Let's pray. I ask the Lord to bless our time. Lord, thank you for the day and thank you for each person that is here, each person that's gathered today to hear your word. That right there is a blessing. That means that you've not given up on us. That means that there are still people that you have set aside to worship you. You've still You still seek out those whom you have called to believe. You still receive worship. So I pray that that's what we give you today. That's what you deserve. And as we look at the text of Scripture today that you have inspired for us without error, I pray that we would be challenged by it, and that we would be changed by it, that ultimately it would be the information we need to give you the worship that you deserve. This we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Psalm 1. I know that normally, how many of you have been to the Bible study in the past and you know how this is run? Show of hands. Okay. It's not going to be that different although today you know that you didn't come here with a bunch of questions, right? You don't have study questions to meet with in your group. Well, the lecture time is going to be me giving you those questions and it's my hope to be able to spur you on to think To think about what I say, to think about what you think. How about that? To think about what you think. That's really very important. You need to think about what you're thinking about. Well, okay, I think about this in the text, but I need to think, right? I'll cut out. I might need new batteries in a minute. Tiffany, are you here? You know where they are? It's my go-to lady. If it's a parking, I got to call a parking. So you need to evaluate whether or not what you're thinking is right. So when we look at Psalm 1, incidentally this is, without a doubt, the best Psalm of all the 150. It starts off, it tells us, it gets us off on the right path of everything we need to know. Let's just take a look at it. First and foremost, we're going to read the text. I'm reading from the New American Standard Bible. How many of you have a New American Standard Bible? Who do you have, Joe? New King James. What do you have? Diane? John MacArthur? That's the study notes. What version of the Bible do you have? Do you know? It's either New King James or New American Standard or even ESV. Okay, good. Any ESVs? Okay, ESVs. Any New Living Translations? NLT, any other translation? You have NIV, okay, NIVs. Alright, when you do Bible study, you need It's not that the NIV is not going to work, but studying the Bible, as we'll do in this class, is best had by a New American Standard Bible, an ESV, a King James, a New King James. These are literal versions of the Bible. NIV is a thought-for-thought whereby you take, in this case, if we're in the Old Testament, you would take a Hebrew phrase, and instead of translating it word-for-word, in a literal wooden way, you would get the gist, the idea of it. And I think the NIV is a wonderful Bible. But for study, I might come to words and you'll say, that word's not in my Bible. And it's because it's become a readable text. So if you can get your hands on a New American Standard Bible, it is my belief that you have the best English Bible available. There's the old American Standard Bible, there's the New American Standard Bible, and there's the New American Standard Bible updated in 1995. no it's a ninety five update uh... it was uh... updated from the american standard bible i believe in nineteen seventy uh... so america's in the new york city at least newt all right but i don't know you can take it if any Alright, anyway, I'm reading from the New American Standard Bible, Psalm 1. How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree planted by streams of water. which yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither, and in whatever he does he prospers. The wicked are not so. They are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor centers in the assembly of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish." Alright, so we've got six passages. And the way we're going to study this semester is we're going to look at a method of Bible study. Now, there's all kinds of methods out there. There's acronyms. Many of you have been introduced and told that this semester we're going to study the SOAP method, which begins with Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer. It's not a bad method, but it's an inadequate method, and I don't want you to memorize it, and I don't want you to put it on there and do the soap, because there's a major thing missing within the soap, and that's interpretation. And if you don't get the interpretation right, then you got nothing right. You can make all the observations about a text of scripture you want to. And you can surmise. And there are lots of preachers out there today and books that are written. They're just speculative books. There are things where people speculate and they go on about their speculation. Speculations become tall tales and they sell. You can make all kinds of observations about great stories and then share something about what you think it means to you, right? You heard people do this? You sit in a group and you say, what did this mean to you? Well, what it means to us is really insignificant, isn't it? If it's not right. So, the SOAP method is good insofar as we attach the O with interpretation. They've got to be there. You cannot, ladies, and if there were men or children, I'd say the same thing, you cannot jump from all the observations we can make about a text to the application. Because if your observations are wrong, you will apply something wrong, and then if you seal the deal with prayer, which is the P on SOAP, well now, you feel good about it. You prayed about it. And we all know how we feel when we've prayed about something, it must be right. That's where it gets dangerous. So it's not that soap is wicked, it's just that soap doesn't work. No one remembers soap. That's a soapy type of interpretation, but we've got to have it. So I'm going to say that even though you might put soap in there and you're going to memorize it as a way, what you really want in the back of your head for every time you look at the Bible study are these three things. Scripture, except not three, we're just going to look at, we're going to say, what does it say? Three questions. What does it say? What does it mean? What do I do with it? What does it say? What does it mean? What do I do with it? So when we start to talk about what does it say, we're talking first of all, the Scripture, that's the soap. Let's read it. What does it say? The second thing, we've got to go into what does it mean? The problem is with what does it mean, it means that it takes time. Doesn't it? Now, Gretchen and Sarah, I sat down with them a couple of months ago and we talked about the study. And because I trust them, I know that they were going to bring this up too. So I'm not saying now that they don't have it, I'm going to say what I want to say. They were going to say the same thing. But when you have a text and you begin to observe, you have to interpret. The problem is most people don't want to interpret. We just want to stop with observation. We don't want to do the time thing. And when you don't want to do the time thing, you tend to go where? Commentaries, right? And we tell them, oh, commentaries. Folks, commentaries are absolutely fantastic to have. Don't let anybody ever tell you that they're not good. They're just not something we want to just read that. A lot of people don't have their Bible, they just have a commentary of someone they love. I was asked this morning in a prayer group what I think of Warren Wearsby. Warren Wearsby is a fantastic preacher, a good and godly man, and if you have his commentaries, you've got a good commentary system. But you might be tempted, instead of bringing your Bible, to bring that particular volume, what are they, six volumes, I think, of that, and you're reading through. Not a bad thing. Sometimes you can, if you brought your Warren Wearsby commentary, and you're following along, and you hear the teacher up there, and you're going, That's what Warren said. And you realize, I know where they got this message. You'll never want to do that as a teacher. But if you have the right commentaries that have the right