Expository Sermon on Psalm 37
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue Seventh-day Adventist Church 10/10/2020
©2020 by Maylan Schurch
(To watch the entire service on YouTube, click the link just below. The sermon begins at the 53:10 mark.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Rh0Kfu9Hg&t=3241s
Please open your Bible to Psalm 37.
This past Thursday, 13 people were charged in an alleged domestic terrorism plot to kidnap Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
The alleged scheme included plans to overthrow several state governments that the suspects believe are violating the US Constitution, including the government of Michigan (and Whitmer).
Six people were charged federally with conspiracy to kidnap, and seven other people, associated with the militia group “Wolverine Watchmen,” were charged by the state.
The Michigan Attorney General, Dana Nessel, said at a press conference, “The individuals in state custody are suspected to have attempted to identify the home addresses of law enforcement officers in order to target them, made threats of violence intended to instigate a civil war, and engaged in planning and training for an operation to attack the capitol building of Michigan and to kidnap government officials, including the governor of Michigan.”
That sounds like the plot for a rambunctious, no-holds-barred action movie. But these guys are real, and their plot was real. Fortunately, the FBI got wind of this months ago, and kept the governor’s security force informed.
Welcome to 2020. And as you know, if you keep in touch at all with the news, this isn’t the only group of evildoers plotting against the democracy and safety of Americans.
And as you know, these very concerning events tend to weigh heavily on our hearts – and on our sanity. That’s why this week I went to Psalm 37 and discovered five of David’s “sanity savers” in those verses.
And they gave me such encouragement that I thought I would pass them along to you this morning.
Why do I think this Psalm is so appropriate? Because “evildoers” is its major theme. This is a Psalm of David, but it seems to be one he may have written when he was older, because I don’t see any of those verses where he asked the Lord to help him, David, defeat his enemies. No, by this time David’s hot blood seems to have cooled. All through this Psalm David reminds us that it is God who will deal with evil and whoever does evil.
In fact, a great summary of what this Psalm is about is found in its first two verses. Let’s take a look at them.
Psalm 37:1 – 2 [NKJV]: Do not fret because of evildoers, Nor be envious of the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, And wither as the green herb.
And there you have the whole Psalm in a neat summary. But let’s not pack up and go home yet, because we haven’t seen the specific “sanity savers” yet, those principles which will give us a solid basis for keeping calm in all the crises we see around us.
So let’s get to those sanity savers right now. Each of them directs our attention and action to the Lord Himself. The first one is in the very next verse, verse three.
Verse 3: Trust in the LORD . . . .
In fact, let’s make that Sermon Point One. What is Psalm 37’s first “sanity saver”?
Trust in the Lord.
Okay. “Trust in the Lord.” There’s really nothing new about that. You hear it all the time in Christian circles. But how can we put it to use? How can we make it a sanity saver for us this coming week?
One way to make this practical is to look at some of the things the Bible says NOT to put your trust in. This week I went hunting for other verses that use this exact same Hebrew word for “trust.” We won’t take the time to turn to them and read them, but I’ll give you the text reference, and of course all have them printed out when I get the manuscript of this sermon online.
What are some things NOT to trust in? For example, take Psalm 44, verses six and seven:
Psalm 44:6 – 7: For I will not trust in my bow, Nor shall my sword save me. But You have saved us from our enemies, And have put to shame those who hated us.
Again, that’s that same Hebrew word for “trust” that we see in Psalm 37. And how relevant these verses are, right? A major worry about those Michigan militia people came from the fact that they were gathering guns and explosives to use during their proposed kidnapping of the governor. They were actually planning to use a bomb as a diversion at one point.
It is, of course, an American has right to keep and bear arms. But it is also a Christian’s responsibility to take a good long look at Psalm 44:6 – 7. “I will not trust in my bow, or my sword.” No matter what action movies teach us, the real presence of a real gun in one’s life is very, very complicated.
My dad grew up with a .22 rifle, and hunted for family food when he was a teenager on the prairies. And when I was kindergarten age he still owned a 30.06 hunting rifle. But his mind was suddenly filled with the horror of his firstborn son getting hold of that rifle when it was loaded, and accidently hurting or killing someone. So he promptly sold that rifle, and never owned another firearm.
