“3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. ”
I dare say our Scripture this evening could bring an adult to tears. David taps into what every adult desperately wants. We want to be nourished. We want to be fruitful. We want to succeed at what matters. We want to know that what we do has a point.
I know you young people want these too, but I doubt you want it as desperately as a fifty year old man who feels time slipping through his fingers. You haven’t yet felt the ache of spinning your wheels for decades fearing that you are getting nowhere. Living that way and hearing that you can live differently can bring you to tears.
Finding that you can not only succeed but succeed at what really matters can bring you to tears. D.L. Moody was right, “Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn’t really matter.”
I imagine there are adults in this sanctuary this evening who have spent a good deal of life succeeding only to realize that their goal didn’t really matter. That is crushing, but if that is you, my hope tonight is that you find something better.
I want you young people to have something better too. I want you to live the life described in our passage and I want you to find it now. I want you nourished. I want you to be fruitful. I want you to succeed at what really matters.
God explains how with crystal clarity. He doesn’t cloak this life in mystery. He has made it blatantly obvious because He wants us to live it.
The blessed life is full of nourishment, fruitfulness, and succeeding at what matters. If you remember one thing this evening, remember that: the blessed life is full of nourishment, fruitfulness, and succeeding at what matters. That’s the claim of this sermon.
We will see this in three points. First: nourishment. Second: fruitfulness. Third: succeeding at what matters. These three points are split by the three clauses of verse 3. Take a look at the punctuation. Until the comma we will study nourishment. Until the first period, we will study fruitfulness. From then on, we will study succeeding at what matters.
First: nourishment. The blessed life requires nourishment and that nourishment comes from God. God plants His people in ample nourishment. Verse 3, the blessed man, “is like a tree planted by streams of water.”
The man who comes to God doesn’t need to search for nourishment. The world needs to search. The world is on a constant search for nourishment. It keeps searching because it never finds it. God takes the repentant sinner and says, ‘none of that for you.’ He plants us by streams of water.
He doesn’t tell us about the blessed life and then say, ‘it’s out there. Now you find it. Read Socrates. Take a pilgrimage. Ponder life for a few decades and I truly hope you find this blessed life.’ That would be negligent, and the Father of Jesus is not negligent. He is meticulous. He plants repentant sinners in abundant nourishment.
He plants us by streams of water. These streams are nothing less than God and the things of God. God plants us in His own grace. God plants us near Himself and tells us to drink deeply of Him.
He is grieved when we neglect Him. He thinks that neglecting His nourishment is about the most foolish thing we could do. “Be appalled at this, you heavens, and shudder with great horror,” God said through Jeremiah, “My people have committed two sins: they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”
Don’t neglect the grace found in God. He offers nothing less than Himself. Not surprisingly, that is what Christ offered when he came. He offered us nothing less than himself. “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”
You understand this grace with more clarity than David. You understand God better than David did. He knew he must drink deeply of God. If you have met Christ, you know God even better. You can drink more deeply. “No one has ever seen God,” John wrote, “but the one and only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made Him known… We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
Drink in grace and truth. Come to Jesus. You cannot find the satisfaction he offers anywhere else. “I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful,” wrote Augustine, “but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.”
Augustine found satisfaction in Christ. “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy burdened and I will give you rest.” The best of humanity has to offer, the best humanity can find, will never supply rest. It will never nourish us with what we need. “Our hearts are restless,” said Augustine, “until they find their rest in You.”
Have you found your rest in God? Are you nourished in Christ? Can you say that you are fuller with Jesus than you would be without him? Are you nourished as you become more like him and emptied when you neglect him?
Do you know Christ as an ocean of grace? Listen to M’Cheyne, “Unfathomable oceans of grace are in Christ for you. Dive and dive again, you will never come to the bottom of these depths.”
God plants us near streams of water for nourishment. He does it for a purpose beyond our satisfaction. He plants us by streams of water because He has designs for us. He wants us to bear fruit. That’s our second point.
The tree of verse 3 needs streams of water so it can bear fruit. As John Goldingay explains, “in the middle eastern climate, the long dry season comes when a fruit tree needs most water as its fruit grows to maturity. It therefore needs to be planted near a water supply towards which its roots can reach.”
We see this connection between nourishment and fruit in verse 3, the blessed man, “is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season.”
