Psalm 1 (ESV)
August 23, 2020
preached by Pastor Ryan Bouton
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Time of Reflection Quotations

“Ultimately we all have to make a choice about how to resolve the mystery, or contradiction, at the heart of human experience: the bewildering mixture in this world of violence and beauty, extinction and flourishing, betrayal and generosity. What is the deepest truth about the world? Is the deepest truth a struggle for mastery and domination? Or is the deepest truth collaboration, cooperation and ultimately love? Since Nietzsche, the deck has been stacked decisively against the second answer. To suggest that the ultimate truth of the world is love sounds laughably and dangerously naive. Suggesting that the world is a pitched battle for dominance, on the other hand, sounds admirably grown-up, sophisticated and, above all, realistic.”

~Andy Crouch, Playing God

“Yet as truly man, Christ’s heart is not drained by our coming to him; his heart is filled up all the more by our coming to him.”

~Dane C. Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers

“To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“You’re born to shine along the way of heaven
To find you’ve been forgiven, to know it works that way

So they were right, and pride is hard to let go.
Would you believe I said so, and put it on the line?
The sun is rising – your confession won’t surprise me.

My love, lay it down
Oh let it all come down on my love
Just as sure as the sun is rising
Your confession won’t surprise me
Lay it down on my love, lay it down.”

~Smalltown Poets, “Lay It Down”

Sermon Passage

Psalm 1 (ESV)

¹ 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;
² but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.

³ 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.
⁴ The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

⁵ Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
⁶ for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.