The Joy of the Righteous & The Misery of the Wicked

Today will be Psalm 1.

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 its 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 will perish.

Church, please join me in prayer over the word.

Heavenly Father.

We're your children.

Father, we adore you.

And um we just adore this time that you've gathered us today.

Father, we just ask you to prepare our hearts and our minds to hear what you have for us today.

Father, we just we just lift up Brother Robert and his preaching over your word today.

We just pray you deliver the word you have for us today.

Father, we're your children, and we just want to learn who you are and know you more.

Father, we want to be the blessed.

We want to be the blessed that we hear in your word.

Show us who you are.

Show us what we need to do, Father.

We love you.

We're so thankful for Jesus, and in his name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

Good morning again.

You guys can be seated.

If you have not already done so, let me invite you to open your copy of scripture to Psalm 1.

We are going to be in Psalms 1 this morning.

As you guys know, the last couple of weeks we've been working our way through some specific Psalms, and we have several more weeks to go in the Psalms.

We won't hit all of them, but we'll hit we'll hit several.

And today we're in Psalms 1, which really serves as the intro for the rest of the book of Psalm, some 150 chapters, and Psalm 1 is the introduction.

It sets the stage for the next 149 chapters.

And as we begin, I want to pose a question for you, and it will really be the driving question that we look at throughout the entirety of our sermon.

And that is, are you blessed or are you cursed?

Are you blessed or are you cursed?

And this passage speaks to both realities.

The truth of scripture tells us that all of us, male and female, every single one of us that sits in this room, every single one of us that walks this earth will fall into one of those two categories.

We are either blessed or we are cursed.

There is no middle ground, there's no in between, there's no one foot in one way and one foot in the other way.

There is either you are blessed or you are cursed.

And I understand that we all came in this morning, likely with some sort of presuppositions as to what it means to be blessed and what it means to be cursed.

So we're going to take, as we begin, before we dive into the specifics of this passage, we're going to take just a moment to kind of set the stage using scripture on what it means to be blessed and what it means to be cursed.

And to do that, first, I want to make sure I provide some contextual understanding to what we're reading here in Psalms 1, really for the entirety of all of the Psalms.

This is Old Testament.

We we hit on this a couple of weeks ago.

This is Old Testament, right?

Therefore, it is written under what we would call the Old Covenant.

And it's important for us to have that understanding while at the same time realizing and understanding the necessity that we have today of reading it through the lens of the New Covenant that is the gospel that we see in the New Testament.

As such, what I'm going to do is I make some references from Scripture as it relates to the meaning of blessedness and cursedness, is I'm going to pull from both the Old Testament and the New Testament and today's passage.

With that, let me point out a couple of things about blessed.

Blessed is undeserved forgiveness.

Blessed is tasting the goodness of who God is and what God has done.

Blessed is dwelling with the Lord.

Blessed is walking with the Lord.

Blessed is experiencing the lights of the Lord.

Blessed is grasping an understanding of the love of the Lord.

Blessed is a form a firm foundation.

It is stable.

It is secure.

It is immovable.

Blessed is imputed righteousness on the life of a believer.

Blessed, as this text says and alludes to, is delighting in the word or the law of the Lord.

Blessed is not temporary, blessed is permanent in nature.

Cursed, on the other hand, when we look at scripture and look at this passage, it's enslavement to sin.

It's the receiver of God's wrath.

Think about the text that we see where it talks about cursed is the man who hung on the tree, the cross.

That's pointing to the one who received the curse on our behalf.

Cursed is unstable.

It's driven to and from like the chaff that Martin just read about, like this passage just talked about.

Cursed will perish, as we see in verse 6.

Imputed sin reigns in the life of the cursed.

Cursed means to walk in darkness.

Cursed is, as we're going to see in a moment, it's building to this point of sitting in the seat of scoffers.

Through a biblical survey, that's how we define what it means to be blessed and what it means to be cursed.

And for us practically today, we're going to look at two realities: blessed are the righteous and cursed are the wicked.

If you have your listening guide, that's what you'll see in there.

So let's begin with blessed are the righteous.

Praise God, we are blessed.

