Chaff Or Tree? How To Thrive In A Withering World Series

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Meditation is the natural activity that comes from delight. The first time you fell in love with someone you meditated on that person - day and night. People who love football have their thoughts consumed with football. People who delight in travel and vacations spend their free thoughts thinking about their next trip. In your free time, when your mind can go wherever it wants, where does it go? That’s what your heart delights in. Delight causes meditation, and meditation also causes more delight.

Introduction to the Psalms

There is a reason why the book of Psalms has always been so loved and treasured by the people of God through the last 30 centuries. It is such an easy book to relate to. No other book draws a clearer connection between God and the issues of daily life. In the Psalms you don’t get neatly stacked categories of theology. What you get is....

• love and hatred,

• fear and trust,

• joy and sorrow,

• hope and despair...

- all breaking in upon one another and overlapping and competing for our attention in the chaos of life. That is how we experience life and so we can relate to the Psalms. In the Psalms we learn how to cry out to God in the midst of all that and how to relate emotionally to God. In the rest of the Bible God speaks to man; in the Psalms man speaks to God. But it is just as inspired as the rest of the Bible, which means it is God speaking through man. So this book shows us what it looks like when the Spirit of God responds to the Word of God through the feelings and thoughts and words of the people of God.

What other piece of literature ever written is as immediately relevant and as easily seen as relevant than the Psalms? When you open the book of Psalms, you are looking at words that have had countless tears of both joy and sorrow dripped down on them in prayer closets of millions of saints in every part of the world for over 3000 years. One of those prayer closets was the one Jesus used. The first psalm I ever memorized as a kid was Psalm 23. I wonder how old Jesus was the first time His parents taught Him the Twenty-third psalm.

Do you realize what holy ground we are on when we look at these words? When you open up this book you are looking at the same words, marveling over the same thoughts, that kings and prophets and apostles and Jesus Himself read, prayed over, wept over, memorized, drew strength from, and treasured. One of those saints was Jeremiah. Our text today is Psalm 1, and if you read Jeremiah 17 you will see right away that Jeremiah read and thought deeply about the words of Psalm 1.

Psalm 1:1-8 Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. 2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. 4 Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away. 5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. 6 For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

Introduction: What Would it Take?

Do you think anyone looks at your life and thinks, Man, I wish my life were going like that? They see the way things are going for you and they think, That’s what I was hoping for in my life. Are things going that well in your life? Is your life an enviable one? Probably somewhat in certain areas, maybe not so much in others? Let me ask you this - what would it take to make it better - so your life would be more enviable? What would you have to change or add or stop doing or obtain or accomplish or accumulate - what would it take for you to have a more desirable life? God’s answer to that question is in Psalm 1. There is something you could do, you could do it today, and by the end of this sermon you’ll know what it is.

Two Kinds of People: The Righteous and the Wicked

But first - a little background on Psalm 1. Whoever arranged the psalm in the book of Psalms decided that this book would begin with a wisdom psalm. It sounds like something out of the book of Proverbs. And as we enter into this doorway to the book, we are immediately divided into two groups: the righteous and the wicked. Those are the only two characters in the book of Psalms, and the first psalm lets you know which character you are - which of those two groups you are in.