Planted in The Word of God

[0:00] The following message was given at a Sunday celebration at Trinity Grace Church in Athens.! For more information about Trinity Grace, please visit us at TrinityGraceAthens.com.

[0:10] And Psalm 1 is our text for this morning. Today, I want to talk about where we can find the blessed life, the happy life, the place where our souls can prosper.

[0:29] I was talking this morning, we did a class on does God care what I do with my phone. Every generation thinks that the challenges they face, the obstacles that confront them, the innovations they get to see are unique.

[0:48] I mean, we're definitely living in a technological age. I don't think my grandparents could have imagined when they were younger the advancements, the technology, the communication that we get to experience every day that we can hold in the palm of our hands.

[1:05] I don't think they could have imagined what is happening in the world today. And yet, Ecclesiastes tells us that there is nothing new under the sun.

[1:16] With all the advancements and technology and communication, it's really just people bringing with them their hearts and their struggles and their loves and their joys.

[1:28] People are still people. People are starting to see, I believe, that all the promises that came with this technology, promises of a happier life, promises of an easier life, promises of a blessed life, might not have been true.

[1:50] Instead of being happier, surveys and sociologists actually tell us now that people are more miserable than ever.

[2:00] I even look at that quote and I think, that's probably in like recent history. I think back over the ages. There's probably people more miserable at certain times than we are. But as they studied it, they just thought people aren't getting happier.

[2:13] They're getting more miserable, more depressed. You know, we keep looking for something to give us the blessed life. Something to bring us joy and contentment and satisfaction.

[2:24] And all these promises are being held out for us. And the good news for us this morning is Psalm 1 tells us, here's where you can go to find the blessed life.

[2:37] Look with me at Psalm 1, beginning in verse 1. We're going to read the whole Psalm. We're really just going to focus on the first half of it through verse 3 this morning. But I want to read the whole Psalm for contest.

[2:49] Psalm chapter 1 says this, 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.

[3:14] And on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.

[3:30] In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

[3:43] 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 wicked will perish.

[4:00] This is God's living and active word, which revives the soul and makes wise the simple. Blessed is the man.

[4:13] What a great way to start the Psalms. To be blessed biblically. The word there is to be happy. Happy is the person.

[4:24] Happy is the man. God created us to glorify him and to enjoy him. The blessed life is enjoying God and being happy in him.

[4:36] And Psalm 1, as an introduction to the Psalms, points us to the place where we can park ourselves and place ourselves to enjoy God and to know God.

[4:49] That's what our soul needs. We need God. We need communion with God. And the main point this morning, I think of this first half of Psalm 1, is our soul prospers when planted by the river of God's word.

[5:08] That's the promise it holds up for us today. Our soul prospers when planted by the river of God's word. Don't you want your soul to prosper?

[5:20] When we can soak up truth, when our souls are nourished by hearing God's voice, when we place ourselves at the source of life and health, there is the blessed life.

[5:32] There is the happiness we seek. And what we see is, it bears fruit in all these other areas of our lives. But, before we can get there, the psalmist doesn't begin with where to plant ourselves, but on what we should avoid.

[5:53] It's a really interesting introduction when you read verse 1. Blessed is the man. Okay, where is it? Well, let me start by telling you where not to go to find this blessing. That's the first thing he does.

[6:05] And so, that's where we're going to start today, is where not to plant ourselves. So, following the text, point number one, we just have two points this morning. And point number one is this. Our soul suffers when planted in worldly counsel.

[6:22] Our souls prosper when they're planted by the river of God's word. But he starts by showing us our soul suffers when planted in worldly counsel.

[6:34] Before he's going to take us where to go to find this joy, he gives us three negatives. Look at verse 1. Three negatives.

[6:59] And the first thing I recognize when I read that, is the first thing he tells us is that the wicked have counsel. The wicked are speaking to you.

[7:12] They are counseling you. We live in a time of many words. One author described it this age as a world that can't stop talking.

