Delighting in the Law of the Lord

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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Welcome to Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community and service.

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Today's message is by Elder Zach Lloyd and is on Psalm 1 and is titled, Delighting in the

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Law of the Lord. If you'd like more information about Recast Church, please visit us on the web at www .recastchurch

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.com. Let's join Zach now. We call it the book of Psalms, but there's really 150 different chapters of unique songs and that's what we're going to be reading this morning.

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If you've ever spent any time, many people delight in the Psalms, they really like them, but you might see the terms righteous and wicked frequently throughout them.

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I'm just going to give you three quick examples and maybe you have some memorized already, but just to kind of get our minds oriented where we're going.

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Psalm 7, 9, again, it didn't take me very long to find three examples to find righteous and wicked, but Psalm 7, 9 says,

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Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end and may you establish the righteous, you who test the minds and hearts,

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O righteous God. Psalm 11, 5 says, The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.

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And lastly, Psalm 34, 21, Affliction will slay the wicked and those who hate the righteous will be condemned.

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So we see those terms throughout the Psalms. I just want to ask this morning, when you're reading those

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Psalms and when we read Psalm 1, where do you read yourself into that? Where are you? Are you righteous or are you wicked?

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Maybe it's an obvious question to you. Maybe you know the answer or maybe you think that I'm trying to be crafty and there's something else going on here.

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But I urge you guys to consider whether or not you are righteous and wicked and really search your hearts as we go through this passage because it paints a pretty black and white picture and not to be deceived by your own heart.

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Jeremiah 17, 9 says, The heart is wicked above all things. Who can know it?

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So it's easy to sit there and think, yeah, I know, I'm righteous or I'm wicked. So my goal this morning as we read through Psalm 1, in coming to hear from the

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Word of God that we would be confronted and through the Holy Spirit that we would be moved and act to delight in the law of God.

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So I'm going to go ahead and read through Psalm 1 and then the band is going to come and we're going to worship God through song.

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So read with me in Psalm 1, it says, 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.

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

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He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.

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In all he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but like the 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.

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For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. Let's pray.

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Father God in heaven, we thank you for this morning. Thank you for this beautiful weather and the season that we're in.

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We pray now that as we enter into this building as the people of God, as your church, Lord, that we would lift our voices to worship you in spirit and truth, and that you would soften our hearts to your word, and that when we sing to you,

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God, that it would be acceptable to your ears, Lord, that we would sing in spirit and truth.

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God, bless this time now. In Christ's name we pray, amen. So we're in Psalm 1 again, and psalms are songs, and they're poems, and they use figurative language, and that's helpful because it provides an emotion, sort of incites some passion in us, but we also can give instructions, and that's largely what

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Psalm 1 is, and I pray that we are listening to the psalm this morning with naïve ears, and honestly considering whether or not we are righteous or wicked.

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And I think it's because the psalms employ emotion that we are... They seem... They're a favorite of many in terms of the books of the

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Bible, because we can empathize with the author and the emotions that they are feeling. It's that we can...

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It's one thing to acknowledge that we see our emotions in here, but another thing altogether to consider that it's God working, this is

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God's Word, and He's kind of giving validity to the emotions. And I certainly... I find it's unique...

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The unique benefit, I think, of the psalms is that it gives us a vent to understand our emotions and to go somewhere with them.

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And I'll use the illustration of anger, and maybe you guys aren't familiar with that emotion, but it's very familiar to me, unfortunately.

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But there is a such thing as a righteous anger. And I'll use the illustration of my kids.

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Say I have four kids, and I say they're young, and they are young, but say I see one of them, and they don't know I'm watching, and one of them injures the other.

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And I see that, and I see the one that did the injuring almost sort of happy about it, and they see their sibling sad.

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I have just sort of this righteous anger immediately, and I have that emotion.

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And if it's a good day, I can consider James 1 .19 and be slow to speak and slow to become angry.

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For man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires, so I can think that. I can process that, and I can go deal with my children that way, knowing that with that.

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But that emotion is still there. To contrast that with something like Psalm 4 .4, where it pretty much gives us similar instructions, it says, be angry and do not sin.

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Ponder in your own hearts and be silent. So the instruction really is the same. It's to take a minute, take a breath, be silent initially.

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But what the Psalm does, the Psalm 4 .4 example does, is it gives us, it says, be angry. Be angry, but do not sin.

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So it kind of gives you some validation to that emotion, and it gives you where to go with it. It gives you some instruction.

