The Lord’s blessing is the fruit of walking in his ways

I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten yourself tangled up in a get-rich-quick scheme. But you understand how they work. You do very little work, but you get an enormous reward. For instance, the lottery is a type of get-rich-quick scheme. You only have to invest the time it takes to drive to the gas station and the few dollars necessary to pick up your ticket, but when you win - and let’s be honest you’re definitely going to win - you get an enormous sum of money in return.

But in reality a get-rich-quick scheme is the hope that the payoff will not correspond to the effort. We know that the general principle of life is that great effort results in great payoff and that minimal effort results in minimal payoff. But we’re hoping that perhaps we can cheat the system and that minimal effort will result in great payoff.

In our psalm this morning, we’ll see an incredible payoff. The whole thing is about receiving the Lord’s blessings. But to receive the incredible payoff it’s going to take incredible effort.

Main Point – The Lord’s blessing is the fruit of walking in his ways

Prayer

We see this correspondence quickly in our psalm.

Point #1 – We receive the fruit we labor for (vs. 1-2)

READ VS 1-2

I want to start off by considering for a moment that first line of verse 2. “You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands.” For just a moment, strip away all the blessing language that surrounds that line and just consider it in isolation for a minute. “You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands”. Consider this. Is that line good news or is it bad news?

I’m reminded of some other biblical texts. Jesus said in Matthew 7 - “Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.” Or Paul said in Galatians 6 - “Whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will… reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit… will reap eternal life” The type of fruit you are planting is the type of fruit that you will receive.

So I ask you to consider again our line from verse 2, “You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands”. Is this good news or bad news? Well it all depends! It depends on what type of fruit the labor of your hands has been planting. If you’ve been planting sickly disgusting fruit, then eating the fruit from your labor will be a horrible experience. But if you’ve been planting delicious healthy fruit, then eating the fruit of the labor of your hands will be a refreshing, delightful, and altogether satisfying experience.

What kind of fruit did our psalmist plant? Will he enjoy that harvest time? It says in verse 1, “Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord and walks in his ways.” That’s great news! He’s going to receive the fruit of a life that feared the Lord with his heart and followed the Lord’s ways with his actions. He’s going to get a blessing! And that makes sense. You will always harvest the thing that you planted or as this psalm has phrased it you will eat the fruit that you have earned.

Alright! So this guy is about to get some blessings! It says “Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord… you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you”. Ok so what blessings are we going to see? Is it going to be money? Is it going to be comforts? Is it going to be job security? Is it going to be more friends? How will God bless this guy? What will his fruit be? That’s a good question to ask and to find out we should look at the rest of the passage.

READ VS 3A

Ok, so that doesn’t help much. It just says you’ll harvest more fruit from your wife.

READ VS 3B

Ok, that’s similar. You’re going to have a bunch of little critters that also grow to bear fruit. But what’s the fruit!? What’s the blessing?

Verse 4, yes, yes, you’ll be blessed again. Verse 5, the Lord bless you. Aha! You’ll see the prosperity of Jerusalem! Prosperity, that’s a blessing right? Well… it’s not very specific at all. The Hebrew word there just means “good”. You’ll see the “good” of Jerusalem. Verse 6 tells us that we’ll see our children’s children. That’s kind of a specific blessing. I guess, but what are children? They’re little fruit bearing critters. So your fruit-bearing critters will also have fruit-bearing critters.

But nowhere in the psalm does it tell us specifically what kind of blessing this guy is going to get! It just says, “You’ll be blessed”. And we’re left to fill in the blanks for what that means. And how do we tend to do this? We tend to think that God’s blessing must mean that we’ll get whatever it is that we want. I’ll get the thing that I think is the greatest blessing. And I’m here to tell you that this notion of God blessing you by giving you whatever you want is absolutely… true. It’s absolutely true.

Listen to this verse from Psalm 37 because it says that exact thing explicitly:
“Delight yourself in the Lord,

and he will give you the desires of your heart.” - Psalm 37:4

Are you confused yet? Because it seems as if the Bible would encourage us to obey God in order to get stuff. Do you want a nicer car? Well, then give a little bit more money to the church, serve a few more weekends at the soup kitchen, and read your Bible a couple more mornings and then God has promised he’ll give you that new car. In fact there are entire ministries based around this notion. You can see many of them on tv. They call it sowing a seed. If you sow a seed of $50 to this ministry then God will give you back $5000. And they might cite this psalm or other passages in the Bible to prove their point, but is that what’s really going on here?

