Psalm 1 is a great doorway to the New Year. If we follow it carefully, it can replace all of the frustrations that we experience with our New Year's resolutions. According to Psalm 1, we can chart our lives in a much more powerful and lasting way. We can choose a course that leads to success and prosperity, and stay on that course all the way through this year and all the way through life to a destiny of happiness and reward. Psalm 1 teaches us that there are really only two ways to do life. This is the Psalm of the two ways, the two destinies. Psalm 1 sets forth the way of the righteous and the way of the ungodly.
Verses 1 through 3 tell us about the way of the righteous and verses 4 through 6 detail the way of the ungodly. In these two pathways, the Psalmist sounds a note that is found in many other places in the Bible. There are not many ways of life as some teach. There are only two. Daniel says it this way: "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt". Malachi puts it this way: "Then ye shall again discern between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him".
In Matthew we read these words: "Enter by the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it". Just two ways. In John we read: "Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming in which all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come forth: those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation". There are many thoughts about life; there are really only two ways. And while the Bible is very clear about the two ways, it is even more careful to point out that only one of those two ways will bring happiness to one's life.
This is the Psalmist's emphatic declaration that God's abundant favor rests upon the person who lives a life that is centered in God. This is the Hebrew method of indicating happiness for if you were to read this Psalm in the Hebrew, it wouldn't have the word "blessed" just once. It would have it twice. "Blessed, oh, really blessed is the man who does not walk in an ungodly way. Oh, how very happy is that man". Most of us spend a lot of time trying to find happiness. We're all involved in the pursuit of happiness. Hardly anybody ever thinks that that journey could end in God, and yet the Bible is very clear to tell us we should not take God out of the picture or we will not have joy.
Psalm 16:11 says: "God, you'll show me the path of life; and in your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore". Psalm 34:8 says: "Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed", happy, "is the man who trusts in him"! So Psalm 1 offers us true, lasting happiness by showing us the difference between the righteous and the wicked. It describes two kinds of people living two kinds of lives with two different kinds of outcomes. And when we see the blessings of the godly next to the emptiness of the wicked, surely we will understand that the beauty of the godly life cannot be overlooked if we're trying to figure out how to be happy.
So let's take this little journey through these six verses. This is a very special psalm. It begins in verses 1 through 3. In describing the way of the righteous, the Psalmist tells us two general things about these people. First he tells us that people who live on the way of the righteous avoid the downward pull of the ungodly. When the Psalmist talks about the ungodly in this text, he's not talking about murderers and rapists and dope-pushers or the kind of people we usually think of as very wicked.
To be ungodly simply means to live your life without God. If you are unhealthy, you are without health. If you are unfriendly, you are without a friend. If you are ungodly, you've decided to do life without God. It can include the person who goes to work every day, takes good care of his family. On the weekend he goes to the desert or the beach or just hangs out at home.
The ungodly have a downward momentum. That's the thing you need to understand. There is a gravitational pull on the ungodly life. And this Psalm, more than any Psalm in the Bible, more than any passage in the Bible, outlines to us what happens if we start to listen to those who are going the wrong way.
If you examine the first verse of Psalm 1 carefully, you will notice these progressions: "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful". In this one verse, there are three sets of three. Three sets of three words. There is walk, stand, and sit; counsel, path, and seat; ungodly, sinners, and scornful. These words describe the progressive downward gravitational pull of the wrong life. It begins with a subtle adoption of principles, followed by a persisting practice of offenses, and it ends with a deliberate mocking of God.
I wanna take you through these nine words and show you what they mean and how they affect your life. First of all, we're going to look at three influences of the ungodly. The three words are counsel, path, and seat. The counsel is a reference to the philosophy of the natural man who's trying to figure life out as if God did not exist. It is man-centered living, not God-centered living. It's what we call humanistic thinking, based on the theory of evolution instead of the fact of creation.
The word "counsel" indicates the idea that a person sits down and has a discussion with somebody about life. They go through the pros and cons, and after the person listens to the counsel of the ungodly, he begins to move in that direction. He begins to be persuaded that something that's being said to him from a person who doesn't believe anything he believes may have something worthy of his consideration. That is the counsel. That's the beginning. At first, you listen. Maybe you heard it before, but now you're listening.
And then there is the path. Having listened to the ungodly counsel, now a man who is walking away from God begins to walk along with the ungodly man. He starts to practice the things that he has heard. What he has been thinking is now translated into what he is doing. That's the way it works. You get with somebody who's giving you bad information, you begin to buy into it, and before you know it, you're starting to do some of the things he did or she did without ever realizing it's going on. You move from the counsel to the path.
And the third word in this first set of threes is the word "seat". Now you're not just a practitioner, you're settled. You've sat down in the midst of this philosophy. You're seated in the seat, you're comfortable in this lifestyle. You've crossed over to the other road. Those are the influences of the ungodly. Mark them well. They work as if they were programmed in life and over the 50 years that I have watched it happen, it's as chartable as it can be.
The next three words are the involvement of the ungodly. Watch how this works. The three words are walk, stand, and sit. Walk is a reference to how you live your life. It's a word that is used sometimes for conversation: your walk. For instance, the Bible tells us we're to walk in the Spirit. What does that mean? We're to live every day in fellowship with the Spirit. We're to have a walk with the Spirit, your daily walk. You begin to walk in the ways of the ungodly.
