The second general session began half an hour after the first seminar session.

As the session began we were called to worship from Psalm 34:1-3, led by an assistant minister of music from GCC. We sang together, “Come, Christians Join to Sing” and “And Can It Be?” After that, classical guitarist and grace Church member Christopher Parkening played a beautiful piece on his guitar for us. Then John MacArthur stepped up and thanked Christopher, and then introduced the speaker for this session.

The keynote speaker for this session will be Tom Pennington, senior pastor of Countryside Bible Church in the Dallas Area. Tom has been associated with The Master’s Seminary and Grace Church for a number of years. John M. and Tom have been close friends for 16 years, including 4 years as a senior associate pastor alongside MacArthur. Tom and his wife Sheila have three daughters.

(As before, the remainder of this post is written from the perspective of the speaker)

As I thought about my responsibility this afternoon, I was reminded of a famous incident from the life of Spurgeon. In his pastor’s college, Spurgeon would often pick a passage on the spot and pick a student. One day he picked a student to preach from Luke 19 to preach on Zacchaeus. The man stood up and preached, “Zacchaeus was a little man, and so am I. Zacchaeus was up a tree and so am I. Zacchaeus came down, and so will I!” As we begin this conference, we need to ask, “Why are we here?” Why are you here? Preaching, food, fellowship, books, it doesn’t get any better!

There are specific reasons for all of us, whether encouragement, refocus, life & ministry. While the specifics may vary, at its root, there is one basic common reason: we all want to have an effective successful ministry. One defined by spiritual life & vitality. By stability and fruitfulness. And that’s what we want for our individual lives as well. Where can we find the roadmap for this? In one sense, Scripture in general. But there’s a specific passage I want to highlight today: Psalm 1.

The purpose of the book of Psalms is to provide a divinely inspired record of man expressing himself to God. Spurgeon said, “Psalm 1 is the text from which the rest of the Psalms is a sermon.” It is one of the wisdom Psalms. It is intended to guide us in the path of divine wisdom. According to Thomas Watson, Psalm 1 discovers the quicksand on which the wicked sink to perdition, and the saints tread to glory. The theme of this Psalm is that there are only two paths in life: the way of the righteous (vv. 1-3), the way of the wicked (vv. 4-5), and verse 6 gives us the destination of those two paths.

But I want to look especially at the spiritual prosperity that comes with the way of the righteous. “How blessed is the man.” This surprises us because it’s not the usual Hebrew word for “blessed.” The usual word is barach and speaks of God’s intervention in a life and grants blessing. The second word is eshare, and it is never used to refer to God, and never something God does. God never uses this word. It is a strictly human conclusion about another person or circumstance. The picture behind this word is another person inspecting the life of the righteous and coming to a conclusion. it could be translation, “O to be envied” or “How completely to be envied” is this man. The Septuagint uses the same word here as the New Testament in the beatitudes. There is an objective state of well being that is accompanied by subjective feelings of satisfaction, joy and delight. Bruce Waltke writes that this word refers to people who experience life as the Creator intended.

Consider v. 3. “… in whatever he does, he prospers.” The point of the analogy is that the righteous man has life, bears fruit. This man has spiritual life & health & vitality; unlike the wicked who are pictured as chaff which has no biological life at all. The righteous man is also carefully cared for. The Hebrew word for planted is literally “transplanted” and the word “stream” often refers to irrigation canals. So this man has been carefully cared for by someone, in a dry and arid climate. This is a picture of sovereign grace. This requires the faithful care of a gardener who tends it. God has brought life into something that didn’t have life, transplanting this man where he will grow strong & spiritually health. Contrast with chaff which can be driven by the wind.

This is also a life of significance: “it yields its fruit in its season.” When a tree bears fruit it benefits others, fulfilling the reason for its existence (unlike good-for-nothing chaff). He goes on to say the enviable life has endurance: “its leaf does not wither.” Even when drought comes, this life survives. Compare again with chaff: what isn’t driven away by wind is gathered and burned. The righteous is enviable because of his stability, significance, endurance. Notice in v. 3 he returns the picture of the tree, and simply concludes with his point: this man enjoys a remarkable state of well-being accompanied by joy & satisfaction. He has life, cared for by God, fulfilling his purpose, giving blessing to those around him. Whatever the circumstances, his soul prospers and thrives.