interpretation, that's good. So let me first of all suggest that you all have a good commentary. They're expensive. So the first thing you do is get a good study Bible. If it's a good study Bible, then it's got the explanations of difficult passages. I have here today the MacArthur study Bible. I'm not a John MacArthurite, but I love John MacArthur. Why? Because I've never heard him say anything that wasn't biblical. And I've listened to thousands of his sermons. I've read hundreds of books. And I'm looking for a problem with him because he's not well-loved all over the place. So I can't find it. Whether I like him or not, his teaching is downright accurate. So the MacArthur Study Bible is good. Also, the New American Standard Study Bible is good. If you get the NIV study Bible, it's the exact same study notes, but just a different version of the Bible. That's a good one. What other study Bibles do you have that you want to ask me about? Ryrie's good, it's old. Ryrie's not nearly as in-depth as the newer ones, but it's a good one. It's an oldie but a goodie. Schofield is excellent. It's another oldie and the notes have been updated a little bit, but you can't go wrong. You're not going to get as in-depth as the ones I mentioned earlier. Becky, which one? Matthew Henry, another oldie, timeless. Matthew Henry's got some great thoughts. How many of you have seen the Matthew Henry commentary itself? That's a man who speculates. And that's why they're so long. But good thinking, he stays with the text. A lot of what was completed with the Matthew Henry commentary isn't Matthew Henry at all, because he died before it was finished. And people he knew finished it for him, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Any other study Bibles you want to ask me about? Thompson chain reference. Not bad at all. It's chaining everything in the Bible with itself. It's interpreting itself. Get a good study Bible if you don't have one. Invest. Ladies, this is what you want to sink your money into. Good study tools because they will last you a lifetime. You won't take that Bible with you when you go to heaven. You'll take everything you knew into eternity. That's what you want. So make sure you get that, so that when we move outside of observation, we can have something and we can know that someone who's been where we are long time ago, we can know that we're on the same path. So it is. When we first look at this, we're going to do, we've read the Scripture, that was easy and quick, we've observed, now we're going to start observing. We'll try to figure out, as we observe, we're going to move into what it means. First of all, you're going to interact with me today. Please, I'll wait till you do. If you've spoken once or twice, go ahead and let that be your time and let somebody else. How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked? What do you see? And when we say this, don't be embarrassed to just throw out the most mundane of observations you may find here. You're just observing it. You can't be wrong. Not an observation. You're just observing. What do you see? Barbara. Blessed. Okay, good. Bea, what did you say? What's a blessing? What does it mean to be blessed? Approved of? Favored? Happy? How many of your translations say happy? Tell me your name. Laura. What's your translation? Do you think that happy is the same thing as blessed? Really? Are they equal? Why? Blessed has God's favor. Happy has a full stomach, right? Happiness, if you're a sports fan, is when your team just went up by a touchdown, and you're happy. And then, three plays later, you're down again. Happy does this. What does blessed do? Remains static. So there's a big difference. Are you happy when you're blessed? Sometimes. But if you read stories of people who are blessed, and they're living in a dungeon for the cause of Christ, they're not happy, and yet there's a sense of peaceful happiness within them. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich at lunch time can make you happy. Others are going without anything and they're blessed. So you see the difference. Even though some translations will say happy, don't think there's a major difference. I'll also tell you, and you can get this in your interpretation. Matter of fact, let me show you. Let me get off my PowerPoint and I want to introduce to you the Logos Bible software program. What I have here, let's see, I'm going to get rid of that. I'm going to move the English version over here. so that you can see it. Can you see that at all? I know it could be bigger. There on the left. Yeah, it'll be on your left. That's New American Standard. I have over here, I have other Bibles. This is called the Lexham Bible. That's the Hebrew text. Here's a Lexham Interlinear text. Here's the ESV text. Down here I have what's called the Analytical Old Testament, which is just analyzing each Hebrew word. I'm not going to bore you with that, but if I go over here to one of my clicks, All my resources are right here. If I want to, I can cheat, and I can just go and see what all the commentators have said. I have over here the Apologetic Study Bible. That's another pretty good study Bible. The Bible Knowledge Commentary, MacArthur Study Bible, Calvin's Commentaries, the Expositors Bible Commentary, the Commentary Critical and Explanatory of the Entire Bible, Handbook on the Psalms, Opening Up the Psalms, the Pulpit Commentary, and on and on and on, and I'm not even halfway down. on all that I have over here. It's an exhaustive way too much, right? Just know that I have a bunch at my fingertips. I don't want to mess with those right now. Here I've got an exegetical guide that tells me every word. I can go through it and figure out each word. But let's just go to the English text in the Bible software program. If I put my cursor next to blessed and I right-click it, I'll just get a... What am I going to get there? What are you doing? Yeah, there you go. Thank you, Sherry. You have this, don't you? I'm going to look it up. I'm going to do actually... Yeah, I'll just look it up. I'll just hit look up. Down here, what I see is the ways in which the word blessed is used throughout the Bible. Now, if I just want a basic listing of it, I'll just click over it, and if I go down to the bottom, I know it's very small for you, but it says it's a noun, it's common, it's a common plural noun. I think that stuck out to me. It's a plural word. So if we know that the word blessed is plural, now what observation would you make? How might you interpret this if you're making your own interpretation of Psalm 1? Many blessings. Blessings over and over. For what? For the man who does not walk in the counts of the wicked. Plural blessings. It's not just one little stamp of approval. It's a multiplicity of them. Because it's plural. I think that's interesting. Might not mean anything, but it's interesting. Folks, we've only made it to two words. We could talk about that in a small group meeting for 20 minutes if we wanted to, or more. And you might begin to think about things that have made you blessed over and over, not just one time. Maybe you had the goal of having a child, and you thought, the child will bless me. I will be able to love this child." But in hindsight, you look back and you say, wow, it was so much more than I thought it would be. Yeah, there were curses along the way, but the curses in hindsight of having kids, you realize are actually blessings. Right? All the bad days, all the difficulties, you see how God turned those into a multiplicity of blessings. That's just one thing. So we have a plural word, blessed over and over, a multiplicity of blessings for the man. Now, how many of you have a gender-friendly translation that says the person or the man-woman? Ladies, let me just ask you. Does it offend you when the Bible just says man? Does it bother anyone? Do you get what the guy is talking about? No big deal. Okay, good. I'm glad to hear that from women. As a man, I would say, I don't see how that can make a difference to anybody. We know what man is. Man is mankind. It's for both male and female. So we can at least stick with man, know what he's talking about. We could also put person in there. Alright? So let's just go with it. Let's take a look at a bigger chunk. Blessed is the man or the person who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers. Now