Prayer Night Sermon (Psalm 1 And Finding Our True Happiness)

The Purpose of Human Happiness in God

Thank you for listening to the Shepherd's Church podcast. This is our Wednesday night service that is focused on prayer and walking through the Psalms together. We hope that you are blessed and we hope that you will join us as we pray for revival.

Jonathan Edwards once said that God created human beings for nothing else than happiness. Now, Jonathan Edwards is not talking about a kind of sensate happiness that is wrapped up in entertainment, food, sex, and drink and all of that stuff.

Jonathan Edwards is talking about a theologically rich, formative, centralizing happiness that describes the very centrality of who you are as a human being. He is saying that your entire purpose for which God created you was that you would be happy in God.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism begins that way. What is the chief end of man that we were made to glorify God and enjoy Him, find happiness in Him forever? Your purpose for why you were created was to find joy in God.

That is your purpose. From the moment you were born until the moment that you die and as you enter into the gates of eternity, your purpose is to find joy and happiness in God. Now, I can think of no better way to introduce an entire book of the Bible than that, and that is how the book of Psalms is introduced to you and I.

The book of Psalms has 150 chapters, but what it really is is 150 handwritten songs, songs of worship to God, and these songs cover a variety of different emotions. They cover how to worship God and find your happiness in Him in the mountaintop experiences of life.

How do you find happiness in God in the valleys? How do you find happiness in God when you're up or when you're down or when you're in various different emotional places? How do you find happiness in God when you are being mistreated by other people?

How do you find happiness in God when everything seems to be going well for you or nothing at all seems to be going your way? The book of Psalms is a theological treatise on how to find happiness in God.

And Psalm 1 is the perfect introduction because that is exactly what it's talking about. Even the first word of the Psalm, blessed, can also be translated, be happy in God. Now, I want you to think about it this way.

If Psalms is trying to communicate the right condition, meaning that we are supposed to have joy in God, then Psalm 1 is the prescription. This is how you do it. Psalm 1 sets the tone for how you and I are going to have joy in God.

And the way that it lays that out is actually very simple. It says that if you believe God, you believe what He says in His word, and you obey His word, just those three simple things, believe in God, believe what He says in His word, and obey what He says in His word, then no matter what your circumstances are, no matter how bad or how good or anything in between, you will be a happy person, a blessed person.

You will be happy in God. Now, this is fascinating, and this is fantastic news because human beings have spilt thousands and thousands of gallons of ink trying to figure out the secret to happiness. We've exhausted countless resources.

We've come up with a myriad of million different commissions to try to figure out what can make a human being happy. And here we have right here in Psalm 1, the answer to the age-old problem of happiness is to believe what God has said and obey what God has said, and then you will be happy.

You will have joy in your life. That is the purpose for Psalm 1. That is the purpose for the entire book of Psalms. So now what I want us to do is I want us to read this Psalm together. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, and 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. But the wicked are not so. They are like chaff that the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners sit in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. Now, as you'll notice after we read that, you've got a couple things going on in this Psalm that I want to point out to you and I want us to meditate upon as the people of God.

The Way of the Righteous and the Way of the Wicked

Number one, the Psalm is going to lay out different approaches to life that are either going to lead to happiness or are going to lead to eternal peril. That's the first thing that we're going to talk about.

We're going to talk about the difference between the blessed person or the righteous person and the miserable person or the wicked person. That's the first thing that we're going to talk about. The second thing that we're going to talk about is that as we know our theology, there's no one righteous.

There's not even one. That means that the psalmist is anticipating something bigger than us, better than us, something that we cannot control ourselves and manufacture ourselves. So therefore the Psalm, while it's a prescription for happiness, it's also pointing to an external hope that we ourselves cannot have unless it's given to us by God.

And then, finally, I want us to see in light of the gospel on who Christ is, that you and I have real hope that we can be happy, that we don't have to live miserable lives, but because of what Christ has done, you and I can have true biblical happiness.

So that is what I want us to examine. So let's begin. The way of the righteous is verse 1 through 3. Let's read those verses once again. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord.

And on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does he prospers. Now, you'll notice that the way of the righteous begins with this word blessed, which means happy.

But the first thing that you need to understand about how to be happy is that happiness begins with three negative commands. Now, we all remember as children that we always enjoyed when our parents said, you can do this instead of don't do this, don't do this, don't do this.

We tend to respond with a knee-jerk reaction whenever we hear someone tell us what we can't do instead of what we can do. But I love how the psalm begins with three negative commands because happiness, first and foremost, is rooted in biblical belief and biblical behavior.

