Blessed

All right, well, again, we are going to be in the Book of Psalms. I don't know if I introduced myself, but I'm Brian, and, yeah, excited to do this. We've done this in the past where we've walked through the Psalms in the summer. Do I dare say we even shorten our sermons a little bit, maybe, and only because it's hot. But in the new place, we got all the time in the world. We got AC and all God's people said, amen. No, I won't go long. I promise. And, well, we've done this in the past, and I think a lot of times I look at the Psalms and I go, there's 150 chapters. And just kind of pick and choose which ones I like. And this time, going through, though, just really exploring the Psalms and seeing that it's a very cohesive book. There's. There's an order to it. There's a structure to it. It's not just a random placement of books within the Psalms or these different hymns. And so just a brief overview. I don't want to spend a ton of time looking at this. You can Google this if you're interested, but it's a collection of 150 ancient Hebrew poems and songs and prayers that spans all of Hebrew history. Ancient Hebrew. There's a psalm in there written by Moses. Most of them, as we think about it, are written by David. What is the number? 73 of the Psalms are written by David. About a third of them are anonymous. The two that we're gonna be looking at this morning are anonymous. But it's not just a hymn book. I think we think that. And it was used that way for sure, in the temple that they took these psalms and they sung them in temple worship. But it was more than that. These were ancient poems, mainly after the Israelites were exiled into Babylon. They then collected all these different poems into one book and they intentionally arranged them. And I don't need to get into the arrangement too much, but depending on your translation, if you look at it, there are five different books within the book, and each one ends with the same phrase about worshiping the lord. The last five of Psalm 145 through 150 all end with hallelujah. We just sang it. We're gonna sing it again. Hallelujah. Halleluj just means praise, and yah was just a shortened word for Yahweh. So hallelujah means praise God. It's what it literally means. But then there's the first two psalms that Kind of set the tone, set the theme for the rest of the entire book. And they point out two main themes which we're gonna see today. The Torah, which is the teaching of God, specifically, sometimes it references the first five books of the Old Testament, but really just the teaching of God. And the Psalms are kind of a new teaching, a new Torah, a new revelation of who God is, and then focused also on the Messiah. And so those are the kind of the two main themes we'll see throughout all of the book. But it has a very unique design, and it's set up like that on purpose. One of the main things, though, that I think we miss, I think especially maybe in our Western culture, or maybe it's just me, but I think it's Western. Is this idea of the genre that it is poetry. Is that my mic crackling? No. Okay. Okay. Oh, it's Andrew. Okay. You're good, baby. You're okay. I thought it was my mic. You're fine. That it's poetry, and poetry is different. I think that maybe some of us have a nervous relationship with it or we don't fully understand it. I mentioned this a couple weeks ago. I think. I don't know what the context was, but I brought up Mary Bennett, the other Bennett sister. There was a show on Britbox. We were just talking about that with Emily this morning. And it's about the Bennett sisters. There's Elizabeth Bennett. Mary is Mr. Darcy. This is about Mary, right? And she and this character, they kind of just take this idea of Mary and they run with this whole theme. And she loves facts. She loves studying history, and she loves studying systematic theology, and she just loves getting into, let me just read it. And then I know it, and I can regurgitate facts. And then there's this guy who comes along and he says, you should read some poetry. And she's like, why would I ever do that? That's just this emotional, fluffy stuff. I want sustenance, I want depth. I want facts. And then he recites some poetry to her, and she's moved to tears. And that's kind of how we think about it. We have either it's historical or it's factual. And then there's this artsy poetry stuff, right? It's pretty, it's moving, but it's not necessarily true. It's soft, it's decorative. And recently, maybe a month or so ago, I stumbled across this guy. His name is. I can't even read his name. Andrew Judd. And he wrote, he's an Old Testament scholar, and he Wrote this book called Modern Genre Theory. And he put his finger on this really well, this kind of, I don't know, tension that we hold between truth and poetry, facts and art. Because what he's going to say is, well, he gives an example, and I'm going to stick with his example because it just lands home. And I think it just paints the picture. So this is from his book. And