And then the Bible says you stand. You make a commitment, you take a stand, you become comfortable with it. You don't even apologize for it. You just sort of blend in and you're a part of that group that's crossing over, going to the other highway. And then the third word is the word "sit". Now you've settled into this lifestyle. So what we do first is make little decisions that are not godly. Then we make commitments, and then we cement these decisions and we settle into those commitments as a lifestyle. There's one more set of three. We've observed the three influences of the ungodly: counsel, path, and seat; the three involvements with the ungodly: walk, stand, and sit. And now the three intensities of the ungodly. The three words are: ungodly, sinners, and scornful.
Now, we've already talked about ungodly, that it's not a person who's outwardly evil, but a person who comes at life without God. If you want an illustration in the Bible of a person sorting that through, you can read the book of Ecclesiastes because, for almost all of that book, Solomon is trying to do life without God and he comes to the conclusion that it's all vanity, that it's worthless. Everywhere he goes, he ends at the same place: "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity". The Bible says we start with this "minus God" attitude.
Then the next word is the word "sinners", and there's a strange word for sinners in the Bible. It's a word that means to make a loud noise or cause a fuss or a tumult. Here's a person who is minus God, but hangs out with the ungodly. Now, he's beginning to act in a way that he would never have dreamed he would act months before. He's being drug into the gravitational pull of evil. How many of you know, evil is always downward? It's never upward. Now you're involved in the activities of those that, before, you did not believe. And the final word is the word "scornful". I need to speak about that word for just a moment.
Notice the Bible says we go from being without God, just living life like God didn't exist, to being kind of proactive about the things we do that are not godly, and then if we're not careful, we become scornful. We become people who are outwardly shaking our fist in the face of God. We are becoming practical atheists and saying that God may exist, but that doesn't have anything to do with me. Please hear me today, men and women. Psalm 1 does not begin with the power of positive thinking. It begins with the power of negative thinking.
In other words, the blessed person is the person who avoids certain things in life, things which make it impossible for happiness to flourish. Because these things are poisonous and destructive and counterproductive. "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly". Don't get yourself involved in relationships and in situations where the influence in your life is dragging you into a wrong position.
Then there's another thing that we learn about the righteous: They accept the decisive place of the Scripture. But this godly man's, "Delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatever he does will prosper". Let's unpack that. Notice, first of all, "Their hearts delight in the Word of God, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night".
Now, the word "law" here in the text is the word "Torah", and that means instruction. It always, in the Old Testament sense, is used to describe the law of Moses. But it's also used in a general way to describe all of the Old Testament Scriptures and quite often used to describe the book of Psalms. Here we learn that the man who is walking on the righteous road is a blessed man because he finds joy in the Word of God. He does not read the Word of God to see what he can get away with. He reads the Word of God because he wants to learn how to please God. You will only delight in God's law if you delight in God himself. And the man who delights in the law of the Lord does not study the Bible so he can find the least common denominator of the Christian life.
I cannot tell you how many people I've met who that's their goal: "I wanna be a Christian, but not so Christian. I wanna get in the door, but I'm not anxious about going much further after I get in the door". This person who delights in the Word of God finds his greatest joy in doing those things which he knows will please the Lord. He studies the Word of God, and when he finds a passage that applies to him, he determines to carry it out in his life. He delights to match up his life with the principles he discovers in the Word of God. He meditates in that Word day and night. He chews over God's Word throughout the day and into the night.
Let me tell you how that can work. When you go to bed at night, and maybe you've had a day full of anxiety things and troubles and problems, and maybe you've read that you should count sheep, I have a suggestion for you. If you have any Word of God in your spirit, meditate on it.
Practice ypur memorization at night sometimes before you go to sleep and you'll discover something that you don't know how to explain, your mind is more fertile in remembering just before you go to sleep than maybe any other time in the day. Now, you wouldn't know that by looking at people who fall asleep in church, but that's true. So when you're laying on the bed at night and your head's on the pillow and everything is quiet, think through the passage you are memorizing. And what a blessing that is. Sometimes that happens in the morning. Sometimes you can wake up before anybody wakes up and you know you'd better not get up, so you can just lay in bed and meditate on the Word of God. Robert Morgan has a great definition of meditation. He says it's the "Powerful practice of pondering, personalizing, and practicing Scripture".
Dr. David Jeremiah recently read a story about actor Anthony Hopkins who, when he gets a movie script, reads through it between 100 and 200 times before production. He makes notes in the margins of the script, he scribbles and doodles and imagines how it would look on the stage or the screen, and by the time Hopkins is finished, he has internalized that script. He knows his character, he knows his and everybody else's lines, and he's able to improvise and he's a personification of the script. That's an amazing thought.
Matt Gardner, who wrote the story about Hopkins, said, "If a Hollywood actor reads a script 100 times, why can't I read a book in the Bible 100 times"? He selected the book of James which, by the way, you can read in ten minutes, and he began to read it over and over and over again and meditate on what he was reading.
As he got into the project and the days passed, he began to see how certain themes emerged and were repeated in the book. He began to get a sense of the author's personality and convictions. He became so familiar with this Epistle, he could think through it with his eyes closed and he began looking at his everyday life through the lens of the book of James. Just read the book of James. Takes ten minutes. What if you read it 100 times? Or 200 times like Anthony Hopkins? You'd pretty much know everything that's in that book and I wanna tell you, the book James is one of the most practical books in the Bible. It will hit you everywhere in your life and help you become a better person.
