Fret not yourself because of evildoers;

     be not envious of wrongdoers!

For they will soon fade like the grass

     and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the LORD, and do good;

     dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.

Delight yourself in the LORD,

     and he will give you the desires of your heart.—Psalm 37:1–4

 

Introduction

I want you to imagine family game night. As a family you decide to play a rousing game of Monopoly. It is fun to pick out your game piece. I always pick the car. It is fast—and we are racing to purchase property and get other people’s money. I want something fast and intimidating. I never understood why certain teams have pitiful mascots. I grew up an hour away from the Sioux Falls minor league baseball team: the Sioux Falls Canaries. A canary? What? Do they sacrifice themselves so that the other team wins? The miners? That is like choosing the thimble in Monopoly! Who does that? I would really like to know who chooses the thimble and why. Maybe I am missing the deeper meaning of that symbol.

After you pick the game piece, you get started. You race to buy property. The rules say that you have to own all the properties in a particular color scheme before you can buy houses for any of them. You also have to build houses before you can build hotels. You know the other rules, right? If you pass go, you get $200 bucks. If you land on the tax part of the board, you have to pay 10%, etc.

But on this particular game night, a couple of the kids decide they are going to do things their own way because they want to win so badly. They start breaking the rules in order to get ahead. When they pass go, they take $500 from the bank, but the other two kids take $200 as specified in the rulebook. A couple of the kids change the rules and buy hotels first instead of building up to four houses before buying a hotel. They keep changing the amount of rent that it costs if you land on their property until you are bankrupt and they win.

They broke all the rules and they won. You kept all the rules and you lost. Some of you that have competitiveness and belief in your strength finders are really worked up just listening to this illustration. You could be mad at your siblings, but the most perplexing part is that Dad has been watching the whole time and didn’t do anything about it. He just let it happen and didn’t intervene!? Doesn’t Dad care? Why keep the rules if they are never enforced? Why should I care if no one else does? If you feel those questions viscerally, then you are ready to start reading Psalm 37.

Psalm 37 is sometimes called an instructional psalm or a wisdom psalm because it gives wise counsel concerning how to live a godly life. In particular, Psalm 37 warns God’s people of a trial and a temptation and provides a way forward to live by faith. Psalm 37 is also an alphabet psalm—an acrostic where each successive section begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This structure allows the Psalmist to speak in a somewhat loose manner about the main theme without a strict logical outline. The acrostic provides the structure and the opening provides the thesis or the theme. As such, we will look at the first four verses as a window into the entire psalm. In January, we will come back to Psalm 37 for three sermons in our topical series on the word, ethnic harmony, and sanctity of life.

The main point could be stated like this: Look to the Lord or you will fall into the fiery pit of burning envy. These four verses tell us about three places to look: look out, look ahead, and look up.

Outline:

1. Look Out  (v. 1)
2. Look Ahead (v. 2)
3. Look Up (vv. 3-4)

1. Look Out  (v. 1)

Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers!

Verse 1 is a warning, indeed a command against a very specific sin: “Fret not” or “be not envious.” What do these words “fret” and “envy” mean? I think the word “fret” is far too weak. It can give the impression of pitifully and anxiously wringing your hands. The word in a form (hiphil) that literally means to “heat oneself in vexation” (See Allen P. Ross, Psalms 1–41, p. 805). The word in this form occurs four times (Psalm 37:1, 7, 8; Proverbs 24:19). I think the word “vexation” is a better translation than “fret.” One commentator translates it as “a consuming indignation” (Ross, p. 805).

The parallel verb “be not envious” in verse 1 is illuminating. It means the passion or burning heat of jealousy or envy. Here is what is important. Having a burning desire for something is not necessarily sinful. Where it becomes sinful is when a desire for something is joined by a burning resentment that someone else has it and you don’t. Covetousness is when you have a desire that becomes so consuming that it captures the heart. Envy adds the element of resentment to the mix. Covetousness desires what someone else has and envy resents them for having it. 