what he does is he highlights a poem written by a young man by the name of Wilfred Owen. And he was a soldier in World War I. And I'm not even going to Dulce et decorum est, which means it is sweet and fitting. The full phrase, though, is it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Which was kind of the recruitment cry of England during World War I. It is fitting. It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. And in his poem, he just calls it out. It is a lie that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. And he. So Judd points this out right in that this guy Owen, this British soldier, the First World War, he enlisted and he survived nearly the entire war. And he was killed crossing a canal in France one week before the armistice. His mother got the telegram announcing his death on the very day the church bells were ringing to celebrate that the war was over. And he was 25. He'd seen things in the trenches that no one should have to see, including watching his best friend die in a gas attack. And out of that, he wrote this. Let me read this portion of the poem. Not going to read the whole thing. Bent double like old beggars under sacks Knock kneed, coughing like hags we cursed through the sludge Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs and towards our distant rest began to trudge Men marched asleep Many had lost their boots but limped on bloodshot all went lame all blind drunk with fatigue, death, even the hoots of gas Shells dropping softly behind Gas, gas. Quick, boys. An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets Just in time. But someone still was yelling out and stumbling and floundering like a man in fire or lime. I'm going to finish reading there. You can look it up later. He gets very graphic in his details of what his friend went through. But Judd's point was this, as he highlights this in his book. Is this poetry or is this true? And Judd points out, it's the wrong question. It's a broken question. The answer is yes. Nobody would read this poem and think, well, I don't know. Was this Guy really in the trenches is this just flowerly, flowery language, you know, it's poetry. It can't be real. But we also don't demand that the poem tell us his friend's name or exactly where on a map that he died. If Owen had given us these details, we would know more facts, but we would understand less. That's the whole point. That's the whole point of poetry. The poem tells us something a report never could. It explains what it felt like. What does it do to a human soul to watch somebody go through that? It's a truth that is told that you can only get through image and rhythm and metaphor. So all throughout the summer, as we look at the Psalms, don't just think, oh, it's just poetry. It's not factual. No, it is in its own way, in its own genre. This is real. And let's remember that we are guests in the psalmist house. So when the psalmist is setting out the furniture and displaying it in a way, we don't get the right to say, ah, Actually, when I think about God and theology, I think about it like Paul and I would move that chair over here and I would paint the walls this way and the flow is all wrong. And we need to just dig into this word study. And let's, let's, let's be a guest in the psalmist house. And let's let him or the author speak to us. And as we're going to see, we can let the images not just speak to us, but the whole point of the Psalms is to let, Let them help us speak back to God. It was one of these just, I don't know, epiphanies I had this week. And I don't know if I've ever thought of the Psalms this way. And let me, let me read one more quote and I'll be done with the quotes from today. This is from John Calvin on his commentary in the book of Psalms. He says this. I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, an anatomy of all the parts of the soul. For there is not an emotion for which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. Or rather the Holy Spirit has here drawn to life all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated. And other parts of Scripture contain the commandments which God enjoined his servants to announce to us. But here the prophets themselves, seeing they are exhibited to us, as speaking to God and laying open all their inmost thoughts and affections, call, or rather draw each of us to the examination of himself in particular, in order that none of the many infirmities to which we are subject and many voices with which we abound may remain concealed. Here was the epiphany as I was reading the Psalms and as I was reading this quote from Calvin, that the Bible is God's word written to us. The Psalms. The Psalms are God writing to us to say, this is how you talk to me. This is God's word almost to himself. And what is he doing? He's displaying raw emotions and saying, this is how you speak to me. This is how you can expose your soul. And they're not necessarily always negative emotions, but it includes those of anger