You are listening to Bible Direction for Life, the sermon podcast of West Side Baptist Church in Bremerton, Washington. We pray that the preaching and teaching you hear on this podcast connects the truth of the Bible to your life, that you would learn more about the triune God who made you and what He made you for. And now, here's today's message. Please open your Bibles to the book of Psalms, Psalms 1 and Psalm 2, and we will work through the text as we work through the sermon. This is the time every year that we take to spend some time thinking about the importance of scripture in the life of the believer. And so usually after the last Sunday of the year or the first Sunday of the year, depending on how the New Year's, New Year's falls, New Year's Sunday, we give some attention to these passages of scripture to think about the importance of scripture in our lives. Let's go before the Lord in prayer and we'll get started. Father, I come before you this morning, and I thank you for your word and how precious it is, how nourishing it is to our souls. I pray that you would give us a deep appreciation of your word this morning, an encouragement to devote ourselves to it evermore faithfully. May your spirit, who authored that word, be present in our midst to lift our hearts up to you this morning. In Christ's name, amen. As I was growing up, one of my dad's favorite stories was of the day when his own father, my grandfather, whom sadly I never met, but he brought home one time when my dad was still quite small, five seedling fruit trees. three peach trees, a pear tree, and an apple tree. And with great joy, my grandfather, my father, and my two uncles planted those fruit trees in their garden in Maryland. With great effort, they kept them watered and weeded and free of pests. And the next spring, the boys were delighted when the new trees were covered with tiny little fruit buds. To their shock and dismay, my grandpa told them to go out to the garden, pick all the fruit buds, and throw it away. The trees, as he explained, needed to focus their energy on putting down roots. If you tried to get edible fruit in the first season, it would compromise the long-term fruitfulness of the trees. And so for three years, at times through tears of disappointment and discouragement, they picked that unripe fruit and they threw it away. This is actually a regulation that's found for planting fruit trees in Leviticus, in Leviticus 19. And so for those three years, they let the fruit trees put down roots. By the fourth year, the trees were strong and healthy. They had deep roots and sturdy branches. And every year after that, for as long as they lived at that house, those trees produced abundant harvest of delicious fruit in their season, year after year after year. And for all I know, those trees are still producing fruit. When they're allowed to grow their own root systems, fruit trees can keep on producing delicious fruit for decades. And there are some trees that have been producing fruit. There's a pear tree in, I think it's in Massachusetts that has been, or Connecticut, that has been producing pears for more than 300 years. Growing roots that are deep and broad takes time. It's sometimes boring work. It's always slow work. It demands patience and sacrifice, sweat, and sometimes even a few tears. But in the end, long-term fruitfulness comes from rootedness. Consistent fruit comes from deep roots. and deep roots take time to put down. Now, at the end of the message, we're gonna come back to this theme as a matter of application, but at this point, we need to consider the overall structure of our text and how it relates to this matter of putting down roots in the word of God. As I've mentioned before, the book of Psalms is a collection. Most of the Psalms are prayers that are addressed to God. Many others are songs that call on others to join in praising God. But these first two Psalms are rather different. They're much closer, in fact, to the instructions in the book of Proverbs than they are to the rest of the book of Psalms. And they serve as foundational instructions to orient us to the rest of the Psalms and to our life as the people of God. Like the book of Proverbs, especially the first nine chapters, these two Psalms contrast two different paths of life. One path leads to life in the presence of God, and the other path leads to destruction away from God. And these two different paths are rooted in two different fundamental patterns of life. On the one hand, we have the blessed and fruitful life of those who root themselves in the Word of God and meditate on the Word of God. And on the other hand, we have the empty and the fruitless life of those who root themselves in meditation on what is empty and what is vain. The first three verses of Psalm 1 focus on the truly blessed life. So both of these Psalms contrast the path of the wicked and the path of the righteous, the path that is rooted in truth and the path that is rooted in vanity. But Psalm 1 focuses on the right path. And by the way, there's this other path that the wicked take. And Psalm 2 focuses on the path of the wicked. And by the way, there's an alternative to that. And they go together. Psalm 1, blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of the sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. The psalm begins by describing some of the things that the truly blessed person does not do. The person who's blessed doesn't walk in the counsel of the ungodly. He resists the temptation to stand in the way of sinners and refuses to sit in the seat of the scornful. We could spend a whole message talking about those, but our focus is not to deal with every detail