Popular sayings communicate things like this.

Some of you have heard these, some of you might have even said these.

Too blessed to be stressed.

That's trash.

Count your blessings, not your problems.

That's also against what we see in scripture.

Do you notice what the psalmist does here from the very beginning of this passage to highlight the blessings?

What does he do?

He points to the problems.

He points to the problems, for which for us emphasizes that blessed has nothing to do with earthly success.

Blessed has nothing to do with earthly comforts.

Blessed has nothing to do with the lack of problems.

But for most of us, if we were just to sit down and write a definition without thinking about it very much, we would write blessed as all the good things that happen in our life, all the lack of problems that we have.

But that's not what scripture has to say for us.

Look with me at verse one.

Blessed is the man.

Then he doesn't first highlight what the blessed man does or what the blessed man receives.

He first highlights, and we'll but we'll get to those things, but he first highlights what he doesn't do.

What he doesn't do.

That is, he doesn't make it a habit of these three things: walking in the counsel of the wicked, standing in the way of sinners, or sitting in the seat of scoffers.

I spent a ton of time on verse one this week.

We could do a whole sermon series on verse one.

That walking in the counsel of the wicked, standing in the way of scoffers and sitting in the way of sinners and sitting in the seat of scoffers.

There is so much there.

It's pointing to the progressive nature of sin.

Think about it this way: we walk in the counsel of the wicked, which means we explore our options of sin.

We check out the buffet that sin is and that all it has to offer.

And in the meantime, as we're doing that, we take advice and counsel from the ungodly.

Then we will stand in the way of sinners.

We identify specific ways of sin that we like.

We identify our flavor, the things that we want to do, the things that we desire to do.

We make our choice and we go do it.

The act of standing with those who are in opposition to God.

We're imitating man in that moment instead of imitating Christ.

Then we will sit in the seat of scoffers, which means we submit to said sin and we brag about it with our words, our actions, our attitudes, and our continued submission to said sin.

We mock those who imitate Christ.

This is the ultimate example of pride.

Is that not how it happens?

We don't just wake up.

I remember when I was in youth ministry, I had a guy say this time, and this statement has stuck to me, you don't just wake up one day and say, I'm going to ruin my life.

We don't just wake up one day and say, I'm going to cheat on my taxes.

We don't just wake up one day and say, I'm going to cheat on my spouse or I'm going to get angry at every single person that I come in contact with today.

We don't just wake up one day and say, you know what, I'm going to get divorced today.

I'm going to pursue divorce without biblical grounds.

Or I'm going to be mean or I'm going to be arrogant or I'm going to be prideful.

There is typically a series of walking in the counsel of the wicked, standing in the way of sinners, and seating in the seat of scoffers that plays out what ultimately it comes out in the expression of us living in submission to prideful self-sufficiency in our pursuit of earthly satisfaction.

And then we're deep.

And all of a sudden we've walked through the wide gate of sin and fleeed from the narrow gate that we're going to talk about later on in the sermon.

And as we see from God's word, and even in this passage, the results of this pattern of behavior and this pattern of life isn't just temporary here.

The results are eternally damning.

Blessed is the man who does not do this.

Blessed is the man who refuses to be trapped by the nature of sin that is him.

Praise God, we are a new covenant people.

That's one thing I've been in prayer about for myself and for all of us as we work our way through the Psalms.

Praise God that we are a new covenant people, which means our obedience to the law is not what determines our standing before a holy God.

I don't know about you.

Praise God for me in that regard.

Because I don't live up.

Praise God.

We're a new covenant people.

We have to understand that in the Old Testament, right?

The old covenant people, they had some 610 plus, I think it was 614, maybe 619, whatever, 610 plus Levitical laws under the law of Moses.

It was a covenant that was based on obedience.

Think about the weight of that.

It was a covenant that was based on obedience.

And in the New Testament, the law of grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, who fulfilled the law, right?

Who fulfilled the law, it is a covenant that is not uh based on our obedience.

It's a covenant that results in obedience, right?

It is nothing, there's nothing binding about our obedience under the new covenant.

It is binding because the blood of Jesus.