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Like Kyle said a couple weeks ago, he says, it's okay to vent to God. We shouldn't be venting to each other, but we vent to God, and the

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Psalms help us do that. It takes us in the direction that we should be going with our emotions. So in that example,

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I could go ahead and be angry and use that emotion, but not initially give the correction and the justice that I think needs to be exacted at that moment, and kind of take a moment and says, be angry and do not sin.

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How can I sin in that moment? How can I correct that child that might actually do more harm than good? So I think that's the helpful thing of Psalms, and that they help us to harness and use our emotions.

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Psalm 1 is meant as an introduction to the book of Psalms. In the initial, in the original, when they were first collected, there was 150 chapters in this, and the first chapter,

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Psalm 1, wasn't numbered. It's meant as an introduction, and again, I said, these were compiled.

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It wasn't like one author sat down and wrote them all. So the idea behind Psalm 1 is to have us in the right frame of mind when we come to Psalms.

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It's kind of the lens in which we enter them. Are we righteous or are we wicked? And just again,

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I caution you, John, which camp you put yourself into initially. So what this

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Psalm is going to do is it's going to contrast righteous and wicked, and I think in many ways in our life, we want to put things into categories, or certainly that's the way

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I am. I like to categorize things. I want things to be black and white. I like things that are like gravity, and it behaves the same way every time.

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Unfortunately, if you've been in this world, you'll know most things aren't that way. There's all these shades of gray, and certainly with people, we're so inconsistent.

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That's why I marvel at things like personality tests, like predictive index or strength finders or Myers -Briggs and those, which do a remarkable job at kind of...we

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feed the questions, and it kind of feeds back to us. You are probably like this. In most situations, this is how you behave, and it does really well.

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And I think of broad categories like you're extrovert or you're introverted, where I find myself more introverted, the category that you're more energized where you're in solitude, where you're by yourself, as opposed to an extrovert who gets more energized in a social setting.

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And I can say, yeah, but then there are times where I'm definitely introverted, but others, you know, there was a group of like eight or 10 of us, and I had a really good time, and that was fun, and I feel energized.

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So I want to put myself somewhere on a spectrum there, and when we come to questions like are you righteous or wicked, it's really difficult for us to say,

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I'm in one or the other. We want to say, well, I'm not Jesus, but I'm not Judas, right?

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So I think it's hard, and when we come to this text, because it's going to black and white put you in one or the other camp, and I'm going to try to walk us through that.

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So where we're going is there are six verses here in Psalms. They're broken up into three two -verse sections.

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The first two is contrasting...they're always contrasting, blessed, righteous, and the wicked.

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And it starts off by contrasting them by their associations, and then the middle two uses a metaphor to contrast them, and then the last two verses looks at the consequences of the righteous and the blessed, or in the wicked life.

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And then I'm going to close with sort of an illustration slash application. So we see the word blessed here, and also the word righteous, and this text really uses those synonymously.

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Just technically blessed is more or less someone that's joyful and forgiven, and a righteous person is someone that's justified, so you can see they're really closely related.

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But the definition that this text provides initially is it goes about defining them as what they are not and what they are.

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You see it says, the blessed man is one who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.

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So you kind of see some repetition there, and I think we can kind of expect to see some repetition in poetry, that's something we're kind of used to, and I understand in Hebrew poetry, particularly, we see repetition.

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But I think Charles Spurgeon is on and accurate when he notes there's a progression here.

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We go from walking, to standing, to sitting in our sin. Isn't that how it normally works?

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We don't always go to, I just had an adulterous affair. I wasn't even planning on it, it just happened. We start off with a thought, then we notice somebody, then we start interacting with them, then we start maybe manipulating the environment to get around them a little bit more often, and then we maybe start taking bolder steps.

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And that's just how we progress through our sin, and you guys probably know what sin that you're struggling with.

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Initially it starts with just sort of compromise, like this really isn't even hardly sin, right? You justify it to yourself.

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You know, it's just sort of a, everybody does this, I don't think God would even call this a sin. It's sort of out of practicality.

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Before long you find yourself sort of distracted by it, and out of curiosity you start spending more and more time with it. And you get to the point where you don't even know if it's wrong or not, and you start surrounding yourself with people that agree with you.

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And if they say it's wrong, if somebody tells you what you're doing is wrong, then they're wrong. So you get this insulation around you.

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Where I was once a slight compromise out of pragmatics, this seems to make me happier.

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This sin that I used to think was sin, now I'm not so sure, and I think what's not giving me happiness is not that I need to get rid of this, but I need more of that.

