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.”
Then he goes on to say “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners.” I read this in the past and for years I thought it meant blocking the sinners. That is not what it means. Think about way as like a highway or a roadway. What he is saying is don’t stand in the same roadway as the sinners. If you stand in that way long enough, if you stand in that lifestyle, if you stand in that behavior long enough, what happens is you are going to be swept down that road and it is a dead end road that leads to nothing. One of my favorite verses comes out of the book of Proverbs. “There is a pathway that seems right to a man or woman, but in the end it leads to death.” That is such a great passage. We are going through life and you say this seems like a pretty good way to live my life but actually it is a way to death. It is a dead end way. Thinking again about our little borough, we know that our borough is not a mecca for healthy lifestyle. It is not. Just walk down the street. You are going to see people that have fallen into bad ways. It didn’t start out that way. Many of them grew up in good, solid, Christian homes. What happened is they stood in the pathway, in the roadway too long and over time they got caught up in their addictive behavior, gambling, sexual immorality, and they end up even with an unwanted pregnancy. Then basically where they are at is they find themselves at this dead end place that they have nowhere else to go. It is simply because they stood too long in the pathway of the sinners or pathway whose lifestyle is not in line with the values of God.
Last Friday was prom night. Frankly, I am glad I have no kids going to prom this last year. No pictures to deal with. All the stuff you have to get done. I was glad I didn’t have to deal with it. But our Youth Minister and some of the sponsors decided they were going to deal with it in a positive way. They had an after-prom party. It started I believe at 1:35 a.m. while we are all sleeping. Or at least I am sleeping because I go to bed at 10 o’clock. Our minister and a few of the sponsors, opened up the downstairs so that after the formal prom the kids could come into the church and just enjoy themselves in a safe environment. I think they played Nerf wars and obviously they ate and just enjoyed themselves. There was no sermon or anything. Just having fun in a very safe place. What was he doing? He was providing an alternative way to enjoy prom night that was safe. I guarantee that there are probably some kids in Pittsburgh and definitely some kids in the United States who regret how they spent prom night. And they will regret it for 10, 20, 30 years. Maybe they got pregnant. Maybe they got drunk and smashed a car. Maybe worse they killed themselves. We provided an alternative way for one night a safe place for children to grow. That is something that I would applaud the leaders for. Even though I suspect a lot of the parents maybe didn’t say thank you, I guarantee that they were thankful for that. As a parent, you know prom night is not a night that most parents look forward to because they don’t know what is going to happen after the festivities are over. They don’t know what they are going to do. They can sleep for the next six hours knowing that their kids are at church and not out getting smashed and partying and laying up with somebody out there. That is worth its weight in gold. Think about that. There is a way that leads to death. The blessed person avoids that.
Not only is the blessed the one that avoids the counsel of the wicked or does not stand in the way of sinners, we also see that the blessed ones do not sit in the seat of mockers. When you think about sitting in a seat of mockers, a mocker is basically someone who ridicules or has contempt for somebody or makes fun of somebody. Really what they are talking about here is ridicule or contempt of authority, particularly God authority. When I was thinking about this, I said okay God give me another illustration in the community. Of course, if you walk down Lincoln Avenue long enough, you are going to see some sights, you are going to have some smells, and you are going to have some sounds. Usually the sounds are coming out of a car with a loud stereo with somebody in that car that thinks their music should be your music. A lot of times, unfortunately, that music is obscene. Some of that rap music is downright bad stuff. The car is stopped right next to you and you can’t help but hear it. All I kept hearing over and over “blank the police, blank the police, blank the police”. Think of the most profane word that you have ever heard and insert it and that is what was coming out of there. That is what the kids were hearing. What that person was doing was mocking the authority of the police. He was saying I am not worried about your law. This is my law. I am going to just shove it in your face. I am going to mock you for that. I can guarantee if somebody mocks the authority of the police or the teachers or whatever, I guarantee they are going to mock the authority of God. They are going to mock the law of God. When you mock the law of God, I guarantee you are going to miss out on the blessings of God. You are. The reality is you become like those you hang with. I remember somebody saying one time that five years from now you will be exactly the same person except for three things: the books you read, the movies you watch, and the people that you hang with. Paul says it best in 1 Corinthians. He says “Bad company corrupts good character.” Take that and pin it somewhere. Especially if you are a teenager, pin it somewhere and remember that. “Bad company corrupts good character.” You need to remember that because it is true. This is true stuff.
