Psalm 1: SRY

Sermon

This week we are continuing on in our Deep and Wide series, we talked the first week about the parable of the seeds and the soil, and the idea behind it is that in order to grow like a seed we need to have deep roots, and we need to have a wide breadth as we grow fruit. And then last week we talked about sabbath, and the idea that in order to grow deep and wide we need to be resting in God, and as we make God a part of our life patterns then our faith will grow deep and wide. This week we’re going to take a look at this idea further by looking at Psalm 1. To start we have a video by the bible project.

Bible Project Video (5 min)

Psalm 1

1. Oh the good life of the man

who doesn't walk by the counsel of the wicked,

‌and doesn't stand in the path of sinners,

‌and doesn't sit in the seat of mockers.

2‌. Rather, his delight is in the instruction of Yahweh,

‌‌and on his instruction he meditates day and night.‌

‌3. He will become like a tree planted by streams of water‌

‌Which gives its fruit in its time,

‌And its leaf does not wither

‌‌And everything he does, he makes it successful.

‌4‌ .Not so the wicked;

‌‌Rather, he is like chaff that the wind drives away,

‌5‌ .Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment,

‌‌Nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous,

‌6‌ .Because Yahweh knows the path of the righteous

‌‌But the path of the wicked will perish.

Verse 1

The bible project talked about the word blessed and explained that a better phrase is to say “the good life” because that is the way that the bible talks about it in its original language. The bible was originally written in Greek and Hebrew and the Hebrew word being used here is אַשְׁרֵי (ash-ray). And it is talking about the type of person who lives a happy life, filled with peace, comfort, stability. Think about the best life you could live… that is the idea… this person is very fortunate.

Who here wants a “good life”? Ok, yeah exactly.

So how do we get this kind of life?

Verse 1:

The good life belongs to the one that:

who doesn't walk by the counsel of the wicked,

‌and doesn't stand in the path of sinners,

‌and doesn't sit in the seat of mockers.

The Bible project pointed out something that’s really cool about this verse and it’s the progression of the action words, let’s take a look at them, first is walk, then stand, then sit. One of my favourite things about the bible, is that the language it uses, especially when we’re looking at poetic literature like the Psalms, is really intentional. And that’s the case for this verse, that the language here, to walk, then stand, then sit, is intentional. In this case what we notice is that the verbs in the sentences are moving in a logical progression from a place of movement to a place of being stuck. And this is an intentional flow of logic as it pairs this progression with the description of bad company.

When paired with the progression of these verbs walk, stand, sit, we see that the more time that someone spends with these sorts of people. People that mix up good and evil, people that miss the goal of loving others, and people that mock and tear down what is good. The more that they’ll become like them and they won’t have a good righteous prosperous life, instead they’ll grow further away from God confusing good and evil, become hateful instead of loving, and showing contempt and making a mockery out of things instead of uplifting and appreciating righteousness and beauty. And they’ll get stuck their they won’t be able to walk away from it, instead they’ll grow comfortable with it, they’ll sit, and get stuck in this way of living.

And so this first verse is inviting the reader or because it’s a Psalm often times those who are singing these words, to stop and meditate on this idea, to think about their life, what kind of life do they want? Do they want a life that gets stuck in a way of living and thinking that fits in line with these people who are evil and hateful and jaded, or do they want to live a good life?

We live a good life by avoiding bad company. It’s really easy to get influenced to do weird or dumb things with our friends, and sometimes that’s ok. Here’s a photo of me with my clothes on inside out and backwards… because I lost a bet to Carson, to be completely honest I don’t remember what the bet was, but this was the consequence. And it was kind of stupid. Obviously, this is not evil, but it goes to show that it can be really easy to be influenced by your friends and to do all sorts of odd things.

Verse 2:

And that brings us to verse 2. What else does someone do to live a good life?

