Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Psalm 1, emphasizing the importance of choosing the right path in life. He contrasts the blessed life of those who delight in God's Word with the barren existence of the wicked, illustrating that our daily choices shape our character and destiny. The sermon encourages listeners to meditate on Scripture and evaluate their influences, ultimately urging them to align their lives with Christ, the true source of righteousness and fulfillment.
Housekeeping and Introduction
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Amen.
If you have a child, they can be dismissed at Children's Church at this time. We're going to be in Psalms Chapter 1 in our Summer of Psalms.
One of my favorite Psalms, I know there's a lot of them, but this is one of those ones I go to often to read and meditate on. And so Psalms Chapter 1 is where we'll be at this morning. Again, be praying for our young people as they leave today.
We'll have a special time of prayer for them. Psalms Chapter 1, if you've made your way there, we'll stand out of the honor and reading of God's Word. And I will read it to get started this morning. Let's all stand.
The Bible says, How happy is the one who does not walk in the advice of the wicked, or stand in the pathway of the sinner, or sit in the company of mockers.
Instead, his delight is in the Lord's instruction, and he meditates on it day and night. He is like a tree planted beside flowing streams that bears its fruit in its seasons. And its leaf does not wither. Whether he does prospers.
The wicked are not like this. Instead, they are like a chaff in the wind that blows away. Therefore, the wicked will not stand up to the righteous, nor sinners in the assemblies of the righteous. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to ruin.
Lord, we love you. We thank you for your reading of the Word. We thank you for what you've done for us. I pray that you'd have your will and way in the service. Give me the words to say this morning. In your name we pray. Amen. And you may be seated.
As we look at this, I've titled it, Which Way Will You Walk?
We are all put in life, and there are paths before us, and there are what we call forks in the road that we decide whether we're going to go to the right or to the left, or where we're going to go with our life.
And we have to ask ourselves often in our life, which way are we going? Where are we at?
And as we're in a vehicle, and you put in the GPS of where to go, am I going in the right direction, or is it continuing to reroute me? And so in our spiritual life, we must ask ourselves, which way are we walking? How are we living our life?
And on January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the Potomac River there in Washington, D.C., shortly after takeoff.
Survival and Decision Making
During a snowstorm, there were 74 people on board this flight.
I'm sorry, 74 people died that day. There were 79 people on the flight. Five passengers survived, clinging to the wreckage and the freezing water. Amid the horror,
a small story of heroism came out from this, of heartbreaking story that had made way here.
A man in the water, later identified as Arlen Williams Jr., repeatedly began passing the rescue line from the helicopter to another survivor. Time and time again, instead of saving himself,
he gave away his chance at rescue to the person that was beside him. And as the line came back to him the sixth time, he had slipped beneath the water, and he died that night along with 74 of the people. Later, the investigators discovered, as they began looking through Mr.
Williams' life, that he had been faced with choices in those moments to save himself or to save other people.
And though no one knew what happened and what was racing through his mind, his action revealed the path that he had chosen long before that crash had ever happened.
It was not a momentary decision that he was making in that moment, but it was a decision of his life and who he was that would define him to take that rescue line and give it to someone else and say, No, I want you to be saved instead of me.
Psalms 1 presents us with this very similar challenge. Not in the chaos of a crash, but in the quiet choices that we make every day of our life. When we are brought before a situation in our life, how are we choosing to respond and what are we going to do in those everyday moments?
There are two paths very clearly laid out in this passage. One that leads to life and blessing and the other that leads to ruin.
The way we walk, where we stand, and who we sit beside will shape who you become in your life. We don't become a person like Arlo simply by overnight, by accident.
You drift into either, you don't drift into righteousness by chance, but it is a daily choice to say, I'm going to do what's right today. I'm going to do the right thing tomorrow.
As one of my college professors used to say, there was an old song, do right till the stars fall. How are we living our life? Are we doing right until the stars fall? A daily choice.
And Psalms 1 invites us to look at both of these roads. It invites us to look and it really gives us a chance to see what happens if we choose a life of righteousness and if we choose a life of unrighteousness. Where are we going to go?
