Psalm 1--The Blessed (Part 2)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. How fast can I talk? I have to admit, I don't really want to admit it, but I'm sitting here at the church today all by my lonesome.

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So we're talking today, another Thursday. It's the always

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Thursday show around here. Always biblical, always provocative, always Thursday on No Compromise Radio.

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And I'm talking about Psalm 1. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the

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Lord. And on his law he meditates day and night. He's like a tree planted by the streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.

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In all that he does, in all that he does, he prospers.

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Wicked, they're not so. But they're like chaff that the wind drives away.

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Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the

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Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. And so we're using this psalm, not in some bad way, but I'm using the psalm as a tool, as an instrument, as a means, as a cause for you to continue in your

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Bible study. I commend the listeners of Bethlehem Bible Church. I commend the listeners of No Compromise Radio.

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You are wonderful Bible students. And I am pleased, really, in all sincerity,

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I'm pleased to be one of your teachers, right? And I want you to continue to study.

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And so the psalm, this gateway psalm, this preface to the psalms, starts off with blessing.

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What a great way to start the psalms. How blessed is this particular man? But it is a conditional blessing.

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If you didn't get last week's show, you should listen to it first so you can see where we are. But this blessing is for the particular man.

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There's a condition for this man. And this man is the one who's going to delight in the law of the

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Lord. If you want to say woman, that's fine too. Her delight is in the law of the Lord. This great blessing.

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And when the writer says blessing, it's fascinating that it's a plural word, blessednesses, oh, the blessednesses, oh, the blessings.

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And this is a blessednesses, amazing.

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Spurgeon said, oh, the blessednesses, the double joys, the bundles of happiness, the mountains of delight.

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And what's really going on here is there's a plural, it's a Hebrew word, of course, plural exclamation.

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It's an exclamatory word, blessed by position, by context.

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This Hebrew is exclamatory, intensive, plural, people sometimes call it, and there's a multiplicity of blessings and joy for those who are meditating on the law of the

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Lord. Oh, how very, very happy is the one, that might be a good paraphrase for this, oh, the happinesses.

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Spurgeon said, those that trust in him are blessed. And I would observe first that they are really blessed.

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It is no fiction, no imaginary blessing. It is a real blessedness, which belongs to those who trust in God.

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A blessedness that will stand the test of consideration, the test of life, the trial of death, a blessedness into which we cannot plunge too deeply, for none of it is a dream, but all a reality.

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Those that trust in him have not only a real blessedness, but they oftentimes have a conscious blessedness.

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They know what it is to be blessed in their troubles, for they are in their trials comforted, and they are blessed in their joys, for their joys are sanctified.

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They are blessed, and they know it. They sing about it, and they rejoice in it, and it is their joy to know that God's blessing has come to them, not in word only, but in very deed.

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They are blessed men and blessed women. So these folks are blessed.

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The Bible says in Psalm 1 -1, blessed is this man whose delight is in the law of the

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Lord. And it's a particular man, no other kind of man, no other kind of person, but the one whose delight is in the

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Lord. How is this blessing obtained? It's not by osmosis. It's not by your parents.

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It's not by your children. It's not rub off, you know, you can't, it doesn't rub off of others. It's not by the sacraments.

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It's not by the church. It is by no other activity except through here,

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Psalm 1, delighting in the law of the Lord and meditating on it day and night.

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But he says something first in chapter 1, verse 1. He gives a negative before he gives the positive.

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This is the kind of person that doesn't walk in the council of the wicked, stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers.

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And there's kind of a little word play here that you can look up in the original if you'd like sometime. This is poetry and there's rhyme and there's meter and there's parallel and there's synonymous parallel lines, right?

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There's a lot of that kind of stuff. And so you have to read it that way. And many would teach that you see a progression, walk, stand, sit.

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First you're walking by sinners, then you stand by them and then you sit down. But there's no progression.

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It is just synonymous parallelism, teaching totality, that you need to avoid sinners, scoffers, wicked, and their mentality at all cost.

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That is the emphasis, that the godly man, the blessed man shuns evil and evil people.

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And we say, okay, that walks in the council of the wicked. This is the person that doesn't follow the advice of sinners.

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He is not following their plan and their principles. He doesn't buy into their philosophical and moral ideologies.

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He doesn't walk in terms of his conduct and his life and his reflection. He doesn't do that because we'd find elsewhere like Proverbs chapter one, my son, do not walk in the way with them.

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Proverbs four, do not enter the path of the wicked and do not proceed in the way of evil men.

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Proverbs 13, 20, he who walks with wise men will be wise. And whatever their theological, methodological, philosophical bent is, and I don't mean smoking cigarettes and drinking malt liquor.

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I'm thinking more things like how their relativism in religion, their materialism in life and ignoring the resurrection, how secular they may be, how their view of anthropology is wrong, how their view of religionism is wrong.