That's the only reason it's binding.

To illustrate this for you further for you, let me read for you Psalms 32.

Just one verse out of Psalms 32.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

You see, blessed is not simply pointing to obedience.

Yes, we should pursue obedience.

That's what we should do.

It should be the outworking of our faith in Christ.

But blessed is the man who delights in the forgiveness that he has received.

Psalms 1.1 makes forgiveness even more beautiful and delightful because it helps us see how screwed up we are and the depth of what we've been forgiven of.

We have been forgiven of so much.

We have been forgiven of things that we didn't even know were wrong.

I was talking about to someone the other day about this.

The older I get, the more I can look back at times in my life and I am convicted now about things I didn't 10 years ago.

That 10 years ago I didn't even, my eyes weren't even open to the fact that it was a sin.

We've been forgiven of all those things if you were in Christ.

Our sin is a big deal.

Our sin is a big deal.

And if our sin was not a big deal, forgiveness is meaningless.

The gospel is worthless.

We have to understand it's not just some isolated sin that we have been forgiven of, it is an identity of sin that we have been rescued from and forgiven of.

You see, prior to Christ's forgiveness in your life or in my life, sin was not just an aspect of who you were.

And I think oftentimes that's how we view it.

It was an aspect or it is an aspect of who you were.

It was who you were.

It was who you were.

You were dead in your trespasses and sin.

And if you're here today and you've never put your faith alone in Christ alone, sin is who you are as you sit in the seat that you're sitting in right now.

You may be a business owner, but at your core, you are a sinner.

You may be a healthcare professional, but at your core right now, you are a sinner.

You may be a mom, you may be a dad, but at your core you are a sinner.

You may be a son or a daughter, but at your core you're a sinner.

You may be a grandma, and praise God for all the grandmas, but at your core, you are a sinner.

You may be an American, but at your core you are a sinner.

You may be old or you may be young, but at your core you are a sinner.

We do a really, really good job of compartmentalizing our screw-ups and our sins and our failures.

We do a really good job at that.

But the truth of the gospel says you aren't a man or a woman who happens to sin.

Sin is not a compartment of your life.

You are in the depths of your being a sinner.

That is who you are because of the imputed sin of Adam.

That is who you are.

And we have been forgiven so that we might die to walking in the way that this passage talks about, right?

Walking in the council of the wicked, standing in the way of sinners, sitting in the seat of scoffers.

We have been forgiven so that we might die to that.

No longer do that.

So blessed is the man who delights in forgiveness, but also blessed is the man who delights in the word of God.

We see that in this passage as well.

It talks about delighting in the law of God.

I want you to think about the word of God when we talk about the law, his covenants, his commandments, his laws, his instructions, his word, they are all given us, given to us through his divinely inspired word.

So think about the word of God.

It means you find satisfaction in it and not simply obey it for the sake of obeying it or conducting some action.

If I'm in a class and a teacher assigns me a book to read, first of all, if I'm in high school, I'm not reading it.

I'm reading the pink monkey notes like most of you guys.

Now I love to read.

I don't know what happened.

Something changed.

But if I'm in a class and I'm assigned a book to read, let's say I'm assigned to read Pilgrim's Progress.

There is a significant difference in me reading Pilgrim's Progress for the sake of reading Pilgrim's Progress, than me reading Pilgrim's Progress and delighting in the consumption of the words on the page.

One of the most significant takeaways for you this morning, if you are a believer from this passage, is we are to delight in the word of God.

We should treasure it.

We should consume it.

But I also want to be careful because I want to recognize and highlight and understand, make sure you guys understand that delighting in the word of God sometimes means the consumption of the word of God is labor.

It's a labor.

It can be hard at times.

Sometimes it may be all joyful and delightful as you read it.

And other times it may seem way more like a discipline that you're doing.

I want us to understand that the spiritual discipline of Bible reading may not always seem delightful to us.

And that is why you have people sitting beside you right now.

That is part of the beauty of the church.

It's for when it's not delightful to you or you're having a hard time reading something.

There have been times in my life when I've been in different situations and I've been struggling, and the word tells me to do something I really don't want to do.

