Psalm 1 - Like A Tree Planted Series

We are beginning a new series called Sermon in the Psalms. What is nice about the Psalms is they lend themselves very well to what is called topical preaching. We can focus on specific topics and each sermon pretty much stands alone. That is one of the reasons for studying the book of Psalms. In addition to that, Psalms is a book that exposes a wide variety of emotions, a wide variety of human behavior. We see the psalm writers being troubled by circumstances and the emotions that follow. We see their fear. We see them crying out in agony to the Lord, and we see them expressing thanksgiving and praise to the Lord when the Lord delivers them. And as we’ll see in today’s Psalm, Psalm 1, we see that the Psalms contain a lot of good wisdom for living a good, practical, and godly life. We are going to read through Psalm 1:1 all the way through the Psalm down to verse 6. (Scripture read here.)

As I implied, the Psalms have different themes. This one actually is a theme of wisdom because it contains very wise and practical advice about the benefits of avoiding the world in many ways and embracing God, specifically, the law of God. As you see in this Psalm, it starts out with a very familiar word called blessed. “Blessed is the man.” When we think about the word blessed, blessed is more of a spiritual term but it means a lot of things. It is very difficult to pin down the word blessed. Many of us say it almost on a daily basis. When somebody sneezes what do we say? God bless you. I personally don’t like saying God bless you. To me I know some of the origins of the phrase and I don’t like to say it. If somebody says God bless you, I go back to the idea that in the olden days what people thought was when you sneezed you were actually giving up a part of your spirit and by putting a blessing on that person you were sealing off the nose and the mouth so an evil spirit cannot come in and take the place. I don’t usually say God bless you except if Debbie sneezes, and she gets mad if I don’t so I do it out of courtesy anyway. So we know the word blessed. It is difficult to pin down its meaning. I think the closest word in the English language would be happy but happy really doesn’t embrace the whole idea of blessing. Really, it is a happiness that is contingent on ongoing communion with God. That is the idea. It really kind of has the idea of bliss or peace but it is not contingent on circumstances. We think about the word happiness. Most of the time it is contingent on circumstance. If you are having a good day, you are happy. If you are having a bad day, you are sad. The word blessedness is not contingent on circumstances. As Jesus would say, the worse the circumstance, the more you are blessed. In fact, he writes in Matthew 5:11 “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.” I suspect that if anybody has been insulted or somehow someone spoke a lie about them this week in work, they are not saying yippee I am blessed. Does anybody do that? Why not? Because you don’t like it. The key phrase here is Jesus says “because of me.” In other words when people insult you, persecute you, and say bad things about you simply because you are trying to live out the Christian life, you are blessed because you are participating in the suffering of Christ. You are lining up with your identity in Christ. To be honest, I don’t think you can be a Christian and grow in your faith unless you experience some of these things. Unless you occasionally have somebody that insults you for your faith, possibly persecutes you, or even spreads a malicious lie about you. What you are doing is exposing the darkness. You are being the light in that particular environment.

Anyways, it is very difficult to pin down the word blessed. In this particular passage in Psalm 1, it kind of points to the idea of blessedness is the result of two things. It is avoiding a certain type of behavior or a certain type of individual, specifically the wicked, the sinners, and that sort of people, and embracing the word, the law of God. This distancing is actually accomplished by the use of three particular verbs: walk, sit, and stand. Three verbs that we are very much familiar with. Let’s first consider the whole idea of walking. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.” What does that mean? You think of counsel it is advice. Blessed is the man who does not walk in the advice of the wicked. What is the wicked? You could replace the word wicked with ungodly. All he is saying here is avoid getting advice from the ungodly people. People whose values are not lined up with God. People whose values are not lined up with kingdom values. That is difficult. Sometimes it is very easy because you know when somebody is giving you ungodly advice. But really we receive advice all over the place. We receive it through emails we get. We receive it through the internet. We receive it through the movies we watch. We receive it through friends and family members. We receive it through advertisements. All those things are basically giving us advice. Sometimes advice is good and sometimes advice is bad. This past Friday I was having a hard time working through my sermon and needed some illustrations. When I need an illustration what I do is take a walk and I usually take a walk down Lincoln Avenue and by the time I get to the other side I have a whole handful of illustrations to use. I was thinking about this idea of walking under the counsel of the wicked or the advice of the ungodly, and I said okay God give me something. He showed me the stores that are closed, but he showed me a couple stores that seemed to be doing pretty well. I won’t mention their names but one is actually a store that rents furniture to people and another store will actually cash your check. I started thinking about that. What is going on in these stores? Why are they successful? I am not here to put down any particular store because I know some people probably use a furniture rental store. They do come in handy at times. The reality is the rental store is targeted towards a certain demographic. You don’t see rental stores in Sewickley. You don’t see it in Franklin do you? You don’t see a check cashing store down in Sewickley. Why is that? Because they are targeting a certain demographic. They are targeting the people who cannot get the furniture because they don’t have the cash and they can’t get it because they don’t have the credit. Their advice is come on in. We will set you up. Forget about the credit. Just bring the first payment in of $50 or whatever. Bring a small deposit and we will set you up and you start paying every week. Pick out a sofa, a loveseat, a TV. Pick out a whole living room and we will set you up for $75 a week. You can enjoy it today. It seems like a good idea until after a couple years you paid 10, 20, 30x over the value of that furniture. Is that good advice? It is kind of bad advice. Then you have the check cashing store. What is their advice? You don’t have a bank account. You have no ID. You have a check to cash for $1000. Come on in. We will take care of you. They take care of you and they are going to charge you a little fee, 5%, 10%, whatever. So you cash a $1000 check you are going to pay $100 right off the bat. That is their advice. Don’t wait. Don’t worry about the bank account. Come on in and do this. Some of you may say that may be bad advice, but is that wicked? I can’t make a case that it is necessarily wicked, but I can suggest that it is ungodly. Given the sense that the idea is that it is outside the kingdom values of God. Jesus came not only to set us free from our sins but all the things associated with sinful behavior, including indebtedness. What these organizations do is perpetuate a cycle of indebtedness. They perpetuate an injustice on the people that can least afford it. Churches should be involved in helping this. In fact, I think it is Allegheny Center Alliance Church on the North Side. They actually have a loan center down there. It provides no or low interest loans. They will give you a short amount of money to get you through what you need and they will sit down with you and help you manage your money, help you set up a bank account, and help you so you can cash your check and save a little money and then turn around and pay cash for the furniture. That is what we should be doing. If they were truly for the people, they should be doing those types of things. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.”