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Let's read our text, Psalm 1, then we'll pray and we'll get into the message. Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season, and bringeth forth his fruit in his season, his leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. Therefore, the ungodly shall not stand in the day of judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. Let's pray. Father, I come before you this morning. You know my weakness and my need of you, and I pray for your strength. I pray, Father, you would give those that are here hearts to hear your word. You would give me a mouth to speak it, and together we would be transformed into your image. And if there is anyone here who does not know you, that you would draw them to yourself, and they would repent of their sin, and they would believe the good news of the gospel. In Christ's name I pray, amen. As some of you may already know, I have long had a special affection for the writings of the Oxford Literary Circle, known as the Inklings, especially C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. And though I've only seen part of one of the movies, I'm almost done with my third time reading through Tolkien's great epic, The Lord of the Rings. And it resonates more deeply with me each time I read through it. This is certainly not going to be my last read of the book. One of the heroes of Tolkien's tale, along with Frodo and Gandalf, is Aragorn. He's first introduced under the name of Strider, a weather-beaten wanderer who doesn't seem much to look at, distrusted and looked down on by most of those that he encounters, and people call him names and sort of whisper about him as he walks by because they think that he's this sort of strange and mysterious wandering person. And the hobbits encounter him, and they're deciding whether or not they can trust him. And they receive a letter from Gandalf that contains a poem about this strider, whose true name, as it turns out, is Aragorn. And the first half of that poem, parts of which, even if you've never heard, even if you've never watched or read any part of the Lord of the Rings, you've probably seen some part of this poem on a T-shirt or on a wall decoration somewhere because it's become very popular. It goes like this, all that is gold does not glitter. Not all those who wander are lost. So if you see those sort of t-shirts that say Washington Wander, like Wander with Washington in it, that's where this comes from. It's an allusion to this poem. The old that is strong does not wither. Deep roots are not reached by the frost. And the poem goes on from there, and the book goes on from there. And I will resist the temptation to give you a full summary of the rest of the book this morning, though it's a strong temptation. But it would no longer still be this morning by the time I was done, and so we will avoid that. But as the story goes on, it becomes increasingly clear just how deep Aragorn's roots really go. And though others, ignorant of his true identity, overlook and devalue him over and over again, he is in reality the true heir of ancient kings, a man whose deep roots in the past sustain him through the frosty darkness of the present. And because he knows where he comes from, because he knows who he is, he has the strength to continue to stand through the storm that threatens to overwhelm all that he holds dear. The deep-rootedness that characterized Aragorn in the story stands in the strongest possible contrast to the overwhelming rootlessness of the age and the society in which we live. On previous generations, the greatest part of your identity, for good or it may have been for ill, this was not always a good thing, but the greatest part of your identity was given to you. The history of your country or your state or your city was your history, the history that told you who you were. With few exceptions, the sort of work that your parents did was the sort of work that you yourself would one day find yourself doing. The beliefs that they held would be the beliefs that you held, and so forth and so on. Though this situation in life may have involved much suffering and many injustices, the vast majority of young people knew who they were, knew what it meant to be rooted, even when they sometimes wished that they weren't. This is, to put it mildly, no longer the case. The young people of today have, by and large, been cut off from access to any understanding of the history that might have helped to ground them in the present. And almost from birth, they have been told that they can be whatever they want to be, that they can do whatever they want to do, that their opportunities are limitless, and their future is up to them to figure out for themselves. They are taught that true freedom comes not from having deep roots, but rather from a continual self-definition, an ever-evolving self-definition. Instead of having decisions made for them, they are forced at younger and younger ages to make their own decisions about everything. And so rootless has our society become that children in elementary school at times, even in kindergarten, are being told that even the very bodies that they inhabit are no longer allowed to inform them whether they are boys or girls or something else entirely. Even setting aside the moral problems of all of this for a moment, we urgently need to realize just how crushing a psychological load our society is imposing on the young people of our land. Even as they are pointed to the glories of the sky, they are being forcefully denied the rootedness that alone makes even modest growth possible. They are being asked to make bricks without straw or even mud, to build skyscrapers on the sand, to