God nourishes you so you can bear fruit. A fruitful life can only come as a consequence of grace. You can only live a fruitful life if you are planted in grace.
What is this fruit? I want you to have a clear answer to this because a fruitful life is a meaningful life. No one wants to lay on their deathbed and think, ‘what a waste.’ Everyone wants to live a fruitful life, but you can’t live a fruitful life until you are planted in grace. You can’t bear fruit that matters until you are planted by streams of water.
That’s what Solomon found out. His book Ecclesiastes details his attempts to live a fruitful life. Wealth didn’t supply it. Romance didn’t fill him up. Accomplishments didn’t make him feel that his life was worthwhile. His conclusion at the end of the book tells us about fruit that lasts. He said, “Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of mankind.” Solomon tried everything else and he found that bearing the fruit of Psalm 1 was the only fruitful life.
The good news for you is that you don’t need to spend decades trying to figure this out. You didn’t need to be wise like Solomon to figure it out. You just need to drink in streams of living water. You just need to drink in God and His grace. You will organically begin to bear fruit, “He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season.”
You will become more like God. Grace bears that fruit in your life. You become more like God. That’s what the fruit of the Spirit is about, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” The man filled with grace becomes more like God. He bears the fruit of godliness.
Apple trees bear apples. Orange trees bear oranges. Trees planted by streams of grace bear godliness. Or, we can use the language of obedience. “Fear God and keep His commandments for this is the whole duty of man.” Pear trees bear pears. Banana trees bear bananas. Trees planted by streams of grace bear obedience.
The apostle Paul told us that the grace-filled life, the life planted by streams of water, will bear the fruit of obedience. He said, “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
Obedience is a consequence of grace. Fruit is a consequence of being planted by streams of water. Don’t try to obey without drinking in grace. Don’t try to make your life meaningful by obeying. That’s the path to legalism. You need to come to Christ and he will bear fruit through you. “I am the vine; you are the branches,” said Jesus. “If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” Stop trying to bear fruit on your own. Come near to Jesus, then you will bear fruit organically.
The fruitful life is the obedient life. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields [obedience] in season.” Obedience makes life worth living. We don’t have to keep God’s commands. We get to keep God’s commands. Satan’s great lie is to tell us that obedience is restrictive. Satan wants us to think that fruitfulness is found in what will make us happy. That was his lie in the Garden of Eden. He told Adam and Eve that fruitfulness was found outside of obedience. Look where that brought us. Look where disobedience has brought you. It has always withered you. It will always lead to death.
Drinking deeply of grace doesn’t wither you. We see that in the next part of verse 3, “which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.”
People stuck in the pattern of this world inevitably wither. Their lives might seem enviable for a while but they all wither. That’s what Asaph discovered. He wrote a Psalm about it. He was envying the people who follow the flow of the world because their lives seemed so easy to him. “They have no struggles,” he wrote, “their bodies are healthy and strong… always free of care, they go on amassing wealth.” But, Asaph realized, these same people soon wither. “Surely You place them on slippery ground, [God]; You cast them down to ruin. How suddenly are they destroyed, completely swept away by terrors! They are like a dream when one awakes; when You arise, Lord, You will despise them as fantasies.”
That is the best-case scenario for those who are not planted by streams of living water. They will wither. That is the best-case scenario for the man with the most enviable life you can imagine if he isn’t planted by streams of water. God will use life to beat him down and then you will see how little nourishment is within that man. He will be withered. He won’t be enviable. He will be pitiable. I don’t want that for you.
I want you to stay leafy and green. I want you to be like the saints of Psalm 92. “They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green, proclaiming, ‘The Lord is upright; He is my Rock.’”
The men and women of our culture think life stops long before old age. They think old age is a time of withering because apparently your best days are behind you. You were fruitful and now you aren’t. That’s not life in Christ. People who drink in grace, “will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green, proclaiming, ‘The Lord is upright; He is my Rock.’” That can be you.
Keep close to Christ. That’s how you keep bearing fruit. That’s how you avoid withering. That’s also how you succeed in what matters. That’s our final point: succeeding in what matters.
We’ve seen the nourishment that will keep us growing and green throughout this life. We’ve seen that godliness and obedience is the fruit of a nourished life. Now we need to talk about succeeding at what matters. The blessed life is a prosperous life. The blessed life has its successes. Verse 3, “Whatever he does prospers.”
