Patience, Peace, and Promises (Psalm 37:7-8)

In this sermon, Jim Osman delves into Psalm 37:7-8, highlighting the importance of waiting patiently for the Lord in a world where the wicked seem to prosper. Osman explains that the path to peace involves trusting in God, delighting in Him, and committing our way to Him. By resting in the Lord and forsaking anger, believers can avoid the pitfalls of fretting, which ultimately leads to evil doing. An exposition of Psalm 37:7-8.

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Jim Osman

Pastor-Teacher, Kootenai Community Church

What is Kootenai Church Morning Worship?

The expository preaching ministry of Kootenai Community Church by Pastors/Elders Jim Osman, Jess Whetsel, Dave Rich, and Cornel Rasor. This podcast feed contains the weekly sermons preached from the pulpit on Sunday mornings at Kootenai Church.

The Elders/Teachers of Kootenai Church exposit verse-by-verse through whole books of the Bible. These sermons can be found within their own podcast series by visiting the KCC Audio Archive.

Waiting is a difficult thing. It is difficult to be patient and it is hard sometimes to wait. And I have often wondered if my struggle with patience is something of an artifact of the age in which we live, if it is more difficult for us to be patient in our age than it was for saints of old to be patient in their age. And I have to only wonder that because this is the only era in which I've ever lived. I've never lived in a previous era. So all I have known is what it is like in my life and what it is like in our day, in our culture. And it seems as if waiting and being patient would be more difficult for us than it would be for people who lived in generations past. I have only lived at a time when things have been available to me relatively quickly.
Even when I was a kid, and this has changed for us quite dramatically, but when I was a kid, you would see the advertisements on one of the two, maybe three television stations that you could get. And it would tell you that you had to write away for this gimmick, this product, this whatever it is that they were selling to this address and then wait four to six weeks for delivery. And waiting four to six weeks for delivery just seemed like standard fare in that day, and it certainly was. And if you ordered something from overseas, forget it. You're waiting months for delivery at that time.
Today we don't wait hardly for anything. We have things available to us almost instantly. We are used to Next Day Air, two-day shipping, getting something from Amazon, depending on where you live, maybe in the same day or just several hours after you order it. Now we can have food delivered to us by Uber Eats. We can have our shopping delivered to us by Walmart. We have things that we order on Prime delivered to us the next day or two days. And if I have to wait for even a week for something to get to me from Amazon, I get upset and frustrated and I check the tracking information. Did they lose the package? Why do I have to wait this long for this book or for this item?
In our time, we have instant coffee and instant hot water, fast food, quick lube, Next Day Air. All of that has conditioned us to get things quickly and to expect things quickly. We can say things in our day like this: “Tomorrow I'm leaving for Europe. I'm going to an event, and I'll be back by next Sunday.” You realize that there was a time, and it wasn't that long ago, when a trip like that, you wouldn't be talking about a week, you would be talking about the greater part of a year of your life that you would commit to making such a trip. And yet we can do it with seemingly the speed of light. It feels like that.
And we live in a time when we are not conditioned to wait long for almost anything, and it is hard to imagine that this age in which we live has not conditioned us in some ways to be very impatient and to struggle with waiting for things to come that God has promised to us.
I know that it has affected me. I pace in front of a microwave. Ninety seconds to warm up my coffee? Is this the third world? Do we live in caves? Ninety seconds? And I sit there and I spend that ninety seconds wondering, Would it be faster for me to go outside and rub sticks together and make a fire and warm it over a stone bowl that I've carved that morning out of granite? Ninety seconds? What kind of an age do we live in that I have to wait—beep! And then it goes off. OK, and then I have my coffee. Ninety seconds seems like an eternity. So I know that this age of instant gratification has conditioned me to expect things quicker than I should expect them, and if people in previous generations needed that kind of reminder to be patient and to wait for the Lord, then certainly it is an aspect of all of humanity, it is a flaw in all of us, no matter what age we live in, that we are impatient creatures. But I think that this age makes us even more impatient, and so we need the council that we find in Psalm 37.