We think about okay the Psalm tells us the three things to avoid. We are not supposed to walk with the counsel of the wicked, we are not supposed to stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers. What are we supposed to do? He goes on to say you are supposed to just enjoy the word of God. He goes on to say “His delight is in the law of God and on his law he meditates day and night.” The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Greek. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for delight actually has a built-in assumption of intrinsic value. It is not like just enjoying something. It is enjoying something because it has great value. That is what the word of God has. I was thinking of an illustration and I don’t know why this came to me. It just dates me a little bit. When I was a teenager in St. Louis, I remember my parents used to take me to a fried chicken place called Chicken Delight. I don’t why I remember it. The chicken place is long closed but I still have this motto in my brain, its slogan. It says “Don’t cook tonight, call Chicken Delight”. I am still ready to call them but they are nowhere in sight. Some people delight in fried chicken more than they delight in the law of God. You say it is because I don’t like this idea of law. Who would delight in the law? That is like meditating on local ordinances or something like that. That is what it sounds like. But you have to understand this law idea actually has more of a truer meaning of instruction. You see the word of God is not an invitation to legalism. It is not an invitation to dry doctrine. It is an invitation to life-giving instruction. That is what it is. Back then, the readers only had really five books. The five books that they called the law were the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. That was all they had. That was the law at the time. They felt that just reading and meditating on that law would give them life. Life-giving instruction. We have 66 books of the Bible to read. We have the word of God we call the Bible. More importantly than that, we have the incarnate word, Jesus Christ. He came. The word became flesh and made his dwelling amongst us. By the power of the spirit, we are able to meditate not only on the written word but meditate on the words of Christ and through the power of the spirit begin to apply them to our lives. That is really what we are talking about when we are talking about meditation. He says don’t just meditate in your seven minutes in the morning. I am going to read a nice verse and feel good for the day and feel like I got close to God. He says live with it 24/7. Meditate. It is not a mystical thing. It is really quite simple. It is just prayerful reflection. You are reading the word. You think about it. You pray about it. You ask God and say show me what is going on here. Show me how I can apply this thing to my life.
In our men’s bible study, we use a basic acronym called SOAP. It means scripture, observation, application, and prayer. Basically anybody who wants to study the word, just remember SOAP. Look up a scripture. Read the scripture. Make observations. Look for an application in your life. Pray that God will reveal it to you. That is how you read the Bible. That is how we prepare sermons to be honest, through the SOAP method. It is quite easy. We meditate and I would include the idea of memorization. We have kind of lost the art of memorization. In those days, they didn’t have two or three Bibles sitting around their house. They didn’t have the Bibles on their iPhones or the Bibles on the internet. They were lucky if they could ever see a Bible. They could see the scroll. They would learn to memorize entire chapters and entire books of the Bible because they saw the value of it. They would meditate and memorize. Over time, meditation begins to open up a place in your heart to make room for God to reveal himself to you so that you can apply the word to your life so that the word can actually become life giving. There is a book called “Celebration of Discipline” written by a man named Richard Foster. It is about the spiritual disciplines that we talk about: prayer, Bible study, worship, and meditation. This is what he says about meditation. He says “What happens in meditation is that we create an emotion and spiritual place which allows Christ to construct an inner sanctuary of the heart.” What he is saying is when you meditate and memorize the word of God, particularly even the Psalms, you create a church inside of you. You have a portable church. I know people come to church on Sunday because it is my spiritual high for the week. Why do you just rely on Sunday? You get in the word and go through that SOAP process; you have church all day long wherever you go. That is why in John when Jesus says you are not going to worship in Jerusalem at the temple. You are just going to worship in spirit and truth. You have the spirit of God living within you. You are a temple of the Holy Spirit. You have church going on inside of you 24 hours a day if you want to go to it. When you are at work and it is one in the afternoon and everybody else is crabby and cranky and you have this big smile on your face and they say where have you been? You say I have been to church. I went to church at lunchtime. I sat in the park and I did church. The more you meditate on those Psalms, you have a whole worship band inside of you too. You have the worship band, you have word, you have a sermon, you have everything you need to do church right here in your heart if you learn to meditate, if you learn to memorize, if you learn to prayerfully reflect on the word of God so there is value to that. The result is, over time, you become incredibly strong so, before you know it, you are able to deal with any situation that life throws at you. You are able to deal with all sorts of things.
As it goes on to say, you become like a tree. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water.” Not a twig. We are talking about a big oak tree that is planted next to streams or canals of water. That is kind of the imagery that the writer is trying to convey here. You have this ongoing source of nourishment and water coming at you from many different directions. What it reminded me of is a picture of what I would call the born-again experience. When somebody confesses faith in Christ, comes out of the baptistery, and comes on out, he or she doesn’t know what is happening is there is a transplant taking place. In Colossians 1:13 it says “But he has transferred me from the dominion of darkness” from the dominion of dead end life and dead spirituality “into the kingdom of the Son.” Into the kingdom of light. Not only that, he then plugs you into that life source, the Holy Spirit. The pipeline to the Holy Spirit. Remember in John 7:37 where Jesus stood up on the last day and the greatest day of the feast and said if anybody is thirsty come to me and I will give you something to drink. He says “Streams of living water will flow from within.” It goes on to say “By this, he meant the spirit of God.” That is what you get from the born-again experience. That is the great resource that you have available to you as long as you are continuing to stay in it and meditate and pray and open yourself up to the spirit of God to come in and teach you. The result as we see is it yields its fruit in season. That fruit can come in all sorts of sizes and flavor and that sort of thing. If you want to know the fruit of the spirit it is in Galatians 5:23 where it says “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Those are those things that come out. You begin to experience them in different ways. All of a sudden you find yourself loving the unlovable. You find yourself at work, even with people that come up against you, being nice to them. Giving kindness and they are expecting you to be mean because they insulted you and you are paying them back with kindness. You are learning patience. You are learning self-control, which means you don’t engage in some of the activities of some of the people around you. You choose to say no that is fine. You are going to do this. I am going to do this. What happens is that fruit is made available in season when you need it. Because you never know when you are going to need that fruit. That is why you constantly meditate day and night and you building up this great resource within you and you don’t know when it is going to come out. You don’t know how it is going to come out. You don’t know when a scripture reference that you didn’t even know you knew all of a sudden pops to your lips. I had one of our men in our men’s bible study say last week that he had a group of people coming around and trying to convert him to a different religion. He said I wish you would just give me a verse, Jesus. Right out of the blue he gave him a verse from the book of John that he hadn’t written down or whatever but he had thought about it and reflected on it and didn’t even know he knew it. It just popped up. It was a perfect verse for that situation. It was a perfect verse for that season. That is what it is.