of these Psalms. We could do a whole series of sermons on them, but to focus on this matter of the roots we're putting down. The psalm tells us next what the truly blessed person does do, and this will be our focus this morning. Psalm 1 verse 2, But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night. Instead of delighting in ungodliness and sin and scorning, the truly blessed person delights in the law or the instruction of the Lord. He or she delights in the scriptures. And this delight in the word of God is fueled by constant meditation on the word of God. As one writer put it, meditation may be characterized as deep reflective thought often occurring in a repetitive or enduring fashion. As another writer put it, the activity in mind here is the soft murmuring reading of scripture to oneself. While meditation is a bit more than the simple reading of Scripture, it's certainly not anything less. If you don't read it, you won't remember it. If you don't remember it, you can't meditate on it. The life of the truly blessed person is rooted in and structured by the Word of God. It says that he does this day and night. This is what is structuring his day. In private and in public, scriptural meditation is what structures his day and orders his week. Over time, the scripture becomes the soil. in which his heart is ever more deeply rooted. This doesn't mean that the scriptures are the only thing the truly blessed person ever thinks about, and it certainly doesn't mean that Bible reading is the only thing the truly blessed person ever does. If we take David as the paradigm here, David was a king. He had wars to fight. He had conquered territories to administer. He had a lot of things to fit into his schedule. It certainly doesn't mean that those who cannot read the Bible for themselves cannot be faithful Christians. Many early Christians were unable to read the scriptures, but we also need to remember that many early Christians gathered daily to hear the scriptures read to them. So this matter of Scripture structuring our days is not just a modern invention when we have printed Bibles, but it's a pattern of life that goes all the way back to the first days of the Church and to the followers of God under the Old Covenant as well. We must not miss how absolutely central the scriptures are to the life of the truly blessed person who's described in this psalm. They meditate on them day and night. The scriptures aren't merely a cupboard that they open when they need a zinger to post on X to really slam down the bad guys. They're not a medicine cupboard that they go to only when they're discouraged so they can get a pick-me-up. The Scriptures are the soil in which their life as a whole is rooted. And the truly blessed person is rooted not just in their pet texts, but in the length and the breadth of the Word of God, the instruction of the Lord as a whole. They're rooted in Leviticus as well as in Philippians. Verse 3. And he, this truly blessed person, whose life is rooted in what God has to say, whose days are structured by meditation on the scriptures, he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water. that bringeth forth his fruit in his season, his leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. This image of the righteous as well-planted, deeply-rooted trees is one that's found all throughout the scripture. As we read in Jeremiah 17, which the ESV translates well, he is like a tree planted by water. And in Jeremiah, this is the man who puts his trust in the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit. A tree with roots in the rivers of water doesn't need to fear the coming of droughts and dry seasons. Though it faces the same dryness and heat as the brambles that surround it, it does not wither and die because its roots go deeper than the bramble's roots do. As we've already seen, a tree that has been well-planted and allowed to put down deep and broad roots is able to bear consistent fruit for the long haul. Not just for one season, a few fruits, you get it, and the next season there's nothing. But season after season, it's able to keep bearing fruit. Roots that reach into the rivers of water provide other protections as well. In the town of Maribor, in the country of Slovenia, grows the oldest grape-bearing vine in the world. It was planted in the 1500s, more than 400 years ago, and it's still producing grapes today. There's a reason for that. It's planted by the Drava River, and its roots go way down deep, and they reach into the river. In the 1800s, there was a parasite that attacked the vineyards of Europe and wiped out millions and millions of vines, but the parasite worked in the soil down by the roots, and because the roots of this vine went down into the water, the waters drowned the parasites, and it kept right on producing grapes and does so to this day. There's one more thing about this tree that's planted by the rivers of water that we need to notice before we move on. We're told that the tree bears fruit in its season. This is really important. Deep roots enable consistent fruitfulness, but there's a difference between consistent fruitfulness and constant fruit bearing. In other words, even faithful and flourishing trees go through seasons. There's a season where there's a great harvest. There's a season. where their leaves begin to fall off, and it's fall, or perhaps it's winter, and yet the roots guarantee that when winter is over, spring is going to come. Even faithful trees go through seasons, so do faithful Christians, and that's okay. It's part of what it means to be a tree. Verse four contrasts the rooted life of the truly blessed person and the rootless life of the wicked. Verse four, the ungodly are not so, but are like that shaft which the wind driveth away. The life of the truly blessed person is rooted and fruitful, but the lives of the ungodly are empty and vain. The righteous are like a grain that is solid and nourishing. The ungodly are like weightless husks that blow away in the wind on the day of judgment. They're like tumbleweeds that turn round and round. They have no deep roots, but the righteous are like an enduring tree. Verse five, therefore, the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous, for the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. In verse 1, the psalm began by talking about a single individual, but now at the end of the psalm, we have a contrast between two communities, two groups of people. The call to root ourselves in the scriptures isn't just about our own individual time in the Word, important as that is, it's about our life together. as the people of God. Those who root themselves in the Lord and His word will not find their confidence misplaced. Those who proudly reject the Lord will perish in the end. So this brings us now, we've talked about Psalm 1, and this brings us to Psalm 2. Both Psalms present a contrast between the way of life and the way of but they each have a distinct focus. The first psalm focuses on the life of the person who's truly blessed, but the second psalm focuses on the victory of the Messianic king over those who rebel against him, who choose this path that leads to death. Psalm 2 and verse 1. Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed saying, let us break their bonds asunder and cast away their cords from us. These first three verses expose the plan of the heathen or the Gentile nations. As the psalm begins, the nations are conspiring, they're forming plots to throw off the yoke of divine authority. Now there's one thing here we must not miss and it's why important that we consider Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 together. And that is that the word that's translated in Psalm 2 as imagine is the exact same Hebrew word, even the same grammatical form, that's translated in Psalm 1 as meditate. I'll say that one more time. The word that's translated in Psalm 2 is imagine, and it's a broad word, and it certainly can be translated in both of those ways, but it is the same word, and it's a word that links those two Psalms together. It's not a coincidence that they're placed together or that the same word is used in both of them. In fact, it's central to what God is saying to us in these two Psalms. They've been placed together for a reason. They present us with a deliberate contrast between the meditation of the righteous on the word of God and the meditation of the wicked on emptiness. They present a contrast between a life that is rooted in the scriptures and a life that is rooted in vanity and rebellion and emptiness. Both the life of the truly blessed and the life of the wicked are structured by meditation, by what they mull over when they wake up and when they go to bed. The difference is not in whether they meditate. The truth is meditation isn't just something that's done in yoga studios or something that's done in churches. Meditation is something that everyone does. Everyone's life is being shaped by something. The difference isn't in whether you meditate, it's in what you meditate on. The truly blessed person, the person of Psalm 1, meditates on the scriptures, and this leads to a life that is abundantly and consistently fruitful, a life that has deep roots, a life that's enabled to endure drought, and a life that's enabled to survive the attacks of parasites. a life that flourishes. But the raging nations, they meditate on vanity and emptiness, and this leads to foolish rebellion against the Lord's anointed. They don't know how the world actually works, and so they're blown hither and thither. They're weightless. Though the righteous and the wicked may experience very similar circumstances, both are going to face storms. That's the point of Jesus' parable in Matthew 7. They have radically different root systems. One has a foundation and the other does not. One's built on the rock, the other is built on sand, and that changes everything. So these first three verses of Psalm 2 describe the plan of the nations, and we'll deal with the rest of the psalm more briefly. Verses 4 through 6 provide the response of the Lord. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath and vex them in his sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. The nations think that their plotting is a very serious affair, but the Lord of heaven and earth does not take them seriously at all. They're simply not the threat that they think they are. So we've got the description of the plot of the nations in verses 1-3. We've got the Lord's response. Then in verses 7-9, we have the response of the Lord's anointing. I will declare the decree the Lord has said unto me. Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron. Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. In the first place, of course, this decree refers to God's promises to David in 2 Samuel 7. But as David himself understood, even in that passage, the promises that are made to David were never just about David. They were always pointed forward towards David's greater son, Jesus Christ, the one who came to save his people from their sins, the one before whom every knee will one day bow. And in the last section, verses 10 through 12, the psalmist turns to directly address the rebellious nations described in the beginning. So we have the rebellion of the nations, we have the response of the Lord, response of the Lord's anointed, and now we have the psalmist turning to address those nations who are meditating a vain thing. Be wise now therefore, O ye kings. Be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they who put their trust in him. No matter how impressive it may seem to them, the rebellion of the raging nations is doomed to failure. Their only hope is to abandon their plotting and to take refuge in the very anointed son against whom they were plotting to begin with. And the image intended by this command to kiss the son is that of kissing the feet of a king as a sign of surrender and submission. Those who put their trust in Jesus Christ will never be betrayed. put to shame. This is the path that leads to life. These two Psalms, taken together, reveal two ultimate paths then. A path that leads to life and flourishing, and a path that leads to destruction and death. The path that leads to life begins with repentant submission to the Lord's anointed Son. The path that leads to death begins with proud rebellion against him. We must bow the knee first before we can follow in the path that leads to life. These same two Psalms show us that these ultimate paths are rooted in two different fundamental patterns of life. And we could do a whole sermon on the different paths, but we're going to focus on the different patterns this morning. On the one hand, we see a pattern of life that's rooted in constant meditation on the truth of God's Word. Meditating on God's Word. Law. We see that pattern. On the other hand, we see a pattern of life that's rooted in meditation on emptiness and vanity, one structured by truth, one structured by what is empty. Following Jesus is about more than a one-time change of path, vitally important as that is. We can't change our path by changing the pattern of our lives. You can't say, well, I'm going to start reading the Bible every day, and that will save me from destruction. Salvation comes by kissing the feet of the Son and entering through Jesus, who is the true door, the only way that leads to life. But as we seek to follow Jesus, we have to work out our own salvation and change the pattern of our lives. This is the process of sanctification. Following Jesus is about the daily battle to change the pattern of our meditation. Fruitfulness in the Christian life comes from rootedness in the Word of God. The simple truth is this, what we meditate on most frequently is what we are rooted in most deeply. What we meditate on most frequently is what we are rooted in most deeply. The reason the truly blessed person delights in the life-giving scriptures is because he or she meditates on them day and night. That's what makes him like a deeply rooted tree, a tree that doesn't need to fear drought or parasites, a tree that brings forth its fruit in its season year after year after year. As we turn now to consider how this truth shows up in our own everyday lives, there are two things that we need to give attention to. First, we need to consider what we are meditating on. If we meditate on emptiness, then we're going to root ourselves in the shallow emptiness of this present age, and we won't be like deeply rooted trees. We'll be tossed to and fro by the waves of the sea. If we want to be rooted and grounded in the truth, then we need to meditate day and night on the truth of the scripture. So we need to talk about how are we going to do this in actual practice? What's it look like for us today to meditate on the scriptures day and night? But second, if we're actually going to continue this process of meditating on the scriptures, if we're not going to become weary and well-doing and give the whole thing over because it was harder than we thought, then we need to consider and remember what we are meditating for. Our goal in rooting ourselves in the scriptures is not to produce fruit overnight, but instead to put down roots over time that will enable us to bear fruit tomorrow. If we forget that, then we'll get discouraged, and we'll stop meditating on the scriptures, and we'll never see the result that we're promised in this psalm. So first, we must consider what it is we're meditating on. The psalm doesn't tell us that the truly blessed person thinks about the law of the Lord now and then, when it comes up. It tells us instead that the scriptures are forming the fundamental pattern of his life. They're able to shape his heart because they have already structured his day. And if our hearts are to be deeply shaped by the scriptures, then our days must be structured by them. So let me ask each of you, directly and individually, what is the soil that your heart is rooting itself in? What structures your days. What is the pattern of your life? What do you meditate on day and night? I'm not asking you about your aspirations, good as your aspirations may be, what you plan to do five years from now. I'm asking you about the normal pattern of your everyday life right now in the present. What is the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? What is the last thing you do before you fall asleep at night? What structures your days? Most Americans start and end their days by checking their apps of choice on their smartphones, their email, their social media, their text messages, whatever else it is that's coming in at them. That's what structures their days. It's the first thing they do, it's the most frequent thing they do, and it's definitely the last thing they do. And sadly, most Christians do exactly the same thing. Let me put it as bluntly as I can. Deep roots don't form in the shallow soil of the algorithms that drive our online experience. Whether we like it or not, most of us are stuck with using smartphones, and many