And it is hard.

It's hard to read, and it's most certainly hard to follow through in that.

But this is the beauty of having one another in the church.

One of the reasons and the beauties of the local church in the life of a believer, so we can encourage each other with God's word.

We can remind each other of the promises of God's word.

We can encourage each other when we don't want to read God's word.

Sometimes it's us singing the word over one another.

Sometimes it's the person sitting beside you and reminding you of what is true when you were so convinced that it's not, or that you're struggling, there's doubts and all the things.

Your brother or sister sitting behind beside you, loving you enough to point you back to the word, even when it's not what you want to hear.

That too is delighting in the word together.

At the same time, I've often had people ask me the question, and I'm struggling with this sin or that sin.

It doesn't matter which sin, but I'm struggling with sin.

I'm really struggling.

I'm desiring to kill this, and I keep doing the things I hate, as Paul says.

I want to kill it, but I can't seem to do it.

How do I kill sin?

To me, this passage highlights that we have to stop killing sin for the sake of killing it and kill it because you find delight in the Lord's forgiveness and in his word.

You do it as a response to what he's bestowed upon you through the faith alone and Christ alone that you have.

We were all indicted and all but convicted sinners, right?

The DA had handed down the indictment, and the guilty verdict was getting ready to be slammed down in our face.

But Jesus, the God man, intervened.

He took your guilt, he took my guilt upon himself.

And as the text said that I alluded to a minute ago, cursed is the man who hung on the tree.

He was cursed for you and I.

Cursed is the man who hung on the tree, so you and I didn't have to be cursed, so we could be blessed.

He paid the price for our guilt.

This is why we can say the word, the law of God that is so difficult at times for us to read through our fleshly lens and desires is life-giving.

The bad news is life-giving because of the forgiveness that we have in Christ.

I say this often: there is no good news without the bad news.

The bad news makes the good news so much sweeter.

We have the pleasure today of reading this passage through the lens of the cross.

The law declares our guilt, but it is delightful and should be delighted in because of the justification made available to us through faith alone in Christ alone, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

You see, blessedness is not temporary.

Blessedness is eternal.

Blessedness is not about conducting a specific physical action or refraining from a specific physical action.

Blessedness is an internal, internal.

Satisfaction that we find through the blood of Christ.

That's what blessedness is.

And verse 3 goes on and it points to this spiritual prosperity idea.

I'm going to read for you Romans 12, 2.

Do not be confirmed, conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, by that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

You might say, why are you talking about the will of God if you just mentioned spiritual prosperity?

Get this.

Spiritual prosperity is the fact that God's will is good and acceptable and perfect.

That's what spiritual prosperity is.

Blessed is the man who walks in submission to his will.

See, we have this skewed view of what prosperity actually is.

I want to give you two scenarios, and I want these are extremes, but I want these to sink in in your mind for a second.

You are a parent.

This is the first one.

You are a parent.

Your son or daughter graduates high school, and they are at best a C student.

As my college professor said, C's gets degrees.

They don't go to college, but the Lord gets a hold of their life.

They marry, they have two kids, and the Lord calls them to faithfully proclaim the gospel in Iran.

They live there for 20 years.

Then tragedy strikes.

And at the moment of their death, they do not own a home.

They don't have a dime in their bank account.

But their kids, your grandkids, are teenagers and they too are faithful followers of Jesus.

And they stand up in the funeral and they proclaim the good news of the gospel at your child's funeral.

They proclaim that mom and dad's death was not in vain.

The gospel is worth it.

Scenario one.

Scenario two, you're a parent.

Your son or daughter graduates high school.

They're a student.

They're number one in their class in high school.

They're number one in their class in college.

They're number one in their class in grad school.

Maybe they even played college football and they pointed to Jesus after every single touchdown, pointed to a Jesus they never actually professed faith in.

The Jesus they claimed to celebrate, they had no relationship with him.

They got married and started what becomes the top-grossing company in all of the United States.

They had nothing to do with church.

They had nothing to do with Christ.

They have and raise two kids, never the darkened the door of the church, and neither do their kids, your grandkids.