Ultimately, the path that you choose determines the person that you will become and the place that you're going to end up.
As we begin to look through this, I want us to turn our attention to the very first two verses and look at the path that we choose. The Bible says, Blessed is the man who walks not, but delights in the law of the Lord. Two writers that I read after.
One is Dante. You may have heard of Dante. He wrote Dante's Inferno. Another one is called Frost.
And they both talk about these roads that are often not taken. And I want to quote from Frost. I've got Dante's in here, but I just want to quote from Frost. Frost says it like this. Two roads diverge in a woods, and I took the one less traveled by,
and it made all the difference. And in his poem, he's talking about how in his own life and in his own journey, he came to a road.
He came to a path in the road, and it was a fork in the road. And I had to determine which one I was going to go on. And there was one that was not well traveled.
One that the weeds had began to grow up. The grass had began to grow up on it.
And the other one had been well taken and well pathed and well taken in life and in his journey. And he said, I decided to take the one that was less traveled.
And when I got to the end of that journey, it paid the price that I took that one because it was the one less traveled. And oftentimes in our life, we are going to have to do the hard things to take the path that is less traveled.
The world's going to look at us, and they're going to say, why are you doing that?
What is possessing you to make those decisions? And yet we take a step by faith, and we continue to serve the Lord. As I was reading after Spurgeon on this psalm, Spurgeon stated that this is what he called a preface psalm.
He said this, it was a desire to teach us the way to blessedness and warn us of sure destruction of sinners.
As I was studying through this, and this past weekend, Allison took Jade on a little girls weekend.
And so I had the boys with me Thursday and Friday night and Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Me and the boys hung out, and there was a lot of time where it was just dad pouring into the boys, pouring into things. And oftentimes, Bertie would ask something, and I would say, well, this is how we do this. This is how we begin to go through life.
And it was a really cool moment for me to specifically invest, and Allie as well, been able to specifically invest in Jade and her life as we were able to do that. We don't get to do that often, but we begin to teach them the way.
Jesus, as I said last week, spent three and a half years teaching his disciples the way that they should go. And oftentimes, we look over this passage because it's familiar, and we say, oh yeah,
those that sit in the way of the wicked, stand in the path of righteousness, walk in the way of the wicked.
And we hear it, and we just sort of breeze over it in our daily reading. I want us to really focus in and say, okay, what are these lifestyles that the Lord is telling me in this psalm, and how do I live my life?
Contrasting Lifestyles
So the first one we see is the lifestyles contrasted. We see the blessed and the barren. We see one life who is blessed and blessed beyond all measure, and we see one life that is filled with torment and pain and going through life that is just barren.
It says he tells us not to walk in the pathway of the sinner, the light in the way of the Lord. And this person that does this avoids a couple of things. There's a progression of sin here. It starts by sin, and it starts by walking.
This is the casual influences of our life. So when we begin to walk down our life, when we begin to go down our path, we are going to walk around people that are going to influence us. These are not people that we maybe interact with on an everyday basis. I put it like this in my life.
These are things that I allow to influence my mind. These are things that, as I'm riding down the road, I turn on a podcast. Peter got me on a podcast the other day. I've listened to him a lot recently.
But they influence the way we think, what we say, how we act, what we do. These are people that have influence on our life, but aren't necessarily there with us. We're walking with us.
We're going down our path. We're allowing them to have influence on us. These are our media influences, our podcasters, our music, things that we listen to. But then it says there's the people that we stand beside. These are the comfortable alignments.
These are your pastor. These are your church members. These are people that are around us that we're standing with, that we're enjoying fellowship with, that we're having these influences with each other, but they're comfortable alignments.
We've aligned them with each other. But then it gets to this point where it says these are those others that sit in the way of sinners, sit in the company of mockers.
These are the ones that we have committed our identity to. I put it like this. These are the ones that we have chosen to spend the rest of our life with, our husband, our wife, our children, our family that we intentionally put ourselves in line with.