On a lighter note, Dr. David Jeremiah read this about Elmer Towns, an old friend of mine, who knew an office manager who liked everything about her job except one thing. She didn't enjoy interacting with the plant manager, and she had to have meetings with the plant manager all the time. No matter what happened in the company, she'd have to go see the plant manager and it was very negative and she dreaded being called into his office. So she had a discussion with Dr. Towns about it, and he suggested that she meditate on the Lord's Prayer. He said, "On your way to the office to meet with the plant manager, just recite the Lord's Prayer. Just pray it over and over again".
Can you imagine this lady walking down the hallway to her managers' meeting and she's mumbling the Lord's Prayer on her way. It's like she's going to an execution or something. But she decided to do it and she said when she did that, by the time she arrived at his office, she was calm, she wasn't defensive, she wasn't angry with him. She was even able to say, "Let me help you get a better perspective on this". She later said, "I got faith from the Lord's Prayer. It gave me courage to aggressively suggest new ways for him to look at things. Now I always say the Lord's Prayer when I'm walking from my desk to his office".
Meditates on the Word of God day and night. The Bible isn't something you just carry to church with you on Sunday and throw it into the back window shelf in your car till seven days go by. The Bible should be the source of your strength. The Bible says, "Their heart delights in the Word of God". Now notice, not only does their heart delight in it, but their habits are dictated by it. Their strength comes from the Word of God. The Psalmist says, "He shall be like a tree". A tree is a picture of a man in this Psalm. Just as a tree is nourished by constant supplies of water, without which it would die in the blistering sun, so the strength of a godly man is maintained by the supplies of grace that are drawn from the Word of God.
How do you stay strong in your life? Don't try to do it on your own. Get strength from the Word of God. Number two, their strength comes from the Word of God and their stability comes from the Word of God. Notice the text says: "Planted by the rivers of water". A fruit tree that is planted by the banks of the river suggests stability. The tree is firmly rooted in the soil so that when the storm comes, the root system is so vast, down into the soil, that the storm does not destroy the tree.
How many of you know Christians who get destroyed by unexpected storms because they don't have stability? Their relationship with the Lord Jesus is one-half inch deep, and so when the storm comes, their root system is right on the top and the storm just takes them off of their game. Do you know that in America today, there are trees still standing that have lived through the entire history of this nation? Remaining strong and fresh and green, just as they were at the beginning. The Bible says when we become aware of the importance of sinking our roots down deep into the soil of God's Word, we become strong and we become stable. Here's the third one. Our spiritual testimony comes from God's Word.
Now, if you're examining a plant, the first thing that you see about that plant or that tree that gives you any indication of how the tree is doing is the leaf. The Scripture says: "Whose leaf also shall not wither". The leaf is the outward testimony of this man. As someone has said: "God's trees are evergreens; they never lose their testimonies. They never wither. Why does the leaf not wither? Because of the connection. It is connected with the branch, which is connected to the tree, which is fed by the roots, which go down deep near a river of water, which is the Word of God".
There is much talk today about the blown testimonies of God's people. I hate to tell you how many I have watched just in this last year who started out right and it looked like they were gonna make a huge difference in the kingdom, and somehow it's all over and they're finished. Let me tell you what I know. That didn't happen overnight. They didn't go to bed one night really full of the Word of God and the desire to serve him and get up the next morning and go out and do something that totally discounted everything they supposedly believed.
I remember hearing Chuck Swindoll as he was talking about marriage, and he said, "If you get into a marriage that's coming unglued, let me tell you it's not a blow-out, it's a slow leak". And that's the way it is in our Christian life, is it not? We don't become ungodly in a moment, but we allow the downward gravitational pull that we have just discussed, the counsel and the path and the seat, we allow those things to drag us away from the centrality of walking with God.
And the next thing we know, our testimony is gone. The leaf does not wither if it stays connected. And you will not wither if you stay connected, connected with God and his Word, God and his people, God and his church. Their strength comes from God's Word, their stability comes from God's Word, their spiritual testimony comes from God's Word. And their success comes from God's Word. I see your ears perk up when I say that. We all want to be successful. And that is what the Scripture says: "That brings forth its fruit in its season, and whatever he does shall prosper".
Prosperity for the believer, it's like the zero that comes after a numeral. Outward prosperity is wonderful if it follows after God, just like a zero that is added to the number one. But if you don't have the number one before your zeros, you are just a row of goose eggs. GomasSuccess starts with God. If you try to build a successful life without God, you're gonna end up with a bunch of ciphers; and at the end, you're gonna be so frustrated that you gave your life to that and all you got left is a bunch of zeros.
But the Psalmist says that the happy man has success in his own time and whatever he does prospers. Why? Because he's connected to the source, the true source which is God. That's how the Psalmist describes the way of the godly man. But notice the transitional statement in this text: "But the ungodly are not so". The way of the ungodly is unfolded for us in verses 4 through 6: "The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish".
Take everything that I've said today about the righteous and negate it, and that's the ungodly. That's what the Psalmist means when he says, "The ungodly are not so". Are the ungodly blessed? Not so. Are they happy? Not so. Are they successful? Not so. Are they fruitful? Not so. They may sound gregarious and look successful, but they are not so. The ungodly actually do what God forbids in verse 1: they walk in the counsel of the wicked, they stand in the way of sinners, and they sit in the seat of the scornful. And the ungodly cannot stand in the time of difficulty. Verse 4 says: "The ungodly are not so, but they are like the chaff which the wind drives away".