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Those kinds of things. When I say worldliness, I'm not talking about, don't let your wife wear pants.

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That's not what I'm after. This advice, these isms found in worldly speculations, the blessed man avoids these things.

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He avoids the wicked, the sinners and the scoffers, their ideologies. We're not saying he can't be friends with them.

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He can't be a neighbor to them, but he, he's determined to walk by the counsel of the word, right?

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That's what we're going to learn in chapter one, verse two, the wicked people. Sometimes we think, you know, that's a rapist.

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That's an abortion doctor. That's a, that's a murderer. And that's the kind of person a wicked person is.

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Rasha is the Hebrew word. Stedman said the term term really means ungodly.

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The man who has little or no time for God in his life, someone who has ruled

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God out of his affairs and his thinking, even though God is the greatest being in the universe, the one who makes the most sense of life, the one who's around whom all life revolves to eliminate such a being from your thinking is to be wicked on godly.

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And so this, this transgressor, this criminal, this wicked ungodly person lives like there's no

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God, lives with no regard for God. That's wicked.

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And would they have a certain philosophy and mentality that the godly person, the blessed person needs to stay away from.

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And so with this parallelism, he goes on, nor stand in the path of sinners to go there, to loiter there, to be with them, with those who missed the mark and, and they, they err.

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They missed the point. There's a standard and they deviate from that standard and then sit in the seat of scoffers are scornful and they scoff at Christianity.

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They deride Christianity. They mock Christianity. They say sacred things are contemptible.

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Those are the kind of people that are really prideful and self -sufficient and they don't want to accept instruction.

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So they mock and deride the word of God. Proverbs 21, 24, proud, haughty, scoffer are his names who acts with insolent pride.

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I will not have this man rule over me. Do not tell me what to do. Spurgeon said the seat of the scorner may be very lofty, but it is very near to the gate of hell.

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Self -sufficient scoffers, scoffing at the word of God, substituting their own emotions and feelings and traditions for the word of God.

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Saying things like first Corinthians 15, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die, denying the sufficiency of scripture.

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These are the kind of things that the blessed man runs from. These ideologies and these mental attitudes, but as I've diluted to earlier in verse two, it says, but his delight is in the law of the

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Lord and in his law, he meditates day and night.

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Kidner said this, whatever really shapes a man's thinking, shapes his life, right? They're tied together, applying your mind to meditation upon God's law by first withdrawing and be separating, separating yourself from the society of the ungodly.

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That's in a nutshell, what Calvin was talking about. So here's how the Psalm works. You've got this emphatic, plural blessedness and the way you move into the word of God is as you're moving away from the worldly influences.

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It's just like first Peter chapter two verses one and two, avoiding certain things.

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So then you can desire the pure milk of the word delights in the law of the

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Lord and he meditates day and night in this law.

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So you can see right away at the beginning in verse two, a, but there's a, there's a strong contrast, but rather he delights in the law and he meditates on it day and night.

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Now what is the law of God? You could say it's instruction. It's Torah, which often talks about mosaic law.

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That is Genesis through Deuteronomy. It is the direction from God.

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It is instruction from God. It can be used as scripture as a whole, a teaching, a precept, the body of laws.

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And so we have the sum of divine revelation and the

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Christian, as we think about it as a Christian book now for a moment, he loves the word of God.

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He just loves the word of God. She loves the word of God. The blessed man loves

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God's word, delights in it. Instead of saying, you know, it's a bunch of rules that tell us, no, we can't do these things.

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Restrictive, petty, confining as Defenbaugh says, no, no, we, we delight.

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We are loving the Bible, desiring the

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Bible. It's my pleasure. It's, it's my happiness. I see who the Lord Jesus is in this.

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And I have warm feelings. I have great favor toward something. That's what this word delight means.

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I get satisfaction from it. I get gratification from it. Highly pleasing, great pleasure.

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I'm just looking at different definitions here found in my notes. No wonder thy words were found and I ate them and thy words became for me a joy and delight of my heart.

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And I have been called by thy name, Jeremiah 15, 16, right?

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And Jeremiah appropriates, appropriates them. He meditates on them.

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This is this, this figure of, of eating. I take pleasure in the word of God.

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I wonder if that describes you. I'm sure it does. Taking pleasure in something, delight.

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That's what this word means. Taking delight in the law of the Lord. Ever delight in something?

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Ever delight in someone? Men are said to experience delight when it comes to women.

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Shechem, son of Hamor, had delight in Jacob's daughter Dinah, Genesis 34, 19.

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The beauty contestants would go before King Ahasuerus and they did not return to him unless he had delight in them.

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Esther 2, verse 14. And so we, we have this feeling of, of love and preciousness and, oh,

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I read the word of God and there, there's an emphatic delight in that very thing.

