The Blessed Ones

Psalms.

So if you're unfamiliar with the scriptures, the book of Psalms is pretty much dead center of the Bible.

You can kind of just do one of these tricks and you'll be there, right?

And so if you don't have a Bible, we'd love to give you one.

We have some Bibles at the back that you can take home and study God's Word for yourself.

Search the Scriptures, read over His Word.

We also will have this information according to the scriptures and different things that we'll be going through on the screen so you can follow along that way.

And also on our app, we actually have a little note-taking feature on our app where you can take notes and follow along with the sermon and then have those notes for your own private study at home.

If you'd like to follow through the app that way, we'd love to encourage you to do that.

But this morning we're going to be in Psalm chapter one.

So the very beginning there.

So before we dive into Psalms, though, there's a couple things I want to talk about.

First thing is this, and really it's the only thing, and then we're going to pray for this thing, but it's that uh next Sunday we are going to be kicking off and launching Missio Youth.

I'm excited about this.

Yeah.

So here's so some background history for some of you.

Why in the world is that exciting?

Well, one, we want to reach the next generation with the gospel.

And we want to build up the next generation in the gospel of Jesus.

But we come from a church plant that's founded in the urban core of Cincinnati where there's not a lot of teenagers.

There's massive amounts of little babies, but not many teenagers.

And so we haven't really had a need in Missio's history to have some type of youth ministry.

But God has blessed us since we launched Missio North with a lot of different teenagers.

And so we're trying to one, be faithful with that.

How do we create a space where they can process with people, with peers and with trusted leaders about what they're going through in life, the things that they're engaging in their culture, the things that are uh causing them uh to uh maybe stress or fear or worry or whatever it might be.

And then how do we shepherd them to put their faith and hope in the gospel of Jesus?

And so we are gonna do this really, really slow, and we're really excited about trying to build momentum to where we can create that space specifically for teenagers.

So this is how we're gonna do it.

Over the summer, we're gonna have three kind of uh getting acquainted parties, right?

And they're gonna be three hangouts where we have leaders and we're uh gonna be hanging out here at the space to just try and build some trust and relationship and have some time where they're studying God's word, praying for one another, but focusing on building that trust between teenagers here and the leaders who will be running Missio Youth.

And so we're just gonna do once a month parties uh to kind of get together, hang out, we call them meetups, uh, and uh and try to build momentum into the school year to have a more stable ministry.

Now, this is kind of where we come into play because we don't know what we're doing.

Like I'm just gonna tell you that straight up.

I don't know, I haven't been a teenager for uh 17 years.

Uh, and so uh I don't know what I'm doing.

I don't know what teenagers do anymore, to be quite honest.

Uh and so we're gonna try and walk through this slowly, but what we know we don't want is kind of a typical youth group culture where it's something that's separated from the church that becomes its own distinct thing, and there's a lot of unhealth and things that can happen in that.

We value uh generationally integrated worship and discipleship.

And so we don't want to take that away.

We want from cradle to grave, if well, if you're in grave, you're probably not studying God's word with us, but uh, we want all people uh to be in community together, pursuing Jesus, loving one another, fulfilling those one another commands in the scriptures.

And so we're gonna place and fight for that value staying placed amongst our church.

But like men need space to process as men, like women need space to process as women.

I believe, and we believe as a leadership team that teenagers need a space to process as teenagers.

And so we're gonna try and create that space.

So there we're we don't know what it's gonna look like.

We're working on that.

If you are in your seat and you're saying, Man, I have a vi I actually have a pretty high desire to disciple and build relationships with teenagers and help them see the beauty of the gospel.

Uh, let us know.

Fill out a connect card, text me, email me, whatever you got to do, let me know that you'd be interested in that because we're looking for leaders among the congregation.

We got a couple people that we've approached, but we're gonna need more with how many people God is bringing here to Mystio.

So next Sunday, here's what we're gonna do.

Next Sunday is gonna be our first meetup.

I know this is quick.

I pull the trigger on things sometimes before I even aim, right?

And so uh what we're gonna do is next Sunday, while the uh church is having the meetup at 16 Lots, the youth, Mystio Youth, will be having a meetup here at Missio.

And so you'll be encouraged if you're a parent of a teenager, to have your teenagers stay behind, hang out.

