Psalm 1
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Friends, I bring you greetings from West Shanghai Baptist Church and from many other churches in our city where 3rd Avenue has made an incredible investment. If you're new to this church, you may not know how much you all have invested in a place quite literally on the other side of the globe. But Chariot Liu would want me to say hello from Springs of Water Baptist Church and Timothy Leo from Shining Light Baptist Church, and Benny Ma from Tanshan Baptist Church, and I could go on.
There are many. So it's a great joy for me to be back here with you, to be able to open the scriptures with you. And for my family, we came to Third Avenue after a decade on the field. We had a one and a three-year-old, and now we're sending them off to college. I don't know what happened, But this stage, it's not just a place to preach from, it's a place for my kids to jump from in my memory. I don't know if that's still allowed or not, but a great joy to be with you.
It is. Yes. I may have created trouble afterwards. I'm sorry. The Olympics opens this week. I think opening ceremony is this Friday. I don't know if you have plans to tune in. I have fond memories of watching the Olympics from China. They have different sports that they will profile. So ping pong chow is one of the main ones. Badminton, swimming and diving, of course. A few Olympics back, I was watching with my son Lawrence.
He was maybe seven or eight years old at the time. He had a thoughtful look on his face. He said, Dad, I'm an American, right? Didn't know where this was going. I said, yes, son. He said, so when America wins, I win, right? I guess so. I guess so. Then he says, but I was born in China. Yeah, that's true. So when China wins, I also win. My son had figured out that by claiming the two Olympic powerhouses, he could dominate the medal count.
So we will be watching for sure. I and my Chinese-American children. This Paris Olympics is a memorial of sorts. It's 100 years ago. It was last in Paris. It's also the 100-year anniversary of the gold medal that Eric Little won in the 400 meters. He was a Scottish sprinter who was born and raised in China and then went to the UK for school. Little's victory was famous in its own right, but of course the movie Chariots of Fire brought it fresh to a generation in the 1980s.
So it's a classic movie now, best picture some 40 years ago. Might be a good old movie to go and watch this week if you haven't seen it. The movie plot is written to depict two different approaches to competition. One approach is that of Harold Abrahams. He's an ethnically Jewish sprinter who has a passion for running because he wants to prove himself. He had been persecuted in school, and he runs because he wants to prove all his persecutors and doubters wrong.
His famous quote an hour before his race is, I will look down a corridor four feet wide and have ten seconds to justify my whole existence. The contrast is this young Eric Little, born of missionary parents whose faith in God comes to full blossom in his 20s, and even while he's running and in school at Cambridge, he's filling a call to ministry. He had begun preaching in local churches and was intending to wrap up school and go to China to serve. At one point, his sister Jenny is concerned that his running might get in the way of that call. And so after she confronts him, his quote is, Jenny, I believe God made me for a purpose, meaning China, but he also made me fast. When I run, I feel his pleasure.
Those are two very different thoughts, aren't they? Ten seconds to justify my whole existence. When I run, I feel his pleasure. Now, as it would turn out, these men ran different races in that Olympics. Abrahams wins the 100 meters. Little had intended to run that race, but because of his convictions that he should not run on Sunday, he was unable to. So he switches to the 400 meters and amazingly beats the field. So in the movie, it ends with both men happy. Both men are celebrating. But we wonder as we zoom out on the rest of their lives, how would these two different thoughts pan out? What would they look like writ large on a person's life? Which is the good way to compete? Which is the good way to live? You know, presenting two contrasting ways is a strategy to get us to think about our own lives. Whenever we're presented two ways, we stop and consider
not just which way is better, but which way are we living? What makes me tick? What drives me and motivates me. Jesus often pushed his hearers to that kind of reflection. He tells us of two gates, one narrow leading to life and one wide leading to destruction. There are two trees, one bearing good fruit, one bearing bad fruit. Two houses, one built on the sand and one built on the rock. It's persuasion. It's meant to awaken in us the desire to live differently than we might otherwise live. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference. This morning, we're going to look at Psalm 1, the first psalm in the Psalter. It's a preface to the whole book, and it's a summary of the God-centered life.
