Good morning. Let's pause for a word of prayer before we get into our text today. Father, we do thank you for the privilege of being together today. Thank you for the chance to praise you and sing songs to you as we've commanded in your scriptures. And so Father, now as we spend time in your word, we just pray that you would take those words, that you would establish truth this morning, Help me to bring good principles and good application. And Lord, might your Holy Spirit be the one who brings those applications in our heart and brings about those areas of encouragement, those areas of conviction and admonishment as they are needed. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen. Hopefully you had time to spend some time this week with your families in Psalm 1. and we are going to be looking at that today. But as we look in Psalm 1, it's good to realize how much we've been learning as a church lately that is related to the Psalm. In some ways, it converges some of the things we've learned with the themes in Psalm 1. Some of the topics have included prayer, money, pop culture, fasting, delighting in God. And in the Psalms, of course, we have all these topics in abundance, but we have them in the form of poetry and song, and many of them are in the form of prayer. My goal is that we come out today with a greater understanding of the role of Psalms in the life of the believer, the life of the church. But today, though, we'll only have time for maybe a primer, as they say, on the Psalms, and then we'll get a little bit into Psalm 1. Before we can do that, though, it's helpful to understand the language and the structure of the Psalms, how it's been used by God's covenant people, since the time of David to the present. And the neat thing for me is that we know when we read the Psalms, when we pray the Psalms, when we sing the Psalms, that we are participating with the church throughout the ages and using the Psalms in that way. And even the church present shapes our thinking as we spend time there. So today we're going to specifically look at Psalm 1 for some insights that it gives us regarding the Psalms And it's intended to be an introduction to the Psalter as a whole and gives us some guiding principles to the purpose of the Psalms and how we can use the Psalms to become rooted and fruitful as Christians. So let's start, first of all, with some presuppositions we need to make in order to understand the Psalms. In your bulletin this morning, hopefully you found an outline that, if the Lord is willing, will roughly keep track of where we're going in the sermon. And somebody commented when we were praying with the elders and the deacons ahead of time that the outline's really good because at least you can know when it's almost over from the outline. So hopefully that will be consistent there. First of all, the Psalms are meant to be instructive about God and man and life. And when we read the Psalms, the purpose is that we might learn things about God and about human nature and about how life is lived. Generally, we don't think of poetry as instructional or educational per se, at least in our culture. But poetry and song were used in Jewish culture for teaching, and particularly the Psalms claims to instruct us. They are meant to be instructive about God and man and life. One of the indicators of this is in Psalm 1, which introduces the whole book of Psalms because it states in Psalm 1-2, his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. The word for law used here is Torah, and the general meaning for Torah is instruction. In other words, it covers the whole range of God's instruction, not just legal ordinances, not just our liturgy. So the entire book of Psalms is introduced by a call to meditate on God's instruction. Well, if you add to that the fact that the Psalms is structured into five books, It's divided into five books beginning with Psalm 1, Psalm 42, Psalm 73, Psalm 90, and 107. And each collection of the Psalms ends with a short doxology, maybe just two verses, maybe just one set of verses. But that marks the end of each book. And these five divisions have been understood through the ages, through history, as a conscious effort to make Psalms parallel to the five books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch. We generally call that the law books. So there seems to be a conscious effort to call the Psalms and their five book of Psalms, five book sets of Psalms, the law also. So when Psalm 1 introduces all five books of the Psalter by saying that the righteous person meditates on the law of the Lord day and night, it probably means that these five books of the Psalms, not just the five books of Moses, are the law of the Lord, the instruction of the Lord that we should meditate on. day and night. So for this and for some other reasons, my first observation is the Psalms are meant to be instructive about God and man and life. The second observation is that the Psalms are songs or poems. That's what the word Psalms means. In fact, the root meaning of Psalm is to pluck a harp. And it came to mean songs. They are meant to be read or sung as poetry or songs. So we ask, what is the nature of poetry and songs and even prayer? Poetry or singing is a motive by nature and it's