By Streams of Water: Discipleship with Roots

Well, I was planning to stand up and immediately disclaim everything that Rachel said, but this will be quite devotional. This will be deeply earnest in its devotion.

Thank you for being here, my friends. I don’t take it for granted that you would give me an hour of your time in this incredibly stressful, busy season. So thank you. Thank you for being here.

I’m going to begin with two images and a question.

Image One: The Tree

The first image: I want you to imagine a tree. An oak tree maybe, a maple, something with really broad leaves for lots of shade. Make your tree in your head really large and expansive. It should be the kind of tree that if you were seven years old, you would want to build a fort under this thing. Or you’d want to bring a book and sit underneath and read it for an hour.

When you step under the canopy of this tree, it feels like you have stepped right out of the world. You can see the light filtering through the leaves. You can smell the soil down by the roots. The bark is warm against your back. But most of all, when you imagine sitting under this tree, I want you to feel how the skin on your face softens, and your shoulders drop a little bit, and your breathing slows.

Image Two: The Person

Now for the second image, I want you to imagine a person this time. Someone who, out of all of the hundreds of people that you’ve encountered in your life, you think of as a real saint. Maybe the first person that you ever came across and just kind of immediately thought, that’s what a disciple is. That’s what a Christian is.

Someone whose goodness and kindness just radiated off of them. They’ve got bright eyes. They laugh easily, maybe. They’re whip smart, but they wear it lightly. You’re looking for someone who is steady, who is peaceful. And once again, I hope you’re imagining someone who makes your shoulders relax and your eyes crinkle a little bit at the edges.

The Question

Now for my question: What exactly is religion supposed to be doing for us? Because whatever else life in this gospel is, it is an awful lot of work. Lots of meetings, lots of callings, lots of scripture study, lots of repentance processes.

There’s so much ministering, there’s so much doing things we would rather not do. White shirts and ties, skirts and high heels, very bleary-eyed mornings at the temple trying to pay attention, arduous months in the mission field, another leadership meeting—I hate those especially. Another rule not to break.

So what is it exactly that we’re supposed to be getting out of all of that?

And I want to be clear that I’m quite aware that that is hardly the most important question that we could ask about the gospel. The gospel is vastly more than what I get out of it. So I don’t mean to put us into a consumerist mindset. But scripture does make a number of promises about the kind of people that we can become as we engage in the life of faith. So while this question is not the most important, it is one that exercises me in particular, and it’s one on which the scriptures have something to say.

So with all of this introductory stuff in mind—your tree, your person, my question—let me show you now the text that I want to consider today. It comes from the Book of Psalms, which, as you might remember, is the Bible’s prayer book: one hundred-odd prayers all compiled into a single book of scripture.

But at the very beginning of that book, first chapter, there’s a short preface, a kind of promise, of what comes to those who pray. Here’s what it says:

“Blessed is the one
who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
or sit in the company of mockers,
but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
and who meditates on his law day and night.

That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.

Not so the wicked!
They are like chaff
that the wind blows away.”

The Tree by the Stream

A tree planted right by a stream. It never shrivels. It’s always green. It always thrives. This is an image of a tree that can flourish even when there’s no rain. While other trees might be wilting from drought, this tree stays green because it draws on deep and constant waters.

This doesn’t mean it’s impervious to weather. Notice that it still only bears fruit in specific seasons, but whatever the forecast brings, this tree withstands, because it relies on a unique source of nourishment.

I’ve been arrested by this image this year. It’s a really potent metaphor for what it is that the gospel offers us. Christ said as much when he said that he can offer peace “not as the world giveth.” And it’s a kind of peace that I have seen from time to time in the lives of other disciples:

• people who aren’t manipulated by political messaging because their allegiance is to a kingdom not of this world;
• people who aren’t fazed by fitness influencers because they know in whose image they are made, and that it is not their waistlines that save them;
• people who, when they lose their job or a spouse gets cancer or their sister leaves the Church or an earthquake robs them of all material possessions, they weather it.

