Like a Tree Planted

SERMON: 2012-01-01--ps0112--like-a-tree-planted SOURCE DURATION: 00:52:19.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidates 0 through 11 contain the main theological exposition and conclusion of the sermon. Candidates 12 through 15 transition into highly repetitive, structured material that sounds like a hymn or musical interlude (e.g., 'Jesus, be my guide...'), marking the end of the spoken sermon content. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:48:53.540-00:49:12.900, 00:49:32.820-00:49:42.300, 00:49:47.260-00:50:04.000, 00:50:32.700-00:52:19.000 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- I want to talk to you a bit this morning about the importance of scripture and the place that it want to be in your life and mine as we face into the future. Word is that the year 2012 is likely to be a difficult one economically. The Eurozone crisis is the number one news story of this past year. It's still far from being over. The economy south of the border remains sluggish. The housing market really hasn't yet bottomed out. Nobody knows if or when it will. And of course all of that has an impact on our own economy. Prime Minister Stephen Harper in his traditional year-end interview put it this way. He said the next year will be a very challenging year for the global economy and therefore for the economy of this country. And as I pointed out over the Christmas holidays and the Christmas services, whenever there is economic stress, there is also other secondary stresses. The social fabric gets stretched. People become nasty. They become irritated. They become unhappy. Questions get overthrown, political instability results. And I often think the line between civilization and chaos in the world is an extremely narrow one. And those of us who are privileged to enjoy political and economic and social stability cannot begin to overestimate the blessings that are ours. And if you don't believe that, listen to the news. Watch what happens in the Middle East. Watch what happens in nations where there are protracted wars and conflict and pain. 2012 is not likely to be any easier in many ways than 2011. The question then that each one of us faces, of course, is how do we prepare for times such as that? How do we prepare for times of economic, social, and perhaps even political stress? Well, of course, the tendency is to hunker down, keep your head low, circle the wagons, hope for the best, do what you can to stay out of trouble, and there's merit to that. Because Scripture says in the book of Proverbs 22.3, a prudent man sees danger and takes refuge. At the same time, you know as well as I do from Scripture that ultimately our security in life does not come from the clever management of our own affairs. There are simply too many factors involved in life over which we have no control. We are but dust. We live by virtue of the breath of God, and throughout Scripture we're taught so clearly that success in life is not so much a function of our own cleverness and even our hard work as it is of God's favor. Many years ago, Psalm 75, the verses 6 and 7 were some of the first verses I memorized in my own life. Not from the East or from the West, not from the wilderness comes lifting up, but it is God who exercises judgment, putting down one and lifting up another. And of course, the Lord Jesus, He put it this way in the Sermon on the Mount, "Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness." And He says all these things, that is to say food, clothing, and shelter, everything after which the world seeks will be given to you as well. And while there isn't much that we can do about the world in general, the reality is that there are things we can do about our relationship with the Lord. And in Psalm 1, Scripture gives us some very practical steps, things that you and I can do so that we walk closely with our God and so we can also expect confidently that we will know His presence and His power. And so in the time that we have this particular Sunday morning, the first Sunday of the New Year, I want to try to walk you through Psalm 1 as best as I can looking at two things that God says we can or cannot do. The results of that, what happens when we do it and what happens when we don't. So first thing I'd like for us to notice in Psalm 1 this morning is that if we want to walk in intimacy with God, we need to get rid of the things that hinder our walk. Listen again to verse 1, "Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers." Now notice there are two sets of three things that represent an increasing slide into sin. First the three verbs, "Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers." Notice how each one of these represents an increasing level of familiarity and intimacy. To walk in the counsel of the wicked is to follow their advice. The picture that comes to my mind is here you have a person who is walking along on the road of life and then you join that person and you can join that person for a long ways of his journey but you can also decide you don't want to walk with him and so you go off the other way. To stand in the presence of the sinner is a closer degree of familiarity because now you're engaging each other. You make a more deliberate choice of listening to one another and of course to sit in the seat of scoffers is now to find yourself at home with those who mock the Lord and you have now become one with them. So you have that increasing level of intimacy from walk to stand to sit. That's one set of the two things that we're talking about. The second set involves the nouns, the nouns wicked, sinners, and mockers. Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. Now a wicked person in scripture is an ungodly person and to be an ungodly person is to live without regard for the existence or the reality of God. We tend to think of wicked as like really bad. Well no, wicked is ungodly in scripture or language. It means you are ignoring God and you can be a very good nice ordinary upright person and still be wicked from a biblical point of view. I've often said if the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind then what do you think is our greatest sin? Our greatest sin is our failure to love God above all. Put it in that perspective and you understand that apart from God's grace we're all wicked. Now beyond being wicked this passage talks about being sinners and to be a sinner is to miss the mark and to be a sinner is to understand that there are moral constructs, there are laws in the universe whether you believe they've been made by God or not or whether it's just the light of your own conscience which the Bible says every pagan experiences unless they squelch it and extinguish it and to be a sinner is to live in violation of God's moral law and to be a mocker is to go a step further. It's not only to ignore God, it's not only to break God's commandments, it is now balling my fist at God and saying God I don't care who you are, what it is that you want, I'm gonna do what I want to do. So there again you have this increasing level of wickedness and God says here in scripture if we want to be blessed and the Hebrew is actually much stronger than the English it is really oh blessed is the man, oh happy is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. God says if you want to experience my blessings then stay away from anything and everybody that is going to hinder your walk with me. Now as you can appreciate that gets miserably practical because scripture never leaves things theoretical does it, it's meant to change our lives and to make us more like Jesus. Let me walk you quickly through some of the practical implications of this and you can think of a lot more. It means first of all that we must examine carefully who our friends are. Any parent will tell you that as soon as your kids hit the teenage years the influence of the friends very quickly begins to exceed and outweigh the influence of parents. Isn't that true? That's where parents struggle with their kids until they become teenagers there's these sweet little children who love you and adore you and you have this great relationship with them and then all of a sudden they don't listen to you anymore, you don't know anything and their friends who are no smarter than they are are elevated as being way up here. Isn't that true? That's where a lot of conflicts come from in homes. Why is that? Because developmentally for children to grow up and to leave home they have to learn that they can do without you and the only way that they can do that is to surround themselves with friends who become their new source of support and so very obviously who your friends are make a huge difference because what your friends think, what your friends value, what your friends speak into your life is of critical importance. You draw your life from them, you draw support and encouragement from each other and so where your friends go you're likely to go there too. There is a saying that says show me who your friends are and I will show you what you're like and I will show you where you'll end up. Paul puts it this way, 1 Corinthians 15 verse 33, "Do not be misled, bad company corrupts good character." So one of the questions to ask yourselves at the start of a new year then is the question who are my friends? Who do I hang around with and do they help me on my journey towards God or do they hinder my journey towards God? And if the answer is they hinder my journey with God then seriously consider breaking off those relationships or those friendships. Scripture is rather categorical about that in 2 Corinthians chapter 6, quoting from the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, "I believe come out from them and be separate, says the Lord, touch no unclean thing and I will receive you. I will be a father to you and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty." If we want to know the favor of God then our relationship with him must be priority over every other relationship. So that's one implication of verse 1 of Psalm 1. A second implication is that we need to be circumspect as to what media we expose ourselves to. And by media I mean first of all movies and television programs. It used to be not that many years ago that good Bible believing evangelical Christians did not believe in movie going. I remember when World Wide Pictures, the Billy Graham arm that made Christian movies began showing them in public theaters as opposed to churches in order to increase their outreach into the secular community. It put a lot of evangelical believers in a dilemma because they had grown up all of their lives believing and saying Christians ought not to be going to movie theaters. I remember my older brother getting into huge trouble with my father years ago when on a date he took his girlfriend to a drive-in theater. And we all know what drive-in theaters were known as. They were known as passion pits you may recall. And I in my own lifetime remember Christians being looked at askance if they were too progressive having television sets in their house. We can't even imagine that kind of a world anymore today. And if those days were maybe too legalistic or maybe too extreme, I think it's probably fair to say we've swung too far the other way. And we now bring stuff into our homes, into our eyes, into our hearts that years ago we would have blushed to be associated with. So ask yourself the question what is feeding into my soul? Because you see, Christians get arrogantly deceived in this place because we like to think oh I can handle this, right? It's like carbon monoxide poisoning, by the time you wake up you're dead. And you don't even know how you got there. How many people have lost their passion for Jesus because they are so in love with the world that they cannot picture being without. Listen again how drastically James puts it in James 4-4. He says you adulterous people. Don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God. Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes a what? An enemy of God. Now the same thing can be said for music, books and literature and I don't have the time this morning to expand on it big time but you know just as well as I do that music gets into our lives through the back door. And we gravitate towards music that gives expression to what lives in our souls. And so it either moves us towards more intimacy with God or it moves us towards greater intimacy with the world and the same thing is true in terms of books and literature. Every so often I'll hear and it's usually a teacher type person saying oh I wish that kids would read more books and watch less movies. Ever hear that expression? And that's maybe a good thing but I'll tell you this much I know just as many kids who get lost in novels as get lost in movies. And you can live just as readily in an imaginary world disconnected from reality in literature as you can by the visual means. And this may surprise you but there was a time when evangelical and Bible believing Christians thought it was wrong to read novels, did you know that? Not because novels were necessarily trashy although they certainly can be that and they won't help you walk with God but because novels were make-belief and who's going to spend his time in make-belief when there is a real world to live in? And again if that was too extreme back then who is to say we haven't swung the other way today? And one of the questions that we need to be asking then if we want to experience a life of intimacy with God, what are the movies that I'm watching? What are the novels that I'm subjecting my mind to and what is the music that I use to keep my interior world calm and under control? And if the answer is this does not yield a closer walk with God then if we're serious about our relationship with God we need to take whatever action we need to take and painful as that is and tough as that is in today's culture we need to get rid of whatever stands in the way. Part of the deception in all of our lives and I speak for myself as readily as I speak for you is that normal is what you live with and we make a thousand and one excuses to say this is all okay when scripture is in the other direction. Listen to these words of Jesus from Matthew 529, "If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out, throw it away. It's better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." People that talk about this nice kind meek and mild Jesus have never read the Bible because when I read Jesus he gets me upset because he tells me to die in the places where my flesh wants to live and I want to see if I can walk on as many different roads at the same time. And I'll bet you I'm not the only one. Jesus said, "Who are you going to follow? Are you going to follow me or are you going to follow what the world says?" Well there's a lot more that we could talk about. We could talk about the education systems. Time forbids me to go into that in any detail other than to point out, again you know as well as I do, that next to parents, friends, and media the one thing that shapes the mind of the next generation is the education system. And one of the questions that we need to ask always is, is this helping us to move forward into the things of Christ or is it leading us the other way? And as parents in particular we need to take huge responsibility whether our kids go to Christian school or whether our kids go to a public school. It's our job to make sure that they are armed and equipped to know how to face the challenges of our day and age because the devil knows how the world operates and he gets very intelligent people formulating all kinds of anti-God propositions that make an incredible amount of good sense. And the whole point of scripture is to say if you go by your senses you will always reach the wrong conclusions about who God is and what God stands for. We need to learn to live by revelation. So you want intimacy with God? Then do not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of scoffers. Do that and you will catch whatever it is that ails them. And don't think that God is automatically going to protect you when he has warned you about the dangers of what the world has to offer. Now that's the negative and the world abhors a vacuum because something always rushes in to try to fill that up. And so the psalmist doesn't stop at the negative, he now goes on to the positive and he says we need to cultivate our relationship with the Lord. Listen to verse two, "His delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night." There's four words in here that we need to dwell on. The first is the law of the Lord. The law of the Lord is literally the five books of Moses where God gave his self-revelation to the nation of Israel, it's the Torah. But by extension God has revealed himself through all the pages of scripture and of course the law has been fulfilled in the person of Jesus. And so to delight ourselves in the law of the Lord is to find joy in God's self-revelation. The second word that ties into that then is the word delight, his delight is in the law of the Lord. The psalmist says in Psalm 119, "I long for your salvation and your law is my delight." Now to delight yourself in something is to be very fond of it. A young man will delight in his bride, a child delights in a new toy or delights in ice cream or you or I can delight in a good experience or in a good friendship. But it's interesting language to use with regard to our relationship with God's law because I'm willing to bet that most of us don't exactly delight ourselves in the law. I mean really, being told what to do, being told what not to do. And so that kind of language is kind of foreign to us because we view as God's instructions in scripture as a way of limiting our freedom and if you don't believe that, watch what happens when you've got your mindset ongoing in a particular direction and God's word says no. And I can tell you I've been around long enough to know that one after the other of us when push comes to shove, we much prefer our will to God's revealed will. Is that not true? And isn't that where the conflict often comes from? Now, the Bible never pictures the law that way. The Bible pictures the law as God's input into your life and into my life to help us live in a very complicated world filled