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Sep 19

Sermon Follow-up: “If You Wanna Be Happy for the Rest of Your Life…”

2011 | by Trent Hunter | Category: Sermon Follow-Up

In Sunday’s sermon, “If You Wanna Be Happy for the Rest of Your Life…,” Ryan preached from Psalm 1 about the blessed life. The word, “blessing,” may create any number of impressions in our mind based on how we’ve heard the word used. But “blessing,” is roughly equivalent to what we might mean by “happy.” Psalm 1, Ryan said, “tells us how to be happy no matter who you married, no matter where you live, or how much you make, or what you do for work, or whether you have the family you envisioned. It tells us the pathway to true happiness even amidst hardships and difficulties.”

As we’ve mentioned over the past few weeks, our series through the Psalms coordinates with the release of a new DSC album, Psalterium, at our next Cause for Praise concert, Friday, October 21. Psalterium is a 5 track album of various Psalms set to song. Here are the lyrics to Psalm 1, a song we’ve been singing for several weeks now, based on the first Psalm and composed by Matt Jones:

Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way
of sinners or of scoffers who are seated,
but finds his delight
in meditation day and night
on the law of the Lord.

He is like a tree
planted by the streams of living water;
In season it will be
bearing fruit and its leaves do not wither;
In all that he does
he will prosper as he goes,
for the Lord knows his way.

Many if not all of the Psalms were originally set to music as a means of helping God’s people internalize God’s Word. Of course, in translation we’ve lost the original meter and any rhyming patterns. But songs like this help deliver the Psalms to our hearts and heads in a way similar to how they were originally received.