of us need to maintain some form of social media profile. I understand that. But the truth is that the devices and platforms that we use are immensely powerful, and they're intended to be tremendously formative. If we do not put in the work to master them, the makers of the algorithms that are behind them will use them to master us. My point is not that you'll have to live like the Amish in order to be truly blessed. My point is rather, if you're not intentionally putting an effort to swim upstream, the current of this present age will conform you to its own image. As the example of Daniel shows us, it is possible to be faithful in Babylon. Daniel didn't just live in Babylon, Daniel worked for the king of Babylon, and yet Daniel was faithful. But that faithfulness didn't come by accident. He gave attention to the little details of the habits that were part of his life, what he was going to eat and what he was not going to eat. He got specific and detailed and focused on not being shaped to be just another Babylonian. And if we are not to be just another 21st century American, if we're actually to be rooted in a different soil, we're going to have to give attention to the things that are shaping our hearts. While most of the Jews in Babylon, we need to remember, Daniel wasn't just faithful in Babylon by default. Most of the Jews in the palace became Babylonians. Daniel and his three friends were the exception, not the rule. While smartphones and social media are new, the temptation to simply go along with the flow and become like those around us is as old as the Garden of Eden. That's what Adam did. He went along with the flow. Eve was eating the fruit, so he did too. The people of God in every generation have always been tempted to live like the nations around them, and the followers of Jesus have always been tempted to slip into a pattern of life that is structured by the emptiness of the age in which they lived. You can read sermons that go all the way back to the 400s and the 200s, and what you find in every age of the Christian church is pastors exhorting people on the basis of the word of God that what seems normal to everyone else in the world around you is not how you ought to live. This is the basics of following Jesus. We've always been tempted to slip into a pattern of life that's structured by the emptiness around us, and we are no different. Though our circumstances differ, the basic pattern is the same. In the long run, what you allow to structure your day is what is going to shape your heart. If you want to walk in the path of those who are truly blessed, you're going to need to live according to the pattern of those who are truly blessed. And in the world in which we live, Until Jesus returns, this is not going to happen by accident. It's going to take intentional effort on our parts. It's going to take attention to the ordinary habits of our lives. Now, my point is not to give you a legalistic list of bullet points that you can say, I've checked off Pastor Peter's bullet points. That makes me a good Christian. There are lots of ways in which we can be unfaithful to Jesus and still read the Bible every day. Simply checking the boxes off the list does not mean I'm in the clear, I'm good, nobody can say anything to me. But the point is to ask each of you to honestly consider what you're allowing to structure your days. If you want your delight to be in the scriptures, you're going to need to meditate on those scriptures day and night. They need to be more than a supplement that you pull out now and then when things are going poorly. They need to be the structure around which everything else in your life is built. So I'm going to give you some practical principles for what this could look like. These are not scripture. This is not thus sayeth the Lord, but these are rather principles that I think are helpful. And if you have other principles, that's fine. If you have no principles, that's not fine. So, two principles for planning your Bible reading. Number one, start small. Be willing to do what you can do. So, here's a secret of habit formation. If you actually want to form a new habit, you need to start with something that is so small that you have no excuse not to do it. So if you do not have a habit, I'm not asking you have you ever read the Bible, if you in the past week, didn't read the Bible more than two or three days out of the week, if it's not a habit that you spend time in the scriptures on a daily basis, then I would challenge you to start by reading a single verse and commit to doing that every day. That would be better than reading five chapters once a month. You need to form a habit, and that starts with admitting that you haven't formed the right habit, and you need to start where you are and do something more than nothing. That's the hardest battle of all. So be willing to do something small enough to actually get started. But of course, I'm not recommending that everyone read nothing more than a single verse a day. You need to start somewhere. You need to penetrate into the soil at some point. But once you've started, you need to stay hungry. Once you get a pattern established, the battle is to keep it from just being another check on the list. And so one of the ways to do this is to read more. So we have our daily Bible reading schedule. It's a wonderful discipline to read through the Bible in a year. And Pastor Scott puts a lot of work into making sure that it's updated every year and has the dates all right. And it's a really good schedule that I'd encourage you. If you are jumping, I wouldn't encourage you to jump from one verse a day to reading through the whole Bible. A good step would