with temptation and with deceit in a way that is sure and in a way that is safe. Think of yourself as being placed in a very complicated factory and you're in charge of running all this equipment and managing all these people, but nobody's given you any training and there is no instruction manual to go with it. So how are you going to learn? Well, you've got to learn by trial and error. What happens when you have to learn life by trial and error? The place will blow up long before you've got it all under control. You see, the law is God's instruction manual that says this whole complicated world that you live in, where you don't yet know the end from the beginning because you don't live long enough to know the consequences of the things that you do. You want to be safe in there? You listen to me. It is your security and your safety. And I had kind of an interesting experience with that this week, not so much with the Bible as with operating manuals. I've been in the process of trying to get a couple of pieces of electronic equipment to talk to each other. And I have manuals for both pieces of equipment and both manuals give me the pin configuration of their outputs and their inputs. But neither book has bothered to mention which pin goes with which on the opposite. I don't know if you can picture this, but it's rather annoying because I don't want to blow this stuff up. It's too expensive to do that. So I've had to scour the internet all over the place to find some poor soul who had a similar problem to what I'm having and at the long last found a pin-out diagram that actually put them together. And I said, thank you, Lord, and thank you, dude, whoever put this up, because now I can make these two things talk to each other. God's law is to be our de-wine. Third word that's of interest in that passage is the word meditate. His delight is on the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night. Now to meditate is to chew your cud, literally. The literal Hebrew there is to repeat and to mumble and to keep on dwelling on what God says in his word. How many of us know that in our Bible reading typically we read over things and we miss three-quarters of what's there? Is that not true? Sometimes after a service somebody will say to me, I didn't know. That was all in the text. The text is rich with nutrients. God's word is rich with instruction. And just a cursory reading or a quick devotional isn't going to give us the nutrients that we need to become strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. And so the Bible says, you want to be blessed? You want to have a life that's solid, a life that's secure? Then meditate, chew your cud. And the fourth phrase that's significant there is day and night. His delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night. That's a Hebrew phrase for all the time. Paul uses a very similar language in the New Testament when he says pray without ceasing. And that doesn't mean that we're to have our nose in the Bible all the time and we're to be praying all the time in a literal sense of the word. But it does mean that we live life in such a way that we are constantly drawing the connection between what God says and what my life is like. And it means that I take every situation and every circumstance of my life and I say, Lord, how through scripture do you speak into my situation? I'm having a struggle in my marriage. What do you tell me about marriage? I'm having a struggle with my children. What does your word say about my relationship with my children? I have struggles with brothers and sisters in the family of God. I have struggles at work. I don't know how to manage my affairs or manage my money. What does your word have to say about this situation? It is an ongoing, active process. And we are to take a delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on it day and night. And if that sounds like work, I'll get used to it because any relationship is work. And if you and I want to have a relationship with God and expect to spend eternity with Him, it might not be a bad investment of our time, talent, and energy to invest ourselves in getting to know Him and getting to know Him better. And again, obviously, practical implications. Let me just rattle off a couple of them. It means we need to be familiar with scripture. Every last one of us needs to read through scripture. Doesn't mean we have to do it every day. Doesn't mean we have to do it every year. But we can't just stomp with the passages we like because there's a lot of passages we don't like. But they're also truth. I remember years ago, we were doing a study in the book of Ezekiel, and if you've read the book of Ezekiel, except for the end where it talks about the new temple and everything else, it is doom and gloom because the prophets were, well, they were God's spokespeople into a sinful generation. And I remember one of the women in our group, you know, we've got a bunch of chapters in, and she, oh, she was upset. And we ought to be upset. You know, it was Mark Twain who said at one point, he said, "A lot of people get upset by what they don't understand in the Bible." He says, "That doesn't bother me at all." He says, "What bothers me is what I do understand." And I thought that was pretty profound for Mark Twain. It means we should memorize as much of Scripture as we can. Certainly means we need to actively reflect on Scripture. And many of us already have this habit, but if you don't have it, I would certainly recommend that day by day you have personal devotions. And even if every time lightning doesn't strike and it becomes routine and habit, it still creates the structure for God to speak into your life. The same thing is true about attending corporate worship. Do you know that in the average evangelical church in North America, a third of the congregation is missing every Sunday morning? And I know there are many good and compelling reasons, but there's also a lot of excuses. Went to bed till late the night before, don't feel like I'm in a good place. I've often said the less you feel like coming to corporate worship, the more