Episode 1. They Sit and Think, But Mostly They Just Sit
We live in a fast food society. And so sometimes, we expect the blessings of God the same way. His plan is to bless us, but He also wants to involve. So why don’t you join Berni on …
When we let God’s Word change us, when we spend the time, when we digest it and ruminate over it, hunger for it and let it change us, it is such an enormous blessing.
The Fast Food Generation
We live in a ‘fast food’ generation. We get everything so quickly – you go to the hamburger store, you go to the chicken store – everything is fast, and we expect it to come that way and sometimes, I think, we expect to receive God’s blessings just in that same way. Now I truly believe that God wants to bless us and God wants to prosper us. Some people get a bit twitchy with that. I’m not going to some sort of extreme here, which says being a Christian is all about driving fast cars and being rich. Not where we are going. We are going over the next three to four weeks have a really good look at God’s plan to bless us.
The series we are starting this week, I have called, “In Everything They Do, They Prosper.” That comes from Psalm 1, it’s the direct quote from God’s Word and I truly believe that God wants to prosper us, but as I said, sometimes we expect to get God’s blessings in a kind of a ‘fast food’ mentality way and God just doesn’t work that way. It’s a funny thing, you know, as we grow up, we have the instructions of life programmed into us by what goes on around us. You know, from conception to being a baby, to being a child, to being an adolescent, to becoming an adult and then maturing as an adult, there are a whole bunch of positive and negative influences on our lives, on our perceptions, on our characters on our behaviors, all sorts of things happening around us.
The ideal role of parents, of course, is to love us and nurture us and support us. The ideal role of school and teachers is to educate us and to help us to grow and develop and realize our potential. But so often our parents weren’t perfect, so often we discover our teachers weren’t perfect and our schooling wasn’t perfect and so there are disruptive things that happened to us in our developmental stages that kind of interrupt God’s plan. Now we might see them as disruptive things, God sees them quite simply as sin and sin interrupts God’s plan in our life. Yet, God’s plan is that in everything that we do we should prosper. There’s materialism, there’s the whole issue of money, and wealth and having stuff. I mean, people don’t talk much these days about responsibility, loyalty, dedication, wisdom, honesty, strength, those sorts of values in one sense, when we talk about them, are seen to be old fashioned, and yet when the truth be known, those things are important to each one of us.
So how do we grow up into an effective person, how do we grow up to make right choices, to experience love, to give love, to have strong secure foundations, in a world where we get tossed around. If we take a look at ourselves and say, “What are my foundations like, what are my expectations of God like and am I actually living in and experiencing His blessing? My hunch is that, if we took a true look at that, we might see ourselves coming up short in all of that. The question is, “What are God’s plans for my life? What are God’s plans for your life and then how do we participate in those plans?
They’re the two questions we are going to be looking at over these next four weeks as we work our way through this series that I have called, “In Everything They do, They Prosper.” Direct quote from Psalm 1 in God’s Word and we are going to spend some time today in that very first Psalm, because, I tell you, it is a beautiful Psalm, it’s is full of God’s love and God’s wisdom and God’s blessing. In fact, let’s go there now. If you have a Bible, open it up at Psalm 1. Let’s have a read of just the first two verses of Psalm 1. It says this, “Blessed are those who don’t follow the advice of the wicked or take the path of the sinners or sit on the seat of the scoffers, but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law they meditate day and night; blessed is the person.” God is in the business of blessing us. The whole point of creation is He makes us so that we can be blessed by Him, so that we can know His love, we can know His goodness, we can know all the blessings that come with being children of God.
Now you might be someone who has never, ever given their lives to Jesus. You’ve never met Jesus. You think, “What is this bloke talking about?” Well stick with us, because I would love to introduce you to a God who blesses – who blesses our socks off. The whole point of making you and making me is that we could know how much He loves us and we could experience the blessings of God. Now some days it just doesn’t feel like that. Some days bad things happen to us. We have accidents, we get sick, people are yelling at us, we’re at the end of our tether. Some days it is really hard to believe that God wants to bless us.