We tend to fall into two errors when we think about these words, “Whatever he does prospers.” The first error is to assume that our goals are worthy of success. ‘I’m a Christian that means that whatever I do will prosper.’ People who fall into this error wind up confused when God doesn’t bless their goals. The second error is to assume that success is an unbiblical category and that results have nothing to do with faithfulness.
Both of these are errors. The blessed man does succeed wildly. “Whatever he does prospers.” If you think results have nothing to do with faithfulness, you need to hear that. But the blessed man succeeds according to God’s goals done in God’s way. If you are caught up in your goals, you need to hear that.
Joshua is a helpful example. He was successful because he pursued God’s goals in God’s way. “Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips,” God told Joshua. “Meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.”
That’s the story of Joshua. He was careful to God’s will and so he received God’s promised results. That’s the blessed man. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.”
God prospers obedience, but He doesn’t prosper us because of obedience. That’s a fine but necessary distinction. Think about Joshua again. God didn’t keep Joshua’s wife looking like a twenty-two-year-old until the age of ninety because Joshua obeyed. God didn’t prevent Joshua from ever getting sick because he obeyed. God didn’t ensure that Joshua’s livestock multiplied because he obeyed.
God didn’t prosper Joshua. God prospered Joshua’s obedience. He told Joshua how to attack Jericho, Joshua obeyed and God prospered that obedience. He told Joshua how to divide the land up, Joshua obeyed and God prospered that obedience.
You don’t meditate on God’s law day and night, drink in streams of living water, and bear fruit in order to prosper at your goals. You don’t live God’s way so he gives you what you want. Rather as you drink in streams of living water, you begin to want what God wants. As you meditate on God’s law day and night, His goals become your goals. Those are the goals God prospers.
If you want to succeed at what really matters in life, do what Joshua did—meditate on God’s word. Know God’s word. God guarantees His own goals, not yours. The only way to always prosper at what matters in life is to live not by your goals but by God’s goals.
Now you might be thinking, ‘Joshua had it easy. God told Him exactly what to do, how to do it, what would happen if he did it. Joshua could measure his success. What about me?’
It really is that easy for you too. God tells you what to do. He tells you how to do it. He tells you what will happen if you will do it.
He tells you how to always have enough to live on. “Do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
If you seek God’s kingdom, you will always prosper in having enough to live on. “Whatever he does prospers.” That’s a reliable way to always have enough. Chasing money isn’t near as reliable.
He tells you how to get wisdom. “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.”
If you ask God what you should do with a heart willing to do whatever God says, you will always prosper in wisdom. “Whatever he does prospers.” That’s far more reliable than worrying.
You can prosper in what matters. Your life can always matter. That’s the life of the blessed man and we see that most clearly in Jesus.
Whatever Jesus did prospered. He always succeeded at what mattered. Read the gospels and you will never have the sense that Jesus wondered whether things would work out. He expected a one-hundred percent success rate because his goals were his Father’s goals. Read the gospels and you will see Jesus as unstoppable. That’s how Isaiah saw him centuries before, “he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth.”
His humiliating death, which even his disciples thought was an utter waste, was a total success. Whatever he does prospers—even his death.
Now you have a choice. Do you want to live your life with your goals and try to eke out some sort of meaning or do you want to live Christ’s life, the blessed life, and have God’s guarantee that your obedience matters?
I want your life to matter. That’s part of why I’m talking to you tonight. I’m not doing this because it is my job. I’m not doing it because I’ve got thirty odd minutes to fill. I’m doing this because you only have one life and it will soon be passed and only what is done for Jesus will last.
“Oh, how sweet to work for God all day,” wrote M’Cheyne, “and then lie down at night beneath His smile.”
That’s a very satisfying life. That’s a very fruitful life. That’s a very prosperous life. Tonight, I hope you can thank God that this is your life. I hope you will start this life. Even with all your sin, all the time you’ve wasted, you can be planted in Christ. You can bear fruit. You can prosper.
Tell God that you don’t want to waste your life. Acknowledge that your life is a gift from Him and that it is precious. Recognize His love in His willingness to give you new life. Come to Jesus. “If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” Stop trying to bear fruit on your own. Come near to Jesus. Amen.