"Two Ways to Live" Psalm 1 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Let me invite you to open your Bibles to Psalm 1.

Psalm 1, the very first Psalm is our text for this morning.

And let me just, as you're turning to Psalm 1, give you a public service announcement of where we're going the next couple weeks.

Pastor Jesse continuing to minister in Australia.

Please be in prayer for our pastor as he ministers down under.

In the next couple weeks, we're going to look at Psalm 1 today and then Psalm 2 next week.

Not as the introduction to a sermon series on the entire Psalter, but more as an introduction to the sermon series Pastor Jesse's going to lead us through when he comes back from Australia, through the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' famous teaching called the Sermon on the Mount.

And understanding Psalm 1 and 2, I think, will really give us a platform for understanding kind of the launching point where Jesus launches really from these two Psalms into his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.

These two Psalms form the doorway into the entire Psalter.

The Psalter, all 150 Psalms are intended to teach us how to live a life of worship, how to take every aspect of your life and every season of your life and all the emotions that you experience in life and your anger and your disappointment and your joys and your sorrows and your suffering.

How to live every part of your life and all of the emotion and all of the trials and all the difficulty and all the joys to the glory of God.

How to worship God, to live a life of worship.

That's what the Psalter is for.

And the first two Psalms form the gateway into that kind of a life.

This is the checkpoint that you have to go through.

These are the two bodyguards that you have to pass if you're going to get into and live a life of worship.

The first psalm that we're going to look at today tells you the kind of person you must become.

And then Psalm 2, which we'll look at next week, tells us about God's King, the Savior, whom you must trust if you're going to live a life of blessing and joy.

And I need to tell you before we start that I was assigned to preach Psalm 1 because Pastor Jesse found out that I can sing it in Hebrew.

And it goes like this Ashrehai Sha Loalah, but Satrashaim Derechataim Loamat, Umoshav letsimloy shav, kiim betorataronaev so, uvtorato yehege, umam valaila, the heyake shatulap alge maim, asher piryo yitenbe to, the lehuloy bowl, the koya seyatsliach, lochen harashaim, kiim comots, asher tidefenurach, al kenloya kumor rashaimba, mishpat, the chateimba, that said a kim, kiuda donai derek said a kim vedereh reshaim to ved.

And that's that.

Now I sang that not to impress you, because I know Jesus is I sang that first hour and Jesus did not invite me into the choir.

I sang that for one reason, one reason only, because when Pastor Jesse found out I can sing in Hebrew, he said, in fact, he swore a solemn oath not to give me any rest until I did it up here.

So I have done it.

When he comes back from Australia, you tell him it's been done.

But Psalm 1 really is a magnificent psalm.

It stands at the beginning of this altar for a very good reason.

And the reason that I went through the trouble to learn it and to memorize it is because this is the kind of psalm that I want written on my heart.

This is a psalm that I want running through my mind.

This is a psalm I want to define my life, because this is a psalm that tells you how you can have genuine and lasting joy in the midst of a hard life.

And you know, if you live long enough, and depending on your perspective, my kids think I've lived a very, very long time.

Some of you might not think I have lived very long at all, but lived long enough to just know that happiness and joy in life doesn't come naturally.

Life is hard.

But this psalm carves out a path by which, if you walk according to this psalm, you can experience genuine and lasting joy and meaning in life.

This is the kind of psalm that I want to shape my life.

I hope as we study it this morning that it will have an impact on you and cause you to live a life of joy and peace and meaning to the glory of God.

So let's read the Psalm together, this time in English.

You look down at your Bibles and follow with me as I read from Psalm 1.

The scripture says this 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, and 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.

This is the word of God.

I just said that Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 serve as the double-gated door into the life of worship that the Psalter describes for us.

And you can really see that in a number of ways.

And one of the simple ways you can see that these two Psalms go together is this literary device we call an inclusio, where the Psalms together begin and end on the same note.

Psalm 1 begins with this announcement: Blessed is the man who lives this kind of a life.

And then Psalm 2 concludes with the same note.

Look at the end of Psalm 2 in verse 12.

The final line says, Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

The blessed life, and this word blessed speaks of happiness, of joy, of solid lasting satisfaction, contentment, and joy is had by those people who become this kind of person, live this kind of life because they trust in God's anointed King and His Messiah.