Now, that's a statement that doesn't resonate with us 'cause we don't know anything about the chaff. So let me tell you where this illustration came from. The picture here is of a threshing floor in Israel at the time of the grain harvest. The threshing floors of Palestine were built on hills that would catch the best breeze. The grain is brought to them. It is crushed by animals or by threshing instruments that are drawn over it. Then the grain is pitched high into the air where the wind blows the chaff away, and the heavier grain then falls back down to the threshing floor and it is collected.
The chaff is scattered or it's burned, and the Psalmist says that the person who walks in wickedness is like the chaff which the wind blows away. Get this, you are either like a strong tree that is embedded with its roots into the riverbed or you're like the chaff which is being blown away by the wind. The ungodly cannot stand in the time of difficulty, when the wind comes, because there's no substance, there's no source. The ungodly cannot stand in the day of judgment. That's the next thing we learn about them. They cannot stand in the time of difficulty nor can they stand in the day of judgment.
"Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous". The Psalmist means that wicked men cannot hold up in the day of judgment. They cannot stand. They will be convicted, they will shrink away. When the Psalm speaks of sinners not standing in the congregation of the righteous, it is just repeating the principle. Wicked men today live in a world which is peopled with many righteous ones. God calls these righteous ones the salt of the earth. But God is not going to allow both classes of people to be together throughout eternity and how awful it will be to be in eternity, to live forever with those who are just as wicked as you are, never seeing a righteous person, never hearing a righteous word, never witnessing a righteous act.
Say all you want to about hell and its fire, this is hell, and this is what it will be like for eternity to those who do not come to God. The ungodly cannot stand in the time of difficulty, they cannot stand in the day of judgment, and they cannot stand in the presence of God. Listen to verse 6, the final word of Psalm 1: "For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish". The Lord knows the way of the righteous. That doesn't mean he's acquainted with us. The word "know" is the word for intimacy. The Lord is intimate with the righteous. And the word is in a continuing nuance. The Lord continually knows the way of the righteous.
Ladies and gentlemen, God knows us. When we're trying to live for him, walking on the road that he puts us on, he doesn't abandon us. He knows us. He sees us. He keeps knowing the way of the righteous. His eye is upon us, his ear is open to us; and in Christ, his Spirit lives within us. But the way of the wicked, says the Psalmist, will perish. The ungodly sinner, judged and condemned in the final judgment, will suffer relentless torment, forever suffering the eternal wrath of God.
Hear me carefully. The word "perish" does not mean annihilation. The Bible does not teach that the wicked will be annihilated. I've heard people say, "Yeah, I'm gonna live my life the way I want to; and if what you say is true, when I die, I will just die like a dog and that'll be it and it'll be over". Not so. Everybody in this room, everybody in this world is gonna be alive forever somewhere. The road you get on will determine the destiny at which you arrive. But don't let anybody tell you that perishing means annihilation. To perish means to be separated from God. Now, this is all very challenging. It's like much of the Bible for me. The Bible says: "Blessed is the man", then it describes how this blessed man lives and I go through this and I think, you know, "I do some of that and some of it I don't. How does anybody live like that"?
Dr. David Jeremiah remembered reading a story about a man named Joseph Flacks who was visiting Palestine in the early 20th century, and he had an opportunity to address a gathering of Jews and Arabs and he decided to speak on the Psalm that I've spoken on today, Psalm 1. So he read it in Hebrew and then he asked, "Who is this blessed man of whom the Psalmist speaks? This man who never walked in the counsel of the wicked or stood in the way of sinners or sat in the seat of the scorners, who is this man"?
And nobody spoke, and so Flacks said, "Was it our great father Abraham"? And a man stood up and he said, "No, it cannot be Abraham. Abraham denied his wife and told a lie about her". "Well, how about the law-giver Moses", said Flacks. "No", someone said. "It cannot be Moses. He killed a man and he lost his temper by the waters of Meribah". And then Flacks suggested David, could it be David? "It was not David", said someone, "because he committed adultery and he committed murder".
And there was a long silence, and then an elderly Jew stood up and said, "My brother, I have this little book here. It's called the New Testament. I've been reading it, and if I could believe this book, if I could be sure that it is true, I would say that the man of the first Psalm is Jesus of Nazareth".
Which tells me that you and I, we don't have any hope of living life on this high road in our own energy. This very calling is consummated by the Lord Jesus Christ. It is he who lives in perfect communion with his Father. It is he who delights in the Word of God. It is he who prospers in all his way. In Christ, we become the blessed person of Psalm 1. He is the God man who fulfills the divine command. It is he who gives us his righteousness and, as we live in communion with him, we can become that tree planted by the waters. And our way will be known to the Lord, and as we live in communion with him, his Psalms become our Psalms and the road to happiness, to blessing is ours because, first of all, it is his and we are in Christ.
And I would just leave you with two takeaway applications. If this Psalm says anything, it says that for us to stay on the right road and not get on the detours that so often appeal to us even as Christians, two things we need to be proactive about. First of all, stay in the written Word. Read the Word. Ten minutes a day for the whole book of James. And here's the second thing. When you're in the written Word, don't forget that the written Word is all about the living Word. Jesus is called the Word of God. We don't study the living Word unless we really understand that the reason we study the written Word is so we can get to better understand the living Word.
When Dr. David Jeremiah comes to this book which is the letter of God, He reads it, he examines it, he outlines it. But, men and women, this is God's love letter to me and to you. And once we understand that and we begin to look at the written Word, we will see the living Word just as we did today. Who could imagine finding Jesus in Psalm 1? But he's there. In fact, he's everywhere throughout all of the Scripture if you just look for him. If you wanna stay happy, if you wanna be "blessed blessed", "happy happy", my counsel to you is stay in the written Word so you can find the living Word, and fall in love with him all over again and you will discover blessed is that man.
