Following the Way

So I'm Josh Collins. You may know me and seen me from doing the

announcements, and they thought, well, this guy talks way too much an

announcement, so we're going to just ask him to preach. So yeah,

okay, you know I talk a lot. It's no secret whatsoever. This

morning we're going to be diving in. So you can go ahead and grab

your copy of God's Word and we're going to be opening up to Psalm Chapter

one or Psalm one. As you open up, we're going to have ushers

up and down the aisle. So if you do not have a copy of

God's Word, just raise your hand. They'll get a copy to you.

They have bulletins and on the back of the bulletin it'll be really helpful.

There's space for it to take sermon notes, and so just raise your hand.

They've got pins, bulletins, bibles for you. There's something that I

don't need to do to convince you that something's wrong in the world today,

right Like, if I have to convince you of that, then there's a

really deep hole in your backyard where your head's been stuck for a while.

I don't know if you've noticed, countries are going to war with other countries.

Peoples are hating other peoples globally, the world seems to be on fire.

Oh and on top of that, this year's an election year. Yeah,

that's great. We're all just massively at peace because we're gonna face such

a courteous and graceful debating of ideas between candidates and no one's gonna sling mud

or you know anything else. Right, Like, this is gonna be a

great time. Guys, this is gonna be a crazy year. We're already

in the midst of chaos. And I don't have to convince you of that,

all right. I want to tell you though, that we truly,

at this point in history, stand on the shoulders of civilizations and times before

us. And you may think, man, this is the worst the world's

ever been. I can tell you this has been the way it's been going

forever and ever and ever. It's nothing new. And what can really make

you lose hope and just maybe lack of stability is the thought that it's never

gonna change, and no matter who promises it or what plans and processes they

put in place, the world's going to continue to be broken. And it's

because of sin. It's because deep down we all have inside of us the

inclination to do things just for ourselves or for our people. We have the

inclination to fight and to struggle and have strife, and it results in pain

and sorrow. And so there's this grand picture of what's external. But then

there's an internal reality. And that internal reality is we are just as broken

as the world. Our very spirits are broken and our souls are broken,

and we have the same attitudes and the same struggles inside of us that we

see in the world out there. In fact, that's just a picture of

what's happening inside. So the question is how do we live? Not like

how do I stay alive? But like, how should we live? How

should we live in the midst of all of this chaos and struggle and strife.

How in the world, as our souls themselves struggle to hunger and thirst

for peace and joy and contentment in this life, how do we find that?

Where do we find that? Who do we find that in? And

as believers in Jesus Christ, what we know is that we have the source

and not just the source of the gift of joy and peace and happiness and

contentment. But he is those things. By definition. There's no happiness or

joy that is not him. It's not a characteristic that he portrays. It's

who he is. But even in the life of faith with Jesus Christ,

we find ourselves still struggling. And so we try to reconcile that in some

way, and we struggle with it. And in the Psalms, what we

find, all throughout the entire collection of the Psalms, what we find is

we're not alone. Throughout all of human history, we've been struggling to find

where joy can be found. And so this Psalm starts with a phrase,

Blessed is the Man, and we're going to dive into that. But right

now, what I'm going to do is invite our brother Nick to come up

and share God's word with us. So grab your copy of God's Word,

open up to Psalm one, and follow along as Nick shares God's word with

us. Blessed is the man who walks not on the council of the wicked,

nor stands in a way sinners, nor sits to see the 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 its season, and sleep does not wither.

And all that he does, he prospers. The wicked and 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

will perish. This is God's word. Amen, Blessed is the man that's

just not just men. Blessed is the person who And then we have a

description and what the Psalmist does here in this kind of prologued the entire book

of the Psalms is he starts us with the end, how can we be

blessed? And the answer is found here in this poetic form. And so

we're going to walk through it and see what God has for us this morning

in it. But we have to acknowledge right off the bat that the word

blessed has been radically hijacked. All right, Look, I'm not trying to

point fingers. I don't follow everyone on social media in here, but maybe

this morning someone took a picture of them sitting with a coffee mug and saying

hashtag blessed. And so what's happened is it's a church word that's been just

churchified churchified. Here's what we do. We take words, we don't really

truly know how to explain them or dissect them or explain them to others,

so we just like leave it alone and let it just be its own thing,

which has an aggie that's kind of like part of what we do as

aggie. We just make up words and use them and you got to deal

with it. But in this case there's a true meaning something for us to

latch onto, and so we can't miss it. Blessed is the man.