We are sitting with them, and they are beginning to influence our lives more than we imagine. Have you ever seen an older couple that's been married for 40 or 50 years, and they begin looking like each other? Like, you can't explain it.
It's like they'll show their wedding picture, and they look like two different people. And then 30, 40 years later, they've been married for 30, 40 years, and they begin to look like each other.
It's like, how do they begin? Like, how does their face change to begin looking like each other? It's because they're doing life together.
They are spending so much time that they begin to mimic each other in their speech.
They begin to mimic each other in their look. I don't know how our body does it, but somehow our body changes in that sense to look like each other. And this is what happens when we sit in the way of the mockers. We begin to sit in that lifestyle.
And we've got to ask ourselves, who are we standing with, who are we walking with, and who are we sitting with? Me and Brody, while Allison was gone, we came across a Netflix documentary.
We sometimes can go down rabbit trails, and it's about, have you ever heard of Forrest Fenn and the treasure hunt of Forrest Fenn?
If you have, raise your hand. Okay, no one in here except me and Brody. Perfect. So Forrest Fenn wrote a book about a treasure that he buried, a $2 million treasure in the Rocky Mountains. And as these, he gave nine clues in order to find this.
Hikers would go into the woods, and they'd try to find it. It took 10 years. He said it was going to take 900 years to find this. He kept giving interviews and kept giving more clues. Finally, someone found it. But many people died along the way because they were misled by the clues.
Hikers, in the same way, sometimes will take the wrong trail. And they'll go the wrong way, and they'll realize hours and hours later, I've went the wrong way, and I've got to turn around. I've got to go back and get to the point where I need to be at in life.
And we sometimes in life inadvertently make the wrong decisions.
We step in the wrong way. We walk in the wrong way. We sit beside someone that we shouldn't have been sitting beside.
This could have been a relationship with a boyfriend or girlfriend in high school or college, and you realize, and you look back, and you're like, man, how crazy would my life have been if I would have married that person? Look at how crazy my life would have been. Look at where they're at.
And we look, and we thank God, but we look, and we say, I would have been that person sitting beside them. And so we've got to look at our life. We've got to examine our life, and we've got to ask ourselves two basic questions. Who are you walking with right now?
Who are the people that you are allowing your life to come in contact with, that you're allowing your life to step beside?
And then what voices are shaping your mind and heart during the week? We all allow voices to come into our mind.
We all allow the voices of the world, the voices of Satan, to influence our mind and our heart. And we've got to ask ourselves, who are we allowing to come into our mind and heart in a daily basis throughout our weeks?
Two lifestyles are contrasted, the blessed and the barren, but we also see two longings revealed. We see that the righteous delight in and meditate on.
There's two things here. They delight in and they meditate on one specific thing, and it says they do these things to the Word of God. They meditate on the Word of God, the Lord's instructions day and night.
The word meditate here, the world has taken, they've twisted this word to have some type of spiritual, like you're meditating to some shaman out in the world in the ethos.
The word meditate simply means to murmur or to chew on. To take and to digest and to chew, not just reading. One word we would put here is rhumitating on.
As a cow begins to chew the cud, this is the same way the Word of God should be in our life.
We should take it, we should digest it, but we shouldn't just allow it to leave our body. We should continue to think on those verses, to think on the passage of Scripture, to really penetrate our heart and to bring us in to the alignment of what God's Word says.
You see, the contrast is this. The world pulls us to distractions.
The world tries to distract us. The world says, hey, look over here. Look at this shiny new object. Hey, look at this new video. Look at this new TikTok trend. Look at this new recipe.
Look at these new things that I'm bringing to your attention. But the Bible says, I want you to be called to devotion. The world tries to distract us.
The world tries to bring things into our life to distract us of what the real thing is going on. And the Bible says, no, no, bring your life into the devotion of the Word of God.
And every day you're reading it, you're bringing it into your mind, you're bringing it to your heart, you're bringing it back into your mind, you're bringing it back into your heart, and you're over and over and over again meditating on the Word of God.
You're saying, God, how can this verse, how can this passage, how can this one little word that I've read influence my life and help the ones that are around me? How can I be someone who is delighting and meditating on the Word of God?