Verses 1 through 3 tell us about the way of the righteous and verses 4 through 6 detail the way of the ungodly. In these two pathways, the Psalmist sounds a note that is found in many other places in the Bible. There are not many ways of life as some teach. There are only two. Daniel says it this way: "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt". Malachi puts it this way: "Then ye shall again discern between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him".
In Matthew we read these words: "Enter by the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it". Just two ways. In John we read: "Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming in which all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come forth: those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation". There are many thoughts about life; there are really only two ways. And while the Bible is very clear about the two ways, it is even more careful to point out that only one of those two ways will bring happiness to one's life.
This is the Psalmist's emphatic declaration that God's abundant favor rests upon the person who lives a life that is centered in God. This is the Hebrew method of indicating happiness for if you were to read this Psalm in the Hebrew, it wouldn't have the word "blessed" just once. It would have it twice. "Blessed, oh, really blessed is the man who does not walk in an ungodly way. Oh, how very happy is that man". Most of us spend a lot of time trying to find happiness. We're all involved in the pursuit of happiness. Hardly anybody ever thinks that that journey could end in God, and yet the Bible is very clear to tell us we should not take God out of the picture or we will not have joy.
Psalm 16:11 says: "God, you'll show me the path of life; and in your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore". Psalm 34:8 says: "Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed", happy, "is the man who trusts in him"! So Psalm 1 offers us true, lasting happiness by showing us the difference between the righteous and the wicked. It describes two kinds of people living two kinds of lives with two different kinds of outcomes. And when we see the blessings of the godly next to the emptiness of the wicked, surely we will understand that the beauty of the godly life cannot be overlooked if we're trying to figure out how to be happy.
So let's take this little journey through these six verses. This is a very special psalm. It begins in verses 1 through 3. In describing the way of the righteous, the Psalmist tells us two general things about these people. First he tells us that people who live on the way of the righteous avoid the downward pull of the ungodly. When the Psalmist talks about the ungodly in this text, he's not talking about murderers and rapists and dope-pushers or the kind of people we usually think of as very wicked.
To be ungodly simply means to live your life without God. If you are unhealthy, you are without health. If you are unfriendly, you are without a friend. If you are ungodly, you've decided to do life without God. It can include the person who goes to work every day, takes good care of his family. On the weekend he goes to the desert or the beach or just hangs out at home.
The ungodly have a downward momentum. That's the thing you need to understand. There is a gravitational pull on the ungodly life. And this Psalm, more than any Psalm in the Bible, more than any passage in the Bible, outlines to us what happens if we start to listen to those who are going the wrong way.
If you examine the first verse of Psalm 1 carefully, you will notice these progressions: "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful". In this one verse, there are three sets of three. Three sets of three words. There is walk, stand, and sit; counsel, path, and seat; ungodly, sinners, and scornful. These words describe the progressive downward gravitational pull of the wrong life. It begins with a subtle adoption of principles, followed by a persisting practice of offenses, and it ends with a deliberate mocking of God.
I wanna take you through these nine words and show you what they mean and how they affect your life. First of all, we're going to look at three influences of the ungodly. The three words are counsel, path, and seat. The counsel is a reference to the philosophy of the natural man who's trying to figure life out as if God did not exist. It is man-centered living, not God-centered living. It's what we call humanistic thinking, based on the theory of evolution instead of the fact of creation.
The word "counsel" indicates the idea that a person sits down and has a discussion with somebody about life. They go through the pros and cons, and after the person listens to the counsel of the ungodly, he begins to move in that direction. He begins to be persuaded that something that's being said to him from a person who doesn't believe anything he believes may have something worthy of his consideration. That is the counsel. That's the beginning. At first, you listen. Maybe you heard it before, but now you're listening.
And then there is the path. Having listened to the ungodly counsel, now a man who is walking away from God begins to walk along with the ungodly man. He starts to practice the things that he has heard. What he has been thinking is now translated into what he is doing. That's the way it works. You get with somebody who's giving you bad information, you begin to buy into it, and before you know it, you're starting to do some of the things he did or she did without ever realizing it's going on. You move from the counsel to the path.
And the third word in this first set of threes is the word "seat". Now you're not just a practitioner, you're settled. You've sat down in the midst of this philosophy. You're seated in the seat, you're comfortable in this lifestyle. You've crossed over to the other road. Those are the influences of the ungodly. Mark them well. They work as if they were programmed in life and over the 50 years that I have watched it happen, it's as chartable as it can be.
The next three words are the involvement of the ungodly. Watch how this works. The three words are walk, stand, and sit. Walk is a reference to how you live your life. It's a word that is used sometimes for conversation: your walk. For instance, the Bible tells us we're to walk in the Spirit. What does that mean? We're to live every day in fellowship with the Spirit. We're to have a walk with the Spirit, your daily walk. You begin to walk in the ways of the ungodly.
And then the Bible says you stand. You make a commitment, you take a stand, you become comfortable with it. You don't even apologize for it. You just sort of blend in and you're a part of that group that's crossing over, going to the other highway. And then the third word is the word "sit". Now you've settled into this lifestyle. So what we do first is make little decisions that are not godly. Then we make commitments, and then we cement these decisions and we settle into those commitments as a lifestyle. There's one more set of three. We've observed the three influences of the ungodly: counsel, path, and seat; the three involvements with the ungodly: walk, stand, and sit. And now the three intensities of the ungodly. The three words are: ungodly, sinners, and scornful.
