Pastor Tim begins a new series on Psalm 1. Please join us as we think about what it means to be a “happy” person.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor describes “destination addiction” as constantly seeking happiness in the next achievement, relationship, or possession. What are some modern examples of this that you see in your own life or culture, and how does the contrast with Psalm 1’s vision of true blessedness challenge that pattern?
The sermon distinguishes between viewing God’s Word as “drudgery” versus “direction”—as a checklist to complete versus a warm fire on a cold day. What barriers keep you from approaching Scripture as a joyful encounter with God, and how might understanding Jesus’s righteousness as the foundation of your acceptance change that?
Reflecting on Roy Yarborough’s example, what would it look like in your own life to speak about prayer and Bible reading as if returning from a conversation with your best friend rather than completing a task?
The sermon calls us to “meditate day and night” on God’s Word—murmuring it like an earworm—so that Scripture, rather than media or other influences, is what replays in our minds. What are some practical ways you could incorporate God’s Word more consistently throughout your day?
The pastor describes a virtuous cycle: the more we are immersed in God’s Word, the more we delight in it, and the more we delight in it, the more we want to be immersed in it. How can we as a community encourage one another into that cycle as we continue this series on Psalm 1?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be with you tonight for our brand new series, Delighted in God. What does it mean to delight in God? We spend so much time thinking about how we follow God, what we need to do, what He calls us to do, but do we take time to actually delight in Him?
You see, scripture calls us to do more than simply follow a list of commands. It calls us to a life that actually delights and experiences the joy of knowing our God. And that’s what we’re going to be thinking about tonight. So let’s go ahead and jump right in. Let’s come before our God in prayer and ask for His guidance as we do so. Will you join me?
Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for being the one whom we can delight in. That you aren’t simply the God of the whole universe, the God who makes the universe work. You are the God who calls us to see You as our heavenly Father, the God who is with us in everything we face. Lord, would you guide us tonight to help us to understand what it means to delight in You and in Your word? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Let me ask a question as we start tonight. What is happiness? What does it really mean to be happy? There’s lots of discussion on that, what it means to be happy or to be delighted. If you go and search online, you’ll find all kinds of people coming up with theories of what it means to be truly happy. And sometimes you’ll find these really nice little pictures with things like, look for happiness inside yourself, that’s when you can be truly happy. Don’t allow other people to provide your happiness, find it within yourself.
If we look in our society, we find lots of answers: if we have the right things or if we have the right amount of money, we have the right accomplishments, the right friends, we have the right positions in our work and in our hobbies. And in that, we find ourselves constantly seeking so much so that a British psychologist by the name of Robert Holden called this phenomena of how we’re seeking after our happiness destination addiction. We always think that’s going to be the next place or the next person or the next things or the next whatever that’s going to make us happy. And we end up just looking down life thinking someday, the next day, the next time things are going to make me happy.
Well, the Bible speaks of what true delight, true happiness looks like. And we see that in Psalm 1. When we look at Psalm 1, Psalm 1 doesn’t look very much like what we often think about happiness looks like. Let’s go ahead and see what true happiness looks like, not all those things of the world, but true happiness in our God.
Psalm 1 verses 1 to 2 says, “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 His law, he meditates day and night.”
So that’s the picture of the person who’s truly happy. Someone who doesn’t do certain things and does other things. And those things boil down to a basic call to follow our God. We see very clearly in verse 1, what the happy person, the delighted person, the blessed person is, and that’s someone who is not a partner with evil. We see these different pictures: someone who is sitting in the counsel of those who are evil, the one who’s walking in the way of the sinner, the one who is seated in the seat of the scoffer, and there’s discussion on how much we should see each one of those as a separate thing versus layers on the picture of evil.