Do you delight in the Word of God or do you just dabble in it? Do you get up every morning and you say, God, it's my daily checklist.
I'm here to read your Word and I've read it today and I'm good to go. Or are you completely focusing in and saying, God, I want to delight myself in the Word.
As I'm out in the garden, as I'm riding back and forth, as I'm taking care of my grandkids, as I'm taking care of my kids, it's summertime, as I'm getting ready for summer vacation, am I delighting in the Word of God? Am I taking time to focus on the Word of God?
What a good way to put this is, what does your calendar say about your priorities? What does your calendar, what is your life of events, when you open up your 5-day, 10-day, 17-day calendar,
Seeking God Over Worldly Things
your 30-day calendar, how much of your calendar are you putting in the Word of God and saying, I'm going to invest my time in the Word of God? And so we begin to see the paths we choose.
The next thing we see, verses 3 and 4, is the product of our ways. The product of our ways. Look at what it says here. He is like a tree planted beside flowing streams. Planted by rivers of water.
There's a difference here that is contrasted. This is all about contrasting in this psalm. The righteous and the barren, the good, the bad. He's contrasting these two.
And the difference here is we're looking at those that love sin and are barren in the sin of the wasteland of sin or those who love God. And those who love what God is doing.
Now, I wrote down like this. One loves what the world has to offer and the other follows the other to seek after God.
To seek after Scripture and to seek where God can be found. You see, oftentimes we love the things of the world and I'm guilty of this as well, right? We love the things of the world. We love toys and gadgets and things.
But God says, do you love me and my word as much as you love those things of the world? Do you love me as much as you love your spouse?
Do you love me as much as you love your children? Do you love me as much as you love these things that I've given you, the gifts that I've given you? You see, the rich young servant came to Jesus and he said, I wanna serve you, Jesus. I wanna follow you.
I wanna follow you with my whole life. He wanted to follow Jesus with everything he had. And Jesus said, hey, that's great.
I want you to follow me. Hey, go and sell everything you have. Deny your mother and father and come follow after me. The Bible says that the rich young ruler dumped his head in doubt and confusion and said, I can't part with those things. I love my stuff too much.
I love these things that you've given me. And he said, if you can't do those things, you can't be a servant of mine.
And he's simply saying to us, do we love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength so much that we would be willing to give up everything that the world has to offer in order to serve Jesus, the product of our way?
What are we doing with our life? The first thing I wrote down, and this is the fruit of the faithful. Look here again, these three things. They're planted, they're prospering, and they're fruitful.
Resilience in Difficult Seasons
They're rooted, they're resilient, and they're rewarded. God puts us in the right place.
Oftentimes we'll question and we'll say, God, why did you put me here in Clingman? Why did you put me in this specific place? Why did you put me in college? Where are you put me in college at? And he says, listen, I'm planting you, I'm rooting you in this area.
It may be for a short time, it may be for your entire life, but I'm planting you here, I'm rooting you here to influence the ones that are around you.
As your branches come out, as you begin to spread your wings, as you begin to spread your life, you are influencing those that are around you. I'm planting you for a reason.
And he says, there's gonna be times where you're gonna be wanting to give up. There's gonna be times where you're wanting to give away.
And he says, no, no, listen, I'm gonna, even in the dry seasons, your roots have to go down. You've gotta be able to find the nourishment. You've gotta be resilient. Because when we're resilient, what happens, the Bible says, we're fruitful and we are rewarded.
In due season, with patience, we begin to get the reward of the Lord.
You see, there's a contrast here of a fruit bearing tree, as it says here, it says a tree planted by flowing streams. But what's the other thing? It's like a tumbleweed in the desert.
We had the opportunity, we lived in Idaho for four years, and we would go down to California. And I never had seen a tumbleweed before until I went down to California. These are, they're massive. And they're just rolling along the desert. They're dry. It's nasty.
It's dirty. You step out of your car to fill up with gas, and you step back in, and you feel like you got a pound of dust on you.
