our God, asking for his help. Our God, you are wisdom from above, and your word says in James 1.5 that if any of us lacks wisdom, let us ask of you, you, God, who will give generously Without reproach, you will give to us your wisdom. And we do not want to take for granted understanding and applying the grace of your word. So we do, as always, lean upon Jesus Christ, who is wise, who is wisdom himself. Lean upon him for the reading and preaching of the word of God this morning. Amen. This is Psalm 1, hear now the word of God. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are 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. Congregation, this is the word of our God. We begin this morning with a new series. It's a summer series, series I'm calling Summer in the Psalms. This series is not unique to me. The title is not unique to me. That's what we're going to be focusing our time, the next eight weeks. Some churches, I know, they have summer at the movies, and they have the movies at church. And you might even see somebody on a roller coaster on the stage and then exhorting us about the moral life lessons that we receive from various movies. And I'm happy to disappoint you if that is your expectation for a summer series. No, no, no, we are doing something else, something more robust, something deeper. We are going back to the Psalms, going to the Old Testament to consider the word of God. And we're doing that through eight Psalms this summer. And this Summer in the Psalms is a 20-year project of mine that I had begun years ago. It's my desire, it's one of my goals as a pastor, well, one, to preach the entire word of God before I die, and that includes all the Psalms. And so I wanna preach all of them. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with Psalm 119. But we'll be looking this summer at Psalms 1 and 2, 8, 14, 38, 67, 87, and either 95 or 96 to be determined. Foundationally, Psalms 1 and 2 structure the entire book of the Psalms. Psalm 1 shows us the wisdom of God and true blessedness in God's way. Psalm 2 shows us the kingdom of God and true worship in his kingdom of wisdom. So we have wisdom in Psalm 1 and kingdom in Psalm 2, and we'll look at Psalm 2 next Lord's Day. But every Psalm, Psalms 3 through 150, every Psalm flows from these two and can be traced back to either or both of these Psalms. And so, for now, we have the pleasure of meditating on God's way of blessedness. Now, you have to be rather young or quite out of tune to the music that the world is playing to miss the world's push to advance away of the world that denies God-given twoism, God-given binaries. The message of the world is that non-binary thinking is in vogue and shall and must remain so. In fact, suppressing binary thinking is essential to the transgender cause. Sex and gender apparently are two separate categories and gender is whatever you want it to be. And so there are as many genders as there are weird thoughts in the world. And you can be cat gender if you want, which I guess would be male or female. Anyways, the message of the word, however, holds tightly to the two-ism of the way things truly are. Light and dark, day and night, earth and sky, water and land, sun and moon, male and female, body and spirit or soul, creature and creator, eternal and temporary, and on and on. Binary is the way. And through Psalm 1, we see an inescapable twoism, and there's no two ways about it. God sets forth two paths, provides us with two pictures of those paths, and then he lays out two possible ends. That's what we're looking at. Two paths, two pictures, and two possible ends. And which path we take is going to determine which end we will have. How we start will determine where we will end. The question I want to put before you is this, do you desire the blessed life? And to you, that might sound like a ridiculous question, perhaps even a no-brainer question. Of course I desire the blessed life. Well, it wasn't a ridiculous question when Jesus asked the lame man if he wanted to be well. Because that would require some change of thinking, worldview shifting. That would require new life. That would require new activity. He couldn't just receive the gifts and the sympathy of others. He would have to get up, walk, and work. And he'd have to also trust in the Lord Jesus for salvation. It is the question before us, do we want to be blessed? Now, it is an overreaction to write, as one man has done, that it is possible to have your best life now. As we know, it's unbelievers who are having their best life now. But for believers, our best life is not now. And for a believer to say such a thing is nearsighted and ridiculous. But it's also an overreaction to speak as if your blessed life is entirely to come, completely in the future. Indeed, it is impossible to have a future blessed life that doesn't start here and now. In other words, if you want a future of real blessedness, then you must start now. And if you don't start now, Before you meet your creator, before you meet the judge of all the earth, then you will never be truly blessed. And the point in Psalm 1 is this, that God's way in Christ is the blessed way. God's way in Christ is the blessed way. Look again with me at verses 1 and 2. 