Turn, if you will, there if you're not there yet. Psalm 37. This is our study for these last few weeks, and it will be for the next several weeks. These first eight verses describe the path to peace in a world where the wicked prosper, and not only where the wicked prosper, but sometimes the wicked prosper at the expense of the righteous as they carry out their wicked schemes. And the injustices and the wrongs in this world can be quite perplexing and vexing to the believer, to the righteous, and our natural instinct is to fret over such inequities. And that is why the psalm begins with a command to not fret in verse 1, and it is why this section that we're looking at from verses 1 to 8 ends with a command to not fret, stated twice, once in verse 7 and once in verse 8.
This psalm addresses this issue of how the righteous respond to the prosperity of the wicked and living in a world in which we are surrounded by the wicked and sometimes suffer at the hands of the wicked. We've covered the first six verses, and today we're finishing this section, looking at the peace that God gives to His people, and we're looking today specifically at verses 7–8. So we will read through all of these eight verses, and I'll remind you of what we have covered thus far. In verse 1, we saw that we must refuse to fret. Verse 1: “Do not fret because of evildoers, be not envious toward wrongdoers.” In verse 2, we see that we must remember that they fade, “for they [that is, the wicked] will wither quickly like the grass and fade like the green herb.” Verse 3, we must respond with faith. “Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.” In verse 4, we must delight in Yahweh for our satisfaction. “Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart.” And then in verses 5–6, we must depend on Yahweh for our vindication. “Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He will do it. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your judgment as the noonday.” That was the last two weeks.
Today we're looking at verses 7–8. Read those with me. “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 carries out wicked schemes. Cease from anger and forsake wrath; do not fret; it leads only to evildoing.” And so we'll see in verse 7 that we must wait patiently, and then in verse 8 we must walk peacefully.
Verse 7, waiting patiently—“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 carries out wicked schemes.” Now I want you to notice a couple of observations before we jump into verse 7. I want you to notice first of all that the idea of fretting, or more specifically not fretting, brackets this section. Verse 1 begins with this. This is how the psalm starts off. Do not fret because of the wicked. “Do not fret because of evildoers.” And then this first section that talks about living at peace and the peace that God gives us ends with a similar command in verse 7 to not fret. And then again in verse 8, it is repeated a third time. “Do not fret.” So it brackets, that command, that idea of not fretting, sort of brackets the whole section. It is a parentheses, as it were, that tells us that everything in here is a cure for fretting.
Next, I want you to notice that this is the last of what I would call the Lord commands or the Yahweh commands. Though the passage is filled with commands, there are four of them that specifically address the name of God, Yahweh. Those four are verse 3, “trust in the Lord”; verse 4, “delight . . . in the Lord”; verse 5, “commit your way to the Lord”; and verse 7, “rest in the Lord.” And the NASB and other English translations translate those as “the Lord.” And it is Yahweh. That is the name of God. So it's trust in Yahweh, delight in Yahweh, commit your way to Yahweh, and rest in Yahweh.
And then third, I want you to notice that these four verbs, these four commands—trust, delight, commit, and rest—really there's a natural progression that is laid out there. This is the path to peace. Trusting comes first, resting comes last. We have to trust and delight and then commit and then we rest. And there's no shortcut to resting. So this I find very helpful to remember when I struggle with anxiety or affliction or I am in some way disquieted by events going on around me, that there is a progression here. I first must come to the conclusion and resolve that God is worthy of my confidence, that He is able, that He is trustworthy. I can put my faith and my confidence in Him because of who He is, because of what He has promised. Because of His infallible track record, He is worthy of my trust.
