Psalm 1: The Righteous and the Wicked

SPEAKER_00: Well, welcome back. How many of you remember the book? Um it was uh published in 2000 called The Prayer of Jabez. Anybody remember that book? It was like this mega bestseller. Well, I did this search on Amazon.com to see what happened to it, and it's still selling strong, and not only is the original book still like this big bestseller, now there's all these sequels. You can buy the Prayer of Jabez Bible study, the prayer of Jabez Journal, the Prayer of Jabez for Teens, the Prayer of Jabez Devotional Guide, the Prayer of Jabez for Little Ones, the Prayer of Jabez for Women, which is not to be confused with the Prayer of Jabez for Women workout video. Now think about that. A prayer workout video. I can't even imagine what that is. I mean, are we is it a workout on how you pray, or is it an exercise thing that you pray just to get you through? Or what I mean, what I don't know. Um then there's the prayer of Jabez music CD and associate assorted things like art poster print, garden stepping stone, charm coffee mug, t-shirt, sweatshirt, bible cover, and teaching. So if you're not familiar with it, the original Prayer of Jabez book was a 92-page sermon based on Chronicles 410, which is I'm gonna read you the verse. All it says is, and Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, Oh, that you would bless me indeed and enlarge my territory, that your hand would be with me, and that you would keep me from evil that I might that I may not cause pain. So God granted him what he requested. That's the whole verse, that's the sum total of what we know about Jabez. From that verse, the author um draws this conclusion that if you pray this prayer every day, that God will bless you, will enlarge your territory. And I'm going to quote from this was an article called Say a Little Prayer for Me. It was written back when the book first came out. He summarizes it better than I do. So this is uh Damon Linkers, the author of this. He says, the surprising popularity of Mr. Wilkinson's book arises not so much from his commentary on this rather unremarkable prayer as from the lesson he draws from the line that immediately follows it in the Bible. There it is written that as a result of Jabez's prayer, God granted him what he requested. Mr. Wilkinson teaches his readers that if they recite the five-line prayer once a day, God will ensure that they experience prosperity just as Jabez did millennia ago. With Mr. Wilkinson's and through him God's help, you too can, quote, enlarge your territory. The prayer of Jabez is thus equal parts homily and self-help. Mr. Wilkinson encourages encourages us to, quote, ask for more and more again from our Lord. The important thing in life is, quote, knowing who you want to be and asking for it. Nothing is too much to ask for and nothing is too mundane, for no matter what you request, God will happily credit your account. So, is that what the Bible teaches about prayer? Does the Bible teach that there is a certain kind of prayer I can pray or a way to pray or particular language I can use that will guarantee that God will happily credit my account? Now, I don't no matter which way you answered that, you can answer for yourself. If you said yes or no, how do you know? So no matter which way you answer it, how do you know? I mean, Bruce Wilkinson's the author of that, and he's a very respected Bible teacher, and he's written some books on how to be an effective teacher that I personally have found enormously helpful. I have I have no reason to believe that he is not a sincere, Bible-believing Christian. So I want to be clear on that. I am not questioning his faith or his intentions or the sincerity of his belief or whether or not he's a Christian. I'm not questioning that at all. I what I'm asking is, is he right about this verse in the Bible? Is he right about the prayer of Jabez? Is there a prayer that I can pray that guarantees God will answer my request? And if and how would I begin to answer that question? So the further question I'm asking is kind of, okay, here's a respected pastor and theologian with whom I disagree, and I'll tell you I do disagree with his interpretation of that. So what do I do? Or what do I do if I find myself in a group disagreement with any other believer, someone in my small group or someone at the church? Obviously, I don't want to get into a spitting match over, you know, who's right and who's wrong. Instead, we want to go back to scripture and humbly and thoughtfully and carefully study them. Always, always, always keeping in mind that I am just as likely to be the one who's wrong as the next person. So if you want to answer a question about prayer, the best place to go is the Psalms, and that's where we're going to be studying. Now, just since I teased you with this, let me just give you a quick I'm not spend too much time on this. But this is all we know about Jabez. So why do I disagree with him? Just from Bible study itself, if I read this, how would I answer the question, how rich was Jabez before he prayed, and how rich was he after? What we don't know. The Bible doesn't say, it says God granted him what he requested. It doesn't say how. Could he not have been like Job and maybe God took every last scrap of material possession away from him and then he became such a person of faith that he never caused evil or pain again? And that God could have answered it that way. We d we just don't know. So to draw the conclusion from this that God will answer in a certain way, I think is is just not good Bible study. But the question I'm asking is if if we disagree or we have this question, how do we know? How do we find out? And the best place to learn about prayer is the Psalms, and I am really excited about this study. So we're going to spend the next um, I don't know how many weeks in the Psalms, and they are the