And I think it's crucial to emphasize at the beginning that these two Psalms are announcing the way to happiness.

Because it's not always naturally the way we read these Psalms.

I've experienced repeatedly, especially working with teenagers, but not just teenagers, often when people read Psalm 1 for the first time, kind of the takeaway naturally is, oh, this is one of those religious texts that says that there are good people and there are bad people.

Try to be a good person and not a bad person.

But that would be to fundamentally miss the meaning of this text.

This text serves as a clarion call, announcing that there is a way to have genuine, lasting, solid joy in life.

And you know, it's absolutely appropriate that the Psalter would begin with that note because that's really the point of all of life, isn't it?

That's the end of all human endeavor, is trying to be happy.

As we look around, I know a lot of you are working very hard to try to provide the kind of life where your kids can grow up and experience some happiness in life.

We want them to go to college and find a career and a family and a life where they'll be happy.

It's the end of really every pursuit of humankind.

All of our psychology and sociology, all of our advancements in technology and medicine, all of our endeavors to improve our government and politics are really towards the end of we want to make people happy.

Answering this fundamental question, what is going to make people happy?

And yet, in spite of all our advancements, in spite of all of the technological and medical and government advances we in the modern world, when you survey the United States of America, for example, you find that we are terribly unhappy.

This won't shock any of you, but uh any survey, any medical institution, anywhere you look, you will find unhappiness rampant.

The national rate of suicidal ideation among adults has increased every year since it began to be recorded in 2011.

The rate of teen depression and suicide has skyrocketed, especially in the last decade.

A number of experts say that we are experiencing the worst mental health crisis in recorded human history.

In spite of all our advancements, there's something about us that is profoundly unhappy.

And in the face of that reality, the Bible opens with this clarion call that there is a genuine joy available to you in this world.

That there is a way to be genuinely and lastingly satisfied.

And it doesn't come through circumstances around you, it comes in your relationship with God.

It comes in becoming the kind of person who is rightly related to the living God.

So Psalm 1 is the very, very first psalm because it has the very most important message.

The most important thing about you is that you would become this kind of person because there's really only two ways to live in this world.

There is a way to live that is rightly related to God, that's in relationship to God, that leads to lasting joy and blessing, and there is a way to live in this world that is disconnected from God, that is astray from God, alienated from God, that leads to emptiness, disappointment, and destruction.

And the question that we have to ask ourselves is on which road am I walking?

What kind of life am I living?

Because there are really only two ways to live.

And you know, that's contrary to the way that we naturally think about the world, isn't it?

Naturally, we think that humankind is basically divided up horizontally.

There are rich people and poor people and all these radiations in between.

There are righteous people and less righteous people and less, you know, and then the really morally inferior people somewhere in the middle.

But this text announces at the very beginning that God does not divide people horizontally.

He divides people vertically.

There are righteous and there are wicked.

There are those rightly related to God and those separated from God, and those are the only two categories of human being in the eyes of God.

And that's what this psalm announces, and it asks us to challenge ourselves and ask, where am I?

How does God view my life?

That's the question that we can apply to our hearts as we begin to look at this psalm.

How does God view my life, and am I walking on the path that will lead to lasting solid joy and happiness?

So I want to study Psalm 1 this morning through that lens of the two ways to live.

And really, in order to examine ourselves and to ask ourselves, what life am I living, there's really a number of headings that we'll see as we go through the psalm.

The first is this the psalmist tells us that there are two habits in the two ways to live, two habits.

And these particular habits he's going to list for us aren't distinguishing, but they're the two habits of the kind of person who's living a blessed life in relationship to God.

You want to be lastingly happy in the world.

There must be these two habits characterizing your walk in this world.

There's a negative and a positive.

The negative is in verse 1, and the positive habit is in verse 2.

Let's start by looking at verse 1.

There's something that you must not do if you would experience blessing in this life.

Look at verse 1 in your Bibles.

Blessed is the man, the psalmist says, who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.

There's a negative habit that must characterize your life, namely, you must resist unrighteousness.

You must separate yourself from sin.

And notice there's a progression here in the verbs.

From walking to standing to sitting.