[7:23] That's so true. We used to be, for Christians, that the world was composed of who we met each day, who we talked to. It grew to include newspapers we read, maybe radio stations people listened to, eventually growing to TV shows we would watch or TV stations.

[7:40] And now we spend a lot of our waking moments every day receiving words, taking in counsel, hearing the voice of many different people from around the world.

[7:51] All this information is coming at us. Right now there are 1.9 billion websites that you can go to, with a quarter of a million added every single day.

[8:07] 102 trillion emails sent last year. 3 billion blog posts. 3 trillion YouTube videos watched this year.

[8:19] 3 trillion YouTube videos. Five and a half hours a day on our phones. Four and a half hours a day on top of that. Watching shows and movies on TV.

[8:31] It comes out to about 11 hours a day the average person is on their screen. That's a lot of words we're taking in all day long. There's so much information. There's so much.

[8:42] Even now it's almost like, where do I go to find good words? You know, there's so much coming at us. Behind all of that, there's a lot of counsel. It's a lot of information that we are receiving.

[8:55] And so the question is, are we, like the psalmist says, walking in the counsel of the wicked? C.J. Mahaney, in a little book he wrote, with several other authors on worldliness, says this.

[9:08] He says, today, the greatest challenge facing American evangelicals, Christians, is not persecution from the world, but seduction by the world.

[9:24] As Christians, we like talking about how persecution is coming towards us, which it is, and it's going to grow. But I think still, the greatest danger is being seduced by the world.

[9:37] That's what Psalm 1 is warning us about, being seduced by the world and its counsel. As you read Psalm 1, kind of the picture you get is, is this flow of information.

[9:51] It's a river of information. And what's been happening over the years, is this river is gaining steam, and it's gaining more and more. It's getting wider. It's getting bigger. It's this river of information flowing downhill.

[10:05] And the psalmist says, the way to the happy life, the blessed life, the way to know God, and to find enjoyment in God, and satisfaction in God, is not to park ourselves by this river, as it comes flowing by us.

[10:19] It's not the way to the happiness we seek. So just think about, think about your life this week.

[10:31] Don't think about the last year, or 102 trillion emails, or how many emails you receive last year. Just think about this week, and how much information, and worldly counsel, you have interacted with.

[10:45] Think about what you've soaked up. Where have you planted yourself the most? That's really the question, the psalmist is asking us, where do we park ourselves, and plant ourselves, and receive our counsel?

[11:00] And there's a progression in Psalm 1. A progression, you can kind of see, of going deeper into a way of thinking. He begins by walking in the counsel of the wicked.

[11:11] And then all of a sudden, you'll notice that the next line, that he is standing. So he's walking, and then all of a sudden, he's standing, and then the next thing you see, is he's sitting down.

[11:22] That's kind of the way, we get counsel. We hear this information, we start thinking about it. And then, we start kind of slowing down, and taking it in, and receiving it.

[11:32] And before you know it, we belong. And we've received this counsel, and this information. It kind of shows us, how we depart from God's word, and conform to our culture.

[11:44] We take in information from the world, we take in the counsel, and then we begin to behave. We start, how we think leads to our behavior. We're standing in the way of sinners, and then all of a sudden, we belong.

[11:56] We've sat down, and we've started to believe, this worldly counsel, that we have received. There's a progression here. It doesn't happen overnight. People don't depart from the faith, and depart from God's word overnight.

[12:09] There's a progression, and it starts with the counsel, that we receive. And our souls suffer, suffer when we walk down this path, the psalmist says. Our souls suffer.

[12:20] I've seen people and friends go down this road. There's a progression into worldliness. Listen to C.J. Mahaney again, what he says about this progression.

[12:32] He says, a love for the world begins in the soul. It's subtle. Not always immediately obvious to others, and often undetected by the people who are slowly succumbing to its lies.

[12:50] We begin to walk in the counsel of the wicked. It begins with a dull conscience and a listless soul. Sin does not grieve him like it once did.

[13:02] Passion for the Savior begins to cool. Affections grow dim. Excitement lessens for participating in the local church. Eagerness to evangelize starts to wane.