We're gonna order some food, we're gonna have a space for them, and we're gonna go over to 16 lots, hang out for a little while, and then you can come back and pick up your teenagers.

So that's kind of what we're doing.

So that's gonna be next week after the gathering, it's gonna start at 12 here at Missio.

We'll announce it again, and I'll even be posting some stuff on social media and probably sending out an email to remind you as well.

But again, if you're interested in uh uh being a leader in that, uh building into the life of teenagers, let us know.

And if you're a teenager and you wanna be part of the meetup next week, make sure you let your parents know uh so that you guys can be a part of that.

So that's next week, 12 o'clock.

We're excited for that to start kicking off.

But slow build, right?

We're gonna slow build and we're gonna try our best to do it healthy and rooted in the gospel to have teenagers grow up in the midst of the church so that they become lifelong disciples of Jesus.

Alright, so let's pray.

I'm gonna pray because uh we wanna be a church.

When we were casting the vision of Messio, we wanted to be a church who reaches the next generation.

Where we're at is a very unique space.

So many high school students are here in this area.

Between Lakota and Mason alone, there's over 10,000 students-ish.

I think it's over, under somewhere around in that ballpark, right?

10,000 students.

That's insane.

And out of those 10,000 students, a huge majority will go to university here in Southwest Ohio.

And then out of those kids who graduate from university in Southwest Ohio, it's understood through uh just a recent survey that over 50% of those graduates stay in Cincinnati.

So that means that we have a huge opportunity to reach the next generation with the gospel.

Future engagers of our culture, future business leaders, future uh pastors and church planters.

We want to engage them now so that they become lifelong disciples of Jesus, that they're raised in the church as they're called to be, and that they're sent out on mission for his glory and the joy of God's people.

And so uh that's a heart for ours.

Let's pray that Jesus would bless us to be a church that does that.

Father, I give you thanks and praise for this uh beautiful opportunity to reach people with the gospel and specifically reach teenagers with the gospel.

Uh, Father, we could be uh a congregation who says, look, those teenagers, they're too weird, they're too emotional, I can't understand them, I get confused being around them.

Or we can be a congregation that says that we're gonna put our life on the line to make sure that they hear the gospel, that they have an opportunity to respond, that they feel included in a part of what we're doing, that they feel valued and invested into by us, that we continue to be a congregation in a church who reaches back to the people behind us that we might pull them up to our space and send them forward to spaces we could never even be ourselves.

For the glory of God to fill this city, for the gospel to go forth that this that the children of God might come home to his flock.

Father, give us a burden and a heart to reach them, give us a burden and a heart to disciple them, give us a burden and a heart to bring them into our homes and sit with them and listen to them and point them back to the hope of Jesus alone.

Father, equip us, grace us, help us to be faithful.

It's in your name that we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

Alright, so we're in Psalm 1.

So we're gonna read the text, then we're gonna kind of open up the series and we'll kind of dive in from there.

So, Psalm 1, verse 1, we're gonna read the whole psalm.

Psalms 1:1

Declares 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.

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 judgment, nor are 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 the Lord.

May God bless the reading and the proclamation of his promises.

So the Psalms.

They're a collection of poetry, songs, liturgical movements that are written by several different authors.

Now, it's understood that King David, who was the king of Israel, a very famous figure in the scriptures, he it's understood that he wrote the most psalms.

But there's vastly many other authors.

There's a man named Asaph who is an author.

It's even understood that Moses himself was one of the authors.

And so we see this collection of poetic writings.

And these pieces of poetry, what they tend to do is bring us intimately into the story of God's people and guide us to a deeper understanding of who God is and how he communes with us.

You see, in many ways, they are the portrait of the human soul's pursuit to see itself wholly submitted to God and his word.

And as we read these, we'll kind of see these poetic phrasings and rhythms that the authors wrote in.

But ultimately, we can really view the book of Psalms, this collection that's broken up into actually five books, but the Psalms themselves, we can see them as a journaling of a person's struggle.

A person's struggle with life, what they see before them, what they experience, the emotions that are brought into that.

And then there's this constant pursuit to say, no, but God.

But God is faithful, God is just, God is holy, God is merciful.

And so these really are the emotions of God's people that help us see how they relate to one another, how they relate to God, but it also sees us striving in a pursuit to submit those emotions to who God has revealed Himself to be.