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So it was once a slight compromise, and eventually it leads to this habitual sin that controls you and it owns you.

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Sin is much easier to conquer, taking captive the thoughts that go through our mind through the obedience of Christ, than it is once it's got its crooked fingers twisted all inside us.

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And the only way to get rid of it is going to really hurt. And just that idea to get rid of this sin,

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I have to go through that, that's enough to repel us from that, and we are enslaved to it. The good news is that Jesus bought that for us.

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He's conquered that enemy, that sin, and we have the ability to conquer sin through Jesus Christ. Let's also look at the categories of people that are presented here.

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We see the wicked, the sinners, and the scoffers. So the wicked, I think hopefully you agree, wicked is a pretty black and white definition, it's somebody that's already judged.

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It's not that they are, sometimes they're wicked, it's hard to tell, no, they're wicked. It's over.

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And also the sinners, it's an active, ongoing term here, they are actively sinning. It's not an issue for them, they're not warring against their sin, they are sinners.

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And that's where I saw the scoffers, I thought, that seems to be, you know, my mind, I'm always kind of, again, categorizing or ranking things, well,

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I'm here, or that's there, and I'm, you know, I rank scoffing seems to be just not as severe as wicked or sinners.

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But if you look at scoffers, the sin behind that, it truly is pride.

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It's putting someone else lower to elevate yourself. And I thought of, you know, just something simple in my life that I've caught myself recently, just I'd rather go to Woodbridge Harding's than the

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National Chain store on Shaver Road, not because of the store, but because of the people. How wicked is that?

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And I'll disguise it by making a funny comment to my wife, mocking these people.

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That heart there, that just wants to elevate myself, and not only am I not being loving to them like I'm commanded to do, but I'd rather push them down.

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They're low already, and I'm going to push them lower to make myself look better. Clearly, a scoffer is no better.

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So the behavior of walking, standing, sitting with the wicked sinners and mockers, it stands in direct contrast with what we see that the blessed man does do, and what he does do is delight in the law of the

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Lord. He meditates on it day and night. You read in verse 2 there.

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Is that you? The Ten Commandments? Is that what you're delighting in, day and night?

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Is Leviticus just the devotions as your balm, the honey to your soul, Leviticus?

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Hopefully you're saying, no, I'm not. I certainly felt convicted by that, but before you slump over too much of a discouragement, let me just add that when we see the

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Psalms, there's 150 chapters in this book, it's broken up to, if you look through there, there's broken up into five sections.

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So there's five sections that was meant to mirror the Torah, the first five books of the Bible that Moses wrote, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, so that there was sort of this mental picture, and that when you came to the

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Psalms, you were delighting in the law of God, which encompassed that, and that's what they had in terms of the revelation of God at that time, and now we have the full

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Scripture. So really what you're delighting in is not, you shall not murder, you don't just sit there and, yes, don't murder, don't murder, that's not what we're talking about, it's what

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God has revealed about Himself to us, and what He's revealed to us, He knows us better than we know ourselves. This is who you are, this is who

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God is. And that's what we're marveling, that He created everything. That's the idea behind this.

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The primary distinction we see here is really pivots on that, in verse two,

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He delights in the law of the Lord. Where is our delight? That's the difference, that's the distinguishing factor.

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Do we delight in the law of the Lord or Scripture and what we know about God? It can take some contemplation to figure out what is really making us happy, what are we really desiring?

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I think there's a lot of... If you evaluate your motives, you'll be discouraged sometimes, because oftentimes it'll be revealed to you that you are desiring someone's approval, someone in your life or maybe in your past or even material things that are driving you.

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So again, I ask that you consider and don't just reflexively say, yes, no, I delight in the law of God.

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Because if you're not delighting in God, it is sin. And this really is the crux of the passage.

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So delighting is oftentimes translated in the text as desiring. What are we desiring? And it's kind of difficult for me to try, what am

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I actually desiring? Because everything, all my motives in this life seem to be somewhat tainted. It's hard for me to find a pure motive, so somehow

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I think fondly of my childhood. And stuff when I was a boy, like baseball or swimming or ice cream, those were great things, and that's all

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I thought about, and that's what I delighted in, literally. And I can see it even in my seven -year -old son,

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Bryce. He plays t -ball now. And I mean, the day of his game, he might have an 11 o 'clock game, and he's up at 8 o 'clock, he's got his uniform on, his hat on, it's, let's go, let's go play some baseball.