That is what every one of us wants as men and ministers, as people and pastors. This is picture of a life we all crave and desire. But here’s the tragedy: we can pursue those worthy ends in the wrong way, and often do. Every couple of years, a new solution appears in the Christian marketplace, promising to fulfill these promises. The same temptations come to us as pastors, pursuing success in the church. The list is nearly endless: maybe we just need to refine our purpose, add some staging & props to create interest, maybe take another survey and reframe our ministry, maybe we just need to embrace some medieval practices and light some candles, etc. These are well-intentioned (but wrong).

Do you want to enjoy the kind of spiritual prosperity in life & ministry that Psalm 1 describes. I know you do, that’s why you’re here. The path to that kind of life is found right here in Psalm 1. There are only two paths: that of the righteous and that of the wicked. The way of the righteous is the way of the Bible and the way of the wicked is everything else. How do we get on the path that produces such an enviable life?

The psalmist identifies two foundational commitments if you want the kind of life that is eshare.

The first is to abandon every human way. Look at v.1, the three expressions of sinfulness and wickedness described. It possible describes a progression of sin. But it’s probably no the primary point. The three verbs used in v.1 are the three postures of someone who is awake. if you’re not asleep, you’re walking, standing or sitting. The point is that in the whole of our waking lives, if we want to be the righteous man, the righteous man has nothing to do with these things. The Hebrew grammar suggests the same, the tense of the verbs pointing to the habit of one’s life. So what does he abandon?

He does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. The word counsel refers to the giving of advice in making decisions. Here the psalmist means the advice of those who regularly break God’s law. The righteous doesn’t walk, as a habit of law, in the counsel who walk in disregard of God’s law. For example, if you’re younger than 40, you probably wear your hear messy (cheap shot at Sovereign Grace in which you like it bald!). If you’re 40-60, you hold your hear in place. And greater than 60, you’re just glad you have hair. Why do we make those choices? Truthfully it’s because we’re following the culture/people around us. Which is fine because the Bible doesn’t dictate hair styles. The problem becomes when we follow the advice of the culture in how we run our lives and our ministries. How are we tempted? To adopt the philosophies of our time. For example, we live in a world where naturalism reigns, which says macroevolution is fact. So we attempt to sync our understanding of Genesis with evolution. Or humanism, which moves us to man-centered ministries. Postmodernism says the reader gives the text its meaning, so we shape the text to mean whatever we want. So we can be tempted to embrace the counsel of wicked in the philosophies of our day.

We can also embrace the methodologies of our day. Some examples include measuring by crowd size. Trying to entertain. Adopting secular psychology by outsourcing the counseling of the church. Survey your folks to find out what they want and shape your ministry. This works for selling cars, but not for preaching the gospel. Whatever form it takes, the righteous man abandons the advice of the wicked at every level, whether in his life or in his ministry.

V. 1 adds he doesn’t “stand in the path of sinners.” The word for sinners refers usually to those who commit specific offenses against specific commands. The Hebrew word for path comes from a word meaning “to tread, to trample.” It refers to the paths or ruts formed by carts passing the same ground again and again. So it’s a perfect metaphor to refer to someone’s lifestyle or habits. I was the last of 10 kids, and our family owned a red jeep in the south. We lived in the woods & swampland, and our jeep cut trails all over those woods. And everywhere we went, just beneath pine straw was red alabama clay. What do you get when you coming lots of rain, red clay and jeep? Fun! If we took the same trail several times, it wasn’t long before the jeep cut ruts into the clay making the paths impassable. The Hebrew word for paths speaks of those kinds of ruts: predictable kinds of behavior. We are not to continue in the ruts, patterns of behavior in which sinners live. We must not adopt the lifestyle of sinners.

Consider to Psalm 119, which I consider a commentary on Psalm 1. You see the same picture in verse 104: “From your precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate every false path. Because I love your way, I hate all other paths.” V. 128 even more profoundly, “I esteem as right all of your precepts concerning everything / I hate every false path.“

Proverbs 4:14 makes the same point: “Do not enter the path of the wicked, do not proceed in the way of evil men. Avoid it, stay away from it.” Go around it, far around it. The emphasis is again made that the righteous person does not adopt the lifestyle/behavior patterns of sinners. There are voices today that say we should adopt the way of our culture in the name of contextualization. However well-intentioned, this is still standing in the path of sinners. There are other ways as well. There are undoubtedly men in this room, even as they are indulging a life of secret shame. If you are hiding a pervasive unrepentant life of sin, I plead with you: repent of that sin, seek God’s forgiveness, and quietly get out of the ministry. Maybe you don’t have a secret life of shame, but you’ve gotten lazy. You’ve gotten into a pattern of giving in and giving up. “Resolved, never to give over, nor in the least to slacken, my fight with my corruptions, however unsuccessful I may be.” Jesus said as much in Matthew 5: “Cut off your hand…” He meant we must get radical in dealing with our sin, doing whatever it takes to deal with the sin that’s in our lives. If you are tolerating ongoing habits of sin, you are standing in the path of sinners.