and distrust and lament, but also emotions of praise that we might lack language for when we read the Bible again. It's God's words to us. God's words to us. The Psalms are God's work, words back to God. God gives us permission to dissect and inspect the anatomy of our souls. That's why I had you look at that question and our deepest infirmities and emotions and pour them out at his feet. What a God we serve. A God that says, I give you permission to be real and authentic with me. And so I want to take that theme from Calvin, the anatomy of the soul. And I'm reserving the right. Ben and Patrick are going to be preaching on one of these, so maybe these emotions will change a little bit. But I want to just kind of hone in on just raw emotion on anatomy. And so this week I'm going to look at delight and rootedness. So let's look at this. Let's look at Psalm 1. This is a short Psalm, but it's the first Psalm. And we'll briefly look at the second Psalm as well. Just portions of says this, titled it Blessed, went through a lot of different titles, but that's what I landed with. Let's look at the delight. Says this in verse one. Blessed or 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. But his delight is in the law of the Lord and his law, he meditates day and night. The man there in verse one is just representative of a godly person. What we're going to see all throughout the Psalms is parallelism. Hebrew poetry doesn't work like English. It's obviously translated from Hebrew. To Greek, to Latin, to English, or from Hebrew to English. And so the poetry isn't necessarily a one for one. It's not how we would do poetry, but it's how the Hebrews did poetry. So there's a lot of this parallelism or regurgitating a thought. And so we see this, that you see this phrase of walks, counsel wicked, stands ways sinners, sits seat scoffers. And what we see here is that it's not an instant sin, that there is a progression here of walking to standing to sitting. It is a gradual shift into sin. It's not just, oops, I did this thing. It is a condition of the heart. But we see this blessed man. And the blessed man isn't just, hey, stop hanging out with those people. Stop hanging out with the wicked. Stop hanging out with neighbors who are up all night. Stop that. In case you missed that, woke up this morning at 6:00 and my neighbors were still awake partying. Good for them. I also got an alert at 5am There was about five teenagers sitting in my front lawn. This is not saying, oh, just stay away, right? Nothing good happens after midnight. Just get away from that. That's not what's happening here. We see that there's a delight. The. But his delight is in the law of the Lord. That law again is that Torah, the word of God. And on his Word he meditates day and night. There's kind of this understanding that Christians are no fun. What we see in the psalmist is actually, it's quite the contrary. There is a delight, there's beauty, there's joy. Here in studying the word of God, we see this word meditate. It's. It's such a good word. It means to mutter or murmur to mole aloud. It's the same word used elsewhere for like a lion's growl or a dove, a mourning dove cooing. It's purposeful, it's filling the mouth, it's muttering. And in this context, the word of God over and over until it seeps in. In a little bit of a break from school and just my own study. Every once in a while I try to read a novel, just something that's not. I have something I have to think about. And I've been reading the Poppy Wars. Anyone familiar with that? It's okay, but it's an Eastern thought and it's about war. It's kind of like maybe a Hunger Games meets the East. If I could maybe put it in my context of what my brain thinks about it. But in it, there's this main character, Rin, and she has to meditate. She has to try to reach the gods, this pantheon of where the gods are to. To tap into their powers. And the way that she does it is she meditates. And so her teacher, her master, says, I want you to meditate for an hour a day. And so she does, and she struggles with it. And the whole idea is, because she has to empty her mind, and she has a hard time doing that. And then after she masters that, it's five hours a day until she spends weeks meditating. And she doesn't even know if she's hallucinating or what's going on. But she finally is able to communicate with the gods. Even just yesterday, I was out at the lake with my kids, and my daughter was in the shallow part of the lake. And she sits and she goes, dad, look. And she sits, crisscross applesauce and puts her hands up and goes, um. I don't know where in the world that. Like, where'd you see that? I don't know, Rafiki, maybe from the Lion King. I don't know if he ever. I don't know where she got that from. That's not what this meditation is. This is purposeful. This is reciting and recounting the words of God and muttering them. So I think a question that we can pose and maybe apply right away is, where are you getting your sustenance