Blessing literally is translated happy. And here we go again, another word that's

been radically hijacked because happiness, as it's mostly understood in our day and age,

is something that's extremely circumstantial. It's based on what happens to us that's

good, it happened. It's defined by something that's happened to us for us,

or something that's good, and it's been reduced to either a circumstantial action

or thing or a circumstantial feeling. I mean, we have to admit right

that like sometimes we feel happy and sometimes we feel sad, but true happiness,

true blessing draws so much deeper into our souls and so much deeper in

meaning that we really need to connect to start out with the Psalmist right here

on what he's really getting at, because the true understanding of blessing in scripture

connects with the very idea and connotation of God's shalom. And again another word

that we've changed, right, it's just peace. No, it's better understood

as the way things were meant to be complete, arranged with a plan,

something that's stable, something that's true no matter the circumstances. And so in

our day and age where we have so many things, I'm gonna get scientific

for a bit because Google taught me to do this. We're always chasing dopamine

hits in a world that's making us addicted to them, when serotonin is the

true answer, something that lasts. That's where we get the true idea of

joy. So, as we see in the psalm As he's going to give

us some contrasts. He's going to talk about the righteous man and contrast him

with the wicked. He's going to show us the blessed man and contrasted with

the cursed. And throughout this psalm, I want you to truly engage,

not just from a teaching and learning perspective, because poetry isn't meant to be

read that way. It's meant to be experienced. So I want you to

experience this Psalm today as the Holy Spirit leads us and guides us to find

where true blessing and true joy and contentment comes, and how we should live

in the world. The good news is is that God isn't leaving it the

way it is. He's not leaving you the way you are. He's not

leaving me the way I am, but actively, and we know from Second

Corinthians that God is reconciling us to him and reconciling the whole world to him.

And that's the great news. And the way he's doing that, the

way he's doing it is he knows, as sovereign God, that it's not

something we can do, it's not something we can earn, it's not something

we can deserve. So he sent his son Jesus to be born as a

person, as a man, to live a perfect life, fulfilling the very

law of God. Which is what God designed us to live like. And

he lived it and yet took on a guilty verdict, was tortured and sent

to the cross in place of us who were completely guilty and were given a

not guilty verdict. He gave his righteousness to us, and that's how we

are reconciled to him. And he rose from the grave, he was buried,

rose from the grave, and that power that comes in that salvation was

the start of God's redemptive plan, not just to reconcile us, but to

reconcile the whole world's himself. That's the plan. And so as we dive

in, let's look at verse one. Let's look at the second part of

it, because here's the first contrast. And if you're following in your notes,

there's blanks. So let me help you out if you're a blank filler.

In fact, let me give you all of them so that I don't

skip one and you get messed up and I stress you out, all right.

The first one is path to blessing. That's what we're gonna look at,

and then we're gonna look at life of blessing and finally destination of blessing.

Last part of verse one. First contrast, blessed this man who walks

not in the council of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners,

nor sits in the seat of scoffers. Here's the progression, and it's

really a set of categories, but it's also a progression, and it shows

us what the effect of sin is in our own lives. It shows us

and what He's walked us through is the fact that if we let a little

bit of yeast come in, as Scripture says, it's going to affect the

whole lump of dough. If we allow just a little seed of sin come

into our life, it's going to metastasize, it's going to spread and eventually

take complete control and change our very nature. Well, let's look at the

progression. The first one is that the blessed man does not walk in the

council of the wicked. Walking in the council of the wicked, literally is

about living your life in a way to where you are allowing influences externally walk

with you in your life that may or may not be pointing you to Christ

or to God, but rather pointing you away. And here's the thing from

our very constitutions inside we can know what truth is and we can and our

faith can be secure. And I'm not talking about acquaintances, because here's the

thing. We can talk about who you're living life with. And then if

I say, well, this means don't spend time with sinners, then the

natural response is, well, Jesus did he associated with sinners. He was

persecuted for it, He shared meals. You know what we're talking about here

in this walk of life is we're talking about your people. You know who

your people are. These are your BFFs, this is your inner circle.

These are the ones that you allow to have insight into your life and influence

into your life. And maybe it's not someone that you want to allow that

to, but it's someone that you consistently spend time with. And so in

the sense that you consistently spend more time with these groups of people, you're

letting them have influence into your life. And so when you walk in their

council, it's not really such that you are asking for their counsel in your

life, but rather through their actions example, and the things they say and

the way they act. What that's doing is it's rubbing off on you.

