Psalm 1 Delighting in the Law of the Lord

Welcome to Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service. Today's message is by Elder Zach Lloyd and is on Psalm 1 and is titled, Delighting in the Law of the Lord.

If you'd like more information about Recast Church, please visit us on the web at www .recastchurch .com. Let's join Zach now.

Psalm 1 as an Introduction to the Psalms

The Bible called 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. 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.

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

Psalm 11, 5 says, The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence. And lastly, Psalm 34, 21, Affliction will slay the wicked and those who hate the righteous will be condemned.

So we see those terms throughout the Psalms. I just want to ask this morning, when you're reading those Psalms and when we read Psalm 1, where do you read yourself into that? Where are you? Are you righteous or are you wicked?

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. 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.

Jeremiah 17, 9 says, The heart is wicked above all things. Who can know it? 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 Word of God that we would be confronted and through the Holy Spirit that we would move and act to delight in the law of God.

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. 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.

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 he does, he prospers.

The wicked are not so, but like the chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

Let's pray. Father God in heaven, we thank you for this morning. Thank you for this beautiful weather and the season that we're in. 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, God, that it would be acceptable to your ears, Lord, that we would sing in spirit and truth.

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

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

It's that we can... 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 God's Word, and He's kind of giving validity to the emotions.

And I certainly... I find it's unique... 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. 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.

But there is a such thing as a righteous anger. And I'll use the illustration of my kids. Say I have four kids, and I say, and 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.

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. I have just sort of this righteous anger immediately, and I have that emotion. And if it's a good day, I can consider James 1 .19, and be slow to speak and slow to become angry, 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 in that way, knowing that with that, but that emotion is still there. And to contrast that with something like Psalm 4 .4, where it pretty much gives a similar instruction that says, be angry and do not sin, 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. 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.

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, like Kyle said a couple weeks ago, he says, okay, to vent to God. We shouldn't be venting to each other, but we vent to God, and the Psalms help us do that.

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

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.

The Blessed Man Walks Away from the Counsel of the Wicked

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, Psalm 1, wasn't numbered.

It's meant as an introduction. And again, I said, these were compiled, it wasn't like one author sat down and wrote them all. So it's kind of, the idea behind Psalm 1 is to have us in the right mind, the right frame of mind when we come to Psalms.

Are we, it's kind of the lens in which we enter them. Are we righteous or are we wicked? And I just, again, I caution you, John, which camp you put yourself into initially. So what this 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 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.

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. 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 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. 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.

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.

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

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

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

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, just technically blessed is more or less as someone that's joyful and forgiven, and a righteous person is someone that's justified.

So you can see they're really closely related. But the definition that this text provides initially is it goes about defining them as what they are not and what they are. 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.

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.

But I think Charles Spurgeon is on and accurate when he notes there's a progression here. We go from walking, to standing, to sitting in our sin. Isn't that how it normally works? 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.

That's just how we progress through our sin, and you guys probably know what sin that you're struggling with. Initially, it starts with just sort of compromise, like this really isn't even hardly sin, right?

You justify it to yourself. 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. 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, and if they say it's wrong, if someone tells you what you're doing is wrong, then they're wrong, so you get this insulation around you.

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

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

And the only way to get rid of it is going to really hurt. And that, just that idea to get rid of this sin, 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, 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. We see the wicked, the sinners, and the scoffers. So the wicked, I think, hopefully you agree, wicked is pretty black-and-white definition, somebody that's already judged.

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

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, 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.

But if you look at scoffers, the sin behind that, it truly, it is pride. 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 Hardings than the National Chain store on Shaver Road, not because of the store, but because of the people.

How wicked is that? And I'll disguise it by making a funny comment to my wife, mocking these people. 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.

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

He meditates on it day and night. You read in verse 2 there. Is that you? The Ten Commandments, is that what you're delighting in day and night? Is Leviticus just the devotions, your balm, the honey to your soul, Leviticus?

Hopefully, you're saying, no, I'm not, and I certainly felt convicted by that. But before you slump over too much with discouragement, let me just add that when we see the Psalms, there's 150 chapters in this book, it is broken up, so if you look through that, they're broken up into five sections.

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 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 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 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 God is, and that's what we're marveling, that He created everything, that's the idea behind this. The primary distinction we see here is really pivots on that in verse 2, He delights in the law of the Lord, where is our delight?

That's the difference, that's the distinguishing factor, 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?

I think there's a lot of, if you evaluate your motives, you'll be discouraged sometimes because oftentimes it will 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.

So again, I ask that you consider and don't just reflexively say, yes, no, I delight in the law of God, because if you're not delighting in God, it is sin. This really is the crux of the passage, so delighting is oftentimes translated in the text as desiring.

What are we desiring? It was kind of difficult for me to try, what am 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 I think fondly of my childhood.

Stuff when I was a boy, like baseball, or swimming, or ice cream, those were great things and that's all I thought about, and that's what I delighted in, literally. And I can see it even in my seven-year-old son, 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 eight o 'clock, he's got his uniform on, his hat on, let's go, let's go play some baseball.