They choose to “delight is in the instruction of Yahweh” “and on His (God’s) instruction they meditate day and night.‌” This is a cycle, the person doesn’t delight in the evil mentioned in verse 1, instead they delight on God’s law.

And so here we see this cycle that the person delights in the word of God, and the more they delight in it, the more they meditate on it, which makes them delight in it even more.

And so we can see this almost infinite loop, where a person walking in the way of righteousness, is someone who constantly delights in the word of God, and in their delight they meditate it all the time, and the more they meditate on it, the more they continue to delight in it. And the loop just continues.

What’s the point of this?

We live a good life by grounding our life and our patterns on scripture.

Verse 3:

3. He will become like a tree planted by streams of water‌‌

Which gives its fruit in its time,

‌And its leaf does not wither

‌‌And everything he does, he makes it successful.

This is a good reminder of the genre of the book of Psalms, it’s poetic, it’s not meant to be read at face value, but to try to understand the depths of it’s metaphors, and the truths that they contain. Because in this verse, it obviously doesn’t mean that the person who forsakes evil and delights in the word of God is a literal tree, but instead it uses rich imagery to give us a beautiful metaphor of what it means to have a good righteous life.

And here again there’s some cool parallels like there was in verse 1. Take for example the word planted, to be planted is to be attached to one a place, a tree can’t get up and move around, it’s movement is static, just like it is when someone is sitting. In the first verse we saw that someone who gets stuck in the way of the wicked, sinner, and scoffer is someone whose life comes to ruin. But here we see that by planting oneself in the streams of water, that nourish and bring life, the streams that represent the word of the Lord, that person who is stuck there is prosperous, they live a good life.

And this metaphor of the tree planted by streams of water goes back to the deep and wide concept. How do we begin to live a good life? We root ourselves in scripture going deep, and then we allow ourselves to grow wide by avoiding bad company. If we think about the parable with the soils, bad company is like the weeds that sprouted up and choked out the seed.

We live a good life, our faith grows by rooting ourselves in scripture because scripture acts as the flowing water and nutrients that feeds our faith, we grow deeper in our faith by deepening our understandig of scripture. And our faith grows wider as we filter our environment and create a space where ourselves where we can easily grow.

Metaphors and poetic language can be fun, but also confusing, lets make this really practical...

Psalm 1 is essentially saying this: you have two choices for how you are going to live your life. You can a good life or a bad one, and this passage is saying that a good life is one that is rooted in God and His word. The bad life is one where we pursue bad things, where we allow our own selfish desires, and the bad influence of others to win, and the rest of the Psalm talks about how choosing this life will make us unable to stand before God, choosing this kind of life will prevent us from living the good life with God.

Very practically we live a good life by going deeper into our relationship with God, specifically by going deeper into His word the Bible. And by avoiding bad company, like we already mentioned. When we do these things we grow deeper and wider. So how do we actually do them?

First, how do we go deeper into the bible. For those who were in the Sunday service our first week of January you might remember Dad talking about bible reading plans, and the idea with these is that there are two ways to read the bible: for familiarity and for intimacy.

Familiarity means that you don’t feel like you completely know what the bible is about, you’ve heard stories from it, but you don’t know how it all fits together. If that’s where you’re at, and you recognize that, that’s great my recomendation is to find a bible reading plan, the Youversion bible app has some good ones that just slowly take you through the story of the bible or through one book at a time, check those out, if you don’t know where to start talk to me, or your small group leaders, or to Pastor Jon, we’ll get you sorted out.

Some of you are in the other group, you’ve been in church, maybe this church, 9 months before you were born, a couple of you may have already read through the entire bible before, that’s great, you’re probably in the intimacy group for where you should go next, and that group is all about building your relationship with God through His word, you might already know all of the major stories, and have all the bible trivia facts memorized, that’s great, I’ve been there, it’s fun, but there’s more, you don’t know everything, if you think you do ask your friend next to you if you know everything, and then ask them to stop hitting you… just kidding, I’m not encouraging violence… the point is there’s room to grow, and my recomendation for that is to start memorizing scripture. In Psalm 1 it talks about the person who delights in meditating on the word, and the idea here is to recite something over and over to constantly be thinking about it, and the best way to do that is through scripture memorization.