prayer book and the hymn book of the Bible. They are meant to teach us how to pray and how to praise. And given that, Psalms ought to be a staple of the Christian diet. Just to give you an idea how important Psalms have been to the church, did you know that in older times, before someone could enter the ministry, so before a pastor could become a pastor, he had to memorize all 150 Psalms. That was a requirement. And considering Psalms as the longest book in the Bible, that was a pretty big accomplishment. Um also the book that Jesus quotes most often is the Psalms. That I find that rather intriguing. And you probably know, especially those of you who were here a couple years ago when we did Romans, you know that Martin Luther developed his theology uh through studying the book of Romans, but do you know what led him to Romans? The Psalms. He was studying in the Psalms, and he began to see this theology of so I can speak, salvation by grace through faith. And he kept it that raised all these questions for him of where I'm seeing this in the Psalms, where can I go to more fully understand it? And that led him to the book of Romans, and that led him to, of course, start uh nail the thesis to the door and start the Reformation. So, included, you all should have a handout. If you didn't pick up one of the packets in the back, you're gonna need it because I'm gonna there are pages in there. So uh those of you who came in late, they're on the back table. In your packet, there's a page that looks like this. It says uh reading the Psalms in a month. I don't know exactly what page it's on. This will change your life. This is a method for reading through the book of the Psalms in a month, and I would encourage you to do that. David Turner gave this to us, the those of us who are on the teaching team, and he challenged us to do this, and I thought, okay, I'll try. And I was kind of skeptical because I thought, you know, what what am I really going to learn from this? And the first time I did it, I was amazed at the breadth and depth of the what's covered in the Psalms. Because what I learned is I was tended to go back to the same like ten Psalms. And whenever I went to the Psalms, I went to those particular ones, and that was kind of all I had learned about. And when I was took it upon myself to read through all of them, I found they cover a lot of stuff. There's a lot more in the Psalms than I ever realized was there, and I didn't know what I was missing. So I would encourage you to do this. It's only January 3rd, so you can just start with day three and just keep going through uh through the month. It's it doesn't take long and it is really enlightening. You can use it as kind of a morning and evening prayer. It's not required. None of your your small group leaders aren't gonna, you know, ask if you've done it, um, or memorize them or whatever, but uh I encourage you, it's worthwhile. So now I just made this bold claim that reading the Psalms can change your prayer life. How? How how do I know that? What can I do for them? So I'm gonna give you four things the Psalms can do. The first is one purpose of the Psalms is to help us to relate to God honestly. I don't know about you, but we tend to hide from God sometimes. Or when we go to God, we adopt uh a holy vocabulary when we approach Him. And Psalms, by contrast, are honest. Um we're kind of good at faking it. You know, we we look good on the outside, we Christians, when we're emotional wrecks on the inside, and I'll bet at least, well, probably everybody in the room at some point in the last month has come to church in a state of emotional upheaval. And one of your friends said, How are you? and you said, I'm fine, right? I mean, we're good at that. I'm fine, you know, I'm frustrated, insecure, neurotic, and exhausted. That's fine, if by any. So to a certain extent, that's normal because you know, when you're passing someone in the hallway, that's probably not the time to bear your soul. But there's a danger in keeping that posture on, especially before God. You want to make sure that you have friends in your life with whom you can be honest and particularly before God. You don't want to get into the habit of faking it, of kind of subtly approaching God with uh this kind of attempt to polish up your act and perform in front of God to gain his favor. And the Psalms can teach us how to do how not to do that, how to be honest. Because in the Psalms, you'll find people going to God when they're angry, when they're desperate, when they're lonely, uh confused, joyful. You'll find this whole range of emotions. And that I think that's one of the things I found I was missing. I tend to go to the lament psalms. But there's a lot more out there. Um so the Psalms can teach us how to be honest for before God. How do we approach Him when we're angry? And if as we study some of these Psalms, you'll be amazed. Some of them, you read through them and you think, that's blasphemous. How can the Psalmist make that claim? How can he ask that question of God? And it raises the question of why is that in the Bible? Because that's an act of faith. At least you're going to God to say, I don't get it, I'm confused, I don't understand, as opposed to turning away from God and trying to do it on your own. So the Psalms can teach you how to go to God when you're angry or when you're lonely or when you're depressed or when you're confused or when you think he's uh out of control. And they help us relate to him honestly. The second purpose of the Psalms is to make us a participant in the story. The language of the Psalms is a you and I kind of language. It's first person and second person, which is unlike any other book of the Bible. And I think what that does is it draws us into the story and makes us a participant. So it takes this God who's a large, theological, you know, omnipotent kind of God and