from? Where are you getting your sustenance in this rootedness, this rooted life? Because you're getting it from somewhere. The question is, where are you getting it from? And again, the rooted life isn't just avoiding the bad guys. It's finding life and sustenance in something else. It's delighting and meditating in the word of God. The second point is the picture. Verses 3 and 4. Let's look at this. Says, he is like a tree planted by streams of water that yield its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither in all that he does. He prospers. This is so beautiful. I'm sure that a lot of you, if you grew up in church, you're familiar with this psalm, or you just start to read the Psalms. And where do you start? You start Psalm 1. Well, there's so much going on in this imagery that is so profound. Says here that he is like a tree. Again using simile. Says here that he's planted. This verb here is passive, which means that he is not planting himself. She, the God of the individual here, is not planting themselves. They are Planted. Someone. God plants them. This is passive. They don't seed themselves there. Someone else plants them. And where do they plant them? They plant them by streams of water. And I think in our mind, maybe because we grew up in the. In the. If you're from Minnesota or from the Midwest, you think of the Mississippi and you think of a big tree that's gone by this river or a stream or a. A crick, as my grandma used to say, catching crawdads. This is not that kind of stream. This is an irrigation channel. This is purposeful. This is a purposeful thing to water and to irrigate. That plant that was specifically put there deliberately. It was dug dependable water in a dry land. The result then is. Is fruit. When in season, it's not constant fruit. It's not fruit that is will that I can just make fruit because I'm. I love Jesus and so I need to produce fruit. I need to just have this good emotion and a love for God all the time. That's not fruit constantly. It's fruit in its season, not constant, not in demand. And then it was it say the leaf that doesn't wither. And we gotta resist this prosperity reading of in all that he does, he prospers. The prospering is not withering. We gotta think again. This Hebrew parallelism, the emphasis here. The prospering is not withering. The prospering is the fruit is being fruitless in the off season. The prospering is being fruit, being fruitful in season and ultimate vindication at the judgment. As we'll see in verse 5. This is not a guarantee of an easy life. The psalmist doesn't teach that. Jesus doesn't teach that. He lives quite the different life, that he is blessed. He is the blessed man, and yet he suffers and he is persecuted. He's abandoned. Jeremiah 17, 7, 8 uses similar language. It's nearly the same picture. Says blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord. He's like a tree planted by water. Same exact language. But what is the blessedness hinged on trust and faith. The rootedness flows from trust and faith, which keeps the whole thing from collapsing into law and trying harder and just avoiding sin. It's passive in a sense. It is God planting. It is God watering. So that in the next verse, the wicked are not so, but are like chaff. The wind drives away. This is supposed to be jarring. Talks about how beautiful it is to be planted and to be watered and sustained by God. And then the wicked are not so. In the Greek it literally is literally in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the wicked are not so. Are not so. It's trying to add this jarring emphasis that happens in this passage, but are like chaff and the wind drive that. The wind drives away. Everything here reverses. You have rooted versus rootless, heavy versus weightless, fruitful versus barren, permanent versus gone. With the next gust of wind, the tree is going nowhere. The chaff is already gone. So then that leads us to this last point of knowing God. Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment. The judgment here is a positive thing. The wicked aren't even there. They're chaffed. They're removed. Nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. This verse 6 here is the ground for this whole psalm. And it's in a single verb here that the Lord, Yahweh, knows the way of the righteous. The word here is yada. I'm not a Hebrew scholar. I hardly remember the Alphabet from school, so. So I have to read. This is coming from other commentaries. But the word here is yada. And initially I thought, oh, yada. That sounds familiar. I was like, oh, yeah, like yada, yada, yada. You know, I mean, like, is that like a. It's like a Yiddish phrase, you know, is that something. Where does that come from? It's got nothing to do with that at all. You know when you think, oh, I went to the grocery store and I bought blueberries and apples and, you know, yada, yada, yada, Right. That's how we use that. That's not how this yada is used. This yada is an intimate knowledge. And a