Now, we've already talked about ungodly, that it's not a person who's outwardly evil, but a person who comes at life without God. If you want an illustration in the Bible of a person sorting that through, you can read the book of Ecclesiastes because, for almost all of that book, Solomon is trying to do life without God and he comes to the conclusion that it's all vanity, that it's worthless. Everywhere he goes, he ends at the same place: "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity". The Bible says we start with this "minus God" attitude.
Then the next word is the word "sinners", and there's a strange word for sinners in the Bible. It's a word that means to make a loud noise or cause a fuss or a tumult. Here's a person who is minus God, but hangs out with the ungodly. Now, he's beginning to act in a way that he would never have dreamed he would act months before. He's being drug into the gravitational pull of evil. How many of you know, evil is always downward? It's never upward. Now you're involved in the activities of those that, before, you did not believe. And the final word is the word "scornful". I need to speak about that word for just a moment.
Notice the Bible says we go from being without God, just living life like God didn't exist, to being kind of proactive about the things we do that are not godly, and then if we're not careful, we become scornful. We become people who are outwardly shaking our fist in the face of God. We are becoming practical atheists and saying that God may exist, but that doesn't have anything to do with me. Please hear me today, men and women. Psalm 1 does not begin with the power of positive thinking. It begins with the power of negative thinking.
In other words, the blessed person is the person who avoids certain things in life, things which make it impossible for happiness to flourish. Because these things are poisonous and destructive and counterproductive. "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly". Don't get yourself involved in relationships and in situations where the influence in your life is dragging you into a wrong position.
Then there's another thing that we learn about the righteous: They accept the decisive place of the Scripture. But this godly man's, "Delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatever he does will prosper". Let's unpack that. Notice, first of all, "Their hearts delight in the Word of God, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night".
Now, the word "law" here in the text is the word "Torah", and that means instruction. It always, in the Old Testament sense, is used to describe the law of Moses. But it's also used in a general way to describe all of the Old Testament Scriptures and quite often used to describe the book of Psalms. Here we learn that the man who is walking on the righteous road is a blessed man because he finds joy in the Word of God. He does not read the Word of God to see what he can get away with. He reads the Word of God because he wants to learn how to please God. You will only delight in God's law if you delight in God himself. And the man who delights in the law of the Lord does not study the Bible so he can find the least common denominator of the Christian life.
I cannot tell you how many people I've met who that's their goal: "I wanna be a Christian, but not so Christian. I wanna get in the door, but I'm not anxious about going much further after I get in the door". This person who delights in the Word of God finds his greatest joy in doing those things which he knows will please the Lord. He studies the Word of God, and when he finds a passage that applies to him, he determines to carry it out in his life. He delights to match up his life with the principles he discovers in the Word of God. He meditates in that Word day and night. He chews over God's Word throughout the day and into the night.
Let me tell you how that can work. When you go to bed at night, and maybe you've had a day full of anxiety things and troubles and problems, and maybe you've read that you should count sheep, I have a suggestion for you. If you have any Word of God in your spirit, meditate on it.
Practice ypur memorization at night sometimes before you go to sleep and you'll discover something that you don't know how to explain, your mind is more fertile in remembering just before you go to sleep than maybe any other time in the day. Now, you wouldn't know that by looking at people who fall asleep in church, but that's true. So when you're laying on the bed at night and your head's on the pillow and everything is quiet, think through the passage you are memorizing. And what a blessing that is. Sometimes that happens in the morning. Sometimes you can wake up before anybody wakes up and you know you'd better not get up, so you can just lay in bed and meditate on the Word of God. Robert Morgan has a great definition of meditation. He says it's the "Powerful practice of pondering, personalizing, and practicing Scripture".
Dr. David Jeremiah recently read a story about actor Anthony Hopkins who, when he gets a movie script, reads through it between 100 and 200 times before production. He makes notes in the margins of the script, he scribbles and doodles and imagines how it would look on the stage or the screen, and by the time Hopkins is finished, he has internalized that script. He knows his character, he knows his and everybody else's lines, and he's able to improvise and he's a personification of the script. That's an amazing thought.
Matt Gardner, who wrote the story about Hopkins, said, "If a Hollywood actor reads a script 100 times, why can't I read a book in the Bible 100 times"? He selected the book of James which, by the way, you can read in ten minutes, and he began to read it over and over and over again and meditate on what he was reading.
As he got into the project and the days passed, he began to see how certain themes emerged and were repeated in the book. He began to get a sense of the author's personality and convictions. He became so familiar with this Epistle, he could think through it with his eyes closed and he began looking at his everyday life through the lens of the book of James. Just read the book of James. Takes ten minutes. What if you read it 100 times? Or 200 times like Anthony Hopkins? You'd pretty much know everything that's in that book and I wanna tell you, the book James is one of the most practical books in the Bible. It will hit you everywhere in your life and help you become a better person.
On a lighter note, Dr. David Jeremiah read this about Elmer Towns, an old friend of mine, who knew an office manager who liked everything about her job except one thing. She didn't enjoy interacting with the plant manager, and she had to have meetings with the plant manager all the time. No matter what happened in the company, she'd have to go see the plant manager and it was very negative and she dreaded being called into his office. So she had a discussion with Dr. Towns about it, and he suggested that she meditate on the Lord's Prayer. He said, "On your way to the office to meet with the plant manager, just recite the Lord's Prayer. Just pray it over and over again".