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. Psalm 1 is a wisdom psalm in which the psalmist is exhorting us, urging us to live fully before the Lord. He exhorts us in part by clearly marking out two different paths. There is the path of the wicked, who is sometimes called sinner, sometimes called scoffer, The wicked are those whose lives are characterized by sin. They are those who are drinking sin in like it is water. It is their very energy for the days of evil. These wicked, these sinners are also scoffers. To scoff would be to mock, to ridicule, to make fun of. This is coming from a position of arrogance, of haughtiness. Scoffers are big talkers. They talk a big game. They boast about their abilities. They boast about their supposed wisdom, which Paul calls folly, foolishness. And the wicked are all those who do not love the Lord, who do not delight in his law, who do not prize, treasure the wisdom from above. The righteous, by contrast, make it their aim to know God and to serve God. The righteous are not sinless. You today who are righteous are not sinless. You have the righteousness of Christ imputed to you, given to you, but you still sin, even as we had confessed earlier today. But the righteous depend upon the grace of God daily, which is why we meditate day and night and delight daily on the path of wisdom found in the law of God. Their lives, our lives, are characterized not by our sin, but by our service to God, by hearing His instruction, by obeying Him. It is the righteous, the wise, that meditate on the law of God. Now, a brief word on meditation, what this does not mean, and what it does mean. It's not an emptying of the mind. It's not a mantra meditation. It's not a mindless repetition of some phrase, just muttering to yourself in effort to clear the mind and then allow some kind of ecstatic spiritual experience. That's not what biblical meditation is. Biblical meditation is actually the opposite. It's not emptying the mind, but it is filling the mind. It is intentionally and prayerfully setting your mind on the Word of God, pressing the Word of God deeply into your heart. Colossians 3, 1 and 2, it says, set your affection or set your minds on the things above, where Christ is. One Puritan, Ezekiel Cloverwell, says, to read and not to meditate is unfruitful. To meditate and not read is dangerous for error. To read and meditate without prayer is hurtful. So here, this brother from the past is telling us that we should not be content with reading, nor should we be content with reading and meditating. But we need reading, meditating, praying, That's how we should approach the Word of God. We don't want the Word of God just to go in one ear and out the other, just to be looked at with a brief glance. No, we need to think about it. And we need content, don't we? We don't want to just begin from nothing and start to think. How many times have you tried to pray that way? I don't know what to pray for. How have you been helped if you read a passage of scripture, perhaps even a psalm? Our prayers are helped, aren't they? Reading, meditating, praying. And we know that Jesus says, I am the way and the truth and the life. Christ never walked in the counsel of the wicked or sat upon the scoffer's seats. Paul says all of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ. It is Christ who is the blessed one. Christ answered truly the high priest question. Remember, he was asked, are you the Christ, the son of the blessed? He didn't say, well, I don't know. You tell me. No, he says, yes, I am. You got it right. Now will you repent? The life that is truly joyous, fully satisfied, and full of divine favor is the blessed life. The blessed life of wisdom, God's way, is that life that is fixed on who Jesus is and on what Jesus has done. And that's a lifetime of meditation, isn't it? To consider Christ, who is infinite, to consider the manifold blessings of his work for us. That takes a lifetime, nay, an eternity to reflect on. By point of application, Thomas Watson, the Puritan, says, association begets assimilation. Now that might not be easily understandable. Association begets assimilation. This means that the closer you are to someone, the more you become that person or like that person. The more you adopt that person's ways. So children, the more that you play army, the more you are becoming like a soldier. The more you join in dancing, the more you will become that dancing queen that you want to be. Bad company corrupts good morals, but good company commends good morals. And so the point is clear. We are not to associate with the wicked. Associating with the wicked is the wrong kind of assimilation. But you must expect to meet many wicked. Do not be surprised when the wicked come. This, by the way, is not a very politically correct message. I've used the word wicked probably 12 times already. Is that word allowed in conversation? Is that allowed in speeches, in sermons? I should hope so. It's the word of God. We are to expect to meet many wicked. Expect the wicked to come from the world. We're not surprised when those who don't believe in Jesus act like they don't believe in Jesus, when they deny the faith that we believe. But even as we were reminded last week, sometimes the wicked come even from the church itself. There are false professors. Don't be suspicious. But be shrewd. Be innocent as doves, as Jesus tells us, but shrewd as serpents. You will know them by their fruit, our Lord says. That is, by their confession and by their conduct. What they say they believe and how their actions align or misalign with their confession. Avoid association