Envy is a sin that requires more than intellectual acknowledgment—we have to feel the burn. Here are some examples of how it may show up among different groups:

To children, I ask, when your friend succeeds at school (get better grades—perhaps even getting them and not studying as hard as you) or at sports (getting more playing time), are you happy for them? What happens when they get more attention or they have better stuff like electronics? Do you rejoice with them and tell them that all they have is a blessing from God and you thank God with them? Or do you have embers of resentment burning within you that those things are not true of you?

To mothers and fathers, do you rejoice when other people’s children succeed at school or sports? Do you rejoice with those parents for their children? Or do you have simmering resentment that it was not your child? Do you look at other people’s marriages and envy them and have secret resentment that you have to struggle more than them? Do you resent the fact that they have less financial struggles or marriage struggles or parenting struggles?

To the unmarried, I ask, when your friend gets a girlfriend or boyfriend or gets engaged or married, are you happy for them or do you put on a happy face but inwardly you are frustrated that you got left in the dust once again. I’m sure that it is frustrating even to have sermon illustrations that mention marriage and children—you wish you could relate to them.

The fact that we can burn with the smoldering resentment of envy over friends and family members testifies to our sin problem. This Psalm goes further in that it is addressing not our friends, family, or fellow Christians, but those who do evil. That is why this is such a trial of faith. The specific struggle for the Psalmist takes on greater clarity in verse 7:

Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; 
fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, 
over the man who carries out evil devices! 

The anger burns hotter when we add the fuel of comparison to the fire. Not only do others have something I want, but they don’t deserve it. We say, “wait a minute. These people reject you and disregard everything you say and you seem to be pouring out blessing on them.” They are cheaters like at Monopoly. But this is not a game. This is real life. They are getting ahead unjustly. They take advantage of others and break the rules, and they seem to be winning and getting away with it. That is the greatest trial—God does not seem to be doing anything about it! Is he even there? Does he even care? Is holiness useless and pointless?

The two words from verse 1 together picture a person on fire with vexation and envy. Verse 8 supports this picture further in associating a fretful, jealous state with anger and wrath:

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath! Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.

These words are like different logs on the same fire burning together. They are all there burning together at the bottom of the fiery pit. This fallen world is full of pitfalls. The Bible is warning us against falling into this fiery pit and getting burned by vexation, envy, and anger. Psalm 73 is parallel in so many ways. He was envious of the wicked when he saw their prosperity (73:3). His bitterness was not only directed at the wicked who were blessed, but at God because he did the blessing (“My soul was embittered … I was like a beast toward you,” vv. 21–22).

I love the Bible because it does not give bare commands. Don’t do this. Why? Just because. It gives us reasons to believe God and obey him. Faith needs more than a “look out” or “don’t do this.” It needs solid ground to stand upon. Don’t fret “for” or because (v. 2). Verse 2 provides the solid ground for the obedience of faith. God tells us to look ahead.

2. Look Ahead (v. 2)

For they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb.

Don’t fret over how evildoers are getting away with evil. They are not. Don’t be envious of what evildoers have—look what they have coming to them—are you still envious? Don’t be angry as if God is not doing anything about it—look at them again in the light of what is coming to them. Don’t envy them, don’t be angry at them. Pity them.

Looks can be deceiving. The green grass and the green herb are here today and fade tomorrow. They are temporary. You have to picture grass in the climates that have a rainy season and a dry season. The grass is there in the rainy season and quickly dries up and dies in the dry season. The psalmist is saying, “Yes, they are in the rainy season now, but the dry season is coming and it will be permanent for them.”

The same logical connection is made between verses 8–9, but the Psalmist adds one important point: The season will change for both of you:

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath! 

     Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil. 

For the evildoers shall be cut off, 

     but those who wait for the LORD shall inherit the land. 

In just a little while, the wicked will be no more; 

     though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there. 