It's rightly characterized as a wisdom psalm very much written to persuade you and I to live wisely. Wisdom is the art of living well in the world God has made. So we're given these two roads, these two lives, and a choice that we must make. So wherever this finds you this morning, young or old or in the middle, if you're in a mountaintop or a valley or flat terrain, you're meant to take stock of your life as we look at this psalm.
How have you been living? How do you want to live? Where do you want to be when this life is over? Let's read Psalm 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. but his delight is in the law of the lord and on his law he meditates day and night he's like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season its leaf does not wither and 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 will perish. Now before we get to an outline, I want to begin just making a couple observations about the remarkable symmetry of this poem. One thing we
can't see in English is that the first word blessed starts with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And that last word, perish, begins with the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So this is A to Z. This is polar opposites here. But we can easily see that the whole poem is structured with this framing method that has these frames that move towards the middle. So the blessed man and the perishing man are a frame. And then the similes of the tree and the chaff are a frame.
And it all drives towards the center there. Those two phrases, in everything he does, he prospers, not so the wicked. And the big idea has to be here. But of course, the psalmist wants us to choose the positive side, to be the prosperous and the fruitful man. So let's state the big idea of the psalm this way. The one who delights in God's word is the enduringly fruitful person. The one who delights in God's word is the enduringly fruitful person.
I want to ask three questions about this man or woman we see pictured here. Number one, how do they live? How do they live? Number two, what do they like? What do they like? And then third and finally, where do they end? Where do they end? So first, how do they live? Verses one and two. Let's look there again. 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. This word translated blessed is often translated happy. It's a word in the plural form, so you could translate it as many are the blessednesses of the man. Or if you leave it singular, maybe better, truly happy is the man. Or more properly, the person. This isn't gender-specific. It's a compelling way to begin, isn't it? Who is the truly happy person?
These two verses consider how they live, what they don't do, and then what they do do. What don't they do? They walk not in the counsel of the wicked. A person's walk is their manner of life, how they conduct their personal business, their relationships. How do they live? It says they don't walk in the counsel of the wicked. Wicked here doesn't refer to a class of sinners. This is not a really, really bad sinner. It refers generally to those who don't walk with God.
People who don't consider what God wants them to do. They're not living with reference to God. And from God's perspective, this is wicked. And we see here the wicked have counsel to give. They're speaking their own philosophies and their own conventional wisdom. They're certainly putting out TikTok videos. They're trending on Twitter when they can. They're definitely podcasting. The blessed person doesn't subscribe.
They're not listening to them. Neither do they stand in the way of sinners. This worldly counsel or philosophy forms a way of living. We're moving from walking to standing now. So these behaviors are forming a certain rut. You might think of the way old wheels would form grooves in the ground that each successive traveling cart would move in. This is the way it's done. This is the way we educate children. This is the way we spend money.
This is the way we work the system. This is the way we enjoy life, satisfy our cravings, gain approval, whatever it is. These are the shows we watch. This is how we spend our free time here in Louisville. Think about the fact that the world around you is constantly trying to press you into a mold. But the blessed person here doesn't follow the mold. They don't stand in the way of sinners. Sinners think they're weird. neither do they sit in the seat of scoffers this word scoffer is often used in the book of proverbs to describe someone who's scornful of the way of wisdom they mock it and laugh at it sometimes we we we read of a father trying to speak to his children like in proverbs 13 1 a wise son hears his father's instruction but a scoffer doesn't listen to rebuke I have a difficult question to ask you children out there.
Do you at all ever roll your eyes at your parents? If you do, two things I want to say to you. First, I'm with you. I've done it many times in my life. But second, it's one of the dumbest things that we could do to roll your eyes at your parents. I mean, they're trying to tell you to work hard, to study hard. They're trying to tell you who you should spend time with and who you shouldn't spend time with. Now they might be wrong in what they're telling you in the moment, but for sure they want the best for you and they can see things that you may not be able to see.
You should listen to them instead of being a scoffer. Proverbs 21, 24 gives us the general description of the scoffer. Scoffer, it says there, is the name of the arrogant, haughty man who acts with arrogant pride. Now, one of the things that's most evident about the description here is that there's a progression, right? We can all see it. We go from walking while listening to counsel to standing in this pathway of the sinner and to sitting down in this seat of scoffers. So these patterns of thinking and behaving can become a settled way of life for us.
