Well, good morning church, we’re going to be in Psalms chapter 1 this morning, Psalms chapter 1, and we’re going to read through all six verses in that chapter.

And here’s what the very first chapter of the book of Psalms says, 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, and all that he does he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like a tree planted by streams of water. 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. Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t heard of something called van life. Van life’s a popular movement, but it’s exactly what it sounds like. Um, it’s popular with younger people, millennials certainly, but, uh, basically you get a van and you gut it, uh, and you make it your only living space and you drive around the country, no rules, do what you want to do. It’s the idea of freedom. It’s the idea of fun. Um, and Instagram, uh, has really popularized van life. A lot of people, um, have video blogs, vlogs, if you will, where they, constantly are updating their life as, as someone who lives in a van and it’s very idyllic and it’s very romantic. It seems if you followed a vlogger who does van life, but it’s very interesting. Someone who has lived the van life for a long time made a video recently and I was watching through it and really what she was doing in the video is saying Instagram isn’t fair and people who do van life aren’t fair because what they only care about is the van life. And so what she’s trying to capture are these beautiful, idyllic moments, which are very few. And so you get this beautiful picture of being at some exotic beach or perhaps being on a mountaintop and it seems so wonderful, but what they don’t show, she says, is all the inconveniences of van life. Like the fact that most people can’t afford, uh, afford a $60,000 van. They can afford maybe a cheap $10,000 van. And in those kinds of vans, you can’t stand up all the way in your own living space.

These kinds of vans don’t have full-size stoves or even small stoves. So if you want to cook, you have to go outside and, uh-oh, it’s raining. So now you’ve got to cook in the rain. And in the wintertime, you can’t leave your van running 24 hours a day. So you freeze in your van unless you have a special heating unit. And the same is true in the summertime. In the heat, you can’t leave your air conditioner running 24 hours a day. So you’re either really hot or really cold in the extreme times. Um, there is something called travel burns. So where eventually you just get kind of burned out doing it. All that to say, uh, pictures and videos of what van life would be. They’re very deceiving. It gives this idyllic life, but it’s not what it really is. And I think that many people, and surely it’s not living in a van for a lot of people, but a lot of people have in their mind what they think is the ideal blessed life. What the best, most favored life would look like if they could have that life. But the psalmist here, the very beginning here, he, he turns our low, dull thinking on its head. And he points us to, if we would listen, a better way of living life, a right and truly blessed life. That’s the business of Psalm chapter one, Psalm chapter one. What he says, here again in chapter one, verse one is this blessed is the man. Now stop there for a second because everyone wants to be blessed, um, to, to be what it means, fortunate, to be favored, to be happy. No one likes the idea of feeling forsaken to fend for themselves all the time. No one envies the lot of an orphan and despises the way of a Prince. Um, but, but what kind of life or way of life that God desires to bless is certainly opposite again to the life that most people want to lead. And also the nature, the true nature of a blessed life isn’t what most people think it is. So these are two monumental issues. The psalmist addresses really in all the Psalms, the nature of a truly blessed life and how it is attained. So this first chapter, as noted by many commentators, it’s, it’s a primer for the rest. Of the Psalms to follow and what the psalmist clues us into here is this in this chapter, the key to a truly blessed life has everything to do with knowing the word, specifically the written word of God. And as we discover, uh, what the word has to do with being blessed by God, I want us to see what the psalmist teaches us about the word and the importance of knowing it. And the first thing he teaches us is this. Knowing the word. Knowing the word keeps us from the way of wickedness. It keeps us from the way of wickedness. Verse one, blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers. So the blessed person apparently before anything else does not familiarize himself herself with the advice, the counsel of wicked or godless people. Before considering, I think even the substance of the verses, note how important this must be simply because the psalmist chose to put it first in the order of what he has to say. So it’s paramount because he says it first. He says the blessed happy man does not plan his life around the wisdom and knowledge of people who are far from God. That’s what wicked means. It means to be without God. Nor does he stand with sinners. Not meaning, you know, literal geography of standing near someone, but regular conversation that impresses a lifestyle upon you. Much worse, he says sitting among scoffers. You know, you’re one who is a regular. You’re one of the guys with scoffers who scoff at godliness. So one whose true fellowship perspective in life matches and looks like wicked. So that you’re not only influenced by wicked if you’re sitting with the scoffers, you’re one who gladly propagates wickedness. Charles Spurgeon speaks of it in terms of a gradation. You walked, and you’re walking slowed down to a stand, and then your stand became a comfortable sit. Influenced by many like wicked people. But however we conceive those steps, the principle teaching is there and it’s apparent. You become just like those who influence you. That’s an undeniable reality. We’re all influenced by someone. It’s not just a question of who. No one can be truly an island. We’re shaped by what we are exposed to the most. Those external influences upon us. Here’s what they do. They do a work inside of us to shape and form our desires, or as the Psalmist says, our delights. Our delights. That means the thing that you find the most extreme pleasure in. It is so because that’s how God designed you to be. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just how God designed you to be. God made you. God made you to be an imitator. He made you to take on the life of someone else. You see it in the tradesman who teaches an apprentice. You see it in the child who picks up the mannerisms, facial expression, world view of their parents. We’re all learning a way of life. It’s not a bad thing. What’s potentially bad are the influencers around you. So go back to the garden experience with me if you would. In the garden, we read that Adam and Eve, they in Genesis 3a, they hear the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day. This is after they’ve sinned, they’ve fallen. And the man and his wife, here’s what they do. They hide themselves from the presence of the Lord. So what we had in the garden was this. We had God’s great training ground. Adam and Eve, holy, but not finished products. They were being taught