Therefore, you can't walk in the counsel of the wicked. You cannot stand in the way of the sinners, and you cannot sit in the seat of scoffers. If you do that, you, my friend, will never, ever be happy.

You'll be miserable. You may have a veneer of happiness that's rooted in sinful pleasure, and there's a difference. A sinful pleasure and a sort of enjoyment that comes from idolatry and a sort of enjoyment that comes from our sin is a dark and sort of dirty pleasure that even as Christians we realize that when we're getting some kind of sinful enjoyment that it's wrong, that it's not quite good, that we're experiencing some pleasure in a maladaptive way that falls beneath the standard of which God gave us.

There is no real joy is what I'm trying to say. There is no real happiness when you walk in the counsel of the wicked or when you stand in the way of sinners or when you sit in the seat of scoffers. What it's really trying to get us to look at, number one, is that when you live a sinful life, you will not have true biblical happiness.

You may have pleasure. You may have sensate emotions. You may have experiences that lead to sort of pleasurable experiences or whatnot, but you're not going to have biblical happiness. We have to define our terms.

Biblical happiness cannot come from living a sinful life. It doesn't, it won't, and you'll never have it. I also want us to see that in these first three negative commands, we see that sin actually carries a sort of downward spiral, if you will, that not only when you begin sinning, it takes you deeper and deeper and deeper as you go, deeper into misery.

If the goal of the human life is happiness, then sin not only takes away our happiness, but it takes us and plunges us into deeper and deeper realms of darkness and into deeper and deeper experiences of misery.

Notice that the psalmist says that we are not to walk in the counsel of the wicked. So when you're walking, it means you have mobility. It means that you're standing up and that you're moving and that you're doing all of the kinds of things that a normal human being with functioning organs can do.

You can walk, you can move, you can bend over, you can whatever. But I love how the next thing that he says is do not stand. Now you see the person's not even moving anymore. Their legs aren't moving.

Their body is not moving. Their arms are not swinging because sin, although it starts in a place where we think that we can control it and where everything seems to be going normally and our body is working just like it always has, eventually sin takes us down a darker and deeper path.

It immobilizes our soul. Our soul kind of feels like that we can handle it in the beginning, but eventually it paralyzes us so that all we can do is stand. And then he ends with sitting. He says do not sit in the seat of scoffers.

Notice that you go from walking to standing to sitting. What he's trying to communicate to us is that our soul becomes increasingly miserable the more that we sin. And the more that we sin, the more incapable of getting out of our sin we actually are.

So that's the first thing is that we must not walk in the counsel of the wicked. We must not take their advice. We must not believe the things that they say. We must not live the way that they live. And then next, we must not stand in the way of sinners.

We must not do the kinds of things that sinners do. We must not live in the kinds of ways that sinners live. We need to protect ourselves from that kind of lifestyle and live a biblical lifestyle if we want to be happy in God.

Because if we don't, we will eventually sit down in the seat of scoffers where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. So happiness in the Bible begins with these three negative commands. But it also has two positive commands.

Yes, don't sin. Don't live like a sinner. Don't walk like a sinner. Talk like a sinner. Don't stand like a sinner or sit like a sinner. Yes, of course. But it also has positive commands as well. The positive commands begin with this.

He delights in the law of the Lord. So if you want to be happy, not only must you not walk in the counsel of wicked or stand in the path of sinners or sit in the seat of scoffers, you must also take that energy that most people are going to use towards sin, and you're going to take that energy and delight in the law of the Lord.

It doesn't say delight in the Psalms. It says delight in the law of the Lord, which I think is a fascinating point. The law of God reveals who God is. So if you want to be happy, you need to know who God is.

If you want to know who God is, you need to go to the law of God. And if you sit in the law of God and you stand in the law of God and you walk in the law of God, then you will have happiness. There's no joy and no happiness when you sit down in sin or when you stand up in error or when you walk in paths of unrighteousness.

But there is joy when you delight in the law of the Lord because the law of the Lord will teach you how to walk. It will teach you how to stand, and it will teach you how to sit down in truth in a way that leads you to unending joy and happiness.

The second positive command is he does meditate on it constantly. He not only finds joy and happiness in the law of God, but he thinks about it all the time. He processes the law of God. He ponders the law of God.

He lets it roll over his mind day and night. He wakes up in the morning thinking about the Bible. He goes to sleep at night thinking about the verses that he's memorized. The person who wants to be happy in God needs to delight in God's word, but also needs to meditate on God's word and think about God's word and live a word centered life.