think with me. What do you see from that passage? Anything you observe? Sherry? The word council. Council? Huge. Stands out to you. Walk is huge. Council, walk. I'm walking with them, I'm spending time with them, near them, perhaps holding their hands. If I'm in their council, I'm absorbed in whatever they're thinking. And who are these people? They're the wicked. Interesting. Interesting. We're going to figure out in a minute how we can know when we're being counseled and held by them the way she just said. Excellent. Thank you, Sherry. Kelly? So you noticed the negatives were there. Good. Excellent. And from a teaching standpoint, we might say we can teach from a negative standpoint. Negativism teaches. He could have made this positive, right? But the negative, because the world that he's describing is negative, why not expose it for what it is? Excellent. Tell me your name, ma'am. Hi, Marilyn. I'm Lance. So, what are you saying? Go with that. A procession of bad, badder, baddest. I love it. Excellent. You see a progression. In this, Do you see poetry? In motion, as it were. So it's progressing, it's moving along, that's an excellent observation. What else do you see? And the negativity. Yes, Cindy? Good. Yeah, they're essentially saying the same thing, aren't they? Except, I do agree with Marilyn that they're getting worse. Who are the people? What are the three people he describes? Okay, let's think about that. Is there a difference between them? Is it just another way of saying it three times? What are we born? Are we born good? We're born wicked. How does a wicked person become more wicked? Your children, by the way, they're all wicked. They're born wicked. They didn't have to be taught to disobey you. They didn't have to be taught to be rebellious. They're just wicked. They're born in sin. As a matter of fact, Proverbs 22, 6 says, Folly is bound up in the heart of a child. The rod of discipline will drive it far from him, but let's just go with him being his heart bound with folly. It's there. Now, your kids grow up. How many of you have more than one kid and one's good and one's not so good? One gets it, one not. That's always the case if you have two and if you have three or four, they're all wild cards after that. But the point being is, one of them born wicked does more wickedness, has a propensity for it. And sinning is when you do something that's wrong, intentionally. Now, don't touch the candy jar. How many of you had a kid that moves toward it, looking left, looking right, and the other kid? Yeah. Laura definitely has that. How many of you, as Sherry said, were that kid? Then how many of you had a brother or sibling, brother or sister, or another kid that when you told them not to touch it, their natural rule follower instincts kicked in and they didn't touch it? These are the future legalists of the world. They are. They're rule followers. God bless them. And by the way, that's a redneck way of saying, you're so stupid. God bless you. No, I heard that from Jeff Foxworthy, so I thought it was funny. But the point being is they're both wicked. One begins to sin more. Then what does it become? Last one, word? Scoffers. So you see, not only progression, as Marilyn said, in walking, standing, sitting, wicked, blatant sinners, now they're downright scoffers. They were born one way, they got worse, and now they have a settled condition where they're scoffing. So that's a picture. We've just made some observations. If we were going to have a discussion group on this, we might list names with it. We don't want to... You've got to be careful in a discussion group. You don't want to begin to trash people, but take personalities, take people that we know. There are certain... There are axe murderers that are on death row today that grew up in the church before they became what they became and before they went to death row. That's what they were, and their story would be the same. I got caught up with the wrong people. Well, hey, that's Psalm 1, right? Another thing that I want to show you, it's not really related to any word in the text, is that we could finish Psalm 1 and please an entire group of Jewish people, because this is Jewish Scripture. This is nothing of Jesus. Are we here to have these observations and welcome Jews? Sure, Jews would be welcome. But unless this points to Christ, what's the point? It's just a good rabbinic message. So we want to be able to see, that's what you're looking for in your observation, is what can we see from what we know of the New Testament, what we know of Jesus in this? Well, did Jesus walk in the council of the wicked? He listened to them. They came to Him, but He didn't go hanging out with them. You know, He didn't go seek their company to have philosophical discussions. Did He stand in their path? It wasn't His goal. They came to Him and He taught them. Did He sit in their seats of scoffers? No. Did He tell us to do the same? You see, modern day evangelism is go out, find them, sit and talk to them. Better be careful. I like the way when Sherry was telling me, she was using hand motions. They embrace when you listen to their counsel. When Cheryl introduced me, my doctorate, PhD means a doctor in philosophy. When you study philosophy, you study idiots and fools. Because the fool says in his heart there is no God according to Psalm 14.1. That's not a name-calling thing. A fool is a person who, in spite of what they know to be true, believes the contrary. You see, the atheist knows there's a God. They have to assume there's a God to reject that there is a God. Did you know that? That's why they're fools. When we listen to fools, and you get in a doctoral program and you have to listen to fools, You have to be constant in prayer. Lord, don't let me be moved by these folks. Please don't let these philosophies prevail upon me. One of my downfalls, I'll admit to you, and some of you are going to go, glad he knows that, is an air of arrogance about me. And I know that it's there, and I'll admit that it's there. I don't think that it's a sinful part of me. It's a resolve in my own heart of I will not be moved. You will not prevail against me. I will not be moved by what goes on. And yes, that comes across arrogant. I know it. I'm not gonna ask you to raise your hand. You'd hurt my feelings if I asked that you've seen that. But I will say, ladies, that you need, if I speak from my experience, I'm not gonna give you a proof text, but if I speak from my experience, I think that we have to have that arrogant resolve and teach it to our kids. Son, do not be moved. Daughter, do not let that boy tell you what he will tell you. He will tell you anything he can to get into you. Anything! I have a little girl who's very naive. She's the rule follower, but naive to a fault. So what am I going to have to do? I'm going to have to tell her, look, you need to assume these little boys were bugging her. She's one of those that if you bother her, if you pick at her, she will say, that is not nice. Please don't do that. She lets it get to her and that's what these bullies tend to prey upon. She came home last week and my fatherly instincts come out and I said, you tell that boy next time somebody does it, that my dad will hurt you. She laughed and I said, I'm dead serious. You tell them my dad will hurt you. Now, it's true, but I'm not going to go to school and hurt a little boy that's bothering my child. What I'm trying to teach her is you stand your ground, you look them in the eye and you say, you will not move me. I'm not afraid of you. As a Christian, we do not back down from atheists. We do not back down from those who think they have a better argument than us, who think they live a better life than us. We know God. We not only know Him, we acknowledge Him as God. So don't you think that one who acknowledges God is better than one who knows there is a God and rejects Him? Of course! We have better arguments. Our arguments are perfect. Theirs are not. These are the people that folks go out and say, go stand, go minister to. Now, that's a discussion all your own. I hope that you can look at that and say, you know, look at the people I've been trying to talk to and save. They're bringing me down. Maybe you dated someone along the way. Maybe you married one of these people, hoping that God would save