Rhythm and Verse

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

You know, music runs through every part of our lives. We have wedding marches. We have funeral dirges. We have fight songs for our alma mater. We even have our favorite songs, maybe the first song or the song that was playing when we danced for the first time with our spouse. We have all these songs that mark different eras in our lives. In fact, in my home, we had a huge picture that's full of all these albums that are all of our favorite albums all the way from 1978, you know, Kenny Rogers, The Gambler, all the way through, you know, just college and beyond. And so music is, it tells the story of our lives, but it also includes our spiritual heritage. is a big part of our spiritual heritage. So the spiritual songs that we grew up singing, we learned about the Lord through them. So it doesn't matter what you were singing, you were learning about the Lord and you were connecting with your church through those songs

that you were singing together as a church body. I can still remember crying my eyes out to the the song open the eyes of my heart. I can still, I can feel it, I can see it. Every time I hear that song I'm brought back to college. Or did you feel the mountains tremble? Same story. You know, just those songs are precious to me and that's why it's so hard to let music go. It's hard to let that go because you grew up on it, you know? And when you look back on it, you think, oh man, that music was way better than it is today. And maybe that's true and maybe that's not. But the reasons that we feel that way are due in large part to our emotions. They're connected to emotions that are irreplaceable, right? The song that was playing that I associate with Becoming a Father, right? That's a specific album for me, okay? It's Switchfoot, Beautiful let down, right? It's a specific album for me, it came out the same year my son was born,

and it just doesn't compare with whatever's popular. It doesn't compare with these other things because nothing can compare with the emotion of becoming a father for the first time, right? So music is just tied in to much of how we see the world, how we think, and part of the science behind that, behind how music does this is because it activates both sides of the brain at the same time. Typically things only activate one side or the other side but music has a way, if you will, to make us think and feel at the same time. Music has a way to engage our compassion and our logic. So music is powerful and And where it gets interesting for us is that the Psalms that we're going to be looking through is inherently musical. There's even musical instructions on how to sing some of them. These are songs, literally. And because the book of Psalms is so musical, it's going to hit us the same way music does

on both sides of the brain. And this is why this series is called the Rhythm and the Voice. Verse, not voice, the Rhythm and the Verse, sorry. It's because there's two sides to every song, or there's two sides to music. There's the rhythm, the part that moves you, the tone, the beat, the emotional response. And then there's the verse, which is like the message of the song, the theme, the idea behind it. And we know this instinctively. It's hard for us to articulate it, but we know, for example, if you sing Mary Had a Little Lamb, the emotion of it is just bright and happy and joyous and kind of carefree. But if you sang that in a minor key, if you sang it in kind of a depressed voice, it would just sound weird. It would probably sound like a horror movie. I don't know, but it would just sound very strange because the rhythm and the verse don't match. And so music has both of these things going on and because Psalms is made up, it's a book,

but it's made up of 150 Psalms, right? What we're going to be doing is looking at the rhythm and the verse that cover most of those Psalms. The way that we're going to divide this up, because Psalms is 150 of them, the way that we're going to divide it up into different books, right? book 1 that's all 1 through 41 book 2 is 42 through 72 it's not evenly divided but they are divided along different themes sometimes they're divided along different authors right King David isn't the only one who wrote Psalms there's also you know the sons of Cora there's a sapph there's a song of Moses in there there's a song of Solomon in there and so what we're gonna do is be moving through these Psalms according to the books. And so we're going to start book one next week. Today what we're going to do is we're going to settle on Psalms one and two. Psalms one and two

serve as an extended introduction into the entire book of Psalms. So as we read one and two and we look at what it's talking about, what it's helping us see, we'll understand some basic things about the entire book. So as we then move through book one, two, three, four, and five, we're going to see those same ideas recur. And this is why in part we call this series the rhythm and the verse because Psalm 1 is the verse. Psalm 2 is the rhythm. Let me explain. Let's start with Psalm 1. Okay? Psalm 1, we're gonna read just the first two verses for right now, Psalm 1 and 2, it 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. Okay, in Psalms 1 there is a huge connection between our hearts and God's law. Right? And what we see in verse 2, it says,