by God, if you will. It was very much so a situation of paradise. As good as it was, tomorrow was going to be better because tomorrow you were going to know more about God. And the more you know about God, the more you find him to be altogether lovely. And so you know how to live your life right in God’s way. But what did they do? They stopped being solely influenced by God and they allowed an alternate, even an opposite. Influence into their lives. Having taken counsel from Satan, their lives stopped being happy. Their lives stopped being altogether blessed as it was. Why? Because they chose the wrong influencer. Once they had stood before God, that now ends because they chose to stand, even if it was for a moment, with the evil serpent. Happiness lost. Delights, pleasures twisted. Their discernment, choices, thoughts, susceptible now to sinfulness and godlessness, where it was once only God. Hence, the psalmist must, if he’s a decent person, and apparently he is, he warns us this, that our desire to be influenced, to be discipled, even if you will, it’s been exploited and manipulated by Satan. He’s exploited our desire to be influenced. He’s manipulated it so that we not be in the happy state God intended.

So the warning can’t be taken serious enough. The great peril of the soul is the sinful, godless, wicked influence of the way, in words of Satan, his domain in which we all live now on earth. If we have been deformed by such a poor, influence, what we need then is to be reformed, made right by that first and righteous influencer,

God. Now, where in all the world, I think we have to ask, if the world is corrupted by all evil influence, where is God to be found so that we can be influenced by him? Well, plainly, the psalmist says he’s found, he’s discovered in his law, his rules, his words. As an Old Testament saint, that would have been the Torah, first five books of the Bible. For us as New Testament saints, we have great riches in that we have recorded scriptures all the way from Genesis to Revelation. All that we can read in these 66 books is God’s self-revelation to us, that we may know who he is, who he is not, what he is like, what he is not like, who he expects us to be. And who he forbids us to be. Take this and see how serious it is. God says this in Deuteronomy chapter 13, verse 12. If you hear in one of your cities, which the Lord your God is giving you to dwell there, that certain worthless fellows have gone out among you and have drawn away the inhabitants of their cities, saying, let us go and serve other gods which you have not known, then you shall inquire and make a search and ask diligently. And behold, if it be true and certain that such an abomination has been done among you, you shall surely put the inhabitants of that city to the sword, devoting it to destruction, all who are in it and its cattle with the edge of the sword. You shall gather all its spoil into the midst of its open square and burn the city and all its spoil with fire as a whole burnt offering to the Lord your God. It shall be a heap forever. It shall not be built again. None of the devoted things shall stick to your hand that the Lord may turn from the fierceness of his anger and show you mercy and have compassion on you and multiply you. As he swore to your fathers, if, here’s it, here it is, really big if, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God, keeping all his commandments that I’m commanding you today and doing what is right in the sight of the Lord.

