Pas Ralph Douglas West - A Blessed Life - Psalm 1 - The Church Without Walls

0:15 to help us understand what a blessed life looks like, how it's described. Psalm 1. I told the church at 8 o'clock, I grew up in a church where every Sunday we read Psalm 100. And I remember the crisis of faith that I encountered when somebody said Psalm 1. I didn't know that there were 149 other Psalms.

0:49 Psalm 1. Blessed is the one who walks, who does not walk in the step of the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers but whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season and whose leave does not wither, whatever they do prospers. Not so with the wicked.

1:32 They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction. This is the word of God. You may be seated. The blessed life. Life is composed with a series of choices. Those choices sometimes are mundane and other times they're majestic.

2:21 Either way, life consists of a series of choices, daily choices. What I'll eat, drink, wear, daily choices, in the ordinary slices of life, mundane, regular, other times majestic, ethereal. Will I stay or go? Will I continue this career or choose another? These are choices. I don't know if we live a day without making a conscious choice about something.

3:10 It might be a reason the scripture appeals to us when we read it as Christians and non-religious people who find it to be a good book of literature recognizes that it meets you at the intersections of life. You don't read long into the scripture without coming to some moment in a person's life where they have to make a decision. Does Abraham stay in the Ur of the Chaldees or Does he move in a direction west, not knowing where he goes? And he journeys without a map, and this is the best God gives him. You'll know when you get there. or when the nation of Israel has been emancipated from Egypt and they are wandering in the wilderness and God says, I've set before you blessings and curses, life and death.

4:20 Choose life that you might live. Choices. Psalm 1 is a psalm of choice. In some ways it reads very much like Robert Frost's The Road Less Taken Two roads diverge in yellow woods and could not determine which road I would take And long I stood and looked down one long as I could until it bent in the underground Then he ends and says, but I chose the one less taken and it has made all of the difference there. Choices. You have a choice.

5:08 You'll be faced with choices. And Psalm is a choice, one, to say that you have a choice whether or not you want to live the blessed life. I want to live a blessed life The blessed life consists of some guidelines that we take when we consider what that life looks like. Psalm 1 is the front porch to the house of the Psalms. Psalm 1 explains what you're going to read for 149 other Psalms.

5:58 The dichotomies of life, height, exhilarations of joy, depths, the disappointments and disasters that accompany life. The breadth and width of the consequences of choices that we make are all found in Psalm 1 as the front porch to say, look at the house that you're going to live in, Psalms 1 through 2 through 150.

6:31 And here in these choices, you can have a blessed life. If it's blessed, then you know that our sufficiency is of God. And because of that, God supplies us with the resources that we need to contend. Blessed. The words sound familiar, doesn't it? You read that word in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7, where Jesus gives a series of blessed, and then we say the poor, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the merciful. and sometimes I identify these beatitudes one, two, three, four, five and on but they're really meant to be read as a corpus and it's a characteristic of the kind of people who live inside of what we know as the kingdom of God where God reigns and we live out what God's teachings are in the world the kingdom of God the Beatitudes have you seen those Beatitudes lately?

7:52 I have I attended via the television the home going celebration of Jimmy Carter And I listened intently to two eulogies, one that they cut away of Jimmy Carter eulogizing Gerald Ford and Gerald Ford eulogizing Jimmy Carter proxy his son. I saw those Beatitudes at work, two political opponents, as they would say, respected each other, disagreed viciously, vehemently on policy. And yet after the presidency, a Baptist, Carter, Episcopalian, Ford, came together, Romans 5, around their faith. If your faith is not big enough to overlook some differences, you need to go get you a new faith.

9:07 That's what Psalm 1 describes as blessed. Sounds different, doesn't it, from these preachers and pundits who describe blessed by car clothes, cash, and creaturely comforts. You see, when you test blessed, you have to ask this question, will it outlast all of the forementioned? Will it outlast a car and clothes and cash? In other words, what do you do when that's gone? Are you blessed because you have it and unblessed because you lose it? Or is it that God can keep and bless you in spite of it? Preach Ralph West.

10:00 Blessed. I have to move on. In the Greek, Septuagint, I just like the way that word sounds. I thought I would sound deep since you have the sisters here today. Septuagint. it's the text that you have in your hand it's the Greek translation of the Old Testament Cyprus Cyprus Island in the scripture is identified as blessed because it needed nothing imported to it to survive. It was self-sustaining. Everything that Cyprus needed to survive to be sufficient was within its shores.