What time is it, Dad? He's not ready, it's not time yet. And then he's, well, can we just go early, can we just be there? And then the game goes, all right, he's not a superstar, nor was I, but after the game, he's still reliving it to me, 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 just, it's his world, and he delights in it.

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, 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, 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 Word of God? Is it something that we are looking forward to?

Do we delight to be in His presence? Do we desire it? And if we're not, if we don't get that opportunity, does it cause us any distress? And what about meditating on it, day and night? That seems like a pretty tall order as well.

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

How do I constantly remember and think about the Scripture and have a life? I would actually be fired in two weeks trying to do this, 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, but that's probably what makes me not such a good listener as well, is there's all these thoughts, and maybe 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 Word of God, the truth, so that we can shine that light on those thoughts as they're coming by and get them, and understand them first, if they're true or false, and deal with them.

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

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

I think it's, you can be deceived easily. Do I prefer what the counsel of the world says? You need to love yourself first. You need to take care of you first. Are you making you happy? Do that first, 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.

You need to love others as you love yourself. Is that the counsel that I prefer? I think that's a good contrast. 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 Word, but understanding it, meditating on it, and being saturated on it, and living it out.

That's the idea here. So it is, again, it's a psalm, so it's using poetic language, so we see that in verses three and four. We see this metaphor presented. 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.

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 chap that the wind drives away. 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. 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.

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. 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, 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 kind of giving me the business, and I said, that's enough, we're going to go ahead and try and cut this down.

So first I cut it all down, and then there's 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. 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 I'm pulling thousands of pounds of wood, and even, I guess 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 start accelerating, pushing on the accelerator, and the R's are going up and up, and the engine's getting louder and louder, and suddenly I hear this kind of loud, quick snapping sounds, and I'm like, well, maybe that's it.

So I back off and go take a look at it, and the rope's frayed, and the hitch doesn't look the same, and 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.

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, we are cemented, we are deep in the ground.

And to press this word picture a little bit, 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. 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 of that, and He's sovereign, 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. So we're supposed to be fruitful, we're supposed to be helpful, nurturing, and in my mind, when you start thinking of fruit metaphors, the text, the Scripture gives quite a few fruit metaphors.

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. Those are the type of fruit we should be yielding, and I think it says, in its season.

I think that might be helpful, that we don't need to bring forth every one of those fruits at every occasion. There's an occasion for faith, an occasion for love and patience. But also, it's the continuation, year after year, bringing forth fruit.

It's not that we were kind one day last week, or three years ago I shared Christ with a co-worker and I'm clinging to those things, it's that we're continuing. We're not like the chaff, one and done, we brought forth some, we had one year and then we're done.

We're continually bringing forth fruit. And I also thought of John 15, 5, where we see the illustration where Jesus describes Himself as the vine, we are the branches, He is the vine. He says, this is Jesus talking, whoever binds in Me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from Me, Christ talking, you can do nothing.

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.

We should be producing fruit that's helpful to people. We're not just producing some random fruit, but something that people benefit from, 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, I'm helped by this person, I need to be around them more, I'm sharpened, 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, 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.

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

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. 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.

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, 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. So it's the part of the wheat grain, so the wheat grows up, and it's the external sort of kernel, and they dry the wheat, and then that kernel kind of flakes away in a process called winnowing, and they, 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.

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. They looked, they endured everything that the wheat grain did, but for nothing.

They had no value, certainly nothing that's lasting. 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.

That seems like a pretty high calling. Everything that we do, or if you put yourself in that category of righteous, we prosper. I don't think that I'm prospering in everything I do at first glance. Maybe you say, yeah, every stock I've invested in, just, that's probably not the case.

So what's going on here? So it's helpful to acknowledge and appreciate the benefits of the law of God. So just taking the 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, 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. 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.

Just note quickly that the prosperity gospel would say that you, 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. What I'm saying is, what Romans 7 says, is that the law of God is true, honest, and good. It's valuable. So it's beneficial to us in that way, but it's primary beneficial to us, 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 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.

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.

We see sort of a longer-term perspective versus the temporariness of the chaff, which is momentary. And even in the broader range of Scripture, we see prosperity linked to eternity, 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. We look at this temporal world and the things that we don't have and wonder why God isn't blessing us.

But Scripture clearly teaches that the things of the world are a snare, and actually suffering is what's valuable. It reads to you 2 Corinthians 4, 17 and 18. It says, So you might say, well, slight momentary.

That's not me. 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, 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. Verse 18 of 2 Corinthians 4 says, The things that are unseen are eternal. So our fruit, we want to be looking and prospering in things that are eternal.

James 1 has two verses, verses 2 and 12 that I'm going to read here, gives more support to this perspective. It says,. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

So trials produce perfection that we're complete, lacking nothing. That sounds like prosperity to me. Verse 12, So what the world might describe as anti-prospering or suffering, in fact, is a refining fire of God that produces faith.