knowing of this is not just God being aware of some route that he wants you to take in life. But he is the one who owns the way. He is the one who plants. He's the one who stains, and he knows the way. To that you should take. It's a verb that's used for just the deepest human knowing. He plants, he irrigates. The righteous are kept not because their way is impressive or because their fruit is impressive, but because they are known by God. That's what makes them alive. And the two destinies are not symmetrical, as I've already pointed out. One is known by God and the other simply perishes. It's blown away. So what is the cry of our soul in this text? Is it to be a better tree? Is it to don't be chaff, don't hang out with questionable people again. There's two major themes in the Psalms, and they're wrapped up in Psalm 1 and 2. Psalm 1 emphasizes the Torah and meditating on the word of God. And Psalm 2 then, is going to phrase that differently. Psalm 1 is going to say, I shouldn't qualify myself as the blessed man. I should see Christ as the blessed man. I should go to the Promised One. I should go to the blessed one, the Messiah, the Christ that we read about in Psalm 2, the son of God, the truly blessed one. Let me just read the end, the second half of Psalm 2. The Psalmist says, I will tell the decree. The Lord said to me, you are my Son. Today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break with them. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them to pieces like a potter's vessel. Now, therefore, O kings, be wise, be warned. O rulers of the earth, serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the sun, lest he be angry and you perish in the way his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him. Just like in Psalm 1. You can't plant yourself, you can't water yourself. So what are we left to do? We take refuge in the Christ, in the Messiah. We have been studying this in Mark, if you've been here with us. And in Mark, chapter nine, we read about the transfiguration and God the Father saying, this is my son. This is my son, whom I love. Listen to him, Be rooted in him, meditate on his words, take refuge in him. Refuge here is not like this warm, cuddly blanket, maybe, that we can maybe think of. This is enemies are surrounding me kind of refuge. This is storms are raging and there's a cave kind of refuge. Survival. My only hope, my last hope. Refuge. The verb here is used for like a dash of COVID Not do I need to build a refuge. It's not a construction project. Just want to end with maybe just some practical steps. Initially, I hear I had on here, how do we take refuge in Christ? But I think that that thinking misses the point of these first two psalms. It's, well, what do I do? Rather than, what has God already done? What does he provide? And so I change this to possibilities because there is refuge to run to. He's there. He's already built the refuge in himself. And so what can we do? What are some possibilities? The first one is expose the anatomy of Your soul, if you remember right, when you had that class and you're dissecting, you're looking at how the muscles go together and the organs are all fixed and how they work. That language of Calvin is just us exposed, our emotions raw and open. Be honest with how you feel in Christ. It's a safe space. And the Psalms teach us that they put these emotions in the open, share with God what's really going on. There's no point of hiding it or trying to stuff it out. You're open and you're exposed. It's the anatomy of your soul. You can't hide what is already known by God that we see in Psalm 1. I know what it's like to be known by even just another human being. That when I am in a mood, if you will, or just something's going on, it could be just school is weighing on me or work, or even just something with my kids or even with my wife. And what happens? Someone who knows you sees it and they go, what's wrong? What's going on? There's no point of hiding it. You know that something's wrong. I might as well talk about it. That's what we need to do with God. He already knows the emotions we're feeling. Why not just bear them? Even if I'm anger and they're raw and I don't even know how to say it. That's what the Psalms are for. That's the whole point. Second thing is know where the shelter is before the storm hits. Back when I was going into college, in between my senior year and my freshman year of college, I worked at this camp in North Carolina as a dishwasher. And that summer, kind of like what we had yesterday, just these random storms pop up. It was up in the Appalachian Mountains and there was. They had this huge field, four soccer fields size, and just this massive field for playing games on. And. And this is a picture of the field. Not when I was there. Cameras weren't invented yet. But this is a picture of a more recent picture. The field, but that it's hard to see, but in the tree line there's this little structure. It was like a human foosball building