them. Maybe He did. Maybe He hasn't. Maybe that person has brought you down. There it is. How blessed, over and over, blessings unending, multiplicity for those who do not do. Verse 1. Verse 2. But his delight is in the law of the Lord. Stop. What do you see? Say it. You can't speak slowly. You got to say it. Contrast. Good. Excellent. You see a contrast. No doubt. Because that comes with but. But is making a contrast. Negative to a positive instead of vice versa. An observation. An excellent one. Charlotte. I'm sorry? Love of the Word. He loves the Word. What part of the Word does he love? Huh? How many of you delight in God's grace? How many of you delight in His mercy? How many of you delight and thank Him for the provisions He gives you? How many of you woke up this morning saying, Lord, I love your law? That's an odd thing to say. He delights in the law of the Lord? And that's putting the Ten Commandments to reading and going, oh, this is good stuff, isn't it? Well, what's he talking about? The word for law, the Hebrew text is Torah. So he's really not talking about anything. What's the Torah? The first five books. Ladies, when's the last time you read Leviticus A? And B, when's the last time you read it and said, I need to read that again? or suggested it, or quoted from it, put it on your Facebook page or whatever you might do. People don't do that. I was thrilled, I was delighted in January through, what, just a couple weeks ago, January until September, I taught verse by verse through Deuteronomy. And there were over a hundred people every single week. I was thrilled. I did not think that. People showed up for Deuteronomy. There seemed to be a delight in the law. But it wasn't a delight in it as it was. People wanted to know it here so that they could delight in it. It was wonderful. I delighted in it when it was over. I think it's one of the most pivotal books in the entire Bible because it sets the stage for, not only gives us the background of Israel, it sets the stage for our Lord. For the Christ, do you know it's the most quoted Old Testament book in the New Testament? It's a good book to know. When Jesus was tempted, what book of the Old Testament did He use on three occasions? Deuteronomy. So, there it is. To delight in the law of the Lord is not something we normally do. But tell me why, at least a couple of reasons why it might be a good idea to delight in it. And let's just call the law the Ten Commandments, because it's the summary. Why would you delight in it? Thou shalt not. Again, negatives. Come on, think Christian. Sarah? Okay, good. So you're not pulled away. You know that those things are wrong. Right up front, you know they're wrong. Good. Leslie? Okay, okay. Okay, so you look at it from the perspective of what He wants us to know. Give me this. Under the same answer, give me the other side of that. What does it say about God? What He doesn't want you to do. Which is who God is. His character. Our God is a moral God. And He cares about things. He has laws. Tony. Love it. Excellent. How many, with that in mind, how many, yeah, Rowena, go ahead. Because, how many of you had security in boundaries? How many of you had curfews when you were teenagers? How many of you liked that when you were teenagers? Why sometimes, Becky? Oh, good. Excellent. So, instead of standing up for what you believe, you could just blame them. Yeah, I like that. No, I mean that. Because as a kid, we need that at times, at least as we grow. Yeah, you use your husband for that now. Oh yeah. Well, and I tell people here, even the small group leaders and the elders, look, just put it off on me. I'll be the bad guy. Or we hire Joe Batluck, and Joe Batluck, as an executive pastor, will become more and more the bad guy. Carol Phillips is the bad guy at times. You know, I have told him to come in and always check on me. And if I'm caught too long somewhere and you see Carol flipping lights, my excuse is, we got to go. Carol wants us to leave. I'd stay all night, but we got to go. No. I shouldn't have given that away, should I? My old clue when I was talking to people that wouldn't go away was, and the elders are supposed to be looking for Lance hitting his head. Yeah. What? Oh, we got to go. The point being is that, what is the point? I don't know what the point I was making. Is it when we make these excuses. I used to counsel kids as a counselor of youth. The ones that got in the most trouble had no boundaries. And I've also talked to adults that in hindsight look back and literally say they wish their parents would have loved them by giving them a curfew. I can look back now, I know we didn't like the curfews, whether it be 10, 30, 11 o'clock or one in the morning, we didn't like them, especially at prom we wanted to stay out later. We didn't like them, but now I look back and I know mom and dad loved me. They did then and they do now. My dad, I wanted a motorcycle when I was a kid and his answer to me was, I love you too much to buy you a motorcycle, son. I didn't get that then. I mean, just eating candy before a meal, I didn't get that then. But it was the boundaries that told me about the character of my parents and that they loved me. Don't cheat your kids out of a rigid set of rules and discipline every single time when they mess up. They will look back and remember you love them. There it is. That's our God. In doing that, we're mimicking our God, delighting in His law. Note that second phrase in verse 2. In His law, He meditates day and night. What does it mean to meditate? Over and over? What does that imply? Okay, what does dwelling in it imply? Time. The one thing you don't have, right? One thing you don't have, Sarah and I were talking yesterday. She's a young mother. She's 36 years old. Yes, that's what I said. You just told me that yesterday, didn't you? She's 35 years old. She has a newborn. She homeschools her children. She has a husband, a home to take care of. They're healthy and it could be worse, right? But it's a lot of work, isn't it? Sherry Klein? Kids are gone. They live in another city. She has grandkids but they're somewhere else. She lives with her husband. Husband's retired. Are they at different life points? Does one have more time to meditate than the other? Ladies, let that be a relief to some of you. When we push here, read the Bible, read it every day, stay in it, make sure you know it. Sometimes you throw it off and you say, I just don't have time. I mean, Samantha, you're in the trenches. How old's Caleb? Eight months old. That's trenches. And his brother? Three? That's the closest a woman gets to hell. That you'll ever be to hell. And that's with children she loves. And there's only two. And if you've had kids, you know that. Lauren, how old is yours now? Eleven months. You got another one on the way? Don't do it. But you'll be arrogant enough to think you can do it in a year. Come on, Corey, let's do this again. Another baby, and you'll learn from it. But that's really what you don't have time to do, whereas a Sherry Klein does, a Joe Owens does. They're older, wiser, and they have time. So, remember, when you're talking about meditating, it takes time, but don't knock yourself out with all the things that you think you have to do if you compare yourself to one of these ladies. Leah, you're the same way, you're almost an empty nesting, right? You're gonna hold on to Michael as hard as you can, that poor kid. So you delight in God's law, you meditate on it, when? Don't you have to do other things? What passage of scripture does that remind you of, if any? Meditating on God's law, day and night. Say again? There's no wrong answer, if it reminds you. Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 6, 4 to 9. Because what do you do with your kids? It's called the great Shema among the Hebrews. What do you do? Hear O Israel, Lord our God, the Lord is one. Teach it to your kids. When you lie down, you wake up, you walk by the wayside, talk about it all the time. It's not like you have to be on your knees all day, meditating with the Bible before you. Prayer is a way of life. It's thinking. Remember that, ladies. You don't have to have your time of prayer. There are special times of prayer where you are on your knees in a dark closet, but when you get up and you're walking around, you're still walking with Christ. You're still praying. You're meditating on it. You're thinking about it. Everything you see is filtered through what you know of the Bible because you've meditated on it. And if you can't do that, then you're not reading it enough. You're filtering it. Vicki told a wonderful story. I won't give away the story, but she was just talking about some life experiences that she had, dealing with her kids, some difficult doctrines she's been hearing for a couple of years, and she was taken by the word meditate. Thinking about it and putting things together. What happened with my kids? What's going on in my life versus what I'm hearing in church versus what's challenging me and connecting the dots until she gets to a point where I think I get it. That takes time, and that's why interpretation is important, because it takes time. If you don't have time, you can cheat and go to the commentaries, that's okay. You'll have the right interpretation, but you cheat yourself out of the time of coming to that. I could be, if I left Harvest Bible Church, I have taught two to four times a week over the last 12 years, and that doesn't include what I did up to this point. I've written more pages than I can count. I know it. If I go to another church, I never have to work another day. All I got to do is break out what I've done and go forward. And that's what a lot of preachers do. They have a file cabinet with sermons, five, six years worth of sermons, and they make the circuit and they move on, and they're still considered great preachers. But if all you're doing is pulling out old sermons from a file cabinet, dusting it off, updating the illustrations, the pastor's cheated out of the beauty of being a pastor. The best part of me being a pastor is that I get to spend my time there. And I'm held accountable to doing it. But if I went somewhere else, I mean, I can't do repeat sermons here. nor would I want to. Yeah, I will be caught in a heartbeat here. There's no doubt. That's a great accountability. It also keeps me out of trouble. How many do we know pastors that have had these moral failures? Moral failures among pastors are pastors that have too much time on their hands. We don't just work on Sunday, but here's the thing, we could. And if we have an ability to speak, I'm not saying I do, but if there's an ability to speak and make up these great we're conjuring up things from an observation, well then we can be seen as the cat's meow. But if we're judged upon what we're saying here, if it's evident that we studied, and studying takes time, and one of the reasons I pass out each week, many of you are on my email list, or now you get it from the website, you say, I know where Lance was last week, because I'm giving you what I wrote, what I spent the time in, it's not for a pat on the back, it's so you know where the pastor is. I don't have a girlfriend. My best friend is my wife. She's always with me. I work most of the time at home. And I stay away from the things that could get me in trouble. So if I'm studying, I'm out of trouble. Meditating, it's what it takes. Day and night, all the time. Do you see some of the observations you can be making? I hope you're able to jot down, well, that reminds me of this. Well, that reminds me of that. What is he? He, the person that does this, will be like... What do you see? Say again, Laura. Okay, like a tree. And what is like a tree? Go back to 5th grade. 4th grade, simile. It's a figure of speech. Is a man a tree? A woman a tree? Well, we see these things all the time. But think about what they're saying. They're painting a picture. There's an image. Like a tree. He could have said, he would be a great man. Great man is not so specific, but a tree. Go out and see one of these big trees out in the yard. And note the age of a tree. Note how big they are. Note the root system. Note when a storm comes along, how those trees remain in the ground. That's what we're talking about here. Like a tree, the New American Standard inserts firmly, because it's in italics, it's not in the text. He will be like a tree, really literally, it's like a tree planted by streams of water. Firmly is the implication. You ever seen a tree planted by streams of water? You're maybe going down the river, and you see trees on the bank. Do those trees lack for water? There's some weathering and the stream flows, you can see a root system and you think, gosh, how can I make it? But the roots are so deep. There's a tree right over here in this courtyard. It's the biggest tree that we have. The roots come out at the playground, which means they're completely under this building. They run all the way out into the field in the back. That's how old and how deep those roots were. So even if one portion of it is, you can see the root system, they're so deep. Will a tree planted by water on the streams, will it be, is it going to dry up? It's always there. So, we're doing a light comparison. We've thought about a tree that's planted by streams of water. This tree, because it's watered, because it's watered, produces fruit and its leaf doesn't wither. But we're talking about men, women, people. So we need to make that connection. So what's the connection? It's not hard. What does it look like when a person, Betty, when a Christian is fed by the word continually like a tree is water? What does it look like? It says fruit from the tree. What would we expect to see in a person like that? Good. Okay. What happens if some terrible pain comes into their life? What would you expect from such a one? And if that didn't happen, what will we assume? That it was all a facade. Ruth? Couldn't say any better. And the only way, in context with my Sunday morning series in 2 Peter and my Wednesday night series in Hebrews, is that you won't know who the real from the fake are until bad things happen. Until you're able to follow and watch whether or not these people are being fed by it. There's an old quote, I think it was A.W. Tozer that said it, he said, It is doubtful whether God can use a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply. It is doubtful whether a man can be used by God greatly until he has been hurt by God deeply. Hurt. Pain. The loss of loved ones. Difficulties. Ministries that don't go according to plan. Kids that aren't always great. I mean, how many of you have managed your kids? Managing is one thing. Manipulating them is another. You can't make your kids into something and you're not a failure if you didn't. But if you didn't manage them well, you can't expect that they will be anything. Well, that's what we have here. We've got a man who meditates on God's law day and night, and he's not just filled with knowledge. When bad times come, everything is blooming. Now let's just take, well, let me finish it. Fruit yields in its season. Leaf does not wither. And in whatever he does, he prospers. We'll just go with English. We're not even going to do any background interpretation here, but what did you just think about when you read that? Money? The prosperity of money, okay? Hold that thought. Let's get a couple other observations. Who or what did you think about? Success, okay. Okay. Could be money, could just be success. I'll ascend to the top of my company if I read the Bible every day, right? No, I mean that could be. Becky? Same thing? Good. And prosperous, and that's true, but really it's in our definition of what it means to be prosperous, isn't it? How we define that. Let's look it up, in a second. You didn't go where I thought you were going, where I wanted you to go, at least where I went. What else did you think about? Get off the success and money, that's definitely there. Marilyn? Contentment? So we'll be content with that. Excellent. That's certainly encompassed in that word. Charlotte? Good. Good. Whatever. Who? Not Jesus. Who did you think about when you read that phrase? Come on, ladies! You thought of yourself? Okay, good. Not bad. We're in the observing sect, so we can't be wrong, and that's right anyway. Cindy? Okay, so you thought of Joel Osteen, fine. Alright, that's all fine. You're going, all of you are going to go, oh yeah. Joseph, what happened to Joseph? Everything he did prospered. The phrase is the same phrase. Apparently you're not reading your Bible. No, he did not. And that's the beauty of his story. The beauty of his story is that here's a boy