It's important for us to remember that sin doesn't rest. We might think we're just dabbling with ideas out there. We're just watching certain TV dramas that normalize an unbiblical sexuality. We're just listening to certain music. We're just playing certain video games. We're just joining the crowd at the bar. But you may, in fact, be getting deeper and deeper into a hole you can't climb out of. The scariest thing about ending up as a scoffer is that you can no longer listen to the rebuke of those that care about you.
You're just laughing inside or outside. I want you to stop and think about your biggest temptations in life right now. Your church covenant, as best as I remember it, calls you to walk carefully in the world denying ungodliness and worldly desires. Does that describe your walk right now? Careful? We're called to be in the world, but not of the world. Are you living differently than the people around you?
So that's what the blessed person doesn't do. But what do they do? That's verse 2, their contrasting choice. Told there, his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. Law here doesn't refer to a specific type of revelation. It's not just the Ten Commandments or something. The word is Torah. It refers broadly to all of God's word, all of his instruction and teaching. It refers to God's word as it's revealed to God's people. And this, we're told, is the delight of the blessed person.
It's a delight which leads to day and night meditation. And that order is important. The delight becomes the duty, doesn't it? The affection becomes the action. Psalm 119, 97. Oh, how I love thy law. It is my meditation all the day. We love it, so we meditate on it. I want to head off a possible objection here. When we're talking about delighting in God's word, loving his word, sometimes people get nervous.
It can sound like we're talking about becoming an academic kind of person, a bookish or intellectual person. You may have met someone who seems excited about all of their learning and they just want to show it off to you how much they know about the Bible. Has that ever happened around here? I wonder. Maybe it's purely academic to them. My college New Testament professor was a thoroughgoing atheist who didn't seem to care one whit about the Bible beyond academic research, but that's not what's meant here.
This is a delight, more the way lovers in letter-writing days of old would look at the letters written to them. I was sorting through some old papers when a relative died, and amidst some financial stuff, I came across a series of letters that were love letters written before they got married. And I didn't know what I was looking at. I feel a little embarrassed as I start to read it. My face started turning red. I didn't know what to do. I mean, they're dead, but I'm reading it.
And I was thinking to myself what it would have been like to get a beautiful letter. I could picture the person just going line by line and reading and rereading it and going over it, memorizing it even. The person who wrote that letter wouldn't confuse that behavior as academic. No, the delight in the letter is because of the delight in the person. That's what's pictured here. And it does indeed lead to action. On the instruction of Yahweh, this person meditates day and night. You've got to travel back in time to imagine the Torah on a scroll. You had to travel to read it or to hear it read. Then you've got to commit it to memory so you can think on it. You can turn it over in your mind as you walk home and as you're in the field working the next day. Maybe you've seen videos of Orthodox Jews to this day at the Western Wall mumbling to themselves. They're not mumbling, they're repeating the words of Torah.
You know, I was thinking about this and reflecting on a common modern sentiment that I hear where people express thankfulness for modern technology. And I always chuckle about it because it's always on a Zoom call and people thank God for Zoom. I don't like Zoom. They're not wrong to do that. I mean, we should be thankful for all things. But there's always another side to technology, isn't there? Thankful to have electronic resources at our disposal, but let's think about what we've done with the Bible.
So a hundred years ago, a family might have a family Bible that was the treasure of their family home. It was the thing that was open to read to the whole family nightly. And if there's a fire in the home, you grab the family Bible. That's how precious it is. Fifty years ago in China, the Bible was something that you lined up to get 15 minutes with. Scribble it on little pieces of paper to take it home. It was that precious.
Twenty-five years ago in China, we were still smuggling Bibles in from Hong Kong. Now we've got unprecedented, just unbelievable access. I mean, you don't have a Bible? Just go to the app store, type in ESV Bible. You can have it 30 seconds from now. It's amazing. It's wonderful. But friends, what have we done with it? This person was described 3,000 years ago. They had none of those technologies at their fingers.
But they memorized and they meditated day and night. As they woke up in the morning, on the way to work, as they ate lunch, as they came home, as their head hit the pillow at night. But you realize, do you believe, that there's an eternal God in the heavens, a God of justice and mercy, a God whose every word is true, who has spoken at various times and in various places, but in these last days has spoken by his Son.