you need to be here because the more likely God will put his finger on something in your life that needs to be addressed. More than that, we ought to study Scripture with a view of applying it to our lawyers. We're all familiar, I think, with 2 Timothy 3, 16, and 17. It's a profound passage, really. All Scripture is God-breathed, that is to say God inspired it with his own life. It's useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the man or the woman of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. God's Word teaches, God's Word rebukes, it corrects, and it trains, and the purpose is to equip us for every good work. A lot of people would not be so susceptible to the philosophies of the world and so sucked in by the world's supposed secrets for success if they had even a smattering familiarity with what Scripture really teaches. And I talked earlier about the wrong view of Jesus that a lot of people have, you know, when people picture Jesus as meek and mild and he loves everybody, you cannot have that view if you have truly read the Gospels because that is not who he is or how he comes across. We need to read Scripture with a view of applying it to our lives and we need to learn how to take the things that God has shown us and share them with others. Paul puts it this way, Colossians 3.16, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as it teach and admonish one another with all wisdom as you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God." Anybody here who's ever taught a class, whether it's Sunday school or an adult class or anybody who has ever sought to give verbalization to the message of the Gospel will know that you learn more than what your students do. And we have been made not only to take in, but we have been made to give out. And the word of God that flows into our lives, we need to be sharing it. Husbands and wives need to share it with each other, fathers and mothers need to share it with their children, it's your primary job to train your kids, and we need to share it as God gives opportunity with people all around us and the people who grow in Christ and the body of Christ are people who on the one hand like the Sea of Galilee receive, but who pass it on and who impart life to others. So don't walk with the ungodly, meditate on the law of God, find the light in it day and night, and what do you suppose happens when we take seriously the biblical admonition? Well we become like a tree planted. Listen to verse 3, "He or she is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither, whatever he does prospers." He's like a tree planted by streams of water. Any of you here old enough to remember can meet him as song, the tree song, it was very popular in the 70s, taken from this song, "I saw a tree by the riverside one day as I walked along, straight as an arrow and pointing to the sky, growing tall and strong. How do you grow so tall and strong, I said to the riverside tree, and this is the song my tree friend sang to me. I've got roots growing down to the water, I've got leaves growing up to the sunshine, and the fruit that I bear is a sign of the life in me. I am shade from the hot summer sundown, I am nest for the birds of the heavens, I am tree coming with the Lord of the trees has meant me to be a strong young tree." And then he goes on to talk about a tree in winter time, and he talks about a tree in the city streets, and these are trees that prosper because the roots go down to the streams of water. And the imagery really doesn't need a lot of explanation, does it? How does a tree bear fruit in good times and in bad times? Because it has roots that go down to the underlying sources of life, and the result is when those tree roots are that far down and it draws moisture from there, then it bears fruit in its season, its leaves stay green even in times of drought. And here's what I want us to understand this morning, nowhere in scripture does God ever promise you or me in this life a rose garden that is without trouble. And when this psalm says everything he does he prospers does not mean that you and I in the course of living our lives will not go through times of pain or suffering or hardship or difficulties. Because we live in a fallen world and everybody experiences the groaning, the travail of sin. That doesn't make us better or worse than anybody else, it is simply the reality of life and God does not automatically protect us from that. What he does promise is that he will keep us strong in the midst of trials, filled with life and filled with his grace, so that we can run the race, love God above all and love our neighbor as we love ourselves. And the key to that is roots that have sunk down deep into the person of Jesus and who draw their life from him, he's gone through everything that you and I have ever gone through and he remained faithful unto death and he says you abide in me and I in you and your life will bear much fruit. Here is how Paul put it in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, we have this treasure that is the presence of God's Holy Spirit in jars of clay to show that this all surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed, we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. How well we fare when the burdens of life come rolling in and there are seasons believe you me and if you have never yet experienced such a season I can confidently say someday you will because God loves you and the devil hates you and there will be times of stress and there will be times of difficulty particularly if you are committed to fulfilling the purposes of God in your life and in your generation. And how you fare in those days is not decided by when the wind starts to blow and the rain starts to pound and the storms start to come, it's determined by how deeply you have sunk your roots into the living word whose name is Jesus. Remember the parable of the ten virgins, what's the difference between the five wise virgins and the five foolish ones? Well the five wise virgins had prepared ahead of time should the master be delayed so their lamps were filled and they