But at the moment of their death, they had three homes that were paid for and three billion dollars in their name.

Look, I'm not making light of anyone's situation.

And these are extreme examples.

But what I want to point out to you, our American intuition tells us that the second one is the prosperous life.

The second one is the prosperous life.

Top grossing company in the United States, three billion dollars in their name.

That's the prosperous life.

The gospel says quite the opposite.

Gospel fruit is not green paper of money.

It's not earthly success.

It's not big companies or large bank accounts or good grades.

That's not gospel fruit.

Gospel fruit, according to this passage, is delighting in the forgiveness of Christ.

It is delighting in his word.

It is saying yes to his will, regardless what it costs you.

That is gospel fruit, which is quite the opposite of what our culture says.

And I know in your mind, yeah, yeah, our culture is screwed up.

I'm not just talking about our culture outside of the church.

I am talking about the culture of the American church as well, the church of the West.

We have a skewed view of prosperity too.

Don't just point fingers at other people.

That can be us too.

In verse 4, we see a turning point, a shift from blessed to wicked.

It says, What we see in the text is cursed are the wicked.

You see, I mentioned the imputed sin of Adam earlier.

I did that on purpose.

Because of the imputed sin of Adam that I mentioned earlier, wickedness is our default.

It is our defaults.

You don't have to teach yourself to sin.

Right?

You don't have to teach yourself to sin.

I promise you.

You just sin.

And if you say, oh yeah, someone had to teach me to sin, you are prideful and arrogant, and you are sinning, right?

You you sin because you are a sinner.

I don't have time to get into the God's original created order and design, but know what I'm speaking of now is based on what we see in the fall of Genesis 3.

You do not have to work very hard to earn condemnation.

It is upon you because of your sinful nature.

Another way of saying this is judgment and condemnation of that is spoken about in verse 5 and 6.

It is our default, right?

It is who we are, which is why I am super passionate.

I say this at nearly every funeral that I've ever preached.

You are either blessed or you are cursed, which means you either follow Jesus or you don't.

There is no in-between.

Zero in between.

You follow Jesus or you don't follow Jesus.

There's no partial faith in Christ.

There is faith in Christ, which is blessedness, and there is faith in sin, which is perishing, as we see in verse six.

One or the other, no in-between, no middle ground.

But we have this word righteousness.

What do we do with that?

That's such a confusing word.

And in the case of this passage, I want us to look at righteousness is not perfection.

We've already established that you are wicked, that I'm wicked, that that we are wicked.

We've established that.

We must understand that the righteousness and blessedness spoken of in Psalms 1 has nothing to do with what we can achieve on our own.

It is not feasible for you to achieve righteousness when left to your own devices.

As I pointed out, perishing is our default.

We see that in verse 6.

This helps us understand and explain why one place in scripture it talks about blessed are the righteous.

And then in another place in scripture it talks about no one is righteous, no, not one.

Let me read that for you.

Romans 3, 10 through 12.

At is a written, none is righteous, no not one.

No one understands, no one seeks for God, all have turned aside, together they have become worthless.

No one does good, not even one.

How are the righteous blessed if no one is righteous?

What do you do with that?

Here's the answer: Righteousness is not the perfection on the part of the wretched sinner, you and I.

Faith in Christ does not equal perfection, right?

It does not equal perfection.

It is faithful trust in the one who is righteous.

That's the answer.

It is faithful trust from us, the sinner, in the one who is righteous, Christ, who was cursed on our behalf on the cursed tree, right?

Faithful trust in the one who is righteous.

It is the one who looks to the Lord for hope.

It is the one who looks to the Lord for help.

And ultimately looks to the Lord for righteousness, which leads us to the second subpoint under that one.

Righteousness is imputed.

Righteous standing before God is not our doing.

It is imputed on us.

Philippians 3, 9, and be found in him, not having righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

We are made righteous through faith alone in Christ alone.

There is no other way.

I don't care how hard you try and how good of a day you have as it relates to killing sin, that's not what makes you righteous.

What makes you righteous is faith alone in Christ alone.

We should pursue obedience in that way.

But our righteousness comes not from our own success or failures.

