Psalm 1; Jeremiah 17:5-8
July 1, 2018
preached by Doug Cooper
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Time of Reflection Quotations

“There are only two ways to read the Bible: it is basically about me or basically about Jesus. What must I do, or what has he done?”

~ Tim Keller (1950-present), American pastor, theologian, and Christian apologist

“Sarcasm, at its worst, is a naked expression of contempt, often masked as humor.”

~ Tim Lott (1956-present), British author and journalist

“Contempt is hateful. It is the attempt to symbolically murder somebody.”

~ Theodore Zeldin (1933-present), Oxford scholar and writer, an excerpt from An Intimate History of Humanity

“The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can’t stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering…”

~ Walter Wangerin Jr. (1944-present), American author and educator

“I know, perhaps as well as anyone, what depression means, and what it is to feel myself sinking lower and lower. Yet at the worst, when I reach the lowest depths, I have an inward peace which no pain or depression can in the least disturb. Trusting in Jesus Christ my Savior, there is still a blessed quietness in the deep caverns of my soul, though upon the surface, a rough tempest may be raging, and there may be little apparent calm.”

~ C.H. Spurgeon (1834-1892), English pastor and writer

“All joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’”

“It [joy] is a by-product. Its very existence presupposes that you desire not it, but something other and outer.”

~ C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), British writer and Christian thinker

“Don’t look to your behavior, your feelings or your faithfulness. Jesus Christ is your righteousness. He is your status and your standing before God. Always there, always reliable, always the same.”

~ Michael Reeves, president and professor of theology at Union School of Theology in Oxford, England

Sermon Passage

Psalm 1; Jeremiah 17:5-8 (NASB)

Psalm 1
¹ How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,
Nor stand in the path of sinners,
Nor sit in the seat of scoffers!
² But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
³ He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water,
Which yields its fruit in its season
And its leaf does not wither;
And in whatever he does, he prospers.
⁴ The wicked are not so,
But they are like chaff which the wind drives away.
⁵ Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
Nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
⁶ For the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
But the way of the wicked will perish.

Jeremiah 17
⁵ Thus says the Lord,
“Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind
And makes flesh his strength,
And whose heart turns away from the Lord.
⁶ “For he will be like a bush in the desert
And will not see when prosperity comes,
But will live in stony wastes in the wilderness,
A land of salt without inhabitant.
⁷ “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord
And whose trust is the Lord.
⁸ “For he will be like a tree planted by the water,
That extends its roots by a stream
And will not fear when the heat comes;
But its leaves will be green,
And it will not be anxious in a year of drought
Nor cease to yield fruit.