[13:15] Growth in godliness slows to a crawl. This is what happens when we begin to park ourselves by the counsel of the wicked.

[13:27] Because you have to be intentional to grow. It takes thought and effort to go down the path of worldly counsel. All you kind of have to do is give up. All you have to do is stop fighting and just sit down by the stream of information as it flows down and just begin to stop thinking, stop asking and interacting with God.

[13:46] Begin to soak it up and your soul will start to suffer harm. If you're not intentionally planting yourself by God's word, then by default, you're planting yourself by worldly counsel.

[13:58] And it has an effect on your soul. So take Psalm 1. Take that C.J. Mahaney quote and ask yourselves, ask yourselves this morning, how am I doing in my soul? How is my soul doing this morning?

[14:12] Does it feel listless? Does it feel lethargic in your soul? How is your conscience? Is your conscience sharp or is it dull?

[14:24] Does sin grieve you like it once did? How is your passion for the Savior? Do you find yourself, as we come in this morning and we're singing songs and we begin lifting our voices to praise to God and is your soul just saying, yes, this is what I need.

[14:41] I'm desperate for this. There's just something about coming into church and we begin, I love, we get God's word calls us to worship and as soon as we start, as soon as I start hearing other people sing praise to God, every week it's the same reaction.

[14:55] I just go, oh, this is so good. This is what my soul needed this morning. I needed God's people. I needed to sing praise to God. It's so good.

[15:06] We're together in this. We're fighting together. We're raising our voices and we're praising God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. How's your passion for the Savior?

[15:17] How's your affection for God? Are you excited to tell others about Christ? Are you excited to serve in the church and care for God's people?

[15:28] Are you growing in godliness? And I think the question the psalmist would say is you answer all those questions. He tracks us back, traces that back. Are you planting yourself in worldly counsel or are you planting yourself by the river of God's word?

[15:47] If you're planting yourself by worldly counsel, the psalmist tells us this is not the way to the blessed life. Trace it back. My soul is suffering harm right now.

[15:59] Where am I getting my counsel from? Okay, our soul suffers when planted in worldly counsel, but our soul prospers when planted by the river of God's word.

[16:11] It prospers. It does well. Point number two, meditation plants us by God's river. That's what the psalmist is gonna show us this morning. We wanna plant ourself by the river of God's word so that our souls can prosper in knowing God.

[16:28] How do we get there? Meditation plants us by the river of God's word. One thing he gives us to do in verse number two is to meditate day and night on God's word.

[16:43] Look at verse two. But his delight, the blessed man, the happy man, the person who is prospering, his delight is in the law of the Lord.

[16:55] And on his law, he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, yields its fruit in season.

[17:07] Its leaf does not wither in all that he does. He prospers. The psalmist is contrasting the counsel of the wicked with the law of the Lord.

[17:19] Proverbs tells us that there's two voices calling out. There's wisdom and then there's folly. Both are calling out to us every day. Which one is louder to you?

[17:30] Which one will you listen to? That stream of information, I think the world's counsel right now is really loud. That's what devices and technology and all this stuff we have.

[17:43] It just raises the volume on the world's counsel in our lives. I don't think the world's counsel has ever changed in thousands of years. I don't think there's anything new going on out there that hasn't been done before.

[17:56] I don't think there's any new sin that the world has invented that hasn't been around since Genesis 3 when sin came into our hearts. Well, I think what's happening is the volume of the world's counsel is just getting louder.

[18:09] We have access to it now. All over the world, we have access to it. And the psalmist is trying to tell us we need to turn up the volume of God's word in our lives.

[18:20] And the way we turn up the volume of God's word is we meditate on it day and night. The world is loud and it's counseling us. And we have to say, I want God's word to be the loudest.

[18:31] I want God's voice to be the loudest. I need to turn up the volume of God's word. Meditation turns up the volume.

[18:42] That's what we're doing. Our hearts are being affected. Our minds are being trained. We're turning up the volume of God's word. As soon as I say meditate, I recognize that meditation has become popular once again.