Our righteousness comes from Christ alone.

A man who has experienced the love and grace of Christ will bear much gospel fruit.

A couple of other things I want to highlight here.

The pursuit of righteousness is not done.

And I think this is how we, the trap we often fall into.

I know it for me, especially when I was a kid, the pursuit of righteousness is not done to escape some eternal punishment.

Understand that.

Pointed back to the illustration I used a moment ago, the man or woman who comes into this life and pursues success at all costs, fleeing from Christ, submits to the way of the wicked.

They are what we see in verse 4.

The chap that's the wind drives away.

And that may not mean much to us, but I want to say this with as kind of a countenance as I can.

The life of the wicked is useless.

Let the weight of that sink in for a minute.

It is pointless.

But for the readers of the Psalms, they understood this was the worthless grain that was left over in the threshing floor that just blew away into oblivion with no purpose.

This passage tells us that the life of the wicked is just like that.

It is blown away and worthless.

Has no purpose.

And if that's you this morning, I pray and hope that the Lord would use that bad news.

That bad news that says the life of the wicked is useless to open your eyes to the need for the forgiveness of Christ.

And if that's not heavy enough, we have verse 6, which tells us not only is the life of the wicked useless, the eternity of the wicked is torment.

You see, the wicked man does not delight in the forgiveness of Christ.

He does not delight in the word or the law of God because he or she has no faith.

Therefore, there's no imputed righteousness.

Therefore, there's no resulting acting in a righteous manner.

They have rejected the opportunity to experience grace, and according to this passage, they will perish.

I'm going to read for you an illustration I came across this week in the commentary, and it's it's a little bit long, but I'm gonna read it for you.

Harry Ironside, the Bible teacher, told of a visit to Palestine years ago by a man named Joseph Flax.

He had an opportunity to address a gathering of Jewish folks and Arabian folks and took the subject, took for the subject of his address the first psalm.

He read it and then asked the question Who is the blessed man whom the psalmist speaks of?

This man never walked in the council of the wicked or stood in the way of sinners or sat in the seat of mockers.

He was absolutely a sinless man.

Nobody spoke.

There was silence.

So Flax said, Was he our great father Abraham?

One old man said, No, it cannot be Abraham.

Abraham denied his wife and told a lie about her.

Well, how about the lawgiver, Moses?

Another man said.

No, someone said, It cannot be Moses.

He killed a man and he lost his temper by the waters of Meribah.

Flax then suggested David.

It was not David.

There was a silence for a long while.

Then an elderly Jewish man arose and said, My brothers, I have a little book here.

It's called the New Testament.

I've been reading it.

And if I could believe this book, if I could be sure that it is true, I would say that the man of the first Psalm was a man named Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus is the man of Psalms 1, and he challenges us to follow him down the road that leads to life, the road that does not lead to perishing, the road that leads to a place that does not disappoint.

As we get ready to close, I want to end with the same question that I began with.

Excuse me.

Are you blessed or are you cursed?

As I alluded to earlier, you can walk one of two ways according to Scripture.

One of two ways.

There's no middle ground.

I want to use Matthew 7 to point this out.

Enter by the narrow gate.

For the gate is wide, and the way is easy, that leads to destruction.

And those who enter by it are many.

For the gate is narrow, and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

You guessed it.

The wide gate is the gate of the curse.

The narrow gate is the gate of the blessed.

How do we know which gate is which?

I want to make it super simple for you.

Your life provides you the opportunity to put your faith in one of two things.

Right?

We can muddy the water here all we want to, but according to Scripture, you're you have the opportunity to put your faith in one of two things.

You can put your faith in sin, which is the wide gate that leads to cursedness, it leads to perishing, all the things that we've seen in this text.

Or you can put your faith in Christ, which is the narrow gate that leads to life, to blessedness.

And this isn't some Mississippi gate.

I'm just gonna be clear.

This is not some Mississippi gate that you drive up to and everybody and their mama drives around it in their four-wheeler.

That's not what this is.

There's no way around it.

You go through one gate or the other.

I don't care how cool your ATV is, you're not getting around it.

You go through the narrow gate or you go through the wide gate, one or the other.