draws him down into a relationship where you're talking to him, you and I, you did this, I I am this and and this, this back and forth. So going to the Psalms can draw us into that situation of how did God deal with other people? And that's often how he relates to people of faith. And I found as I was beginning to study the Psalms, I that my prayers were very self-referential. I was praying with I, but there was a language of I want, I need, uh, I'm confused, I want you to fix this, I'm in a mess, can you get me out of it? Um, you know, and and it was very much preying on my agenda. And what I found in the Psalms is this language of you and I, but it's pre it's praying on God's agenda, not my agenda. So it can teach us how to take where whatever situation we are and approach God based on what He values and what His agenda is instead of our own. So Psalms help us to be honest before God, they make us participants in the story, and another way they can help us is they give us a guide to worship because they were meant to be also the hymn book of the Bible. And I I don't know about you, but worship is a very slippery concept for me. It you know, I I tend to think, oh, it must just be singing or it must be a certain emotion, and and I tend to fall into the trap of thinking I can only worship when I feel a certain way, and then I then you're stuck. How do you worship when your emotions are dry, or how do you emotion worship when you're afraid, or when you're confused, or when you're angry? And the Psalms can teach us that because they are ways to worship God in a wide range of emotions, and we can learn that. So as we pray through the Psalms and read through them and study them, you want to meditate on them, visualize them, and that invokes a response in us, which is essentially, I think, what worship is a response to what God has done for us. And because the Psalms cover this wide range of moods and circumstances and emotions, I think it can teach us how to worship in a in a wider uh way. So, in some ways, we can use the psalms to learn to approach God like a child learns to speak. You know, we were just transferring some uh VCR tapes to DVD of when our children were little, and and you probably are in the stage where you read the book, you know, and you say apple, and your child repeats after you and you keep repeating and mimicking. Well, that's one way the Psalms can function for us. We we read them and repeat them, and we learn the language of approaching God, a vocabulary for approaching God in all kinds of moods and emotions, and the theology behind it. So Psalms can um help us be honest before God, draw us into the story, give us a guide to worship, and finally, I think they can teach us the importance of reflection and meditation, because they're written in poetry. And poetry is a different kind of creature. It's not the kind of thing you can go through and logically analyze. It's something that is meant to speak to you intuitively, to move your emotions, to move your long to your feelings, and to take you from A to Z, but not through a logical argument, through a poetic expression. So I think you're gonna find as we go through this study that psalms require some calendar time, some thoughtful time. Not just, you know, it's not you will get more out of it if you do a little bit each day rather than if you do it all Tuesday night at ten. So I'd encourage you to take whatever psalm you're studying and put it somewhere where you see it, like on your bathroom mirror or on the sink where you do dishes or on the refrigerator, or something where you run into it in your daily life, because that kind of running into it and thinking about it and giving yourself time to uh really kind of get immersed in it will serve you in the long run. So Psalms invite us to uh stop and think. Now, I've said all that, and you're the next question, the next thing I'm gonna tell you is how do you interpret them? And that sounds kind of contradictory, because I've just told you they're poetic and they're reflective and they're intuitive and you ought to meditate them, and now I'm gonna say, get out the reference books and study them. And isn't that kind of a contradiction? It's kind of like, you know, butterfly collecting. When you catch a butterfly, the first thing you do is you stick a pen in it, you know, and you kind of kill it. You know, doesn't that defeat the purpose of studying it, you know? So um Psalms are kind of like that. If you have to study them, have you defeated the purpose? And to answer that, it's similar to how do you study English poetry? I mean, is there some value in studying? It's the same kind of creature. So if I was going to study a Shakespearean sonnet, I would need to know something about iambic spentameter and the rhyming schemes and the line length and kind of the format that a a Shakespearean sonnet takes, which is very different than, say, a haiku or a limerick. And understanding the format and the genre and the limitations and the expectations of that format can help me understand it better. So if you really want to enjoy a poem, you need to understand it. And the more you understand it, the deeper your understanding, the more you're going to get out of it. Um it's kind of like, and that's why we studied the Psalms. It's kind of like have you ever watched a movie that you've read the book that it's based on, and you understand the movie so much better for having read the book? That's the same idea. My daughter and I watched this uh book, uh the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring. I don't know if any of you have seen it, it's a pretty good movie. It's based on a Vermeer painting and it's a fictionalized account of how did this girl come to be the girl in the painting. And in the book, the or in the movie, there's this scene where she walks into the market and there's this star, multi-pointed