They are rooted deeply in a peace that passes all understanding.

But as much as I trust and have seen in the lives of other people that deep spiritual roots and constant peace are possible, I also have to confess that I am not like that tree. Not yet. I am much more like the chaff in verse four. I am distracted, unrooted, influenced, susceptible to being blown about. Compared to the tree in Psalm 1, I am a spiritual lightweight.

And there is one place that I feel it more than any other.

Chaff and the Infinite Scroll

Ever since I aged into a tax bracket where I could afford a smartphone, I have been increasingly captured by the infinite scroll. I am more and more likely to choose screens as my preferred form of rest, where I collapse into a vegetative passivity, ready to absorb whatever advertising agencies and entertainment companies have decided I ought to consume.

And I can feel the way that it is instilling values and desires in me that I would not have chosen for myself—and that the Lord most certainly has not chosen for me.

Thanks to my online life, I unconsciously judge my home against interior decorating reels and my body against the impossibly smooth skin of actresses. I prefer consuming my favorite YouTube channel to spending time with my children because YouTube doesn’t talk back and it doesn’t need me to make dinner.

(Which is a laugh line, but it’s also true.)

And the more time that I have spent in our collective online social media world, the more I’ve felt myself succumbing to the values that are quietly embedded there. Ideas like:

• things ought to be easy and quick, just like the efficient UX design that shuttles me cleanly to a checkout page;
• they ought to match my consumer preference, just like all the ads that are algorithmically served to me on Facebook;
• and anything that’s difficult or challenging or unpleasant should be avoided at all costs—unless, of course, it is in the service of my self-actualization as a fitter, trendier, and wealthier version of myself.

I live in a world that privileges me, the consumer, and scrambles to keep me constantly flitting between shows and video games and political opinions that are exactly to my taste and that capture the maximal amount of my attention.

With that kind of golden spoon in my mouth, you can imagine my increasing distaste for the resistance of real life and, much more dangerously, real discipleship.

I have felt, thanks to the past few years of my online habits, the ways that my phone attunes me to different values and different time scales than those on which the Lord operates. And it has happened every bit as gradually as verse one describes. Notice the progression here from a casual acquaintance with evil to a settled one. The path that we’re warned against begins with walking, then standing, then sitting—what one scholar calls an occasional compliance that then becomes lingering, and finally, settled identification.

The verse describes a process that to me, with my 21st-century eyes, looks downright algorithmic.

And I will admit that the algorithm really has served me well on occasion. It really has led me to the perfect pair of shoes and my favorite brand of skincare product and an Instagram account with sound mental health advice and the perfect Christmas gift for my daughter.

But it’s always a consumer product. It always requires that my eyeballs stay glued to the screen, and the only incantation that releases them is the input of my credit card number.

And just as suspiciously, the algorithm has never led me in the same inexorable way to a general conference talk. Not once have I opened my phone to decompress and then found myself in the kitchen of one of my ministering sisters helping her with the dishes. Not once have I started with “just five minutes” of New York Times puzzles or a quick YouTube short and found myself immersed in close study of scripture.

What makes me suspicious is not some Luddite distaste for new technologies so much as the fact that I have felt the way the algorithm always seems to work only for one side—the side that wants me numb and disconnected and pacified and entertained and purchasing and distracted for hours.

In all of these ways, I am the chaff described in Psalm 1.

But the passage holds forth the possibility of a different option, a promise that in the face of all the digital habits and market forces that would keep us spiritual lightweights, we might grow roots. And if there is one thing that I have begun to crave over the past few years in my discipleship, it is this: I want roots.

I suspect that if I want to hear the Holy Ghost, I need an attention span longer than a Sora video. If I want to know the power of scripture, I have to desire something that isn’t algorithmically designed to hold eyeballs, that isn’t crowd-tested or optimized by a marketing agency or generated by artificial intelligence. And until I do, I risk being blown about by every societal wind.