I hope your bad Bible interpretation radar is going off. I hope when you hear teaching like this all the alarm bells are ringing in your head just saying, “That doesn’t sound quite right.” Good. Because that is not what God has in mind here. Let’s look at that verse from Psalm 37 again because it will help us understand our psalm.

“Delight yourself in the Lord,

and he will give you the desires of your heart.” - Psalm 37:4

If you delight yourself in the Lord, then what is it that your heart desires? It would be impossible to say, “I find all my delight in the Lord and my heart desires a new car” or “I find all my delight in the Lord and the great desire of my heart is romance” or “the great desire of my heart is pleasures” or something else. No, the only possible way to finish the sentence is “I find all my delight in the Lord and so my heart desires… the Lord”. God’s promise is that if you delight in him, then you will receive him. Draw near to me and I will draw near to you. He says, “If I am the greatest joy and goal of your heart, then you will not be disappointed because I will guarantee that you receive the one you are pursuing, me”.

So back to our psalm, Psalm 128. Verse 1 says, “Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways. You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands.” What will that fruit be? If my goal in life is to please the Lord, then what is the blessing that I will receive? The blessing will be the pleasure of the Lord whom you set out to please. God will bless you by giving you the thing that you want - his pleasure.

Is that disappointing to you? Were you hoping that God’s blessing was something more? Are you saying to yourself, “Pshh, God’s favor isn’t worth much to me. What I need is to be free from these troubles I’m in”? Because this very principal is what causes so many people to walk away from the faith. Have you ever heard someone say something like, “I tried Christianity, but it didn’t work for me.” Do you know what that means? It means, “I came to Christianity with a list of expectations and blessings that I’d hoped I would receive from God and after a while he never gave me those things, so I gave up on him.”

It sounds foolish when you phrase it out loud that way, but there’s this notion that there’s a lot of stuff I want, material, worldly, temporary stuff and if I obey God he’s supposed to give it to me. That’s what I think it means that he blesses those who walk in his way. But when God says, “How about I give you more of me and more of my pleasure in you without all of that other stuff?” So many people say, “No thank you. I really wanted that other stuff more than you.”

Christian, if you gave your life away to others, abandoned every selfish pursuit, worked your fingers down to the bone, and spent every waking minute of your life attempting to please the Lord would you be satisfied if the only thing you received in this life was the knowledge that you had faithfully obeyed the Lord and that he was pleased with you? That’s a soul searching question.

Praise God he often graciously gives us many great gifts, but praise him more that he gives us himself. When we pursue walking in his ways and pleasing him, we will receive the fruit of our labor.

And this passage points out further blessing, that the fruit you bear will grow exponentially.

Point #2 – Our fruit multiplies over time (vs. 3-4)

READ VS 3-4

Verse 4 concludes these two verses by stating, “This is what God’s blessing looks like.” Part of the blessing is how you see it manifested in your home. Starting with this man’s wife. “Your wife will be a fruitful vine.” The keyword here being “fruitful”. This is what connects it to the verse directly before it. The labor of your hands will produce fruit and now we see that as a result of the labor of your hands, your wife will also produce fruit. That’s a pretty wild concept, that when I fear the Lord and walk in his ways, it can produce fruit in others.

Now this word, fruitful, is used in the book of Genesis more times than all of the other books of the Bible combined. And almost every single time it’s related to bearing children. You remember the command that God gave Adam and Eve in the first chapter of the Bible - “be fruitful and multiply”. That’s this word. It’s the same word for a tree bearing fruit. So at face value, the fruitful wife would be one that has many children. And I believe for the Jew singing this song in the times before Christ came, this would be absolutely true. If they followed God’s commands, they would be blessed with many children. The Bible actually states that promise rather clearly for them in Deuteronomy:

“And if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God… the Lord will make you abound in prosperity in the fruit of your womb” - Deuteronomy 28:1, 11

So I think that was certainly an aspect of this blessing for them, but to be clear - we are not under that same covenant as the Jews were. That was called the Mosaic covenant and it was for a specific people at a specific time, and while we can still learn so much about how God interacts with his people from that covenant, God’s promise to us is not still “if you obey me, you’ll have lots of babies.”

