Planted by the Waters

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, 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, that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither.

In all that he does he prospers.

The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous, for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish.

Let's pray.

Lord, these six verses.

We ask that you would impress them on our heart in a very real and tangible way today.

I ask that they would speak to us and change us through the power of your spirit.

We ask that your spirit would be present with us.

Open our eyes, open our hearts to see you.

Give us a thirst for you.

Give us a picture of the strength that you can provide and something to aspire to.

In Jesus' name, amen.

What is a blessed man?

We start with says, Blessed is the man.

Blessed is the man.

So before we can really dig into the meaning of this scripture, we have to start by asking what is blessing, right?

Because if we're going to aspire to this, if we are going to reach out and say, I want to be blessed, what are we hoping blessing looks like?

So we start, even though it seems simple, with a question almost begging to be asked.

What does it mean to be blessed?

Well, in our culture, we can get this mixed up.

We can chase the wrong things and call them blessing.

So let's start by saying what blessing is not.

Blessing does not mean that we're going to be rich, good looking, healthy, and popular.

That's not what blessing is in God's eyes.

It does not mean that our problems disappear.

It does not mean that life is easy for us.

A blessed man is not a man whose life is trouble-free.

A blessed man is not a man who gets everything he wants.

We must take away this cultural definition of blessing from our minds before we can dig into this psalm because if we approach this psalm thinking that these things are gonna result in money, good looks, health, and popularity, then we are chasing the wrong thing from the get-go.

So let's just dispel that.

We'll set it aside and keep it in the back of your minds.

So if we're gonna say, okay, so that's not what blessing is.

What is blessing?

What is blessing meant here?

Well, it's interesting because there's two main Hebrew words that we translate blessing or bless or blessed, depending on the form.

One is baruk.

Baruch is a Hebrew word for blessing that is used when God says, I bless you, to man.

And it is also used when man says, I bless you to God.

Right?

It means I bless you.

But this word is not that word.

This word is not baruch, it is a word asher.

And asher is never used.

God never speaks the word asher about man.

Neither does man ever speak the word asher about God in all of Scripture.

Asher is a term that we translate blessing when man is speaking about man.

And we're gonna talk a little bit about why that is, but but but basically we translate it blessed or happy.

Happy is the man, is the way we tend to translate it in English.

Blessed or happy.

So we're saying here's a happy man.

But the reason we don't use this word to describe God, or this word God doesn't use to describe us, is because this word carries with it a sense of envy, which is really interesting to me.

It carries with it a sense of envy.

It almost could be translated accurately, envied is the man.

And all of a sudden it starts to make a little more sense why God never speaks this over man, because God would not envy man, right?

God would never envy man, so he would not say, envied are you, because in God's mind, man's not envied.

And man would never speak it about God because God, man would never propose to think he could aspire to God.

When we do, when we have that kind of envy towards God, that's where you end up with Lucifer falling as an angel.

And so this verse where we say, Blessed is the man, it carries with it a sense of envy.

Now, you say, wait, well, doesn't scripture discourage envy?

I don't, I thought, you know, thou shalt not covet.

Yes.

This is a soft sense of envy.

So, so let me just try to, because I got confused when I first started reading this.

I'm like, wait a second, you're telling me to envy this man.

But but it's not the same sense of the word that we use when we say covet.

So let me just explain this.

It's a soft sense of envy that almost a more accurate way to convey the meaning in English would be we should aspire to be like the man.

So it's a sense of envy, but not in a covetousness, not in a that should be me, but somebody that we would look at and go, I want to aspire to be like that.

You get the point?

So when the psalmist says, Blessed is the man, what you have here is actually God painting a picture of the type of man we would hope to be.

He's using the psalmist to paint a picture of going, you should aspire to be like this man.

So all of a sudden, have you ever felt like sometimes I just wish God would tell me what to do?

Everybody ever feel like that?

Here you have it.

God is saying through the psalmist, we should aspire to be like this man.

And we we do this, don't we?