Can you imagine this lady walking down the hallway to her managers' meeting and she's mumbling the Lord's Prayer on her way. It's like she's going to an execution or something. But she decided to do it and she said when she did that, by the time she arrived at his office, she was calm, she wasn't defensive, she wasn't angry with him. She was even able to say, "Let me help you get a better perspective on this". She later said, "I got faith from the Lord's Prayer. It gave me courage to aggressively suggest new ways for him to look at things. Now I always say the Lord's Prayer when I'm walking from my desk to his office".
Meditates on the Word of God day and night. The Bible isn't something you just carry to church with you on Sunday and throw it into the back window shelf in your car till seven days go by. The Bible should be the source of your strength. The Bible says, "Their heart delights in the Word of God". Now notice, not only does their heart delight in it, but their habits are dictated by it. Their strength comes from the Word of God. The Psalmist says, "He shall be like a tree". A tree is a picture of a man in this Psalm. Just as a tree is nourished by constant supplies of water, without which it would die in the blistering sun, so the strength of a godly man is maintained by the supplies of grace that are drawn from the Word of God.
How do you stay strong in your life? Don't try to do it on your own. Get strength from the Word of God. Number two, their strength comes from the Word of God and their stability comes from the Word of God. Notice the text says: "Planted by the rivers of water". A fruit tree that is planted by the banks of the river suggests stability. The tree is firmly rooted in the soil so that when the storm comes, the root system is so vast, down into the soil, that the storm does not destroy the tree.
How many of you know Christians who get destroyed by unexpected storms because they don't have stability? Their relationship with the Lord Jesus is one-half inch deep, and so when the storm comes, their root system is right on the top and the storm just takes them off of their game. Do you know that in America today, there are trees still standing that have lived through the entire history of this nation? Remaining strong and fresh and green, just as they were at the beginning. The Bible says when we become aware of the importance of sinking our roots down deep into the soil of God's Word, we become strong and we become stable. Here's the third one. Our spiritual testimony comes from God's Word.
Now, if you're examining a plant, the first thing that you see about that plant or that tree that gives you any indication of how the tree is doing is the leaf. The Scripture says: "Whose leaf also shall not wither". The leaf is the outward testimony of this man. As someone has said: "God's trees are evergreens; they never lose their testimonies. They never wither. Why does the leaf not wither? Because of the connection. It is connected with the branch, which is connected to the tree, which is fed by the roots, which go down deep near a river of water, which is the Word of God".
There is much talk today about the blown testimonies of God's people. I hate to tell you how many I have watched just in this last year who started out right and it looked like they were gonna make a huge difference in the kingdom, and somehow it's all over and they're finished. Let me tell you what I know. That didn't happen overnight. They didn't go to bed one night really full of the Word of God and the desire to serve him and get up the next morning and go out and do something that totally discounted everything they supposedly believed.
I remember hearing Chuck Swindoll as he was talking about marriage, and he said, "If you get into a marriage that's coming unglued, let me tell you it's not a blow-out, it's a slow leak". And that's the way it is in our Christian life, is it not? We don't become ungodly in a moment, but we allow the downward gravitational pull that we have just discussed, the counsel and the path and the seat, we allow those things to drag us away from the centrality of walking with God.
And the next thing we know, our testimony is gone. The leaf does not wither if it stays connected. And you will not wither if you stay connected, connected with God and his Word, God and his people, God and his church. Their strength comes from God's Word, their stability comes from God's Word, their spiritual testimony comes from God's Word. And their success comes from God's Word. I see your ears perk up when I say that. We all want to be successful. And that is what the Scripture says: "That brings forth its fruit in its season, and whatever he does shall prosper".
Prosperity for the believer, it's like the zero that comes after a numeral. Outward prosperity is wonderful if it follows after God, just like a zero that is added to the number one. But if you don't have the number one before your zeros, you are just a row of goose eggs. GomasSuccess starts with God. If you try to build a successful life without God, you're gonna end up with a bunch of ciphers; and at the end, you're gonna be so frustrated that you gave your life to that and all you got left is a bunch of zeros.
But the Psalmist says that the happy man has success in his own time and whatever he does prospers. Why? Because he's connected to the source, the true source which is God. That's how the Psalmist describes the way of the godly man. But notice the transitional statement in this text: "But the ungodly are not so". The way of the ungodly is unfolded for us in verses 4 through 6: "The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish".
Take everything that I've said today about the righteous and negate it, and that's the ungodly. That's what the Psalmist means when he says, "The ungodly are not so". Are the ungodly blessed? Not so. Are they happy? Not so. Are they successful? Not so. Are they fruitful? Not so. They may sound gregarious and look successful, but they are not so. The ungodly actually do what God forbids in verse 1: they walk in the counsel of the wicked, they stand in the way of sinners, and they sit in the seat of the scornful. And the ungodly cannot stand in the time of difficulty. Verse 4 says: "The ungodly are not so, but they are like the chaff which the wind drives away".
Now, that's a statement that doesn't resonate with us 'cause we don't know anything about the chaff. So let me tell you where this illustration came from. The picture here is of a threshing floor in Israel at the time of the grain harvest. The threshing floors of Palestine were built on hills that would catch the best breeze. The grain is brought to them. It is crushed by animals or by threshing instruments that are drawn over it. Then the grain is pitched high into the air where the wind blows the chaff away, and the heavier grain then falls back down to the threshing floor and it is collected.