But I think there’s something greater going on here than merely God keeping his promise. I think God is reversing the effects of sin.

Now, I recognize that’s an outrageous claim to make from the simple phrase “your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house”, but track with me. In Genesis 1:28, the very first command that God gives to Adam and Eve is to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”. Being fruitful is the one thing God wants them to accomplish. But then we know that they sinned. They ate of the wrong fruit. And now there were consequences. God curses Adam and Eve and the curses have to do with both having children and bearing fruit. This is what he says to Eve:

“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;

in pain you shall bring forth children.” - Genesis 3:16

No longer will you be able to be fruitful  easily and smoothly. Being fruitful is going to be extremely difficult. And he has a curse for Adam too:

“cursed is the ground because of you;

in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you” - Genesis 3:17-18

No longer will you be able to be fruitful easily and smoothly. Being fruitful is going to be extremely difficult. Because you have chosen to oppose and rebel against my ordering of creation, now the created order will no longer cooperate with you. In the garden fruit just came up. It required little effort because you were working alongside the world in the way I intended and the world was then cooperating and working alongside you in the way that I intended.

It’s very simple to illustrate. Imagine that God has created a river that leads towards him and towards life and beauty. It leads away from sin and destruction and hell. When Adam and Eve were in the garden they were swimming in the river along with the current leading towards God. But in sin, they turned around and tried to swim upstream towards death. Now every stroke and every step is a battle and a fight against the way God designed the world. And why? Because they didn’t want to obey. They wanted to be their own masters.

This is how God designed the world to work. Obey his commands and walk in his ways and you will be cooperating with the created order and will see blessing. Oppose God’s commands and you will face greater difficulties. This is the message of all the wisdom literature in the Bible. Being wise is cooperating with how God designed the world. Being a fool is opposing it.

So in the phrase “your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house”, we see that the man who walks in God’s ways is swimming with the current of how God created the world. And within his own house it becomes a miniature garden of Eden where sin’s curse is reversed and he is living in harmony with his Lord.

That’s a blessing. Because how many of us would describe our homes as the Garden of Eden? Do we see our home as a place where we are in harmony with God? But the promised blessing here is that when every single step we take is directed at obeying God’s commands, we will experience a taste of what that communion with God is like, we’ll swim with the current.

But what about the children in verse 3. Look at that, “Your children will be like olive shoots”. In Psalm 127, the author compared children to being like arrows and now we’re seeing them as olive shoots. This is just an incredible analogy.

Full disclosure. I don’t know anything about olive trees, but the things I found while studying are fascinating. Olive trees take notoriously long before they start bearing fruit. If you plant an olive tree from a seed, it can take 8-15 years or even longer to start bearing fruit. That means that you will be cultivating, nurturing, watering, pruning, protecting it from the elements, and all kinds of things and you will have zero harvest for your efforts. For years you will do this. Everyone else with their fig trees and apple trees and peach trees are all getting a huge harvest and blessing from their tree and here you are working just as hard as they are and you’re getting nothing.

That’s pretty discouraging right? But hey, that’s parenting. “I’ve told you this a hundred times and you still haven’t listened!” Hang in there parents. It might take 15 years or even longer.

But here’s the other unique thing about olive trees that makes them such a perfect analogy. Olive trees are among the longest-lived and longest-fruit producing trees on the planet. Your friend’s peach tree will live for 20 years and die. Your friend’s apple tree lives for 50 years and dies. Even your friend’s fig tree lives for 100 years and then dies. Olive trees very commonly live for 500 years and keep producing fruit year after year. There are some claims of olive trees that have lived to be 1,000 or even 1,500 years old and are still producing fruit.

Do you see how immediately encouraging this psalm would be to those who are singing it. Your children will be like olive trees when you walk in the Lord’s ways. It may take some time, but they will bear fruit for decades and centuries to come.

Again, this is more than the surface level promise that if you obey God you’ll have a big family. This is a promise that when you fear the Lord and walk in his ways, God will multiply your fruit so that it grows and spreads in ways that you never could have imagined. If it seems slow, wait for it. In his parable of the soils, Jesus says that the good soil bears fruit “thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and a hundredfold”!