What’s something else NOT to put your trust in?
Psalm 49:5 – 7: Why should I fear in the days of evil, When the iniquity at my heels surrounds me? Those who trust in their wealth And boast in the multitude of their riches, None of them can by any means redeem his brother, Nor give to God a ransom for him—
Again, that same Hebrew word for “trust.” Trust in the Lord, but don’t trust in your money.
Here’s something else NOT to trust in.
Psalm 146:3 – 4: Do not put your trust in princes, Nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help. His spirit departs, he returns to his earth; In that very day his plans perish.
So, trust in the Lord. Don’t buy an AR-15 and join a militia. And don’t pin all your hopes on a political party or political figure. Trust in the Lord.
And here’s something else NOT to trust in. This is very crucial:
Proverbs 28:26: He who trusts in his own heart is a fool, But whoever walks wisely will be delivered.
It’s interesting to see how the different Bible versions translate “heart.” The literal Hebrew word is “heart,” which is lev. But the NIV says “He who trusts in himself is a fool.” Very true. The English Standard Version says, “Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool.” Again, very true. And the New Revised Standard Version says, “Those who trust in their own wits are fools.”
Again, trust in the Lord, but when it comes to things only God can truly solve, don’t trust in your own heart, yourself, your mind, or your wits. Trust in the Lord instead.
Doesn’t that give you a sense of relief? Can’t you look ahead to this coming week with a bit more confidence as you deepen your trust in the Lord?
David’s second “sanity saver” is an intriguing one. It’s also very unusual, when you’re surrounded by evildoers.
Psalm 37:4: Delight yourself also in the LORD, And He shall give you the desires of your heart.
Here comes Sermon Point Two. What’s another of David’s “sanity savers”?
Trust in the Lord, and delight yourself in the Lord.
Okay, how do you delight yourself in the Lord? It seems like it might be kind of hard to work yourself up into a state of delight, considering all the evil and extortion and oppression and discrimination that’s happening around us. Isn’t life supposed to be lived severely in survival mode?
Let’s put a marker here in Psalm 37, because we’ll be back soon, and let’s go to Isaiah chapter 58. Two verses in this chapter – which are direct quotes from God Himself – tell us one way to grow a feeling of delight for the Lord. I know these verses well, but until this week I had never made the cause-and-effect connection between them.
Isaiah 58:13 – 14: [Again, this is God Himself speaking] If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, From doing your pleasure on My holy day, And call the Sabbath a delight, The holy day of the LORD honorable, And shall honor Him, not doing your own ways, Nor finding your own pleasure, Nor speaking your own words, Then you shall delight yourself in the LORD . . . .
Did you see what I did not spot until this week? I knew, of course, that we do need to turn away our foot from the Sabbath – in other words, stop trampling on it with our work boots. But I hadn’t made the connection that faithfully keeping the Sabbath leads to a delight in the Lord. Psalm 37 tells us to delight in the Lord, and keeping the Sabbath is a very practical and powerful way to do it.
A lot of people have discovered – and I’m one of them – that the more we celebrate the Sabbath the way they must have celebrated in Eden – laying aside the stress and worry of the work week, and enjoying God’s presence, and admiring what the Sabbath is a memorial of–His Creation—the more we do this, the greater our delight in God Himself will grow.
Yesterday at our local library’s curbside pickup, Shelley received a book she had put on hold. It’s a book on listening and how important it is. It’s written by “professional listener,” a reporter.
The book begins by the author telling us that most of us have forgotten how to simply listen. She mentions how social media has provided us a platform not so much to listen but to publish, to express ourselves, to get our ideas out.
I think part of learning to delight ourselves in the Lord is learning to thoughtfully listen to what He has to say to us through the book of nature, and through thoughtful, unhurried conversation with other people. I think the more faithfully and truly we keep the Sabbath, keep it in the way Jesus did, the more our delight in God will help keep us sane in a world gone mad.
Now let’s look at a third sanity-saver in Psalm 37.