who was sold around the age of 17 into slavery by his brothers. Imagine the pain of being in a pit knowing that your brothers just did this and now they're going to sell you. You hear them up at the top talking about, let's not kill him. Oh, let's kill him. No, let's not kill him. We'll sell him to those guys. We'll sell him over there. He has nobody's nothing. He's a mama's boy, daddy's boy. His mom's dead, so I shouldn't say he's a mama's boy. He's in Egypt. He's now enslaved in Egypt. He ascends to a certain level. Why? Because everything he did prospered. Now all of a sudden he's back in prison for under a false trumped-up charge. And now he's putting his hand to everything and prospering again. Do you see this man's life? Up, down. Up, down. Everything he touched prospered. But everything, it wasn't Joel Osteen, and he wasn't a wealthy man. In the midst of that, later on he became such. He was obedient. He was moral. He apparently knew enough about God to where he believed God in the midst of this, and he never cursed Him. And at the end of it, when he's looking back and his brother's thinking that Joseph's going to kill him, he says, no, what you meant for wickedness, God meant for good. So that, to me, is what stands out. That's why I have Joseph written out. Write it in your Bibles, ladies. Come on. I loved all your observations are good. But there's a biblical example that we need to look at. It's what makes him such a great story as to what happened and then how God prospered him. And whatever he does, he prospered. That means that it doesn't mean that he's going to be rich or that he's going to be successful in all things. He might die in the midst of it. Sue, do you have a comment? We know that God works out good. Good. That's a prosperity, isn't it? So we know from the Bible we're observing that it doesn't mean that they're going to be wealthy, per se. That it doesn't mean they're going to be healthy, per se. But I'll tell you what, when you pull that out of context and you read a good Joel Osteen book, that's exactly what it's going to mean. That's why you can't observe this without interpreting it, because you're going to mess up, not only for yourself, but for others. You're going to teach the wrong things. Now, let's do... I love to do this. You've heard me do it on Sunday mornings, but let's do the opposite. Let's go back and let's just take the opposite of what this says. What is the antithesis of being blessed? Cursed. Cursed is the person or the man who walks and listens to the counsel of wicked people, who stands in the path of those who do what they choose, and who sits in the seat of those who scoff at God. He hates God's law. He never reads it. He will be like a weed that grows up in shallow sand, maybe in the crack of your driveway. planted by concrete underneath it that yields nothing, has no leaf, but is dead at the end of a hot summer day in July in Houston. Why? He doesn't read God's Word, doesn't love it. That little phrase right there, in his law, he meditates day and night. If we just take the opposite of it, all you got to do is say, he never reads it. And it's because he doesn't love it, and because of those things, he's found himself in the quandary he's in. These are just ways to observe the text, ladies. Make sure you do that when you're talking about it. You're not going to go to your small groups with a whole list of questions. You're thinking right now. You're going to talk about those. Sherry? Ask what the key passage is in these three verses. What's the key center thought that's all around? What is the key thought? She asks. It's the law of God, isn't it? Meditating upon it. Kind of runs the whole thing, doesn't it? Permeates the whole thing. If you don't have that, you don't have this. The multiplicity of blessings. So there's the stage. Stage is set. Did I tell you anything today that you didn't know? No. I might have given you some thoughts you hadn't pondered, but this is not a reinvention of the wheel. It's profound, but all we did was spend 45 minutes talking about it, didn't we? Alright, now we're going to make the transition. I'll go a little quicker. We're not doing small groups today, are we? Did we decide we're not doing small groups today? I can't remember and we prayed about it. We'll do small groups. They won't be as long, but we'll get, yes. That way you'll know who your leaders are. Not so the wicked. We could have figured that out. They're not like that. What are they like? They're like chaff that the wind drives away. Let me just tell you what in the Bible you'll see this phrase called the threshing floor. The threshing floor. Sounds like it's a room with a floor, but it's really a place upon the highest mountain where it gets the best breezes. And you would take the wheat that you just harvested. It's in a kernel. It's in a shell of sorts, half broken. And you would take this and you would put it on the ground with a pitchfork of sorts. And you would pitch it in there and you would throw it up into the air. And you would keep doing it. And you would keep doing it. And the shell on that wheat kernel, you'd throw it up into the wind, the shell would blow away. And the wheat, weightier than the wind, would fall to the ground. And you do it over time. You know, all you're going to have eventually is just the wheat. Everything else is blown away. That's a great image. They're like the chaff that the wind drives away. That's what the wicked are like. Well, think about that. They're blowing away. The first thing I think of when I look at it is Ephesians 4.14 says that these people, the wicked, are driven away by every wind of doctrine. You'll be driven by every wind of doctrine when you don't know true doctrine, which comes back to what Sherry was making point. What's the effective solution? You've got to be reading your Bible. Whether you're Sarah, busy as all get out, or Sherry, not quite as busy, although busy nonetheless. You're reading God's Word. The wicked are not like the righteous. They're being driven away by the wind. Therefore, drawing the conclusion, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. That means there's a judgment if we're going to make some observations, right? It also looks like that there's a separate judgment for the righteous and the wicked, that we will not be together. How will the righteous be judged anyway? And what are the righteous? That's a good word to track down in the Bible. Who is made righteous? Who's the king of righteousness in the Old Testament? Abraham. And what did Abraham do to become righteous? He believed God, and God counted it to him as righteousness. And I like the word obey, because believe is synonymous with obey. If you don't obey, you don't believe. If you believe and you don't obey, you don't believe. You just know something. So, we know who the wicked are, and we know that they're... So if a righteous person is made righteous by God, what judgment are we going to stand in? Is there a judgment? It seems to imply that there's a judgment for us. Well, Why do you think that? You're right. Why do you think that? Right. What we did and what we didn't do. Excellent. I couldn't have said it better myself. That's exactly right. The righteous are judged. I think it's going to come down to something like this. Lance, what did I give you and what did you do with it? When my wife told you that I got my doctorate, I look at my life and I think, wow, I was given the opportunity to study. I was given the opportunity to be educated, to go to Dallas Seminary, to go to Newburgh Seminary, to study. I was given that. It cost money. That's a gift. So if God educated me, He wants something from me. He wants something from that. I'm also a healthy man. I can go run. I can be out of breath and gain my breath back. I can eat. Everything works. I look at my family. I've got a wife who loves me. I've got children that I love and they love me back, sometimes. I've got a church of people who look upon me. I'm admired in some people's eyes. I have more friends than most people have. And so do you if you come to this church. The opportunities that are there, I think, wow, what an amazing life. I'll never forget as long as I live the day I was a junior in high school and I was depressed. I was down and I walked over to the neighbor's house. I was taking care of their