Peter, in the New Testament, he says, we must remember all the prophets taught us and what the apostles taught us. We must remember all the prophets taught us and what the apostles taught us. The apostles are teaching you now, he writes to the churches. So you see, Old and New Testament teaches us living outside of God’s word, outside of his commandments. It’s not a less than preferred reality for God’s people. It is the sentence of certain death and destruction outside of the perfect control and influence of God. Separation, death, destruction await, but the rules The laws, the commandments, the promises of God would leave us approved in his sight. This is what Paul tells Timothy. He says, Timothy, when you preach the word, here’s what you’re doing. You’re saving both yourself and your hearers. Without the word of God and the influence of the early church age, surely they would have buckled. They would have fallen apart under the weight of the godless influence of their time. And that’s not novel. It’s true in every age, all the way back in the Psalms, in Psalm 119. The psalmist says, Lord, I want to hide your word in my heart so I don’t sin against you. So the word of God is that powerful to save. The absence of it, a sure forfeiture of your soul. So I don’t have, I don’t have, if you want them, I don’t have any caveats. I don’t have any special case scenarios. I’m not interested in reasoning, compromising with differing views about the validity, the nature, the authenticity of the word. And neither must you. We as Christians are nothing if we are not people of the word. You must have a high view of the authority and the power of the word of God to either save or damn a man’s soul. The Hebrew writer says it like this, for the word of God is living and active. It’s sharper than any two-edged sword and it pierces. Divide the soul and the spirit, the joints, the marrow. It discerns the thoughts and the intentions of the heart. God’s word sees right through you and down to our core and it exposes those parts of us that are godless and it demands repentance. It warns of the wrath to come. It pleads us to throw off foul influences. So any foul company that is influencing you away, from God’s way, you must, I must, we must wholesale abandon. You attempt to walk the line, you cannot do it. The word will not be a master with someone else. It is a soul influence. So the psalmist says this to us at the very start. I think it’s the most important thing for us to hear. What kind of counselors do you keep? What are the words that they speak? What are their ways? What are their influences? How are their influences shaping your delights? If it’s not only and explicitly God, there you have found an influence that must be parted with. You choose not to take it serious, you forfeit your own soul. Makes me think about that old children’s hymn, you know, be careful little eyes what you see, be careful little ears what you hear, be careful little feet where you go.

Every once in a while when I go up to my home state of Kentucky, especially in the wintertime, I look forward to cold weather. You get, you know, four square seasons there. It’s close to southern Ohio and southern Indiana. So it’s pretty, pretty far north to get snow usually in the wintertime. But I’ve discovered I’m changed. I’ve lived in Alabama too long. As much as I think in my head I like cold weather, I don’t. I like the Alabama lifestyle, I like it being mostly warm year round. I cannot handle extreme cold. The same thing’s true about accents. There’s been times that, you know, we’ve gone back to Kentucky and people say they notice more of an accent and a twang, you know, in our voices than before. I don’t notice it. But that’s how influences work. The person who is being most influenced doesn’t recognize the change. All the same, the change is there.