Psalm 37:5: Commit your way to the LORD . . .
Let’s put the next sermon point down and then talk about it. What is this next sanity saver? Well, it’s right there in print.
To stay sane in truly appalling times, you need to:
Trust in the Lord, delight yourself in the Lord, and commit your way to the Lord.
Two very interesting words there, in the Hebrew: “commit” and “way.” The word “way” in the Hebrew is exactly the same word for “path” or “road.” It’s such a common word that my edition of the Strong’s Concordance decided that there were too many occurrences to give the context of each one, so they put that word in the appendix, where they just list the Bible references. In fact this word “way” shows up several times just in this one Psalm.
As I say, that Hebrew word can mean a road, the kind I drove on coming up to church today. But it can also mean the path you travel through your life. Just like this morning I couldn’t drive both I-405 and Coal Creek Parkway at the same time, you can’t take two paths at once. You have to choose, day by day and even moment by moment, which path you are going to take.
Now let’s take a look at this other word, “commit.” If you look it up in the Hebrew, you see that it also means “roll” – R – O – L – L. This is the same word used in Genesis 29:3, when Jacob rolled the stone away from the opening of a well so he could help water the sheep belonging to Rachel’s father. I would imagine it took a high level of commitment to shift that heavy stone and roll it aside.
So actually, when verse 5 says to “commit” your way to the Lord, there is a certain amount of “rolling” involved in that word. It seems as though something heavy is being moved from one place to another.
And when it comes to choosing the direction you should go along life’s path, that’s actually a pretty weighty matter. I’ve told this story before, but when I was about two or three years old, my parents really prayed to the Lord that they would make wise life decisions for themselves and their family. They told Him again and again that they wanted to do exactly what He wanted them to do, and go where He wanted them to go.
The Lord took them seriously, and they felt Him leading them to leave their culture of materialism and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, and move a bit out into the country. So they moved a mile away, out near Plainview Adventist Academy, which had a little elementary school as well. To the intense surprise and dismay of their former church members, they sent all four of their kids to eight grades of Seventh-day Adventist education.
This particular path wasn’t an easy one for my parents. Not only did they have to shrug off the social pressure, but financially things were really tight. At one point, all four of us kids were attending that little elementary school at the same time, and mom was a stay-at-home mom. But somehow they scrimped and saved and squeaked by, to come up with those tuition payments, and I have a feeling that they were often assisted by generous church members.
But my parents had made that difficult decision to roll the responsibility of what to do and where to go squarely onto the capable shoulders of their Heavenly Parent. I’ve often imagined God glancing at them and saying to himself, “You know what? These folks really care about me. They really want to go in the direction I think is best for them. So I will lead them there.”
So what should you do in order to commit your way to the Lord? Roll your own will over to Him and give Him charge of it. Just keep rolling your burdens, your problems over in God’s direction.
I think it was my mom who taught me how to give my problems to the Lord. You know how sometimes you lie awake at night worrying, wondering what you going to do the next day, how you going to deal with a difficult person, or solve an appalling problem?
What mom told me she did was to simply say firmly to the Lord, “Lord, I give this to you.” Often she had to say it several times. But that was her habit, and that has become my habit too. “Lord, I give this to you.”
A little over a week ago I was walking past our neighborhood park. Near the sidewalk was a type of child’s stroller I’d never seen before. The front part was a little tricycle, complete with pedals and handlebars.
But what made this trike also a stroller was that it had a long bar rising from the back of the trike to a circular handle which a parent could hold on to it. So if a little kid is riding the trike, he can pump the pedals and steer this way and that way. But if mom or dad sees him veering into danger, they can grab hold of the handle and keep him safe. And if the little guy still stubbornly tries to pedal out into the street, they can actually pull back on the handle so that his front wheel can’t get traction.
I know that navigating life is a whole lot more complicated than trike-riding. But wouldn’t you like God to be your guiding Parent? The Bible says that this is something like what He’ll do if you allow Him to. Here are just a few examples of verses which tell how God promises to lead us if we let Him:
Psalm 23:2 [NKJV]: He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside the still waters.
Psalm 25:9: The humble He guides in justice, and the humble He teaches His way.