pool and I just sat in their backyard and I thought, where's my life going? Lord, what's going to happen to me? I'm not the top of my golf team, so I don't think I'm going to become a professional golfer. That's all I ever wanted as a kid and I worked hard to be that, but I could see it not unfolding. I recognize, I'm not a tall, dark, and handsome dude. I'm probably not going to bait the best babe in the world. Well, that was wrong because I did. She lured her in. What kind of a job will I get? I was 17 years old. I don't know what I want to do. Who am I going to be? Am I going to be able to afford it? I love where we lived growing up. We lived on a golf course, and my dad gave us everything. And I thought, I'm never going to be able to do this. I mean, who can do this? As technology advanced, I thought, I'll never be able to have a phone or a laptop, computer. I'm going to be a preacher as that began to unfold. And now as I look back, and I challenge you to look back over your life, go back to when you were 16, 17, or the days in which you thought, what will I ever amount to? and begin to count. Wow. If you would have told me then, God, what I know now, oh my. And now if we stop here and go forward 30, 40 more years, we think, if that's the case, what will I be saying then? Looking back on my life. Even if bad things have happened to you, God works everything out for good. Everything is prospering you if, in fact, you are being fed by God's Word. Because being fed by God's Word makes you see the world in the right way. So our judgment is, what did I give you? What did you do with it? Lance, here's what I gave you. Great privilege, great health. Did you sleep in every day? Did you do your repeat sermons? When I gave you opportunities to counsel with people, did you ignore it? Did you watch more TV and sit with your kids? What did God give you? What did you do with it? That's our judgment, Leah. The rest, that's a different judgment. They're judged. God is flipping through a book. I don't see your name here in the book of life. That book that I wrote from before the foundation of the world. Depart from me. That's not the judgment that you and I stand in. If we know Christ, we know we were entered into the book of life long before we were ever born. An unedited book. There is no erasing in that book. The wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. The Lord knows the way. You've got to look at know if you're going to observe. He knows the way. Does He not know the way of the wicked? He knows the way. He knows our way. Of course He knows our way. He paved our way. When we're on His way, He knows that way. The wicked, by sheer virtue of being wicked, are not on that way. Now you're going to think of names in your mind. You're going to think of people that are on that way in your observations. That becomes a prayer list. I'm going to pray for these people. They're on the wrong way. Might even an opportunity to share with them. So, as I've gone through this, let me go back to my PowerPoint and just go through quickly what I do so that you see. Let's take a look first of all. We're going to do a recipe. One cup brown sugar. How many of you know what this is? You know what a cup is. You probably have a measuring instrument in your kitchen for this. You know what brown sugar is. Let's assume you don't know what a cup is. This is a cup. It says cup. So you put something in it. Sugar? What's brown sugar? Do I need to get it dirty? If you don't know what brown sugar is, you might just go make your sugar dirty. Or pour brown food coloring on your sugar. It sounds absurd. But you're only imagining, you know exactly what this is, right? Imagine that you don't, alright? 3 quarter cups of shortening. What's shortening? What popped into your mind? For me it's always that old 1970s can of Crisco. And you do the big spoon through it and it's a big white chunk of lard, right? Crisco. Well, I know what that is. Not everyone does. And I know my fractions. It's 0.75. It's not quite a cup. But if I don't, I don't know what a cup is, I don't know fractions, and I don't know what shortening is, I might just think, it could mean all kinds of things, shortening. How many of you substitute, because you know what shortening is, substitute shortening with butter? All right, well, what if you're a stupid man and you say, well, I know that my wife uses butter sometimes. Oh, there's some brummel and brown stuff. You know the brummel and brown, it's part yogurt. That looks like butter, you throw that in there. Is that, yeah, Sue's back there going, huh? Because you know better, right? You think whatever it is you're cooking ain't going to be too good. And why? Because you know. You're interpreting this as you go. You don't need to do observation. A quarter cup of molasses. Well, I said a quarter cup because I know one-fourth is a quarter. So I just interpreted that right away. Another cup, molasses. What's molasses? You know what it is? One egg white. Egg white? The egg is white. If I don't know, I might think, well, that's the white. And when you open it up, it's yellow inside, right? One's more yellow than another. But if I don't know, I'm going to throw out the contents of the egg and chop up the white part. Now, there's a person in here whom I will not tell you. Yes, Sherry. There's another way you can look at this. The more you've cooked, we can use a process of elimination. Good. So we know we're in a certain part of things we're going to cook. This is something sweet we're making. It's probably chocolate chip cookies or something like that because we're familiar with cooking. We know recipes. Excellent. But you're talking to my daughter. You're going to teach my young daughter, and they don't know that. So you can't take it for granted, can you? But if you already know, that's exactly right. An egg white, there's a woman in our church, I won't tell you who she is, if she wants to show her face, she can. Okay, the funny story of Leslie and the egg white. If you don't know the story, she made cookies for Paul one day, and to her an egg white was a boiled egg with the white, right? So she cracks open the shell, and she puts the egg white into this batch of cookies. And she serves these cookies, and it's got little chunks of white in it, right? Okay, well there you go. But you know, it's a funny story, but why did that happen? Because she didn't quite know yet. If she did that today, we'd laugh at her, but it would only be again because she didn't know what an egg white. By the way, how many of you know exactly how to separate the yolk from the egg white? Do you go back and forth? You're doing it wrong. Here, you're going to love me for this. Take an empty water bottle with a spout like that. Put it on top of the yoke or squeeze the bottle first on top of the yoke and let go and it goes out like that. It's gone. Presto, all you have left is the white, no more back and forth. You take an empty water bottle and you squeeze it and you just suck it. You let go and it just sucks it out and that's all that goes. I know it. I won't even charge you for that. But it takes interpretation, doesn't it? I'm trying to make a point. Two cups of flour, well, you and I know what flour is. What if somebody went outside and got a flour? The spelling changes everything. All the while, we've got to have exact measurements. If it's not one, three quarters, a quarter, one, two and one, whatever it is we're cooking is not going to be very good, right? It has to be precise. Note that. One teaspoon of baking soda. How many of you watched growing up, eight is enough? Remember, eight is enough? The little kid, I'll never forget, he was making something and one of the sisters comes in and, How's it going, Nicholas? He says, Oh, it's going great. He's digging through. He said, I'm not quite sure what all the tibbles and tisps are, but it's going to come together. Tibbles, tablespoons, tisps, teaspoons, right? And he had this big concoction of something. You got to know what a tisp is, right? Baking soda. Got to know what that is. I'm thinking soda, I'm thinking Coca-Cola. One tisp of cinnamon, half pound of ground ginger or half teaspoon, pound of ground ginger. Some of you are beginning to see what might be coming together here. Very specific though, right? One teaspoon of ground cloves, quarter