Every single one of us in this room has already walked through the wide gate.

Hear me.

Every single one of us has already walked through the wide gate, faith in sin.

Remember what I said earlier?

You do not have to work hard to earn condemnation, you just earn it.

You don't have to work hard, you've already passed through that gate.

It's default, it's wide, and everybody's coming, it's a party.

But you also have the opportunity to walk through the narrow gate.

Some of you have already done so.

For those others of you, it's not too late.

If the spirit is turning, stirring in you right now to step through the narrow gate, your response is threefold.

Listen to the spirit, right?

Respond to the spirit's prompting.

Confess right now that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead and you will be saved.

You will have walked through the narrow gate and you will be counted as blessed, because you have received the grace of the one who took the curse for you.

The righteousness that we spoke of earlier will be imputed upon you.

You will be blessed, and you will get the experience as such.

I was talking to my wife yesterday, actually.

It's an aside, but I'm gonna add it in here.

I was talking to my wife yesterday about this, and she was like, Why in the world, Psalms one, like, why?

It's weighty, it's heavy.

There's 149 other options, right?

Why Psalms 1?

I just want to emphasize something.

I am charged with caring for your soul, myself and the other elders.

So I want to speak really candidly this morning, and I hope you guys will hear my heart in this.

So many professing believers, Christians, seem to step into the Christian journey with one foot in and one foot out.

I'm scared myself that I will do that.

But so many of us fall or pursue that temptation.

So many of us fully not just pursue it, but live in it.

We we sit in the seat of scoffers, as it's as I said earlier, to have one foot in and one foot out.

I will be obedient when it's command convenient.

This is this is examples.

I will be obedient when it's commandment, uh convenient, excuse me.

I will attend the gathering if I have nothing better to do.

The gathering's not that important.

I'll go do my Jesus in the tree stand.

That's the antithesis of scripture.

You can't do that.

I will give when I have tremendous excess.

I will give, I will, I will kill sin.

I will I will battle this fight against sin when it's convenient and doesn't take too much work on my part, when I don't have to be honest with people.

Scripture says, no, you can't do that.

And I want us to appropriately feel the weight of that.

Scripture says, no, you can't do that.

Either Jesus is Lord of your life, or he is not.

Jesus is either the Lord of your life or he is not the Lord of your life.

He's not just Lord of your life on Sundays.

If that's the only time he's Lord of your life, then bad news is he's not Lord of your life.

He's a compartment of your life.

So the challenge for us today is to see the forgiveness that we have been given the opportunity to receive because he hung on the tree for us, and then we live out a righteousness because of that, with both foot in, both feet in, fully in submission to his will, regardless of what it cost us.

That's why Psalms 1.

We don't need to be a people who have one foot in and one foot out.

We need to be a people who live in submission with both feet in because you can go through the narrow gate, but the only way is faith alone in Christ alone.

There's no path around it.

Let me pray for us and then we're going to continue to worship as we participate in the Lord's Supper together.

Father, we are grateful for who you are.

We're thankful for your word.

And this morning, as we um God, as we dive into another psalm that provides us such hope as we look to the the blessedness of what it means to be recipients of the grace of Christ.

God, what hope we have in Christ.

What goodness we have as a result of what you've done on our behalf.

God, we we we celebrate that.

And that that is to be cherished and that is to be screamed from the mountaintops.

But at the same time, I love how this psalmist points not only to the blessedness, but he plant points to the the cursed, to the perishing as well.

And God, may we as believers, may we see that and understand and have a greater sense of the sweetness of your forgiveness as we look at that.

May we be challenged to be uh people who have both foot in, that that Lord is you are you are Lord of our life at all times and all in all things.

Not that we're gonna do that in perfection, but that we will be obedient in our pursuit of that.

And God, for the person here who's not a follower of Jesus, I pray that the the weight of the bad news of this passage, that the life of the wicked is worthless and the eternity of the wicked is torment.

I pray that the weight of that this morning would be what you use, that your spirit uses to prompt your response in them to uh put their faith in Christ for the first time today.

May it be so for the sake of Christ, in whose name we pray.

Amen.