We're going to talk about Psalm 1 tonight,
if I can ever get to it.
I've got lots of introductory things to say,
but if you want to be ready to
jump on when we get there, you can
open your Bibles to Psalm number 1.
For some people, the word argument means haggling
and wrangling and disputing, right?
Getting an argument.
Well, I want to use the word argument
tonight in a very positive sense.
That doesn't mean any of those things.
It means instead giving reasons for what you
think and drawing inferences from facts.
That's good.
Everybody does that from day to day, whether
they think about it or not.
I don't like haggling.
I don't like disputing.
I don't like wrangling.
But I love to ponder the arguments of
Scripture.
When Scripture gives reasons for its assertions and
draws inferences from known facts, my heart gets
all stirred up and chills run up and
down my back when I hear a solid
argument about sanctification.
For example, take you sanctify us by the
truth, premise one.
Your word is truth, premise two.
Therefore, apply yourself to the word in order
that you might be sanctified.
When I see little things like that in
the Scripture, I get all excited.
Now, last Sunday evening, I said that one
of my goals for Bethlehem was that we
be a kind of people for whom nothing
is trivial.
When we look in each other's faces, we
don't regard any body as trivial.
Instead, we see things with the eyes of
God and therefore see a reflection of eternity
in everybody.
See a glimmer of something infinite and startling.
And I used a fish and a twig
of grass as an example.
Well, I've got a second little goal to
mention tonight, and it's this.
I want us to be a kind of
people who do not believe or feel that
argumentation, as I just defined it, and deep
emotion are opposites or contrary or intention.
Many people think that the work of the
head and the overflow of the heart are
at odds with each other.
Like oil and water, they repulse each other.
Whatever the reason for this intention, I don't
think it has to exist.
My own experience tells me it doesn't exist
in my own experience.
My study of church history, and I'm going
to read from a famous saint at the
end tonight, and my study of scripture tell
me it ought not and need not exist
this tension between the work of the head
and the overflow of the heart.
My goal is to help us become a
kind of people who have sound thinking and
deep feeling.
I think most of the opposition we sense
between thinking and feeling, thought and emotion, is
not due to anything in the nature of
thinking or feeling itself, but due to some
learned patterns of behavior that are traditional and
not necessarily true.
How many times did my mother tell me,
especially between my sophomore and junior year in
college, watch out son, lest you become a
cold intellectual.
I used to get mad when she said
that.
Why is the intellect cold, I'd say?
Why not hot?
Why do we have to think, mom, that
the use of the mind always throws water
on fire?
Why can't it light fires?
I never understood that tension.
Although I think I appreciate now the concern,
because I have seen a lot of cold
intellectuals, I've seen a lot of cold non
-intellectuals too, though, God has given us minds.
He wants us to use them to understand
his word and to live righteously.
He's given us emotions, and he wants them
to be vigorously engaged in worship and in
love.
If we neglect the mind, we'll drift into
all sorts of wrong doctrine and dishonor God,
who wants to be known for who he
is, not for who he's not.
But on the other hand, if we neglect
the heart, we will be dead while we
yet live.
You know, Jesus said, this people honors me
with their lips, but their heart is far
from me.
They got head work, but their heart is
dead.
And so my goal is to put these
together for us and to keep them together.
So let's be clear in our heads and
warm in our hearts.
Let's feel with all our might and think
with all our might.
And now you're probably, if you're alert, asking
the question, what's all that got to do
with Psalm one?
Well, here's the way I hit on this.
I never know quite when I start preparing
for a sermon what the introduction is going
to be like, because I never know what
I'm going to say in advance and what
ideas will need to be introduced.
Here's what my approach to the Psalms is
going to be.
We're going to start a series and we'll
take us through the rest of the summer
called Summer Psalms.
I think that my approach to every psalm
is going to be to ask this question.
It's not the only question I'm going to
ask, but this is going to be one
I ask every time.
What is the argument of this psalm?
Now, I knew when I said that if
I hadn't given a preface, somebody would say,
well, he is really stuck in a rut.
All he thinks about is arguments.
Doesn't he know these are songs?
You don't worry about arguments and reasons and
syllogisms when you sing.
You just sing from your heart, right?
Well, I don't think so.