You see, now when we investigate this Psalm, though, particular, it's a little bit unique.

It's possible that this psalm was actually written as the introduction to the whole Psalter.

Many people would believe that this was written as the collection of the Psalms was put together.

This was written as an introductory piece to the Psalter itself.

And what stands as one of the most unique things about this in a collection of poetry, songs that express deep emotion, struggle, turmoil, joy, pain, suffering, this psalm itself is quite starkly absent of emotion.

In fact, this psalm is very clear and concrete on its guiding in wisdom.

For such a collection of emotive poetry, we see this as a foundation of wisdom and in a way that which we should live.

Now, when we seek to live our lives, what this psalm is not communicating, what the scriptures don't communicate, what we're trying to kind of understand and comprehend in this series is that the Bible does not call us to live a life absent of emotion, but one where our wavering emotions are placed in submission to the unwavering word of God.

So that's what we are trying to pursue as we investigate this.

But we're going to start in Psalm 1.

It's the introduction, it's going to lay a foundation for the rest of the series.

So, verses 1 and 2, really what's happening in this opening of the Psalms, it lays out for us the way of a blessed life, which is through the knowledge of the Lord.

Blessed.

Right?

Blessed.

What a sweet introduction to this collection of works.

What a gracious statement placed upon those who love the Lord.

Now, this statement of blessed is not a proclamation of how much you have accumulated of good things.

No, it's actually a statement of a person's very being.

It's not that you are blessed because you have acquired wealth or riches, it's that you are blessed in your very personhood.

You are blessed.

Blessed is a declaration of immense joy and happiness because the blessed man is held as we see in contradiction to those who are cursed due to their wickedness.

You see, what we investigate and see through this first passage is that the blessed man lives his life in contradiction to the culture around him.

Now, this is not a statement of retreatism.

And the church often gets this wrong, right?

They see passages like this and they see other passages in the sculpture, and they create a theology of what I call retreatism, that if we are among those who are labeled as the wicked or unrighteous, somehow our beings, our personhoods, might become stained or marred or tainted.

And so we build this theology of retreat where we pull back from the culture so that they cannot infect us with their wickedness.

And this is something that has plagued the church for so long.

We see it in extreme conditions like the Amish community might be an extreme example.

Well, it is an extreme example, that not might be, it is, but we see it in our own selves, right?

You can't wear this type of clothes, you can't listen to this type of music, you can't go watch this movie, you can't go and be a part, you can't even go to their educational systems because you might be tainted.

And so we fear and we build this theology of retreat and we go into our hidings and in isolation, and the church becomes ineffective of engaging culture and reaching them with the hope of the gospel in and of themselves.

We become so disconnected with culture that we can't even engage it with Jesus.

Now, if we look at this passage of scripture, what we're gonna discover is that there is this progression in its description of how the righteous live in contradiction to the wicked.

There's this progression of a life removed from God's word, and it's a gradual descension into permanence.

You see, we see that he does not walk in the council, he does not stand in the way, nor does he take a seat among them.

This gradual descension into permanence.

And the psalmist lays out three ways in which we're cautioned to remove ourselves in lifestyle, not remove ourselves in relationship, but remove ourselves in lifestyle from those who oppose God.

And here are the three ways: embracing their counsel, conforming to their values and practices, and adopting their worldview.

Embracing their counsel, conforming to their values and practices, and adopting their worldview.

Now we can actually glean from the parallel of Deuteronomy 6.4 of how godliness is to consume our lives through embracing the counsel of the Holy Spirit, conforming to the image, values, and practices of the Son, and adopting the eternal cosmic worldview of the Father, all things for his glory and the good of those who love him.

Let's read Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 7.

It declares this Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk with them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

You see, church, this sit, walk, lie, rise progression represents the immersion of righteousness that we are to pursue in our lives in contrast to the immersion in wickedness as portrayed in this passage.

We will find ourselves in a place of permanence.

Change is inevitable.

It's are you consciously changing or are you subconsciously changing?

Are you active and proactive in the change that's happening in your life?

Or are you allowing passive change to take place which is predominantly going to be for the worse?

And we find ourselves in this immersion and dissension into permanence with the wicked when we start adhering to their counsel, when we start listening to their advice, when we start conforming to their values and practices, and when we adopt their worldview.

Look at the gradual dissension into permanence of abortion.