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What time is it, Dad? He's not ready. It's not time yet. And then, you know, he's, well, can we just go early?

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Can we just be there? And then the game goes, all right, he's not a superstar, nor was I, but at the, after the game, he's still reliving it to me.

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He's telling me, you know, you remember when Adrian made that play, or Owen Scott, and I don't even necessarily know who all these kids are, but it's his world, and he delights in it.

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And I can remember when I was a kid, and again, I only played like eight games, it was my whole season, and he's got,

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I don't know, 20 games or something that they get to play, it's a little bit different now. But if a game was canceled, for me,

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I mean, it was like a death blow. I would, I remember crying when my game got canceled, and I think that's a fairly accurate picture of what this text is talking about, and do we delight in the

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Word of God? Is it something that we are looking forward to? Do we delight to be in His presence?

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Do we desire it? And if we're not, if we don't get that opportunity, does it cause us any distress?

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And what about meditating on it, day and night? That seems like a pretty tall order as well.

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The righteous life is not characterized solely by how much time you spend in the Word. I mean, if that's what we're being called to do, then we should just be monks and go get our

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Bibles and close the door and start locking it down, right? But that's not what we're called to do. It's meditating on it day and night.

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It's considering, contemplating, chewing on the Word throughout the day. And so, you might be thinking, well, maybe, how do you do that?

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How do I constantly remember and think about the Scripture and have a life? I should be fired in two weeks trying to do this.

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But I would argue that there are thoughts constantly going through our mind, independent of what we're doing. Even now, there's thoughts going on in the back of my mind that I struggle with, even now, making this more difficult.

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But that's probably what makes me not such a good listener as well, is that there's all these thoughts. And maybe

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I'm just crazy. I trust that you know what I'm talking about, that you have this internal voice. And those are the thoughts that we need to be exposed to the

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Word of God, the truth, so that we can shine that light on those thoughts as they're coming by and understand them first if they're true or false and deal with them.

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So it's meditating on the Scripture and the attributes of God, reminding myself of who He is and who

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I am and instructing myself in truth. And those are the opportunities for us to have victory. The truth of God really does shape our lives minute by minute.

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That's the idea, meditating on it day and night, continually. Another observation that can be made in this text is that it's presenting two different influences.

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Do we delight in the counsel of the wicked, or do we delight in the law of God and what it says about us?

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I think you can be deceived easily. Do I prefer what the counsel of the world says?

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You need to love yourself first. You need to take care of you first. Are you making you happy? Do that first.

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Then take care of all these other things, whereas what God would say, you need to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.

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You need to love others as you love yourself. Is that the counsel that I prefer? I think that's a good contrast.

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So delighting in God is a lifestyle. It's what we do with the Word. It's an action. It's not just studying the

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Word, but understanding it, meditating on it, and being saturated on it, and living it out. That's the idea here.

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So it is, again, it's a psalm, so it's used in poetic language. So we see that in verses 3 and 4. We see this metaphor presented.

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It says, the blessed man, or the righteous man, is a tree, or he's like a tree, planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.

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I think that picture is pretty clear to me, but we're going to walk through it, and maybe it is to you, and it's contrasting that with the chaff that the wind drives away.

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And certainly, you think of a tree, and it's planted, its roots go deep in the metaphor there. Our roots are grounded in Christ and in His Word.

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It doesn't matter what's going on up in the environment, in the world of that tree. It can be blazingly hot, it can be months without water, but its roots are deep in that ground, and it's being fed and nurtured.

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Or it could be the dead of winter, and it just seems like bitter cold out, and that tree is fine, it's planted. I don't know if you've ever tried to dig up a tree, or certainly a stump.

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It's virtually impossible. I hadn't even tried, I just considered it impossible, but I thought I'd give it a shot. About six weeks ago,

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I was mowing the lawn, and things were starting to grow a lot, and I kind of just live in this middle of the forest with a small patch of grass, and I have a tractor, and I was mowing, and there was a thorn bush, it was just getting unruly, and I would drive by, and it was just kind of giving me the business, and I said, that's enough, we're going to go ahead and try and cut this down.

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So first I cut it all down, and then there was a little stump there, and it's not even like one stump, it's like six or seven little branches going into a stump, maybe six or eight inches around.