We prop up people in our life and we aspire to be like them, usually for the wrong reasons.

Right?

We pick all sorts of heroes to emulate ourselves after, don't we?

We pick all sorts of heroes to emulate ourselves after.

And we we we move from one person to the next and we prop up whether it be their business practices or their parenting skills or whatever it is, and we say, oh, I gotta be like that.

But but here, rather than doing it out of our sinful sense of inadequacy or desire or selfishness or greed or whatever it is that we're hoping to gain when we emulate a particular person from the sinful corners of our hearts, here instead we have God propping up in a good way the things that we genuinely should aspire towards.

What this passage is doing then is giving us a glimpse of the life of a man God thinks we should pay attention to for modeling purposes.

To me, that's pretty exciting.

So if you say, okay, now that we've got blessing down, what do we learn about this blessed man?

What do we learn about the blessed man?

Well, I find it interesting that in this scripture, the first thing we learn is what he does not do.

The things he abstains from.

Because the reality is that to be sometimes the way that we should emulate life is not about I gotta do this, this, and this, and this, but I gotta avoid this, this, and this.

There are things in life, little boundaries that God has placed and said, listen, if you want to know the comforts of my grace, don't wander outside that fence.

It's why he gives us the picture of a sheep and a shepherd, helping to guide us away from the dangerous corners of the cliffs that we might fall down and get hurt, or the wolf on the outside of the fence who might devour us if we step outside.

God sometimes, in order to protect us as our shepherd, draws little boundaries.

And the first thing we see about this blessed man is what he does not do.

If you read verse one, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.

And you go, what's going on here?

Well, the interesting part about this psalm is that it is employing here a Hebrew poetic device.

A Hebrew poetic device meant to show process.

It shows how we settle into a life apart from God.

First we walk, then we stand, then we sit.

It's a progression.

You start walking with the sort of people that you shouldn't walk with, and you think, oh, I'm just walking just for a little bit.

We see we may be walking towards God.

We may be walking with God, and then we think in our minds, we're just gonna take a brief detail.

Oh, you know what?

I'm just gonna walk with these guys for a second.

Okay, just a second.

And we think it's just a little, a little step off the path.

But but the next thing you know, you're comfortable enough talking and hanging out and shooting the breeze that you're standing and you're kind of settled, and you're kind of like, oh, yeah, and you're talking about things.

And the next thing you know, you're sitting in a lazy boy with your roots down, fully comfortable, in a place that you should never have been comfortable.

It's a progression.

And it's a progression that they point out through this Hebrew poetic device, and it says, Who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers.

And so all of a sudden, you're sitting down, comfortable where you never should be, mocking the things that you should never mock because they're the things of God, but you put them so far out of your brain that you're totally comfortable there.

This is the way sin happens, folks.

This is the way sin happens.

We get comfortable enough in these situations that we hardly notice that we've stopped moving and we're just standing around hanging out with this crowd that we thought we were just taking a slight detour with.

This is how Satan gets you.

Nobody just wakes up one morning and says, you know, I think instead of starting my morning by spending a little time with God, I'll just leave my wife, rob a bank to get some seed money to start a drug business.

Let's do that.

It's a slow, gradual decline with little steps that Satan hopes we won't notice.

It's the little decisions.

It's a process that takes place over time, our hearts slowly drifting further from God and growing more and more comfortable with the word world.

This message is something we all need to hear, but I want to speak just for a second, just to our graduates.

Right?

Because today we're celebrating our graduates, and I can't think of a message more appropriate.

Because I remember graduating high school and stepping out into the world, and there was all sorts of opportunity before me, and I can make decisions in a thousand directions that I could never make decisions in before, and it appealed to me, and I thought, well, I'll just take a little path here and a little path here, and a little, and it's just a little, little path, right?

And I found myself in a bad place.

Walking becomes standing, and standing becomes sitting, and then we're setting down roots in a place we were never intended to set down roots.

In my own life, this looked very interesting.