it says, this blessed is the man, he avoids all these things in verse 1, right? He doesn't, he doesn't walk in the Council of the Wicked, he doesn't stand the way of sinners, he doesn't sit and see scoffers. But what he does do is he delights in God's law. He delights in God's law. When we hear about delighting in the law, that can sound a little foreign to us. We think about obeying a law, but not delighting a law. And so we're going to need to think about it differently. So think about this. Think about a good parent, how a good parent is going to set up rules for their child. They're going to set up laws, and those laws are going to give them boundaries, protection. A good parent hopes not simply for dry obedience.

You want obedience from your child. If you're a good parent, you want your child to obey, but you want more than that. You want your child to see the love that's packed into the law or the rule that you're giving them. You want children to delight in the law that you have set down if you're a good parent. But typically, like most people, typically, we will only delight in a law when we watch it protect us. We will only delight in a law when we watch it protect us. Let me give you an example. I want you to imagine in your backyard, there's a telephone pole being worked on, right? And there's some, you know, a lot of electricity is going on in those telephone poles. And what the telephone pole worker does, he goes in your backyard and he sprays with this kind of this chalk spray. Sprays a big line, right? And it's like, okay, don't cross this line, okay? And even, you know, the worker talks to you about it,

you tell your kids about it, you gotta show them the line, don't cross this line, okay? And of course, like any good child, they're curious. And what are they gonna do? They're gonna get right up to that line, okay? They're not gonna, well, they might try to go past that line. But any kid, any kid is gonna wanna get close as possible and see what's going on because they're curious. Now what happens when one of those wires gets loose and starts kind of waving everywhere and then ends up seriously harming that telephone pole worker and all of that happens mere feet away from that line that worker put in the ground. What happens is in that moment, the children that are standing at that line that witness all of that, that boundary that you've just spread in the line, it it becomes real and they begin to see the protection. They begin to understand, oh if I were closer, whenever all that happened, I could have been severely hurt

like that telephone worker, the telephone pole worker. The protection becomes real And when the protection becomes real, we begin to understand what it's like. We begin to see that God's law, we begin to delight in it because we understand it protects us. It doesn't just restrain us, it protects us. And so when we talk about delighting, verse 2, delighting in the law of the Lord, it's this understanding that it's there for our protection, not just to restrain us, But it doesn't just stop with delight look at the second half of verse 2 on his law He meditates day and night so meditation here is key Meditation kind of has some strange Associations when we talk about meditating sometimes people think of yoga poses sometimes people think of chanting, you know, we think oh We think of meditation and but really biblical meditation Right what the meditation that we're talking about in Psalms and really all throughout Scripture

has a lot to do with reading, reciting, memorizing, turning it over in your mind. And the way we talk about that is how we say we talk about rehearsing what is true. We rehearse timeless truths. And I've said it before, I'll say it again, you become when you rehearse, you become what you rehearse. So meditation here is important because the Bible is written as meditation literature. Look, the Bible is a big book, right? It's 66 books in one. It's old in New Testament. It takes people years to read the whole thing through. But the way that the Bible was written, the intention of it is not for us to just, you know, just memorize the whole thing and be able to, you know, recall verses, chapter and verse. That's fine. Memorization is fine. but the idea is that we meditate on it. The idea is that we rehearse what's in Scripture. What we see in Psalms 1-2 is the Lord asking us to read the Bible

regularly. That we should be turning verses over in our minds. That we should be meditating on what the Lord has said. And this is why Psalm 1, I'm summarizing it kind of as the verse because it's the ideas, it's the themes that we get over time, it's the gist of Scripture that we get only as we meditate. I don't know if you've ever watched a movie, you know, 10, 15, 20 times, but sometimes when you watch a movie more than once you see something different because you've watched at once and now you're watching it again, you see something more, and I don't mean like little Easter eggs here and there, I mean you understand the movie more fully. That's the same idea that you're only going to get some things, not as you read it once, but as you read it 20 times, as you meditate on it, as you turn it over in your mind, right? Psalms one is the verse because meditation helps us get the gist, the idea, the theme, the

