Bobby Bosler: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast. I’m Bobby Bosler and I’m speaking to you today from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, where I just got the chance, as of the time of this recording, to finish up training a group of freshmen here at BCM on how to win souls for Jesus Christ. It was quite an encouraging week.

We had 32 students, and all of them went out soul winning on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and we were blown away by what God did. On the first day, we had 14 people saved, which that was encouraging. But on the second day, God exceeded our expectations.

We had 35 saved. Come to find out, somebody had been praying that we’d have 30 saved. And on the final day, Thursday, yesterday, as of the time of this recording, we had 36 more people saved.

That was 85 people who trusted Christ in a three-day period just by going out and knocking doors. Listen, young people, don’t let anybody convince you that knocking doors doesn’t work anymore. Anyway, I’ve got a guest here on the podcast today, but before I get to him, I just want to say.

I haven’t mentioned this much in our podcast intros, but I want to make sure I tell you about it. I think most of you are aware that October 16, 17, and 18 is coming to the Thee Generation Youth Summit. That’s two and a half days of exciting competition, four-team competition, and revival preaching, really trying to get the core passion of The Generation into your soul and to show you how your life can make a difference.

This year, our theme is going to be 0-100. If you don’t know what that means, check out thegeneration.org slash 0100, the number 0-100. And we are really looking forward to this Youth Summit.

We’ve got a lot of exciting things we’re doing. We’re shaking things up as we’ve been working through the schedule. And I know it’s not only going to be an encouraging time, it’s going to be a helpful time.

And so please make sure you come and join us. Registration is open. We have many registrations coming in, and we would love for you to join us as well.

If you’re interested in coming, go to thegeneration.org slash youth-summit, youth-summit, and come and join us, or just go to the homepage and click on the Youth Summit tab in the menu bar. Our guest today is someone I think most of you know, Joseph Mueller. He’s here at Falls Baptist Church on staff, and his passion is right with us with The Generation.

And so I’ve asked Joe to share his heart here today. So Joe, why don’t you share what God has put on your heart?

Joseph Mueller: Thank you, Brother Bosler. I appreciate the opportunity to be back again with you all here on the Thee Generation Podcast and count it a privilege. I love what God’s doing through The Generation, and I’m looking forward to the Youth Summit coming up, the opportunities we have with that.

Come and join us. And I want to just share with you something this morning from Psalm Chapter 1. And I had the opportunity this summer to do some study in Psalm Chapter 1 and present some material, And there was one particular point here that I thought this is going to be a really helpful, something I need to share next time I’m on the Thee Generation Podcast.

And so we’re doing that here today. And Psalm chapter 1, familiar words that we see here. We see really, if we were to read the whole chapter, a contrast of the way of blessing and the way of destruction.

And God wants us to live in the way of blessing. We read in verse number 1 of Psalm 1, Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night.

Now these verses are probably familiar to you as they were to me, but sometimes when verses are familiar, we lose the impact of what God is saying to us through those verses. And I want us to see here, just we can’t get into everything. I could spend hours talking about Psalm chapter 1 here, and we can’t.

And I just want us to see one main point really from Psalm chapter 1 that I think will help us as we try to go on this journey of seeking to live a life of total surrender and total dependence on Jesus Christ, and something that can hinder us from that life. We’ve heard recently a couple of podcasts about the end of the wicked, and certainly Psalm chapter 1 deals here with that.

And we heard a podcast about really the joy just of serving the Lord, that it’s not duty, it’s something that it’s a great experience. It’s wonderful to serve the Lord. And we see that here as well in Psalm chapter 1.

But what is it that’s going to keep us from living the life that we see here, really the first word, the focus of the whole psalm, blessed. Blessed life. You see, God wants you to live a life of blessing.

He wants to bless you. That word means to be happy, to be satisfied, to be fulfilled. God wants you to live your life knowing that you’re doing exactly what he created you to do.

Can I say it this way? God wants you to be happy. He wants you to be enjoying your life.

He’s not out to make you miserable. He’s not out to make you do something that you hate doing. He wants you to feel satisfied, to know that you’re doing something that really matters.

He wants you to be blessed. And as we talk here at the Degeneration about total surrender and total dependence, I think one of the things that keeps us often, that makes us so we struggle with this matter of total surrender is that we don’t believe that first point, that first word, that God actually wants to bless us.