It's dirty. It's just, everything's dry. It's dusty. There's no life out there. And it gives us a contrast of, when we walk outside and we see the rain, and we see trees, and we see green grass, it's like the Lord's blessing. And then you have the contrast of this dirty, barren desert.
And he says, this is what is the contrast in our life. One thrives when it follows after the Lord, and the other just drifts along the way with the wind. The questions we've got to ask ourselves are,
are your roots in our life, are they rooted in the word of God? Are they rooted in what God has said, or are they rooted in the swamp of the world? Are we allowing our lives to be so rooted in God's word that when adversity comes,
we stand up and we say, blessed be the name of the Lord.
Think of Job's life. As Job went through trial and torment and difficulties in his life, he said,
blessed be the name of the Lord. He gives and he takes away. I'm just going to keep blessing the Lord. Or are we going to be like other people who say to Job, you should curse this God.
I can't believe he would do these things to you. Look at what you've done. You should get rid of this God that you're serving. But Job continued to press forward. He continued to serve God.
And really, I want to ask this is, what kind of fruit is visible? Allie was asking me this week, she said, Brody was asking her a question about Christianity and what Christianity is.
And I say, you know, in my mind, as we think through Christianity, a Christian should bear the fruit of a Christian. You look at an apple tree and you say,
well, I know that's an apple tree because it's bearing oranges. No one would say that.
You wouldn't go up here to Highway 16 and go to the apple market and go into an apple tree field, a vineyard of apples, vineyard of apples, a field of apples? I don't know.
I'm not a farmer like you guys are. You wouldn't go into this field of apple trees and say, hey, I'm looking for the orange trees. The guy would look at you and say, hey, you're at the wrong place. These are for apple trees.
You would go in and you would find the apples and you would pull the apples that you wanted and you would say, this is the fruit of the apple. And so when we begin to evaluate our life and we begin to look at who we are, we say, I'm a Christian.
Am I producing the fruit of a Christian?
Fruits of a Christian Life
What's the fruit of a Christian? Love, joy, peace, goodness, faithfulness, the fruit of the spirit. Are we producing these things in our life?
And then we begin to see the futility of the foolish. The wicked one, the Bible says, is like a chaff. It's dry. It's rootless. It's weightless. It's weightless. The Bible says it's easily blown away.
There's no stability in their life. There's no legacy. I'll put it like this. There's no real life in the chaff. There's no real life in what is going on in their life. There's no substance.
When a farmer begins to beat the chaff and get the wheat harvesting, the chaff is what they throw up in the air and it blows away because there's no life to it.
It blows off into the distance and the wheat begins to settle down into the barrel and that's what they use to harvest.
The Bible says that those who are following the way of the world, they're like the wind that takes them wherever the wind goes. They have no meaning to their life.
They have no value to their life because they're just going by where the wind blows. We have to ask ourselves, are we having a life that is built on substance or is it built on just the surface level of Christianity?
Are we building our life where there's roots that are going down, where when there's famine, when there's heartache, you're digging your roots down and you're saying, God, I want you to bless.
I want you to, I want to serve you even when times are tough, even when things are hard, I still want to serve you. And then that famine's over and now you're able to flourish because your roots are down deep in God's word.
Begin to ask yourself if God would remove everything in your life, everything that you post, everything that you live for, if he removes everything in your life, what would be left?
If he removed all of your family, again, going back to that thought of Job, if he removed your family, if he removed all of your wealth, if he removed all of your servants, if he removed everything that you had, what would be left?
And what would be left? Is it worth serving God for?
Because Job looked at the end of his life and he said, my wife, my life has been taken away. My, my, my fortune has been taken away.
The only thing I've got is the woman that God gave me and blessed be the name of the Lord. I'm going to continue serving God in this area. Would we do the same thing?
Judgment and Righteousness
And then we get to the last two verses, the, the place it all ends, the place that it all comes to an end, it all comes to a head. And we all begin to see what happens here. The Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish.