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I have a pickup truck, and I thought, well, I'll just, I dug around it, I'll just hook that up and yank that out of there. It's a legitimate truck, it's not these monster trucks, but I use it to haul wood, like thousands of pounds of wood, so it can pull stuff easily, it doesn't even notice it when

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I'm pulling thousands of pounds of wood, and even, I guess

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I notice it when I'm braking, but other than that, it's pretty easy to pull wood. So I hooked up a rope to it, hooked it around that stump, and I started accelerating, pushing on the accelerator, and the

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R's are going up and up, and the engine's getting louder and louder, and suddenly I hear like this kind of loud, quick snapping sounds, and I'm like, well, maybe that's it.

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So I back off and go take a look at it, and the rope's frayed, and the hitch doesn't look the same in the tree. It's like laughing at me, nothing's, it hasn't changed, it hasn't even moved, it's like I knew where I had dug around, and it's like no less loose, and that's just this little thing.

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That's how the righteous are. We can be cut down, we can be pruned, we can be made low. If we're rooted in God, in His word, it doesn't matter what happens up here.

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We are cemented, we are deep in the ground. And to press this word picture a little bit,

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I think, is to note that it says, the text says that the tree is planted, it's active, it's actively put somewhere, we are planted.

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We didn't just randomly spring up where we're at. We are put in a position, in a place in life for a reason, and God is in control, and He's sovereign.

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That's how we are, we're planted in a specific spot. And also note that the tree really is useful, and the text says, it brings forth its fruit in its season.

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So we're supposed to be fruitful, we're supposed to be helpful, nurturing, and my mind, when you start thinking of fruit metaphors, the text, the scripture gives quite a few fruit metaphors.

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Think of Galatians 5, 22 and 23, where you see the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self -control.

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Those are the type of fruit we should be yielding, and I think it says, in its season, and I think that might be helpful, that we don't need to bring forth every one of those fruits at every occasion.

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There's an occasion for faith, an occasion for love and patience. But also, it's the continuation, year after year, bringing forth fruit.

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It's not that we were kind one day last week, or three years ago, I shared

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Christ with a co -worker and I'm clinging to those things. It's that we're continually, we're not like the chaff, one and done, we brought forth some, we had one year and then we're done, but we're continually bringing forth fruit.

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And I also thought of John 15, 5, where we see the illustration where Jesus describes

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Himself as the vine, we are the branches, He is the vine. He says, this is Jesus talking, whoever abides in Me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from Me, Christ talking, you can do nothing.

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So that's the kind of fruit that we should be bringing forth, fruit and making disciples. But I also like the example that John Piper gives, and I think it's consistent with those two metaphors in Galatians 5 and John 15, where he says that people should be nourished by us.

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We should be producing fruit that's helpful to people. We're not just producing some random fruit, but something that people benefit from.

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And I think you can probably picture people that are in your life that you know, when you're around them, you feel better, like,

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I'm helped by this person, I need to be around them more, I'm sharp and I'm built up. Hopefully, there's people in your life that you can think of that give that, and if not, that's not the end of the world for you.

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But the call here is that we should be like those people. People should be enjoying being around us, we should be nourishing them, we should be bearing fruit that it's helpful to them.

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In the contrast, there's also, you can kind of, the other side of the coin, where there's people that you're around them, you're like, man, that's just such,

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I'm drained when I'm around that person, I feel like, or I'm dirty, like, it's feel like, was that gossip or why were they sharing that with me, and that kind of thing.

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So it's not that, we don't want to be that person, but we don't want to surround ourself with people that only build us up, we are to bear with one another.

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We're to surround ourselves with whoever God puts us around us and minister, and those actually are, those people that are maybe difficult to be around or you feel it's more of a taxing experience, those are the people that give us the opportunity to actually show that Christ loved to, and to minister to.

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And note also that the leaf of the tree does not wither. So even the littlest parts of this tree are cared for and nurtured.

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And that's how it is with the righteous. So we contrast that picture of the blessed man being like a tree planted by the stream with the picture of the wicked, and the wicked are described as the chaff that the wind blows away, and if you're like me, you don't really know what chaff is, and you have to do a quick little search.

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So it's part of the wheat grain, so the wheat grows up, and it's the external sort of kernel, they dry the wheat, and then that kernel kind of flakes away in a process called winnowing, and during that process, they kind of throw it up in the air, and the wheat grain falls to the ground, and the chaff just drifts off.

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And that's how those that are wicked are. Their life is useless. They spent their whole life for a season, they spent one season, and they produced nothing of any value.

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They endured everything that the wheat grain did, but for nothing. They had no value, certainly nothing that's lasting.

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And to further contrast the righteous and the wicked, we see the consequences of their lives. It says in the righteous, all they do, they prosper.