But I think the thing that we can say very clearly is that the person who is truly blessed, the person who is truly happy, is someone who flees those things, who isn’t being absorbed into the ways of the world, the sinful things that ensnare us. The seat of the scoffer can be a very attractive sounding place for a period of time where we can scoff at various things and feel superior, and yet it doesn’t leave us happy. The sinful path often looks like it’s promising great joy but leaves us feeling broken inside.
The blessed person is not party to these things, but instead turns and delights elsewhere. What’s something that’s delighted you recently? If you can think of something, maybe leave it in the comments as we go tonight. There’s lots of little simple things that we often delight in, and things that feel very big in the moment at least.
Certainly here in St. Louis, it felt like we had a huge delight the last few days when we heard that Adam Wainwright was returning to the Cardinals this year. I think the whole city felt delighted for several days, and then as some of the other moves have been coming in, it just feels like we have this delight as baseball gets ready to return. Well, that’s a perfectly good thing. But that’s just a picture, right? We know that that’s not what the secret to a delighted life is, a happy life.
It’s a picture of just a momentary delight. Those are good things. God allows those things in our lives, those things that bring delight. But then we start to say, well, what’s really going to bring happiness to my life? What’s going to bring deep meaning on an ongoing basis?
As we start to examine different things, we often follow what the world says, the counsel of the wicked, the seat of the scoffer, the way of the sinner. In that, they tell us the things that we see listed in Ecclesiastes 2, verse 9, are what’s going to make us happy. Listen to what the preacher says in Ecclesiastes. He says,
“So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me. And whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil. And this was my reward for all my toil.
Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it. And behold, all was vanity and a striving after the wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”
The author of Ecclesiastes looks at the access he’s had to every delight, every pleasure, every bit of power that one could have in the world. And he says, “Well, it was really nice in the moment, but it didn’t make me feel blessed. It didn’t make me feel genuinely happy, because it’s all passing.”
We see that wonderful contract come in for the Cardinals, and it’s great in the moment, and yet in a year or two we know it’s passed.
What anchors us? What provides true happiness that lasts? Is it really just those clichés on the internet that we just need to look in ourselves and be happy in ourselves? And when we look in ourselves, what do we find?
The author of Ecclesiastes has all his wisdom, he says, and yet he looks inside himself and it doesn’t make him happy. It doesn’t delight him. Where does true delight come from? Happiness. True happiness. True blessedness comes from finding delight in God and in His word.
Take a look at verse 2. The blessed man, what we heard about in verse 1, his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night. The law of the Lord? Most of us, and now maybe if you’re a lawyer this is a different case, but most of us don’t find a delight in the law, in any kind of law. We tend to think of law as something that maybe protects us or maybe restricts us, but we don’t tend to think of that as our place of delight.
What does it mean to find delight in the law of the Lord? Well, that word law, that’s a good translation of it, but the law encapsulates all of God’s instruction. In other words, all the things that God has given us in His word that help us to understand who He is and who He calls us to be. And so we find delight in it because it’s coming before God and understanding who He has intended us to be.
It’s not merely a set of instructions, it’s not merely a bunch of regulations to make sure we don’t violate, it’s an invitation to understand the Creator of the universe and who He is to us.
You see, when we’re living a life like the psalmist in Psalm 1, what we’re called to do as we look to God’s word is, as one commentator put it, not see it as drudgery, but direction. When we see it as learning God’s word so that we can avoid getting zapped by some lightning bolt when we violate something, it doesn’t feel like something to delight in and it feels like drudgery. When we’re worried about, am I reading it the right way, as in, have I read enough today? Have I followed the right plan today? Have I memorized enough today? Can I tell you the verse references of everything I’ve read?
We start to turn it into a series of to-dos instead of reading the very words of the Creator of the universe, our heavenly Father, that He’s given to us.
And make no mistake, memorizing it is a wonderful thing, and in fact, we see hints of that in this passage. Knowing where things are in the Bible is a great thing, but the first step is to simply come before God’s word and hear it as God speaking to you and to me.