star like a compass in the market square, and she stops and she waits and then she takes a path. Well, in the movie that's kind of ooh, kind of visually interesting. But if you read the book, you know that that star was placed in the center of the city and the points pointed to the different sections, and she had to go to the Catholic section, and she was Protestant, and she'd never been there before. She'd never followed that point of the star. So it's kind of this, ooh, she didn't know if she could do it. Well, having read the book, we knew that. You have no clue if all you did was watch the movie. Because the book has all the subtext and the subplots and the motives that the characters are thinking that you can only suggest in movie. So that's one reason to study the Psalms. You get that deeper subtext, you get the deeper understanding, and the deeper your understanding of the story behind it, the better you'll you'll like it. Okay, so what we're gonna do for the rest of the time is I'm gonna give you a quick primer on Hebrew poetry. It really is not that bad. And um then we're gonna look at Psalm 1 as an example. So the Psalms are broken into five books. Um scholars think the five books correspond to the first five books of the Bible. So Genesis, Leviticus, Exodus, or Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, that the themes of those five first five books of the Bible correspond to the themes of the Psalms. I don't know if that's true, but it's kind of interesting. Um other thing you need to know is uh many of the Psalms say they're a psalm of David, and that may or may not mean he's the author, certainly. For most of them, he is the author, but sometimes they were psalms written for him by someone else. So they say a psalm of David, but it was a psalm written for him, or a psalm written in his style. However, most of them are actually written by him. There are two psalms by Moses, and Solomon has some, but by far David is the most common author. All right. In your handout, you should see a page that looks like this: types of psalms and classifying the psalms. This is the first thing you need to know to study them. It's by Dennis Brattram. This is the most common way to categorize the Psalms, and what you'll find is within the cata the genre of Psalms, there are there are types, and primarily there are three types: lament, thanksgiving, and hymn, also called worshipful songs, worship psalms. And then within those three broader categories, there are subcategories. So you can see on your handout there's community laments, individual laments, penitential laments, and so on. Um, and then there's some specialized types, wisdom psalms and Torah Psalms. And then he has written, has categorized them for you here. Now, why is it important to know the types? You all probably many of you probably watch Thessal Street. You know, three of these things belong together, three of these things are kind of the same. Well, you know, one doesn't belong. Types of Psalms are like that. They're they're things that belong together, and they have the same kind of elements in them. So lament psalms typically have a complaint, a petition, and an affirmation of trust. And that's on this page in your handout. You don't have to write all that down. The second page of that type of psalm. Um Thanksgiving Psalms usually have a plea and then some kind of recitation of how God intervened or delivered them. Hymnic psalms usually have a call to praise and a reason to praise. And what he has done is categorize the basic elements that you would find in that type of a psalm. And that's helpful when you're studying them, because if you come to a verse and you say, I have no idea what he it means, you can come back to this and say, okay, I'm looking at a Thanksgiving psalm. Could this be a plea for God's deliverance, or could this be a cry for help of some kind, or does this recite the original problem? Now, you don't want to get bogged down in this because these types are helpful, but they're not hard and fast. Every lament psalm will not have every one of these elements, and it will not necessarily have them in this order. It's kind of like um a wedding. If you think about weddings or a genre, if you go to enough weddings, you can you know that they have the same patterns, and you kind of know what to expect. There's going to be a processional of some point, there's going to be an exchanging of vows, there's going to be uh an address by the pastor, uh probably a song or two. And yet within the wedding genre, there's lots of very variations. You know, are they going to do the unity candle? Well they might or they might not. Are they going to celebrate communion? Well they might or they might not. And they might come in different orders. So the types of Psalms are like that. They contain these elements but they may not contain all of them in the same order or in the same flavor. So you can just read through that as we begin our study to kind of and then figure out what type we're looking at and what you might find in it. And that's helpful for looking at what you're trying to understand it. And sometimes they break the type. They will go through and then put in something way out of the ordinary and that's often a ooh call attention to this. This is important. So you want to watch when they break the patterns. Okay. Then also in your handout you'll just see a page on Hebrew poetry. That's the next thing we're going to look at. It says Hebrew poetry and wisdom litter and it literature is two pages. Hebrew poetry does have meter and rhyme but not in English. It does in the original language to some extent so but that gets lost when we translate into English because we may take five you know words to say one Hebrew word or vice versa. But what the main thing you need to know about Hebrew poetry is that they rhyme ideas. The words