A Tree That Does Not Hurry: What This Changes Between Us

The foyer already knows how to say we. We are a family. We are a people of the Word. Somebody printed it on a banner that looks like belonging. Tuesday still sends each household home with a closed Bible and a private plan. Psalm 1 will not help you keep that arrangement.

A tree does not hurry. It also does not grow as a private slogan. It drinks. Fruit comes in a season the tree does not vote on. If you preach this psalm as a map of anyone's private drought, you will lie. If you preach it as a poster for a community campaign that never opens the book between households, you will lie in a different direction. Preach it as wisdom about a life planted in Yahweh's instruction, and you give this church a God who feeds people beneath the surface.

The psalm is talking about a person whose life is located in Yahweh's law. The tree is how the poem says what that life is like. The congregation is named in the psalm. What this changes between us is whether that location is audible in more than one house.

Text

Hear the first psalm, from the World English Bible: "Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand on the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in Yahweh’s law. On his law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree planted by the streams of water, that produces its fruit in its season, whose leaf also does not wither. Whatever he does shall prosper. The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For Yahweh knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish." (Psalm