with the wicked. Do not dabble in darkness, however light that darkness appears to be. Now, just to clarify, this does not mean that you must leave the world, Paul tells us. If that were the case, then we wouldn't be interacting with anybody. It's not like you know somebody who is an unbeliever. You say, well, I got to run away. How would anyone be saved? This is, again, however, the idea of adopting that person's ways, of continually making justification of compromises of your own behavior because of your association with someone. Do you see the progress from walking in the counsel of the wicked to standing in the way, then sitting in their seats? Psalm is saying, you're getting closer and closer to evil. And you're going to be just like one of them. And why would you be surprised if you do become one of them? As Solomon urges his sons not even to go near that adulterous woman, the righteous do not even dare to dip a toe in the water just to see how it feels. Do not think that you can play with fire and not be burned by it. This means we need to investigate what we put in our hearts. What shows we watch, what music we listen to, what relationships we form and care about maintaining, what searches we make on the internet, what books we read. When I was a kid, a teenager, My walk with the Lord was hurt and my choice of music was not useful to my walk with the Lord. And I had this young lady in my life, we'll call her my future wife, and she said, Should you be listening to that CD? Now, I already told many of you that I enjoy a bit of rap, and I can tell you that most of these, and by most of them I mean all of them, were some hip-hop. Yes, Eminem was among them. And I remember just listening to stuff and you listen to stuff, you think about the stuff. The lyrics are repeated in your mind. You maybe even adopt some of that. You got a little hipster swag or whatever. I don't know. You become like that, right? And I remember also I was in love with the Spanish language in part because of this young lady who I'll call my future wife. Loved the language, and I was trying to gobble up every single Spanish word that existed, and that meant slang. And you know what? Not all slang is clean, okay? Just to warn you all. And that meant some books found their way in the trash can. Because I was rightly corrected. Michael, should you be reading that? Should you be learning that? Should you be listening to that? What we put in our hearts is going to affect how we behave. So associate not with the wicked, not with that which is wicked, that which is evil, but associate with Jesus Christ. That is the right kind of assimilation. Do you want to be like Jesus? Of course you do. If you believe in Jesus, if he is your Lord, then you want to be like Him. And just as you can expect to meet the wicked in the world, you can expect to meet with Christ whenever you open up His Word, whenever you meditate on His Word. When you run away from the house of the wicked and you pound on that door to the house of the Lord, you will find that door wide open. You will find Jesus welcoming you with open arms. So keep asking Jesus to reveal Himself through His Spirit-inspired Word. Keep seeking Him in that Word. Keep knocking on the door to the throne of grace. The Word will be given to you. The pearl of great price will be found. The door to the truth will be opened unto you. That is God's promise. Pray then for strength of spirit to focus your mind on the things above. Read the Bible verse by verse, slowly or generally, repeatedly. Memorize some, mutter some to yourself. Learn it. I love it when my kids finish a book of the Bible and they say, Dad, what should I read next? What a wonderful question. Because then that means I get to consider the child and what they've read and where I want to see them. Yeah, I have something Old Testament, let's go new. Yeah, new, let's go old. It's a wonderful question. Pray for your eyes to be opened, for your hearts to receive, for your ears to hear and your minds to recall what God has written in his word. Ask, really, two basic questions. What does this mean? Not, what do I think, what do I feel it means to me? No, it has an objective meaning. What does it mean? Do the hard work of studying the scripture. And then, once you've gotten clarity of what the text means, you say, well, how does this apply to me? It's not rocket science. But then you must pray for the grace to obey your Lord. Resist the urge to abandon ship. What I mean here is there are some passages of scripture, some books of the Bible that are harder than others. And you know what those are. Perhaps you've never read them in your life. Maybe you don't want to touch Habakkuk with a 10-foot pole or Leviticus. Well, you're doing yourself a disservice. So much good stuff in those books and in all of the books of the Bible. It's hard sometimes. But nothing worthy of our attention is instantly easy. As the great Peloton commercial once said, great things take time. And as the word of Christ dwells in you richly, you will know Christ's presence and his power, his wisdom all the more. Charles Spurgeon famously has said of John Bunyan, prick him anywhere, he bleeds Bibline. His blood is Bibline. The very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting the text, for his very soul is full of the word of God. You couldn't have a greater compliment than that, a greater encouragement. Do you want to be like that? Do