It's rubbing off. Francis Schaeffer wrote a book How Should We Then Live?

And in it what he says is, and I'm gonna paraphrase because I didn't

memorize the whole quote, but he says that how we live spreads to us

like measles to a child. Think of it. No child is like,

hey, you got some of those measles? Can I have some of those?

That's like, not how it happens. It's not that you welcome it

in. It's the fact that you're around it and it just latches on and

then you think, well, And I think, well, if I'm around

this type of crowd more often, then I'm gonna be wise enough. I'm

gonna have a strong enough faith to not let it impact who I am,

or how I act, or how I believe. But sin is much more

powerful than our greatest efforts. Sin is more powerful than your greatest effort.

What happens is that seat of sin turns from walking in the council of the

wicked into Scripture says standing in the way of sinners. Now that's not like,

hey, the sinner's walking this way, I must stand in his way

and get in his way. That's not the sense of it, but rather

standing in the way means that you are actually standing like with them in congregation,

in association, and you're standing with them in the sense that you're becoming

more like them. And in this sense we know in scripture it says that

bad company corrupts good morals. You've heard that one before, right, But

here's the thing. If we allow ourselves to persist in an environment that is

unhealthy to our faith, it's eventually going to take over and when and so

now you're standing with them, but it doesn't stop there. The progression persists.

And now it says nor sits in the seat of scoffers. I'll tell

you some words. I have to like google and ask like what does that

mean? I'm not the most learned man grammatically speaking. But here's the thing.

I asked chat GPT, what's to use scoff and a word and a

sentence so that I could better understand it. And the sentence that gave me

was and I scoffed at the notion, and I was like, that doesn't

help me one bit. That is such an aggy thing to do. Just

throw the word in any sentence like I am that. Oh see, there's

a sentence, so it doesn't help. But here's the thing. It's a

point of derision. It's an attitude of being against. It's not just an

attitude, but it's an action of speaking against to scoff at something. Oh

no, that's wrong, that's useless, that's worthless. What happens in this

progression is you started out walking, then you ended up standing in the presence,

and now all of a sudden, you're sitting in the seat. Now

that's not talking about sitting down, which to all of us who are getting

older, were like, this progression was kind of good. I was walking

and I was standing. Now I'm sitting. Next, I'll lie down and

take a nap. The connotation of how this is working, though, is

you are now sitting in the seat, in other words, the seat of

someone appointed to a position. You have now become the scoffer himself. You're

now the one fully transformed in the sense that now you are impacting and influencing

others to walk a different way. Isn't this opposite? It's so great that

this is a contrast, because it isn't it opposite as to what the Christian

life does? Look like and should look like, because what we say is

walk in the council of your brothers and sisters and your elders of the church,

stand with those who love Jesus, sit in the seat of disciple maker.

See, that's the progression that God designed to reconcile the world to himself.

But here what we see is clear how things can go the wrong way

very quickly. So the question is is where are our roots planted? What

seat are we sitting in? And the way you answer what seat you're sitting

in is by evaluating which way you are walking in? Where is your association?

How important is that? Listen, if you are not consistently around people

who are drawing you and pointing you towards Jesus, it's time to reevaluate.

And by reevaluate, that's like the really nice way of saying, you need

to change your group. Because let me tell you. If you're the only

person in your group and you're like, I'm a missionary, I'm gonna point

all of them to Jesus. No, here's the thing. You see the

progression, You're gonna end up sitting in their seat. They will not end

up in yours. Here the contrasts in verse two says, but his delight,

this is the blessed man, for his delight is in the law of

the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. You could

read this and think, oh, my gosh, does that mean we're supposed

to move into caves in the mountains and become monks meditating day and night,

repeating the Gregorian chance. No, this is about the course of our lives.

The course of our lives. It sounds like the word meditate can throw

us off, because if we're going to delight in the law of the Lord

and we're going to meditate on it, the first thing we have to realize

and reconcile inside ourselves is that he is not speaking of capital l law like

the Ten Commandments. Okay, that's not what he's talking of. Literal translation

is the fact that we need to delight in the instruction of the Lord.

