,
(a) your Lord’s perfection became yours, and your sins became His (1 Peter
2:24);
(b) His strength became yours, and your weakness became His (2 Corinthians
12:8–9);
(c) His life became yours, and your death became His (Romans 6:4); and
(d) His perfect and unblemished integrity became yours, and any lack of
integrity in you became His
(D) You are now “partakers of the divine nature,” as Peter declares in his
second epistle (2 Peter 1:4).
(1) Because of your participation in the divine nature of Christ in and
through your Baptism, every Scripture passage that speaks about Jesus now
also speaks about you.
(2) In all of human history, only Christ Jesus, our Lord, could pray to His
Father on the basis of His own merit:
(a) “You have upheld Me because of My integrity.”
(3) But Jesus has now joined Himself to you.
(a) In that miraculous joining, whatever the Scriptures say about Jesus can
now also be said, in all faithfulness and honesty, about you:
(1) “You have upheld me because of my integrity.”
(3) Integrity means “whole and undivided.”
(A) Integrity means “in the original, unblemished condition.”
(1) Integrity indicates such qualities as:
(a) honesty,
(b) faithfulness,
(c) purity,
(d) reliability,
(e) uprightness,
(f) honor,
(g) incorruptibility,
(h) and forthrightness.
(i) Those qualities all describe Jesus, the One who was crucified (1
Corinthians 1:23).
(j) Because of our Lord’s personal integrity (Acts 2:24), “God raised Him
up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for Him to be
held by it.”
(B) As you heard in today’s Gospel these words:
Mark 16:1–6 (NASB95)
1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James,
and Salome, bought spices, so that they might come and anoint Him.
2 Very early on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb when the
sun had risen.
3 They were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us
from the entrance of the tomb?”
4 Looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away, although it was
extremely large.
5 Entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting at the right, wearing a
white robe; and they were amazed.
6 And he said to them, “Do not be amazed; you are looking for Jesus the
Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen; He is not here; behold,
here is the place where they laid Him.
(4) By the power of His death and in the victory of His resurrection, Jesus
has now given all of His integrity to you so that His perfect integrity may
be yours forever!
(A) Our Lord’s personal integrity has been delivered to you in the water of
Baptism, which joined you to both His death and His resurrection (Romans
6:3–5).
(B) Our Lord’s personal integrity has miraculously entered into your heart
and mind through the proclamation of the Gospel.
(C) Our Lord’s integrity likewise enters your mouth and fills your entire
body when you participate in the blessed Sacrament of the Altar.
(1) With confidence, we can proclaim that yes, Christ lives—and we with
Him—as we hear in Romans 6:9:
Romans 6:9 (NASB95)
9 knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die
again; death no longer is master over Him.
(D) Our Lord’s personal integrity, given personally to you, is the power by
which you now can pray to the Lord, with all godliness and honesty:“
(1) You have upheld me because of my integrity.”
(2) That same integrity, poured out by our God, is the only reason why I
can likewise pray with you.
Conclusion
(A) King David did NOT rely upon his own integrity when he prayed.
(1) King David relied upon the integrity of his Christ, who was both
David’s Son and David’s Lord.
(2) You and I do NOT and cannot rely upon our own integrity any more than
David did.
(3) David’s Son was born also to us (Luke 2:11).
(4) David’s Lord died also for us.
(5) David’s prayer is therefore our prayer, and David’s rejoicing in
eternity is likewise our rejoicing, both now and forever:
(A) “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to
everlasting! Amen and Amen.”
(B) Why? Because Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed!) Alleluia! Amen.
(B) Let us pray:
Lord, as we proclaim with Paul that Your grace towards us has not been in
vain, may we, too, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in Your work,
knowing that in the Lord, our labor is not in vain.
Empower us by Your Spirit to bear witness to the resurrection of Jesus,
living as people of hope, transformed by the reality of the empty tomb.
On this glorious day, help us to grasp the magnitude of what it means to
say, “Christ has risen indeed!”
May this truth renew our minds, inspire our hearts, and guide our actions.
Let the joy of Easter not just be a momentary celebration but a lasting
reality in our lives, shaping us to be bearers of Your light and love in a
world that so desperately needs the hope of the risen Christ.
In the mighty power of the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit, we pray. Amen.
(C) The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts
and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
(D) Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.
(E) In the Name of the Father…Amen.