tablespoon or teaspoon of salt. What have we made? Ginger snaps. Now, the egg white, I just threw in there. It's actually just a full egg. It's not the white, it's the full egg. I was trying to make a point. I needed to tell Leslie's story. Ladies, if you're off on this, your cookies are going to stink. Everything needs to be interpreted. It needs to be exact for that batch of cookies to taste good. If you're off, they don't. Am I right? If I decide that salt and sugar look the same, they're both white, what are those cookies going to taste like? If the flour I use is a ground up dandelion, what is it going to taste like? If I grind up the egg shell because it's white and not the egg white or the egg itself, what's it gonna taste like? It's not good. This is the illustration for how important it is to do our Bible studies correct. It is exact. You must be right. You must be right in how you apply it and you must be right in how you teach it. If you're off, you have no business opening your mouth. You have no business thinking it if it's not right. There is a right and there's a wrong. Some observations I made, I looked at it, I said blessed is plural, set in contrast to the wicked, which are just singularly wicked. What Marilyn said, they walk, stand and sit, that's all an elevation, sin getting worse. Wicked sinners, scoffers also elevate the person. I asked myself, can one actually delight in God's law? Meditation seems like it takes silence, not always easy to find. And thought, day and night, seems like it takes all the time. That's what it takes to be a theologian. It's what it takes to be an athlete, doesn't it? It's what it takes to be in shape. Whatever he does prospers reminds me of Joseph. Read it backwards. We did. Verses 1 to 3 remind me of Jesus while exhorting me to be the same way. The only one that fits this is Jesus. But I want to be that way. I want to delight in God's law. That leads me to Christ. When I see His law, I see that I have fallen short of His glory. I need Jesus. I need something. Because if that law is what I'm supposed to delight in, I'm going to loathe it because it kills me. It's going to kill me, but I know Jesus saves me. He did the law. I didn't. I identify myself with Him by faith and I'm saved. Meditating on the Word occupies my time. That's a good way to occupy time. It feeds my actions. If I'm feeding on God's Word, then my actions look like it, and it makes me strong. If I'm looking for prosperity, I have found it, whether I'm rich or not. Prosperity. I see a strong distinction that is made between blessed and wickedness in God's eyes, and while we might not notice, God does. We might not think it's a big deal because we compare ourselves to others. God notices that strong distinction. God knows the way of the righteous as if to say that He is with the righteous. That's why He knows us and He knows our way. As the chaff blows from the kernel, so too will the wicked not be in the presence of the righteous at the final judgment." I'm conferring with Revelation 24 to 6 and verses 11 to 15. It's the great white throne judgment, different from the judgment of the Bema Seat of Christ that we see in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 that Leah described. The figures of speech I noticed, I noticed day and night, means all the time. I noticed like a tree. I noticed, like chaff in the wind. So when you see these figures of speech, you're observing and you're thinking, alright, let me get that image in my mind and put it out there so that I can think about it and illustrate it. Or at least get to where the writer was. The best way, you know you've read something and you've been effective when you are thinking the writer's thoughts after him or her. Get in their mind. What were they thinking? They're thinking about this wind driving away. We're going to look at Psalm 23 next time. And in Psalm 23, it's David taking all the responsibilities of being a shepherd over sheep and relating them to who God is. There's an image in his mind. We want to get on that page. We can think his thoughts. The figure of speech is that the righteous are related to fruitful tree and wheat. What's a fruitful tree look like? What does wheat look like? What is it? The wicked are related to chaff that blows away with the wind and is burned. Blowing away with the wind are those who are taken away by every wind of doctrine in Ephesians 4.14. They're burned in the sense of what Jesus said in John 15.6. He cuts off the branches that bear no fruit and throws them to the fire. There's judgment. The wicked and the righteous are not together in judgment, so why would they be together in life? If we're not going to be judged together, why are we associating with them and bonding ourselves together with them in our lives? Especially when 2 Corinthians 6, verses 14 and 18 tells us not to be bound together with unbelievers. Why? We're not going to be in eternity that way. Why here? You say, well, how else am I going to evangelize? Folks, evangelizing people is not about going over to their house and becoming best friends with them. It's about taking the opportunity to tell them about Jesus and saying bye. That doesn't pass as evangelism today. No, you've got to become friends. Friendship evangelism. You can't tell them about Christ. You've got to move into their lives, you know, like an Amway salesman. You've got to try to sneak in so that you can eventually, one time, at a certain point, one day, give them the gospel. That's never what Jesus did. You tell them about Jesus, and if they say, yes, I love it, then you go into their home and tell them more. And if they don't want to hear it, say, have a nice day. Ruth. Oh, you're reading along. Oh, I'll go back to it. I can give you these. Now, finally, we're going to approach the New Testament. We can't go to Jesus. We've just made the Jews happy because they would amen everything we say. Jesus says in John 17, 17, sanctify them, praying to the Father. Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. Sanctify means to be made holy. That's what the word means. It means to be set apart. Jesus is saying, Lord, God, Father, set your people apart with the truth. We become set apart when we meditate daily on God's Word. That's what sets us apart. James chapter 1 22 to 25 says this prove yourselves doers of the word not merely hearers who delude themselves But if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer He is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror once he has looked at himself and gone away He has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was but the one who looks intently at the perfect law There's that law looking intently at it. That's meditating the law of Liberty and abides in it Not having become a forgetful here, but an effectual doer this man will be blessed in what he does is that not Psalm 1? There it is, New Testament. Find your New Testament parallels so that we see. And finally from the New Testament, Romans 12, 2 says, And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. How do we renew our minds? We let God's Word feed it and fuel it. Why? So that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good, acceptable, and perfect. Alright. You have something to talk about? Do you need a list of questions that someone concocted and put in a book? No, you have six verses of nothing but observations to sit down, talk about, and pray about. Let me close this. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the challenge of it. There is no way we could sit here all day and exhaust all the observations we could make. And so I pray, Lord, that with this in our minds early on in the day, that this would fuel us, that we would be fueled, that we would go and learn more. And if we haven't figured out everything, that we go and try to figure it out. It's a book you've given to us. It's in our hands. We have multiple copies of them in our homes and offices. Let it fuel us, Lord. Let it not be a good book on the shelf. Let it be what fuels us. May we love your law. Meditate on it day and night. Lord, let everything we see, from the election to talking to our friends, remind us of what your word says. May we filter everything with your word. Thank you, Lord. Your word is truth. Sanctify us with it. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.