What we should see when we come to God’s word, when we look at the pages of His word, what we should see is like when we’re coming in on a cold day like today and we come before a beautiful warm fire that warms our hands as they feel so cold and frozen. But whatever is cold in our heart that feels like it just takes away happiness, it takes away delight.
As we come before our God, His word thaws it, because even when we find that we’re out of accord with what God has called us to do, we read in His word the hope that we have, that we can come before Him and that He will restore us and that He will transform us.
We come before Him and we see that all of what we find in His word is preparing us for an eternity in His presence. Talk about a warm fire on a cold day.
We look at a world in which so much is passing away and so many things fail us, and yet we’re told that God doesn’t, and we see over and over again how He doesn’t. And when we approach God’s word in that way, then when we’re going to try to memorize a bit of it, or we’re going to try to remember where things are, or we pick out a Bible reading plan, it’s because we’re coming before the God of the universe and we want to know more of this stuff, not because we’re afraid that God won’t love us unless we accomplish a certain set of tasks.
And it’s only then when we start to see God’s word as a delight that is there because we’re having a conversation with our Heavenly Father, that then it doesn’t just become a bunch of knowledge we stuff in our heads, but it starts to change our actions, not out of a fear of punishment, but out of a delight in the God who loves us and has given us His word because He loves us.
Engaging with God’s word in this manner that we see described in this psalm is meant to change us. But we don’t always experience that, do we? Most people I know enjoy coming and reading parts of God’s word. There’s at least parts of it that bring joy, maybe other parts that don’t. But do we really experience delight?
I was thinking this past week it was the 6th anniversary of the death of a dear friend, Roy Yarborough. And Roy was just this amazing man in so many ways. But what really struck me from the very early moments of our friendship was that Roy genuinely delighted in coming into God’s presence.
You see, he wouldn’t just talk about Jesus and check off the various things that you should check off that would sound good, that would sound pious. He didn’t just sound religious. When he talked about that he had taken some time that morning and he had been praying and he had been reading God’s word, he didn’t sound like he had accomplished a task. He sounded like he had just left a wonderful conversation with his very best friend.
That’s what it means to delight in God’s word. That’s what the psalmist is talking about. When we start to see coming to the word of God not as a task, but as a joy. And we don’t get there right away, right? We can’t just say, okay, now I’m going to accomplish the task today of delighting in God’s word because there we are right back at it again.
But what we’re called to do is to start chipping away at all the things that we’ve laid on top of God’s word that keep us from delighting in it. And to remember why we have it is because God loves us. Because yes, He’s holy and He’s powerful and He’s majestic, but He loves us enough to actually give us His word so that we can know who He is and we can relate to Him and we can be transformed by His Spirit.
One of the things that Roy would do, of course, he’d come and read God’s word and he would also pray and most of us probably pray at least sometimes. Almost everyone prays as they say there are no atheists in the foxhole because in the most stressful moments of life, even the people that usually don’t pray think, well, I’ll give it a shot.
But even in our prayers, we often can fall into a task-based mentality where we think I need to do this and I need to do this, I need to say these things. What does it mean to instead say, I need to spend some time with one who’s more delightful to be in the presence of than anyone else? How do we get to that point?
It comes from not just reading God’s word, but being immersed in God’s word. You see, the call that God gives His leaders of His nation over and over again is not just to know what His word is, but to come back to it over and over again, all the time. Not at a certain time of the day when they have their quiet time, but throughout the day that it actually immerses their life in the love and the knowledge of who God is.
Look what we’re told in Deuteronomy chapter 17, when God instructs the people on what the king should look like when they have a king. It says, “And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, that he may not turn aside from the commandment either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children in Israel.”
He’s supposed to come to it day and night, and that’s what we see also when God comes before Joshua and He’s going to take the people of Israel into the promised land. Joshua 1 chapter 8, excuse me, chapter 1 verse 8, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it, for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.”
You see, over and over again, the people were called from the very top leadership to be coming back into God’s word day and night.