themselves don't sound alike but the ideas are rhymed if you will. And that's what this handout explains. The um they call it parallelisms so you take two um pieces of a verse and they are rhymed in some way and they call those verses a stick S-T-I-C-H. So if you're reading through any reference books and they talk about a stick all they mean is the phrase of a verse like the one unit. You know how in your in your most Bibles they have them on each individual line. They try to break the sticks based on those lines. So you need to know that term because you'll run into it. It will also be called a hemistick don't ask me why or a colon and sometimes a verse number. In pairs you might see it as a die stick in threes you might see it referred to as a tri stick and so on. So I just summarize that so if you're working through any of the reference books and you see this vocabulary, you'll know what they're talking about. So basically what they're doing in Hebrew poetry is they're taking two lines and putting them side by side to make a point. And you can basically put two lines together in any combination you can imagine. So the most common kind is what we call synonymous and that is the first the second line repeats the idea of the first line. So I've given you an example there in Psalm 717 his villainy descends upon his head and upon his violence descends. So the two one the second line the second stick repeats the idea of the first stick. Antithetic they contrast each other we're going to look at this this is from Psalm 1. Yahweh knows the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked shall perish. They've got an A and a not A. And emblematic we're also going to see today that's basically they use a simile or they use a metaphor or a picture as a deer pants for the water so my soul pants for thee. They're using this emblem or this metaphor of a deer to make the point about the psalmist. Progressive they build and you'll find as we go through that you'll see this little pattern sometimes where they do X, X plus 1, X plus 1, X plus 1. So it's like I have two things, I have three things, I have four things, I have five things to say about the Lord. Usually the last one in the series is the most important. Hebrew poetry tends to build up to that and say, to emphasize the last one. So you'll see a progression. And this is not by any means a complete list. There are if you want to get a better understanding of this the how to read the Bible for all it's worth has a great chapter on Hebrew poetry you can just read or there's lots of of stuff on the internet as well. But this is just to get your feet wet to make you think when you read through a psalm how are the two pieces of a verse related? Are they just repeating? Are they progressing? Are they contrasting? You want to think about what ideas are being related. On the second page of that handout one more thing I want to point out I'm not going to read it all to you because you can read it later watch the one number six there watch for patterns in the psalm as a whole you will often be able to go through the verses and see that ideas are repeating. So there's like an A B C A B C A B C D kind of pattern or it might be A B C C B A or it might be A B A B C D C D that kind of thing. And it's not so much the language as the idea that's being repeated or amplified. And there are as many patterns as you can imagine in the Psalms. But that's another helpful way if you're stuck and you're saying I don't see how this verse relates I don't see why this is here. Go back and see if you can find a pattern and then maybe by the pattern it should be C. Well that gives you an idea of how to to figure out what he's saying. Now that you probably looked at that and thought oh that's overwhelming but it's not really let's look at someone which you should have in your handout and since we're not that many today and we're going to do this interactively what I want you to do is try to apply that this is the first Psalm it's a wisdom psalm and let me just read through it to get it on the tape here. So Psalm blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked nor stands in the way of sinners nor sits in the seat of scoffers but his delight is in the law of the Lord and on the 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 in all that he does he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. 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 shall perish okay think about everything we just talked about what do you see in the Psalm there's no wrong answer here. Uh huh? Very good right so the first half is all about the righteous and the second half is all about the wicked so you've got verses one through three talk about the righteous verses four through six talk about the wicked. Good so we're contrasting. So you could say that's A and then B B B sort of that might be a pattern. And what else do you see? Uh-huh is an uh emblematic thing like a tree yes very good in verse three he is like a tree planted by streams of water. So he's using an emblem or a visual image of a tree and then notice it's contrasted with ver verse four but the wicked are like chaff. So you have this image of here's a solid tree standing firmly planted by a stream versus chaff being driven and blown about the by the wind. So think like dandelion seeds when you blow them and they scatter everywhere. So what's he saying about the righteous versus the wicked that would be the next question to ask you got this sturdy solid secure foundation versus just driven wherever the wind goes. So two contrasting emblems there. Good. What else do you see? In other words this is why it said yes yes very good verse six is in many ways a summary of the psalm the whole for the Lord knows the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked will perish. So it's a summary statement. What about verse one? What kind of verse would that be? 