And the words about his Son and spoken by his Son are recorded in this book. You believe all that? Does your life reflect that belief? You believe like that's true? Friends, we need to take this first point in hand and make some application to ourselves, very practically. How should the picture of the blessed person, the truly happy person who delights and meditates on God's word, affect us?
What kind of prescription is there for us who live in the most distracted of ages? Three prescriptions. Number one, read the Bible wisely. Which means think through when in your schedule you're going to do it. Everything that matters most to you gets planned in your schedule. That's true. Everything that matters most. Most have found first thing in the morning is the only way to make sure that it's going to happen.
Certainly if you have small children, that may be true. There are other windows as well. Wisely means doing it systematically. You were meant to eat food from all 66 food groups in the Bible. If you've been a Christian for a few years and you've never read through the whole Bible, that's a great place to start. Just take the table of contents, just read a book, and then put a line there showing you've done it. Just work your way all the way through it. And wisely means reading carefully, perhaps with a pencil in hand.
Make some notes, maybe with a notebook, so you can write down your thoughts, your questions, your application. So prescription number one, read the Bible wisely. Prescription number two, read the Bible prayerfully. Pray Psalm 119.18. Open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things from your law. Pray for understanding. Pray for humility.
Ask the Spirit who inspired the Word to illuminate your heart. Prescription number three, read the Bible corporately, meaning with other Christians. We're doing that here in Gathered Worship. Meet up with someone in addition to that this week to read the Bible together. Maybe read the passage that's going to be preached on next week. Maybe just read through a book of the Bible together. Discover the joy of sharing your thoughts and hearing somebody else's thought about a passage of the Bible.
In China, the teens get in on this through what we call bubble tea reading. Bubble tea Bible reading. We like bubble tea where we are. I don't know what the equivalent would be here. Heine Brothers Bible reading. I don't know what you would do. But meet up with someone. Teens, it's the coolest thing that's going here in Louisville. Read the Bible corporately. So read it, meditate on it, and be blessed. That's how this blessed person lives, what they do and don't do.
But let's ask, secondly, what do they like? Look at verses 3 and 4. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. Its leaf does not wither. And all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. We've seen what the blessed person does. What are they like? What is the result of their delight and day and night meditation on the instruction of Yahweh?
A picture is worth a thousand words, so the picture here is a tree. Now, I think it's useful here to picture the topography of the Middle East. this is not like the rolling hills of Kentucky. We have some rolling hills if you get outside of Shanghai. They're covered with bamboo and anji. Neither of those pictures work. This is a part of the world that's more arid. I was visiting that part of the world earlier this year and I was just amazed how much sand there is for much of the stretch. And then you get to a place that maybe it's lower in a valley. There's more of a water source and you have some trees. You have some vegetation so that the trees stand out more because there are fewer of them. We should picture a tree that has been intentionally planted somewhere. So the word planted here is more properly transplanted. So this meditation on Yahweh's instruction is like the choice to take a sapling and plant it next to the water source where it can send down roots and flourish.
And we have these two phrases that fill out the picture. It bears its fruit in season. This is a productive tree. It isn't just surviving itself. It's got things to share with others. Its blessedness is overflowing. You can always tell a healthy Christian because they've got fruit hanging off of them. They live a trail of encouraged people wherever they go. And it says its leaf does not wither. So now we're thinking of times of drought. that may come times of difficulty don't cause this tree to shrivel up they're able to ride out the storm the tree is enduring it's stable now when i think about this picture i can't help but think about older saints that i have known that have lived a lifetime of fruitfulness so i think of bob and maxine zopf my wife's home Church in Washington, D.C. They came there in the 1950s to work for the government, stayed around
through the decades, sat in the same seat. One of the striking things as they aged is they kept getting to know successive generations of younger people that would come. And as they retired, the missionaries were their special focus. So Megan was one of their favorites, of course. That makes a lot of sense. I married into that. Every time we were home, Bob and Maxine would take us out to dinner, and Bob would explain that at every meal you have to have meat, potatoes, a green vegetable, and a yellow vegetable. This was an important truth to him. You would go to the prayer meetings to hear Maxine pray, the most unselfconscious, beautiful prayers. They were just the kind of people that when you're with them, you think this is the real thing. They've got the genuine article. I want to be around them. Bob died a few years back. Maxine is in her final days, I suppose, from her frail condition last we saw her. But spiritually, she's a glorious
tree. She's a grand old tree. There's another picture here, isn't there? The wicked are like chaff. The wind blows away. Chaff is the leftover husk after wheat is harvested. After you beat it, you can throw the wheat in the air. The kernel will fall to the ground and make a growing pile of grain. But the chaff is so light that even a slight breeze will just take it away. It's weightless, it's meaningless, it's worthless. It's quite a contrast to that stable and enduring tree. It's here today and it's gone tomorrow. Some people are like chaff, but you don't want to be like that, do you? The contrast is summarized at the very center. All that he does, he prospers.