I think the Psalms have arguments, so I
needed to give a little defense here of
my approach and I'm not done.
I have another way I want to make
my case.
I think that psalms, of course, are songs,
are poetry and all good poetry.
Well, maybe almost all good poetry, I better
not be too absolute.
There might be an English teacher out there.
Almost all good poetry has a good argument
in it.
And if it's a bad argument, the poetry
or the song will diminish in value, even
the emotional value.
Now, Sonny and Cher, anybody remember Sonny and
Cher from the mid 60s when I was
in college?
1966, they had a song and Sonny has
this awful twangy voice, which he sings to
Cher with.
And they've got some lines in this song
that go like this.
I'd live for you, I'd die for you,
I'd even climb the mountain high for you.
You remember that?
That is a stupid argument.
Think about it.
Every time I heard that argument, I said,
I'd live and I'd die and I'd even
climb a mountain.
Every time I heard that, the song was
nothing.
It just was ruined because I was in
love head over heels with Noel in 1966.
And I listened to all kinds of love
songs.
But when I heard that one, it didn't
do anything for me because it was backwards.
The logic was all wrong.
The little word even implies that climbing a
mountain is harder than dying, which it isn't.
The logic of the song is contradictory, and
so it was useless for me.
And now you're probably saying, well, you're the
only person who ever listened to Sonny and
Cher who thought that, probably.
But now, that, I hope, is not true.
But if it's true, that's exactly why I
want to say what I'm saying.
Because the advertisers and the entertainers of our
day, they know us better than we know
ourselves.
And they lock us into the noses of
our emotions and pull us around while our
minds are completely shut off.
Don't they?
And they shouldn't be able to do that.
But they've got us convinced that when the
music starts, the mind is done for.
Just let it all hang out and emote.
Bethlehem Baptist Church is going to be different.
We're going to keep together what the world
separates so often, the spirit and the mind.
I will sing with my spirit, Paul said,
and I will sing with my mind.
So let's be a whole people.
Let's not buy into the stereotypes of intellectualism
or emotionalism.
Let's make a new mold fashioned after the
spirit of God, who is the spirit of
wisdom and truth.
And he is the spirit of love.
One other illustration to drive my point home.
You will find out sooner or later that
just like some of you, I like to
write poetry.
And I believe that every time I write
a poem, I have an argument I want
to make.
I wrote a poem for Noel on Mother's
Day, 1977 this was, so Abraham wasn't around
yet.
I wrote this poem.
I'm going to read it to you to
make you see if you can catch the
argument here, because if Noel in reading this
poem on Mother's Day didn't catch my head
work, she wouldn't get the full impact of
my heart work to my son's mother.
Were there a price that I could set
upon my sons, it would surpass what I
with goods and life could get or in
a thousand years amass.
They bear my image, flesh and bone, my
language and my inner thought.
And in their soul, there is my own
by God's design, inborn and taught.
They've been my long day's sweet dessert.
How can I ever once forget the father
fan club in concert, the front porch daddy's
here duet.
And they will be my old man's joys
if by God's grace I live so long
and they no longer little boys be men
whose love for God is strong.
And yet these lines I do not write
to give my son's praise supreme.
These I extol so that I might their
mother's value more esteem.
The more I love these little men, the
higher does my joy ascend that Carsten and
his brother Ben have you for mother and
for friend.
Now, there's an argument and the whole argument,
and I wouldn't analyze this when I read
it to Noel, but I'm going to analyze
it for you.
The whole argument hangs on that little word,
so that these I extol so that I
might their mother's value more esteem.
If she didn't understand that those first four
stanzas of praise to the boys were really
praises to her, she'd blow it.
And wouldn't feel what I was feeling.
But there are a lot of people who
think that you should pick up a poem
and not try to do that kind of
analysis to it and pick up a psalm
and not try to do that analysis to
it.
And I think that if you don't, you
miss a lot and hopefully we won't do
that.
Let's look at Psalm one together.
Blessed is the man who walks not in
the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in
the way of sinners, nor sits in the
seat of scoffers.
But his delight is in the law of
the Lord.
And on his law, he meditates day and
night.
He will be like a tree planted by
streams of water that brings forth its fruit
in its season.
Its leaf will not wither.
And in everything he does, he prospers.
The wicked are not so, but are like
chaff, which the wind drives away.