So what is this call for for you now? Well, what it calls for is an incredible amount of spiritual discernment. It calls for a sharpness, an awareness to keep ourselves from that way. Let’s call them dilemmas that you now constantly have to face. And what are the dilemmas of our time? How can we consider this? I think the first dilemma that comes to mind, because it’s so pressing in every time that every household in America, it’s pressing in every Christian household in America, is the ever present reality of television, television land, the Internet, media, entertainment culture. You know, I read in an article a while back that due to the coronavirus and everyone staying home, the average household is watching eight hours of television a day right now. Eight hours of television a day. Now, here’s the thing. We do not, not that you should have wasted a bunch of time doing this anyway. We do not live in past decades when TV was squeaky clean. Not remotely. If you have a subscription to Netflix, to Hulu, to Amazon Video, whatever. The certain fact is this. So much of it is just smut. It is. It is loose nudity. It is loose sex. It is very foul language. It is crude, dirty joking. It follows the lives and lifestyles of people who worship themselves. It is banality. Meaning just meaningless and just silliness that amounts to nothing in life that has no great value in meaning. When you choose to, over a period of time, entertain yourself by watching people who aren’t your husband or wife, undress themselves, when you, over and over again, listen to foul language, when you constantly listen to crude jokes, when you constantly watch people that obsess over themselves and over just the idolatry of our times and materialism, you cannot possibly be surprised when you find yourself in sin struggles that look just like those things you were entertained by. Why? You were designed to be influenced. And I wish this wasn’t just a problem in secular culture. It’s a problem in the church where I think so many godly men and women are losing sight of the reproach that God calls us to be above and the kinds of things we allow to enter our head and our hearts. And I wish I was with you in person because I would like to look every man in the eye and say, you are flat wrong if you have no problem watching graphic nudity, certainly sitting there with your wife in the room. It’s disgusting and it’s wrong and it dishonors the Lord. What did you do except give the enemy ammunition to use against you in the future? That moment when you’re alone in bed and an image pops in your mind that shouldn’t be there, something you never should have seen. Do you guard your soul from the wicked way, friend? So internet, television, entertainment, media, it’s something that we as a church, we’ve got to get a handle on and say just because it’s available, just because it’s there, just because it’s popular, in no way means I need to be digesting it like everyone who is not following Jesus. So constantly keeping your eye on those cultural norms.

Second dilemma I would say to you is this, and that would just be the friendships you keep. In no way would I advocate that you should stay away from people who don’t profess, who don’t have faith in Christ. That’s absolutely ridiculous. But the Apostle Paul does say bad company ruins good morals. So when you have friends, you need to be defining what a friend is. I think you could say one person is a friend and that’s a godly brother that builds you up. You could call someone else a friend and that’s perhaps a coworker or a neighbor, someone you know that, no, they’re not following Jesus. And yeah, you care about them. They know they care about you, but you’re not allowing them to invest in you to the point where they are wearing off on you and your life is starting to look more like theirs than their life is starting to look more like yours. So are you careful in these things? Are you diligent? Are you taking a fine-tooth comb over the relationships of your life and saying, where in my life am I wrongly letting the enemy have a foghorn to just blast into me what God would have? Have me flee? The Hebrew writer says, throw off the weights. Throw off the sin so you can run. Are you guarding your soul and staying away from the way of wickedness, the way of evil? It is the Psalmist’s first encouragement to us this morning.

So look at verse 2. In verse 2, he goes on and says this.

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 yield its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither, and all that he does he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. So he makes a contrast. And the contrast is between the wicked man and the happy man in his delights. We saw the wicked man, but now he says the blessed man. He delights in God’s law. It’s his extreme pleasure to meditate or think deeply about it. And when we talk about this meditation day and night, it means nothing less than a life’s obsession. To the point of saturation.

God is not happy when you and I just aren’t doing wrong. We can stay in this neutral state. That’s not at all what he’s calling us to. He’s calling us to actively pursue godliness in the word. Charles Spurgeon, again, he rightly instructs on this. Perhaps some of you can claim a sort of negative purity because you do not walk in the way of the ungodly.