If you don't do that, it's not enough to try to live a righteous life and to not live a wicked life. If you're not going to invest your life into the very means of grace that God has given you in order for you to have joy, if you're not going to live a word filled life, then you're not going to have happiness in God.

The Bible is so clear on this that really we are a people who are left without excuse. Those are the positive commands. Meditate on his word constantly. Delight in his word thoroughly. Finally, we get a couple metaphors for what it means to be a righteous person.

A righteous person is like a tree that is planted by streams of living water. It's a person who's being constantly fed and nourished and taken care of. It's a person who has spiritual life coursing through their veins, like a tree that's sucking up all of that wonderful, beautiful water from that rich and fertile soil that's planted right beside streams of living water.

To be a person who is rooted in God's word is going to give you life, satisfying life, sanctifying life, joyful, happy life in God. It says that this tree also is going to yield fruit in its season. If we want to live a fruitless Christian life, if we want to live a life that does not bear the fruit of God, then all we need to do is try to root ourself in anything other than his word.

We can root ourself in pleasure and we won't bear fruit for God. We can root ourself in our career and we won't have joy in God. We can root ourself in our family and we can root ourself in our relationships and we can root ourself in money and sex and power and experiences and travel.

What hobby am I going to do next? What entertainment am I going to watch? What TV show am I going to invest 47 hours of my life in? We can root our lives in those fickle, terrible things that are going to suck life out of you, or we can root our life into the word of God, which is going to pour life into you.

It says that they bear fruit in season. There's a season for bearing fruit and there's also a season for preparation. Both are true. If you are rooted in the word of God, you will bear fruit in season and you also have a season of preparation where you're being cultivated and maybe you're being pruned and maybe you're being prepared for the harvest.

Both of those things are true, but only if you're rooted in the word of God, which again is like streams of living water. It says that that person will not wither, which is actually fascinating because the kind of trees that are always green are called evergreen trees and they don't actually bear fruit.

The kind of trees that bear fruit go through a season of death. They go through a season of cultivation and preparation. They go through a season of harvest. They go through a season of changing and dying, and then all that cycle starts all over again.

What this is saying is that you will be like a tree planted by streams of living water, but you will never wither. You will never go through the down season. You will never go through the season where you are experiencing spiritual death.

As long as you are rooted in the word of God, believing the things that God says, trusting who God is, then you will be like that tree. Now, the way of the wicked is a little bit different. The first is the way of the righteous.

You'll be happy. You'll be joyful if you do these things like we talked about. But the wicked, it says it's not so for them. They're like chaff. Chaff is a particular substance that breaks away from a kernel of wheat and it eventually ends up flying away into the distance.

In the ancient days, they had little things called winnowing forks that people would use to go through a process of winnowing the wheat. They would throw the wheat up into the air and the wheat would come back down and it would strike the concrete and it would break open the husks.

The heavier parts would fall down to the ground and hit the concrete or the rock or whatever it was that they used, and the lighter chaff elements would be blown away in the wind. This is what God is saying about the wicked, that they don't have substance, that they don't have weight, that it looks like they're living weighty and significant lives, but really, one good windstorm will blow them away forever.

So we can see that negatively, the wicked are like chaff. They have no substance about them and eventually they're going to be blown away. But we also learn that the person who believes in God, the person who's rooted in his word, the person who trusts in him has weightiness to their life as well.

They're not flippant people. They're not light people. They're heavy, meaningful, weighty, significant people who are rooted and anchored to a very significant truth and they'll never be blown away. They'll never be taken captive by worldly philosophies.

They'll never be blown into any wind or doctrine. They are anchored to something permanent and they cannot be blown very easily away at all. The consequence for the wicked is described in verse 5. It says it like this, that they will not stand in the judgment to come.

It says that they will not sit in the congregation of the righteous and they will be plunged into the fiery chaos where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth. Now, I want you to notice that earlier we were told not to walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of scoffers.

Now it's telling us that the wicked will not be able to stand. If you stand with them, you will never be able to stand. If you sit with them, then you won't sit in the congregation of the righteous that is in heaven.

You will actually be plunged down into the darkness and you'll be plunged down into the fires of hell where, again, there's weeping and gnashing of teeth forever. So the wicked have no hope of eternal happiness.

They only have hope of very temporary, sensate pleasures that will not last. They're as temporary as chaff that is blown away in the wind. If you want to have eternal, weighty, significant, and life-changing happiness, then you have to be rooted to the word of God and you'll have it.