10:58 The blessed life is God gives to you everything that you need to be sufficient because your sufficiency is of God. Yeah. Thank you. There's another truth that this text is tailored to teach us. And that is the blessed life has a way of avoiding the inertia that there are no resources. you pick up the regression of this psalm. I know you did. You're a member of this church. I know you paid attention to the words.

11:45 Look what it says. It's blessed are the people, are the one. And look what it says. Who walks and then who stands. And then who sits. This is a descent into an antithetical posture that rejects God's blessing.

12:20 You spend your time walking with the wicked and standing with the sinners and sitting with the mockers. You know, the people we love to be around that you let make fun of the faith that you enjoy. There are times even now when people do not know me, when I'm intersecting, maybe traveling, and somebody sees my Bible and I'm reading it, and they ask me about church or religion or faith, and do you really do this? and they say you know because the people that go to church they are and they go through these descriptions about y'all and I always find a great joy even for some of you who may have tipped in you were dragged in by somebody you didn't want to be here because all these old hypocrites in here I tell them that's why I go because we're a bunch of people that know we got problems but we also know a God who solves problems.

13:55 Your difference is you got a problem and worse still, you don't know you got a problem. It's the teachings of 12 steps, isn't it? That you can't get help until you recognize you got a problem. in the second verse it tells us how we can get past this inertia that you can be situated somewhere, that you can delight yourself in the law of the Lord.

14:39 To meditate on it day and night. It's hard enough to focus on anything. And here Psalm 1 is telling us to meditate on God and his word day and night. all day To meditate is an interesting word.

15:07 It's the word to murmur or to mutter. when we're in the car and we'll ride in different places depending on who's driving that day, they have their field listening to me murmur and mutter throughout the ride,

15:31 reciting a piece of hymn or reciting some line that I'm trying to memorize learn muttering. Any dog lovers in here? None of you? I miss my dog. My dog was a Christian.

15:56 He knew how to meditate. His name was Elios. and Elios knew how to meditate, you give him a bone and he would murder and murmur over that bone.

16:27 That's what meditation is. Taking your time, chewing it up, savoring the juices of it, letting it fill your mouth. and it becoming a part of you and you becoming a part of it until it becomes part of your life and you're meditating on it.

16:54 You want to be blessed? Learn how to meditate on God's word day and night. In 1611, a Frenchman by the name of Brother Lawrence had served the military until the age of 55 when he entered into the Cisternian Monastery of Paris. and there he was given what you might call a dehumanizing job. He worked washing pots and pans at the Abbey and there he found and gave to us and you can still purchase this book now.

17:48 It's still in print. Practicing the presence of God that washing dishes He knew how they invoke God's presence Where he be You work at the school, the hospital With children out on the road In corporate life That doesn't mean that you don't have to meditate You can find ways Put a sticky note up somewhere And write a line of scripture in it And periodically set your phone and have it to ring at a certain time so that you can read that line over and over and over again until God's word get all inside of you. In his law do I meditate day and night.

18:46 Let me close now. Let me close. Why do you want to meditate on God's word like that? You don't know the answer? I got that line from my grandson who was speaking Spanish. And I said, what are you doing? He said, oh, that's Spanish. And then he asked me this question. He said, And I'm going to get you on the show. You don't know Spanish? I said, yeah. And then he followed up with this and said, how old are you? At that time, I said, I'm 63 years old, and you don't know Spanish.

19:50 I said, you're going to find yourself. How do you become a tree? Glad you asked. All you have to do is plant yourself by the rivers of water. That's the answer. The blessed life is a planted life. and you'll grow like a tree by the rivers of water. how do you grow Well, you meditate, you plant. but Pastor West I'm faced with so many I know I know that that's why it's written because you have so many challenges you can grow in hard places Another part of my life has been, I've traveled so much for all of my adult life, actually from I guess 18 years old, just 21, sometimes I would be gone 45, 47 weeks out of the year.

21:30 I've flown over a lot of territory like everything else that you do you make hobbies and you pick things up and when you fly over West Texas you don't have to guess where you are things from 38,000 feet on a clear day look barren and you start creating games after a while and you say you don't have to guess where the rivers are. All you have to do is look for a cluster of green and that's where the trees are planted in a hard place by the rivers of water.

22:16 You've seen these kind of trees before, haven't you? They grow singularly above the timber line separate from the 10,000 trees in the forest and they are situated in the crags of the mountain. They're not protected by the forest. And the merciless weather, the inclement climates, come along and test them. And when the sun comes out, those trees are twisted, bent, distorted, branches broken barely see leaves sprouting out from them standing out there isolated and alone defying all of the weather that is tried to counsel it and it stands in the sunlight not attractive not pretty but firm and fitted and said let the next storm come and the same way God is able to sustain an old tree, he's able to keep you in the hard places. Preach Ralph West.