The chaff is scattered or it's burned, and the Psalmist says that the person who walks in wickedness is like the chaff which the wind blows away. Get this, you are either like a strong tree that is embedded with its roots into the riverbed or you're like the chaff which is being blown away by the wind. The ungodly cannot stand in the time of difficulty, when the wind comes, because there's no substance, there's no source. The ungodly cannot stand in the day of judgment. That's the next thing we learn about them. They cannot stand in the time of difficulty nor can they stand in the day of judgment.
"Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous". The Psalmist means that wicked men cannot hold up in the day of judgment. They cannot stand. They will be convicted, they will shrink away. When the Psalm speaks of sinners not standing in the congregation of the righteous, it is just repeating the principle. Wicked men today live in a world which is peopled with many righteous ones. God calls these righteous ones the salt of the earth. But God is not going to allow both classes of people to be together throughout eternity and how awful it will be to be in eternity, to live forever with those who are just as wicked as you are, never seeing a righteous person, never hearing a righteous word, never witnessing a righteous act.
Say all you want to about hell and its fire, this is hell, and this is what it will be like for eternity to those who do not come to God. The ungodly cannot stand in the time of difficulty, they cannot stand in the day of judgment, and they cannot stand in the presence of God. Listen to verse 6, the final word of Psalm 1: "For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish". The Lord knows the way of the righteous. That doesn't mean he's acquainted with us. The word "know" is the word for intimacy. The Lord is intimate with the righteous. And the word is in a continuing nuance. The Lord continually knows the way of the righteous.
Ladies and gentlemen, God knows us. When we're trying to live for him, walking on the road that he puts us on, he doesn't abandon us. He knows us. He sees us. He keeps knowing the way of the righteous. His eye is upon us, his ear is open to us; and in Christ, his Spirit lives within us. But the way of the wicked, says the Psalmist, will perish. The ungodly sinner, judged and condemned in the final judgment, will suffer relentless torment, forever suffering the eternal wrath of God.
Hear me carefully. The word "perish" does not mean annihilation. The Bible does not teach that the wicked will be annihilated. I've heard people say, "Yeah, I'm gonna live my life the way I want to; and if what you say is true, when I die, I will just die like a dog and that'll be it and it'll be over". Not so. Everybody in this room, everybody in this world is gonna be alive forever somewhere. The road you get on will determine the destiny at which you arrive. But don't let anybody tell you that perishing means annihilation. To perish means to be separated from God. Now, this is all very challenging. It's like much of the Bible for me. The Bible says: "Blessed is the man", then it describes how this blessed man lives and I go through this and I think, you know, "I do some of that and some of it I don't. How does anybody live like that"?
Dr. David Jeremiah remembered reading a story about a man named Joseph Flacks who was visiting Palestine in the early 20th century, and he had an opportunity to address a gathering of Jews and Arabs and he decided to speak on the Psalm that I've spoken on today, Psalm 1. So he read it in Hebrew and then he asked, "Who is this blessed man of whom the Psalmist speaks? This man who never walked in the counsel of the wicked or stood in the way of sinners or sat in the seat of the scorners, who is this man"?
And nobody spoke, and so Flacks said, "Was it our great father Abraham"? And a man stood up and he said, "No, it cannot be Abraham. Abraham denied his wife and told a lie about her". "Well, how about the law-giver Moses", said Flacks. "No", someone said. "It cannot be Moses. He killed a man and he lost his temper by the waters of Meribah". And then Flacks suggested David, could it be David? "It was not David", said someone, "because he committed adultery and he committed murder".
And there was a long silence, and then an elderly Jew stood up and said, "My brother, I have this little book here. It's called the New Testament. I've been reading it, and if I could believe this book, if I could be sure that it is true, I would say that the man of the first Psalm is Jesus of Nazareth".
Which tells me that you and I, we don't have any hope of living life on this high road in our own energy. This very calling is consummated by the Lord Jesus Christ. It is he who lives in perfect communion with his Father. It is he who delights in the Word of God. It is he who prospers in all his way. In Christ, we become the blessed person of Psalm 1. He is the God man who fulfills the divine command. It is he who gives us his righteousness and, as we live in communion with him, we can become that tree planted by the waters. And our way will be known to the Lord, and as we live in communion with him, his Psalms become our Psalms and the road to happiness, to blessing is ours because, first of all, it is his and we are in Christ.
And I would just leave you with two takeaway applications. If this Psalm says anything, it says that for us to stay on the right road and not get on the detours that so often appeal to us even as Christians, two things we need to be proactive about. First of all, stay in the written Word. Read the Word. Ten minutes a day for the whole book of James. And here's the second thing. When you're in the written Word, don't forget that the written Word is all about the living Word. Jesus is called the Word of God. We don't study the living Word unless we really understand that the reason we study the written Word is so we can get to better understand the living Word.
When Dr. David Jeremiah comes to this book which is the letter of God, He reads it, he examines it, he outlines it. But, men and women, this is God's love letter to me and to you. And once we understand that and we begin to look at the written Word, we will see the living Word just as we did today. Who could imagine finding Jesus in Psalm 1? But he's there. In fact, he's everywhere throughout all of the Scripture if you just look for him. If you wanna stay happy, if you wanna be "blessed blessed", "happy happy", my counsel to you is stay in the written Word so you can find the living Word, and fall in love with him all over again and you will discover blessed is that man.
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Lori Ann, thank you for praying! Let's keep lifting up 
Hello everyone! Let's lift up 