Now, our natural tendency as as humans typically is to take instructions from the

Lord and create the checklist. Right, you've all got it, don't lie,

cheat, steel, don't do these things. And if you don't,

you look it over there and someone else is doing it, and you're like,

ah, I'm glad. I'm not like them. They're idiots, and

I'm great. It's the checklist, Christian right. Jesus blows that whole dynamic

up in the Sermon on the Mountain. He says, create the best checklist

you want. But I will point you to where the root of the sin

problem is. It's not in the actions of your mouth and hands and feet.

It's in the attitudes of your heart. Delighting in the instruction of the

Lord, in the law of the Lord gets the sense where you say,

world, i am done listening to you. I am done following your ways.

I'm done doing anything to find true joy and contentment and peace and happiness

outside of God, who created everything for me to not just experience that,

but to be that. I'm done with it, and I am going to

root myself in Him because that's where my true so of desire and want comes

from. And until we are reconnected with God, until we are, as

Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they find their comfort in Him.

He is the source. Now meditating on his meditating day and night on the

delighting in his law. What does it look like to ma, I'm not

talking about cross legged fingers out like own type of meditation. Meditating is setting

your focus. Meditating is setting your focus. And by him saying day and

night, he's saying setting your focus throughout every day on God. And you're

like, well, that sounds kind of easy. That sounds a lot easier

than like what I hear meditation to be. But then the question is is

can you track throughout the day how many times you're thinking on God? Found

yourself at a part of your day where there's something going on because the world

is broken, where you're constantly trying to find a solution to get out of

it or just get it done, and all these things, and the last

thing you're thinking about is Jesus. If we are not meditating day and night,

we're never satisfying our soul's true desire. If we're not thinking of God

and the way He made things to be and calling to mind his scripture and

his teachings, then we are sick without a medication. We are lost without

a map, but more importantly, without those terrible illustrations, we're actually just

disconnected. We are disconnected from the true source of joy and peace and his

shaloam in the way things should be. You think, why can't I'm not

good at scripture memory, I'm not. I can't do that. I'm just

gonna call all of us out for a minute, because if I can wrap

the entire song of Ice Ice Baby, which I can, in fact,

it's our closing song today, if I can enter any conversation with anyone throughout

my day and not get through an entire conversation without quoting a movie or a

TV show, And I'm telling you, I'm finding that harder and harder.

Just the other day, I was like, what we do in life echoes

an eternity? Yeah, dudes, you know what movie that's from? All

right? So here's the thing. We have so much stored up in our

minds, and yet we think that we cannot store up the word of God

in our hearts. Iceized Baby does nothing for my soul, but it gets

laugh from my kids when I'm performing at home. Quoting movies doesn't give me

any satisfaction. God's law, God's instruction, which really is just outlining and

describing to us and engaging us with the very character and nature of God himself,

is where you are truly connected to his joy and his peace, and

where you can be truly blessed. But let me make one point about this

meditating on his word, which is critical constantly being connected to him in our

thoughts and in our heart's desires. These are not actions that God demands of

us for some form of repayment for what he's done. Every good action,

every good work that God's instruction would call us to, is not men as

repayment for what he's done. It's not something we owe him. It's not

something we get credit for. We don't get a report card when we get

to Heaven based on those things. Our report card in Heaven already says saved

a plus one hundred percent on the exam, because Jesus took the test.

When we follow God in this life, we are not following him to prove

anything to him, to earn anything from him, or to make him less

disappointed in us. We are doing it because it's the way He's made us

to live, and it's the true way to be connected with him and have

him live his life through us. It is no longer I that live,

but Christ who lives through me. That's the connection we are talking about.

So we can't have this human response of like, well, I'm not doing

it right. God's not happy with me. I'm not doing good enough.

There is no good enough when you compare yourself to the work of Jesus,

and so in obeying God, the first step is trusting Jesus. Again,

it's a heart attitude, not based solely on outward action. But here's a

picture on how the inward attitude turns into an outward action. Because he gives

us a great picture. This almost says he is like a tree. This

is the blessed Man. He's like a tree planted by streams of water that

yields its fruit and its season, and its leaf does not wither. In

all that he does, he prospers. The wicked or not so, but

are like chaff that the wind drives away. In this picture, I feel

deeply challenged and lacking. I would say we have a tree in our backyard,

but it's not really accurate or safe to call it a tree. It's

a dry stick that's stuck in the ground. Actually, just a place in

the yard where we've tried to grow a few different trees and we're not good

at It gets full sun throughout the day. We've put water next to it.