God works on the order of centuries. His patience with His children is millennia long. We, meanwhile, can barely contain ourselves for the five seconds it takes for the “skip” button to appear on an advertisement. We gnash our teeth if free shipping isn’t available for an impulse buy we thought of less than ten minutes ago.

My worry here isn’t just the reactionary hand-wringing of an elder millennial worrying about new technology. It’s that when I feel the effects of our online culture on my own mind and heart and body, I feel a disconnect between the directions it’s tugging me and the habits and behaviors and loves that I read about in scripture and hear about in general conference.

God doesn’t operate on the time scale of two-day shipping. But as long as I do, I suspect that I will be less serviceable in His work and living well below the privileges of what a life of faith can offer.

Trees and Time

Here, then, is the deepest reason that I’m drawn to the image of a tree in Psalm 1. Trees operate on a different time scale. They follow slower tempos and more ancient rhythms.

God could have planted many things in this metaphor: a seed, a sprout, a bush, something smaller, more tender or vulnerable, to really play up His nurturing care. But we are asked to contemplate a tree specifically, an organism that is much larger and much older than we are, that outstrips human timeframes.

Trees are not anxious about next quarter’s sales. They toil not, neither do they spin.

Every day that passes in the 21st century, the media economy ratchets up, devising ever more granular and invasive ways to capture our attention. But as the apps proliferate and the commercials take on ever more frenetic cutting rates, the trees outside this building, right there in the JFSB quad, they spend that time chasing nutrients in the soil just a few millimeters deeper.

For every election cycle that we endure, they add a few more inches to their canopy, and they cast that much more shade on us on hot summer days.

As we grow panicked about finals and grading and deadlines, there are right this moment trees in the Utah mountains that were alive when Wilford Woodruff was president of the Church, that gave oxygen to the Saints as they made difficult negotiations with modernity at the opening of the 20th century, as they gave up polygamy and negotiated secularism and later built this very school.

And if we think to a very particular kind of Utah tree, the famous aspen, there is a root system just a few miles from us that, on a conservative estimate, has been drawing life from the soil since the last Ice Age.

Psalm 1 promises not just that we might be nourished independent of weather, not just that we might be cared for like a tender plant, but that we might become like trees, rooted in rhythms far beyond the frantic disattention economy that tugs at our every 21st-century step.

We can aspire to “think celestial” only when we first aspire to the spiritual rhythms more on the order of maples and aspens and cottonwoods. We will live according to the cadence that structures our calendars.

Streams and Sources

The tree in Psalm 1 thrives because of that stream. It can grow old and slow because of its source. But if we draw our meaning from Instagram rather than from scripture, we will live by the 24-hour expiration of reels rather than the deep wisdom of centuries. If we draw self-worth from the heat of our political takes on Facebook rather than from the cross of Jesus, we will never internalize a love that outstrips this world.

If our gratification comes from shopping highs rather than service of the poorest among us, we will only ever live in Amazon’s shipping radius and never in Zion.

So, how do we do it? How do we grow roots? How do we become slow and steady? How do we drink deep from this comfort beyond what the world can give?

Verse two tells us straight: it’s a matter of delighting in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night. “Law” here is the Hebrew word Torah—so not just a body of rules and regulations, but the instruction that God gives us, especially as contained in scripture.

And apparently our meditation on God’s word should be something like the way that a tree relates to a nearby stream. And trees, remember, are not pipes. They don’t just transfer water from one place to another. They draw it up deliberately, and they suffuse it throughout their body, and they use it to aid in every task a tree performs: photosynthesis, respiration, nutrient transport.

Our relationship with scripture—this, at least, is the suggestion—our relationship with scripture can look the same. Scripture is something to be metabolized. We can draw it up and weave it together with every piece of our lives. It can quench spiritual thirst, nourish our souls, and suffuse us to such a degree that we begin to bear the fruits of the Spirit.

If we want it, God’s words admit a deep relationship. I take it that this is some of what’s captured in the verb “meditate.” We’re not just to read or apply or even closely study—good as that is—but to meditate on the words of scripture.