dig for diamonds with their bare hands, to produce a bountiful harvest of fruit without being allowed to plant an orchard. And our society seems to have forgotten that where there are no limitations, there is no identity. Where there are no boundaries, there is no freedom. And where there are no roots, there can be no fruit, no matter how urgently it is demanded. Though we may sometimes be tempted to wish that we'd been allowed to live through some other time in history, the reality is that this is the world in which we have been called to be faithful. This is the battleground on which we have been placed by our captain. And this is the storm through which we have been called to stand. In our text this morning, we find the key to growing a rooted and fruitful life, even as much of the world blows about in the frosty air like chaff before the whim. We begin our reading in verse one. Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly." Could someone go and see if we could get them to take a break at whatever's going on? Not possible? All right. Well, we will carry on as best we can. We also don't get to choose the soundtrack that surrounds the sermon either. So we will do our best to apply the sermon while we are speaking here. Verse 1, blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. This first psalm, an instruction that points out the path that leads to the truly blessed life, begins by telling us a thing that the truly blessed person does not do. So it starts out on a negative note. The person who is blessed, there's a list of things that he avoids doing, of behaviors, of influences that he puts out of his life. The person who is truly blessed doesn't walk in the counsel of the ungodly, resist the temptation to stand in the way of sinners, and refuses to sit in the seat of the scornful. Rather than taking his cues from the ungodly and scornful sinners that are present in every human society, since the fall of Adam, the truly blessed person finds his identity in the Word of God. Verse 2, But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night. Instead of seeking satisfaction in ungodliness and sin and scorning, instead of swimming in the sea of all of the ungodliness that characterizes our present evil age, The life of the one who is blessed is filled with a very different sort of delight, a constant delight in the law of the Lord, which here clearly stands for all of the scriptures, the written Word of God as a whole. And this delight in the Word of God is fueled by continual meditation on it. As one writer explains, meditation may be characterized as deep, reflective thought, often occurring in a repetitive or enduring fashion. In this context, as one commentator put it, the particular activity most in mind is the soft, murmuring reading of scripture to oneself. The blessed life described in this psalm is a life that is thoroughly saturated with the scriptures. A life that is daily reshaped by the word of God. The psalmist goes on in verse three, and he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The result of this focus on the word and the will of the Lord is a life that is stable and prosperous. One that continues, even in the most difficult of seasons, to put down deep roots and to bring forth fresh fruit. Because this tree is planted by the rivers of water, even when there's drought in all the rest of the land, this tree has roots that continue to grow down deeper and deeper and to continue to be able to bear fruit for the refreshment of others, even when everything else around begins to wither and crumble. The truly blessed life isn't just for seasons when the sun is shining and everything is going the way you would like it to go. It is also and equally for seasons when the storm is raging, for times of difficulty and trial, for times when it seems as though everything that once felt most stable has been turned upside down. Certainly the season through which we have lived feels a lot like that. The blessed life described in this psalm is a life that is quite literally rooted and grounded in the scriptures. Because the roots of this life are secure, the fruits of this life are safe. Because the roots are secure, the fruit is safe. The living words of God are both the long-term soil in which its roots are planted and the daily supply by which its fruit is grown. Far different is the fate of the ungodly, the sinful scorners that the blessed person learned to avoid in verse one. As we read in verse four and following, the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. Therefore, the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous, for the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous. The way of the ungodly shall perish. In contrast to the rooted and fruitful life of the person who experiences true blessing, the ungodly lead lives that are empty and vain, as weightless as the shaft that the wind drives away from the solid grain left on the threshing floor. The dramatic difference between the righteous and the wicked doesn't come because the righteous are stronger or smarter or more talented than the wicked, but rather because the Lord resists the proud but gives grace to the humble, because he watches over the way of the righteous who trust in him, but causes the way of the most powerful of the ungodly to perish. Those who trust in the Lord, those who delight in His Word instead of their own thoughts will never regret their confidence in Him. Those who believe in Him will never be ashamed of their confidence. On the other hand, those who proudly reject the Lord will find that their lives, no matter how promising or successful they may look in the present, will ultimately, if not in this life, then most certainly in the next life, prove as weightless and transient, as rootless and as fruitless as the chaff which the wind so easily drives away. Before we move on to develop and apply the truth that this psalm contains, let's read through our text as a whole one more time. Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night. He shall be like a tree, planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The ungodly are not so, but are like the shaft which the wind driveth away. Therefore, the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. This message is the second of what will, Lord willing, be a seven-part series that I have entitled Standing Through the Storm. No matter how fierce the storm may rage around us, our goal, both as individuals and as a church, must never be to simply survive until things improve. to huddle and cuddle until fair weather returns, but instead to stand firm even as the storm continues to increase, to dig our roots ever deeper so that we can, in every season and in every situation, continue to boldly carry out our mission of building up the kingdom of our Master, confident that He that is in us will always be greater than he that is in the world. Last week we found our text in 1 Kings 18, the glorious story of Elijah's triumph over the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. As we focused on then, no matter how great the odds that we face, we can face them with confidence because the Lord our God is alive and the idols of the nations are empty nothings. Confidence is a subject about which it is easy to get excited, and rightly so. The Lord our God is the true and living God, and that should excite us, and that should give us great confidence. No matter how overwhelming our adversaries seem, we can and should be confident in the outcome of our struggle with them. Yet we need to remember that it is all too possible for this language of confidence in the one true God to be co-opted for agendas that have little or nothing to do with biblical Christianity. Just because someone uses Christian language, just because someone portrays themselves as the champion of Christianity against the idols, doesn't mean they really are. Deception is a real danger, because it's easy to assume that what we want is what God wants, and to conclude that all who oppose us getting what we want must therefore be on the side of the idols that are doomed for destruction. Professing Christians of every variety face a constant temptation to assume that God is on their side, and even those who are not Christians, who know that professing Christians think in this way, have a strong habit of using Christian language to get Christians on their side, even when what they are trying to accomplish is rooted in their own pride and lust for power rather than in the life-giving law of God. To give a current example of just how far this can go, Vladimir Putin, the oppressive and thuggish dictator of Russia, who has basically voted himself in to lifelong power just this year, routinely characterizes himself as a champion of Christianity against the forces of unbelief. And if you listen to him, he is the lonely righteous leader in the world who is confidently standing against the hordes of idolaters that threaten mother Russia. And however sincere or hypocritical Putin's belief in his own righteousness may be, it is indisputable that the Christian rhetoric that he uses is simply one of the tools he uses to protect his power and to legitimize his ambition. To put it bluntly, this sort of deception is not a danger faced by heads of state alone. And when we see it in such an egregious, crazy example, we can say, aha, I see what you're talking about. That can definitely happen. But it can happen in our own lives as well. It is one that all of us need to be aware of. Because while confidence and zeal are necessary and good, the danger of self-deception or being deceived by others means that confidence alone will never be enough. both as a church and as individuals, we therefore desperately need to add to the confidence that we have and we find in 1 Kings 18, the bold confidence of Elijah. We need to add to that the daily delight in the Word of God that we find in Psalm 1. We need to be rooted in what God's Word actually says so that when we go out with confidence, we are representing the truth and not using using the name of the truth to advance our own agenda. We must make the living words of God both the long-term soil in which our roots are planted and the daily supply by which our fruit is grown. We need to recognize that deep roots only grow in deep soil. The rooted and fruitful life described in verse three of our psalm requires the consistent pattern of delight described in verse two. If we desire to be like trees planted by the rivers of water, we must begin by delighting in the law of the Lord, meditating in it both day and night. As the book of Deuteronomy makes plain, this sort of delight demands diligent daily effort. These words which I command thee this day shall be in thine heart. Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. That sounds pretty comprehensive to me, doesn't it? Basically, the writer is saying, whatever you do and wherever you go and whatever time of day it is, you should be talking. about the Word of God. It should be shaped by the Word of God. The book of Deuteronomy is describing a life that is saturated by the scripture and it's reminding us that that kind of life requires intentional diligence to bring it about. It won't happen by accident. You see, the scriptures are not some sort of magical powder that we can sprinkle onto our lives every now and then and miraculously produce deep roots in lives that otherwise look very much like the lives of the worldlings who surround us. It's not like this miracle grow that we just sort of drop on here and there and expect radically different results from much the same method. If we are to grow deep roots in a rootless age, Scripture must be more than a mere slogan. It must be more than our battle cry, more than the flag that we fly. It must be the story that tells us who we are, the water we swim in, the air we breathe, and the soil in which our roots are placed. And this isn't going to happen by accident. Our society from top to bottom is dominated by the weightless counsel of the ungodly. This is no new thing. This is what fallen societies have looked like ever since Adam's first rebellion. But it's certainly true of our own society. It's dominated by the weightless counsel of the ungodly, the wind-driven way of sinners, and the rootless seat of the scornful. If we live our lives by default, if we make a habit of going along with the flow, this is the flow that we will inevitably find ourselves going along with. If we want to root our lives in the scriptures, we cannot spend our days walking in the ungodly council of the television, standing in the way of the sinners on social media, or tweeting from the seat of the scornful. We cannot continually saturate ourselves in the wickedness of the world and expect to have everything turn out alright because we sprinkled a little scripture on our lives on Sunday morning. Because of the real danger of self-deception, it isn't enough to simply wave our Bibles in the air and zealously proclaim our hatred of the idols. If we are to stand through the storm, we must learn to make the scriptures, the soil in which our roots are placed, to ever more deeply immerse ourselves in them, to allow our minds and hearts to be ever more deeply grafted into the grand story of redemption that God has been weaving since before the foundation of the world. To reference once more a quote I used last week, scripture is like a river again, broad and deep, shallow enough here for the lamb to go wading, deep enough there for the elephant to swim. To put it bluntly, we aren't growing to grow deep roots, the kind of roots that are not reached by the frost, the kind of roots that will enable us to stand through the storm by paddling around in the shallows of whatever happens to seem relevant to us at the moment. Though all of us begin as little seedlings, barely able to wade through the shallows, all of us need to learn in obedience to the command of our master to launch out into the deep, to let down our nets so that we can, by being filled to overflowing with the treasures of the scripture, become broken enough to begin to be usable for his purposes. And yet just as there is more to a healthy tree than deep roots, so also there is more to the truly blessed life than knowledge of the scriptures alone. We need to put that knowledge to work. If we are to stand through the storm that we are facing, we need fresh fruit as well as deep roots. Deeply rooted by the rivers of living water, the truly blessed person goes on to bear fresh fruit. Every season bearing fresh fruit. to produce leaves that do not wither, and to prosper in all that he or she does. Genuine rootedness in the Word that God has given us leads to genuine fruitfulness in the world He has placed us in. Rootedness in the Word leads to fruitfulness in the world. The very same Word of God that forms the long-term soil in which our roots are planted provides the daily supply by which our fruit is grown. In a church of this size, we have a wide variety of vocations. Some of you work at a steel mill. Some of you work as homemakers. Some of you work at the shipyard. Some of you serve in our nation's navy. Some of you have a business that you run from home. Some of you are doctors or construction workers or lawyers or teachers or students or a bunch of other procations that I wouldn't even perhaps know to mention. And yet all of us, in all of these different walks of life, are called to bear the fruit of the truth in the nitty-gritty furrows of the everyday vocations to which we have been called, in which we have been called to represent Christ. You see, Christianity was never intended to be a fragile wallflower that we dust off on Sunday mornings and keep hidden away the rest of the week, but a transformative reality whose roots run so deep that we produce the fruit of Christ's kingdom in every corner of our lives. And as we survey the hostility of the world that surrounds us, as we look out at the storm Christians, especially conservative Christians, can have a tendency to develop what I like to call a greenhouse mentality. We can become so afraid of being influenced by the ungodly, the sinners and the scorners of this world that we retreat from the world altogether into sheltered greenhouses that we vainly hope will insulate us from the dangers of the surrounding world. And we reach out only to share a pre-digested presentation of a boiled down gospel. And we're so afraid of the surrounding world that we seem to not believe that the gospel is actually true in every walk of life. Don't get me wrong, we're called to pursue holiness with all of our might. And we need to be aware of what things are shaping the way that we think. Indeed, I think I hit that point as hard as I knew how just a few moments ago. We must take care to reject the counsel of the ungodly, the way of sinners in the seat of the scornful. But at the very same time, we need to remember that we aren't called to be potted plants on the shelves of a sheltered greenhouse, but to be rugged trees whose fruitfulness is unaffected by our circumstances. We need to remember that the Great Commission