But the meek shall inherit the land 

     and delight themselves in abundant peace.—Psalm 37:8–11

You seem to be in the dry season and they seem to be green grass in the rainy season, but a reversal is coming for both of you permanently. They will experience death, and you will be in full bloom (inherit the land; delight in abundant peace). All that you see the wicked taking will be taken from them and given to you.

So is the solution to just hold on until then? Have a grim face and just hold on like you are hanging from a bar—just hold on a little longer and don’t fall?

Don’t just look ahead, look up at God.

3. Look Up (vv. 3–4)

Trust in the LORD, and do good;

     dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.

Delight yourself in the LORD,

     and he will give you the desires of your heart.

1. Trust
The call here is to look to the Lord. Put your trust in him. Trust is not so much a trust an argument as trust a Person. In other words, David says more than just trust in a future you don’t know, but trust in the God you do know. Do you believe what you see more than what he says? Trust Who he is and what he says. These verses are the flip side of verse 1. You can respond with vexation and envy or you can trust in the Lord. Thus, envy, anger, vexation flow from unbelief. Envy has captured the heart and God’s word has not. It is like capture the flag—sin has come and captured the flag of your heart from God. God aims to get it back in this psalm.

How does this trust in the Lord actually address our anxiety? Verse 5 gives an amazingly practical answer. Don’t deny your fretting. Just “stop it.” Start rolling your anxiety onto God. Look at verse 5: “Commit your way to the Lord.” The word for “commit” literally means to roll something onto something or someone else. Look away from the vexing problem of the prosperity of evildoers and look to God because he wants to carry your burden. The burning of envy and anger is like a hot potato that you are not meant to carry—give it quickly to God. Let the perplexing pain of the situation drive you closer to God, not farther away. 

I love how the rest of Psalm 37 addresses the lie that the life of faith will be a passive, lazy, sit-back-do-nothing-and-let-God-take-care-of-everything kind of life. The life of faith is an active life that calls for doing, dwelling, and delighting.

Trust in the LORD, and do good;

     dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.

Delight yourself in the LORD,

     and he will give you the desires of your heart.—Psalm 37:3–4

2. Do
Get busy doing the things you know are right, even if you don’t see an immediate reward for doing it. The rest of Psalm 37 fleshes out the good we are called to do.

The wicked borrow and don’t payback, but the righteous are generous with their money and help people in need (v. 21). The righteous speak wisdom and justice (vv. 30–31) because it comes from the heart (the Law is on the heart, v. 31). Jesus taught that from the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. If God’s just and wise ways are written on the heart, the mouth will speak them. Go all out on doing good. As C.S. Lewis says, “There is no excess of goodness. You cannot go too far in the right direction” (The Pilgrim’s Regress).

Psalm 37:5 also says that God will do something with the deeds of the righteous.

Commit your way to the LORD; 

     trust in him, and he will act.

How will he act? Read the next verse (v. 6).

He will bring forth your righteousness as the light,

     and your justice as the noonday.

God will cause your goodness to shine in the dark. It will stand out. God’s goodness and glory will shine. This is exactly what Jesus said about our good works. Your identity will shine and we provide a beacon for another world—a future world. You put God on display for the world to see: his justice, his wisdom, his glory.

3. Dwell (feed and wait)
The next part of the verse says to “dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness” (v. 3). The second part of that phrase is a little ambiguous. The word for “befriend” literally means “to feed.” The question is whether they are to “feed on their own faithfulness” or “feed on God’s faithfulness.” In some ways, both are true because they are called to do good and they are called to delight in the Lord. But I think the phrase in question should be taken the second way: Feed on God’s faithfulness. While they dwell in the land, they feed on his faithfulness like a rich pastureland. The wicked are feeding on the things of this world, but the faithful can feed on God’s faithfulness even when the things of this world are scarce.

Feeding on God’s faithfulness has another dimension as well as dwelling in the land. They can live in the land like those who will possess it all later. They just have to wait (v. 7). 

Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;

fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way,

over the man who carries out evil devices!

Trust in the Lord very practically includes trusting his sense of timing. We don’t have a heart set on self-vindication—we are willing to wait for God’s perfect justice in God’s perfect timing. The waiting takes place while dwelling in the land because God promised that the meek would inherit the land (vv. 9–11).

For the evildoers shall be cut off, 

     but those who wait for the LORD shall inherit the land. 

In just a little while, the wicked will be no more; 

     though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there. 

But the meek shall inherit the land

     and delight themselves in abundant peace.

The faithful are not powerful—they are powerless and often oppressed by the faithless who look powerful. But the powerless feed on the promises of God and leave justice in God’s Almighty hands. They wait for him because they know he can do what no one else can do: bring judgment. The judgment will be so complete that the wicked will be gone. There will be no one there—and the meek will be there to inherit it. It is like the game of monopoly: Dad intervenes and the rule-breaking kids have to give up all their property and money, and the other kids will get it all. You may not own Boardwalk and Park Place and all the railroads, but you keep playing the game and don’t quit because you know that your heavenly Father is going to intervene. He will take it all away from them—and give it all to us. Don’t get caught up when you see the houses and hotels and piles of monopoly money. You know how it all ends.

Jesus tells us the same thing. He told us that we would not just inherit the land, but the whole earth. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). Paul expands it in the same way when he tells the Corinthians to stop fighting over stuff because “all things are yours” (1 Corinthians 3:21). They just had to wait patiently.

4. Delight
Now God calls us to delight ourselves in him. This is perhaps the greatest weapon against envying the wicked. Why would I envy people who do not have God? The war against envy is a battlefield that is set up to see whether you win the war against idolatry: Do you love the gifts more than the Giver? Can you be content with the little that you have compared to the wealth of the wicked (v. 16)? You have God and they don’t! Why would I prefer the hole in the ground I can dig and fill, compared to the Niagara Falls fountain of God’s delights—the fountain of life?! (Psalm 36:8–9). This is the same theme as Psalm 1 where the righteous find their delight in God and his word (Psalm 1:2).

What does it mean that God will give them the desires of their heart? Notice the order. If what we do flows out of love for God or delight in God, our desires or our deeds will be pointed in the right direction. Covetousness for the things of the world and envy towards those who have it are great dangers, but there is no such thing as wanting or having too much of God. Envy is what happens when your heart is not satisfied in the Lord.

Application: Gospel Delight and Rest

Proverbs 27:4 is right: “Wrath is cruel, anger is overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy?” How can we stand before this deadly danger? Envy comes when people have more than us: They are more gifted, more educated, more likeable, more beautiful, more popular, more successful, more wealthy. It is bad enough that the burning of envy starts simmering inside even with our friends or family, but it is even harder to stand before wicked when the comparison is between those who seem to deserve it more (and don’t get it) and those who seem to deserve less (and have it).

It is a trial of faith when God seems to bless those who reject God and are not children of God more than those who love God and are the children of God. We instinctively feel that judicial sentiment rising that says, “the wicked are being treated better than they deserve.” But here is the deadly danger for us in that position. We assume that the opposite is true: We are being treated worse than we deserve. We deserve better. Lie! That is one of the deadliest thoughts you could ever cultivate. Envy and anger grow best in the garden of self-righteousness and pride. Fighting envy and anger is a fight against self-righteousness. Self-righteousness says, “delight yourself in yourself.”

Here me clearly. Nobody earns the inheritance. The meek don’t inherit the earth because they out-meek everyone else in a meekness contest. What would that even mean to out-meek someone? We come back to the fact that there is no one righteous (Psalm 14:1). No one who seeks God. No one who earns anything good from God. They do not earn the inheritance as a reward; they receive the inheritance it as a gift. They do not rely on what they do; they rely on what someone else has done for them. What did Jesus do for his people? Jesus did two things. First, he perfectly fulfilled the righteous requirements of the Law. He obeyed verse 1 perfectly: He never was vexed and envious toward the wicked. He obeyed verse 3 perfectly. He perfectly trusted in the Lord, perfectly did good, perfectly fed on God’s faithfulness, perfectly delighted in his Father. Second, he perfectly paid the price for all the times we didn’t perfectly trust or perfectly delight in God. He paid the penalty for all the times we were vexed and envious. he perfectly and fully paid the penalty for all the places we have fallen short of what God required of us.