Meditating on Scripture

At first glance, this can feel like a clash of incommensurate things. Our colloquial associations with meditation are something more like this: sitting silently, eyes closed, focusing on breaths. It’s what Buddhist monks do or New Age spiritualists. We tend to think of meditation as an intransitive activity. You don’t meditate on something, you just meditate.

But once again, the Hebrew is helpful here. Hāgāh does not refer to a purely intellectual activity, something you do with your mind. It’s something you do with your mouth as well. It can also be translated as a mutter or growl. It’s something vocal, suggesting the murmur of recitation just as much as it is a cerebral activity.

To “meditate on the law of the Lord,” then, turns out to be an oddly hybrid activity. It’s not quite pure contemplation, because there’s something both textual and vocal about it. But it’s also not pure study, because meditation draws it back toward a realm more like prayer.

What we tend to think of as two separate devotional activities—an opening prayer, then you do your scripture study—this verse draws into a single figure. Meditation is something like prayer, but a prayer in conversation with scripture, motivated by it, inspired by it: a prayer on scripture, whatever that means.

And this apparently is the activity that draws up living water and gives us leaves that do not wither.

But the question remains: What does that actually look like? How do you do it?

One of my hopes for this talk was that it would be ruthlessly pragmatic. I wanted you to walk out of this room armed with something that you could actually try, a concrete suggestion if you wanted it. And so, if you’ll allow me, I’m going to use the second half of my talk to share one way this might look.

I’m going to introduce you to the method that I have been using in the past few months to pray in something like the way that Psalm 1 suggests. And it is all thanks to this guy.

Learning from Martin Luther

This is Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation. You’ll probably remember him as the guy who nailed 95 theses to the door of a German church. Allegedly. It’s complicated. But that guy. Yeah, him.

In 1535, one of his parishioners, who also happened to be his barber, wrote him with a question—the very same question to which I’ve now led you: How do you do it? How do you pray? We poor German folk out here, this is a high task. It feels like our prayers can’t get past the ceiling. What do you recommend, Martin Luther?

And in response, Luther wrote a treatise called, aptly, A Simple Way to Pray. It was immediately very popular. It was published four times that year alone, then in thirteen editions during his lifetime. People seemed to find it quite helpful. And in it, he offers concrete guidance for people who are trying to get their prayers past the ceiling.

Here is how the essay opens:

“First, when I feel that I have become cold and listless in prayer, I take my little Psalter, hurry to my room, and, as time permits, I say the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and, if I have time, some words of Christ or Paul or some Psalms out loud to myself, just as a child might do. Now, when your heart has been warmed by such recitation to yourself and is intent upon the matter, then you kneel.”

Notice that for Luther, prayer doesn’t start with kneeling and folding his arms. It doesn’t start with “Dear Heavenly Father.” In fact, he doesn’t start right into prayer at all. He starts with a list of passages he recites out loud to himself. And here’s why: to warm his heart.

He starts with a warm-up routine. Just like you need to lengthen cold muscles before a hard workout, Luther thinks that we need to warm up our hearts before we can engage in prayer.

And I would guess that you’ve felt this, if you’re anything like me. If you try praying when you are busy or sleepy or hungry, you know how clumsy it feels, how much your heart’s not really in it.

And so Luther recommends a surefire list of passages that warm up your heart. Recite the words of scripture that enlarge your spirit and turn your attention heavenward. And notice that he has a list: “some words of Christ or of Paul or some Psalms.” He has favorites, a list of surefire passages that are guaranteed to awaken his heart, plug him into an eternal perspective, or remind him of who God is and what prayer is for.

I warned you that I wanted to be ruthlessly pragmatic. Here’s the list of passages I’ve been using, if you’re curious to try this for yourself. These are like calisthenics for the heart. You recite one a couple of times out loud before you pray. They remind you who you’re approaching and why. It’s like turning on a tap or firing up the pilot light.

If your prayers have felt more like a dry faucet or a cold shower lately, perhaps you just haven’t been doing the warmups.