big themes in scripture as we meditate on the Bible. And so meditation here in verse 2, when meditation is paired with delight, we get this picture of someone with a mature trust in the one who is over them. The picture that we get is somebody who is meditating on what what has been told to them, and they're delighting in it. And you get the picture of someone who's mature, who now trusts the rules that are given to them, they appreciate the laws that are around them. And it's like whenever a child grows up into an adult, and they're able to look back on all that was given to them, on all that was done for them. They see all the wisdom now, they see all the sacrifice now. I remember when my stepfather entered the picture, he married my mom when I was 11 years old, almost 12. My older brother was 13. God bless him, he took on two young boys and really trained us how to be men.

He taught us how to do chores. He taught us financial wisdom. He taught us to be tough. He taught us to forgive. He taught us to pray. Only later, only later, and I think I was probably in my late teens, early 20s, I realized all that he gave up just to marry my mom and to take on me and my brother as a stepfather. Only in retrospect could I delight in all those rules he gave me because I saw how it shaped me. I appreciated them like I had not before. And what this does, this points to the larger truth in Psalm 1 and that is that meditation on the law. Meditation on God's law is an invitation to know Him personally. As we meditate on it, as we delight in it, right, that we're going to not just learn about God through it, but that we're going to get to know God personally. And we see this idea all over the Psalms. Psalms 1830, this God, His way is perfect. The Word of the Lord proves true. The Word of the Lord,

the Law of the Lord's Savior. He is a shield for all those who take refuge in Him. Psalm 40 verses 6 and 8, In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear. For offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said, Behold I have come. In the scroll of the book it has written of me. I delight to do your will. Oh my God, your law is within my heart. In Psalms, as you read them, God's word, God's law, that is his faithfulness. God's word is his protection. God's word is his wisdom. God's word is his grace. When we meditate on God's word. We're not simply rehearsing facts. We are meditating on God Himself.

Meditation on the, whenever we meditate on the Bible, we learn about God. That's true, but we also come to know Him personally. God uses Scripture to speak to us and invite us into a relationship with Him. As we meditate on Scripture, the Spirit works that in our hearts, We begin to see things differently and we begin to know God personally. And in our day and age, and I've mentioned this a few times, but maybe not like this, it can sometimes be trendy to not trust the Bible as God's word. It can sometimes be trendy to say, you know, like, hey, I love Christianity, but like all the Bible, all the rules in the Bible, I don't know, you know, it seems really, you know, there's some rules I want to throw off, There's some rules I want to put on. There's some, you know, I want to mix and match. I want to take scissors to the Bible

But look like a child Just like a child who hates their parents rules If they grow up hating their parents rules And I mean hating not just kind of being bothered by them every once in a while if they hate them If they were sent their parents rules, they will grow up to despise their parents And when you do that, when you see that, anybody that says, hey, you know what, there's some things I like about the Bible, but there's a lot of things that, you know, I don't really listen to. I think it's outdated. I think it's blah, blah, blah. What you have is someone who mistrusts the Bible. And if you're mistrusting the Bible, you're mistrusting God. Now I don't mean honest questions and discussion, right? If you have some real questions about the reliability of Scripture, that's great. And you're going to need room to ask and answer those questions. That's great.

That's not what I'm talking about. There is a way to approach Scripture where it's beyond just normal suspicion. It's like you are sitting over it. You are sitting over Scripture and you're saying, well, I don't know if this is true, I don't know if this is true. What you're doing is you're not really viewing the Bible as God's Word. You're viewing it like a religious book that's just there to keep people civil or to help the marginalized. And you say, oh, it's outdated. We shouldn't listen to what the Bible says. The Bible. The Bible is what we should meditate on day and night. The Bible is the living and active Word of God. The Bible will pierce your soul. God will speak to you through the pages of Scripture. God will speak to your specific life circumstances. He will prompt you to act in real time. He will inspire you, blessing other people. And He will do that as you are just simply reading words on a page.