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That seems like a pretty high calling. Everything that we do, or if you put yourself in that category of righteous, we prosper.

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I don't think that I'm prospering in everything I do at first glance. Maybe you say, yeah, every stock

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I've invested in, it's probably not the case. So what's going on here?

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So it's helpful to acknowledge and appreciate the benefits of the law of God. So just taking the

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Ten Commandments, for example, where if you live a life by the Ten Commandments and you don't routinely steal and kill and have an affair, things go generally better, right?

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Than if you just blazingly break the Ten Commandments. And I think there really is some benefit that you could read that into this text.

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And you might be thinking, well, that's... We know that if I'm a father of Christ, things are going to go bad for me. So that sounds like the prosperity gospel, that I should be expecting things to go better.

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Just note quickly that the prosperity gospel would say that if God wants you to be blessed and He wants you to be healthy and wealthy and have all these things, and if you don't have them, you don't have enough faith, that's the prosperity gospel and that's false.

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What I'm saying is, what Romans 7 says, is that the law of God is true, honest, and good.

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It's valuable. So it's beneficial to us in that way, but it's primary beneficial to us.

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And then it contrasts who God is and who we are and that we've fallen short. So it's a tutor to bring us to Jesus Christ in the need of a

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Savior. That's its primary benefit. So there's a deeper point that I think we need to evaluate when it talks about, in all they do, they prosper.

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So we should really consider this, and while prosperity, I think we need to interpret it both in text, in this context here where we see this metaphor and where this tree is bringing forth fruit year after year.

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We see sort of a longer -term perspective versus the temporariness of the chaff, which is momentary.

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And even in the broader range of Scripture, we see prosperity linked to eternity.

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So that we can, it's tough for us to evaluate prosperity based on our feeble senses, and they can actually cause us to be to some despair.

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We look at this temporal world and the things that we don't have, and wonder why God isn't blessing us.

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Scripture clearly teaches that the things of the world are a snare, and actually suffering is what's valuable.

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We read to you 2 Corinthians 4, 17 and 18, it says, So you might say, well, slight momentary, that's not me.

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I've been suffering. I was born with this. I've been suffering the whole time. But you contrast that with eternity, to get your mind around what eternity is,

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I don't care if you live to 120, that's a vapor in light of eternity. And what it's preparing for you for is an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.

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Verse 18 of 2 Corinthians 4 says, We look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen, for the things that are seen are transient.

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The things that are unseen are eternal. So our fruit, we want to be looking and prospering in things that are eternal.

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James 1 has two verses, verses 2 and 12 that I'm going to read here, gives more support to this perspective.

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It says, Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.

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And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

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So trials produce perfection, that we're complete, lacking nothing. That sounds like prosperity to me.

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Verse 12, Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial again. For when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life, which

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God has promised to those who love him. So what the world might describe as anti -prospering or suffering, in fact, is a refining fire of God that produces faith.

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You can't buy faith. Faith in Jesus Christ that's been sifted and refined through the trials and fires of this life is more valuable than anything you can buy.

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It's more valuable than health, wealth, or family. To have come to the bottom and having all those things stripped away and find joy in Christ, that is eternally valuable.

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That's prospering. And I urge you to read like missionaries, you read these biographies or autobiographies of people like Brother Andrew or Eric Liddell, and some of these more recent missionaries, there's a lot of them out there, and they've forsaken everything for the cause of Christ and they've suffered what appears to be on the outside, suffered tremendously.

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But you read, even by their own account, had joy and peace. That's them saying that, but we don't know the half of it.

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They're in eternity now, prospering. The righteous do prosper in all that they do.

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Now to verses 5 and 6, we see that the wicked will not stand in the judgment. So this chaff is consumed, will not be able to stand, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

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The way of the wicked will perish. The text is clear that those that choose their sin, delight in the things that are not of God, that's not their desire, they want their sin, that path is not known by God, and He's going to destroy it.

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And we see that direct contrast there, it says, the Lord knows the way of the righteous. This is an act of knowledge,

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God knows this way. It's not that He's aware of it, He walked this way. He walked in our shoes.

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He was tempted in all the ways that we are, yet He did not sin. He's been in our shoes,

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He knows what it's like to walk in this world. Jesus Christ did it, yet He did not sin. So let me be clear now this morning, it might be easy to walk away or be thinking there, no,

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I need to be righteous, I need to stop listening to what the world says, I need to produce more fruit.

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I need to try harder, I need to start staying away from evil, that's not the point.