We’ve somehow bought the lie of the devil that if you follow God with your whole heart and truly surrender your life to him, that’s going to be a horrible decision. God’s going to make you miserable. He’s going to make you do something you never wanted to do.

He’s going to make you—it’s going to be bad. But that’s not what he says. He says that if you follow his way of blessing, if you allow him to bless you, if you’ll stay in the place of blessing, you’re going to have greater joy, greater peace, greater satisfaction than you have ever known.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have hard times in your life, that there’s not going to be difficult circumstances. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have a fancy house or a nice car or a lot of money in the bank. That might be what we think of being blessed, but that’s not what God thinks of when he’s talking about being blessed.

A life of blessing is not everything is going good. A life of blessing is no matter what’s going on, no matter what my circumstances are, I’m happy. I am satisfied.

I have peace. I have joy because God is with me and I am with him. That’s a life of blessing, and that’s the life God wants you to have, young person.

That is what God desires more than anything else for you. He doesn’t want you to be miserable. He doesn’t want you to be sitting there thinking, why am I even here?

Does this, is what I’m doing really even matter? He doesn’t want you to live in that kind of life. He wants you to have a life of blessing.

But here’s the problem. This is what Psalm 1 points out to us so powerfully here, is that you can leave the place of blessing. God says, listen, if you want to be blessed, this is where you need to be.

And he tells us in verse 2 what that is. That’s delighting in the law of God. Loving the Lord, loving the word of the Lord, and loving and knowing him, seeking him, pursuing after him.

That’s the place of blessing. Making that the focus, the passion, the joy of our life. But we can walk away from that.

There’s something that draws us away. And that’s what we see here in verse number one, where we see you can leave the place of blessing. Now, I have five kids.

At dinnertime, we’ll be sitting around the table, and sometimes I’ll say to them, now kids, we have some dessert. If you want dessert when you’re done eating, you need to stay at the table. When you finish your meal, you need to stay at the table.

Don’t get down and go play. You’ve got to stay here if you want to have dessert. Now let me ask you, do I say that to my kids because I’m a mean dad and because I don’t want them to have dessert?

Not at all. I say that to them because I do want them to have dessert. And in order for them to have dessert, they’ve got to be at the place where dessert’s being served.

They’ve got to be in the place of blessing. Here in Psalm chapter 1, we find a downward progression of a person who is walking away from the life of blessing, who’s walking away from the place where God can bless them as he desires to do. It’s tragic what we see, but I’m afraid it’s all too familiar.

Some of you may even be able to think right now in your mind of someone who at one point in their life, they had the heart of what we’re all about here at the generation. They wanted to serve the Lord. They wanted their life to matter for eternity.

And now they’re at a place where that’s the last thing on their mind. And you wonder, how did they get there? The same way you and I can get there if we’re not careful.

First of all, we see here that you leave the place of blessing when you start listening to ungodly counsel. Notice what it says, Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel. That word means the advice of the ungodly.

Listen, there’s a lot of voices out there that are competing for your attention. And those voices, whoever you listen to, is going to influence who you are. Proverbs chapter 13 tells us that he that walketh with wise men shall be wise, but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.

I’m amazed sometime about how much we allow ungodly people to influence our thinking. Listen, we can hear ungodly advice from all sorts of different places. From your friends, the friends that you’re hanging around with.

They might be saved, but they’re being influenced by ungodly people and they’re passing it on to you. We can so easily be influenced and swayed by our friends. We start hearing things, and what we hear then begins to affect how we think.

It can happen on Facebook, on Instagram, on the television, on the news. Some of them, well, I’ve got to keep up with the news. Do you know how these people are ungodly people?

And if you’re not careful, it’s going to start to affect your thinking. Listen to things on the radio, magazines that you’re looking at, YouTube videos you’re watching, blogs you’re reading, novels you read, whatever. We could go on and on.

the voices that we allow to influence us, the sports commentators, guys. Oh, we could go on and on. These are ungodly people, and they’re not thinking according to the word of God.

But if we keep pumping that into our lives, you know what’s going to happen? We’re going to start thinking and listening and being affected by that ungodly counsel. And then we start questioning God and his word.

God says this, but you think, well, is that really true? Does God actually do what he says he’ll do in the Bible? And it begins to affect how we think, not just about ourselves, not just about the world around us.