where you had these ropes. You'd hang onto it and you'd have to try to kick a ball and whatever. The point is that there was a bad storm that came and we had these sirens going in this. One of the camp directors, Rand Hummel, he said, brian, get in a truck, drive down there, get on the PA system and yell at These kids to get out of the field because there's just water everywhere. So I'm there, and for the sake of illustration, I was like, seek refuge. I didn't say that, but I was, run for your life. Right? And what do they do? Instead of running to the chalet, this giant building behind the truck, they run to that little hut. And as they're running, unfortunately, lightning struck the tree line and it just knocked these kids right out. That was terrifying because then I'm driving out there and I'm throwing unconscious kids into the back of a truck, thinking I'm going to get hit with lightning. They all were fine. They just got a little shock. They were fine. But the point is, know where the chalet is, know where Helm's Deep is. Right? And how do we do that? We memorize scripture. We know where this is, we meditate on it so that when trouble happens, when the storms arise, I know exactly where to go. I seek my refuge in Christ. So much for being short. I'm going long. Couple more points and we'll be done. The shelter is big enough for more than one. We're going to see this all over the place. In the Psalms, we're going to see the psalmist continually bring up sanctuary in the assembly. Sometimes taking refuge looks like gathering together with the body on a Sunday where I just don't feel like going to church, where I'd rather just rot in bed and just open up TikTok and just do my own thing. When we get to come to a church and we get to assemble and we get to literally seek refuge together in the Lord's table and remember and taste what it is that he's accomplished. The psalms again, are gonna keep dragging back this refuge idea to the assembly. The last one is avoid false and temporary refugees. Refuges. The discipline of not bolting to false, A false refuge, to a human foosball building, to the phone, to drink, to fixing, tinkering the garage, or lashing out, refuge sometimes looks like just sitting still, seeking out Christ rather than running immediately to a counterfeit shelter. So an application. How can we be honest with our emotions as we look at now, the next eight weeks moving forward? Let's be honest, let's be real. We're gonna see some real raw emotions and language to be like. That's in our Bible. Yeah, because it's human. And again, this is God writing these words for us to write and to say back to him. God gave us this language to be vulnerable, to be real. How can we be honest with our emotions toward God by taking refuge in the blessed one. Psalm 2. If you notice that Psalm 1 opens with the blessed man, Christ is the blessed man. And then the second psalm ends with the blessed one seeks refuge in Christ. How are we blessed? How do we live that kind of life? By focusing on Christ. That's what these first two psalms are about. And they set the stage for the entire rest of the book. So let's do that this morning. Let's take refuge in Christ and let's do it together. And so as you pray, as you take these elements and remember the finished work of Christ in the cross, the juice that represents his blood that was spilled for you, the bread that represents his body that's broken for you, we take refuge in him and his finished work. And so when we confess our sins, we know that he's faithful and he's just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness because of his finished work. That's our refuge this morning. You don't need to be a member of this church or any church, but if you're a follower of Jesus, you say, yes, I want to seek refuge in that Christ. And I would encourage you to do that with us this morning. Let me pray. Worship team's going to come back up. They're going to sing two songs as we have a time to reflect, and we're going to sing Hallelujah. We're going to sing praise to God together as we seek refuge and bear our souls and our raw emotions to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. Let me pray. Father, again, I just thank you for our time together this morning. Thank you that we can be real with you, that we can expose our emotions to you, to a trusted friend, to our small group, to a loved one, to anyone in this room, that we can just be authentic because you've given us the freedom to do that. Because there are times where we just don't feel like we're in season. But God, you have planted us. You put us there. You water us so that we would have seasons of fruitfulness. God, would that just be us now? Would we have fruit that has grown because of what you've already done and what you've accomplished? Thank you. Now that we get to take these elements together in memory and of him who finished this work on the cross thousands of years ago? We love you and it's the name of Jesus. I pray. Amen.