I I started, I went to college in the summer.

I got accepted to a college, but I was just like right on the line uh of getting in.

So they said, well, you can start if you start in summer, right after high school, um, kind of to prove yourself before the fall semester.

You kind of had to do a probationary summer.

So I started, and the first thing I did, the first day I got on campus, I met a Christian guy on campus, and I and I asked him, Do you know of any places where there's good Bible study?

He said, Yeah, I'll take you.

We go to the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship on campus.

And I went and I hung out and I'm meeting all these people, and every night I'd be in my dorm about to go to sleep, and the people in my dorm were just crazy doing all sorts of things that I knew I shouldn't be partaking in.

So my door was shut, and I was trying to be a good little boy in my first couple of weeks of college and and just block out the things that I shouldn't do.

But then one day I heard them leaving.

And they were leaving, and I thought to myself, they're in a bad place.

Uh they've been doing some things they shouldn't be, and they were in no condition to drive.

And I stepped out, I said, Where y'all going?

We're going to Denny's, we're hungry.

And I said, Oh, are you driving?

They said, Yeah.

I said, Let me drive you.

Let me let me drive you.

Uh, because they weren't in a place that they should have been driving, and and I drove and just hung out with them just because I thought I don't want these people to get hurt.

But I sat there at Denny's and had conversation with them and slowly get to know them, and my heart went out to them a little bit, and I started driving them more and more and hanging out with them more and more.

And what I thought I was doing is a slight detour just to help somebody.

I I eventually found my roots put down somewhere that they shouldn't have been, and I was doing everything they were doing, and I was involved in stuff I shouldn't have been involved in.

And I look back on that now, and I I realize that this psalm was true for me.

And as you're going out in the world, graduate to look, we want you to be a light in the world.

But you've got to note your path.

And you gotta ask yourself where God would have you walk.

Because it's a slow process, and all of a sudden you're gonna wake up one day if you if you don't chase God.

You're gonna wake up one day and you're gonna realize you've put down roots in a place you you never wanted roots.

But this message isn't just for graduates.

The reality is we're all susceptible to this.

No matter how old we get, the slow process of decline can start at 57, 67, 89.

I don't care where it begins.

If you let it slip in, it slips in.

It's a decline.

And so it's something that we need to be aware of at every juncture in our life, every crossroads that we reach.

We need to be asking questions.

Am I about to walk in the council of the wicked?

Every little business decision, every little home life decision.

Is it possible that through this psalm God's trying to wake us up to something?

We're all susceptible.

And I love that the psalm starts off with this warning.

Because that's the way sin takes hold.

So if that's what the blessed man stays away from, what does he pursue?

What does he pursue?

What does the blessed man pursue?

By the way, just I say blessed man because it woman too, right?

You know, just make sure we're being correct.

This is mankind, we're talking about.

This is all of us.

No one's exempt.

Well, if you look at this, the word of the Lord is the primary source of blessing in this man's life.

And so I want to read verse two.

It says, Well, I'm gonna read from verse one.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of the sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.

His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.

Well, it says the law of the Lord is central here.

Well, what is meant by the law?

Well, the Hebrew word that we translate law is the Hebrew word Torah.

Torah legitimately specifically expresses the first five books of the Bible.

The books written by Moses.

They called that the law, because in it we find the Ten Commandments, but we find so much more than the Ten Commandments in the Torah.

We find the promise of a Savior, a promise to Abraham that he will bless the entire world through Abraham's descendant.

We see man fall into sin and God promised that he will send one who will crush the head of the serpent.

We see the gospel in the Torah.

See, we tend to think that when we look at the Torah, we're looking at some other stuff that doesn't really apply.

And when you want the gospel, you turn to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

But the reality is that all of Scripture is the gospel, is it not?

All of Scripture is the gospel.

So when he says he is meditating and delighting in the law of the Lord, he could be saying, meditating and delighting on the gospel.

He could be saying, meditating and delighting on Jesus.

The Torah was the core scripture.