the wicked are not so everything he does prospers not the wicked you know i think when we come to a verse like this one we need to avoid two mistakes one is to take the path of the prosperity gospel which is huge in asia we are constantly dealing with it it reads a statement like this one and turns it into a formula for success. I have a good friend, Xia Yang, who for years was a part of a businessman's Christian lunchtime fellowship where they would have people come and give testimonies at this fellowship.
And it drove Xia Yang a little bit crazy because the testimonies were always basically the same. They would go something like this. My life was a wreck. My business was going poorly. My wife didn't like me. I was overweight and out of shape. Then I gave my life to Christ and everything turned around. My business is worth millions. I ran a marathon last year and my wife likes me again. And all of it might be true, right?
It's not like when you're listening to that, you're thinking, no, it didn't. I mean, it's probably true. But the fear, of course, when every testimony is like that, that the people hearing it will want to sign up for the goodies, but not sign up for God. That's a problem to read the text that way, that it's somehow a formula about physical, tangible, right here, right now, game. The person delighting in God's word isn't going to be confused about that.
They know that Jesus said, in this world you will have trouble. They know that Paul went around preaching to the churches through many tribulations you'll enter the kingdom of God. They've read about Jeremiah the weeping prophet and the faith hall of fame that they were stoned and they were sawed in two and they were put to death with the sword. So they're not going to be led astray. And we shouldn't read the text that way. But I think there's another danger for us when we read this text.
And that's that we would dismiss it out of hand and forget that success, rightly understood, should be the expectation of the godly. We read a verse like 2 Chronicles 26.5 about Uzziah. As long as he sought the Lord, God gave him success. Old Testament professor Mark Furtado, great RTS professor, puts it this way. When we live in keeping with God's word, we live with the confident expectation of succeeding in all we do.
So two temptations to avoid. Now, some of us will come to these words with a great inner struggle because success doesn't feel like the rule of our lives right now, perhaps. If that's the case, we should start with ourselves. We should start by considering whether we struggle because we haven't been living in keeping with God's Word. We haven't planted ourselves by streams of water. Perhaps we're anxious because we haven't been meditating on God's sovereignty over all of life.
Maybe we feel like we're on the miserable treadmill of trying to prove ourselves to God and the world because we've forgotten the meaning of grace. Or maybe we've started thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought. We start making everything about us. It's my career, my comfort, my satisfaction, my ministry. Rather than making our lives about following our Lord who lived, giving his life in service to others. Okay, so this is the picture of the blessed person.
We've seen how they live. Now we've seen what they're like. Let's consider third and finally, where do they end? Verse 5. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment or sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. So far the contrast has been two ways to live and the resulting kind of life that we can picture.
The scene shifts now to the very end of life and even beyond. When it says there, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. We have an Old Testament glimpse into the details of Judgment Day, when everyone must pass before God. Everyone has to give an account of themselves to God. To stand in that judgment means to pass or to endure through it because you're approved.
The picture here is of a congregation, an assembly of the righteous who have come through that judgment together. Verse 6 says that this is because the Lord knows the way of the righteous. Or the older translations say the Lord watches over the way of the righteous. He knows them because he watches over them, because they're his. But not the wicked. They shall perish. I think it's essential that we see in these words the grace of God operating in the lives of the righteous.
This will help us solve a riddle of the Old Testament. Who is the truly righteous man that lives in a Psalm 1 sort of way? Who is the one who fulfills all this? It's not Abraham. In fear, he gave up his wife in the moment of danger. Not Moses, he struck the rock in anger and impatience and was made to die outside the promised land. Not David, he of adultery and murder. It's not until the coming of Jesus that we see a perfectly righteous man, the blessed man of this psalm.