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There is none righteous, not one, except for Jesus Christ. It is only in Christ that we are righteous.

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That's the answer to that initial question, are you righteous or wicked? You're only righteous in Jesus Christ. So I think this psalm has clearly presented two camps, wicked and righteous, and it's obvious, it's black and white, there's not a lot of gray area there.

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Let me point you to 1 Corinthians 1 .28 where it says, this is kind of where we get our righteousness from and give some support to what

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I've just said, that God chose what is low and despised in this world, even the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, so that no human being may boast in the presence of God.

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And here it is, it says, and because of Him you are in Christ, who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that as it is written, let the one who boasts only boast in the

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Lord, while righteousness is in Jesus Christ. So that seems to present sort of a difficulty and it's sort of one that's been wrestled with with humanity, how do we marriage this right doctrine with this right action?

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We're called to be holy and to be righteous, but we're only righteous in Christ. So can

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I just stand in Christ and do whatever I want? Maybe even sin, because the more

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I sin, the more grace may abound. And of course, Paul dismisses that argument, he says, no, absolutely not, in Romans.

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So how do we walk this life in righteousness? And I thought, maybe you've heard an illustration like this before, but this is something from my own personal life that might help you remember and get a picture of what this text is driving at,

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I think. So the summer between, I went to college at Western Michigan University in the mid -90s, and between I think my sophomore and junior year, maybe freshman and sophomore year,

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I can't remember exactly, I went back to stay with my parents for the summer and got a job and I didn't go to school that summer, so I just needed to earn some money.

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So they lived near Flint, Michigan, and I got a job as a temporary employee at a golf course, and the golf course was

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Warwick Hills in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and that's actually a pretty nice golf course, they actually host the

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PGA Tour, comes to town there. And I don't know if you've ever golfed, but there's something really, it's like the perfect marriage between competition and just being up early in the morning watching sunrises and green grass and the sounds of the summer, it's just, it really is, it was a nice opportunity for me to be there in that environment for that summer job, it was a blessing from God.

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And just to, you know, to be able to actually play on that type of course was really a privilege.

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But the job wasn't that great, I didn't have any security, it was a temporary job, it was for a few weeks at best, and I was asked to, what they had done was redid the sprinkler lines in the fairway, so in golf, particularly professional golf, it really is a game of inches, and the way the ball bounces, right or left or however, really matters, and certainly matters in terms of dollars to the professional golfers.

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So when they tore up those sprinkler lines in the fairways, they needed to put sod back down, and the sod had to be down in a particular way, because if the ball bounced left or right, people wouldn't be happy.

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So it was the cool of the spring, and we had to literally get on our hands and knees and lay little chunks of sod down where they had tore up the fairway, and smooth it out with our hands and pat down those pieces of sod, and we did thousands of yards over a few weeks where we did all that, and really wasn't that great of a job.

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We had no security, really no benefits, but at the end of the job, the head groundskeeper, the guy that took care of the grounds, he had a crew, and he was looking for someone, and he asked me if I'd like to stay on for the summer and cut grass, and work on the golf course, and I said, fantastic,

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I'd really like being at this golf course. I had no, I'd never done anything on that, I don't know anything about how to take care of a golf course,

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I had no talent of my own, and he just asked me to stay on and start working there, and if you've ever looked at, if you've ever watched golf on TV, I mean it's really well taken care of, and the greens in particular, you'll notice that even they seem to have like lines on them, if you know what

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I'm talking about, and they're like perfectly straight, and I remember them asking me to mow greens, and you had to mow this straight line, and they give you this machine,

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I'll call it a lawn mower, it's not like the lawn mower you're thinking of, it really was like sort of a foil shaver on wheels of self -propel, and it had more controls than my vehicle did at that time, it was a lot to keep track of, a lot of rules, a lot of things to be aware of, and he told me, well the key is you just make that first line across the middle of the green straight, and then after that, you just use that as a guide, you just go back and forth, you can do any pattern you want using that first one as sort of a guide, and I thought, okay, so there's a lot of things to sort of keep track of, but I got the mower pretty well, it's self -propelled, got that understanding, and just kind of walked behind it, and unfortunately they make these greens a little bit challenging, they have sort of rolls in them, and it's not this pancake flat little thing you can walk across, so I just walked across that first line just holding on tight, because I was going to nail this,

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I had understood exactly where this green was going, and I was watching everything I was doing, making sure I wasn't scuffing my feet on the grass, because like I said, if you ever watch golfers,