intended to stir up and carry the affections of the heart. John Frame, a reformed theologian states, poetic musical form enhances the word of God in various ways. In particular, poetic musical forms impart vividness and memorability to God's word. That vividness and memorability in turn drive the word into our hearts so that it becomes precious to us and motivates us to praise and obedience. Now poetry and singing may not be the normal mode of instruction in our culture, but surely we share the emotional nature of poetry and song with the Hebrews. Similarly, the Jewish culture communicated emotions or intensity during significant events within the context of the covenant-keeping God. So if you look through scripture, you see that poetic language appears at some critical junctures in Israel's history. In the Bible, you'll see it at the creation of man, poetry, the institution of marriage, poetry, the giving of curses and redemptive promises, God's covenants with Noah, with Abraham, and with Hagar, Isaac's blessing of Jacob, and Esau, Jacob's blessing of his son, and more. And all of those have poetry connected with them, so that was a typical way that we communicated intensity of emotion in important times. Perhaps if we brought this to the present day, we might write poems and songs when we're celebrating our congregation's fifth year anniversary, or the birth of your child, or the death of one of our saints. Those would be appropriate, at least in the Hebrew context, for writing poetry and songs. So, if you read the Psalms primarily for doctrine, or only for doctrine, you're not reading them for what they are. They are psalms and songs and poetry, often in the form of prayer. They're musical, and the reason we express truth with music and poetry is to awaken and express emotions that fit the truth. God delights in music and in fact commands it in scripture. Over and again you'll see a command to sing and make a joyful noise to the Lord. And God himself even sings over his people. I found an interesting verse in Zephaniah 3.17. The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save. He will rejoice over you with gladness and he will quiet you by his love. He will exult over you with loud singing. Think about that. God exults over us with loud singing. The Psalms express emotion and remind us of God's character, his personality, and our appropriate responses to that. And we are admonished to sing as response to who he is and what he has done. Turn in your Bibles, if you would, in the Psalms to Psalm 92 because we see In some rapid succession, several psalms that I'm going to read some excerpts from that talk about our responsibility not only to sing and to praise, but why we do that and the purpose of that. In Psalm 92, it begins, and appropriately, it's a song for the Sabbath day. It says there, it is good to give thanks to the Lord and sing praises to your name, O most high God, to declare your loving kindness in the morning and your faithfulness every night. on an instrument of 10 strings. How many strings does a piano have, Carl? 88. 88. OK. 88 keys and probably multiple strings. So we have an instrument of 192 strings or something. On the lute and the harp with harmonious sound. There's an idea, lutes and harps. Turn over to 95. Just a little further. 95.1. A call to worship and obedience. Oh come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to him in psalms. And then over to 96. Verse one, oh sing to the Lord a new song. Sing to the Lord all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless his name. Proclaim the good news of his salvation from day to day. Declare His glory among the nations, His wonders among the peoples. And then lastly, turn over to Psalm 98. Verse one says, O sing to the Lord a new song. He has done marvelous things. And then jump down to verse four. Shout joyfully to the Lord, all the earth. Break forth in song, rejoice, and sing praises. Sing to the Lord with the harp, with the harp and the sound of the psalm, with trumpets, and sound of horn, shout joyfully before the Lord, the King. Sounds like we have a little ways to go in adding to our ensemble up here. So you young men and women, keep working at those fiddles and whatever else you're playing out there. Mr. Schroeder has designs for the future on you. What do we see here? I think if you were to take these verses, one, we are to sing with emotion. We are to proclaim his works and we are to give thanksgiving. And when you think about it, that's a lot of what we do on a day. We declare who God is and we praise him for being who he is. So do we only sing when we're feeling joyful or when we've seen answered prayer? Of course not. We are commanded to sing and commanded to come together in a corporate setting to sing. And most of the commands to sing are in a corporate setting, but we are admonished to sing individually even. Ephesians 5, 18, 19 says, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in hymns, psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord. And we find the same admonition in Colossians 3, 16. So song is to permeate our experience with God, and more explicitly than all the other books of the Bible, the psalms are designed to awaken and shape our emotions in line with the instruction