23:28 Oh yes he can. And you don't have to ask for it. Life will come at you that way and yet God will sustain your life in the hard places. God can plant you also in a way that you can last. God can give you longevity of life in a way that you can outlast circumstances. the oldest tree that we know of, this Swedish spruce, they just call it a Christmas tree,

24:18 that they can determine today outliving the ice age is about 9,900 plus years old. It's up 29,000 plus feet. And it has lasted, lasted.

24:40 Well, the way it lasts is that it lasts about 600 years, and as soon as it looks like it's gone, immediately, immediately in its roots, there's a shoot that breaks out, that continues that life to keep on going because it does not suck life out of life. It gives life back to life. It is a continuation of that which is already begun and that is what God will do to you. He says, I give you life that you give life to somebody else that you keep on living. Y'all didn't get that? I'll just use an ocular demonstration. Y'all sitting here celebrating your anniversary.

25:44 The founders of your sorority, they are not here today and yet they are here because you are here. You see, your life is not designed for you to live it. Pack up and take it with you.

26:07 You haven't lived until you've given. Every tree we sit under, somebody else planted it. And we enjoy the fruits of it. And now it's not ours just to absorb the shadow and the shade of the tree. It is our opportunity. Where do we find space to plant trees for a generation that have not come to us yet? Preach Pastor West. Planted by the rivers of water also, you're planted to hold one another up. Trees hold each other up. the redwoods in the Muir Forest in West America and Northern California. You go in there and you see those huge redwoods shutting up hundreds of feet.

27:12 Then you look over and you see a redwood fall or fell to the ground. You gonna move that? No, no. How do these trees keep on growing? Y'all have had so many fires. Oh, we need the fires.

27:35 You do? Yeah, that's what the forest ranger told me. He said every hundred years, you know, we have a big fire here. And what it does, it cleans the ground floor. There are rotted vegetations and carcass and all the things that can grow up to attack these huge trees, small insects that could eat out the heart of these trees. but every 100 years, a big fire comes in and it just cleans the ground floor. I said, well, why is that tree leaning there? I said, well, that tree may be leaning, but this tree is holding it up. You can go on the net and look at some of these trees. I said, well, what is it doing? They said, well, it would have fell, but the other tree was there to catch it. All they needed was enough support to last the fire and new roots start growing.

28:36 I was asked to speak yesterday for the swearing in of our new congressman of the Congressional 18th District, Brother Sylvester Turner. And they asked me if I would speak of his religious life. Would I speak of his faith? Is that what they asked me to do? And for those of you that don't know him, he's at church this morning. He's at church on Bingo every Sunday. Don't have to go look for him. That's where he is.

29:15 And one of the things they asked me, he said, what about his faith? And Maya Shade, the journalist for ABC News, had asked me this question November 2015 when he was elected as mayor. What about his faith? and then I exchanged I said well one of the things that's consistent with him is church It doesn't matter where he is. And I told him that yesterday. I said when he had gone for his orientation and he was with as a freshman congressman, he said the only question he asked over the weekend is this, do we go to church?

29:59 You see, that doesn't register with almost the average Christian now because church attendance ain't high on our market since the Lord survived us. But for some of us, we know that church attenders ain't just marking something off the list. It's where somebody holds me up when I'm falling down. Church is the place where I'm encouraged when I'm discouraged. Church is the place where God empowers me. Church is the place where my sins are forgiven. Church is when I have an image of what the kingdom of God is supposed to look like. I'm done now. But let me tell you one last thing. And that is a tree planted by this water. can make you a beautiful instrument.

30:58 The Stradivarius violin cost millions of dollars. Nobody knows why. This little ignorant Italian Antonio Stradivarius would take people out into the wood country and he had a very sophisticated apparatus that he used to determine the value of what piece of wood should be cut to shape a violin that gets his name Stradivarius. you can get one on sale for a few million dollars and this is it this is how he determined whether we're going to use it He thumped the wood.

32:01 Y'all missed all that setup. It was something in his hearing that determined whether or not the wood. And to this day, people who play it say, we don't know. The purest sound comes from that piece of wood. The purest sound, you would think they would say, from the blade or the string. They say the wood. some of y'all beat up broke up broke down and yet God keep on making beautiful instruments out of you You surprise yourself. You don't know how God does it, why God does it, and yet God takes you and people don't understand it.