[18:59] You'll see this. I've seen it all over the place now. But I want to distinguish between the kind of meditation that's become popular today and what Psalm 1 is encouraging us to do.

[19:13] There are celebrities promoting meditation. Athletes meditating before professional sports games. Employers are having times of meditation in the workplace.

[19:24] Maybe that hasn't come to Athens yet, but it's probably coming. It's come to Knoxville. Knoxville. Guys are like, yeah, my boss told me to take a 15-minute meditation break. Like, you know, it's coming.

[19:35] It's becoming popular once again. Right now, there's over 5,000 meditation apps in the app store. All of them are new within the last five years.

[19:47] 5,000 meditation apps. Listen to just the names of some of these apps. Calm with over 100 million downloads.

[19:59] Headspace. Balance. Meditation that adapts to you is one of them. My life meditation. Meditation mist. Sounds real spiritual, you know.

[20:11] Meditation mist. Take some time. The subtitle of that one is take some time for yourself. Mesmerize. Harmony hypnosis. That sounds dangerous to me.

[20:22] Smiling mind. Better me. These are the most popular apps on meditation in the store. You just listen to the names of those apps, and immediately you should begin to discern the difference.

[20:36] Because these apps, this form of meditation that's popular today, is all about self. It's all focused on emptying yourself, and relaxing yourself, and calming yourself, and having a smiling mind.

[20:51] I don't even know what that means, you know. A smiling mind. Meditation today in culture has become a self-help hack, life hack, so you can deal with all the stress coming at you without stressing everyone else around you.

[21:06] Biblical meditation, like Psalm 1, is very different. It's really not about you. It's not about emptying yourself, or relaxing yourself.

[21:17] When Psalm 1 tells us to meditate, it's telling us to meditate on something outside of ourselves, on the law of the Lord. It's not looking inward.

[21:28] All these forms of meditation, their goal is to look into yourself. The goal of biblical meditation is to look up and out, away from ourselves.

[21:38] That's what Psalm 1 is calling us to do. Take some time. Plant yourself here. Get your eyes off of yourself. Stop thinking about yourself. Direct your gaze to God, and His Word, and His law.

[21:51] He's good. He's great. He's mighty. He's magnificent. Let's think about the Lord for a little while. Meditation, biblically, is the activity of thinking over, and dwelling on, and interacting with, and applying God's Word to your life.

[22:09] It's a means of communion with God. It's unhurried time. Each day, allowing God to tell us, this is what's true.

[22:22] It's God telling us, this is what's most important. It's God telling us, this is what I'm like. This is why you can trust me.

[22:33] It's time with God. Donald Whitney, in his book on spiritual disciplines, calls meditation the missing link for many Christians.

[22:44] The missing link. We want to grow. We want to pray. We want to know God better. But often, the missing link is that unhurried time of meditation with God, where He can speak to us, and encourage us, and we can know Him, and our souls can prosper.

[23:02] It's a means of grace to bless your souls, so you can prosper. This is how David Mathis defines meditation. He says, in meditation, we pause.

[23:16] I think this is, stop right there. Okay, in meditation, we pause. We stop. We turn things off. We pause. We slow down. We reflect over His words, which we have read, heard, or studied.

[23:32] We roll them over in our minds. And I love this. We let them ignite our hearts. We warm ourselves at the fire of meditation. That's what the Puritans would say.

[23:43] We meditate. We think. We roll it around. We stay in one spot until our hearts are ignited. We warm ourselves at the fire of meditation. We go deep in God's revelation.

[23:56] Take it into our very souls. And as we're being changed by truth, we respond to Him in prayer. It's this, it takes time.

[24:07] It takes study. It takes unhurried time, undistracted time with God thinking about His Word until it affects our souls. It affects our hearts.

[24:18] We just stay there. We sit there. We stay in this one spot. We plant ourselves by the river of God's Word. And we just keep drinking it and soaking it up and asking questions until our hearts leave there going, man, I love the Lord.