they give. And what happens when you read and sing the psalms the way they are intended to be read and understood and sung is that your emotions and your mind are shaped by these psalms. We are given insights into how to think and feel about evil, right and wrong, justice, injustice, riches, poverty, birth, death, war, and providence. And we see what is to be the emotional responses to these kinds of things in the Psalms. And then thirdly, one more observation about the Psalms in general. The Psalms are inspired by God. They are not merely the word of man, but also the word of God. And what that means is that God guided what was written and arranged so that the Psalms teach truth. and when properly understood, they give right direction to our emotions. One of the reasons we believe that the Psalms are divinely inspired and trustworthy is that Jesus does, and there are numerous places where Jesus talks about the Psalms and uses them, but let me give you one example. In John 13, 18, he quotes a Psalm by David, Psalm 41, 9, and says, the scripture will be fulfilled And so Jesus has implicit faith in the reliability of the Psalms time and again. The words of the psalmist are both man's words and God's words, and what man expresses, God is expressing for his purposes. Therefore, when we read and we sing and we pray the Psalms, our minds and our hearts, our thinking and our feeling are being shaped by God. So the question for the first Christians was, and is for us, how does the new man, the new mind, the new heart, with all of its imperfect thinking and feeling, pursue right thinking and the fullness of holy affections? One of the main answers of the early church was to immerse itself in the Psalms. The Psalms is the most often quoted book that was quoted by the New Testament authors, makes its way into the New Testament is the Psalms. It was a song book and poetry book and meditation book of the church. It was, alongside the teaching of Jesus and the apostles, Psalms was the book that shaped the thinking and the feeling of believers more than any other. So, with those things in mind, let's look a little more closely at Psalm 1 and turn there. Psalm 1 starts out, blessed is the man, and I know a lot of you have this memorized, Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful, or the mocker, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. Understanding desire. This psalm serves as an introduction, as I've said, to the whole book of Psalms. It instructs us on how to use the Psalms, even how the law works in our life. And the contrast is not just between the lifestyle of the ungodly and the godly, it is an insight into the very nature of those two groups of people. Instead of focusing on being ungodly, being sinful or being scoffer, he focuses on influence here. The contrast he wants to draw is that of being influenced from one place versus another place, from being shaped in one way versus being shaped in another, and being shaped in our thinking and our feeling by the wicked, the sinner, and the scoffer versus being shaped by the law of the Lord, the instruction of the Lord found in Psalms and in the law. So the contrast he's making clear in verse two is that which we delight in. Don't walk. stand and sit in the world to the point that you delight and admire evil, but in contrast, delight in the law of the Lord. We're brought to a point of choosing what will influence us in here, in our heart and in our minds. So the question is, how does one get to the point of walking in sin and sitting in this scornful seat spoken here? Nobody walks in the way of the wicked out of duty. Nobody stands in the way of sinners out of obligation. Nobody sits in the seat of scoffers. Contrary to their will, we walk and we stand and we sit where we do because we want to. And we want to because we've been watching them so intently that what they do now is attractive to us. We have meditated on them without calling it that. And we now delight in them. This is how worldliness happens for anyone, even for us as covenant children. There may even be an explanation of the process here. We walk by and we see. And we observe life of the ungodly. But instead of continuing, we begin to stay there, to stand in the way of sinners, to be interested and curious. And then ultimately, there we are, sitting among the wicked, participating in their sin. And so there's a progression, even, of walking and standing and sitting. You know, there are some easy applications today in the virtual world. And I bring these up not because they may or may not apply to you, but because they apply to me. Walking in the council of the ungodly. We could call that surfing the web, perhaps, or browsing MySpace or YouTube. Or we're channel surfing. Something catches our eyes. We pause there. We're now in some cases, standing in the way of sinners, in the path of sinners. But instead of moving on, we remain there and find ourselves comfortably seated among the mockers, mockers of God, mocking His admonition that we reap what we sow. You start by looking at the stuff the world produces and you look at it and you think about it so much that you want it. And so you walk and stand and sit in their counsel. and then their way and their seat. And maybe it doesn't