He goes on to say “Your leaf will not whither.” What he is saying is, if you stay connected to the source, you are going to have this fruit for the rest of your life. The minute you walk out of that baptistery to you take your last breath of your deathbed, you are going to have that fruit available. He goes on to say “Everything you do will prosper.” We are not talking about material prosperity. We are talking about prosperity in the kingdom of God which is totally different than prosperity in the world. Prosperity in the kingdom is eternal. Prosperity in the world is just temporary. It is just temporary. The lowest form of prosperity and success in the kingdom is higher than the highest prosperity in the world. There is a Psalm that speaks of this. Psalm 84:10 says “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” I would rather open the door for people for all eternity than hang out with the dwelling of the rich and wicked. That says a lot.
I can’t go into the remaining three verses, but in summary, if I can paraphrase it, going back to verse 1 he says “Blessed is the man”. I would say blessed is the woman, blessed is the teen; blessed is anyone who does not get caught up in bad advice. I would call it advice from the wicked or advice just from people that shouldn’t be giving advice because they are not in line with your values. Why would you be listening to them? Don’t listen to the advice of the ungodly. He goes on to say don’t stand in the way of sinners. In other words, don’t hang around with losers. You are going to become who you hang with. That is the reality of it. Don’t stand in the roadway of losers. Look around which sort of lifestyle you see and if you hang there long enough and if you stand there long enough, you are going to get caught up in that roadway, that dead end way. You don’t want to do that. Don’t stand in the way of losers. Don’t stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. If you are hanging around people that just love to make fun of authority, make fun of teachers, or policeman, or make fun of God, run from that. Run from that. It is nothing good. It is going to corrupt you. You are going to become like one of them. You are not going to be able to have any sort of blessings. Nothing. Nothing at all. He goes on to say “But his delight is in the law of the Lord.” Get hungry for the word of God. You know what I love about these ten guys that come? I am amazed. I have been doing this Bible study for a year and a half and I am shocked how every week I still have ten people over there. I am totally in shock. All we are doing is opening up the word of God and reading through the Bible in two years and it is just amazing me that these guys are hungry for the word because I assumed they weren’t. I really did. Get hungry for the word. Take this faith seriously or get out and leave room for others. Learn the word of God not just because of some dogma or whatever because Chuck tells you to. Learn it and delight in it because it truly is life giving. As you meditate on that word and think about that word, you are giving yourself life and you don’t even know it. Life that is going to manifest itself in a thousand different ways down the road. You are going to be like that tree. You are going to be like that tree that is transplanted right next to the river where you will have an unlimited supply of nutrients. You will begin to bear good fruit in season exactly when you need it. When you are just sitting at home or you are at a family gathering or wherever you are at and somebody says something. Maybe somebody is struggling with a loss. Maybe a divorce. Maybe a death. You are like God give me something to say to this person and then out of the blue remember that Psalm that said something in there. I just remember Psalm 23 or whatever and I want to give them some comfort. They are lost in that pop stuff and they say wow that is good stuff. That is a very wise saying. That is what it means that you are going to yield that fruit in season. If you do those things, you are going to yield your fruit in season and whatever you do will prosper.
If you are here today and maybe you have been listening to bad advice, maybe you have been listening to ungodly advice, maybe you have been walking along the road of sinners and hanging out too close with these sinners, and you find yourself getting caught up in a lifestyle that you know is leading to a dead end. Possibly maybe you are in a situation where you find yourself sitting around with mockers. You find yourself sitting around with people that are just putting down God or whatever, I would say walk away from that stuff. Walk away from it and pick up your Bible. Pick up your Bible and find a place that you can begin to have your quiet time. Start today, start tomorrow, start whenever and begin to bring in the word of God. Look for that stream of living water. Anticipate the streaming of water and, most of all, anticipate the life-giving fruit that is going to come from it. Let us pray.