I know that doesn't make much sense, but it's actually how it works. You read the words and the Spirit begins to speak to you. And there's really no other way I can put it. That when you meditate on Scripture, God speaks through that. Charles Spurgeon says, the great Baptist preacher, says nobody ever outgrows Scripture. The book widens and deepens with our years. And that should really just help us understand meditation, right? As we trust the Bible as God's word, then we will meditate on it. As we do that, it's not like it will get thinner. It's that it will get actually not more complex, but just deeper. It'll speak to things you didn't know it spoke on. It'll reveal things in you that you didn't know were there. And it'll grow you in a way that you didn't even suspect. And just reading the rest of Psalm 1, it's like a tree planted by streams of water

yields a stream of season. happens when we meditate on God's Word and we will not regret it. We will be blessed by it. There will be joy eternal. This is the verse of Psalms and we see it in Psalm 1. This is the content, the gist. Now I want to move on to the rhythm in Psalm 2. Okay? Psalm 2 and Psalm 1 are very different from one another. Okay? Psalm 2 builds a scene for us. And I want you to listen for the characters in the first three verses, and we're going to go through the entire song. First three verses of Psalm 2 says, Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us. Okay, there are three Sets of characters there in the first set you got nations peoples kings rulers

That's all the same thing. That's just worldly powers. We're just gonna call them worldly powers They're all meant as synonyms in verse 1 and 2 So that's that's the first kind of set of characters. You have the first set is worldly power. Then you have the Lord God and Then you have his anointed Okay, that's a third person. It's not like that's another name for God. It's somebody that we'll see later. It's somebody that he is giving anointing to. He's giving authority to. And what's going on in the first three verses is that the worldly powers here, you know, the kings, the nations, people's rules, they are conspiring. There's a rebellion going on. And what are they rebelling against? They're rebelling against the bonds and the cords or the constraints. They're rebelling against God's law. They're saying, oh hey, God's law isn't here to protect us. God's holding us back.

We can see this all the way back in Genesis 3, whenever Adam and Eve are being deceived. What is the lie? The lie that the serpent tells Adam and Eve is that, hey, God's holding out on you. God is restricting you from something that's really going to be great for you. God just doesn't want you to have it. And that's exactly the same lie that you see in the first three verses in Psalm 2. You have these worldly powers coming together and saying, you know what? All these shackles, all these things that are protecting us, they're just constraining us. They're not really protecting us. And so they want to throw it away. Okay, next three verses, we'll see what happens. Verse 4, 5, and 6, Psalm 2. It says, "...he who sits in the heavens laughs." So God's not too concerned. "...the Lord holds them in derision. Then..." This is scary. "...then he will speak to them in his wrath,

and terrify them in his fury, saying, As for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill." Again, you see the Lord and his anointed here. So the Lord God is unfazed. He's not worried about them at all. In fact, He calls their bluff. He says, you know what? You can do, you can break whatever bond you want to break. I've got a plan of my own. I have set my King, the true King, the worldly power, the real power. I have set my King one sign. I have a different plan. And what He does is He makes this King that He's going to set up. This is the same person as the anointed in verse 2. He's going to make this king the focal point. Let's look at the next three verses, verses 7, 8, and 9. It says, I will tell of the decree, the Lord said to me, You are my son, today I have begotten you. Ask me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.

You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. What he's saying is, I am going to put my son, the Lord God is saying, I'm going to put my son, which is the king, the anointed, right? I'm going to put everything on him. I'm going to give him all authority, all power. I'm going to give him the will to do whatever he wants. And there are going to be no negotiations. There's going to be no, oh, you know, hey, maybe I should, maybe I should revoke some of that power. I'm going to give everything to Him and He is then going to judge you. He's going to break you with a rod of iron. He's going to dash you to pieces like a potter's vessel. And He leaves them with this advice in verses 10 through 12. And this is where He ends it. He says, Now therefore, O kings, be wise. This is the Lord God talking to all these worldly powers.