It begins to affect how we think about God. And it draws us away from the place of seeking God, the place of blessing, to a place now of questioning God and his word.

so what voices are you listening to who are you allowing to shape your perspective on life but not only that we see so it starts off with listening walking in the council listening to the council of the ungodly but it goes on it says nor standeth in the way of sinners so now it’s now we’re not just listening to the council now we’re standing in the way of sinners of the ungodly that means that we have entered into the way that they are going.

We’ve now stepped into that. So you leave the place of blessing, yes, when you start listening to ungodly counsel, but then before long you leave the place of blessing because you’re embracing ungodly living. Listen, you cannot listen to the advice of the ungodly for long before you start following that advice, even if it’s directly contrary to the word of God, that you say that you believe.

So if listening is the counsel of the ungodly, we begin to question God and his word. Standing in the way is where we start to disobey God and his word. You start making decisions that are directly in violation to the things that he has clearly laid out in his word.

So instead of letting God and his word influence you and call the shots on the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, the hairstyle you have, the attitude you have towards authority, the way you interact with the opposite gender, you now let ungodly people start to call the shots. I watch young people and think, now why are they doing that? I can tell you this, they’re being influenced by someone.

They’ve been listening to the counsel of the ungodly and now they’ve started walking in the way. Now some of you, your parents wouldn’t let you do that. Your parents aren’t going to let you do certain things.

But did you know that you can, in your heart, embrace ungodly living, though maybe you can’t on the outside? What voices have affected you and now you’re disobeying God? Where are you disobeying God’s work?

Can I tell you this? You’re not going to have the impact that we’re all about here at Degeneration if you’re embracing ungodly living because you’ve walked away from the place of blessing. It started with listening to ungodly advice, to being influenced by ungodly voices.

And then you, before long, are now embracing the very things that you thought you would never do. And that’s tragic enough when we’re patterning our life after ungodly people. But it goes a step further here that is just heartbreaking.

The end of verse number one says, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. You see, you’ll leave the place of blessing when you begin to resist spiritual truth. The word that’s translated here, sitting, as well as the word the seat, is a much deeper idea than what initially just meets our eye as we look at that.

We could capture the fuller sense of what God is saying here if we were to say it, maybe paraphrase it this way. This is talking about nor the one who dwells, who lives, who settles in to the dwelling place of the scornful. So now you’re not just being influenced.

You’re not just starting to make some choices that way. But now you’ve settled in to that kind of living. Can I ask you this?

Who is it? It says that this is someone who dwells in the dwelling place of the scornful. Who dwells in the dwelling place of the scornful?

Scorners. A scorner is someone who defies, who mocks at, who laughs at spiritual truth. So this is saying that you literally become one of the scorners, one of those who is resisting spiritual truth, who is resisting God.

You’re not just now questioning God. You’re not just disobeying God. You now are fighting against God.

You’re resisting him. It’s the someone who literally just digs into their position saying, This is where I’m going to stay now, and you’re not moving me. How often have I seen teenagers in that position saying, this is my music, you’re not moving me.

This is my persona, you’re not changing me. And they’re fighting against God. And they’re missing out on the life of blessing because they’ve left the way of blessing and said, it’s my way, what I want, and nobody’s changing that.

What’s your attitude towards spiritual things? Are there areas in your life, maybe not every area of your life, but are there some areas in your life where though you have a heart to say, yeah, I would like to be as good as you said, I’m not moving there. No, no, that’s mine, and you’re not touching that.

In that area, you’ve settled in to the seat of the scornful. Don’t do that, young person. God has an incredible plan for your life.

He wants to bless you. He wants to use you, but you’ve got to allow him to do so. So can I ask you, where are you at on this progression?

If you were to take a piece of paper and write out each one of these steps, the place of blessing where you are delighting in God and his word, and then you were to put step number one, listening to the advice of the ungodly, step number two, now embracing the way of the ungodly, and step number three, fighting against God, resisting spiritual truth.

If you were to put an X at where you were at on that continuum, where would it be? Have you been drawn away from the place of blessing? Listen, you don’t have to stay there.

God says if you’ll come to him, get right about the fact that you’ve walked away from the place of blessing and begin to, again, seek after God. Begin to make him your delight. You can get back into that place of blessing.

And that’s the place where we live a life of total surrender and total dependence that makes an incredible difference for eternity.

Bobby Bosler: Amen Joe, thank you so much for that Young people I trust that you will do some soul searching As a result of what you’ve heard And if your heart isn’t where it ought to be Surrender it to God Depend upon Him to get you back into that place of blessing Thank you so much for listening We’ll see you soon