be you go from reading one or two verses to maybe reading through the New Testament. If you want to read through the New Testament, that's basically a page a day in most Bibles. That's very doable. And once you've done that, maybe then you bite off reading through the whole Bible. But let's say you've read through the whole Bible in a year, every year for the past 10 years. Well, you might want to think, do you have time to do a little more? Or maybe you want to mix things up and do something a little different. Maybe take a particular book of the Bible and read through that 10 times in a row and see what new things that you see in the Word of God that you didn't see before. If you know other languages, You could read the Bible in different languages. If you've only ever read the Bible in one translation, you could read it in a translation that you've never read before, or read two or more alongside one another. The battle is to stay hungry that you are still rooting yourself in the Word of God, rather than just checking something off of your list. And there's a lot of other things you could do as well. So, two principles. for planning your Bible reading for the year to come, three principles for prioritizing your Bible reading, and they all have to do with the relationship between your phone and your Bible. If your phone is not your temptation of choice, if that's not your primary distraction, why then you can just swap out whatever it is. First, scripture above foam. You should spend more time in the scriptures than you do on social media. Now, the exception would be if your job is as a social media consultant, that may not work strictly for you. All of us have to work and to fulfill our responsibilities to our families, and sometimes some of your jobs may involve spending a lot of time on the internet or some other means like that. But what I'm talking about is the discretionary time that you have where you can choose. This is not time your employer paid for. This is time that you have where you can choose to do what you're going to do with it. And you should spend more of that time in what is solid than you do in what is empty. Because that is how you'll put down roots in what is solid. Second principle, scripture before phone. Again, this is not something that the word of God says, you should pick up your codex of the scriptures before you pick up your shining electronic mirror. When the scriptures were written, there were not codices of scriptures that people had on their nightstand, nor were there shining little electronic pocket mirrors that we could carry around with us as portals to the whole world. We didn't have either of those things. But if we think about scripture and that principle of morning and evening as the first thing you think about when you wake up and the last thing you think about before you go to sleep, that principle is found in the scriptures. And experience tells us that our phones are very distracting. This is where common wisdom comes in. Yes, you can do your Bible reading on your phone. But I don't recommend it. Because you're picking up the number one most distracting thing, and you're going to have to battle the temptation to, okay, I'm just gonna put this aside, and I'm going to just see what came in, or I got this ping, or this notification, or this thing, and that thing that came in, and it's very, very hard to stay focused, unless you're superhuman, or unless maybe your eyesight is so bad that this is the only way that you can read, is to use a device, in which case, go and do it. But most of us are not in that situation. And finally, scripture after phone. after you've put your phone in the distractions for bed. Now, this doesn't have to be that you do an hour of Bible reading after you put your phone away. It could simply be that you reflect on the Lord's Prayer before you fall asleep, or a verse that you're memorizing. It could be very simple and very short, but that you are spending time after you've put away the distractions of the day and meditating on the scriptures in some form. While the smartphone is the primary temptation for most of us, if you have a different distraction or choice, Something else that tempts you to meditate on emptiness? Why, then, you can easily make the substitution. These are very simple principles. They are, in fact, the same simple principles that I share with you every year around this time. But what we need to realize is that it's the simple things like this that determine the patterns of our lives. When I'm talking to people and doing pastoral care and trying to see how people are doing It's these things that make the difference. It's the ordinary habits of your life that shape how you actually are doing, whether you're flourishing or not over the long run. These are the things that shape our hearts. It's what it looks like to put down roots into the Word of God. And if we want to be a truly blessed congregation, then we need to put down deep roots, not just in our favorite verses or not just in the current controversies of the day, whatever is trending on X or whatever is going around the workplace. We can't just be dealing with Scripture at that level. We need to be putting down roots in the length and the breadth of Scripture, the things that nobody's arguing or fighting about. We need roots down there, because those may be the roots that we need five years from now. We need to be rooted in the scriptures as a whole. We need to live our lives within the community that the scriptures create. We need to plan our weeks around the gathered worship of that community. We need to structure our days around the word of God. We need to make the scriptures