In Psalm 1, the term that says meditate could be translated to moan or to murmur. In other words, those things that, if you’re really wrestling with something, you find yourself talking to yourself, and just throughout the day you’re saying things to yourself, hopefully you do that too, I do that, but whether it’s just running a track in your head or you’re actually verbalizing it when you’re alone, or maybe people are distancing themselves from you because you’re doing it even when they’re around, whatever it might be, those things that just eat at us and we can’t let go of them, we’re supposed to have something wonderful that does that, and that’s supposed to be God’s word.
We’re not supposed to just go and do a little quiet time and say, okay, I’ve read my Old Testament reading for the day and my New Testament and my Psalm and my Proverb, okay, I’ve got it all covered. No, what we’re supposed to do is, as we read God’s word, we chew on it, we wrestle with it, we think about it.
What keeps us from delighting in it and being immersed in God’s word, I do think it comes down to those barriers we put where we set expectations that aren’t necessarily bad but get in the way of simply coming and recognizing what God’s word is. Maybe it’s a fear of failure that we think, well, every page I feel like there’s something in it that I wish I did better. What do we do when we feel like that?
We don’t find delight in God’s law and His word because we feel like we fall so short. There’s something amazing in this psalm. Because you see, all those things that we’re told that the blessed man doesn’t do, the blessed woman doesn’t do at the very beginning in verse 1, well, Augustine long ago observed that if you look at that list of things, they’re exactly the things that Jesus didn’t do. He didn’t sit in the seat of the scoffer. He didn’t walk in the way of the sinner.
He experienced what it was like to live in a sinful world, what it’s like that we face, but He didn’t fall to temptation. And what does that mean for us? Well, as we come before God’s word, we’re reminded that Jesus has done what we’re called to do. That as we relate to God’s word, just like the psalmist later says, we can come before God as those who are righteous, not because of our own righteousness, but because they recognize what God had promised them, ultimately what we see fulfilled in the New Testament because of Jesus’s righteousness.
And when we recognize that, then again, we don’t come to God’s word thinking, oh, no, it’s going to beat me down again. We think, oh, wow, look at what Jesus has done. Look what He invites me into to experience, what He invites you into to experience.
I asked online this weekend, if people could think about a name, what the most annoying song that gets stuck in their head, what that earworm is, they just can’t get out of their head at some point, whether it was right now or in the past. And I got all kinds of interesting suggestions.
Some of them were somewhat predictable. I was expecting Baby Shark to show up. Sure enough, it did. Mariah Carey’s Christmas music, of course, should be in there because you hear it for months and it gets stuck in our heads. There’s some I had never heard of before, and thanks for mentioning those so that they’re now stuck in my head too.
But think about that for a moment. Why do those things stick in our head? It’s often because we keep hearing them over and over again.
Why were the songs from Frozen stuck in everyone’s head? They were playing everywhere. Why is Baby Shark getting stuck in people’s heads? Because you can’t seem to escape it. Why at Christmas time can we get Mariah Carey stuck in our heads every year? It’s because you can’t turn on the radio without hearing her singing.
That’s a negative thing. But when we keep coming to God’s Word, when we make sure that we come to it throughout the day and are refreshed by it, instead of having that annoying thing stuck in our head that we can’t get out that just drives us crazy, what are we going to have in our head instead? What plays over and over again? What do we murmur in our head? We murmur the promises and the hope that we find in the Bible.
Instead of hearing “Never Gonna Give You Up” stuck in your head, you hear about the one who will never give you up. Our God.
Am I engaging with God’s Word so that it is what is stuck in my ears? Sometimes it’s easier to say than to do. But as we think about what we’re called to do here and what we can experience, it’s an invitation to personalize how we approach it.
For some of us, it might be listening to God’s Word on the way to work in the car. For some of us, it might be reading a little bit throughout the day. It might be a standard Bible reading plan. It might be something much more informal.