One thing that was once unspeakable is now celebrated.

That didn't happen overnight.

That was a gradual dissension into permanence as we did these very three things that the scripture is calling us to not do.

We have listened to their counsel, we've conformed to their views and practices, and ultimately we've adopted their worldview.

So how then does a person incur such a blessed state upon his being?

Fundamentally, it's through the battle of the mind.

This is what the psalmist declares: that it is those who delight in the law of God who are blessed.

You see, this law, this isn't necessarily referring strictly to the Torah or the first five books of the Bible, which include the Levitical law, all these specific practices and ceremonies of how a nation and a people would be righteous and live rightly before the Lord and before culture.

Now, this speaks to the more uh immersive way of who God is and how he desires us to live our lives.

It's not just known in these prescriptive commands, but it's known in the very being of God and his revealing of himself.

And so we delight in the law of God and the battle for righteousness.

The battle for this blessed state starts in the mind.

We kicked off Mystio talking about this head, heart, hands trichotomy, where we engage first the mind.

It is through the renewing of your mind that you be see the fruit of righteousness displayed in your life.

You have to start with informing your mind so that it can trickle down and become a conviction and belief structure in your heart, and then it can be pushed out through your hands as you seek to bless and minister to the world around you.

But the battle is first and foremost in the mind because the mind is the key to the whole man.

We must immerse our minds with righteous information so that righteousness might be a product of our lives.

He also calls for him not just simply delight, but to meditate on the law of God day and night.

You see, church, the word of God should ever be before us.

Not alone in the context of study, but in thought and in conversation.

The word of God is not something we just crack open a Bible and study remotely or in isolation, but it's something that we ponder and think through throughout our day.

It it informs our emotions, it informs our experiences, it guides us and instructs us, and then it should be ever about our conversation as we are speaking about how good God is, how much He's blessed us, how much Jesus loves us, what sacrifice did He pay for us.

Look at how joyous and good our relationship with God is because of the finished work of Jesus.

To meditate is to immerse ourselves in the word of God.

Verse 3 and 4 talk about the man of God's word.

And it talks about him as an established tree.

So the man of God's word is established in and displays evidence of righteousness, while the man of the world is established.

Only in his own perishing.

Talks about a tree planted.

That's the first descriptive way he talks about this blessed man.

He's a tree planted.

The man is planted intentionally by the Creator's hand.

He is not a wild bush, he is a tree planted, chosen, cultivated, and secured.

We see Jesus talking about this in his ministry in the book of Matthew.

He talks about this, these trees who are planted.

He says this in Matthew 5.

He declares that every tree or every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.

It is through the Creator that these trees are planted with intentionality and divine purpose.

And they're planted by streams of water, the water of the word, and the water that flows from the fountain of life, Jesus, ensure the health and prosperity of the one who is planted.

And then it produces fruit in its season.

The righteous are expected to display in their being the fruit of the Spirit.

The fruit of the Spirit should be so cultivated in our lives that in the diverse seasons of our life we would utilize the proper fruit.

When we are provoked to hate, we would blossom with love.

When sorrow seeks to flood us, we would be seen with joy.

When turmoil is all around us, our souls would be rested in peace.

When temptation is beckoning us, self-control would keep our feet planted.

You see, the fruit of the spirit should be utilized and seen and displayed in its proper season according to what we are experiencing in life, because it is the fruit of the Spirit.

Though it is seen and displayed in diverse and multiple ways, it is not the fruits of the Spirit.

Every believer who is a tree planted by this stream of living water should in and of its branches have the fruit of the Spirit.

A person who is planted by God and who delights in God's word will never have to fear or experience even a season of death, let alone final death.

For through God and by God they will persevere.

And then it says that he prospers.

Oh, his soul prospers.

No matter what life throws at him, he stays rooted in the fertile soil of the Lord.

There is no weapon formed against him that will prevail.

He will remain abiding in God forever, sharing in the righteous victory of Jesus.

But the wicked, they are not so.

They, in fact, are the exact opposite of the righteous.

They are not planted, but they are plucked up.

They are not saturated with water, but thirst in dry land.

They don't bear fruit, but are blown away by the wind.

Let's investigate this a little bit more detailed portrait of this in the book of Jeremiah.

In Jeremiah 17, 5 through 8, it says this.

Thus says the Lord, cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord.

He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come.

He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness in an unhabited salt land.

But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.

He is like a tree planted by water that sends out its roots by the stream and does not fear when he comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.

See how Jeremiah kind of unpacks and magnifies this passage of scripture in the contradiction.

That's what we said in the beginning is that we'll find these kind of rhythms of poetry in the Psalms where they will express one thing and then they will communicate the opposite of it.

And so we see this dancing of back and forth between here, even in Psalm 1, the righteous and the unrighteous.

Verse 5 and 6 declares this: that the end of the wicked is death.

Unable to stand without eternal guilt before God, and unable to fellowship with the righteous in glory, they are without hope.

It talks about them standing in the judgment, their inability to stand.

The unrighteous have nothing to stand on before God.

Their works and waves have created for them no foundation.

They cannot stand before God the Father in his judgment.

They're unlike the righteous, whose foundation is the perfection of Jesus, who is our rock of ages.

Nor can they stand in the congregation of the righteous.

The fact that the wicked are cast off like chaff dictates that they will be also cut off from the fellowship of the righteous.

The congregation, those of the true church, who have placed their faith in the finished work of Jesus, and they've been united to him in eternal fellowship.

The unrighteous will have no place among them.

And then finally it says that the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the wicked shall perish.

The Lord knows the way because the footsteps of the righteous have been ordered by God.

He knows their way because he has ordained their way.

Let's look at Ezekiel.

The prophet Ezekiel chapter 36, 26 through 29, says this, and I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you.

Ezekiel 36 · chapter mention

And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

And I will put my spirit within you, and get this, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and be careful to obey my rules.

You shall dwell in the land that I give to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God, and I will deliver you from all your uncleanness, and I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you.

What Ezekiel is prophesying is the promises of the New Testament church, that when the Spirit of God is poured out in this church, and the Holy Spirit comes and he comes in contact with a person, he takes out their heart of stone, and he puts within their chest a heart of flesh.

And why does he do it?

So that you might walk in my ways.

And if we continue reading through that passage of Ezekiel, we see the pursuit of God for his glory.

Because he says, I want you to know something.

This prophecy is for you, but my ways and my motives are not for you.

Will you be beneficiaries?

Yes, you will.

But I will do this not for your name's sake, declares the Lord, but for my own.

So God not only puts us with a new heart of flesh that is enabled to finally love him, but then he causes us to walk in his ways and his statutes, and he doesn't even do it for us, though we experience and we receive eternal benefit and joy and pleasure because of the pursuit of his glory.

The footsteps of the righteous are known by God because he has ordained every single one.

So, what's the main idea of this passage of scripture?

It's this the blessed are those who delight in God's word.

The blessed are those who delight in God's word.

Notice how closely our standing and relationship with God is tied to our knowledge of who He is.

Because our delight in His Word will establish us forever as His people.

Our delight in His Word will establish us forever as His people.

Now, here's what I want to say as we're investigating this psalm and we're looking at this emotions in the Psalms.

What I want us to realize is that this is not a contention against emotion.

But it is working to place our emotions in their proper place, which is in full submission to the Word of God.

The way of the world, the road to destruction, is paved with endless statements of I think or I feel.

And we cannot rightly process and know our emotions without rightly holding them up to the discerning mirror of God's word.

And so this isn't saying that you can't have emotion, or it's not come out and outrightly saying that emotions are inherently wicked, but what it is saying is that our emotions, the way that we relate to God and relate to one another, first and foremost, must be submitted to his revealed word.

God dictates what is true, and our emotions and experiences in life have to submit to that.

And that's what you're gonna see throughout the Psalms where David says, You've abandoned me, you've forsaken me, every enemy is rising up against me, you've caused them to prosper.

You are you you where are you, God?

And then what does he respond with?

You're near.

You've blessed me, you're merciful, you're good to me.

Do you see how David is working to submit his experience and emotion to the revealed word of God of who God is?

Because tell me, I'll tell you, church, they don't always line up.

We have to be a people, a blessed people, whose delight is in God's word and who can rightly process our emotions by holding them to the discerning mirror of it.

But we don't do that.

And we don't do that in a couple of ways.

The first way is this some of us seek to discover the path of righteousness through our emotions.

Some of us seek to discover the path of righteousness through our emotions.

We try to dictate truth through our emotions.

Using phrases of I think or I feel when it comes to dictating truth, when we aren't rooted in the word of God, we will be tossed by the wind and waves of our culture.

Our feelings and emotions will lead us away from his revealed authoritative truth, if not in submission to God's word.

And we and we see this all the time.

If you're talking with anybody about God or about how to get to heaven or what is morality and ethics, you're gonna come across with a lot of I thinks or I feels.

And then even more dangerous is that in the church we do the same thing.

And we'll grab on to one little phrase or one little statement like, God is love.

Biblically true, but then through our experience and through our emotions, we actually try to dictate what that love should look like.

You see, we don't submit it to what God has said his love truly is.

And so we have this issue in our culture where we try to discover the path of righteousness through our emotions, and that's what we see.

We experience certain things.

We experience people who are practicing what the Bible says is wicked, but man, they seem like good people.

They seem really nice, they seem like they don't want to cause harm.

They seem like they're good people, but yet their lifestyle displays and demonstrates the very wickedness that the Bible condemns.

And so, what do we do?

We allow our experience and our emotion to dictate the path of righteousness.

And we say, Well, I'm not experiencing harm from what the Bible calls wicked being displayed in their life.

So therefore, this must not be that bad.

Or we allow the waves and the winds of culture to toss us to and fro because look at the hot buttons of our culture.

Are they not becoming the very same hot buttons of the church?

Everything that our culture is pushing is being pushed against the culture.

You have celebrity pastors going on talk shows, being asked if abortion is sin, and they respond with, I don't know, we probably need to have a conversation first.

No, it's wickedness, pastor.

And you failed to promote the holiness and righteousness of God to demonstrate his glory before the earth, that those who permit and participate in such murder demonstrate wickedness and are cut off from God.

But we've allowed our experience and emotion to dictate the path of righteousness.

Some of us, though, we reject our emotions in seeking a relationship with the righteous one.

We reject our emotions in seeking a relationship with the righteous one.

We only try to relate to God through knowledge.

We are those who realize that our emotions have the capacity to deceive, but instead of striving to submit them to God's word, we seek to suppress the good gift God has given us to relate to Him.

And unfortunately, this really attacks men in the church.

Men are often the ones who suppress emotion and fill themselves with knowledge in their relationship with God.

Because we haven't been taught how to demonstrate affection, we haven't been taught how to process our emotion, we haven't been taught that it's okay to cry and do it, we haven't been taught that it's okay to scream uncontrollably in anger.

We have been taught to keep yourself together, boy.

But that's not what God declares of us.

Both men and women, according to the revealed word of God, are united in this thing called the bride.

And we are to relate to our Savior as a bride would her bridegroom.

Imagine, husbands, if your wife never lavished your praise and adoration for you and affection for you, if she never sought to embrace you and hold you and be with you presently, emotionally.

Imagine how you would feel in your relationship with her.

Both men and women are called and brought into, through the perfect finished work of Christ, to this thing called the bride.

And we are called, both men and women, to relate to him as our husband.

And so we should lavish our affections on Jesus.

We should lift our hands and worship.

We should shout for joy at his victory.

We should lament and weep over the brokenness of our culture.

We should be men who relate to God emotionally.

Not wild and reckless, submitted to the word of God, but emotional nonetheless.

And you can say all you want, well, hey, look, that's just not my personality, man.

I'm not, it's not how I do things.

That's fine.

If you want to use that as a crutch to not be affectionate, I would worry, though, men, that that probably is happening in your marriage or your relationships with your children as well, where you're using your personality type as an idol to stay in the very things that you know you should not be doing.

Your personality type, your Enneagram number, your whatever, whatever doesn't mean a lick in your responsibility to act rightly as revealed by the Word of God.

Process it, submit it, pursue righteousness.

And this is another thing that we do as the church, and this happens both in wicked wildness and it happens with hyperconservative pseudo-righteousness within the church.

Here's what we do: we take our experiences, we take our emotions, and we start to dictate truth.

And in dictating that truth, we actually tarnish or dispose of the very good gifts God has given us.

So let's take this on a second when it comes to same-sex marriage.

Many of us might have same-sex friends or relatives in our lives who are good people.

As far as like, they're really nice.

And they really are kind of cool to hang around.

And it seems and is perceived that they really just want to express and live in a state of love, monogamous matrimony.

It seems like that's what they want to pursue.

That seems like that's what they want to capture for themselves.

And so our experience and our emotion will start to soften and we'll find our gradual descent into a permanence where we would take a position that they should be able to be married as well.

And then we dictate truth.

And then we take the very good gift of marriage that God has given us and we dispose of it.

We tarnish it, we pervert it.

But we do the same thing in the church with things like alcohol.

We experience the slippery slope of the abuse of it.

We experience family members or people that we know and love who wrecked their lives with it.

And I will tell you this, church, they did not wreck their lives with alcohol.

That was just an expression of the wreckage and tarnage that was in their hearts.

And what do we do?

We see that it could be a slippery slope.

We see that it could lead to damage and destruction.

We see that if abused, it could harm us.

And so what do we do?

We throw God's good gift out.

And God says, No, that wasn't the issue.

Your heart of idol worship and serving false gods was the issue.

And you've thrown out my good gifts in the process of it.

You see, at the end of the day, we don't have issues with the stuff God gives us.

We have issues with our worship.

When Paul's writing to the church at Corinth, and they're the ones who are abusing the communion wine, they're literally getting, we don't even pour enough wine in communion for y'all to get drunk.

They are getting hammered drunk on communion wine.

And Paul writes to address them.

What does Paul not do?

All right, guys, you've shown that you abuse it, you've shown that it's a slippery slope, you've shown that it will be destructive to you.

Get rid of wine at communion.

Throw it out, get rid of it.

Let it be abandoned from your presence.

No, that's not what Paul says.

Paul says, get your heart right, church.

Because that's a sacrament of the living God, of our Savior Jesus Christ, who He's called our church to participate in.

It's not about the object, it's about the false worship.

And you're seeking greed and selfish gain, and you're not loving your brothers the way that you would want to be loved.

That's the issue.

And so Paul, beautifully and wonderfully as articulating the gospel to this church that needs to hear it, doesn't throw away God's good gifts.

He addresses the heart that it fails to worship him and the gifts of which he's given us properly.

So we can do this on both sides if we want to, church.

Our experience and our emotions can continue to dictate truth for us, or we can allow our emotions to help us and enable us to relate deeper to God and one another, as long as we pursue submitting those emotions to the revealed authoritative truth of his word.

And what's the beauty of the gospel in all of this?

It's this Jesus, the blessed one, perfectly delighted in God's law, yet he died in the place of the lawless.

Jesus the blessed one perfectly delighted in God's law, yet he died in the place of the lawless.

He is the righteousness for the righteous.

He is the blessing of the blessed, and his perfect obedience to the law of God, his death on a cross, and his victorious sin-crushing resurrection are the deep roots of which these trees are planted in.

How can we stand?

Because we stand upon him.

How can we remain rooted?

Because his roots run eternally deep for us.

His ultimate delight is submission to God's law, tempered and formed even his own emotional response in the way that he pursued relationship.

Because Jesus was an emotional person.

And Jesus was a person who expressed those emotions.

But even more so, Jesus was a submitted person.

In sorrow, he wept over Lazarus.

In exhaustion, he went away to pray.

In anger, he condemned the religious leaders.

In disgust, he flipped the money tables.

In agony, he cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And in joy, he dances over his lost sheep who have been carried back to the fold.

Jesus is an emotional being.

And he relates to us through emotion.

But those emotions were never found to be sin in his life.

Because every experience and every emotion to the Word of God.

Look at him in the Garden of Gethsemane, sweating drops of blood, crying out in agony.

God, if there's another way, let this cup pass from me.

You see the fear, you see the turmoil inside of him.

He is wrestling with his emotions.

And finally, in wrestling with them, he submits them, lest not my will, but your will be done.

That is submitting your emotions wholly to God's word.

And so what do we do as believers?

I got four things, and they're all D's for those of you who love good Puritan alliteration.

Number one, delight in God's word.

Church, delight in God's word.

You have to be honest.

Your social media feeds are continually being increasingly sorrowful and burdensome.

But yet, like a slave who's chained to it, you go back to the scroll.

There's no good news in there.

You know that.

The news that you're hearing is getting worse and worse and worse.

And that's not a statement of culture, it's just a statement of who we are as people.

Why do we not delight in God's word?