the first thing that we pick up in the morning and the last thing that we think about before we fall asleep. We need to teach them, as Deuteronomy tells us, diligently to our children to talk of them when we sit in our house and when we walk in the way and when we lie down and when we stand up. If we are to continue to flourish as the wicked continue to rage, we must become a people, a community, that is rooted in and shaped by the scripture at every level. Second, and more briefly, we must remember what we're meditating for. If we're going to keep this up, if we're going to have the long-term fruit that comes from putting down deep roots, then when we go to spend time in the scriptures, we need to remember what we're meditating for. And I want to end on a note of encouragement in this respect. Last year, I have no doubt that many of you started out with good intentions. Pastor Scott talked about the Bible reading schedule, and I preached a sermon about spending time in the scriptures, and you said, this is going to be the year that I read through the whole Bible. This is going to be the year that I will master my phone and no longer be mastered by it. I trust that many of you carried through with those intentions. But if experience is any guide, my guess would be that after a few months, some of you had fallen back into old habits. After all, picking up our phones is very easy. They're built that way. Meditating on the scriptures is hard work. And to be honest, sometimes that work doesn't seem to be reducing much in the way of immediate fruit. So you think, I'm gonna read the scriptures and I'm going to discover all of this amazing fruit every time that I sit down and this is going to be amazing. And you sit down and it feels like nothing happens. You show up to hear the Word of God preached. This matter of rooting ourselves in the Scriptures isn't just about our personal Bible reading, but about the reading of the public reading of the Scriptures and the preaching of the Scriptures. And you show up to hear the Word of God preached, and it feels like nothing changes. And you sweat to memorize Scripture, and you still struggle with the same temptations. But what we need to remember is we can say, like, this isn't making any difference. Why am I putting in all this work? I'm just going to let it slip and maybe I'll try again next year. How many of you have been there, even this past year? What we need to remember is that the point of meditating on the scriptures is to put down roots. This is why we do what we do. This is what we're meditating for. And growing roots that are deep and broad takes time. It's sometimes boring work. It's always slow work. It demands patience and sacrifice, sweat, sometimes even tears. But in the end, fruitfulness comes from rootedness. Consistent fruit comes from deep roots, and deep roots take time to put down, and the result of putting down roots takes time to show up. So you may say, well, right now, everything in my life is going fine, and I'm faithful, I'm a faithful Christian, and I'm not reading the Bible every day, so what difference does it make? Give it five years. Give it 10 years. it will make a difference. The roots you put down now will show up. The benefit from meditating on the scripture morning and night doesn't always show up right away. The scriptures aren't a magic pill that will make all your troubles go away, but if you root yourselves in them, week in and week out, year in and year out, decade in and decade out, you will find yourself with roots that are deeper and broader than you could have ever imagined. And because you have roots like these, you'll be able to survive storms that will once have destroyed you, endure drought that once would have finished you, produce fruit that once would have astonished you. When others succumb to false teachers and the winds and the waves of false doctrine, your roots will be too deep for them to reach. If we want our lives to have roots like these, we don't just need to go through the right motions, we also have need of patience. As the writer to the Hebrews teaches us, having done the will of God, we must wait for the promise of God. In this, as in all other aspects of the Christian life, we are called to live by faith. Reading your Bible isn't just about going through the right motions, it's about having faith in the God who wrote it, that he will do his work in your heart over the long haul, even if you don't see how he's doing it. There's a reason the truly blessed person is compared to a fruit tree. Trees take time to grow to maturity. When my dad and uncles were stripping the unripe fruit off their trees for the second and the third years, they felt very discouraged. After years of work, they still had no peaches, no pears, and no apples. But in the end, In the fourth year, their patience was fully rewarded, rewarded with fruit so abundant and so delicious that my dad still waters, his mouth still waters at the thought of the peaches that came off of those trees. Solid fruit roots produced a long-term harvest of consistent fruit. And this same principle is true of us as the people of God. Those who put their trust in the Lord will never finally be put to shame. Those who put themselves in the scriptures will never finally be disciplined. We can trust the promises of God to us. Thank you for listening to this message. If you would like to learn more about the Westside Baptist Church, please visit our website www.bibledirectionforlife.com. Subscribe to the podcast if you would like to hear new sermons and lessons each week. And remember that a sermon podcast is no substitute for opening up a Bible and reading it for yourself. you