Therefore, the wicked will 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 sinners will
perish.
Now, there's an argument in that psalm, and
I want to sum it up for you
and then look at the main point together
with one other observation.
Lots of things in the psalm.
One of the frustrating things about preaching, by
the way, like on that text this morning,
which was very long, is that there are
so many things you have to skip in
preaching.
Because if you said everything in the text,
you'd have to preach on just three or
four words at a time, which, of course,
everybody would get frustrated with.
Well, I'm going to leave out a lot
and we'll come back to someone someday.
So don't fret if I leave out your
favorite part.
Here's the argument, as I see it.
The psalmist places the reader at the outset
of this collection before two alternatives.
You can either be a wicked person or
a righteous person.
Verse six, two kinds of people are pictured.
Everybody belongs to one of those two classes.
There are no others as far as the
psalmist is concerned.
Second, these two kinds of persons are accompanied
by two kinds of destinies in this world
and, I think, in the world to come.
The righteous will be like a tree.
That's one kind of destiny.
The wicked will be like chaff.
That's another kind of destiny.
The wicked will not stand in the judgment.
They're bound for destruction.
The righteous, on the other hand, the Lord
knows their way.
Now, I'd love to spend about 10 minutes
talking about what that means.
The Lord knows the way of the righteous
because, of course, it raises the question, well,
he knows everybody's way.
So what's the point in saying he knows
the way of the righteous?
But I'm not going to talk about that,
except to say that the word no.
In the Old Testament is richer than be
aware of.
It means have your eye upon, attend to,
care, love, guard.
That's what it means.
He's going to guard their way right on
through the judgment to the end.
Third, the two alternative types of persons and
the two alternative destinies.
Are now supplemented by an explanation of one
of the one of the essential differences between
the righteous and the wicked, and the difference
the psalmist chooses to focus on is this,
the righteous man delights in the law of
the Lord and meditates on it, the wicked
man scoffs at the law of the Lord.
I think that's what the scoffing refers to
in verse one.
One is a scoffer when he hears God
speak.
The other delights when he hears God speak.
Then fourth, the conclusion.
The man is very, very blessed who is
in the one category and not in the
other.
Blessed is the man who belongs to the
category of the righteous, the delighter, the tree.
I think there's an implied fifth point here.
It's an imperative.
This psalm was probably put at the beginning
of this collection, not accidentally.
It stands like a doorway through which we
enter all the other psalms and what the
collection, the people who put these psalms together
were saying to us, I think is as
you enter into this psalter and read the
words of God communicated through the songwriters of
Israel, make sure you delight in what you
read rather than scoffing.
So there's an imperative implied, a command, as
well as all of these descriptions and indicative
statements.
Now, two things I want to look at
before we look at the main point, which
I think is delighting in the law of
God.
There's another thing that I think troubles a
lot of people about the term righteous in
the psalms, the righteous man and the wicked
man.
And I want to talk about that briefly.
Probably if you are a good Protestant, you
kind of squirmed in your seat a little
bit when I said there are two categories
of human beings.
There are righteous human beings and there are
wicked human beings.
And everybody belongs to one.
And if you know your Bible well, you
probably said one category of human beings.
We.
Because Paul said in Romans three, there is
none righteous, no, not one Romans three, 10,
right?
See, that's a problem.
And I think that Pauline teaching makes it
hard for us to read and understand psalms
like this, which say very plainly, God looks
on the righteous.
He's going to bring them to glory.
And we say, who's that?
It's very helpful, I think, to look at
the psalm that Paul was quoting.
I was quoting from Romans three, 10, when
Paul wrote Romans three, 10, he was quoting
or paraphrasing Psalm 14.
Flip over to Psalm 14.
I say paraphrasing because where the psalmist says
no one does good, no, not one.
Paul said no one is righteous, no, not
one.
But let's read the first three verses of
Psalm 14.
It's going to help us understand how the
psalmists understand righteousness.
The fool says in his heart, there is
no God.
They are corrupt.
They do abominable deeds.
There is none that does good.
The Lord looks down from heaven upon the
children of men to see if there are
any that act wisely and seek after God.
They've all gone astray.
They're all like corrupt.
There is none that does good.
No, not one.