even look particularly evil, like mocking or sinning. And in a very real sense, evil doesn't look evil to the sinner, does it? But this walking, sitting, standing in evil, it's another way of seeing what Pastor Walker was talking about several weeks ago regarding pop culture and our vulnerability to it. But it's larger than pop culture. The principle applies maybe more to all the influences of the world and worldliness, delighting in something less than God and His law. That's what the world can provide. So verse two is not instructing us from the point of our duty to obey, but from the point of delighting and meditating on the law. The antidote to the poisonous pleasures of the world is the delight in the pleasures of the word. the pleasures of godliness. Many of you have been studying Desiring God by John Piper on Thursday nights. This is the same idea that Piper calls Christian hedonism. As we meditate and we pray through the Psalms and the law, the word, our desires are conformed to that of God's. And that is what the Psalms are designed to do, to inform our thinking in such a way that delights our hearts in godliness. Meditating day and night leads to delighting and righteousness, which accomplishes much to free us from the pleasures of the wicked, the sinner, and the scoffer, and worldliness. Fruits of desire. In verse three, he continues, he said, he shall be like a tree planted by rivers of water that bring forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither. And whatever he does shall prosper. So what is the result of following this instruction? The answer is that the psalmist wants us to see the life of the godly, that it's like a tree bearing fruit, not like a laborer picking fruit. To use Paul's language, the Christian life is the fruit of the spirit, not the works of the law. In the language of Jesus, it's the fruitful abiding, being connected to the branch. He who abides in me bears much fruit. The psalmist gives us a picture of the Christian life, abiding in Christ and his word. As we are planted by God's sovereign grace, our roots reach the water of life that Jesus speaks of with the woman at the well, when he says, you will be like streams of living water coming up from within. The root system, though, is not mechanical or automatic. The roots work by meditation, that is, by giving attention and thought to the psalms. Meditation on the Psalms is the way the roots touch the water. The result is delight, spiritual pleasure in what we see of God and man and life. And from this delight comes all kinds of changed attitudes and behaviors and character. The battle to avoid the counsel of the wicked and the way of sinners and the seat of scoffer, the battle to be righteous and holy and humble is a fight that is won by delight. And that delight is nourished through meditating on God's instruction in the Psalms day and night. So the result, fruit and leaves that do not wither, prosperity in all our endeavors, contrasts with the ungodly who are meditating on other things, sin, worldliness, living to the flesh, covetousness, and on. The ungodly, he says in verse four, are not so, but they are like shaft that the wind drives away. So he continues with the harvest metaphor here. The ungodly are not fruitful. In fact, they are like shaft, the outer covering of the wheat berry. Of no value, it's tossed to the wind to separate the valuable grain. And in ancient times, when the wheat was gathered, it was first threshed maybe with sticks, which would separate this outer covering, this shaft from the grain of wheat that some of you use in your home grinders to make your wheat flour. Then on a breezy day, the chaff and the wheat would be tossed in the air, and that chaff has no mass to it, just flies away in the wind. This blowing chaff is what he says the ungodly are like. When they come into judgment, their lives will have no value or substance to them. And he's not referring to just their works either. He's speaking of the ungodly and speaks of their destiny in verse five when he says, therefore, the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. They won't make it, they won't be there, they won't be part of that final congregation. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. So number three, the source of desire. Let's look a little further at who the psalmist is speaking about. And the question is, is it just that simple? Who are the ungodly? Who are the righteous? Are they just people who have made good choices about meditating on the Psalms? Is it that simple? Are these observations about just two kinds of people who make up the world? This is where we must see Christ in the Psalms. The psalmist says none are righteous. No, not one. But for God's grace, we are all the ungodly here in the Psalms. Only as we are found in Christ and take on His righteousness and are being sanctified by Him, can we begin to practice these things and claim His promises? We will all, at times, walk and stand and sit with sinners and mockers. It is only by God's grace that we can do otherwise. So understand, we're not talking about a works righteousness of meditating enough to get somehow acceptable or somehow godliness. But truly, this is explanatory of the process by which the means of grace