He's the one who never walked in the counsel of the wicked or stood in the way of sinners or sat in the seat of mockers. His delight was truly in the law of the Lord. We see him quoting the book of Deuteronomy to the devil in the desert. We see him quoting the book of Daniel to Pontius Pilate at his trial. We see him quoting the Psalms on the cross. And the good news is that we who are unrighteous, who haven't lived this way, are given the gift of his righteousness by faith.
When we trust in Christ, you can do that this morning if you've never done it before. That's the most significant thing in any person's life to reckon with, that you need a righteousness that has to come from outside of you and that only Jesus is offering that righteousness. If you'll turn from your sins and trust in him this morning, then you'll be given that righteousness as a gift. We call it imputed righteousness. It becomes yours.
And that righteousness that comes to you as a gift will then become in you a growing righteousness that will start to change the way you live. So by all means, we pursue that righteousness in our words, in our financial dealings, in where we put our eyes, and how do we think. And this gives us joy and confidence that we are truly a child of God and truly saved. And as we look ahead to this final day, it gives us confidence that we will stand in the assembly of the righteous.
I want us to think about this text in application to the way we view others and the way we view ourselves. First, in the way we view others. It occurs to me that one of our greatest struggles in life is envy. And it comes to us as a product of walking in the counsel of the wicked. we can easily adopt a view of success that is not from God. And then when we see people around us that aren't the Psalm 1 person, we start to envy them.
Maybe we see someone in our office getting promoted. We see an old college friend who's making a lot of money. Maybe it's just a general feeling that people around us are doing well and we're not doing well. When we think this way, it's sad because if someone doesn't know the Lord and is successful, they're in great danger because they don't know what true success really is.
So friend, replace the envy that you struggle with in your heart with compassion for them. Make it a prayer for them. Let it lead you to opportunities for evangelists. secondly and most importantly we've got to apply this to how we view ourselves we've got to examine ourselves using the lens of psalm one william plumber writes this one of the most striking effects of the last judgment will be a perfect and eternal separation between the righteous and the wicked thenceforth they can meet no more forever here they often live together protected by the same laws, inhabiting the same city, frequenting the same houses of worship, of business, and of recreation, members of the same family, or lying in the same bed.
And yet, when on the last day they shall part, their intercourse shall never be renewed while eternity endures. It should be a great business of our lives to examine ourselves, whether we are righteous or ungodly. To this end, in part, this whole psalm is given to us. An aversion to this duty is no good sign. So friends, let's examine ourselves. Which way are you living?
What are you like? How will you end? The movie Chariots of Fire made it seem like everything worked out wonderfully for all. 1924, the Olympics. Not everybody would view Eric Little's life as a success as it unfolded. Many lamented the loss of his athletic career as he returned to China as it was descending into the war years of the 1930s and 40s. He would spend most of his time in Shandong province doing ministry, but the Japanese war machine eventually overran that territory.
he was scooped up with a lot of foreigners and put into a camp where he would spend his last days. His ministry there was astounding based on eyewitness reports. One eyewitness said, we had no idea what to do with the teenagers in the camp, but Eric Little gathered them all. He would run races with them. He could no longer win. He was playing chess. He was sharing the gospel with them. He had already sent his pregnant wife and two daughters to Canada, so they were safe. They would spend his last year separated from him. He would never meet his third child.
In the camp, amidst brutal conditions, he would eventually die of an undiagnosed brain tumor the age of 43, just months before the end of the war. And so I guess it makes sense in some ways that people could view his life as not prosperous. That was certainly the attitude of a newspaper man who regarded him as slightly out of his mind when he asked him in 1932 whether he was glad he chose the path he did over the one he could have had.
The man asked, don't you miss the limelight? The rush, the frenzy, the cheers, the rich red wine of victory? Eric's humble reply was, a fellow's life counts far more at this than the other. I think that's true. The one who delights in God's word is the enduringly fruitful person. Let's pray together. Father, there are so many ways you've been good to us.
Thankful for the Lord Jesus Christ this morning. And we're thankful for the word that you've spoken, which allows us to know you. We pray that you would make us people who treasure it, who delight in it, and who meditate on it day and night. And thus I pray that you would make us enduringly fruitful. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you.