Here’s Luther’s next step:

“I go through the Ten Commandments. I take one part after another and free myself as much as possible from distractions in order to pray. I divide each commandment into four parts.”

And we’ll get into those in a minute. But notice where he starts: “Go through the Ten Commandments.” We have still not yet arrived at “Dear Heavenly Father.” There is not as yet any expression of our thoughts and wishes offered to God. Luther starts first with a text. He knows that prayer is a conversation that begins first in what God has said to us.

This is something that’s very easy to overlook. If we approach prayer thinking that we are initiating a conversation, we have already stepped off on the wrong foot. God started a conversation with you before you were even born. He’s been sending us revelation since the beginning of the plan of redemption.

If we want our prayers to be genuine dialogue with God, we have to step into the conversation that He has already begun. Otherwise, we’re asking for a present while ignoring the gift that’s currently being extended to us. It’s a real dialogue only if it begins in what God is already saying to us through scripture. Martin Luther understands this. So he turns to a text—in this case, the Ten Commandments.

What next?

“I divide each commandment into four parts. I think of each commandment as, first, instruction, which is really what it is intended to be, and consider what the Lord God so earnestly demands of me. Second, I turn it into a thanksgiving. Third, a confession, and fourth, a prayer.”

Luther looks for four things in this passage of scripture that he wants to pray:

1. Instruction – What is this text trying to tell me? What’s the straightforward lesson?
2. Thanksgiving – What in this text sparks my gratitude? What gives me occasion to praise God?
3. Confession – What in this text calls me to repentance? What sin does it lead me to recognize?
4. Prayer – Taking all that reflection and finally addressing God out of it.

Then Martin Luther gives examples. He’s very helpful; this is a great treatise.

Here’s the first commandment. We’re all familiar with it. And as he’s just told us, Luther starts with instruction:

“Here I first consider that God expects and teaches me to trust Him sincerely in all things. It is His most earnest intention to be my God, so I must think of Him this way. My heart must not build upon anything else or trust in any other thing, be it wealth, prestige, wisdom, might, holiness, or any other creature.”

Lovely, but pretty straightforward. We do this kind of thing in Sunday School all the time. We’re pretty good at drawing clear-cut lessons from scripture.

But the next step is maybe a bit more unfamiliar: looking for thanksgiving, for something to praise. Luther says this:

“Second, I give thanks for God’s infinite compassion by which He has come to me, a lost mortal, in such a fatherly way, and without my asking, seeking, or deserving Him, has offered to be my God, to care for me, and to be my comfort, protection, help, and strength in every time of need. We poor blind mortals have sought so many gods and would have to seek them still if He did not enable us to hear Him openly tell us in our own language that He wants to be our God. How could we ever in all eternity thank God enough?”

I find that really moving. Alongside the instruction about placing nothing higher than God in our affections, he recognizes the sheer grace by which God offers to be our God in the first place. He recognizes the instruction itself as an instance of mercy, and packages all of that into a moment of praise.

Now for confession:

“Third, I confess and acknowledge my great sin and ingratitude for having so shamefully despised such a sublime teaching and precious gift throughout my whole life, and for having horribly provoked His wrath by countless acts of idolatry. I repent of these and ask for His grace.”

It doesn’t take much self-reflection to list all of the ways that each of us sets our hearts on any number of idols: career advancement, social status, physical attractiveness, the comforts of wealth. We are so prone to worship the things that are not God.

What’s important to notice, I think, is the way that Luther has programmed into his prayer practice a moment of self-assessment and self-reflection. Prayer is a chance to take an honest look at how we’re doing and to do it in the company of a loving God. As one pastor puts it, prayer is how to go into the inner rooms of the heart, see clearly what is there, and deal with it.

We’re going to learn many of our faults and sins just in the normal course of living. Other people will point them out; life circumstances will bring them to your attention. But every sin has its roots first in our disordered attachments. And unless we have a space for self-examination, where we consciously set aside time to look into our hearts and bring them before Christ for healing, we’re going to miss the thousands of little seeds that sin installs in us every day.

