Faithful Before Fruitful

Greeting

Good morning Lighthouse Church!

Aren’t you glad that you made it to the house of the Lord today! Come on, if you are glad to be in the house of the Lord today, would you give God some praise this morning.

We have come to the end of our 21 Days of Fasting & Prayer. How are you feeling? Should we add 19 more days and go for 40?

No? I get it. You all are ready for some protein, aren’t you?

Listen, I believe that today God is going to meet you in a such a powerful way. I believe God wants to have an encounter with you this morning. But here is what needs to happen. You need to elevate your expectation.

Tell your neighbor, elevate your expectation.

When Jesus was in Nazareth, his home town, he could do no miracles there. Why is that? Because he was Joseph’s son. The carpenter. He was familiar to them. They didn’t believe he was anyone special.

And sometimes, Sunday is just a Sunday. It’s just another day. It’s not special. I’m just doing what I do every other Sunday.

But what if we would elevate our faith this morning and believe that God is going to heal today?

What if we believed that God is going to give us a vision for the year?

What if we believed that God was going to deliver someone this morning?

That BELIEF, that EXPECTATION, would change EVERYTHING.

So let’s lift up our faith this morning and let’s pray with an expectation.

[Pray]

Reading

Psalm 1:1–3 (ESV)

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.

Faithful Before Fruitful

Introduction

One of the great challenges of teaching the Bible today is that more and more, we are losing touch with what it meant to live in an Agricultural Society. The Bible was written in a time when the primary source of wealth was from farming and cultivating the land.

That’s why often times the analogies of scripture involve seeds, and harvest. We have to bring the modern day reader into the Biblical setting by setting the context of the scripture.

Today, for the majority of us, that context does not come naturally.

[Pause]

To give you an analogy, let me talk about land lines and house phones.

For the majority of our kids, they have no idea of what it is like to have a house phone.

How many of you remember the house phone? How many of you still remember the number to your house?

[phone] that was the Herrera Household

We had to memorize phone numbers, and that brought about a level of complexity to relationships.

We didn’t get to directly call the girl we were interested in, we called the house and prayed to God that her Dad didn’t answer the phone. We didn’t slide into DM’s… we had to learn HOW to speak to an adult. We had to learn how to speak respectfully. We called adults by either sir or ma’am.

We didn’t just go around asking, “What’s her @”

Different time.

Transition

But in the scriptures, we have to set our mind back to an agricultural society to see the way God works. Because God’s first order of business after creation was the plant a garden called Eden and to put mankind in the garden and then he said your responsibility is to take care of the garden.

God didn’t put them in social media, he didn’t put them in a cubicle, and, he didn’t tell them to work from home.

He put them in a garden.

When Mary came to the tomb the day Jesus rose from the dead, she saw but didn’t recognize Jesus. John writes that when she saw him, she thought he was the gardener.

And the way I read my Bible, I think the same as well! Maybe, Jesus is a gardener. Because, when you get to Revelation, we aren’t done yet. We see a garden once again.

There is a tone set in the Bible, that we need to approach the Bible like first century hearers of the Bible, because that is how Jesus meant for it to be understood.

Text

Our text today, Psalm 1, is set with the imagery of a garden. I saved this verse for the end of our series because we often times look at the end of this passage with an expectation on our life - “whatever they do prospers!”

Oh we like that.

We want whatever we do to prosper.

We want to Thrive in 2025.

We want to Come Alive in 2025.

And any other word that rhymes with 25, we want it.

But you need to understand that that statement is the conclusion of it all.

Meaning, in order to get to this place of flourishing, there are things that need to be done first.

So let’s walk through the text together so that we can get to the place of flourishing.

Counsel, Way, and Seat

The writer opens up with this didactic relationship of how to be blessed. He says that a blessed person is the one who:

“…walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.”

We’re going to focus our attention not on the action of walking, standing or sitting, because they are all neutral actions, but we need to find the words that really matter here, and I’ve highlighted them for us; counsel, way, and seat.

Let me set those words for you another way - what is shaping how we think, how we behave and where we belong?

Where do we get our counsel from? Who are we listening to? What are the voices that are shaping our thoughts?

What is impacting the way that we behave? Who are we hanging around with? How much time is spent with people who are not going to propel you in the direction of God’s plans for your life?

And what seat do we occupy? Where do we find our sense of belonging? Are we living just for the here and now, or are we living knowing that we are a part of something that is bigger than us?

The writer tells us that a Blessed person begins by taking inventory of these things. You have to pause and evaluate all of the different “inputs” into your life. Whatever is coming into your heart will eventually come OUT of your heart.

You cannot go through this life simply existing.

When my son Jude turned 11, he wanted us to take him to the beach with his friends. And even though the temperature was dropping, there we went. And of course we needed some kids that are just as crazy as our kids, so naturally we called the Angulo Family so Sammy and Caleb could come.

So there we were, and of course I’m not getting in. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

But as the kids were out there, every 20 minutes of so I’d walk out to the water to tell them that the current was taking them north, and they needed to come back in front of us.

Did they know they were being pulled? Of course not, the current was taking them.

Here’s the application:

The current of this world does not move in the direction of God; it moves us away from God.

When you think that you are simply existing, what is happening is you are being pulled away from Jesus. You are being counter formed into the image of this world. You are caught in a current of worldliness.