It’s not about how we approach it in that sense. It’s about approaching it regularly so that instead of the things that we allow to get stuck in our heads because we listen to them and we watch them all the time, that God’s Word is what’s getting stuck in our heads. And as we do, we learn more about our God.
And it’s a virtuous cycle that the more we study God’s Word and the more we’re immersed in it, the more we delight in it. And the more we delight in it, the more we want to be immersed in it.
Maybe it’s getting into a Bible study, if you aren’t, so that you can have others who are encouraging you to read through God’s Word and that you’re not getting stuck and wondering what things mean. We can all encourage each other and benefit when believers, and if you’re not a believer, someone who just is curious about the Bible, all the more so. We can all benefit from each other when we come to God’s Word and we encourage each other in it.
We encourage each other in it. It’s meant to be a delight. It’s not the sort of thing that happens overnight, but it is what is the core of true happiness.
We can find all those answers on the internet that claim this or that thing or what are truly going to make us happy. You know what? They’re all going to be passing. They’re all going to fall short.
We look at ourselves and we see some wonderful things. God made us. Hopefully, we see that, but we also see people who are deeply flawed.
We look at external things, even wonderful things like the signing of a contract for a beloved player on our favorite team, and that hopefully is the Cardinals. It’s wonderful, but it passes. But God’s Word never fades. It’s always there just as He is with you and with me.
And as we understand that more and we immerse ourselves in it, we come to understand that God’s Word is not meant to be a chore. God’s Word is meant to restore. And that’s the truth of delighting, of being one of those who is blessed in the presence of God.
So let’s come before God again in prayer and ask that He would help us to understand how to do that more in each of our lives. It’s going to look different for each of us, but as we seek God’s wisdom and the power of His Holy Spirit, He invites us into that delight. Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, so often that we don’t delight, times that it does feel like a chore because we just know we have to read some of your Word and we come before it and we just feel like we have to get it done. We don’t want to be a failure. We’re so busy trying to accomplish something, we forget what we’re doing, which is actually coming before You into Your presence, seeking Your Spirit to apply Your Word to our lives.
Would You help us not to do that? Help me not to do that. Would You help us all to instead come to Your Word, seeing it as that which restores, seeing it as that which reminds us constantly of Your love for us from the very first page to the very last?
Would You give us good opportunities, whether it’s a Bible study or a good reading plan or just some friends that we talk to throughout the week that encourage us, that we would come to be those who are immersed, who spend our days murmuring Your Word in our heads, that instead of all the things that cycle again and again from television and the internet and radio, that we would instead be immersed and hear replaying in our head the truth of who You are and Your love for us?
Would You help us delight in You? Thank You for being the God that we can delight in, the God that we can seek to have help us even when we struggle, because You are with us. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, we are going to continue this series next week and dig more into God’s Word, dig more into this Psalm 1. This is the invitation, essentially, to the Psalms, and if you haven’t really spent very much time in the Psalms, I think this is a wonderful place to start. And if you’re in the Psalms all the time, sometimes we rush right past Psalm 1.
So I’m really excited for the next two weeks beyond today, we’re going to dig further into Psalm 1 and think, what does it mean to live this Psalm 1 life of delight in God? We’re going to see more of that next week and see sort of the negative flip side of that the following week.
So I do hope that you’ll join me next week as we get back into this. I hope that you’ll invite some friends to join you as well. If tonight has been an encouragement to you, please do share this video. Give it a like. Leave a comment below if you have any comments or questions.
If there’s something that has helped you to delight in God’s Word, please share that below too. We can encourage each other to delight more in our God. If there’s any way I can be praying for you this week, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to shoot me an email at the email address on screen. It’s always a delight. Or you can leave a prayer request below. What better thing than to get to delight in our God together as we pray together?
Hope you have a wonderful and blessed week. And I hope to see you again next week as we dig more into what it means to be delighted in our God.
Have a great week.
Thank you.