Summer in the Psalms
Allen Snapp
Grace Community Church
June 27, 2021
The Blessed Life
Please turn in your Bibles to Psalm 1. We were in Maine this past week on vacation so I am going to share a message from the Psalms that I shared back in 2021.
Music has the power to move us - literally. Glass can be shattered by the right musical frequency. The way that works is all glass – in fact all material on earth – has a natural resonant frequency and when a note matches the resonant frequency of the glass, it will vibrate even to the point of shattering. The sameis true of the human heart. There are resonant frequencies that can powerfully move our hearts.
Music can evoke powerful emotions. A song can transport us back in time. When I hear the Eagles You Get the Best of My Love, I’m a teenager in high school again. Music has the ability to bring back memories. Songs can make us feel good, songs can move us to tears. Music can move our hearts in powerful ways.
One day I was working at the computer with music streaming on YouTube, and an instrumental came on I had never heard before.It was just piano and violin but the melody was haunting and I realized it was stirring deep emotions in my heart. It was tapping into an unnamed sadness and longing in my heart. I felt like the song’s haunting melody was resonating at the same frequency as my heart.
I clicked over to YouTube to find out more and smiled when I saw the name of the song. It was a composition by Max Richter called Mercy. I wasn’t surprised that mercy would resonate in my heart.
The Psalms are songs - songs about God, about mankind, about life. The Psalms resonate with our hearts and have the power to move us deeply because they span the spectrum of human emotions from faith to doubt to joy to despair, from praising God, to questioning God.
When the psalmist cries out, “Where are you God, have you forgotten me?” there are seasons when it resonates with our hearts. Yeah, God, have you forgotten me? Where are you? Other times our hearts can sing along with the psalmist as he sings of the faithfulness and righteousness of God. And still other days when the frequency of our hearts are set to discouragement, and we will say with the psalmist, why so downcast oh my soul? Put your hope in God!
The psalms are raw and honest and cover the span of human experience and emotion and then connect all that to God. The psalms are a treasure from God to us.
Psalm 1 is a great place to start because it is the introduction to all the Psalms.
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; 2 but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. 3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.
4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. 5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; 6 for the Lord knows the way of the
righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. Psalm 1:1-6
The first note of the first psalm should resonate with all of us. Blessed is the man…(Man represents all people). The word blessed is so overused it has lost a lot of its original meaning. We say “God bless you” when someone sneezes. We write I pray God blesses you. In the south when someone says “bless your heart” it’s a nice way of saying you’re a total idiot…bless your heart.
But the Hebrew word for “blessed” has layers of meaning and all of them resonate with the deepest longings of our heart. Blessed refers to having the favor of God on our lives. It means to be happy in the truest sense of happiness. Blessed embodies everything we want our lives to be in the fullest sense. An important characteristic of “blessed” is that it doesn’t look at life from a narrow lens view, it looks at life from a wide angle view. It doesn’t see in snapshots, it sees life in panorama. We’ll come back to that in a few minutes.
So how do we get to blessed? Psalm 1 gives us a roadmap that starts by telling us where not to go.
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; vs 1
If the psalmist wanted to draw a straight line, he could have written don’t be wicked, don’t sin, don’t be a scoffer but he doesn’t. He warns us to be careful about what influences our lives. What shapes us.
The road to the unblessed life is rarely a straight line downward. It’s a gradual descent down. Notice the downward progression: it starts with walking in the counsel or advice of the ungodly. The word translated “wicked” actually means the ungodly and refers to those not in covenant with God, unbelievers. It’s a warning to us not to get our life direction from those who don’t know God.
The next step is to stand with the sinner. Standing is a more settled position than walking, and sinner a more intense description of someone who is openly disobeying God. The progression goes from being influenced by someone who leaves God out of the picture to someone who openly defies God. The sin gets more intense and the association gets closer.
The last step is to sit in the seat of scoffers. Scoffer describes a deep level of wickedness and sitting in their seat means to collude with them, to be one with them. Scoffers ridicule and mock. They call evil good and good evil. They mock God and defy Him and belittle those who don’t join them in their arrogant sin. The religious leaders scoffed at Jesus and mocked him as he hung on the cross. Scoffers are not content to despise God, they want you to despise Him too. They want you to sit in their seat and be one of them.
The road to an unblessed life starts with ungodly influence so be careful about what influences your life. In contrast, the blessed person is influenced by the word of God:
…but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. Vs 2
This influence is an influence of delight. More than just knowing God’s word; it’s delighting in God’s
word. When we sit down to read the Bible, we should read it not just to connect with our heads, but also to connect with our hearts. We should delight in the wisdom contained in this book. We should delight in the insight into human nature contained in this book. We should delight in the infinite greatness and glory of God revealed in this book. We should marvel at God’s loving plan of salvation unfolded from Genesis to Revelation. Delight means that as we ponder it with our minds we love it with our hearts!