Your obedience isn’t merely a blessing to you. It’s a blessing to those around you. Perhaps even to generations that haven’t yet been born. Do you know how hopeful that makes me for this church? That the things we do today, will be a blessing to those who come 10, 20, or even 100 years after us? This is the promise of Psalm 128. Your fruit will multiply over time.

And in this way, the fruit you bear today will be what you pass on to the generations that come after you. We see this in our third point -

Point #3 – Our fruit will be our legacy (vs. 5-6)

These final two verses are a benediction. The author is offering a blessing to all those who sing this song.

READ VS 5-6

He wants God to bless the works of their hands. He wants them to live to see the fruit of their labors. He wants them to see how the whole city of Jerusalem would prosper as a result of their fruitful labors. That’s a wide impact. He wants them to see their grandchildren benefiting from their fruitful labors. That’s a long impact. He’s praying for them to have the opportunity to see with their own eyes the impact that their faithfulness had on others.

The story is often told of a Sunday school teacher named Edward Kimball who lived  in Boston in the 1850’s. He felt a burden for the salvation of a specific young man. He went rather timidly to the store where the young man worked, knowing that he should share the gospel with him, but being afraid. That teenage boy became a Christian that day and his name was Dwight L. Moody. And Moody would become one of the most widely known evangelists of that era who reached hundreds of thousands with the gospel. And Kimball who actually outlived Moody, got to witness the fruit of his faithfulness.

But instead of talking about the beautiful legacy that obedience leaves behind, I’d like to revisit an idea I brought up earlier. It was that, “eating the fruit of the labor of your hands” is only good if we have labored for good fruit. Because there’s a flipside here that we haven’t explored. What if your labor isn’t producing good fruit? What if as Jesus put it you are a “diseased tree that bears bad fruit”? What kind of legacy will that leave behind?

For starters, you’ll be swimming upstream towards a meaningless and destructive goal. You’ll work tirelessly for something that will not satisfy you and all of your efforts will be wasted.

Isaiah says, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,

and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” - Isaiah 55:2

By disobedience, you work against the grain of the universe and you arrive at nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true. You arrive at something. You arrive at destruction. Jesus states that,

“Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” - Matthew 7:19

The legacy you leave behind is a bad example and a hole in the ground where a good tree should have been. Church, this is your home. This is your community. They are watching you. The fruit of the labor of your hands will spread to them. If you choose not to fear the Lord and walk in his ways, your home will not be a miniature Garden of Eden. It will instead be a miniature Hell, where nothing is cooperating with God, everyone pursues sin instead, and no one is bearing healthy fruit.

But isn’t pursuing sin the way each of us has lived? Aren’t we so often the fools who turn from swimming with God’s river towards his blessing and swim upstream towards our own deaths? Don’t we so frequently say, “I’d rather be the ruler of my own life regardless of the cost. I’d rather be free from any demands that God might place on me”. The apostle Paul recognized this in Romans and he says,

“For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” - Romans 6:20-23

The fruit of the labor of our hands, far from being healthy and life-giving, is actually diseased and destructive. The legacy it will leave behind is one of shame. But through Jesus Christ’s salvation, that fruit is healed. He’s the one who sees the diseased tree that deserved the fire and he heals it. He revives it. He causes it to bear fruit. He gives us his spirit to bear the fruit of the Spirit which we never could have born without him, but now which we will perpetually bear with him. And Jesus is the one who is able to take that dead and barren tree and cause it to fruit into a Garden of Eden tree.

Jesus earned the Lord’s blessing by walking in his ways. And I get to eat the fruit of the labor of his hands. I get the approval of the Lord. I get to be declared righteous. I get to be made holy. I get to enter into God’s presence forever. I get to be the heir of all of God’s promises. And now I get to walk in a way that imitates Jesus Christ.

Church, I pray that the legacy I leave behind one day won’t be the fruit that I earned and won’t be the fruit that I deserved. But rather that it will be the fruit that Jesus Christ earned. He’s the only one who perfectly feared the Lord and walked in his ways. I pray the same for you, that your children’s children will look back at your life and say, that’s what Jesus Christ is capable of accomplishing. That’s the blessing I want to receive one day. Not the Lord’s blessing that I earned, but the Lord’s blessing that Jesus earned.

Prayer