[24:32] I trust Him. He's good. He's going to be faithful to His promises. Nothing can pull me from His hand. He's the good shepherd and I hear His voice and I know His voice. We just stay there until our souls are affected by God's Word.

[24:46] and you'll just notice that's the opposite of how the internet feeds our brains. It's the exact opposite of what we're training ourselves to do every day online.

[24:59] Meditation is a process. It takes time. It's not instantaneous. If there's one thing that technology is really good at, it's being instantaneous. I mean, it is immediate.

[25:11] It's supposed to be fast. And what's happening is we're training ourselves to take in information really quick and move on to the next thing. Switching topics, you know, clicking on the next link, going from one thing to the next as fast as we can.

[25:26] That's kind of what technology is training us to do. I read an article that was written for bloggers that said bloggers, those who write blogs nowadays, are supposed to limit their blogs to 250 words because at 250 words, nobody's reading anymore and nobody is paying attention anymore.

[25:46] Okay, the average person reads 250 words in one minute. That means the average attention span they're telling bloggers they have is you have one minute to get this information communicated to your audience.

[26:01] Listen, meditation is very different from that. It's not one minute. It's not five minutes. It's not ten minutes. It's unhurried time with God communicating with us.

[26:12] We don't move quickly from one page to the next. Remember, Psalm 1 is giving us the happy life, the blessed life and the key is to plant ourselves by the streams of God's word to enjoy it, to let it color the way we see the world and to do that, we have to meditate on it.

[26:30] We have to chew on it and pray over it and apply it to our lives and let it affect our hearts and this takes time. It's not instantaneous. It's not a quick download.

[26:42] We don't have a greater, you know, Wi-Fi speed so we get this information faster. We're kind of stuck. You know, some of you may be smarter or quicker. We're kind of stuck at where we're created. Like, just takes me a while to get this thing rolling, you know?

[26:56] And it can't really upgrade how I'm doing up here. Just take some time to get this downloaded. Let me give you an example of why it's important to slow down. Even this week, last two weeks, one verse I've been meditating on.

[27:13] Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church and gave himself up for her. Just stop. Okay, the way we use, the way we read that typically is we read it and we go to the next verse and the next verse and we do our Bible reading and we check the box.

[27:30] You can meditate on Ephesians 5, 25. If you're a husband here, if you're a wife or someone else, you can take another verse that applies to you. It's just a personal illustration but just that one verse. I just kind of sat there and go, man, there's so much here in this one verse that can transform so many hours of my day.

[27:49] Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Stop. How did Christ love the church? He gave his life away for the church.

[27:59] He died for the church. He shed his own blood for the church. He sacrificed himself. You know, he cares for the church. He sent his Holy Spirit to indwell the church, to counsel us and lead us and you can just go to all these scriptures about what Christ has done and you begin to meditate on it and you begin to apply it and it warms your heart.

[28:19] Man, that's a high privilege. Will I ever love my wife as Christ loved the church? That's an unobtainable goal to get there but I want to grow. I want to do better and you just start to meditate.

[28:29] Think about it. Apply it to your life. How do I interact? What can I say? What can I do? You know, just we warm ourselves by the fire of meditation. You can take one verse and spend years applying it, meditating on it, thinking about it.

[28:46] It's a process God gives us. That's what meditation is. I like how Donald Whitney describes meditation as soaking in God's word like a tea bag soaks in water.

[29:00] You know, I historically have not been a big tea drinker. I think recently I've been drinking tea every day. I don't know if it's just getting older. It's like as you get older, you drink more tea but I drink tea like every day now and I have like, you know, you learn as you drink tea, if you just put the tea bag in and take it back out, that water is going to taste like hot water.

[29:19] That's all you're getting there. There's no tea in that water at that point. You put the tea bag in and you let it soak and you let it go and if you do three minutes, it's going to taste a certain way and if you do five minutes, it's going to taste a certain way and I remember one day, someone distracted me and I left my tea bag in there for like 30 minutes and I forgot it was still in there.

[29:37] I took a sip. That was some strong tea that day. It got really strong. That's what meditation is. It's not taking a verse and dipping it in and then removing it and moving on with our lives. It's letting it soak into our souls.