are displayed in our life. Only as God's covenant children are we able to fulfill these commands. But as covenant children, we must be covenant keepers, nonetheless, and our lives must be ever increasingly resembling of this tree with deep roots drawing upon spiritual waters. And we are exhorted to do so, and we are promised fruitfulness as we do these things. So finally, what companions will we choose? What are the application here that we've even touched upon already? One is delighting in the world. As we choose what we will immerse ourselves in, how we will walk and stand and sit, we choose those delights for ourselves. They are choices we make of what we approve of or what companions we make. Proverbs 13.20 says, a companion of fools suffers harm. Let's make some observations, not of what you must do, or should do, or not do. I don't want to come across that way, but I'm trying to communicate maybe as a dad, maybe as a man who has tried to see the landscape for what it is and what obstacles stand in the way of our godliness. I try to make practical applications to my own life and guide my own children. In this day of media saturation, pop culture, virtual reality, we make choices every day of who we will make our companions. Companions are easier to come by today and much more difficult to moderate in our own lives, I would venture to say, let alone in the lives of our children, to manage those. So if we choose to spend extended time with Pastor Walker's famous Jack or Jason or Oprah or Hannity or Leno or Rush for that matter, I just selected the banterings of ones that I'm aware of, Or if we immerse ourselves in MySpace or Facebook or World of Warcraft or any other virtual world, those can become our companions. And it's not that those are necessarily wrong things. It's not what I'm saying today. Unless you think I know not of what I speak, I've been a companion of Jack and Jason and Hannity and, hey, for that matter, I've got an iPhone with YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace all built in. But if these things become our constant companions, or things like them. Even a constant diet of Christian pop music, if that's where we're getting our primary source of our worldview, we must understand that all of those things are the choices we are making on what to set our affections on. This is the contrast that the psalmist is setting before us. Sometimes we think evil will stand up and announce itself, but when the Israelites worshipped Moloch and offered their children, as sacrifices to him. You know what? They thought they were doing right and they were acting religiously. Folks, I believe we are frogs in a worming kettle. We have to see ourselves as aliens and strangers in a foreign land or we are cooked. Peter says those sinful desires wage war against our souls. Now, after I've said those things, some of you maybe are feeling overly smug about your good habits. So Pastor Walker, next week, I saw, is preaching on judge not lest ye be judged. So don't get too confident here. Balancing culture. The focus is the principle. What do we delight in? Is it wrong to participate in the pop culture? Perhaps a better question is, is it possible not to participate in the pop culture? Is it admirable to stay away from sinners? I don't think so. Jesus was considered a friend of sinners. So those aren't the options. So that's nearly the long-term answer is more something else. There's a difference between allowing the culture to shape our hopes and desires and affections versus participation in the culture for the sake of redemption. You have to flesh that out more for yourself. and for your family, but it is one of moderation and balance at the least in our relationship to the culture. And it is one of protecting our hearts and the hearts of our children in all things at all times, realizing that we choose what we will delight in, but also teaching them to guard their own hearts. You only have them for a very short season. Does God have your heart? Does he have the hearts of your children? You know, just one illustration before we wrap this up. The culture of evil has, I think, a long and cumulative effect on us that we don't sometimes see. And I think Proposition 8 was a good example of that. Decades ago, in any state in our union, I think it would have been easy to pass a Proposition 8. This time it barely eked by. Next time, who knows what will happen? But what has happened there? The normalcy of sin has worn down the offense of sin to us. The frog in the kettle had no idea of what was happening until it was too late. And in Psalm 1, the psalmist makes the same point, to walk and to stand and to sit, immersed in sin around us, we will soon find that we delight in it. So the macro view, the psalmist is contrasting this to give us the big picture macro view of the process and the result. Delight in the law, meditate on it, and consider the result. Like a tree, we will prosper. So the order is not work it, green leaves, and you'll become a tree, but meditate and delight in the law. And that brings us back to the Psalms and back to the need for a savior. He is that book of the law that is the occasion for meditation. Psalms, songs, poetry, hope, fears, aspirations, feelings, they are all there. As