It’s as we delight in God’s word, that our lives prosper!
He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. vs 3
The psalmist uses the simile of a tree planted by streams of water to paint the picture of a blessed life: as our roots go deep into the water of God’s word, our lives flourish and bear fruit. The blessed life isn’t determined by what’s happening around us, it’s determined by what’s happening in us. Where our roots are drawing from. What’s influencing us and nourishing us – in this case, God’s word.
Notice it says our lives will yield fruit in its season. Life comes in seasons and some seasons will be more fruitful than others. Sometimes we may not see much fruit at all. We may be in a season of pruning where God in His love says I’m going to cut you back for a season so you can be more fruitful in time.
There will be hard seasons. Seasons of drought. It occurred to me that over the years I have often heard believers say, “I’m going through a dry time.” Usually the implication is that something is wrong. Maybe there is, but maybe there isn’t. It might just be God allowing us to go through a season of drought. Either way, the answer is to put the roots down deeper into God’s word. As the water of God’s word nourishes our souls, our leaf (our life) will not wither. They may get a bit distressed, but they won’t wither.
Last summer we moved an ash sapling that started to grow near some bushes in our yard to right near out house. It was flourishing but then I read that you don’t want to plant an ash tree near your house because while they have a deep taproot, their other roots stay shallow and spread out quickly looking for moisture and nutrients and can damage the foundation of your home. So we moved it again away from the house. This year when everything else was blooming and trees were budding, this poor ash tree had nothing. We decided it was dead and we were going to pull it out but didn’t get around to it for several weeks. And then, we saw little green buds coming out on it. Now it has healthy green leaves and is doing great. It’s season to leaf, at least this year, was later than other trees.
There are seasons when we put out fruit and there are seasons when we don’t. But when our roots go deep into God’s word – when we love, obey, and treasure God’s truth- hard times and droughts might come, but we will survive and even thrive! We will bear fruit and that fruit will prosper.
Prosper means success but not in the way the world defines success. Because we delight in God’s word, we are able to make wise decisions, good choices. We value the things that have lasting value. We are able to identify the roads that look good in the short run but lead to regret. Regret is seeing our wrong choices after it’s too late. Wisdom is seeing those wrong choices before it’s too late. Speaking of regret…
4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. 5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; 6 for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. Vv. 4-6
Remember I said that blessed doesn’t take a snapshot view of life, it takes a panoramic view of life. Snapshots can be deceptive. One person’s life looks amazing - today. Another person’s life looks terrible - today. But snapshots never tell the whole story. For that we need to see in panorama.
One of the best things about blessed is that it understands the clearest measurement of a person’s life comes at the end of that life. The Hebrew have a word for it: the acharit, the final ending. Panorama.
Those who reject God and His ways come to nothing. They are chaff – their lives empty husks blown away by the wind. On the way to this acharit they may become rich, famous, they might sell books or get their own TV show, they might become world-renowned influencers, they may build fortune 500 companies, they may build empires. Along the way we look at the snapshots of their lives and say “wow!”
But when the panoramic view is seen, when the acharit is seen, we will say, “wow”.
A dramatic illustration of this is Jeffrey Epstein. Snapshots of most of his life looked incredibly successful. Rich, powerful, well-connected, influential. 60 years of snapshots.
But the panorama view reveals a disgraced man whose sin was exposed for all to see. He died a miserable man in prison, and his name is a name no one wants to be associated with. His life may have looked blessed but it never was, and we see that clearly from his acharit, his final end. He will not stand on the day of judgment and he will not live forever with the righteous. But this reminds us of a problem.
for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. Vs. 6
Problem: Psalm 14 and 53 tell us there is no one righteous, none who do good. The Lord knows the way
of the righteous, but according to other psalms we are all on the way of the wicked and will perish.
The Lord knows the way of the righteous, and by His grace we do too. Jesus said “I am the Way…” Jesus is our way of righteousness. We, like the Apostle Paul, seek the righteousness that comes from God through faith in Christ. But that’s not just a New Testament teaching. As the psalmist delighted in the law of the Lord, he read about Abraham who “believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness”. (Gen 15:6) The prophet Habakkuk also tells us the “just shall live by faith”.
This means, there is hope for everyone and anyone. The snapshot of our life can go from unblessed and regret, to blessed and thriving when we make the song of our life Mercy. Turn from sin and to Christ. If you don’t know Jesus as your Savior, today is a great day to receive him through faith and trust. (Band)
As the old hymn says, I love to tell the story, ’Twill be my theme in glory, To tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love. I pray that the truths of Psalm 1 resonate in our hearts, that the frequency of this beautiful psalm resonates with the frequency that our hearts are tuned to and stirs in us faith, love, hope, and joy. Let’s tune our hearts to God and His word. We will be blessed if we do.