But let me just read you the beginning of that very first Psalm again. “Blessed are those who don’t walk in the advice of the wicked or stand with the sinners or sit with the scoffers, but their delight is the law of the Lord. On His law they meditate day and night.” In fact, it is really interesting, the book immediately before the book of the Psalms in the Old Testament, is the book of Job. Job was a man who honoured God, he was wealthy, he was blessed, he lived his life for God, he prayed, he gave to the poor. He did all the things that God called him to do, then God let curse after curse after curse after curse fall on Job. The devil came to God and said, “Can I curse Job?” – And God progressively allowed the devil to curse Job. It’s a great book to read and you get to the last bit, Chapter 42, right at the end, and when Job has traveled all this way, and when all his friends criticized him and all his family deserted him and his money went away and everything he owned was gone, right at the end, God says this, “And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.”
Sometimes we see problems and difficulties and hard days and sad days and we think, “Where is God’s blessing?” God’s heart is to bless you and to bless me and you can see it here in Job. After Job had traveled through the path that God had chosen for him, God gave him double for his trouble. God blessed Job and God’s heart is to bless you and to bless me. The past no longer has a hold over us when we belong to God and I can hear you say, “But, but, but, you don’t know my life, I had terrible parents, I had no good input. My foundations are so rotten and so cracked; my life will never be any good.” Well, let me take you to Psalm 27, verse 10. It says, “Although my mother and father have forsaken me, yet the Lord will take me up and adopt me as His child.” That is a healing Scripture. That is a Scripture for anyone whose past is robbing them of their present and their future. God wants to bless you and me.
God is in the business of healing and reconciling and holding and loving. We can get a wrong picture of God. We can get the sort of picture of God the devil wants us to have, which is, you know, God is mean spirited; God wants to take everything away from us, God …..Hang on! Listen to Psalm 1 again. “Blessed is the one who doesn’t walk in the advice of the wicked, or stand with the sinners or sit with the scoffers but his delight is in the law of the Lord and on this law he meditates day and night.” We can either get in tune with what God is doing and believe what God says about us or we can believe the devil. Now for me, I am going to get in agreement with God.
We are going to talk next week about some of the difficult times in life and what it means to be blessed in the difficult times of life. Between then and now you may want to go to the passage we are going to next week on Christianityworks, which is Proverbs chapters 1 and 2, which talks about the blessing of God in the midst of adversity. But right now I would like to focus on this Psalm 1. God wants to bless us. Full stop, end of story! Well, how, what’s involved, how does that go?
Thinking and Sitting
We are talking today about the fact God has a plan for our life and that plan is a plan of abundant blessing. We are looking at Psalm 1. If you’ve got a Bible, go and grab it, but it’s a fabulous Psalm. “Happy are those, or blessed are those who don’t walk in the advice of the wicked, or stand with the sinners, or sit with the scoffers but their delight is in the law of the Lord and on this law they meditate day and night.” What a sharp contrast, isn’t it, between those who love God and those who are wicked, those who are sinners, those who are scoffers. In fact, in verse 3, he goes on with that. “They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves don’t wither. In all that they do, they prosper.” There it is – there’s the name of our series, it’s a direct quote from Psalm 1:3. “Blessed are those who don’t walk with the wicked, or stand with sinners or sit with the scoffers, but they delight in God’s revelation and they meditate on it day and night.” Those people, they are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in season and their leaves don’t wither. In all that they do, they prosper.” You know, when we walk with the wicked, we take steps away from God. When we walk with the wicked, we walk away from God and we rebel. When we stand with the sinners, we passively align ourselves with enemies of God and when we sit with the mockers, we just make ourselves comfortable with cynical people who undermine the love and the grace of God. Walking with the wicked, standing with the sinners, sitting with the mockers, is one side of that sharp contrast. The other side is the person who delights in the law of the Lord and this law he meditates day and night. See, God wants us to be involved in His plan. This is not a passive, ‘sugar-daddy’ plan. This is not a plan where God say, “Well, you believe in me and ever after there you’ll be driving a Rolls Royce and you’ll be living in a huge house and you’ll have gold-plated taps.