Everything we do it kills the tree. And I don't even know why

we want a tree there, to be honest, we just keep trying and

wasting money and killing trees. We're going to be reported to some organization for

that. But in this picture we see a tree that's planted by the water,

as we see in Jeremiah. Jeremiah gives us kind of a similar picture.

And what he tells us there is that the tree has its roots that

are firmly grounded and driving in the nutrients and the life giving nature of the

water for the tree, so that the tree can be what it was meant

to be when it was just a little bit e seed planted in the dirt.

It grows up, but it doesn't just grow up. It prod it's

fruit and it's season, which means it acts as it should. The apple

tree makes apples at the same time, though the psawmist goes deeper, and

he says, and his leaf does not wither. There is a sustaining nature

to the river as well. It's not one and done, got the apples

were good. No, this is the continual state of this tree that is

planted near the water, and its root system is established and it's drawing in

what it needs to be, what it was meant to be, and in

that you prosper. You prosper Now, I'm not talking about prosper in the

sense of like what we call prosperity, because we've got it all wrong.

We've got it all wrong. We think prosperity is to have a certain kind

of house, drive a certain kind of car, have a certain kind of

vacation home. And yet everyone that possesses all of those things are like,

man, I really wish I had the private plane, and I really wish

I had this and that, and there's always something more. It's a hunger

and a thirst that never ends because like the like the preacher and Ecclesiastes says,

it's vanity. It's like chasing after the wind. You can reach out

constantly through you I have trying to grab it. You're never gonna catch it

because it's not real. True prosperity means that you are fulfilled in who you

are. It means that you are who you were meant to be. And

let me tell you, friends, if you are one today that doesn't fall

on the side of the blessed man this morning, and you're disconnected from God,

and you think, man, I'm kind of comfortable in this seat of

being a scoffer, Like life's treat me pretty well. Let me let me

just connect with you for a second, because I can tell you it's you're

still empty. You're still empty because once you taste and see that the Lord

is good, there is nothing else that will ever quench your soul is still

longing. And it's because your roots are not planted firmly next to this river,

says the wicked or not. So they're like chaff. Chaff is just

the useless parts of a harvest. Like in the Old Testament, if you

remember back to the Book of Ruth, you know she's out gleaning the fields

and then there's chaff, and Boaz wants to make sure they get she gets

some of the good stuff, and not just the chaff. The chaff is

useless parts of the husks of the wheat and leaves that have died because it's

been cut down and harvested. And the picture that they had back in these

days is that the wind would just drive all of that trash away and it's

gone, and the only thing that's left is what's useful and beneficial and fruitful.

That's the vanity. It's the chasing after the wind. Because here's the

thing. If you chase prosperity and the way that the world chases prosperity,

you can end up with all the cars, all the planes, all the

real estate, all of the power, all of the position, all of

the true temporal happiness that comes in the moments where you actually even feel good

about all that stuff. And yet then this world comes to an end and

you die, and what happens. All that stuff goes to someone else so

that they can chase it too. Even if you put it in your casket,

you don't get to touch it because you're dead. It's like a game

of monopoly. You end up with all the hotels and you win, but

when the game's over, everything goes right back in the box. The chaff

is worthless. Here we go on because what we've seen now is that there

is an experience of this life of blessing, this experience of the life of

blessing, showing us that it's not something external, it's something internal. And

in scripture it's always this way. Life is meant to be lived inside out.

Life is meant to be lived inside out. The outside will be healthy

until the inside is. Your life won't look better feel better until the inside

is fixed. And yet when we face struggle, we always try to fix

the outward circumstances, don't we. The key is to turn inward, because

in your heart, that's where God is looking to meet you. It's where

God is looking to change you. So the question is, if the heart

is the root and we need the waters, what are we feeding it?

What are we feeding it? What are you feeding the roots of your heart

with each and every day? And now we start to get a sense of

what it means to meditate on the law of God day and night. It's

a question of where your roots are drawing the lifeblood from. And if you're

not drawing it from the work of Christ and the life of Christ and the

nature of God himself, then you're disconnected from anything that's real. Ultimately,

we find as we're kind of wrap up in the Psalm, there's a destination

because here's the thing. We live life in the context of different things.

We live life in the context of the next five years. If you have

kids in high school, you live life in the context of getting them to

college. Maybe if you believe in you know, this traditional form of retirement.

You live your life and the context of this mythical twenty to thirty years

at the end of your life that you may or may not get, and

you make all your decisions based on that. Today when what scripture shows us

is that this life, the entirety of it, even if you live to

one hundred, it's not even a noticeable blip on the radar of eternity.