is the post-resurrection restatement of the First Commission given to Adam. We are called not to hide our light under blinkered bushel baskets that protect us from answering any difficult questions, but rather to go forth into all the world to enter into every walk of life confident that the truth in which we are rooted will never fail to prove fruitful. This doesn't mean that our faith will never be challenged as we strive to bear fruit in our varied vocations. On the contrary, you won't get very far in any task worth doing or any subject worth studying before you come up against questions that you can't easily answer and difficulties that you may struggle with for the rest of your life without being able to fully resolve. Marred by sin, the real world is messy, and those who seek to bear fruit in the real world, however deep their roots, will inevitably, like every fruitful tree, suffer a few battle scars along the way. And yet before we decide that the cost of real world fruitfulness is too high, we need to seriously consider the alternative. We are, whether we like it or not. If you claim to be a Christian, you are caught up in a cosmic conflict. You are on an international battlefield. No matter how secure we think our greenhouse is, sooner or later, The fact that it's on a battlefield means the panes are going to be shot out and the neatly arranged pots are going to be knocked over. And regardless of how steadfastly we refuse to go to where the battle is, the reality is that whether we like it or not, the battle is going to come to us. And if the battle comes to us, we'll be a whole lot safer as deeply rooted trees out in the elements with a few scars than as neatly arranged pots that have never had to deal with the real world. The good news in all of this is that our faith was never intended to rest in the perfection of our understanding of the truth. Our faith is not in how well we understand the truth, but rather in the perfection of the God whose truth we seek to understand. Our hope is not in the strength of our faith, but rather in the strength of the one in whom our faith is placed. and we can therefore dig our roots deep and confidently seek to bear fruit in every area of life we have a God-given vocation to engage. The living words of God are both the long-term soil in which our roots must be planted and the daily supply by which our fruit alone can be grown. The life of those who daily delight in the word of the Lord is a life that is rooted and fruitful. A life that is as far removed from the rootlessness that characterizes our present generation as you could possibly imagine. And yet this life, this rootedness, this fruitfulness, will never be arrived at by accident. The truly blessed person is the one who, refusing to walk in the way of the counsel of the ungodly, to stand in the way of sinners, or to sit in the seat of the scornful, chooses instead to delight in the law of the Lord, to meditate in the Word of God day and night, to saturate every aspect of their lives in the life-giving truth of the Scriptures. All of us, I trust, desire to have a rooted and fruitful life. And if you're a follower of Christ and you hear about this rooted and fruitful life, I don't think there's any of us. If you're a follower of Christ, I can't imagine someone that would say, no, I'd really rather be like the chaff. I really don't want to bear fruit. I really would like to be blown about by every wind and wave that passes by. No one would say they want their life to be like that. We desire to have rooted and fruitful lives. But the question that we face is whether or not the practical priorities of our lives reflect what we would all say that we want. When you come to church, do you limit your interest in the scriptures to what seems to be relevant to what's going on in your life at the time? Or do you instead have a deep desire to dig into the precious Word of God? If Scripture is to be the soil in which our roots are planted, we must learn to delight in every detail of it. And there's a tendency when listening to sermons to pay careful attention to the introduction, because there's normally a story or something there, and perhaps to the application and the conclusion, but to let your mind wander while the text itself is being explained. I recognize that the details of exposition can sometimes seem dull and boring, and at times, due to my own weakness, it may be presented in a dull and boring way. But it is precisely through careful attention to the details of the text that we grow the deep roots that enable us to stand through the storm, to remain unreached by the frost, That's what will, over the long haul, produce the greatest change in your life. Not the emotion of the moment, but the rootedness of a lifetime that pays attention to the scripture and allows it to build up in your life one grain of soil at a time until you have enough soil to put roots down into. As important as it is to give attention to the Word of God when it is preached or taught, devotion to Scripture must never be reserved for our times of gathered worship alone. On the contrary, as the text we read from Deuteronomy made plain, attention to and discussion of the truth of Scripture must shape every aspect of our family's lives from the time we get up to the time we lay down. If you want your family to be rooted in the truth, then you must ensure that the scriptures, rather than the television, or the game console, or social media, or anything else of that nature, retains central place in the culture of your home. The culture of your home needs to be saturated by the scriptures. Read the scriptures together. Talk about them constantly. And whenever possible, be open with your