[29:51] It's thinking about it and praying over it until it changes the way we think and our love and our affection. That's what meditation is.

[30:01] Until we're communing with God and we're talking to God and hearing from God. The goal is to know God and worship God and to love God.

[30:14] And the river of God's word is a blessing to us. It's just a blessing. There's so much in here. There's hard sections in here. I did an interview yesterday with Dr. Wellam who's a professor at Southern and I was asking him some questions about the Old Testament.

[30:32] How do we read this? How do we interpret this? How does this bless my soul to read some of this? You know, it takes some work. He actually, I asked him a question about Joshua and the conquest of Israel, conquesting these other people and that's hard to read at times.

[30:47] How do we read that and let that bless our souls? And he just started meditating on God's word with me. He said, well, go back to Genesis 3. God was good in his creation but sin has entered.

[30:58] It's a fallen world and we just went through the Old Testament and by the time he was done, I was like, man, that's encouraging, you know? And then I asked him, how do we do that every day? And his answer was, it just takes time.

[31:10] You gotta read God's word. You gotta think about it. You gotta meditate on it. We wanna plant ourself by the river of God's word and just soak and soak and soak. I love how Charles Spurgeon, one of my historical heroes, described this river of Psalm 1.

[31:26] He described it as, the rivers of pardon and the rivers of grace. The rivers of the promise and the rivers of communion with Christ are never failing sources of supply.

[31:44] That's where I wanna plant myself. I wanna park myself by rivers of pardon and rivers of grace and rivers of blessing and rivers of joy and rivers of promise for my soul.

[31:55] You know, I wanna park myself there. I need that every day of my life and if I park myself every day by the news feed and Twitter and everything else going on in this world, man, my soul is not gonna be that encouraged.

[32:11] But if I park myself by the rivers of grace, you know, you just picture this sunny spot right by this river stream. It's just pleasant and you're just enjoying.

[32:22] That's kind of, the psalmist is painting a picture for us. Who doesn't wanna hang out there all day? You know, who doesn't wanna do a picnic there and just stay there and put up a hammock and spend the day enjoying that?

[32:33] That's what he wants us to see. There's blessing here. There's joy here. There's goodness for our souls here. So let's, let's talk about some application.

[32:45] What does this look like? Well, first of all, you have to have a plan for this. This has not happened by default every day in your life. You today have to have a plan to unplug, to silence the beeps and the buzzes and to read and to commune with the Lord.

[33:02] You gotta have a plan for this. You gotta have a time. You gotta create space in your life where you're saying, whether it's early in the morning or at night or lunchtime, I'm gonna turn this off and I'm gonna be on hurried time right now to meditate on God's word.

[33:17] So just think about it right now. What's your plan? Where's your place? Where are you gonna go? How are you gonna silence the worldly counsel so that you can spend in unhurried time in communion with God?

[33:32] What's your plan? Where are you gonna go in God's word? What are you gonna read? I love Bible reading plans. I love every morning having a plan. I love knowing I'm gonna read some Old Testament.

[33:43] I'm gonna read some New Testament. I'm gonna read some Psalms. But for me, I was, you know, I was born a legalist. I'll probably always fight legalism. I love checking boxes and plans.

[33:54] So I have a plan and actually we did a plan for Cornerstone this year. And when they designed the plan, I told them, you gotta have a box by every reading. There's just, man, you check that box. It just feels so good to check the box.

[34:05] You know, you're just like, oh, I got so much done today. But listen, here's the problem. You can check every box and walk away and feel really good about yourself and have learned nothing about the Lord if you're not careful.

[34:16] And so the key is not checking the box. The key is, what I do is I'll get my Bible reading plan, open my plan, I turn to that section for the day, begin reading, I do Old Testament, then I go to New Testament.

[34:26] But if I hit a passage that is just speaking to my soul, I stop. And I have to remind myself, I don't have to finish the plan today. The plan is not to check the boxes.