we recognize the process and realize our inability to fulfill righteousness on our own behalf, we can go to Christ in the Psalms, the law, and the word of God, and we can meditate on those to the nourishment of our soul. It is there that we find provision and mercy. So the Psalms are the law at the level of the heart and the emotions, and they are God's instructions that we can feast upon and go to in all seasons of our life, and we can learn to pray and learn the affections of godliness. Well, let me conclude using the Psalms to pray about something about that. The connection of Psalms and prayer, making it more explicit here. How does the Psalms help us in that regard? Are you struggling to learn how to pray? We've been learning a lot about that lately. To learn more than going through a list of self-centered requests, we've been learning from the Lord's Prayer, a biblical content for prayer, not focusing just on our wants and our desires. But how do we get there? How do we get to that kind of praying? The Psalms can enable you to pray like a saint because Christ has made you one. and seeking the Psalms and praying the Psalms within your heart as you meditate on them is one way to do that. James Boyce has said that learning to pray is a little like learning to play the violin with virtuosos. No instrument sounds worse in the beginning stages of learning. It's all screech and scratch. Can some of you attest to that? Okay, very difficult. But if the student is determined to play well, he checks the program guide for classical music station and notes when the violin concertos will be aired. This is an old quote. He buys the score for each concerto, and he does his best to play along. And at first, he sounds terrible. As time passes, however, he begins little by little to sound more and more like the virtuosos. But all along, as he groans on his instrument, the orchestra plays the music beautifully, His poor performance is caught up and completed in the music of the masters, and praying the psalms is like that. We have the music of the masters, the virtuosos. We can learn and we can be caught up in their music of prayer. Begin to use the psalms as prayer. Slow down. Meditate on them. Pray through these psalms. What does God want for us? We have learned that prayer is not even primarily a means to get God to give us what we want. It is a means he uses to teach us what he wants for us. Holy Scripture in general, and the Psalms in particular, teach us who God is and what he wants to give. Ben Patterson, writing in Christianity Today recently, tells the story of Abraham Heschel, the great philosopher of religion, and when members of his synagogue complained about the words of the liturgy, that they did not express what they felt. Abraham replied wisely, and I think biblically, he told them that the liturgy wasn't supposed to express what they felt, they were supposed to feel what the liturgy expressed. To be taught by the Bible is to pray, to learn, to want and feel what the Bible expresses. He adds, those who practice this kind of prayer over time make a surprising discovery. As they learn to feel what the Psalms express, their hearts and desires are enlarged, and they find that what they once regarded as strong desires were actually puerile little wishes, debased inklings of what is good. Of course, would not the God who made us in his image understand better than ever we could what we really need, and shouldn't we ask him for it? As C.S. Lewis put it in The Weight of Glory, Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. The psalm lifts us from mundane aspirations and events to a heightened perspective of life, a perspective from God's point of view. Use the Psalms as a mentor of grace to delight in those things which delight the heart of God. It is a provision of God's grace to meditate on and see our affections changed, and truly, it is a means of grace in our lives. Ultimately, that's our calling, to worship in spirit and in truth, and be transformed by his word from glory unto glory, not a work which we perform, but a transformation we go through, not instantaneously, but incrementally. 2 Corinthians 3.18 says, but we all, with unveiled faces, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into his same image from glory unto glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord. That's what it's all about, folks, being transformed into his image from glory unto glory. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you that you have given us a means of grace to be transformed, your Holy Spirit residing within us, the comfort of knowing that you are our deep redeeming work, that you are our law, and that as we meditate on your law, we find you there, and we not only find you there, we are able to delight in the things that delight your heart. We pray, God, that we might, as we meditate on your word, as we meditate on your psalms together, that you might change us into your likeness, that we might rejoice in those things that are pleasing to you. Lord, do that work, we pray, and as we participate now, In your table, we just pray that that means of grace would be extended to us in such a way that we would be changed in the process from glory into glory. We ask it in Christ's name, amen.