That is not what God is talking about here. He’s talking about much bigger things. God wants us to delight in who He is and to meditate and to think day and night. How many Christians are in the camp that walks with the wicked, that stands with the sinners, that sits with the mockers? I am sick of hearing Christian’s winging about other people behind their backs; that harbour ill towards one another, that don’t pay all their taxes. That is rubbish – that is junk. That stuff is a stench in the nostrils of God. And then we think, “Well, how come I’m not getting blessing here, how come I’m not getting peace here, what’s the matter?’ God wants to involve us in His blessing. We don’t passively receive His blessing. God’s blessing is poured out and God wants to involve us in that. He wants us to delight in Him. He wants us to spend time in His revelation which is the Word of God – the Bible – His love letter to us.
Sin – walking with wicked, standing with sinners, sitting with mockers – sin – I know it is a horrible word, but it’s what God calls it – sin misses the point. Sin completely misses the point. We want the blessing of God, we’ve got to get involved, we’ve got to get involved the way God wants us to get involved. He calls that obedience! Again, people think, that’s an old fashioned concept. Hey, listen, God wants to involve us in His goodness. Don’t we think that’s going to involve our goodness as well? Growing in the goodness of God, obeying Him, delighting in who He is.
There is a liberating Scripture out there; First Corinthians 13, verse 7. It says, “Love bears all things.” If you’re walking with the wicked and standing with sinners and sitting with the mockers and grumbling about people and complaining and stabbing them…- have a look at that verse, First Corinthians 13, verse 7 – “Love bears all things.” When other people winge and complain and do a character assassination on us and talk about us behind our backs; “love bears all things.”
We need to accept their weaknesses, not just today, but next day, and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that. We need to be looking for good; we need to be looking for peace. This is one of the biggest miracles in my life, in coming to know the person of Jesus Christ. I used to be the most critical person you could ever, ever meet. Every year when I was in the Army and we got confidential report on us as officers. Every year my confidential report said, “This officer does not suffer fools gladly.” Well, you know something, if we don’t suffer fools gladly, we’re not going to be glad, we are going to have our lives ruined by the weaknesses of other people and when God set me free from that and gave me this liberating Scripture, that love bears all things, I’ve got to tell you, that was so much blessing, that was so much peace, that was so much being set free from getting angry and frustrated by the weaknesses of the people around me. It was setting me free from walking with the wicked, from standing with the sinners, from sitting with the mockers.
Blessing comes from repentance. Another old fashioned theological term which means – leave the junk behind, for goodness sake? God is good, God wants to bless, God wants to bless your socks off – leave the junk behind – turn away from it – repent and experience the blessing of God, because it says here, that if we do that, if we leave the walking with the wicked and the standing with the sinners and the sitting with the mockers, we go away from that then we will be like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in season and they’re leaves don’t wither and in all that we do, we prosper. That’s a promise from God, that’s God’s wisdom. How? We delight – we delight in the Word of God, we meditate on it day and night. Here they were talking about the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, the law.
We look at it now through what Jesus did for us. We look back on that Old Testament and say, “There’s more to this revelation because Jesus came along, He showed us what God is like. What we read when we read that, is that we delight in the revelation of God and on that we meditate day and night. God’s revelation, God’s guidance, you know, the godly in every age live in the revelation of God. The Bible, who God is, His plans and purposes and who we are in Jesus and how we should respond, by looking at Jesus Himself and seeing who God is and by listening to what God has to say. There is a awesome Scripture – we’re not going to go there now, but I would encourage you to go to it – in Isaiah, chapter 51, where Isaiah is giving an exiled Israel, a nation exiled in slavery in Babylon, some good news and it’s all about the blessing of God. All about it!