I think verse six is such a fitting way because it distinguishes between the final end of the righteous and the final end of the wicked. We begin to see here the way of judgment
for those that choose to follow him and those that choose to follow the way of the world. We begin to see the first thing, the two destinies determined.
The two destinies that are determined here, we stand in the judgment and as we're looking on Wednesday night, if you've been able to come, we're talking about these, the seven churches and how they stand before God and God
judges them and God says, I know your works from before big time began until right now. You've been faithful.
He says to some others, you've been lukewarm. You have, you're disgusting as I look at you and I want to vomit you out of my mouth. He begins to compare these churches and he says that one day we're going to stand in a judgment of God
and those that are covered by Christ are going to be able to stand. We're going to be able to stand before God and we're going to say, as we stand before him, how are you worthy to come into my throne?
I'm not worthy, but he is. He is worthy and that's why I'm standing here because I'm able to come before you because of Christ. Look at what John chapter 14 verse 6 says. As Jesus is talking to his disciples, Jesus told them, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me. If we want to get to that point where we stand before God and we have a life that is worthy, that a life that is worth the sacrifice for God, it's going to be coming to him through the
Son of God where he looks at us and he says, there's not going to be a perishing, there's not going to be a misfortune, there's not going to be an eternal separation from God, but you're going to be able to come to him because of Christ and because of what he's done.
And if we don't believe that, if we don't believe what Christ has done, then the other one is the destiny of hell where God says, depart from me, you wicked and evildoers, because I never knew you.
Depart from me because I don't know what you're doing, I don't know who you are, the Son is not of you and I don't know who you are.
Depart from me, I don't know who you are. Words that as we think about, I pray every day that that would not be one of us, that that would not be one of my kids, that that would not be one of us that are sitting here today where Jesus looks at us and says, depart from me for I never knew you.
It's a sad day, it's a hard day, but we know what's going to come, we know what's going to happen one day. And then the last thing we'll see as we begin to close down, a divine divide. A divine divide that happens here.
You see, the wicked will stand in judgment as well. They're going to stand and they're going to say, God, this is what I've done with my life. Look at all the good things I've done. And he's going to look at them and he's going to say,
I'm looking at you and yet you're still a wicked and evil person because you don't have the Son with you. We begin to see as they stand in judgment, the righteous will be justified.
The ones that know him and intimately know God will stand before him and they will know the way of righteousness. In Matthew chapter 7, I believe it's the parallel passage of Psalms chapter 1.
I believe Jesus takes Psalms chapter 1 and he takes Matthew chapter 7 as he's given the Sermon on the Mount and he gives us an exposition of Psalms chapter 1.
He talks about two gates and how there's two gates, there's a narrow gate and there's a wide gate. He talks about the two roads that we're going to take, the one last traveled and the one very much traveled. He talks about two trees and how one is barren and one is great.
He talks about two houses, one house that's built on rocks and then one house that's built on sand and when the storms come and when the waves of life come, the one that's built on nothing, the sand, is demolished.
But the one that's on a rock that is firm and has a firm foundation, it continues to go forward.
As we begin to think through that, I want you to choose in your mind and ask yourself in your mind, which one of these paths is my life? Am I building my life, my house on that firm foundation, that rock that's never going to fail?
Or am I building it on sand that when the world and when the storms of life come, it just completely falls over? When the wind blows, when the life, when the storms of life comes, are you still standing because what Christ has done for you or do you collapse into nothingness?
We're going to have hard times. We're going to have difficult times. We know that, but based on everything that we've known over the last 6,000 years of human history, bad times come, hard times come, difficult times come, but are we trusting in the Lord even in those moments?
Begin to ask yourself this, do you want that blessed end?
Do you want to look at the life and you turn around and you say, 60, 70 years of my life has passed and I'm thankful for the decisions I've made. Yeah, I made some hard decisions.
Yeah, I made some wrong things. I went down the wrong path and I realized halfway down that path, I'm wrong. I've got to turn back.
I've got to get back to that fork and go back to the right way. It's difficult.
It's tough, but we must be a people who say, I want to choose the way of the Lord.