Now, it sounds like we're in the same
pickle with the psalmist that we were with
Paul.
No righteous, no doers of good at all.
So who in the world can fit into
the one category in Psalm one?
That's the problem.
But if we read on, we get an
insight.
Look at verses four and five.
Have they no knowledge all the evil doers
who eat up my people as they eat
bread and do not call upon the Lord?
There they shall be in great terror, for
God is with the generation of the righteous.
There they are again.
Who are they?
My suggestion is that what the psalmist means
in verses one to three.
Is that not every single solitary human being
should be called unrighteous and a doer of
evil, but rather everybody outside the sphere of
God's special sanctifying work, which in that day
was happening almost exclusively within Israel.
Within Israel, the psalmists many times called people
righteous without batting an eye.
Now, does that disagree with Paul or not?
I think not, because in Romans three, when
Paul said in verse 10, there is none
righteous, no, not one.
In verse 18, he climaxed this terrible indictment
of the human race by saying there is
no fear of God before their eyes.
Now, who is he talking about there?
Himself?
Does he really think there is no fear
of God in his eyes?
Does he think there are no Christians who
fear God, no real believers, no people like
it says in Luke one were righteous?
No, I don't think so.
I think Paul is thinking just like the
psalmist when he indicts the human race, he
indicts the human race apart from God's special
sanctifying work.
When God comes into the life of a
human being and starts to transforming by the
Holy Spirit, we no longer look at him
and say he has no fear of God,
nor do we say of him, if we're
thinking like the psalmist, he is wicked and
not righteous.
On the contrary, he then fits into the
category of the righteous.
Now, one other comment about this, what does
it mean then to be righteous?
Because I think the reason we kind of
choke and hesitate to put ourselves in that
category, I mean, when you're reading a psalm
and it says the eyes of the Lord
are upon the righteous, do you say that's
me?
Praise God.
Or do you say I'm sure not in
that category.
If you're a Christian, you ought to say,
that's me.
And here's the I think I can help
you say that without making a perfectionist out
of you.
Righteousness in the Psalms does not mean perfection.
A righteous person in the Psalms is not
a flawless or a sinless person.
And we can see that when we look
at Psalm 32, flip over a few more
psalms to 32, I would choke and be
unable to say it if I thought that
putting myself in the category of the righteous
meant putting myself in the category of the
sinless.
We all would be in the other category
if that's what it meant.
Look at Psalm 32, blessed.
Paul, by the way, also quotes this in
Romans four.
He was he was a man of the
Psalms, and I would like us to become
people of the Psalms.
Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose
sin is covered.
Blessed is the man to whom the Lord
imputes no iniquity and in whose spirit there
is no deceit.
Now, the first thing to notice in the
psalm is there is justification by faith in
the Old Testament.
This is exactly what Paul quoted this psalm
to prove in Romans four.
Justification means we are sinners, but God is
going to hold it against us if we
trust him and his forgiveness.
So the psalmist, as David writes this psalm,
he knows he's a sinner.
But now watch how the psalm develops.
When I declared not my sin, my body
wasted away through my groaning all day long.
For day and night, my hand was heavy
upon me.
My strength was dried up as the heat
of summer, as in the heat of summer.
I acknowledge my sin to thee and I
did not hide my iniquity.
I said I will confess my transgressions to
the Lord.
Then thou just forgive the guilt of my
sin.
Therefore, let everyone who is godly.
Offer prayer to thee, so there are godly
people who are sinners, right?
At a time of distress, in the rush
of great waters, they shall not reach him.
Thou art a hiding place for me.
Thou preservest me from trouble.
Thou dost encompass me with deliverance.
I will instruct you.
This is God speaking now.
I will instruct you and teach you in
the way that you should go.
I will counsel you with my eye upon
you.
Be not like the horse or the mule
without understanding, which must be curbed with a
bit and bridle, else it will not keep
with you.
Many are the pangs of the wicked, but
steadfast love surrounds him who trusts in the
Lord.
Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O
righteous.
Now, who's that?
That's David, who has just confessed all his
sins, right?
But notice in verse 10, the contrast between
wicked and what?
Who's the contrast?
Those who trust in the Lord, that's the
opposite of being wicked.