Only now, having been taught, having praised and confessed, does Luther finally approach prayer:

“Fourth, I pray and say, my God and Lord, help me by Your grace to learn and understand Your commandments more fully every day and to live them in sincere confidence. Preserve my heart so that I shall never again become forgetful and ungrateful, that I may never seek after other gods or other consolation on earth or in any creature, but cling truly and solely to You, my only God. Amen, dear Lord God and Father. Amen.”

Again, beautiful.

From here in this essay, Martin Luther moves on to the second commandment and illustrates with commandment number two, and then the third commandment, and so on, all the way through the Ten Commandments. It’s very much worth reading, but this, in a nutshell, gives us his method.

I hope that after reading this, you can feel his devotion. I hope you get a sense for how much richer his prayer is at the end of this process because it’s been honed and crafted in conversation with scripture. And I hope that you get a sense for the way this kind of prayer works on the heart of the person praying, rather than simply expressing a laundry list of desires.

There are surely other models for what it might look like to meditate on the word of the Lord, but I think this is one of them.

Trying It with Psalm 1

So now I want you to try it. Let’s return to these verses from Psalm 1.

I won’t ask you to share or anything. This is not interactive; I’m too much of an introvert for that. But I am going to give you a couple of minutes, and I want you to see what arises for you when you look for instruction, thanksgiving, confession, and then prayer within these verses. I’ll watch the clock for a couple of minutes and then keep going.

Obviously, if this were your real scripture study, you would spend a lot longer on this passage. But here’s what arises for me. This is like the moment in a cooking show when they pull out the cookies they’ve already baked. That’s what I’m about to do.

Instruction

God offers us a peace that does not depend on life’s circumstance, a source of nourishment such that we need never fear or doubt no matter the season of our lives. His word is that source, and He wants us to delight in it, to develop our attention and our taste and our discipline until scripture is something we turn to not out of duty but out of genuine pleasure.

Thanksgiving

Can you imagine anything more merciful than an unending supply of peace, no matter what life throws at you? What compassion and what enduring love, that without us deserving it or even asking for it, God would orchestrate this kind of peace on our behalf. And knowing that we were naturally going to look for it in all of the wrong places, He even places this reminder in scripture. It is so kind. What generosity in the face of our weakness. How could we ever thank Him enough?

Confession

Of course, I have spent much of my life ignoring this deep river and looking for satisfaction in all the wrong places. Desiring rest, I settle instead for numb, distracted consumption on social media. Craving acceptance, I lust instead after certain class markers: fashionable clothes, a fashionable body, the right home decor, the understated but regular and no doubt European vacations.

Hungry for security, I am far more prone to worry over the number in my bank account than I am to remember that the faithful will inherit all that the Father has.

Prayer

And so, if this were my prayer, I might ask the Lord to help me trust more in the peace that He offers. I would ask Him to make me slow like the trees, so that I can drink more often from His stillness, to calm my rhythms, to run in concert with His so that I might recognize the world’s frenetic counterfeits for what they are.

I would ask Him to change my heart so that it truly delights in His word, and my habits so that I am weaned off the false liturgies that have disordered my loves and learn to rely on Him as my first and best and most constant support.

Tish Warren says this about prayer:

“Faith, I’ve come to believe, is more craft than feeling. And prayer is our chief practice in that craft. Most popular understandings of prayer get this backwards. We think of prayer as mostly self-expressive, but prayer actually shapes our inner lives. Prayers teach us how to believe.”

I’ve been praying this Martin Luther method for the past several months. I’m still learning how. I’m still developing patience. And in the meantime, I am still very much chaff.

But I can tell you this: when my husband lost his job earlier this year, I didn’t collapse into stress and panic the way I might have done a year ago. To my surprise—and it was a great surprise—I watched my thoughts slip like water down a newly formed channel and turn in a new way, with new instinctiveness, to the Lord, to memories of His sure provision all through my life, and to a reassurance that He would provide for our family the way He always has and the way He always provides for His saints.