And Scripture tells us to live our entire life just the entirety of that little

blip in the context of eternity. And once you're done letting that, blow

your mind up, because it's impossible to understand the reality is, whether you

believe it or not, whether you want to admit it or not, eternity

is real. We're in the midst of it, and we're on the timeline

of it and will never exit it. So the destination matters because if you

care that much about how the next eighty years of your life are going to

go, what about the next gazillion trillion? I know? And that's even

a blip on the radar, Isn't that wild? Like really? Like that'll

give you a headache? Lator try it. Here's what he says, 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 wicked. The way of the wicked, will perish. When you walk,

when you stand, when you sit, you eventually lie down, we

all die. It's a reality. What he's saying here is that who you

choose to be a part of in this temporal life is who you lie down

with for eternity. Once you lie down, you don't get to move,

you don't get to change teams. You don't get to say, don't like

this bed, I want to go, try to the therapeutic one. Like

you don't get to make those types of decisions. And so in this last

section there is a warning implied, and then there's an encouragement. The encouragement

is found that when this psalm was written, the name of Jesus was not

known. Explicitly. The warning is this, and I want to make it

very plain and very clear, because that's the way it is in scripture.

And my job isn't to give you my thoughts. My job is to share

God's word with you. If you are not walking with Christ today, I

want to tell you tomorrow is not promised to you. Ten years from now,

is not promised to you. Eighty years from now, not promise to

you the next ten minutes, not promise to any of us. If you

are not walking with Christ, if you are not purchased by his blood,

reconcile with him, walking in faith with him. And that doesn't mean you

doing anything other than throwing your hands up and saying, I quit trying in

this life, and I give myself to you, and I trust you,

and I put my faith in you and your work and your work during your

life, and your work on the Cross, and your work in the resurrection,

and the fact that you're coming back again to take us into eternity with

you that will never have trouble, never have strife and struggle or chaos.

If you haven't, then the Psalmists is giving you a picture you won't stand

in the judgment. And it's not just a picture of you don't get to

be on team Jesus. It's giving you a picture that the God of the

universe, who knew you before you were born and conceived, who knew you

before the foundations of the earth, who desires to be with you, you

will be disconnected with Him for all eternity. And in scripture, if you

want to see that as the burning lake of fire doesn't sound great. But

here's the thing. Don't make decisions based on these pictures. But it could

also be the coldness of space, of being separated from God. We see

both pictures in scripture. Here's the reality. It's not about the fire,

it's about the absence of God. Imagine living any of this life where there

is there no hope for you to be content or pe at peace. Some

of you don't have to imagine that. So the encouragement on the other end,

and even for those that are currently in the seat of the scoffers and

in the place of the wicked, is this. God didn't design it to

be that way. God's plan and his desire is that none should perish.

And that's not my opinion. That's God's word. That's his desire, and

he has made a way of reconciliation. And so what I want to do

with you this morning, as the Psalmist is trying to warn you for,

is I want to encourage you and actually just plead with you. If you

are not connected to the God who loves you, to the Lord and Savior,

who is the lover of your soul. Don't waste one second. You

don't want to make a decision just to be happy. You want to be

You want to make a decision to live your life with the one who completes

you, where you can truly be fulfilled in what you were created to be.

To be reconnected with Almighty God who loves you and desires to be with

you and Christian on this side of the cross, if your faith and trust

is in him. This is a call and an encouragement and a warning to

talk to you about the dangers of sin so that you might stay away from

that. Because even covered by the blood of Jesus, we still walk and

stand and sit. We've been offered a t bone steak, and we continue

to eat whatever junk. Choose the path of blessing. Walk in the path

of blessing. Be rooted in scripture, be planted with believers. That's how

we live the life of blessing. I'm going to invite the band to come

up to the stage as we close out, and because we're going to respond

to scripture. It's funny, we're going to respond to a song with a

song. But I told you, I told you earlier on that the way

to follow obediently in the path of Christ. It's not about do this,

do that, do that, do that. It's about just following Jesus.

So instead of walking in the way of the wicked, standing with the sinners,

or sitting in the seat of scoffers, make the decision now to walk

with Jesus on this road of life, because he's the one that will never

fail you, will never desert you. He's always with you, and he

is in fact God Almighty, to where you will truly have peace and love

and joy in your life, and the fruits the spirit will spring from you

like a tree. Follow Jesus.