Now, that shows us what it means to
be godly and what it means to be
righteous in the Old Testament, to be a
person, not who's flawless and sinless, but to
be a person whose hope, whose trust is
in the Lord and his promise.
And if you have hope in the Lord,
if you trust in the forgiveness of God,
when you read Psalm one, you can put
yourself in the category of a sinner.
You can put yourself in the category of
the righteous and not feel that you're proud
or arrogant, but rather humble because it takes
a humble person to trust in forgiveness.
So I hope that helps a little bit
in reading not only Psalm one, but many
Psalms which contrast the wicked and the righteous,
because if we are Christ's and have been
forgiven and are repenting of our sin and
walking by the Holy Spirit.
That category.
And now someone adds one more one more
essential characteristic to the righteous, the characteristic we
just talked about was to trust in the
Lord.
And that characteristic, of course, is the righteous
man delights in the law of God.
He meditates on his instruction day and night.
God wants us to be righteous, and I
want this church to be righteous, and therefore
I want to say to this church and
to myself tonight, it seems that of paramount
importance at the beginning of the Psalter is
we have to be a people who delight
in the law of God.
If I had 10 minutes, I'd talk about
the word law, too.
I'm going to talk about the word law
a lot.
It does not just mean demands.
Literally, Torah means instruction, God's communication to his
people how to live and what he's doing
for them.
We want to be a people, in other
words, then who delight in the instruction of
the Lord in the Bible, to put it
simply for our day.
Oh, how I love thy law.
It is my meditation all the day.
Psalm 119.
How sweet are thy words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth.
Never reduce Christianity to a system of demands
and resolutions and willpower.
Christianity has to do with what we delight
in, not just what we grit our teeth
and will to accomplish.
When Jesus came into the world, he split
humanity in half and he did it by
what they love, not just by what they
will to do.
The light has shown in the darkness and
man what?
What?
Loved darkness rather than light.
The reason people don't come to Jesus is
because they don't love the light.
Doesn't have merely to do with the head,
nor merely to do with kind of screwing
up resolution.
It has to do with what we delight
in.
We must be a people who delight in
the law of the Lord.
And that raises a problem for us, doesn't
it?
Because you're all many of you now saying,
well, how can I how can I when
I don't feel very much delight, delight in
the law of the Lord?
Where can I get that kind of joy
in the word of God?
Then I have two suggestions to make.
One, I get these from the Psalms, pray
that God will give you new and holy
taste buds on the tongue of your heart.
The only reason anybody relishes the law of
God and loves its taste is because they've
had a gift from God.
The same psalmist who said, how sweet are
thy words to my taste, prayed about 100
verses earlier in that psalm.
Lord, open the eyes of my heart that
I may behold wondrous things out of thy
law.
He knew that if God left us to
ourselves when we opened the Bible, we'd be
dead as a doornail.
We'd feel nothing.
There would be no delight.
We must pray and bathe our Bible reading
in prayer.
That's the first thing.
Secondly, when you pray, indeed, while you're praying,
meditate on the word day and night.
Now, I think that it would be very
hard for a person to really believe that
reading a book would make him not like
chaff, but like a cedar of Lebanon.
Not like the dust bowls of Texas, but
like the orchards of Hawaii.
If he really believed that, he would delight
in those words, wouldn't he?
And so I call you with him to
meditate on the promises of God, the benefits
of Scripture.
I'm going to talk a lot in the
future about the benefits of the Lord to
his people, because there's a lot of screwy
notions about selfishness in our day that are
cockeyed because people think it's wrong for a
Christian to dwell on the good that God
is doing for him.
Boy, if God weren't doing me any good,
I'd fold up shop, go home right now
and call it quits with Christianity.
Nobody, I walk through Elliott Park and believe
this more and more, nobody wants to be
a person who's rootless, weightless, useless.
That's what chaff is, nothing.
Nobody wants to be that.
But there are so many men lolling around
in Elliott Park just like that.
And the only way they can tolerate it
is to souse themselves with alcohol, because when
they're sober, they can't take it.
God didn't make them to be that way.
And I pray we can help them.
I've talked to a couple, it's very hard
to get through.
But on the contrary, all of us want
to be people who draw strength from a
deep river of life like that tree planted
by the stream.
We want to be fruitful, useful people.
And that river of reality is the word
of God, and all the great saints have
drawn from it.