We are going to go there, I can’t help myself and these people are in exile and they are down, and it’s been going on for a long time and God sends Isaiah to say, “I’m going to set you free. You are my people. I am He who comforts you. Why, then are you afraid of men who have to die; a human being who fades like grass? Have you forgotten the Lord and your Maker?” And then He said, “Rouse yourself! Rouse yourself; stand up Jerusalem, you who have drunk at the hand of the Lord, the cup of His wrath. Stand up, rouse yourself.” In other words; “Wake up! God wants to bless you.
Read chapter 51 of Isaiah – fabulous! And you know what we do; we trifle with the Word of God in our culture. Reading isn’t in, it’s about video games and television and you know so many things to grab our attention – a razzamatazz-y world. Politicians reduce complex issues to eight second grabs on the steps of Parliament House; that’s the kind of world that we live in. Look at the first two verses of Psalm 1 again. “Blessed are those who don’t walk with the wicked or stand with the sinners or sit with the scoffers, but they delight in the revelation of God and on that they meditate day and night.” Blessing comes when we delight in the revelation of God, in who God is. What a contrast! Delighting in words God is listening to His voice and then – goodness gracious – thinking about it, meditating on it, chewing on it. You know, you go to church and you listen to a sermon that some preacher has worked hours to prepare that sermon. People listen, they forget ninety percent of it and they get ten percent of the benefit. What if we took notes? What if we thought about what had been said during the week? I mean, what if you spent some time this week just in Psalm 1? Over and over again in prayer and meditated and chewed on it.
I remember having a dear friend, he was my business partner for many years, his name is Graham. One of the smartest and wisest people I know. He said, “You know, when I was a lad, one of my teachers said to me once, “Graham you sit and think but mostly you just sit,” and I think, well, you know something, maybe that describes a lot of Christians. Maybe we expect to get through life on thirty minutes a week, but we can’t even get through kindergarten on thirty minutes a week can we, without taking notes? Going through education, growing and changing, and reaching out, potential takes effort, takes work, takes involvement. It’s a bit like food, you know, you see some food and you sniff at it, then you bite it, then you chew it then you eat it, then you digest it, then your body uses it. Well, I think we stop at the sniffing and the biting when it comes to God’s Word. I think so often, we fail to chew and eat and digest and benefit from what God is saying to us in this fabulous love letter.
Isaiah in Chapter 31 verse 31 said this. He said, “The time is coming when God will put His law in our hearts and write His Word on our hearts and God will be our God and we will be His people.” God wants His Word to be written on our hearts. It doesn’t happen by watching TV all the time. It just doesn’t happen!
Trees That Bear Fruit
For those beautiful three verses that we have been looking at in the first Psalm; Psalm 1, finish with the notion that people who delight in God’s revelation and meditate on it, are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season. Their leaves don’t wither and in all that they do, they prosper.” What a beautiful picture; a picture of a tree with deep roots by a stream of living water – growing, bearing fruit. I believe God’s church should be like an orchard of those trees, each one of us bearing our different fruit, trees that don’t wither.
The challenge is; is that the sort of Christian we want to be? – Because that’s the sort of Christian God wants us to be. God wants to bless us and for us to be a blessing in His name. God wants our leaves to be green and our fruit to be rich for other people to enjoy. God’s Word has the power to transform you and God said, “Let there be light and there was light.” When we let God’s Word change us, when we spend the time, when we digest it and ruminate over it, hunger for it and let it change us, it is such an enormous blessing;
There are two roads. There’s the high road, the high road of sacrifice and blessing, the high road that involves drinking in God’s Word and then there’s the low road. That’s a saved soul and a wasted life. That’s a life that doesn’t experience the blessings of God, that Jesus died and rose again to give us. We have a decision to make, which road we’ll take. What’s stopping us? What’s stopping us? God’s promise is that when we digest His Word, we will be like trees planted by streams of water which yield their fruit in season and their leaves never wither and in all that they do, they prosper.
Comments
Clive Rees
Hi Berni,
I just want 2 say God Bless u for all that u do. I hope u understand how wonderful what u do is & helps so many of us. Thank u,thank u, thank u.