But let me ask you, is your delight in the law of God? Do you study God’s word? Do you make it the man of your right hand, your best companion and hourly guide? If not, this blessing belongeth not to you. So understand there is for the one who is under the influence of God truly an accompanying love for his influences, to the disdain and growing contempt for all that elicits disgust in God. We love what God loves. We hate what God hates. So there’s a real question. For your soul, what in life is your true obsession? What’s your greatest delight? Or are we lukewarm? And what does God say about those people who are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold? He spits them out of his mouth. Forced marriage has no real love. So also forced religion has no real change. You can’t fool God. You can’t fake it with God. And so again, that doesn’t mean, you know, there aren’t times when you and I fall into, you know, lulls and lethargy spiritually. But we need to repent of those and get back to the business of giving God our deep and full attention in his word. That should be the desired habit of our lives if we truly love him. Loving him means loving his commandments, his way. And so our love is genuine in its outward habitual pursuit of God in and through his word. Jesus says it plainly. In John chapter 14, he says, If you love me, what? You obey me. It’s that simple. But the psalmist pushes this meditation, this ongoing obsession with God’s word. And he gives sort of this metaphor about a tree. And we’re getting closer to the nature of truly being blessed here. The psalmist illumines the blessed favored one, this one who obsesses to discover who God is in his word. He’s not just like a healthy tree. He’s a healthy tree that’s planted near flowing water so that it never lacks anything, regardless of the season. The tree is in perfect supply at all times. The water ever flowing, it grows the tree up, and it grows the tree out to health, to maturity, and usefulness in bearing fruit. But what is the fruit bearing? Or what is the blessed state really? What does it mean to constantly have that supply of the water, the word here? Has it to do with material gain in the world? Success in business affairs? Is that a blessed state really? Well, those aren’t bad things.

They’re not innately bad things, but they’re not at the heart of true fruitfulness in life. God would have us, because his word instructs us to, to look forward to a day when all of God’s people have provision, there is no hunger, there is no poverty. Those things are forever vanquished in a new heaven and a new earth. But that’s not really the blessedness that the Psalmist is getting at here. And Jesus answers the mystery for us plainly in Matthew 5. Certainly if you were with us when we walked through the Beatitudes, which Beatitude just means blessed, the blessed life. And what does Jesus describe? The blessed life as? Well, he describes it as a godly life. He describes it as the life of heaven, a citizen of heaven. It’s a life that’s rooted so deep in God’s revealed word that you are beginning to think like, talk like, act like, desire like, and for Jesus, God’s son. You ever become more like Jesus and you like Jesus and love Jesus all the more. So the water of the word is poured out upon your soul by God’s spirit. And it makes us all the more happy. And it makes us all the more blessed and satisfied as we know and become like Jesus and the power of the spirit.

So the happiness that you and I should have in life, the blessedness that you and I experience now, it’s a taste of what’s to come. The more we’re in the word, I get a clearer, and I get a clearer picture of who this God is that was lost in the garden. I see a little bit more of who he is. And the spirit turns my soul a little more in sanctification towards him. And that water is my source. And that source is God. He grows me up into godliness, to my content and delight. And so we are doing that thing the Psalmist encourages everyone to do in Psalm 34, taste, see that the Lord is good. The Psalmist calls us to taste and see, but oh, he calls us onward to feast on Christ, to feast on God and the word. But I want you to see also the health of the tree isn’t for its own sake alone. It’s also for the sake of others. A deep fixation, a deep meditation on material possessions, on yourself, on your desires. Your own lust, your own wants doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t really help you, but it doesn’t help anyone else. It hurts them. You’re showing them a false life. So everyone produces some kind of fruit with their life, which is to say no one’s neutral. Just as you are always being influenced, you certainly are always influencing someone else in one direction or another. Being a Christian though means this. It means bearing fruit for the Lord. It means being useful for God’s kingdom. To God’s kingdom. So a truly blessed man knows the way, the life of righteousness. It’s not just for his own enjoyment and pleasure. It is, but as he enjoys it, as he takes pleasure in it, what does he do? But he offers it out for the sake of others, that others may have an obsession with godliness, that they would forsake their godlessness and taste the flavor of Christ in your life. You taste and then you offer the taste. But you cannot give what you don’t have. So what do we do? I’ve got to constantly remain by that water stream. I’ve got to constantly be drinking it in. I constantly need my roots to fill me up with God. I constantly need to be saturated in the word. I need to be an approved workman who’s not ashamed, Paul says. Ready, willing to sacrifice the lesser pursuits of life for that greater one. That greater one. Of being satisfied. And showing others the great satisfaction of the simplicity of just godliness in Christ Jesus.