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I mean they will look at their line, and they'll pick up blades of grass in their line, just to make sure the ball doesn't go where they don't want to, so it's just really fragile, so I walked across there, and I was accounting for every little turn and undulation of that green, and I got to the other side, and I looked back, and I was just horrified, it was terrible, it was like a three -year -old had done it, it was a big

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S, what happened, I was so meticulous, and he thought, well, you can just correct for that by going back and just maybe take a little bit off, and it just gets worse and worse, and after tolling for a couple of days, he gave me the one instruction that really, and this is where you guys are probably familiar with this, you just pick out an object in the distance, on a distant horizon, something that's not going to move, typically a tree on a golf course, and you set your eyes right on that, pick your path, and look exactly at that, and walk right towards it, and I said, all right, so I tried that,

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I mean I was just glued to it, I wasn't paying attention to anything going on, I was like, tears were streaming down my eyes, I wasn't going to blink, just dead on, walked right to that tree, and I remember, you know, just kind of quieting the motor down, and stopping the propulsion, and turning around,

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I mean the line that I first hit was just razor straight, it was like I had snapped a plumb line or something, it was just, how is that so easy?

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And as I continued to do that over the summer, they actually asked me to mow the greens when the

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PGA Tour came to town, the greens that were televised, so they don't put all the greens on TV, they just construct

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TV towers on a few of the greens, and those are televised for the nation to see. So I had that opportunity, as I found throughout the summer,

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I got to mow these greens, it really was effortless, I didn't even need to, I hardly touched the mower, it was so easy, and that's how this

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Christian life is. We've been purchased with no talent of our own.

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God didn't die for you and live a righteous life because you had some great skills that He wanted that could really help

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Him out. We're inconsistent at best, we continually fall short, we don't even know what path we should take, when obstacles and challenges and trials come in our life, we don't know the righteous path.

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And the harder we try to hold on and fight against these trials and think that we can control our circumstances, the more we fail to walk that righteous path.

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But Christ has walked in our shoes, He who knew no sin, He knows the way of the righteous, we don't.

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Our job is to focus on Him and delight in Him. Philippians 4, 6 says, be anxious for nothing.

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And Jesus also said in Matthew 6, 31 -33, He says, Therefore do not be anxious, saying,

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What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after these things, and your heavenly

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Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

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We don't need to worry about the trials and bumps in our life. Keep our eyes on Christ. Don't stop and stand in the way of sinners.

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If I was, when I was mowing that green, if I were ever to stop, even for a moment, to itch my nose or anything, it would create a, it wouldn't be a straight line.

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That's how it is. We should continually focus on Christ and continue to follow Him. Don't take breaks. We can't follow

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Him, we can't let Him work through us, unless we are born again.

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We're born with a sin nature. He's here, we're infinitely below, where there's no way to reconcile that, but through Jesus Christ's shed blood.

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We must be born again to have that Holy Spirit working in us and through us. So we're going to move now to communion.

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And we do this every week at Recast, and I hope it doesn't become rote to you, because it really is a joyous celebration. It's an opportunity for us to remember that Jesus Christ walked this life.

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And it's, I don't want to minimize the agony that He felt on that cross, but He lived a life that was sinless.

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You try to live one day without sinning, it's impossible, but to live His whole life.

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And He gave that for us. That's our righteousness. That's been imputed to us. That's what we have. That's what we're celebrating here when we go to communion, is righteousness in Christ that He's given to us freely.

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But if you're not, if you've never trusted Christ as your Savior, this is an opportunity for you to cry out to Him, saying,

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God, I need you. I can't do this on my own. I need you as my salvation. I need your righteousness, and I need you to forgive me for my sins.

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And that's what we remember when we drink the juice. We remember that His blood was shed for us.

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So I'm going to close with prayer, and I ask each one of you here to consider whether or not you are righteous before God.

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And if you will, the only way you're going to be able to say that is if you are in Christ. And if you're not, that you would confess to Him and accept

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Him as your Savior. Let's pray. Father, God in heaven, Lord, we are thankful for Your Word.

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We're thankful for You and how You revealed Yourself to us, and that we recognize that we are fallen creatures, and we need

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You. We need Your salvation. Help us now as we remember, and help us to do it with joy in our hearts, and to keep short accounts.

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Lord, if there's something in our lives that we know where we've fallen, Lord, that we would confess that to You, and that we would be able to celebrate that we are forgiven.

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And if there's anyone here, God, that has not accepted You as their Savior, Lord, I pray that that would occur now, that they would trust