Be warned, O rulers of the earth! Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Verse 12, Kiss the sun. Kiss the sun. Bow. Pledge allegiance to the sun. Lest he be angry and you perish in a way, For his wrath is quickly kindled. are all those who take refuge in Him. His advice to these kings, he's saying, look, I'm about to turn this, I'm about to turn my son loose. If you want to survive at all, if you want to see any kind of blessing, if you want to live, if you do not want to be destroyed, kiss the son. Pledge allegiance to the son. And And notice he doesn't say, hey, put your bonds back on. Put those chords back together. You know, start doing right, no, no. He simply says, fall on the mercy of the Son.

Fall on His mercy. Take refuge in Him. And this is the rhythm of the Psalms. This is Psalm 2. This is why Psalm 2 is the rhythm of it. This is the rhythm of the Psalms. Because we're not just reading or memorizing or meditating, although that is great, that's the verse, but there's also the rhythm where we are living in the grace. We are bathed in the mercy of Jesus. We understand from the outset that we don't deserve to be following Him. We don't deserve to have community through the Spirit. We don't deserve to be following the Lord at all. It is the grace and mercy of Jesus that coats everything.

It's the rhythm by which we move. It's the glasses through which we see everything in the Psalms. It's, whenever it says blessed are those who take refuge in Him. This is the message of the Psalm and it's found. In Psalms one and two together, when you read them together, This is the verse. This is the rhythm. This is why we call this series, Rhythm and Verse, right? Psalms, rhythm and verse is why we've called it that because if we're going to read scripture at all, if we're gonna understand what the Lord is calling us to do, we need to understand both that it's going to take meditation on what He has told us. You know, sometimes it's so easy to take the Bible for granted. It just seems like we're inundated with it. It's the most popular book in the world, right? But often we can just take it for granted. We can say, well, I don't know. Maybe it's not worth it.

Maybe it's not. No, no. I just want to encourage you. Read Scripture. Get on a reading plane. Obey it. Memorize it. the truth that is there. If you need to write it out and stick it on, put it on a piece of wood and put it on your wall, do that. As we read scripture, do that in that process. You will find that you will begin to delight in God Himself. That will change the affections of your heart. That you're not just reading the law that you are listening to your Creator. You're not just reading words. There is something you be drawn in through it. And so that's the verse, the meditation of it. But also we do all of that through the rhythm of falling on the mercy of Jesus. That we take refuge in in the fact that Jesus was gracious toward us. Think about what churches are named.

And a lot of churches are named after the grace that we have in Jesus. I know even in Burleson there's Grace Baptist Church, there's Grace View Baptist Church. A lot of churches are called Redeemer, right? All of these things are showing that we walk according to the rhythm of grace that we have been redeemed, that we have been rescued, and all of these things, it colors how we're going to read these Psalms. Whenever we look at what's going on here, we need to remember that trusting what Jesus is doing in us and what he's going to do is the key. Without it, we're gonna kind of run out of We're not going to want to read scripture, but I want to encourage you begin reading the Psalms. There's an easy way to do it. If you read five Psalms a day, you can finish all the Psalms in a month. We're going to be going through a six week series. So if you want to start reading Psalms Book One for next week, go ahead and start doing

that. It's Psalms One. We just did one in two. So you're going to be finished reading Psalms Three through 41. That would take you about. If you read six Psalms a day from now until next Sunday, there you go. You'd be right on par with where we are. I want to encourage you to start reading Scripture, start consuming it, start meditating on it. And then also understand that it's not just memorization. It's really the relationship. It's the rhythm of walking according to Jesus' grace. Let's pray. Jesus, we thank you for the Psalms. We thank you for the rhythm and the verse that permeates all of it and all of the scripture. We pray that you would speak to us through your word this week. We pray that you would inspire us to begin reading the Psalms, that you would help us to know what it's saying, that you would speak to us in our everyday situations, that we would begin to see how your word is speaking to us in the midst of it.

That's your name that we pray. Amen.