I’ll tell you what I’m doing this year, and what Reuben is doing, and hundreds of other people across the world with us. We’re spending the entire year going through the sermon on the mount, the most famous sermon Jesus told, verse by verse with the BibleProject, the guys that made the video we watched at the beginning. And each week we go section by section and dive deep into what Jesus is saying in each verse, and both Reuben and I have made it our goal to try and memorize the entire sermon by the end of the year. If you’re interested in that, see Reuben or I and we’ll get you set up with the BibleProject app, which makes it really easy to go through each section bit by bit, week by week.

This process of going deeper into scripture whether for familiarity or intimacy, it helps you to build your relationship with God, because it roots us deeper into His word and helps us to get to know Him better.

So that’s the first practical step, get into God’s word.

The second practical step is to be careful with what else you’re being influenced by. The Psalm talks about having a good life or a bad one, and it completely depends on what you’re allowing yourself to be influenced by. We should be being influenced by God, His word, and by close Christian friends that help us stay on the right track.

I can’t begin to tell you how helpful that was for me in middle school and high school being able to go through things with Carson, and Lex, and some of our other friends really helped all of us in our faith. Vice versa, I know other people that chose to allow themselves to be influenced by non-Christian friends and many of them no longer are Christians, or at least have a strong faith.

I’m not saying not to have non-Christian friends, we should have non-Christian friends because our life mission is to share the good news of Jesus with all people, but we also need to be watch that we are not being influenced by people or things that aren’t in line with God and His word.

And I add things, because it’s not just bad company that can lead us away from God, it’s all sorts of things.

We need to be careful what media we’re taking in. What are you looking at on Instagram, is that helping your faith or is it taking you away from God? What kind of movies are you watching, are they chalk full of gore and sex scenes and language, or are they glorifying God? What kind of music are you listening to? Is it full of swearing? Is it perversely sexual? Is it super angry and angsty? Because these things aren’t helpful to you in your walk with God. What are you reading? Because books can be the same as movies.

Here’s the thing guys, I’m not just going on a “phones are bad, and teenagers are always on them” rant, I’m not your parents, I’m not a boomer… But this stuff actually matters. There have been studies that have shown that angsty, angry music with lots of swearing and other stuff in it leads to higher rates of depression. There have been studies that show that viewing sexual content in media such as movies, youtube videos, instagram reels, etc… leads to increased sex and porn addictions later on in life. I’m not going on this rant because I’m trying to repeat what you hear from adults all of the time, the truth is what you’re taking in, what you’re allowing to influence you it actually matters.

And because our generation has allowed itself to be constantly exposed to media that has lots of swearing, and sex, and violence, and other trash in it we’ve become known as the generation that is depressed and anxious and addicted, the one that can’t take anything seriously and masks everything we do behind dirty jokes and sarcasm.

Here’s the thing guys, the fault doesn’t lay on any one of us completely, a lot of this is part of a societal hand that we were dealt that none of us asked for, but we can choose what we’re going to do with it. We can choose what we’re going to allow to influence us. We can choose where we’re going to lay our roots, where we’re going to build our foundation. We need to be vigilant, and I say we because I’m preaching to the choir, I need to be reminded of this too, as much as we can we need to be monitoring what we’re taking in.

Because Psalm 1 makes it abundantly clear, and this is the last thing I’ll say as the rest of the band comes up.

How do you live a good life? You choose to be influenced by good, Godly things. You avoid bad company, whether that be bad friends or bad content, and instead you root yourself in good content, with good company, in a relationship with God through His word. That’s how you grow deeper and wider, by choosing what is going to influence you.