I want you to see that while the psalmist specifies the Torah, it really means the gospel.

We tend to think the gospel in those other terms, but we find the beautiful message of Jesus within the Torah.

And in John 5, 39, Jesus himself says, You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness of me.

When he said you search the scriptures, the scriptures he was referring to was this very law of the Lord that the psalmist refers to.

So when he says, In the scriptures, you find that they bear witness of me, he's speaking of the Torah.

It is the gospel.

In John 5 46, Jesus says, But if you believed Moses, Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, by the way, if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me.

But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe in my words?

When we talk about the law of the Lord as our source of delight and meditation, we are talking about Jesus as our source of delight and meditation.

The word of the Lord is central to being this blessed man.

So if we aspire to be of this blessed man, remember the word blessing has a sense of envy almost to the point of saying we would model after this man.

And so if we aspire to be this blessed man, we have to have the word of the Lord central in our life.

But let's just take another moment to pause and say what it does not say.

It does not say, blessed is the man who has several Bibles on his shelf.

It does not say, blessed is the man who has a really big Bible prominently displayed on his coffee table.

It does not say, blessed is the man who posts a lot of Bible verses on his Facebook page.

It does not say, blessed is the man who says God's word is important.

And it does not say, blessed is the man who reads his Bible every day.

Oh well, you weren't expecting that one, were ya?

But I think we need to pause.

It does not say, blessed is the man who reads his Bible every day.

You're like, wait a second.

But it says every day.

Day and night.

His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.

Delight and meditate are not the same thing as read.

I want you to pause on that.

Delight and meditation are not the same thing as read.

See, we have a tendency to turn God's word into a checklist item.

Things we delight in aren't checklist items.

Read the Bible every day.

Check.

But when we do that, we can come to the Bible and we can open it up and go, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, done, done.

And it's out of mind for the rest of the day.

It's just checked off.

We scanned words and that's it.

We love to hit that check mark, don't we?

I tell my students, I'd rather you we read the Word of God twice a week and engage it in your hearts than have your eyes look at it every day and never think about it.

We need to change our ideas of what reading and soaking in God's word looks like because delight and meditate are key words in this passage.

So I want to spend a little time on what these words mean.

If we're going to grasp the depth of this psalm, there are two words here that we have to come to grips with delight and meditate.

So delight, let's start there.

What does it mean to delight in God's word?

Well, you know, I don't think we have to give a very deep Hebrew word study to discuss what it means to delight in something because we love to delight in things, don't we?

Like this word rolls off our tongue.

This word is pregnant with meaning.

It's pregnant with hope and joy.

It conjures up visions of happiness and even a sense of safety.

Things we delight in, we can't wait to get to.

We can't stop thinking about them if we tried.

We can't.

This literally means pleasure.

Take pleasure in.

It is the same word that we translate as pleasure in the Song of Solomon when it speaks of the newlyweds finding pleasure in each other on their wedding night.

How do we take pleasure in God's word?

Not how do you read it?

For half an hour a day?

How do you scan the words?

How do you read through the New Testament in 90 days?

How do you read through the Bible in a year?

This is not a completion guide.

This is not not saying those things are bad, but the way we approach them, our heart and our intent, what we think we're getting out of them, or the brownie points we think we're getting, or whatever it is, that does change whether or not it is a good or bad practice.

And if we are coming to God's word and not finding delight, we are not this blessed man.

The presence of God's word in our life isn't all that's required here.

So let's look to meditate.

Meditate.

This is a word that's a little harder for us, isn't it?

Delight, we're really ready to delight in things.

Meditation in our culture conjures up pictures of some guy in an uncomfortable yoga position trying to convince himself he likes it and chanting weird syllabic things, right?

Like meditation to us is an uncomfortable term because it's not common to what we do and operate.

We think of it as foreign.

But what does meditate mean?

The biblical word for meditate is rich with meaning.

It means to imagine, to devise, to muse.

The word is even translated to growl and to groan at times.