Psalm 48:14: For this is our God, Our God forever and ever; He will be our guide even to death.
Psalm 73:24: You will guide me with Your counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.
Isaiah 30:21: Your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it, whenever you turn to the right hand or whenever you turn to the left.
John 16:13: However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.
So there’s a lot of Bible precedent for committing, for rolling your life decisions on to the Lord’s shoulders. Why not choose some of your major worries and let Him know that you want Him to take care of them?
What’s the next sanity saver in Psalm 37? Look at verse seven.
Psalm 37:7: Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for Him; Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, Because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass.
Here’s the next sanity-saver:
Trust in the Lord, delight yourself in the Lord, commit your way to the Lord, and rest in the Lord.
“Rest in the Lord.” When I saw this next sanity saver, I said to myself, “I’ll bet this Hebrew word for ‘rest’ is the same word as ‘Sabbath.’” But when I looked it up, it wasn’t. It was an entirely different word for “rest.” At first I felt disappointed. It would’ve been so fun to be able to tie this verse in with Sabbath rest.
However, the rest is spoken of here in this verse is a really important one. This is a “be still” kind of rest. This is coming to a complete stop.
Back in Joshua 10:12, when Joshua commanded the sun to “stand still” so a battle could be concluded, this is the very Hebrew word he used. David tells us to “rest in the Lord,” in Joshua told the sun to “stand still.” The same word.
So why could this kind of rest be a sanity saver for us? Is there any way we need to just simply stand still, stop moving, even though evildoers all around us are continuing to do their evil?
I don’t know what this could look like for you, or for me. We would have to probably think this through on a case-by-case basis. For example, there are a surprising number of Bible verses about being “slow to anger.” Psalm 145:8 says that the Lord is “slow to anger.” Proverbs 16:32 says, “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, And he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.”
So maybe part of “resting” or “being still” in the Lord is being as thoughtfully patient as He Himself is. Maybe “being still” is giving ourselves permission not to let our temper flash, not to be quick to flash out in irritation.
Let’s look at just one more sanity saver in this psalm. Again, like all the others, it is connected to the Lord Himself.
By the way, I would suggest, maybe this afternoon, to read this entire psalm out loud. Even though we haven’t had the time to live within all of it’s forty verses, they contain lots of encouragement. Most of the “sanity savers” come early in the chapter, but as you read the entire Psalm, you can watch how each of these principles can help us face the evildoers whose deeds are so stressful and sometimes dangerous to us.
Glance all the way down to verse 32. This is one more command, tied directly in with the Lord Himself. The sanity saver is in verse 34, but if we start with verse 32, we’ll get the context.
Psalm 37:32 – 34: The wicked watches the righteous, And seeks to slay him. The LORD will not leave him in his hand, Nor condemn him when he is judged. Wait on the LORD, And keep His way, And He shall exalt you to inherit the land; When the wicked are cut off, you shall see it.
Here comes our final sanity saver in this chapter.
Trust in the Lord, delight yourself in the Lord, commit your way to the Lord, rest in the Lord, and wait on the Lord.
What does it mean to wait on the Lord?
Maybe waiting on the Lord is simply combining all of the other sanity savers together, and letting them build our faith, and then and then just being patient.
That’s what many of the most prominent Bible people had to do. Think of Noah waiting 120 years for the flood. Think of Abraham and Sarah waiting for decades for a son. Think of Joseph, waiting in prison until Pharaoh had his dream. Think of David, waiting for God’s timing for Him to be king.
And think of the people of the last days, in Isaiah 25:9, joyfully seeing their Lord return for them:
Isaiah 25:9: “Behold, this is our God; We have waited for Him [that’s that very same Hebrew word], we have waited for Him and He will save us. This is the Lord; We have waited for Him; We will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.”
I believe that to survive the bewildering unease of these last days, we need to trust and delight in the Lord, commit our ways to Him, and rest in Him, and wait on Him.
How about you? Would that make the week ahead a little—and maybe a lot—easier for you? Would it maybe change your whole life? Why not ask the Lord to help you apply these sanity savers in practical ways this week?