you want the word of God just to come off the lips? As you think about something, as you're wrestling with a question, don't you want your mind just to come to the scriptures? What does God say about that? And you need to start now. Or if you've already begun, you need to carry on as you have. Do you desire to know the word more than the world? Of course, the world wants you to know itself intimately. The temptation is to continue to know the ways of the world so much easier. And you have a lot more friends if you do that. How do people know you? Would they be surprised to learn that you follow Jesus? Or would they say, yeah, you say you follow Jesus, but I know what you just did last week. I know how you spoke to our friend. Associate with Jesus, but also associate with the righteous, that is, with the wise who are in Christ, his saints. Again, if bad company corrupts good morals, then good company commends righteous living. One reason our church offers many events is not to promote a social club, It's not to give you things to do when you're bored. It's not to fill up your calendar. We already know your calendar is filled. But it's to fellowship with the wise. Proverbs 13, 20 says, whoever walks with the wise becomes wise. Do you want to be wise? Then you need to start or you need to continue working at forming, at maintaining these guided relationships. A true friend sticks closer than a brother. So find one, be one. Grow in one. Grow in blessedness. And let me just give you a warning. If you do not, that is, if you do not regularly interact with other brothers and sisters, you will drift away. I can almost guarantee it. You are not meant to worship alone. You are not meant to do the Christian life solo. It's not you against the world, it's you and the church witnessing to the world. And the more you pull away from the presence of your brothers and sisters, the more you are moving towards the world. Again, it is very easy to be in the world. And the temptation is to say, well, my brother, my sister in Christ said this, did this. I'm just going to write him off. I don't want to be with him anymore. It's too much heartache. You need to resist that. Christ, who is your peace, has called you to peace and called you to fellowship with one another, to grow together as a united body. The psalmist, in distinguishing these paths, shows us one to be the better way. Verses three and four, he says, he is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. What does a parent do to entice his child to pursue the righteous path? He paints a picture. He might paint the path of life as something entirely attractive, or he might paint the life of death as entirely repulsive, even as we were reminded last week. There are different approaches to proclaiming the gospel, and they're both good. And one is to highlight the horror of what awaits those who don't trust in Jesus. And the other is to highlight the blessedness for those who find refuge in Jesus. And for his son, Solomon painted the path led by the forbidden woman. He says, sons, what do you see? Look at the forbidden woman, what do you see? Yes, you see a woman whose lips drip with honey and whose speech is smoother than oil. She will look however you want her to look. She will do and she will say whatever you want her to do and say. She is yours for the taking. But look closer. Discern her way. Look at her hands. Do you not see that they are holding a sword to drive into you, to destroy you? Do you smell her breath? It is bitter. Don't you smell the death that is on her breath? Avoid her like the plague that she is. Run away from the forbidden woman and run to your wife. See her, see how lovely she is. Enjoy her. Her cistern always is flowing with water of life. Delight in her all days. Now, the psalmist is not a game show host, like the Price is Right, asking us to choose one door blindly without any knowledge of what lies behind each door. No, he's saying, here's door one, and here is door two. Here's what's behind, and you see it all. Look how wonderful this life of wisdom is, of blessedness. Look at this, this only death and destruction and darkness and despair. And so he paints for us two pictures. If the kingdom of God can be compared to a grain of mustard seed that starts small, that grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants, the blessed man is like that tree. The blessed man, we're told, the man of wisdom is an evergreen tree, always flourishing. His fruit is always in season because he has been planted with the seed of the spirit. The streams of the water of the word are forever found of nourishment and life. Now, husbands will sometimes tease their plant-loving wives because their wives love the idea of plants, such beautiful life in and around their homes, but they seem always to kill their plants, don't they? These plant children last a few days, a couple weeks at most, only to be lost among the household hubbubs unless Their hubby saves the day by watering the plant faithfully. But in the case of the blessed man, his father in heaven never leaves, never forsakes, never neglects, never abandons. Each day we, his children, drink in new mercies as the father waters our spirits with his Holy Spirit. And the result is the antithesis, it is the opposite of figless Israel. It is branches whose leaves never wither, never waste away. But the wicked do not receive this fatherly attention, this devotion. Indeed, as the proverb says in 16.4, the Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble. That's a sobering word, isn't it? The wicked are like the chaff whose purpose alone is to be separated from the wheat. Rather than speaking of the wicked in terms of a withering tree, he uses now a more debased image, a more lowly image to ingrain in our minds the eventual eradication, uprooting, and destruction of the fool. As the Holy Spirit blows where he wishes and enlivens whom he wills, the Father blows away the wicked with his breath of wrath. The wicked finds no refuge in Christ, who is the true tree of life. And so his destination is exactly as the scriptures have foretold. Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. Curse. But the blessed, the truly wise, will find life in the one who took that curse for them. The curse isn't any longer a curse upon us, because Christ hung on that cursed tree for us. And as we become his branches now, we'll bear fruit, because from his bosom flow living waters. We have the Holy Spirit indwelling us. And so you see the two pictures of two different ways of living. Again, which do you desire? Which do you want? There's only one way for you to bear the sweet or plump, crisp fruit, and it is to abide in Christ. Now, you'll remember earlier when I said that you would know the wicked by their fruit. But you know, this is only true if you can distinguish their fruit from your own. That is to say, what is your fruit? How does your fruit smell? Does it smell rotten? Does the fruit of your flesh bruise like a peach? Are you aware of its scent, or like a habitual smoker who lives in his house of stench, are you oblivious to your own vaporous, malodorous life? As our souls abide and meditate on Christ, our hearts grow more and more inflamed with the love of Christ. Dear ones, you are meant to be pulled in, to be drawn to the pleasantness of the evergreen tree, the sweet-smelling aroma of the gardenias that grow in the garden of our Lord. Be persuaded by the smooth words of our Savior, by the oily speech of the Anointed One, whose feet trod upon the path of life and whose hands lead you on paths of righteousness to blessedness. And finally, verses five and six, 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. The psalmist highlights this wise path by identifying two possible ends. There's either prosperity or there's punishment, there's perishing. And the blessed person, we are assured, because he has been planted by God and for God will prosper. His prosperity, his flourishing will depend upon the continuing work of the Spirit of God and his prayerful meditative dependence on the Spirit's power and presence and word. And this word here communicates strength, effectiveness, usefulness, power even. Speaking of King Uzziah with this language we read in 2 Chronicles 26.5, he set himself to seek God in the days of Zechariah, who instructed him in the fear of God. And as long as he sought the Lord, God made him prosper. Seek the Lord, and you will prosper, truly prosper in him. Thomas Brooks says, it is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most that will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest, and strongest Christian. But, punishment. Perishing is what awaits the wicked. The end of the wicked is to be swept away in a judgment worse than the judgment for Sodom and Gomorrah. Proverbs 19, 29 says, condemnation is ready for scoffers and beating for the backs of fools. Although the fruit of the wicked may appear sweet, it is bitter to the apple core and it will meet its bitter end. The wicked will disappear and will fade into eternal blackness. The ungodly, even those who cover themselves with religious garb, will be shown to be false. They cannot fool God, who sees all. The only remedy. is then to be found in Jesus Christ and to flourish because of Jesus. Christ alone is the way of life. Christ alone is the way of wisdom. Christ alone is the way to true blessedness. The wicked will not stand in the way of divine judgment, but the righteous man, Jesus Christ, stood under divine judgment to make righteous the once wicked. Rosario Butterfield says, the blood of Christ will not be an ally to the sin it crushed on the cross. Love and true prosperity is found only and fully in Jesus Christ, who is the way. Pursue lasting life, eternal prosperity in Christ, who is not just life, who is not just the life, but who is your life. Can you say that? And you say that about Jesus, that He is my life. Without Him, I am nothing. Everything that is good comes from His hands. For what is a prophet in Ahab to take the vineyard of Naboth, only to be taken away, cut off by the vinedresser? What is a prophet of Jezebel to gain a kingdom for a time, only to be thrown down and have her blood licked up by unholy dogs, because she was not covered in the blood of the Lamb? And what is a prophet, a man to be a five-star general, only to lose the war against the sun, that bright morning star in the Lord of hosts? But oh, how it profits you eternally to be a tree planted by streams of water, to live truly blessed and ever flourishing now and forevermore. Amen. Let's pray. Our glorious God, you are our vision, you are our wisdom. We thank you for true blessedness found in Christ alone. Without Him, there is no hope. Without Him, there is no wisdom. Without Him, there is no light. We thank you for Jesus Christ. In His name we pray, amen.