You need to remember that you are not a human being having a spiritual experience, you are a spiritual being having a human experience.

What is that experience going to look like?

What are the things that are going to control your experience?

David then contrasts that with a better option…

Look at your neighbor and tell them, “there’s a better option.”

But His Delight

In stead of allowing the world and ungodliness to shape our thoughts and our actions, we are going to delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on it day and night.

I love this.

We’re not without an option.

We’re not without direction.

We have the option to either listen to the lies of the world, or the truth of God’s word.

We can spend our time feeding ourselves from things that don’t produce life, or we can go to the one who promises to give us life, and life in abundance. We get to chose!

God’s word is God’s voice to us.

If we want to prosper and if we want to flourish, then we need to go back to the one who holds our design.

Let me ask you something, how many of you have ever had an issue with technology or an appliance at home and you knew that the best thing you could do was take it back to the manufacturer? We knew that if we want this done right, we need to get the designer to look at it.

But we don’t always do that, do we? Of course not.

Why? Because we know a guy…

And how many times did you regret going to a guy rather than going to the source?

Our source, Our creator, is the Lord God Almighty.

And we are able to come to him directly and feed ourselves form his voice to his - his word.

[Pause]

I advocate that a life full of wisdom is a life that is spent in word of God.

It takes the whole Bible to make a whole person.

Planted by the Rivers

Then we get this strong language and image from the writer. He says that we will like a tree that is planted by stream of water.

Can you say planted?

Where you are planted matters.

We need to read this as not one thing, but two very important things. The first is the importance of where we plant ourselves. Where we plant ourselves shapes our sense of belonging.

In the book The Boy Crisis, we read that a fatherless generation of boys has led to so many young boys planting themselves in gangs, and planting themselves in sexual promiscuity.

Why is that?

Boys need a sense of initiation into manhood. When a father doesn’t call them into manhood they will self-initiate through gangs or sex to prove to the world around them that they are becoming a man.

Said differently, they are planting in the wrong places.

David tells us that a tree that is always flourishing is a tree that is planted by a stream of water.

Why is that?

When the tree is intentionally planted by the water, it’s done with the knowledge that the roots of the tree are going to continue to grow towards the water stream.

Can I give someone a word right now?

What other people can’t see has everything to do with what they can see.

We see the success of a person, but we don’t see the sacrifice of the person.

We see the anointing on a person, but what we don’t see is the consecration of that person.

We see the impact that that person is making, but we don’t know everything they had to give up in order to have that impact.

We want the impact, but we don’t want the sacrifice.

We want the influence, but we don’t want to put in the work.

The reason the fruit is growing on that tree, and the reason that the leaves are not withering, has nothing to do with what is going on above the ground, but EVERYTHING to do with what is going on below the ground.

Conclusion

And this is where I want to land this plane this morning and I want us to think deeply about this phrase, “that yields its fruit in its season.”

Can you say fruitful?

How can we live fruitful lives?

A fruitful life is the result of a faithful life.

Do you want to know why being faithful can be so hard?

Because no one celebrates faithfulness.

We celebrate success. We celebrate breakthrough performances. But, we don’t often celebrate faithfulness.

We post our vacations on social media, we don’t post the over time, and the hustle, and the side hustle it took to get us on that vacation.

We rarely share with the world when we simply showed up.

It’s not something that makes our headlines.

But us showing up is the only thing that directly affects our fruitfulness. When we are faithful, we become fruitful.

But we are so quick to abandon our faithfulness to things when we don’t see the fruit.

Imagine for a second, if a gardener planted seeds, and then uprooted the plant if by the next day there was no fruit?

That’s crazy right? You can’t plant seeds one day, and expect there to be fruit the next day.

So why is it that we do that with our lives? Why is it that we run from one thing to the next running after fruitfulness when God has only called us to faithfulness?

God only asks me to be faithful.

Our problem is we want to fruitful. And we don’t control the fruit. We can only control our faithfulness.

We can only show up, again and again and again…

If your marriage doesn’t feel fruitful, keep being faithful.

If your career doesn’t feel fruitful, keep being faithful.

If your relationship with your child doesn’t feel fruitful, keep being faithful.

If you don’t feel like your ministry is being fruitful, keep showing up and being faithful.

Here is what I know and here is what I see from God’s word… one day, at the right time, you are going to reap an abundant harvest!

Galatians 6:9 says, So let's not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don't give up, or quit.

Call

Can I take you back to the garden for a second?

Mary thought that Jesus was the gardener, and as I said earlier, we see gardens throughout the entirety of the Bible.

But do you know where I also see God tending to a garden?

In my life.

You see, his word is going out like a seed every day into the soil of my heart.

I wonder how many times God has looked at me and wondered when I’d start to produce the fruit that he is cultivating in my life. When am I going to start being fruitful? When am I going to start looking like what he created me to become?

Do you want to know what He doesn’t do, that we so often do? He doesn’t give up on us. He doesn’t pull us out of the ground and discard us.

He is patient. He is loving. He is providing care for us.

But Jesus, the gardener is watering me with his word and with his spirit. He’s giving me good things. He’s caring for me in ways that allows fruit to be produced in my life. He doesn’t give up on me because he is a good gardener.