I want you to not just receive what Jesus did for you—I want you to delight in it—its beauty and majesty. I want you to be overcome with the soul-stretching magnificence of what Christ did. Self-righteousness delights in your own righteousness; the saved delight in the righteousness of Christ.

The meek confess that they have no power at all to save themselves. God tells them that and they believe it. He then tells them what they have to do to be saved: Rely completely on the sheer, undeserved, unmerited (ill-merited) grace of God. How did that happen? Jesus was meek and humble in heart. He obeyed his Father—every step, every part of the plan to save us. His meekest moment was in the Garden of Gethsemane—facing the horrors of God’s wrath—tasting the horrors of hell, the cup of wrath held out before him. He shuddered. He sweat drops of blood. But he came to that meek moment: “Not my will, but yours be done.”

The Almighty Lion with terrible claws and teeth became the sacrificial lamb, meek and silent before its shearers, submitting as a willing sacrifice. (He didn’t resist, he didn’t fight back, he didn’t call down angel armies). He let go of self-vindication and vengeance. He was innocent and yet suffered for our guilt. He was the owner of everything and yet he gave that up here on earth (no place to lay his head; no palace). We can become the heirs of all, because Jesus gave it all up and was stripped of everything but love. Tim Keller points out that the soldiers even cast lots for his last possession, his garment (The Songs of Jesus, p. 73).

Have you ever seen that it is only the meek who can rest? Those who refuse to trust God’s sense of timing and God’s plan cannot rest. Sometimes I get up early to go work out. I sit on the couch. I sometimes close my eyes and wake up five minutes later. The rest is fitful. It is not REM rest—deep rest—replenishing, rejuvenating rest. How different Friday night rest is for me. I know that Saturday morning is coming and I have no agenda. I will wake up and make breakfast for my family, but it is my one day to sleep in. The one day that the alarm does not wake me up.

Gospel rest is like that Saturday rest. When everyone else wants to run or take matters into their own hands, the meek say, “I trust in you, I come to you, I delight in you, I find rest in you alone—and I will receive a permanent rest—a heavenly Sabbath rest because my King has crushed the curse of death and I am his forever. My Redeemer! My God! O Praise him! Hallelujah!

Closing Song: “My Soul Find Rest in God Alone”

 

Sermon Discussion Questions

Outline

1. Look Out  (v. 1)
2. Look Ahead (v. 2)
3. Look Up (vv. 3–4)

Main Point: Look to the Lord or you will fall into the fiery pit of burning envy. Verses 1–4 tell us about three places to look: look out, look ahead, and look up.

Discussion Questions

• What does it mean to “look out?” Look out for what? What is the temptation and what is the trial that makes that sin an even greater temptation? (vv. 1, 7, 8)
• What do we see when we look ahead? How does that help our fight against being vexed and envious and anxious? (vv. 2, 9–11)
• What are the four things that come with looking up? (vv. 3, 4, 5, 7)

Application Questions

• Where do you see the wicked prospering in your own life? Have you suffered unjustly because someone got ahead by taking advantage of you or walking all over you?
• How often do you think about the Second Coming and your heavenly inheritance and full and final justice? How can these things become more of a focus in your life?
• Of the five things mentioned in the section on looking up, what things come naturally to you and what things are more of a struggle or a fight of faith?
• Is the gospel a place of delight and rest for you?

Prayer Focus 

Pray for a grace to look out, look ahead, and look up so that you delight in the Lord, wait upon the Lord, and display the glory of the Lord.