32:58 When you serve him, all you know is, is God can turn broken cut things into beautiful instruments. I wish I had a witness this morning. I'm done. I got two minutes left. It's hard preaching to y'all. No, no, no, I mean this. It is. I mean it's physically hard.

33:28 Inspiring people who can't believe that God could use somebody like you. It's the hardest thing in the world. Some of you just can't put your arms around. God could love me. when you leave you're gonna tell your friend your wife husband say I hear him up there doing all that but he'll know what I've been to I don't want to know what you've been but you ain't been through what my Lord went through on Calvary to get you I'm gonna sit down now.

34:22 And so I close the way I began. Life is just filled with a series of choices. You have to make a choice with what you're gonna do with your life. It ain't based on how young you are, how old you are. It's just making a choice of what you're going to do with your life. Do you want a blessed life or the opposite thereof? I know I didn't read the second half. I don't have to. The way to interpret the second half when it says not so for the wicked is to compare in parallel what the wicked looks like to that which is just a right and blessed.

35:02 Trees growing by the rivers of water and your leaves never falter. And those who try to live life without God, their life is like chow blown in the wind. They make money and ain't happy. Living in almost mansions and can't sleep. Got all kinds of access and need all kind of drugs to rest at night. Everybody knows your name and yet nobody knows who you are. And then you get envious of somebody that doesn't have half or fourth of what you have because they have planted their life by the living waters. Yeah.

35:50 Bless life. Bless life. blessed life. Let me close now. Just give me two, three minutes because I'm trying to help somebody. Let me close the way I am. So that was the first thing. It just, it just, it's a choice. And when Jesus tells this Psalm 1 in his sermon on the Mount chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Matthew, he closes with a choice. He says there are two ways to hear Pastor Wes's sermon this day. You do it the same way that the builders did it. And that is one man built his house on a rock. Another built his house on the sand. And I'm here to tell you, you can build your life any way you want to.

36:47 You can select whatever kind of material you want. You can do that. But there's just one thing that you don't get a chance to make a decision on. And that's the weather. Storms will come, winds will blow Floods will rise, rain will fall You can build your house any way you want But if you build it on sand Down the river it goes But if you build it on a rock Your life will stand I challenge you this morning Build your life on a rock Plant your tree by the rivers of water And you know it means something God loved these trees He started creation with a tree in the midst of the garden And then in Revelation he ends it with a tree that's good for the healing of the nation But in the last tree and the first tree He held them together with the central tree that's in Calvary on a hill called Calvary.

37:57 And on that tree is where God reconciles us to be unto himself. Church, plant your life. Don't sit up in a room like this hearing this kind of preaching every week and your leaves with them.

38:20 Plant your life in a way you say, I prosper. I prosper and people say you prosper you looking for a job say that right I prosper because my prosperity ain't connected to my materiality hey let me tell you here you go there are those of you here now in between some tough times hard places and then when life really gets good when you don't even know how to explain it and God been keeping you, feeding you. In fact, in the middle of inflation, you don't even know how you got the money to pay for them expensive eggs and milk now. And all you can say is God took what I had, blessed it and made it fit into what I needed. I could holler right there.

39:15 And I mean that because of what the Lord has done. So don't let anybody have to push you and prod you. Just think of how good God has been to you. And every strength you have, just however you do it. Raise your voice, lift your hands, throw back your head, and not be worried about who's looking at you. And just say, Lord, thank you for a blessed life. Yeah. I'm going to let that sink in. Lord, thank you for a blessed life.

39:59 For a blessed life. For a blessed life. Lord, help people in this church understand that when you say blessed in your word, it's a little different from what the world thinks. Okay, we do thank you, Lord, for houses, car, clothes. We thank you for all of that. But we don't want that to be our ultimate aim. This morning, there ain't house and car and clothes some of us need. Some of us need health and strength and peace. And we can't buy that across the counter. So we ask you today, Lord, grant us. We planted our lives next to the living water.

40:55 Now, Lord, whatsoever we do, let it prosper now in the name of Jesus. There are those who are here on this Sunday without debate, discussion, dialogue. You've spoken to them. help them now knowing that you've spoken to them just decide to say i accept what god got for me and lord we're gonna rejoice when they walk down this aisle thanking you that they made the choice of a blessed life in jesus name amen give god praise today give god praise here we go church the door to church is open and i want you to get up from that seat wherever you are and come down this aisle today and you let today be your day that you says i'm gonna accept the blessed life that god has