Closing Illustration and Reflection
I want to walk in the way the Lord wants me to walk. I want to trust that He is the way, the truth, and the life for my life.
As Terry comes, I want us to close by one simple illustration that I came across this week that I thought was powerful. Psalms 1, it's not just poetry.
It's not just something that someone wrote down and said, you know, this sounds really good. I'm going to lay it down and a couple thousand years later, a guy named James is going to read it. It's going to be really beneficial. This is the word of the Lord.
It's a pathway that we go and it is a sure and steady foundation for our life. Harry Ironside, a Bible teacher,
told of a visit that he had in Palestine. Years ago, a man named Joseph Flax had the opportunity to address a gathering of Jews and Arabs in Palestine.
He took the subject of Psalms chapter 1, this first Psalm, he read it and he asked one simple question. I want to end by asking us this same question. He said this, who is the blessed man that the Psalms is speaking of?
He says, how happy, how blessed is he who walks in the way of the advice of the wicked, who doesn't stand in the pathway of sinners, who sits in the company. He said, who is the blessed man that this speaks of?
This man never walked in the counsel of the wicked. He never stood in the way of sinners and he never sat in the seat of the mockers. He was an absolutely sinless man.
In this address of Jews and Arabs, no one spoke up at first. So Flax said, was this our great father Abraham? The Arabs and the Jews both believed in Abraham.
One old man spoke up and said, no, it couldn't be Abraham. Abraham, he denied his wife and he told a lie about her. So he asked another question.
He said, how about the lawgiver Moses? Oh, we love Moses. He gave us the law. He gave us what we abide by and someone else spoke up and said, it can't be Moses. He killed a man.
He lost his temper by the waters of Merib and he hit the water with his stick.
Flax suggested, maybe it's our father David. David. Maybe it was the great King David who, as we studied in Sunday school, killed Goliath and led the key people out of Israel who went into bondage and went into slavery. He was a great king.
And there was a silence for a while and he said, no, it can't be David. He sent it with Bathsheba.
He didn't live a perfect life either. And in the silence that happened for a moment, an elderly Jew rose and said, my brothers, I have a little book here.
Someone gave it to me. It's called the New Testament because as you know, the Jews don't have the New Testament. They just live by the Old Testament. He said, I've been reading it for a while. I haven't been able to put this book down. I don't even know if it's true,
but I would say if I could find a man in scripture that would be the man in this first Psalm, it would be Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus, this man, of course, he's the only perfect man that's ever lived as this New Testament tells me. He didn't stand in the way of sinners, but he was the Savior for those who sinned. He didn't stand in the way of those who were there.
He told them how to have life and how to have life more abundant. And we sit here today, we know the gospel is true. We know that God has given us the tree of life. And if we flourish when we're rooted in Jesus and what he's done for us,
Jesus, as it says in John chapter 1, is the word. And in John chapter 15, it says that I am the tree of life. And in John 14, 6, Jesus says, I am the way of life. Psalms 1 is pointing to Jesus.
And everything we've got to do in our life has to be focused toward Jesus and what he's done.
We've got to be living our life in a way that's got Jesus at the forefront and we're walking and we're sitting and we're listening to the advice of what Jesus has for us. Church, this morning, if our life isn't pointed to Jesus,
it's pointed to something else. And our life must be brought back into alignment with who Jesus is, what he's done for us and how we're going to live our life for him as we begin to step forward in our paths.
Whether you're 8 years old or whether you're 80 years old here this morning, we've got a path that's before us.
We've got a portion of time that's before us and we've got to say, I'm going to make the rest of my time of my life mean something for Jesus. Are we going to step out by faith and we're going to trust in him this morning? Father, we love you.
We thank you for what you've done. God, help us this morning as we look at Psalm chapter 1 that we would meditate on this Psalm all week long. That we wouldn't let it remove from our mind or our heart and we would continue to think and say, God, what is it that you want me to do?
Conclusion and Farewell
What area of my life am I wrong in? And help me to live more closer to you. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Thank you again for taking your time to listen to the sermon audio of Pleasant Grove. Please subscribe to get our latest sermons each week.
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