[34:38] The plan is to know God and commune with the living God. And God, by His Spirit, is speaking to me through His words. Stop. Think about that. Read this.

[34:48] You know, let's meditate on it. Why is this affecting my soul? What does this say about my trust of God? Why is this convicting me right now? How is this speaking to me?

[34:59] We stop and we meditate on God's word. And the goal is, this is what I say the goal is. Don't set a time limit for yourself. Don't put a time expectation on how long you're to stay in that one passage.

[35:15] Stay right there until your soul is happy in the Lord. Stay there until you are blessed. Listen to this quote by George Mueller. He said his goal every morning was to get his soul happy in the Lord.

[35:29] And he said this. He said, I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it.

[35:40] That's what Psalm 1 is telling us. That thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed, and that thus by means of the Word of God while meditating on it my heart might be brought into communion with the Lord.

[35:59] That's the goal. That's the river. That's the happy life. That's the blessed life. We're created to know God and enjoy God. And the psalmist is saying, here's how to find it.

[36:12] Plant yourself by this Word. Soak it up. Just stay there until your soul is happy in God. There's tons of resources to help you get there.

[36:24] There's study Bibles. There's commentaries. There's good books written by Christian authors on certain topics. You can take all of those and just stay there. And I want to encourage you with one thing.

[36:35] If you think, man, I've never done this. I've never meditated on God's Word for that long. I get distracted. I get lost. I'm not sure how to do this. Where do I start? I read it.

[36:46] I could read Psalm 1 and I think, okay, I don't know where to go from there. Listen, this morning, I want to tell you this. If you come to church, every week, what we're doing is we're spending 40 or 45 minutes meditating and applying God's Word to our life.

[37:03] You just did it. You did about a 38-minute meditation already on God's Word this morning. That's the gift of the local church. I love that. We're doing it together. So even if you fall short, even if you think, man, this week really didn't get into God's Word that much, you know, I was distracted.

[37:20] I was checking my news feed. I was doing this. I really didn't meditate on God's Word. The gift of the body of Christ is just come and we'll meditate together. We're going to enjoy it together. Walt is going to open God's Word to you week in and week out and you're going to meditate on God's Word together and then you're going to apply it to your lives together.

[37:40] That's the wisdom of God in the Sunday gathering. We get to meditate on God's Word together. Here's the promise for you. Okay, where we land this morning, verse 3. This is the promise.

[37:51] If you do this, if you walk not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers, but if you meditate on God's Word and you plant yourself by God's Word, here's what you're going to look like.

[38:06] Here's what your life is going to look like. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season and all, its leaf does not wither in all that He does.

[38:18] He prospers. It's not talking about health and wealth. It's not prosperity of you're going to always be healthy or you're going to have riches. He's talking about soul prosperity.

[38:31] He's saying you're going to be happy. You're going to know God. You're going to enjoy the Lord. When times of suffering comes, you're going to know where to go for your refuge. When times of prosperity come, you're not going to trust in riches and wealth.

[38:43] You're going to trust in God and be generous. You're going to prosper in your soul. You're going to be like this tree that's got these branches that's just healthy. It's not withering.

[38:53] It's not dry, you know. It's not dying. It's going to be a healthy tree. It's a vision of the blessed life, the happy life. And the way to get there is by planting ourselves by the river of God's word.

[39:10] And the way to do that is through meditation. Our souls prosper when we are planted by the river of God's word. Amen. Amen. Let me pray for you.

[39:21] Father, I thank you so much for your word this morning. I thank you for Trinity grace and your work by your Holy Spirit in this body of believers, Lord.

[39:35] And I pray this week that you would bless them with your presence, with your spirit. You would bless them as they come to your Holy Word and spend time with you, God.

[39:49] We pray that you would open our eyes to behold wondrous things from your Word, Father. That our souls would be ignited, our hearts would be lit, that we would love you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with all of our soul, heart, mind, and strength.

[40:07] We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. You've been listening to a message at a Sunday celebration at Trinity Grace Church in Athens. For more information about Trinity Grace, please visit us at trinitygraceathens.com.

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