But see the last thing he says there in verse 4.

He says, The wicked though, as good as all that is, that we just read, the wicked, he says, are not so. He says the wicked are like chat. Now you and I aren’t farmers.

We don’t live in a grand society.

But a chaff is like husk. You know, on like corn or wheat. You know, in the summertime I love to get corn and put it on the grill. But you’ve got to be careful because that husk, once you start grilling it, it catches flame quick. It’s dry. It’s really not good for anything. So for a farmer in the psalmist’s time, what he would have done is take a pitchfork and he would have thrown the wheat up in the air and that would have separated the wheat from the chaff. And that wheat would remain and that chaff would be blown away and the chaff that remained would be gathered up and it would be burned. It wasn’t useful.

Chaff’s not valuable.

So understand the wicked man, just like the blessed man, he spends his whole life being filled up. He spends his whole life being satisfied with the great many things. Thinking those things are true satisfaction. Thinking they’re profitable.

Thinking he has real joy. But in the end, what he discovers is this. His obsession, his source, it only took life. It never gave it. It left him entirely malnourished. When anything but God is our true source of nourishment, we will, our souls will, die. Our souls will be as dry and worthless as the chaff, ready to be consumed by the fire. Are you, as you resist the wicked way, are you, by the power of the word, remaining in the right way? Jesus says in John chapter 15 verse 6, If anyone does not abide in Jesus, he is thrown away like a branch.

He withers, and the branches are gathered,

thrown into the fire, and burned. It’s like salt water. You know, they always say, if you’re ever at sea and you don’t have fresh water, as thirsty as you may be, never drink salt water. Because salt water, it may seem to satisfy you, but what does salt water really do? It further dehydrates you. Salt water takes from you. Salt water would kill you. It can never hydrate you. It would only take your life. And so it is, friends, with sin. So it is so vitally important that you and I be that rigid, that set, that we must be saturated in the word of God alone. It alone gives life to our souls.

So when I’m thinking about what that text means for me, I’m thinking about all the great blessings I have as a 21st century Christian. Okay? Both what’s biblically prescribed and that what is just, again, a grace that you and I have. You and I are told to, and despite what we can’t do right now because of the virus, you and I have the great blessing of Sundays. And I do hope that this time away from Sundays, as I mentioned in my email, it’s produced a real longing in your heart to be with the church. God desires his people to gather as the body of Christ, and as they’re together in truth and in spirit, they worship God, and God is among them, and God changes them in the word as the word is taught and prayed and sung and spoken. Friends, the beauty of this, the beauty of being physically together is that it is true that the Spirit of God is among us, and there the Spirit takes Christ and applies Christ to us. You must value Sunday mornings. And again, you know, a blessing and a curse or a good thing out of a bad thing, I hope that if nothing else, COVID-19 has stirred us up to see that great value, the great privilege of our gatherings on Sunday. But past that,

you have, and I know I say this and I’m happy to be a broken record on it, you have the written word of God in your language. You can carry around, if you would like, your own copy of God’s word. I’ve been watching a historical