Why do we not see it as the bread of heaven, as the fountain of life, as that of which we should feast on?

Delight in God's word.

We have to change our minds.

That's the thing.

We have behaviors, we have practices that we have either consciously built or subconsciously built in our lives, and they are affecting every aspect of what we do from a day-to-day basis.

We have to change our minds.

Be proactive about delighting in God's word because whether you were conscious about it or not, you have created a delight in your social media feed.

That's why you pull it out of your pocket and scroll.

You didn't mean to, but you did.

Some of you, like me, have created the delight that when you smell two sidious pizza, you've got to eat a deep dish, right?

I didn't mean to make that happen in my life.

But it did.

But it did.

We have to fight the mind.

We have to be intentional about creating healthy habits in our life.

And that will foster and cultivate a delight in God's word.

I used to know a pastor who would say this poem frequently, and he would say this that this is off the top of the head, so if I forget it, I'm not sticking to my notes.

Nonetheless, okay, I think it's something like this.

He said, uh, there are two beings within my chest.

One is cursed and one is blessed.

One I love and one I hate, the one I feed will dominate.

I got it right.

But think about it.

What are we nourishing our souls with?

What are we feeding our souls with?

Are we feeding the new creation in Christ who has put to death the old man and has seen the resurrection of us in spirit that we might be reconciled in relationship with him?

Are we feeding that old man?

It's like that dog that you should just put down and you just throw a plate of food to him.

I don't know why I attack animals all the time, but I do.

Number two, display the fruit of the spirit.

Display the fruit of the spirit.

Church, we should be great demonstrators of this fruit.

And that fruit has to be cultivated in our lives, but we should display it before the world and before the church.

Look, how many times in our lives have we experienced life and the fruit of that experience does not fall in line or submission to the fruit that the Bible says that we should have.

We fear when we should not fear.

We are angry when we should not be angry.

We hate where we should not be hateful.

We don't often have the right fruit displayed before the culture and before the church when we experience life circumstances.

And we as a church should seek to display the fruit of the spirit.

And that's going to take discipline.

It's going to take some of the fruit of the spirit, like self-control.

But we have to pursue those things to be cultivated in our life.

And in that, you have to discern your emotions.

So an ability to display the fruit of the spirit properly is the ability to discern your emotions.

One thing we're talking about in my house frequently is this you can't help the way you feel.

That's fine.

That initial spark of emotion, that initial way that you feel when life happens, you didn't put that there.

You can't control it.

That's okay.

Here's what you can control, though.

You can control the way you respond to it.

Now, granted, there are extreme instances of emotional flooding that it kind of inhibit our ability to respond healthy.

But still at the end of the day, we can have control of the way that we respond.

We have control of the way of which we respond to the emotions of which we're feeling.

And we have to be a people who, when we discern that through God's word, seek to then display the fruit of the Spirit that should properly be there in our life.

And we can only discern our emotions if we hold them up to the mirror of God's word.

When you feel like the world is caving in on you, when you feel like your money is going to be the end of you, when you feel like your kids aren't behaving the way that you want them to, when you feel like things at work are going to come to an end quickly, when you think feel like your marriage is going to fall apart, when you feel, when you feel, when you feel, are you taking those emotions and experiences and submitting them to what the Word of God has to say?

Or are you just wholeheartedly embracing them and white knuckling that roller coaster bar in front of you, hoping that you make it through the other side.

Lastly, if you do these things, if you delight in God's word, if you display the fruit of the Spirit, if you discern your emotions, then direct will be your path.

Church, there are two paths laid in front of you: one that leads to death and one that leads to life.

The Bible is very clear on that.

And then the Bible says, too, choose one today.

Choose life.

It follows up with.

Choose life.

Direct will be our paths on the road of righteousness.

Direct will be our path on the road to salvation.

If we build our foundation on God's word instead of our experience and our emotions, like this Psalm is declaring that we should do, then we will walk the narrow path that leads to salvation.

That wide path that Jesus talks about, the wide path of destruction, like I said before, it's paved thoroughly with statements of I think or I feel.

Because ultimately, your emotions are misleading unless they're anchored in God's word.

Amen.

Amen.

I'm gonna lead us in a time of response and invite the band to come back up here.

And we're gonna respond this morning to what we've heard.

Missio works off this kind of back and forth of.