So let's talk about what these things mean to imagine God.

You know, they ever said that song, I can only imagine.

You remember that song?

Do you spend time imagining?

Do you spend time imagining God?

Thinking of his goodness, dwelling on him, going, oh, to devise, to muse.

We love that word muse.

We talk about muse in the artistic culture.

You know, in the Shakespeare would talk about, oh, she's my muse.

And that she inspires me to think deeper about life and to create.

Does God inspire you?

Do you reflect on his goodness?

And you go to growl and to groan, what does that mean?

How does meditation equal to growl, to groan?

I don't get that one.

Well, if you want to get that one, I would suggest taking one of the men in your life and giving him front row tickets at a sporting event of his favorite team.

Okay?

Because as he gets closer and closer to that event, he's gonna do things like this.

I can't wait.

Right?

Because he's gonna be thinking, he's gonna go, oh, yeah, I can't wait.

It's exciting.

And there's things we do that for.

This is that sense of meditation to growl and to groan.

That our thoughts are so deep on it that it is taking over who we are.

This is not close done.

This is to think, dwell, contemplate, spend time musing, devising, thinking about, ruminating on God's word, on his kindness, on his goodness, on his love, on his forgiveness.

Do we do these things?

Or is it simply an exercise and checklisting?

God is awesome.

I mean, he is awesome.

When we bring delight and meditation of Jesus together, it will consume us in a way that will change the very fabric of our lives.

Think of other times something has consumed you like this.

Do you think it's a coincidence that God gives us the marriage metaphor as a picture of his relationship to us?

We as the church are called the bride of Christ.

For those of you that are married, can you remember when you were working towards that marriage?

And the way that you would think about your beloved.

And we would think, and well, you couldn't get that person off your mind if you tried.

Right?

When you hit your bed at night to go to sleep, you couldn't go to sleep because you're just thinking, I can't believe I'm gonna marry them, right?

There's this excitement, this joy, this passion.

You dwell in and ruminate and stew in the love of your betrothed.

And God tells us that we as the church are his bride.

Do you think it's by accident that the same God who gave us the Song of Solomon as a picture of the love, desire, pleasure that we should experience with our spouse on earth, that he gave us also the analogy that we are the bride of Christ.

He wants us to learn something from the marriage relationship that inspires us towards this.

The problem is that in our culture we're good at losing that sense of awe, both in our spouse and in the Lord.

When we first understand the gospel, maybe we're enamored by it, but as time goes on, it just kind of fades.

And sadly, in our culture, we do that with our marriages too, don't we?

And we could say, oh, but that's just because it becomes less about the feelings and more about the richness of commitment, and that's true.

But God tells us to never lose some of that joy.

In Proverbs 5.18, it says, Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe, let her fill you at all times with delight, be intoxicated always in her love.

This is the encouragement that Solomon says to his son, When you get old, find blessing in the wife of your youth.

He's saying, Remember when the romance was young and don't lose it.

And this is what we need to be with God if we are going to delight and meditate.

This is why God tells the church in Ephesus in Revelation 2, 4, I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.

He expects us as a church, as his body, to not lose sight of that love, to not make it a checklist.

So what happens when we delight in the law of the Lord?

What happens if we do all of this effectively?

Well, we become like a tree planted by streams of water.

It says, He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither, and all that he does, he prospers.

That's pretty neat.

What does it mean?

See, my whole life I've lived by great rivers that paint a vivid picture of what can happen to a tree as its roots are found directly in water.

Can I show you a couple of pictures?

Let me just switch over here.

Um, and I'm going to.

It's gonna let me on this thing.

I have a remote.

But it's got the little wheel spinning.

Don't you hate that?

Little wheel spinning.

Okay, so I can't get to it.

Can you all just put up that first picture?

So in Louisiana, we had live oak trees by the Mississippi River.

This is what they call, I don't know what's different between a live oak tree and a regular oak tree because they're both alive, but they called these live oak trees.

