Psalm 1
Living a Blessed Life

This Psalm is about 2 visions of what life and what happiness is all about. The way of the world and the way of the Lord. It is an exhortation with a promise for everyone outside of the faith who will hear the gospel and is a reminder to those who are already in the faith. The way of the wicked will perish but the Lord knows the way of the righteous and it is blessed. 

There are 3 great ideas. One is how not to live your life and build your world view. The second is how you should live your life and build your world view. The third is the results of these two options. 

I. FIRST IS THE NEGATIVE WARNING ABOUT TAKING THE CONVENTIONAL VIEW OF THE SURROUNDING CULTURE ON HOW TO LIVE YOUR LIFE. 

1. It is to not be like the people who are around you in society. "v.1" This applies to the notoriously wicked but, for the true believer, it also applies to mere worldliness and secularism and failure to take into account the eternal dimension of things, which views are not usually thought to be very bad by Christians. In fact such persons may be very attractive to us. 

How often we Christians have a view that we must avoid the wickedness of the murderous, the adulterers, the blasphemers, the violent and criminal elements of society while forgetting that there is much in the nicer aspects of society which is to be avoided, too. This avoidance is not necessarily to separate from them geographically, however. We are normally called to be witnesses within society at large. Yet this calls us to scrupulously avoid their sinful lifestyle and their secular world view. 

Many of you will find this to be a perennial problem -- how to live in the world and not be of the world. You who are students in a secular University are right in the thick of it. All of us who have friends we admire and look-up-to who are not Christians are in the shadow of this predicament. The community of God's people, the church, is a help and solace; as are the writings and organizations of faithful Christians. But it is a major problem in a society with a lot of secularized religion that claims to be Christian. It would be so much easier in Japan or Saudi Arabia or India. Don't discount the problem. Face it. 

2. "V.1." You are familiar with the progression here. It is sometimes called a synthetic parallelism. It concerns the way and the advice and the standards of the wicked. First the person walks; then he stands; finally he sits and makes himself at home. 

It is the biography of a thousand disasters of professing Christians -- the familiar story of people who gingerly walked in the way of the ungodly; then stood and lingered and enjoyed it and finally sat down and made themselves at home in the lifestyle and behavior of the ungodly. 

Can you see here a similar sequence in your past life like this -- walking, standing, sitting? Can you see here a warning for the future? 

How many times have you seen this applicable to believers getting into unbelieving theology; into illegitimate sex; into covetousness or theft; into idolatry: or into a hundred other things? Walking in the environs of evil, standing there, settling down there -- progressing from bad to worse and from worse to disastrous? How many times have you seen it in the experience of professing Christians? 

Now, we here are especially vulnerable. Many of you are connected with a great secular university. Most of us are graduates of it and all of us support it with our taxes. It is a transmitter of a standard of behavior, an interpretation about reality and a view about life that, though it is not notoriously wicked and barbarous, it is quite contrary to the way of God which is "blessed." Let it be said that knowing your vulnerability is the better half of your defense.

1. It concerns living your life according to God's standards. "v.2" 

2. The "law of the Lord" here is not just the 10 commandments or even all the commandments of the Bible but, with a frequent usage in the Bible, it refers to the whole counsel of God and its application to our lives. It is the truth of the Scriptures digested, compared, studied, balanced, ordered and applied. 

A thousand experiences confirm this verse: "Blessed is the man -- whose delight is in the law of the Lord." Not only in history but in our own observation, the truly happy people -- blessed people -- who are "like a tree planted by the streams of water, who bring forth fruit in their season and whose leaves do not wither and, who, in all they do they prosper" are those people who follow the law of the Lord. 

It is the common testimony of true followers of God that the gospel has enriched their lives in very unlikely areas as well as in the more predictable ones. This is true in individuals and in societies and in nations where there have been many Biblical Christians. The truth of God contained in the Scriptures has a record of producing much blessedness. 

3. Now the second aspect of that positive way of the Lord is that it meditates on the law continually. It hears and considers and attempts to understand the word of the Lord. The word for that here is "meditates" which has almost nothing in common with the stuff that is called meditation and is connected to Eastern religions. 

We do this in various ways. Hearing the Word of the Lord read and explained publicly is one. Or reading it, personally, is another. (Interestingly, we put the priority on the second of these while the Christians of ancient times had to be satisfied with the first. We forget this -- that no private individuals -- except people like Jerome and Augustine had personal Bibles until the time that old Guttenburg invented movable type in the mid 1400's.) 

Two weeks ago I said, meditating on the law is thinking about the meaning of the Bible as you go about your day. Memorizing it is a wonderful aid to doing so. Sometimes it helps to write a verse on a card and use it to stimulate you meditation as you drive or do physical tasks during the day. How much more blessed we would be if this were a frequent practice of Christians. 

But do not ignore the way in which discussion and teaching and preaching enables you to consider the law of the Lord and enables you to apply it to your life. It is yet another reason that God has ordained that Christians should gather together into faithful churches comprised of earnest believers. And it is a good reason for you to be involved in our studies and discussions that we have in the second hour on Sundays and for you to read books from time to time by authors who themselves understand the law of the Lord with regard to the theme of their book and are able to pass the truth on to you. 

"Blessed is the man" -- Blessed is the person -- "who delights in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night." Blessed is the person who not only delights in the amazing theoretical truth that we have the very Word of God but who delights also in the Word itself and meditates on that word day and night; i.e. that he applies it to the practical affairs of his life. "Blessed is the man!" 

Does this describe you? Are you one of these blessed people? Probably it doesn't describe you in the fullest extent of the words but if you are a truly regenerate Christian it will describe you in some sense of the words. But it ought to be a continuing quest for all of us to seek growth in this area.

1. One is negative. Verse 4 says "The wicked are like the chaff -- (v.4-5)" 

2. We believe that there is such a thing as a final judgment. There are aspects of it which may trouble us but we accept it because it is taught by God's "law". One aspect of it that we readily respond to and which is essential to a rational view of life is that there is a time and place of requiting the inequities of the present life and that atrocious and horrible wickedness is not just passed over in the total scope of things. The ungodly are warned that "The wicked shall not stand in the judgment." 

3. And with the fuller light of the N.T. teaching we understand that there will even be a judgment for Christians not with reference to their entrance into heaven but with reference to their having lived lives to the glory of God. Even though they are saved and go to heaven by grace. "We must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ," Paul reminds us. 

4. But the positive truth is a wonderful encouragement for Christians to seek out the godly way of life: The godly (spoken of here as) "the blessed man is like a tree -- (v.3)" 

No doubt, this is a promise for this life as well as for eternity. Do you see, even in this life, aspects of the blessedness of delight "in the way of the Lord and meditating on his word day and night?" -- and putting it into practice in your daily life? Do you not see a maturity and wholeness and restoration of your true humanity that has come through the Christian life you have lived. I see this time and time again in the lives of the people of this congregation when I compare them to the "rock out of which they were hewn." It is a graciously repeated story over and over again of "v.3". 

But, of course, this is imperfectly fulfilled in this life and the last line of v.3, "in all he does he prospers" is often set aside by God's sovereign exception to the rule and the godly person must wait for the life to come when the whole promise will be fulfilled in its entirety and to a extreme and glorious degree. You can count on it! You have the Savior's word for it that any aspect of this prospering, this blessedness spoken of here that you do not experience as a result of your following God's way will be made up to you a hundred or a thousand fold in the life to come! 

We often need to remind ourselves and to remind one another of this truth lest we be "weary in well-doing" and imitate the world rather than the way of the righteous in our behavior and view about life. Let us each take this as a personal exhortation -- "vv1-6".