children about the things that God is convicting you about through the pages of his word. Because that's what shows them that this isn't just a tool to control how they're behaving. It's something that shapes the way that you're behaving. And that's when they're going to begin to see that this is really something that is real. something they can put their own roots down into. The living words of God are both the long-term soil in which the roots of our families must be planted and the daily supply by which alone they are able to bear fruit. Above all things, we must saturate every aspect of our personal lives in the root-forming, fruit-producing truths of the Scriptures. The blessed person described in our Psalms so delights in the Word of the Lord that they meditate in it at all seasons of the day and night. And if we desire the rootedness and the fruitfulness of a truly blessed life, this is what we must also do. While it is not sinful to read or watch or listen to the news, it's not sinful to work long hours or pursue side jobs or hobbies or schooling. These all can be good things, in some cases very good things, even essential things. But we can't make even the most essential of these things the focus of our lives and expect to grow deep roots or to bear sweet fruit. Both rootedness and fruitfulness demand that we saturate ourselves in the Word of God and we arrange the priorities of our lives so that we have the time to do that. Demand that we assign a priority to our time in the Word that we give to nothing else in our lives. We are living in difficult days. Though I'm neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, and I don't know the future, it seems to me quite likely that the storm that is coming will be far greater than the storm that we have already been facing. And yet, we do not need to be alarmed. though the coming of the storm may reveal the depth of our roots, or the shallowness of them, the freshness of our fruit, or the absence of it. Putting down roots and bringing forth fruit is simply what it means to be a Christian, regardless of how calm or catastrophic the surrounding circumstances may be. Lives that are truly being built on the rock have no need to be either shaped or shaken by the coming of the storm. Desperate times don't call for desperate measures for the one whose life is rooted in the word of God. Desperate times simply reveal whether or not we have been faithful to the ordinary means of grace that form the core of the Christian life in every season and every situation. In other words, we prepare best for the storm, not by focusing on the storm and thinking, what's going to happen? How am I going to be ready? Am I going to have enough of this? Am I going to have enough of that? And preparing is a good thing. I'm not against preparing. But if we get so bound up that we're so thinking about this is coming and how am I going to be ready for this? And how am I going to be ready for that? And what if this happens? And what if that happens? We can become so bound up and we can become so anxious that our focus drifts away from growing down roots and bringing forth fruit to being shaped by the storm. And a storm-shaped life is a terrible shelter for the storm. But a life that is built on the rock, a life that is rooted in the truth, will survive the storm, whatever the storm ends up looking like. We prepare best for the storm not by focusing on the storm, but instead by simply pursuing the same everyday faithfulness that the Christian life always calls for. We aren't responsible to stop the nations from raging, as we see in the second psalm. God has that one handled. He knows how to deal with the raging nations. We haven't been commissioned to stop the storm or to take power over the world. We've simply been commanded to serve as salt and as light. Not to control the raging nations, but to remind them Not only that another life is possible, but that another kingdom is coming. A kingdom in which the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the seas. A kingdom that is both rooted and fruitful. And though we may be despised and even persecuted by those who give their allegiance to the idols of this present age, the truth is that we are the sons and daughters, not merely of ancient earthly kings, but of the ancient of days himself, the king of all kings. If our lives are deeply rooted in a living word of God, then no frost, however severe, will reach us. And no storm, however great, will cause the house of our life to fall down, for we have built our lives on the one foundation that will never cause us to be ashamed, the rock itself. Because the living words of God are both the soil in which our roots are planted and the supply by which our fruit is grown, we are able not simply to survive the storm, but to stand and indeed to grow through it in confidence, delighting in the word of the Lord, communing with one another about the things of our God, boldly proclaiming the good news he has entrusted us with, and daily enjoying the peace and the joy he has given us as we wait in hope for the day when our faithful labor for the sake of his name will receive its full reward. Let's go before the Lord and pray. Father, I come before you this morning. I thank you for your goodness. I thank you for the richness of your word. A word that can enable us to grow deep roots and bear sweet fruit. No matter what season you call us to follow you through. Help us to be faithful to you. In Jesus name I pray. Amen.
Rootedness
Series Standing Through The Storm
Sermon ID | 92720181517365 |
Duration | 44:55 |
Date | |
Category | Sunday Service |
Bible Text | Psalm 1 |
Language | English |
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