There’s a third thing the righteous man doesn’t do: he doesn’t sit in the seat of scoffers. This has to do with our belonging. The Hebrew word for scoffer describes those who are farthest from repentance; those who openly ridicule and reject God’s laws. This doesn’t mean we cut off all contact with these people. Paul told the Corinthians we have to interact with unbelievers because we’re in the world. But the psalmist is talking about “sitting” which refers to a gathering. There are times this is referring to formal assembly, and other times an informal social one. This is talking about connecting ourselves physically or socially such that we belong to scoffers. This may sound old-fashioned, but this is the path, that we must run away!

I’ll mention ways we sit in the seat of scoffers. Attending seminaries, sitting under the feet of men ridiculing the faith. Joining the local ministerial association when there is no unity on the fundamental doctrines of our Christian faith. We cannot belong to the assembly of those who are scoffers.

Don’t miss the main point of v.1. Together these three nouns include all unregenerate men. These are not small subsets of unbelievers. In fact, the psalmist wants us to see is that that every unbeliever without exception is included in v.1. The righteous man abandons every path of all those who reject God. He abandons thinking like they think, living like they live, belonging where they belong. If this is not your commitment, you will never spiritually prosper in the sight of God. You may have some success in this life, but you will not enjoy the enviable life that Psalm 1 describes. Calvin wrote, “no man can be duly animated to the fear and service of God, and to the study of his law, until he is firmly persuaded that all the ungodly are miserable, and that they who do not withdraw from their company shall he involved in the same destruction with them.”

Second, we must embrace only God’s way if we would live the enviable life. The psalmist reduces the righteous man to one thing: his response to Scripture. The righteous man finds his delight & meditation in the law of God. Early in Israel’s history, “torah” was used to refer to one command, the pentateuch, the whole law, etc. Eventually it referred to entirety of God’s revelation. The point here is how a man responds to God’s way as revealed in the bible. Note: he delights in it. The word refers to emotional joy or desire. It’s what he wants, it’s what he craves. A picture of this word in a non-theological setting by going back to Psalm 107:30, it’s used to describe experienced sailors stuck in a storm for days and when completely exhausted, their chief delight becomes the idea of returning to land, to a “delightful” harbor. That’s a picture of what our desire for God’s Word is to be.

This is also a major theme of Psalm 119. E.g., vv. 14, 24, 35, 47, 72, 77, 143, 174 all speak of rejoicing, delighting in God’s law, often better than gold or prosperity, in spite of trouble. Is that really how you think about the Bible? If on Sunday morning if you substitute anything else for the Word of God, I guarantee that is not the case. But that’s not the case for most of us here. But let me ask, can you truly say that you find delight and pleasure in the Word of God? Or has your approach to Scripture become merely cold & academic, just for sermon preparation? Do you find more joy in theological blogs than in the Bible? If you have to admit that you’re not in the same place in the psalmist, how can you increase your delight? Simple: spend more time there. Jeremiah 15:16 describes how he “ate” the word of God and delighted. Luther said the more you draw and drink from the Word, the more it stimulates your thirst.

The happy enviable righteous man finds his greatest delight in the Word of God.

There’s a second response of the righteous man: he also meditates on it. This describes the man who quietly speaks to himself about the Scripture, or reading quietly and going over & over again. It literally means to moan, mutter, whisper. The main point, though is not what comes out of the mouth, but what’s in the heart. In the context of Psalm 1, we can define meditate as to reflect, to think, to have an internal discussion of the Scripture. To think deeply about the Word of God. There are always two goals to this type of thinking. First, to understand the meaning of the text. Meditation brings weight to the text through illumination, consider Psalm 19:18. Or the prayer that God would open our eyes to see. Illumination is a work within us that enables us to grasp and love the meaning in the text before us. It’s so we grasp as reality for ourselves what the sacred text sets forth for us. The second goal of meditation is application.

But this kind of work requires diligence and hard work.  Don’t be lazy! Not all “expository preaching” truly is. You need to meditate on the text, and also apply it to yourself.

[At this point, I needed to leave the session 10 minutes early to attend to our travel group's affairs. Sorry!]