That movement is meant to convey the totality of your life separated from sin and what displeases God.

Now let's break this down a little bit.

Notice the first thing that the psalmist says on that first line who walks not in the counsel of the wicked.

So if you'd be happy in this life, you must not walk in the counsel of the wicked.

And that leads to a natural question.

Well, who are the wicked?

Are they the super evil?

I think that's probably the way most of us hear the word wicked in modern vernacular English, unless you're saying this person's in some kind of Broadway play.

Wicked usually conveys somebody who's extra bad.

Is that what this is talking about?

As long as you don't hang out with the extra bad people, I don't know who I don't know who would that be.

We would probably all have some category of person naturally springing into our mind, but as soon as that happens, you see you're grading people horizontally.

The extra bad, the wicked, they're the bottom of the barrel.

That's not the way this word is used in the Bible.

This word, occurs all over the Bible and it's used as the most broad word to speak of any action, thought, or intent that displeases God, anything that's guilty before God.

And so if you call for the Bible to denote somebody as one of the wicked, it's saying the people who live their life displeasing God, who do not have relationship with God.

That's the way the word is used in the Old Testament.

The wicked in the Old Testament are not the super bad.

They're the people who do not have a right relationship with God, who live contrary to God's will, who don't please him with their life because they're not rightly related to him.

In other words, they're just unbelievers.

Those who haven't trusted God, who don't follow Jesus Christ, the wicked are unbelievers.

You can see this all over the Old Testament if we examine the usage of this word.

I just want to show you one text where this is very clear.

Malachi chapter 3, verse 18.

Malachi 3:18

Then once more the Lord says, You shall see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked.

Here's the distinction between the one who serves God and the one who does not serve him.

That's the difference between the righteous and the wicked.

The wicked are those who don't trust God, who aren't rightly related to Him.

Now, back to Psalm 1.

If you want to live a blessed life, you must not walk in the counsel of the wicked.

And counsel is advice.

So you must not live your life based on the advice of unbelievers.

What does that mean?

From the time you are born, you are hooked up to an IV giving you worldly advice at every turn through the course of your life.

It's unbelievers, it's people in the world, it's any every culture, whatever culture you were born in, whatever culture you moved to, giving you advice on what you should value, what you should love, how you should spend your time, how you should make decisions, where you should find your identity, what will give your life meaning and purpose, how you determine what is right and wrong.

You are constantly receiving input from the world, from those who are not rightly related to God, telling you how to think, love, feel, and act.

And if you would live a genuinely blessed life, you must not heed the advice of the world.

You must not follow the counsel of the wicked.

Then the psalmist goes further, and he says, not only must you not walk in the counsel of the wicked, but secondly, you must not sit in the seat of scoffers, excuse me, stand in the way of sinners.

Standing in the way of sinners.

There's a progression here from walking to standing, but before we get to the verb, we have to again answer the question: who are sinners?

And of course, sin again, is one of these really broad words.

But the word sin fundamentally means to miss the mark.

To miss the mark of God's standard or what pleases God.

And so a sinner is someone whose life is characterized by going astray, astray from God.

Someone who, whether intentionally or ignorantly, goes astray from God and does not follow God and please Him.

And if you would live a genuinely happy life in this world, you must not stand in the way of sinners.

What is going on here?

You're walking, you're living your life, you're hearing the advice of the world saying, this is what's going to make you happy, this is what will make you fulfilled, this is what's moral.

If you really want to feel morally superior, you have to believe this and do this.

And suddenly you begin to stop and stand and consider the sinner's way of life and to find it appealing.

It's like window shopping.

I know when's the last time you were at the mall with a group of people, but I find that when I'm at the mall with a group of people, sooner or later, at least one person in the store, if not all of us, sooner or later we'll be walking by all the various stores, and somebody will have one of these experiences where they find something that's really appealing to them, really attractive, and it's like a gut reaction.

Where they they stop and in the middle of conversation, they leave the conversation, they turn and they're, wow, there's something in the window that's really appealing.

And different people will find different windows appealing.

And so it is when you're living your life.

You'll find different styles of life, different pursuits, different endeavors in the world attractive.

And what the psalmist is saying is you can't stop and begin to envy the life of unbelievers and to think that would make me happy.

If I could live my life that way, if I could be freed from the shackles of God's requirements for righteousness and holiness and humility, if I could live that way, man, then I would really be happy.

If you're going to live a blessed, fulfilled, joyful life in this world, you can't go window shopping in the world.

You have to recognize, just like the psalmist does in Psalm 73, that all the pursuits of this world are like a dream.

They give temporary pleasures and eternal disappointment.

In Psalm 73, as a psalmist is envying the life of unbelievers, he comes to his senses with these lines.

He recognizes truly God sets them in slippery places.

You make them fall to ruin.

They're destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly like terrors, like a dream when one awakes.

Oh Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms.

The righteous person, the blessed person, recognizes that all the offers and all of the advertisements of this world are like a fleeting vapor.

And you're going to wake up and find that this life was the dream and eternity is the wakeful state.

Don't forfeit the wakeful state.

Don't forfeit eternity for a nice dream.

If you want to live a satisfying life, you must avoid the advice of unbelievers and not envy the life of a sinner.

And then thirdly, not sit in the seat of scoffers.

And sitting in the seat of scoffers is an interesting way of describing the outcome of this progression.

You started by walking and hearing the advice, then stopping and beginning to envy the life, and then finally you sit down and you join them.

A scoffer is somebody who not just has doubts, but someone who has openly taken the position of mocking the righteous and deriding it and saying it's ridiculous and stupid and outdated, etc., etc.

etc.

And the progression that's happening in this person's life is they've heard the advice, they've begun to envy the life, and now they're beginning to actually sit up and take a position belonging to the mockers and turning around and mocking God for themselves.

You see the progression?

When you begin to listen to the advice and envy the life, it's only a short step before you find yourself so entangled in sin that you can't determine right from wrong, you just live by whatever feels good in the moment.

So entangled in sin that you belong to and take up an identity with scoffers, mocking the living God.

Now that's what a person must avoid.

That's the negative habit.

You must recognize where the advice is, you must recognize where your temptations are, you must know yourself and avoid them.

But if that were it, I mean this would be kind of depressing, like just avoiding temptation.

And so the psalmist gives us a second habit, a positive endeavor, that you must be occupied with if you're going to live a blessed and satisfying life in this world.

So negatively, avoid unrighteousness.

Positively, delight in the word of God, delight in the Lord.

Notice what the psalmist says in verse 2.

Here's the positive outcome, positive habit of the blessed man's life.

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

Positively, you must revel in God's revelation.

Now, there's a couple things we have to ask ourselves here because there's a number of ways we can misunderstand what's going on here.

First, when he says his delight is in the law of the Lord, what does the law mean?

And it doesn't just mean those parts of the Bible where there are rules.

This is not somebody who just finds the rules in the Bible and says, ah, that's a good rule.

I like that.

I'm going to apply that to my kids.

Rather, the word law, the word in Hebrew, torah, it means instruction.

And it's used often in the scriptures broadly to refer to the totality of God's instruction, namely to the totality of God's revelation in scripture.

That's what the scripture is.

The scripture is God's instruction to us, not just his rules, but the totality of his revelation.

And the blessed man delights in it.

The blessed man looks into the scriptures and finds that there's the revelation of God, of who God is and his character, that you can know the living God before you were born and after you die, was there, will be there, forever will be.

And he loves him.

And he wants to know this God.

He wants to know what this God is like.

He wants to know what this God desires and what this God despises.

And he wants to know what this God has done in the world.

You want to know how God has made you, what he's wired you for, what his purposes are for your life.

You want to know what God has done for you in order to redeem you and bring you into his family.

You want to know what God is storing up for you in eternity.

You want to know what the future is going to hold for you.

You want to know all of it because you delight in it, because you love God, you love his plans, you love his purposes, and you want to know him.

So the blessed man delights in the law of the Lord because he loves the Lord.

He wants to know the Lord.

And so the outcome of this is he meditates on it day and night.

Now the day and night part of that's pretty easy to explain.

That just means all the time.

There's daytime, there's nighttime.

If you're meditating on it day and night, it means you're thinking about it all the time.

But the meditation part we have to make sure that we clarify.

If I were to ask you, how would you define to someone what meditation means in the scriptures?

I wonder what you would say.

I recently surveyed a group of teenagers and asked them, what does meditate mean?

And they kind of looked at each other, you know, sideways glances, and a few of them went, something.

And I understand where they're getting that from.

I mean, even in the modern world, uh in Western culture, meditation and mindfulness have become kind of a sweep.

Phenomenon.

I hear much less about it now.

I see fewer and fewer mindfulness clubs popping up in Arlington than I did a few years ago.

And surveys say, statistics say that the mindfulness movement has kind of moved on a little bit because a lot of people have found that setting aside time to intentionally, voraciously empty your mind and think about nothing is not all that satisfying and fulfilling and really hard.

And so people most people have given it up.

Just statistically, that's what the survey seemed to indicate.

Instead, they've taken up other hobbies.

I don't know if you remember a couple years ago, adult coloring books became all the rage in publishing.

You remember, I'm here, yes, you remember.

What in the world was that about?

And in kind of the aftermath of that, what publishing companies have discovered is that the reason that that kind of lit the publishing world on fire for a couple years was that people found that coloring books, adult coloring books, were kind of like low-level, low-hanging fruit meditation.

That is a practice where you would just kind of like forget about the world, be in your zone, take a breath, relax.

Now there's nothing inherently wrong with taking a breath, relaxing.

There's nothing wrong with taking a vacation.

But here's the difficulty.

When you put your coloring book away, or when you come back from vacation, your problems are still there.

It didn't solve any of them.

It just delayed the inevitable.

Biblical meditation is not escaping and it's not emptying your mind.

Biblical meditation is much more conducive to dealing with real-world problems.

Biblical meditation is about engaging with the truth of God and applying it to your life.

The word for meditation, the word that's translated meditation in our Bibles is yeah.

Betorato Yehege, Yehege, Yehige, Yehige.

If you say that over and over, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's kind of on a monopoetic in that it sounds like what it means.

If you hear me saying yeah, yeah, yeah, it just sounds like I'm muttering to myself, and in fact, that's exactly what the word meditation means.

The root means to growl or to mutter, and the idea is that you have stored up God's word in your heart.

You memorize scripture, you're wrestling with scripture, you're learning the doctrines of God, you're learning about redemption, you're learning about God.

It's in your mind, and as you go through your day, you're meditating on it.

Namely, you're thinking about it, you're wrestling with it, you're preaching it to yourself, you're praying over it, you're saying, God, how do I apply this to my life?

Well, God, what does this mean?

God, help me to hope in your promises.

God, remind me of your goodness.

God, help me to make this decision, and you're applying the scripture to yourself, and you're engaging with it, and you're talking to God, and if someone were to walk by you, it would almost be like you were.

Because you're meditating on God's word.

You are taking God's truth and you're applying it to your heart.

You're applying it to your life, you're letting it shape the way you think and feel, and so act.

That's what meditation is.

Meditation is taking God's word and applying it and saturating your mind and your heart and your feelings and every phase and experience of life because you're doing it all the time, day and night.

That person is going to be blessed.

Because that person will experience trials, that person will experience disappointments, but they have resources, supernatural, spiritually empowered resources to deal with the difficulties that you encounter in life.

And when you're going through life and you're beginning to doubt, you begin to take God's scripture and apply it to your heart and say, Hope in God, O my soul, for I shall again praise him.

You begin to remember that I have an inheritance in heaven, undefiled, unfading, kept in heaven for me, who, though tempted by trials for a f for a very small time, am going to achieve the outcome of my faith, the salvation of my soul.

You're applying Scripture to your life as you go through the various stages of life.

You're actively engaging.

You know, there's really only two ways to live here.

There's the passive way to live, which is verse 1, where you are letting the world shape the way you think, letting the world tell you you should be so disappointed, letting the world tell you you should be so put off by what's happened, you deserve so much better, your life should be so much better than it is.

Why isn't your life better?

You should be mad at somebody.

That's the passive way to live your life, and there's the active way to live your life, to take hold of yourself and say, no, hope in God on my soul.

I'm gonna apply the scripture to my life.

I'm gonna believe the promises of God.

I'm gonna put my hope and my trust on the word of God and what's true and lasting.

That's the active way to live your life, and that's the kind of life that's blessed.

That's the kind of life that's solid, that's not blown to and fro by the things that you experience in life.

That kind of life has a source of strength and calm and comfort in every phase of life, but you have to actively engage it.

The blessed person is characterized by abstaining from the counsel of the wicked and delighting in the law of the Lord, and that's going to make you a blessed person in this world.

But then the psalmist goes on and says that there are really two these two different ways to live, they're really composed not just of two habits of life, but they're really composed of two different natures, two different essences, two different fundamental qualities of who you are as a person.

And so he gives us two pictures to describe the nature of these two different lives.

One is in verse three and one is in verse four.

Let's start with the positive one.

Look at verse three.

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

The life of the blessed person is like a tree, planted by streams of water.

Those are probably irrigation canals.

They've been intentionally dug so that this tree has its roots into a source of ever-flowing living water that's there no matter what the circumstances are, even in a desert environment like much of the Middle East is, this tree still has access to a flow of living water that gives it supplies of life in all seasons.

And that's crucial to note.

Every time I come back to this, I am stunned by how well this describes life.

Look at the picture in verse 3.

A tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.

You notice that?

It's yielding fruit in its season.

So this tree doesn't escape the reality that there are seasons in life, and every season is different.

Some of them are hot, some of them are cold, some of them are filled with storms, some of them are dry.

So the blessed person is not someone who escapes the circumstances and escapes the various seasons of life.

The blessed person is not a person who escapes suffering.

The blessed person is not a person who is exempt from disappointment from all of your hopes being shattered.

The blessed person, rather, is a person that in whatever season of life you encounter, your roots are deep enough and attached to a source of ever-flowing living water that no matter what season of life you are going through, look at the end of verse 3, your leaf does not wither.

That is, you don't go dry, you still have a supply of life, you still have a hope that can't be taken away by suffering, you still have a joy that isn't completely removed by disappointment.

Because your roots are deeply connected to a source of living water.

Now I want to make one very obvious point about this.

I want to say the obvious part out loud.

Where does this tree get this water?

Are you ready?

From outside itself.

What the world tells us is look inside of yourself, find your desires, and act them out.

That's what's going to make you happy.

But don't you see if that is the way that you try to be happy, you never will be.

You're trying to look around and find a stage where you can act out your desires.

And that stage is always moving.

And sometimes it's crowded, and sooner or later it's going to be ripped out from under your feet.

If you are trying to be happy in life by looking inside of yourself, finding your desires, and finding a platform to act them out and express your authentic self so that you can be fulfilled and happy, you're always going to be chasing and ever disappointed.

There is a better way to live in this world.

And so then the question becomes, where do you get that?

And I want to back up for a second and notice something we glossed over at the beginning of verse 3.

Notice he is like a tree planted by streams of water.

That's something that happened to the tree.

I'm not a botanist, but I'm pretty sure trees don't plant themselves.

And what the psalmist is implying here is that something has to happen to you in order to become this blessed person.

You have to have your life planted somewhere.

You have to have your life planted in the living water because you aren't born into it.

Trees aren't born naturally into the irrigation canals.

They're intentionally planted by the gardener into the irrigation canals.

That has to happen to you.

And this goes back to what we said at the very beginning.

That when the Psalm is talking about the righteous and the wicked, the blessed and the cursed, he's not talking about horizontal gradiations, that there are some people who are more righteous and so things just go better for them.

That's not the way the world works, and that's not what the scripture says.

The psalm says that there's a vertical division between humanity, then all human beings are actually born in the wicked.

That is, all human beings are born outside of relationship with God.

We know this.

Just look at verse one.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the wicked or stands in the way of sinners or sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, not on his law.

He meditates day and night.

Have you ever done that for one day?

Of course not.

You're not a righteous person by nature.

You're not on the standard of God.

All have fallen short of the glory of God.

Every single human being in the world is born naturally seeking their happiness inside themselves and loving themselves and wanting to treasure and prize themselves, and you something has to happen to you to get planted in the living water.

You have to be confronted with the reality of the scripture that there's a holy God who will judge you.

And you fall short of his standard.

And if you're going to come into relationship with him, you have to come on his terms.

You have to come humbly, willing to submit, willing to say, God, take my life and plant me wherever you will plant me.

I want to belong to you.

And if you'll come to the point where you will give your life to your creator, he will plant you in streams of living water.

That's what this text says.

If you will give your life to your creator, he will plant you in streams of living water, and you will have life.

This is what Jesus promised in the New Testament.

Give you just one text where Jesus says this.

In John 7, Jesus stood up and cried out, If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

Whoever believes in me, as the scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive.

If you will give your life to your Creator, if you will come and give your life to Jesus Christ, Jesus will plant your life in the very divine life of God.

You will receive the very Spirit of God, and you'll have a source of comfort and joy and strength that will enable you to be a blessed person in this world.

That's the picture of a righteous person, but there's a second picture here.

It's the picture of the wicked, and that's in verse 4.

While the righteous person is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit and its season, its leaf does not wither, and all that he does is he prospers.

The Psalm takes an abrupt turn in verse 4 and says, The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

And the turn here is so abrupt.

It's three words in Hebrew.

Lochen Hareshaim, not so the wicked.

All that is true of the righteous, that they have hope and they have a source of life, and they're rightly connected to God, not true of the wicked.

Those who are outside of relationship with God have no access to these things.

That means that everything that we pursue in this world that is outside of the favor of the Lord Jesus Christ, that is outside of the favor of God, is fading.

Is empty.

Chaff was part of wheat in the ancient world and in the modern world.

And it was common in the Middle East to grow wheat and various grains, and when the grain came time to harvest, you'd cut it down, you'd beat it, the chaff is the outward shell of the grain, it would be broken off, and then you would winnow it.

You'd throw it in the air, the wind would blow, the grain was heavy enough that it would drop down and be preserved so that you could eat it, and the chaff is just a shallow, flimsy, flaky outward crust that the wind would blow away.

And the scripture is saying that outside of relationship with God, that's your life.

That's everything that you pursue.

That's everything that you're putting your hopes in.

You're putting your hopes in in your job to find vocational fulfillment, and you're putting your hopes in your family, and you're putting your hopes in ev anything in this world is like chaff.

Here for a moment, and gone.

Nothing will last.

These are the only two ways that you can live your life.

You can be a tree firmly planted by streams of water when you give your life to your Creator, or you can pursue your own pursuits, and your life will turn out to be chaff, blown away by the wind, as though it were never here to begin with.

Finally, the psalmist says, these two natures ultimately lead to two destinies.

There are two ways to live in this world, there is no third, and in the end they part forever.

And here's where the forks in the road lead.

Look at the last two verses here, verse 5 and 6.

The psalmist 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 way of the wicked will perish.

The judgment here that the psalmist describes is the final judgment where God will separate the righteous from the wicked.

And the wicked, as we have seen, I hope repeatedly in this passage, are not the worst people in the world.

They're just people outside of relationship with God.

And they may well have contributed to society, and they may well have been loved ones, and they may well be you and me.

But outside of relationship with God, there will be no place for any human being in the congregation of the righteous in the judgment of God.

Now there are a number of lenses that the Scripture gives us to understand the judgment of God.

One of them is the basic reality that God is a holy God by nature.

He's pure and separate from anything that is evil.

And so he can't be in the presence of anything that is impure.

And this makes sense to us even on a human level.

You come over to my house?

I am so glad that you came.

I welcome you inside as soon as you take your shoes off.

Because your shoes are dirty.

That's true even on a human level.

How much more infinitely so?

A holy, holy God who is blazingly pure by his very nature.

What defines him is his purity.

He cannot be in the presence of anything that is impure, of anything that falls short of his perfect standard.

That would be all of us.

We cannot come into God's house.

The only way that you can come into God's house is if you embrace the sacrifice God provided in his son.

His son's blood is what can wash you clean and remove your sin, so that God can look upon you and count you as righteous and then bring you into his house, and then plant you in streams of water, then make you a member of his family, but only if you will come to his son and give your life to him.

I grew up in the Midwest where wheat fields are pretty common, and there's a point in the year when the chaff isn't that ugly.

Now you you go past the harvest point and the chaff begins to get really ugly.

It overripe, it's just pretty disgusting.

But there's a point where the chaff actually looks pretty decent.

And if you're looking at a wheat field that kind of goes out as far as the eye can see, it might sound a little bit strange if you haven't seen this, but it actually looks rather beautiful.

The sun glints off it in just the right way.

The chaff reflects the light, and it kind of looks like a golden field that you're looking at.

So there's some something kind of nice about the chaff.

And yet when you harvest it, you're not going to keep it because it doesn't last very long.

The chaff looks nice for a moment, and then it gets overripe and it becomes disgusting and it's flaky, and you want to be rid of it because wheat wasn't grown for the chaff.

That's not what wheat is for.

Wheat is grown for the grain so that you can eat it, and so the chaff is taken away.

Wheat isn't grown for the chaff, and so in the harvest it's gone.

Now we should ask the question: what are people for?

And people are not made to live for themselves.

People are not made for their own temporary fleeting pursuits and pleasures.

The Bible tells us what people are for.

The Bible tells us what God made human beings for.

One of the many texts that says this is Isaiah 43, where God says, In that day I will say to the north, give up and to the south, do not withhold.

Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.

That's what people are for.

That's what you are for.

God made you for his glory, to know him, to love him, to delight in him, to be infinitely satisfied in him, to have a place in his kingdom where your life will be resounding to God's glory forever and ever and ever.

That's what he made you for.

But if you live in this world neglecting the glory of God, loving yourself and not God, and pursuing the things in the world, but not the creator of the world, there will be no place for you in the judgment.

There won't be a place for you because it's not what your life is for.

You were made for the glory of God.

Now, if that's you, and if you're honest with yourself as we've walked through this text, and this text has shown us there's only two ways to live.

There is no third.

And you find that your heart and your life is more characterized by living for yourself and your glory, finding your desires in your heart and trying to act them out in order to achieve happiness in this world.

The scripture says you're among the wicked.

You don't have a right relationship with the living God.

Your life isn't connected to divine life.

But the scripture says that's where every single human being starts, but it's not where your life has to finish.

Turning them, turning their hearts to r to turn their back on their old ways, of pursuing your old life, and come to him.

And if you will come to God through Jesus Christ, the blood of Jesus Christ is open to you, and he can wash you clean, he can change your heart, he can plant you in streams of water, the God of heaven can come into your life this day and change you and take you off the path that leads to misery and destruction and put you on the path that leads to blessing and eternal life.

What God requires of you is that you would come to Him and you will find He will abundantly pardon.

That's the one destiny.

One leads to destruction until you repent and give your life to God for real.

Then your destiny becomes this, verse 6.

The Lord knows the way of the righteous.

And that word know is this word for intimate relationship.

Adam and Eve, Adam knew his wife Eve, and they had a child.

The word doesn't necessarily have any kind of sexual intim uh uh connotation, it simply describes an intimate relationship.

And here the psalmist saying, When you give your life to the Lord, he knows you intimately, he guards you, he gives you life, he gives you meaning, he gives you an identity, he gives you hope, he will give you joy.

The God who knows you knows you better than you even know yourself.

He looks in the depths of your heart, he sees every sin you have ever done in thought, he sees everything you are ashamed of, he sees the things you don't even know you will yet do in the future, and he says, I took all of that sin on myself, and I endured the wrath that sin deserves, and I know you, and I want you in my house.

And I'll guard you along the way.

And I will keep you until that day when you will hear, Well done, good and faithful servant, who walked the path of eternal life, finally enter into unlimited joy, the joy of your master.

These are the two ways to live.

There's no path in between, there's a path of ruin and misery, or there is the path of delighting in the law of the Lord, planting your roots in streams of water, being known by the living God.

May God seal these things to our hearts today.

Oh God in heaven, we thank you and worship you for the reality that you have revealed yourself in your word.

And we ask that you would give us hearts that are hungry for the realities that you reveal to us in your word, that we would be a people hungry to know you and to love you and to follow you.

Lord, we ask that you would stir our affections for the God revealed to us in Scripture so that our lives would be conformed to His image, and we would walk in a manner worthy of the God who called us, worthy of the gospel by which he called us, worthy of the Son to whom you called us.

Lord, we want to live lives that matter.

We want to live lives of joy.

So we pray that this week you would shape us and mold us and cause us to be consumed by your word and firmly planted in it.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, DC area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.