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. Progression Yeah progression. So you've got he's walking he's standing he's sitting so when you walk by someone that doesn't take too long then you stand and you start listening and now you're sitting you've kind of made your way with them. So there's kind of a progression there. Which should lead you to ask well is there a progression of wicked sinners and scoffers? In English it doesn't sound like it but you'd have to go to the Hebrew and I can tell you there is the word for wicked is more I think similar to our word for foolish. So it sounds like it's the strongest word in English but it's not in the Hebrew. So you're walking in the counsel of the foolish and then sinners are those who kind of deliberately know what they're doing versus scoffers who've rejected the whole part of God's law. So there is a progression of wicked sinners and scoffers being each one a harsher word. So he's amplifying that point. So you kind of get blessed is the man who does not how you think how you behave and then accepting this kind of behavior and then verse two but what does he do instead delight in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night so you've got here's also one more thing look at verse three planted by streams of water that yield its fruit in season its leaf does not wither in all that he does he prospers. Notice the idea repeating there is permanence and productivity. So he's planted by streams of water that's kind of permanent and long lasting yields its fruit in seasons that's the it's being productive if leaf does not wither there's the permanence again it stays. In all that he does he prospers there's the productivity or prosperity so you've got a little A B A B kind of rhyming pattern within the verse I heard one commentator then said in in four through six you've got this this image of in verse four the wicked are driven in verse five they're doomed in verse six they're damned and he said there's also a progression there. So you have this contrast of here's the righteous who's permanent and productive versus the wicked who were driven, doomed and damned see how the the kind of the rhyming schemes helps you put it together? So we kind of got the basic idea of the psalm in that quick reading we really I think we pretty much got the main point. Now you'd want to start thinking digging a little deeper how do we accept the ways of the world? What does it mean to walk in the in the council of the wicked? You know maybe I read too many beauty magazines or something or financial books or or self-help books or something and I let that worldly thinking start influencing me. You know that that's where you want to start going deeper and applying it to yourself and thinking about what it would look like in your real life. There's actually a lot more we could do on this verse. Oh let me say one more thing. One person I saw three or four different ways of outlining the psalm but one I like the best was that it's an A1 A2 A3 pattern than B3 B2 B1. So A1 is the righteous is how blessed they are A2 is what they do A3 is what they're like. Then you have B3 here's what the wicked are like B2 here's what they do and B1 they are not blessed. So it's this A1 A2 A3 B3 B2 B1 kind of thing. See that kind of pattern? It's hard to see if I had an overhead I could find it. So the the right so the first verse they're blessed because and then what they do they delight in meditate in the law and they're like this tree. So that are the results of that blessing. So you've got they're blessed, why they're blessed and the results of the blessing and then the wicked are not are um what they do their results are they're driven in verse four what they do they will not stand as opposed to the the righteous and then they are damned. They're not blessed. So it's a contrast so six contrasts one two contrasts five and three and four contrast each other. That kind of idea so if I was gonna if I was planning to teach this or planning to study it further the I think the thing I'd go from here is zero in on verses one and two. What does it mean what does it look like for a righteous man to not do those things and to and to do what's in verse two? And just a a thought to leave you with um how do you delight in the law of the Lord and meditated on it day and night when um when people are trained to spot counterfeit money they don't look at counterfeits they look at the real thing and they spend you've probably heard this before they spend days studying real money and dollar bills and $10 bills and so on and they become so intimately familiar with it that when they see a counterfeit they can go, that's counterfeit and it's almost intuitive because they are so familiar with the real thing. When I was thinking about this Psalm I thought that's what he's advocating. This delight in the law of the Lord meditated on it day and night immerse yourself so much in the law of God that when you see the counsel of the wicked or the contrary or the ways that are not right you recognize it immediately. And that I think is what I hope we come through our study of the Psalms as we go through each of these different kinds of Psalms we learn more and more about the ways to approach God in whatever circumstances and how to worship Him. So let me stop there and give you a couple minutes for questions. Let me just pray to close us. Father thank you that you're a God who loves us and that we can approach you in all kinds of moods and emotions and that you invite us to approach you honestly when we're confused, when we're angry when we're lost when we're joyful when we're grateful or whatever state we're in that we can come to you and know that you're a loving Father who will deal with usly and righteously because of the blood of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen