God of the Guilty

Since we're covering the basics, let's start with the fundamentals of faith - God loves you immeasurably, we've betrayed God through sinfulness, restoration can only come through His Son Jesus Christ, life becomes purposeful and fulfilling when it is lived through faith in Christ.
Any life not grounded in these principles is doomed to an eternity in Hell at worst and only periods of deceptive happiness at its best.

True happiness - blessedness - comes only through the Father. In fact the Father sent Jesus to us for that very reason. Jesus made it clear by saying "I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly." So how do we have the blessed life? Let's look at Psalm 1 and the context under which it was written.

David, a man whom the Bible describes as after God's own heart, authored most of Psalms chapters 1 - 41. Yet though Psalms is one of the most treasured books of the Bible, there is a dark side to David. David's adulterous relationship with Bathsheba and the murder he plotted to attempt to legitimize it are well known. However there was a time in David's life before all that happened, a time when David wasn't yet openly condemned and his kingdom cursed. A time before his son was sentenced to death for his sin and his kingdom sentenced to ruin. Can you relate?

Many people today live life in failure, totally despondent. Still huge numbers of others live life in the margins, never venturing out to try anything bold for Christ because of their feelings of unworthiness. Most of these people trace this feeling back to a single event in life or a single period where they really blew it, and feel like life after that can only be OK at best. These poor people see life through their despondent lenses; looking at the news, witnessing terror, watching TV in their godless homes where their relationship with the spouse beside them falls apart, while godless children fray their last nerve. They see their problems, their addictions, and their woes as unsolveable quagmires and resign themselves to mediocre existences believing at least subconsciously that this is the best life has to offer. But for you, for me, and for them, there was a time when it just wasn't like that.

What event or period in your life can you trace this back to? What robbed you of your blessedness? What forbidden fruit cast you out of your Eden? Why do you feel God hasn't stepped in to help?

Here's something awesome about God's plan for you and me: John 1:1 says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Then in verse 14 it says that "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us". See most people view Christ as God's reaction to man's sin, but the Word - the complete Word, existed from the beginning. The arrival of Christ was the Father's plan from the beginning. Christ was the Father's proaction. It took man's sin in the garden for the revelation of Christ's full glory to be revealed. No lifeguard can ever become a famous lifeguard until he's saved someone from drowning. Similarly, the full glory of Christ could never be realized until He fulfilled His divine role as Savior. So does your sin confine you to a life of mediocrity or in the light of Holy Scripture does it create the opportunity for you to personally experience the full glory of Christ? Awesome!

So Psalm 1 contains the keys to the blessed life - avoiding evil influences and abiding in God constantly. You can't do one and not the other - they're mutually dependent. Satan thought he could do one w/o the other and the result was catastrophe on a scale the physical and spiritual world haven't seen since.

In verse 1 we are advised to avoid evil in its three forms. First we are to be happy by not walking in the counsel of the ungodly. All of us are bombarded daily with advice and advisors. Spiritual blessedness depends on only following God's advise. Sin, on the contrary, is a decision not to follow God's advice. All decisions are made from an internal struggle between the advantages and disadvantages of the choice we're considering. So when we walk in the counsel of the ungodly, we are exhibiting the ultimate lack of faith. All sin boils down to a lack of faith. Walking in ungodly counsel is a physical act that says, "God, I don't believe You and what you say about this." It's defiance and selfishness, and eternally dangerous.

Satan's choice, which he made for himself alone, changed the course of eternity forever. Six billion people walk the planet today under the influence of that supremely defiant act. Who does your choice to heed ungodly counsel affect? How many children are the result of heeding ungodly counsel? How many addicted souls became so from the choice to heed the advice of the ungodly? How many careers destroyed, homes wrecked, and churches split from heeding ungodly counsel? You can never say your choices affect no one but you. In fact, walking in ungodly counsel creates a path.

As a child I'd often visit the farm of my Great Aunt Gracie. Behind her barn was a downhill slope leading to my favorite hang out in the world - the creek. The cows on her farm weren't the brightest animals around but they did know how to walk. The knew food was at the barn on top of the hill and that water and pasture were at the bottom. Since cows aren't smart, you're really hosed if you're one of the dumb cows. At that point you're stuck following the "smart" cow in front of you. Every cattle farmer knows what I'm talking about and can visualize the paths that form on the farm from this daily feed and water cycle taking place. Sure enough on Aunt Gracie's farm was a singular path, worn to the bare dirt, just wide enough for one cow at a time, leading from the barn down to the pasture. Where has your following taken you? What paths have your decisions to heed Godly or ungodly counsel built for you? How do you get off of them?
The paths in our life clearly point to where we seek our contentment and happiness. Where do yours point? To the Bible on your nightstand, or to the bottle in the fridge, or a pointless relationship on the net? To the arms of your spouse or the comfort of a stranger? To a life walking in God's Word or a life of deception and mediocrity built upon a path of one compromise after another? The paths in our life can be found in the lingering words of our conversations, our checkbook ledger, our internet history, and the TV shows we watch. The trails we leave in life show where we place our faith. The Bible says we're blessed when our paths aren't the paths of sinners. So to begin being blessed, look down at your feet and see where you've let them take you.

Eve, in the garden, elected to walk in ungodly counsel. Her feet then took her to her husband who listened to her ungodly counsel, which caused their collective feet to go hide from God. Those two, Adam and Eve, in an instant, went from perfect people in a perfect universe to the pavers of the path leading to eternal death in a contaminated universe. The effect of their footsteps? A path of sin that caused their son to murder his brother. See, Cain followed the smart cow in front of him on the path laid out for him. Generation after generation lives out this cycle, prisoner to the high cost of acting on ungodly counsel. God warned when He gave the ten commandments that He was a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the father on the children of the third and fourth generations. What are your struggles? Alcohol? Gossip? Being critical? Divorce, homosexuality, work-a-holic? Ask your parents and you will probably see the paths of your struggles run through their lives as well. Need more proof? Look at Soloman, David's son. He took his father's adultery to a whole new level with over a thousand women. Look at Simon Peter who was scared and denied Christ. Who laid that path of fear for him? Jesus told him who when He addressed Simon as "son of Jonah", the one too scared to go where God had told him to go. Our iniquities are passed from generation to genaration until God, through Christ breaks that cycle by adopting us into His family.

One choice made wrong makes me and you a sinner. We've seen how one sin ripples through life like wildfire. Just one sin changed heaven and the hosts of angels. Just one sin changed man's lineage forever. Sadly, this doesn't surprise or even move most of us. In fact most of us are far beyond the one sin and more like the next part of Psalm 1:1 - we stand in the path of sinners. How sad! I know the effects of my bad choices, yet instead of seeing their painful effects and running from them, I did something much worse. I stood in the path.

Does an alcoholic get cured by standing in a bar or the assembly line at the brewery? Or can a gambler get cured by standing in a row of slot machines humming their tunes as they steal people's money? Of course not, yet we stand anyway.

Take a minute. That's all you need because you know (if you'll admit it), and look where you're standing. Does it match your biggest struggles? When we stand in the path of sinners we see, hear, think about, are greated by, and advised by other sinners. Every possible input into our lives is from sinners. Does it then surprise us that the fruits of that is more sin and failure?

What do your surroundings reveal about you? Who are you seeing and hearing from? What kind of counsel are they giving you?

A funny thing happens when you stand somewhere. You become part of the scenery there. Instead of being a rock that got thrown into a lake, you've been there long enough to become part of the lake floor. Why is our world so messed up? Because too many people have stood in the path of sinners and changed the landscape of our Father's world. Why is pornography rampant? Because people like us have stood in the path and made it part of everyday life...turning what once would be scandolous into simply what girls wear to school everyday. Why are teens confused about their sexuality? Becuase people like us have gone before them laying a path that makes premarital sex seem safe to travel, giving every TV show a token gay character that's attractive, disease free and charmingly unaffected by his / her choices. Why does half of all marriages end in divorce? Because the path of sin into our homes is littered with all the tools that make it so easy to happen. We pipe in garbage on TV, spend time in places to be tempted, don't filter our internet access, have no outside accountability, yet think ours will be the immune relationship to temptation.

When we park a car in the liquor store parking lot, our car makes the lot that much fuller and that much more inviting for the next car to pull in to. There are things the Bible permits us to partake of but we are to be wise in deciding if our permissions to indulge is worth the cost. Want to see our world change? Want to change your world? Then get off that path of sinners and make it a lonely road. Be a light on hill instead of another face in the crowd.

Notice that the Bible says "Blessed is the man who (doesn't)...stand in the path of sinners". It could have said "paths of sinners", but sin leads in one direction to only one destination - hell. In fact, much of Proverbs is about Soloman warning his son to avoid the ungodly counsel of adulterous women, sternly warning them to not stray into her paths because her house is the way to hell.

Every sinful choice is immediately followed by another opportunity - the opportunity to stop, repent and change, or the opportunity to continue to sin. No one can stand forever. They either walk away or pop a squat and sit right there where they've gotten comfortable. When you sit, you've made a commitment to inaction, a commitment to join the rank and file of the spiritual losers. Misery loves company and the decision to stay in your rut breeds contemptment and bitterness, as you view from your seated position the rest of the world passing you by.

This seated position is the final part of Psalm 1:1. We are told not to sit in the seat of the scornful. Who are the scornful? They are the contemptuous, disdainful, disrespectful, and mocking. Who woldn't be miserable in company like this? If you want blessedness, the Bible says to change the company you keep.

Too often we expect the other person to change. I think the most frustrated people I've ever met are those who are stuck waiting on someone else to change. We are powerless to change someone else. Only God can do that and only He is the one worthy to do it. But we can choose with whom we associate. Just as you can't stand forever in a path without becoming part of the scenery, neither can you sit and be unaffected.

All sin is disbelief in what God says. So sitting in a postion of mockery towards God is a recipe for disaster. By whom are you sitting? What mocking words are your collective voices and lives saying? Sitting in a seat of scorn is an act of judgment, looking down on those who are doing anything but sitting with you. If you weren't affected by walking under ungodly counsel or standing in the path of sinners, then you're in real danger of being in a judgmental seat, thinking you have it all figured out...or at least more figured out than those you know. Our scornful words of judgment push people away, make it harder for them to escape their path, and do nothing to get us up and moving again in the direction God wants us to go.

One of the funniest sayings I ever heard was "You should avoid using cliches like the plague". Well Psalm 1:1 lists all the things we really should avoid like the plague. Unfortunately, this is where most people stop. They just want to know the "rules" and then be left alone to follow them. Outsiders avoid church like the plague because they see how consumed we are with our arbitrary rules, like good baptists don't dance, and then they never hear the wonderful forgiving words of Christ.

It's time to admit, like David, we're guilty. God wouldn't have began His most inspirational book with it's first verse about what to avoid if we were mostly innocent folk. God is God of the guilty and until we own that, we're missing out on the blessed life.

Is following God all about obeying rules? Absolutely not. Every event and chapter in the Old Testament reflect their Author, the Christ, the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. God spends time telling us explicitly about the rules, using them as a mirror to help us understand how desperately we need His Son. Psalm 1:1 merely sets the stage to help us grasp the central, resounding theme of all the Old Testament - what comes next! Christ came next and that opened the door to the blessed life.