were ready to go when they heard the call of the bridegroom. The five foolish virgins they neglected to make preparation and because they neglected to make preparation when the bridegroom came they were not ready. How many of us are not ready to face the challenges of life because we haven't sunk our roots deeply into the living word whose name is Jesus. Now remember God's very gracious and we often say God meets us according to our needs and indeed he does but that's no excuse for sloppiness. Don't live like the world, don't ignore Jesus, don't ignore scripture, don't ignore walking with God day by day in the thousand and one little choices that you've got to make and then expect to have what it takes when all hell breaks loose and your faith is shaken to the very core of its foundation. We need to understand that the believers lot stands in sharp contrast to that of the wicked because verse four of this chapter now tells us not so the wicked they are like chaff that the wind blows away. Chaff is the dead husk around grain. And when grain has been threshed and it gets winnowed the whole idea is to blow the chaff away a bushel full of chaff weighs next to nothing. All it takes is a little puff of wind and scripture is pretty categorical that no matter how unbelievers seem to prosper sooner or later the wind is going to blow them away. Now let me end with one final observation that I think is critical with reference to the passage and that is this. We need to take a long range view. Listen to how the psalm ends in verses five and six. 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 will perish. The danger of a psalm like this and the danger of preaching like this is that there are always some people who want to make it into a formula. And if I just don't do the bad things that I'm not supposed to do and if I do the right things that I'm supposed to do then God is obligated to make sure that he blesses me and that my life goes well. And when sometimes it doesn't then I go through a crisis of faith that says where is God and how can I trust him? Is that not true? And the antidote to that is to realize yes the promises of God are true and yes obeying God honoring God and walking with God will bear good fruit both in time but especially in eternity. And if you take only the short term view you will discover that being obedient to God in fact will sometimes make your life more difficult. Talk to any new convert who's had to give up his old friends. Talk to any of us who have had to break off old habits. It's not something that gives you a lot of fun or a lot of joy. And many a time people slide back because the journey is too hard and where is God and all the good things that God promised me? But you see God's promises are true and they are true eternally. When judgment comes as surely it will both in time and in eternity those who are rooted and grounded in Christ will be like a house that's built on the rock and it will stand the test and they'll hear the words of Jesus, "Well done good and faithful servant. You've been faithful over little I will put you over much." But those who have not dug their foundations onto the rock and who have built their house upon the sand will discover that when the rain starts the foundation washes away and as the little song says the house comes tumbling down and it goes crash. So let me leave you with a question. What is there in your life right now? What is there right now that hinders a closer walk with God? What relationships get in the way? What besitting sins are you in love with that keep you locked in a place of guilt and shame? What places are you in love with the values of the world and want the approval of the world that make you an enemy of God in those places? If there are those places how about we just kneel before God and say, "God I don't even know how to get rid of this. In fact the matter is I don't even want to get rid of this. I love my sin and yes intellectually I know that you don't like it very much but it feeds something in me that I cannot do without. God take my heart, change me, make me passionate about my love for you and then ask yourself the question, what is there that I can do in this coming year to be more solidly rooted in Christ? Where has God been speaking to me? Where has God been showing me what it is that he wants me to do? Lord I don't know how to do it, I don't even feel like doing it. Obedience is a word that just rubs me the wrong way. I've bought into the lies of the devil that freedom means following my passions and following me. But Lord here's my life and I've given myself to Jesus and Jesus I'm giving you the right. Just change in me what you want changed. Help me to take up my cross, deny myself and love you above all." And then you know God promises that as we do that, step by step, we'll be tested, we'll be tried, but we'll get stronger and stronger at our core. And then when ultimately there comes that day when we stand before Jesus, we know that we will hear those words, "Well done good and faithful servant, you've been faithful over little, I will put you over much." God's desire is to bring us to the party and if we need to go through hard times sometimes it is to prepare us for the day of glory when the wicked will truly be cast into the lake of fire and the children of God will inherit a new creation and nobody who hopes in God [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:48:53.540; remove through 00:52:19.000] will on [CUT] that day ever be ashamed. on the day of glory when the wicked will truly be cast into the lake of fire and the children of God will inherit a new creation and nobody who hopes in God will ever be ashamed. Jesus, be my guide, call me to your side and I will love you to the end, to the end. Jesus, be my guide, call me to your side and I will love you to the end, to the end. Jesus, be my guide, call me to your side and I will love you to the end, to the end. Jesus, be my guide, call me to your side and I will love you to the end, to the end. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:52:19.000; resume after this marked segment]