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Used elsewhere of something that gives you delight, business, pleasures of life, affairs of life.

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Make me walk in the paths of thy commandments for I delight in it. Same word.

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Pretty close to the word love when it comes to scripture. I shall lift my hands to thy commandments, which

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I love. Oh, how I love thy law. I love thy law. Therefore I love thy commandments,

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Psalm 119. I love thy precepts. I love them exceedingly.

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And when something or someone delights you, you want to spend time with it or him or her or them.

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Right? And the text says, and in his law, he meditates, Psalm 1, 2, day and night.

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This word to meditate is, is a very onomatopoetic. It's Haga.

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It means to murmur. It means to mutter. It can, it gives an allusion to a lion growling,

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Isaiah 31, 4. To a dove moaning, moaning like a dove,

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Isaiah 38, 14. Kind of a moaning noise, Isaiah 16, verse 7.

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And it's, you're meditating on something so much, you're kind of talking about it under your breath, going back and forth, thinking about it.

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You know, when you, when you memorize Bible verses, memorizing Titus now with the men's group, and you kind of under your breath, you're just going over it and over and over to remember it, to muse on it, to replay in your mind.

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Making a sound is this kind of idea of meditation, slowly chewing the cud of the word of God.

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That's the Haga there. The book of the law, Joshua 1, 8, shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night.

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That's the idea. So you're preoccupied with something, you're consumed with something, and you want to understand who

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God is as you look at his perfections in the word of God. It's an imperfect tense, by the way, and it's showing habitual action over and over and over.

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It's not a burden. It's a delight. The word of God is a delight for this man of blessedness.

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And so we are told in 1 Thessalonians 5 to pray without ceasing. And we, with the same kind of attitude, we're supposed to just be meditating on God's word day in and day out, all the time.

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Tozer had this to say about meditation and meditating on the Bible. Read it much, read it often, brood over it, think over it, meditate over it.

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Meditate on the word of God day and night. When you are awake at night, think of a helpful verse. When you get up in the morning, no matter how you feel, think of a verse and make the word of God the important element in your day.

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The Holy Ghost wrote the word, and if you make much of the word, he will make much of you. It is through the word that he reveals himself.

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Between those covers is a living book. God wrote it, and it is still vital and effective and alive.

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God is in this book, and if you want to find him, go to this book.

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The Word of the Living God. Open up your Bibles and read it.

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I love Isaac Watts, his song, Oh, How I Love Thy Law. Tis daily my delight, and thence my meditations draw divine advice by night.

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My waking eyes prevent the day to meditate thy word. My soul with longing melts away to hear thy gospel,

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Lord. Oh, how I love thy law. To be a delighter, to be a meditator.

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We say with Job 23, I have not departed from the commands of his lips.

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I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my necessary food.

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Isn't this important in our day today, Christian, when people are saying my experience trumps things, when people say my tradition trumps things, the magisterium trumps things, the church trumps things?

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Martin Luther said, I have covenanted with my Lord that he should not send me visions or dreams or even angels.

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I am content with this gift of the scriptures, which teaches and supplies all that is necessary, both for this life and that which is to come.

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When you see that kind of view towards scriptures, then you read the

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Roman Catholic Catechism, section 85, which says, the task of giving an authentic interpretation of the word of God, whether it is written form or in the form of tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the church alone.

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This means that the task of the interpretation has been entrusted to the bishops in communion with the succession of Peter, the

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Bishop of Rome. Or another place, section 82, the

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Roman Catholic Church does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the Holy Scriptures alone.

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Both scripture and tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence.

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So now let me translate Psalm 1 according to the Catholic Catechism, 82.

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How blessed is a man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seats of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the

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Lord and the Roman Catholic tradition. Is my word not like fire,

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Jeremiah 23, like a hammer which shatters a rock? It's thy word is a lamp to thy feet and a light to my path,

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Psalm 119. The word of the Lord abides forever, 1

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Peter 1. You want blessedness in life? Then you need to put your

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Bible in a place that you see it often and open it up and read your

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Bible and meditate on your Bible. It's just the way it goes.

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It's just the people that meditate on the Bible, eternal riches, yes, and even temporal.

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Look at verse three, and he will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither.

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And in whatever he does, he prospers. In all that he does, he prospers.

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The godly man, it's like a tree, a healthy, luxuriant tree.

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Psalm 92, the righteous man will flourish like a palm tree. He will grow like a cedar in Lebanon.

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Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is in the Lord, Jeremiah 17, for he will be like a tree planted by the water that extends its root by a stream, and he will not fear the heat that comes, but its leaves will be green.

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Well, my name is Mike Abendroth. I know you love the Bible, and why don't we ask the Lord to help us read the

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Bible and treasure it more than we do now. Lord, help us to do that very thing.

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In Jesus' name, amen. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.