Walk, Stand, Sit
Notes
Transcript
Psalm 1
Psalm 1
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in 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.
This Psalm shows us that there are really only two ways to live, the righteous way and the wicked way. This is seen throughout the Psalm but I want to focus on the first stanza, the first words of the book. Psalms holds bits of a wide amount of theology from the entire Bible and we must hold to the whole book in the same way that we must hold to the whole Bible.
The first word of this Psalm shows us what the first statement is, it is a statement of blessing. The blessing is for those who do not do something though. it says in Psalm 1.1 “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers;” This shows us a progression down into evil. You start out by walking around by the wicked and then you slow down to hear more of what they have to say and pretty soon you are sitting with them as one of them. This is not the way that we should be going and there is a blessing pronounced for those who do not go that way and that go another way.
The other way is the way of delighting in the word of God and meditating on it all day and night. This is how we are to oppose the wicked and be set apart from them. Meditating on God’s word is something that is highly neglected in the lives of Christians today. Biblical meditation is not even close o what we typically think of when we think of meditation. Worldly meditation works to clear the mind while biblical meditation works to fill the mind with the things of God. There are many different examples of how you can do this but the basic idea is to have a small piece of scripture, probably just a verse, and to focus on it and think about just it for a time. In a way this podcast is just simple meditations that I do on scripture just with a more pastoral approach instead of a personal one.
We need to strive to be people of the word and work hard to not be people of the world.