They'd sprawl out, the branches would grow uh really low to the ground, they'd become like an overground root network while the underground root network was doing the same thing.

They're magnificent trees.

They're gorgeous.

If you've ever been to New Orleans, you go to Ottoman Park, and you could see this, the soil by the riverbed is just ripe for growing these things gigantically.

You see those two people just dwarfed by it.

Go to the next one.

Here's another example of the look at that.

Sprawling out above ground, these rich, deep trees.

And then for a while I lived in in uh the hill country of Texas, and we had the Guadalupe River.

Go to the next the next slide.

We had cypress trees that had these, see these roots that are sprawling right to the, they're going, reaching right into the water.

The whole shoreline at times was just roots.

Because those roots of that tree were saying, I'm gonna get to that water.

Go to the next one.

So I I was at a place like this when I I was at a camp I worked at, and and one of the directors took us down to a place like this where you had all these roots so thick and intertwined by the river, the Guadalupe River, and he read a Psalm 1.

And he said, Look at these trees.

Look at the girth.

Look at how firm they are.

Look at how deeply their roots are in the water.

Look at how their roots fight and sprawl to get there.

What's gonna move this tree?

Right?

What's gonna move this tree?

Thank you.

You can take the pictures down.

The uh the answer was nothing.

And and that picture.

You know, I moved to Ark to Colorado.

I live by the Arkansas River.

We had those trees.

I moved here.

I would encourage you, go down.

Go down to the river, take a walk on a nice day.

Today it's pretty nice.

Take a look at the root networks on some of these trees.

Look how the trees that are close to the water, you find these giant ones that you don't find in the middle of town.

Look at the picture of what God is saying, the strength you can gain from having your roots constantly dwelling in the life-giving waters of God's word.

Jesus time and time again refers to himself as a life-giving substance, the living water, the bread of life, things that we cannot live without.

A tree cannot live without water.

And when you plant a tree by a stream, it's gonna put its roots down so deep that it is gonna demand those nutrients.

And when it does, it can grow thicker and deeper and stronger than any other tree around.

This is what Jesus wants.

Are your roots in God's word?

Are they digging deep?

I want to tell you a story about a flood.

Are you familiar with floods around here?

You had your big flood in 97.

In 1998, when I lived in central Texas near the Guadalupe River, there was a hundred-year flood.

Rain came down so hard for days that a flash flood of proportions nobody had seen in a hundred years.

That's why they say a hundred-year flood, was throwing houses and buses everywhere.

It was in the middle of land and it was a torrential downpour like a hurricane.

People were not prepared.

And their bus yards just took up the buses and just started throwing them.

See how they back up?

Started throwing buses at trees.

See, the reality is that storms are gonna come.

The waters are gonna rise, the levees are gonna break, the rains are gonna fall, life is gonna get hard, the winds are gonna come.

It says in here that the wicked are like chaff, that the wind drives away.

And when the storm comes and tries to drive the chaff away, are you gonna be the chaff or are you gonna be the tree?

See, that picture right there shows that the bus was more hurt than the tree it was thrown against.

You ever hear somebody say when they're having a bad day, I feel like a bus hit me.

You ever hear that phrase?

Are your roots gonna be so deep in God's water that the bus gets hurt and you don't?

When life throws a bus at you.

This summer we're gonna spend some time in the Psalms.

And God's word has some rich stuff for us to soak our roots in.

I want to encourage you.

Don't settle.

Put your roots deeply in the water and prepare yourself to soak it up.

Let's pray.

Lord, we come before you.

We thank you for who you are.

We thank you for who you are and what you've done.

We thank you for your word.

Inspire us to put our roots more deeply in your waters, to meditate, to delight, that we would grow strong, that our foundation would be in you and your word, and that the rains coming down would not move us.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

As we finish our time together in worship, I've I need to turn to your hymn.

No, hymn number four, how great thou art, let's stand and sing.

This is who we want to put our roots into this great God in which we serve.

How great thou art, number four, let's stand as we close our time together.