reenactment of King Henry’s life in his span, his rule in England, and in that time, this was so revolutionary, not just revolutionary, the idea of it, but it was illegal. People were burned at the stake for having a Bible in the English language. I mean, that was thought to be wrong. And friends, now you and I live by the blood and the sweat and the convictions of men who gave their lives to bring the word of God into our language. We have it at our fingertips. You have it at your disposal. Read the thing. Love the thing. Spend your life knowing the thing. God’s Spirit desires to teach you through it. You have community. We have something at Providence that I think is so special. We have a tight-knit community where we can come together and we can speak the word into one another’s lives. The encouragement we need, the sometimes rebukes we need, the love we need, the teaching we need about obedience and truth in life, that’s there. So let me say to you, the word, it is ever so readily available to you if you would make yourself available to it. To whom much is given, much is required. Oh, how so many Christians in past centuries would have given so much to have access to the word of God as you and I do. And I say this to you and I say it to myself just as much. If you do not have a desire in you to be in God’s word, in all of those forms I mentioned, whether it’s on your own, you’re studying, you’re studying the Bible with someone else, over coffee, Sunday mornings, you just, you have to be honest with your own soul and you don’t have a love for it. You need to get on your knees right now and beg God, give me a hunger. Give me a thirst for your word. Because without a hunger and thirst for your word, I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. That’s got to be your prayer and faith that God will both give you a hunger and thirst for his word. And so he will also satisfy you with the fullness of himself as you read it and you know it in the spirit.

Verse five.

Verse five he ends the chapter saying, 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. I’ve heard it said before, whenever you see a therefore in scripture, you’ve got to ask the question, what’s it there for? So the Psalmist, he gives the final results of the way of wickedness and the way of righteousness.

And it’s there to assure us

godlessness, it results in God’s great disapproval. It results in God’s great judgment on judgment day, something we all must face. And consequently, the wicked will not be found in the company and the congregation of the righteous of God’s people, but they will be eternally cast off into darkness, into destruction, into the most unfavored, unblessed life imaginable. But he says this, he says the righteous, he says the righteous in their way, that’s something he knows. God knows the righteous. These are the ones God loves. These are the ones God approves of. They’re right. Why are they right? They’re right because they’ve ordered their life in the way of God’s word, that source of righteousness and godliness. The only source. So it’s true, friends, that the blessed life is the life that’s known by God. It’s the life over which he smiles and cares for and loves. He knows the lives that are righteous. And it doesn’t mean he knows about them. It means that he approves of them. It means that he sees in the righteous life his own life, the life of his son, Jesus. Have you,

known God? Have you received the blessed life? Because here’s what I want you to understand. God is not trying to keep it from you. God wants you to be blessed. God wants you to be known by him because he deeply desires you to know him. Deuteronomy chapter four says, if you seek God, you will find him. God will not remain hidden. So much so that God did what? He sent his son, Jesus, the living word. Jesus, who is the full embodiment and manifestation of everything that is God. Jesus came and Jesus preached that mighty, powerful gospel message to us. That if we would repent of the way of wickedness and we would believe and trust in the only way of righteousness that is Christ himself and receive his sacrifice, we would be made clean of our way of wickedness and God would see the righteous way of Christ upon us. And so then God would know us deeply. God would love us. God would care for us. God would desire then and only then to eternally bless us. Imagine that thing. The God who has always been in eternity past, who is majestic and beautiful and powerful and good.

He deeply desires to know you and love you and call you his own. He calls you out of darkness, out of worthlessness. He calls you to perfection and to blessedness in the riches of his son, Jesus. Christ is that living way. Have you trusted in, have you believed Jesus? Have you believed his work? Jesus tells us this in John chapter 10. He says, I’m the good shepherd. I know my sheep and my sheep know me. Do you desire to know God? Let me say he desires to know you. And he knows us when we obey his word. Repent, turn from our sins and find the blessed life of holiness and righteousness and forgiveness and love and Jesus Christ alone. Do you desire to know him? He desires to know you.

Matthew, verse 10, Timothy, chapter 2, verse 19.

Paul says,

The Lord knows those who are his and let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity. And so there it is simply. Depart the way of wickedness and come to the way of righteousness in Christ and be known and be blessed. That’s the good news of the gospel. That’s the good news of the Psalms that we’re taught to worship. We’re taught to live all of our life in a way that honors and pleases God to his glory and to our joy. God bless you.