I could feel in that moment that my roots had grown.

I’ve noticed too that I’m much better at catching my heart in its unruliness. I notice much more swiftly when I’m slipping into resentments or anxiety or judgment. I know better how to recognize these everyday sins as sins and how to rope them and drag them back to Christ.

And weirdly, it is a joy as I do it. I don’t feel overly guilty because I never had any illusions that my heart was righteous to begin with. What’s more, yoked to Christ’s grace, I know that I’m not condemned. Christ has already paid everything it costs to change my heart. My job is just to lasso it like the runaway goat that it is and bring it back to Him.

And because I rest confident in that grace, I can do it chuckling a little bit at how the whippersnapper thought to escape this time.

“Look who I found trying to burrow under the fence,” I say to the Savior. “It was my anxiety about an upcoming deadline at work. And look who was hiding in the vegetable patch: my feelings of inferiority compared with that woman in my ward. And right there in broad daylight, brazen as can be, this stubborn old cow: my resentments about my Church calling.”

Though I am still very new at this, the youngest and tenderest sapling in the Lord’s nursery, to be sure, I can feel my roots growing, and I can feel an increasing instinct for where the soil is deep and where the stream bends and when and how to reach for it.

Deep Roots in a Distracted Age

My friends, I do not know if this style of prayer will work for you the same way that it has for me, but I do know that enriching our prayer and our scripture study, our meditation, is how we become slow and stable disciples. I don’t think there’s one right way to do any of this, but I do think we need deep roots now more than ever.

I feel this pressed upon me with an urgency not just born of the Old Testament Psalms, not just of my own experience, but also with the urgency of Restoration scripture. When God opened this dispensation, He did it with another iteration of this very same image.

Psalm 1 warns against sitting in the company of mockers and contrasts it with this tree that we’ve been contemplating. So too, the Book of Mormon opens with mockers in opposition to a tree that never withers, that grows alongside the word of God, and a reminder that our tenacious, devoted grip on that word is what will make all the difference.

I am convinced that the number one challenge to discipleship in the 21st century is the gulf, the chasm in our culture, between what God needs from us and what the market wants from us.

The market wants us constantly distracted, constantly overstimulated, permanently entertained, multitasking five different ways in the name of a productive efficiency that burns us out so thoroughly that all we can do at the end of the day is collapse in front of yet another screen and passively imbibe more of the world’s values.

But God needs a people who can pay attention, who can sit still, because that’s the only way the dews of heaven could possibly distill on our souls. He needs a people who can withstand boredom and monotony, because sacrament meeting is more often boring than not, and ministering to God’s children is so very often monotonous.

He needs a people who are patient well past the five-second skip button and on-demand streaming, because the arc of redemption is long and His work and His glory span the eternities. And whatever the affordances of artificial intelligence might be, I am certain that they are not the principles of intelligence that can rise with us in the resurrection.

We need new hearts with longer attention spans and more righteous desires and an eternal perspective. And the only place we find those new hearts, scripture teaches, is in Christ.

So let me be most clear on this point: we cannot do this for ourselves. You cannot change your own heart, and you know because, like me, you have tried. You can simply show up day after day for the appointment where your heart is changed, and that daily appointment, I believe, is prayer.

I have issued many implicit altar calls over the course of this talk. Please hear me now in what I intend to be the loudest and most explicit of them. If Psalm 1 calls us to meditate on God’s words, let’s recognize that we depend first and always on the incarnate Word of God, to whom we look day and night for our redemption.

He is the one who plants us by streams of grace. We might be like the tree in this passage only because of what He won for us on a tree of His own, and it is His rootedness, the surety of those nails in that place, that grants us the privilege of plentiful fruit and leaves that never wither.

If we find ourselves with changed hearts and more fruitful prayers and thicker roots for drawing up the water of salvation, it will be only and always because of Him.

So hallelujah for the possibility of deep roots and slower rhythms and the stream that makes it possible.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.