Christ as the Righteous One Who Fulfills Psalm 1

Now, again, we understand—I'm switching gears a little bit here—we understand that no one in this room has a righteousness of their own. We understand that when this verse is talking about don't walk in the way of the sinners or the wicked and don't stand in the place of sinners and don't sit in the seat of scoffers, we realize very clearly that that's us.

We are the ones who've walked in wicked ways. We are the ones who stood in the place of sinners. We are the ones that sat down among the congregation of the sinners. We are the ones who have broken God's law at every command.

We are sinful. Our thoughts are sinful. They're wicked constantly. We lust. We lie. We cheat. We steal. We are the people that this particular chapter is saying are destined for eternal misery. The omniscience of God knows it.

The justice of God requires our judgment. And the only way that you and I can escape the judgment of the wicked is if someone who truly is righteous comes to our aid. Someone who truly is the one who doesn't walk in the way of the wicked.

Someone who is the one who does not stand in the place of sinners. Someone who truly does not sit down in the company of the wicked but sits down in the company of the righteous, yes, barely even the one who sits down upon the throne of God himself, which is Jesus Christ.

He is the one who must come. He is the one who must do what Psalm 1 is telling us that we must do because we can't do it on our own. He's the one who's going to meditate in the law of God, and he's the one who's going to delight in God's word day and night, and we see that in the Bible.

He's the one who is going to be that true and living vine or tree that is planted by streams of living water. Actually, he is, he says in the New Testament, the living water that flows into our hearts and makes us alive in him.

He's the one who causes us to bear fruit in season because he truly is that tree that bore its proper fruit in its proper season when he was crucified on the cross, raised from the dead on the third day as a first fruit of the new creation.

He's the one who is bearing fruit, causing us to bear fruit, and he's the one who will never wither, never fade. This Christ is the one who will make us into the image of what Psalm 1 is actually saying.

He is the one who will give us a sort of happiness that is not our own but belongs to God. He came, he did what Psalm 1 is saying for us to do, and he was the one who had pure and perfect joy because he obeyed Psalm 1 perfectly, and he shares that joy with us.

He shares that joy with us even when we don't deserve it. He shares that joy with us even we don't perfectly obey it. Jesus Christ has given us the joy of God, which is now a fruit of the Holy Spirit, so that we can be happy in God, and all we have to do is believe and trust in him.

And now as spirit-indwelled believers, we not only trust in him, we worship him. And we not only worship him, but we submit our lives to him, and we obey him, and we trust him. Do you see what Jesus has done?

We could never in our own strength obey Psalm 1. We could try to delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on it day and night, but then tomorrow we're going to be sitting down in the seat of scoffers once again.

We could try our best to be like a tree planted by the living waters, but our roots don't go deep enough because our righteousness is so superficial, and we would be like the chaff that was blown away.

We cannot do what Psalm 1 requires, therefore we have to hide in the shadow of the one who does. He is the one who's rooted. He's the one who's grafted us into him, and he's the one now that we obey and worship and cherish so that we can find all our happiness in him.

Prayer, Revival, and a Christ-Centered Corporate Response

As we transition now to a time of prayer, I want us to remember that true happiness can be found in Christ and Christ alone. True happiness is found in knowing who God is, knowing who Christ is, knowing who we are, and resting in the finished work of Jesus Christ.

That's the gospel, that we're not resting in our sins, but we're resting in his righteousness, and when we do that consistently, we will be the most joyful people on planet Earth. Let's pray, and then we will open up a time of corporate prayer together.

Father, thank you so much for this being our very first prayer service at The Shepherd's Church. Thank you that you are the author of our prayers, the receiver of our prayers, and the one who is overjoyed at our prayers.

You're the one who cares for us, who loves us, and who, like this psalm is teaching us, the one who will make us happy in you. Father, I pray that as we pray tonight, as we direct our hearts towards you in light of what we've just learned, that, Lord, you would cause us to pray with joy and with happiness and with thanksgiving and with adoration and confession for how we fall short.

Lord, that you would cause us to pray Christ-centered, God-honoring, spirit-filled prayers. Lord, I pray that you would shake the foundations of New England from a little church like The Shepherd's Church where we pray every Wednesday night.

Lord, I thank you that we can start this tonight, and Lord, I pray that we would be able to see it grow, that the ministry of prayer would become central to The Shepherd's Church, and that, Lord, prayer would cause revival to break out in this land.

There is no such thing as a revival or as a fresh breath of God's grace upon a culture without a move of prayer. God, would you cause us to be a people who want to and yearn to pray. In Jesus' name, amen.