And then second, I can move on to that and make Him the source of my delight and mortify the sin that seeks to find its joy and delight in other things, to make God my focus. So having trusted in Him, then I am to delight in Him. And then having trusted and delighted, I commit my way to the Lord, trusting in Him. And as we saw last week, that verb means to roll onto the Lord our burden, to commit our way or to roll it onto the Lord, like casting our concerns, our cares, our burdens upon Him. So I trust Him because He is worthy of that trust. I have my confidence in Him. And then I can delight in Him, seeking my joy and my satisfaction in Him and Him alone, committing my burdens and my frustrations and my anxieties to the Lord.
And then the fourth step, I can rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him. That's verse seven. Trust, delight, commit, and then rest. And when I find myself getting to the resting part and then my mind or my heart fixing on my problems and the difficulties and the things in this world, and resting seems difficult, I come back to step one and I say, “Who is my God? He is trustworthy. So I can delight in Him, and I can roll my burdens onto Him, and now I can tell my heart to be at rest.” And then when I'm restless, I go back to step one again.
Now you might say, “Jim, that sounds like a lot of work to do those four things.” It is a lot less work than fretting over a thousand things that you cannot control and you cannot change. That's a lot of work. Trying to run the entire universe and keep control of everything out there that you can't control and you can't change, that's a lot of work. Trusting, delighting, committing, and resting, those are simple commands. Those are simple things to do compared to trying to control everything we can't control.
So we are commanded in verse 7 to rest. “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 carries out wicked schemes.” The word that is translated “rest” there at the beginning of verse 7 is a word that means to be still or motionless. You might expect that—still or motionless. But it means a little bit more than that. It means to stand still and to keep quiet. In fact, it is the Hebrew word damam. Sounds like our word dumb, D-U-M-B, and not in the sense of being ignorant or not knowing something but in the sense of being deaf and dumb—that is, unable to speak or silenced. So this is a command not just to be still and unmoved and not moving but to rest and to keep silent, to grow dumb or silent, to stop speaking.
Now this does not mean that we are to stop praising God, that we are to stop praying to God, that we are to stop giving Him thanks or worshipping Him or trusting Him. It is not advocating that we stop all communication with Yahweh and cease speaking to Him about anything. That's not what the psalmist is saying. The psalmist here is commending silence as opposed to the murmuring or complaining spirit that characterizes those who fret over circumstances they cannot control. So here's your two options. You can fret over it, be anxious, hot, bothered, angry over it, indignant over the circumstance or the situation, or you can remain silent and rest and be patient with the Lord. This is not the opposite of praising, it is the opposite of fretting that the author deals with in verse 7 and verse 8. This is describing the quiet mind that rests on God and trusts in Him and submits its way to Him and does not murmur against God or complain against His way. It is the opposite of fretting.
We are to wait patiently, the text says in the first phrase of verse 7. That word that is translated “wait patiently,” this is a very interesting word. You're going to find this curious. It is used forty-seven times in the Old Testament. It is translated sometimes as “wait.” It is also translated in the Old Testament as “writhe,” “travail,” “tremble,” “shake,” “anguish,” and “be in labor.” Now just let that settle in for a second. Wait and travail, wait and writhe. How is it that this same word could be translated both of those ways? Is it not true that sometimes when we are waiting, we are writhing? See, this is not suggesting that waiting and resting is going to remove the travail or remove the labor or the anguish or the trembling or the writhing. I think that the author uses this word to remind us that there are some times that we have to wait upon the Lord while we writhe under the affliction or under a circumstance that we don't want to be in. We have to wait in writhing, and so we are to wait patiently and to writhe patiently, to travail patiently, and to endure that affliction or that unjustice, that inequity, and we are to do that with a heart or soul that does not murmur and is quiet before the Lord. So we rest in Him, silently before Him, and we writhe patiently, travail patiently.
The author is reminding us that sometimes while we wait, the pressure of living under the wicked in a wicked world is still there. We still groan. We still moan. We still are in labor, as it were, waiting patiently for the end of it, but just because we rest and just because we wait does not mean that the difficulty goes away. We are waiting really for the end of the story, and that will clear up the plot. You don't judge a story or a book or a narrative halfway through. You have to wait until you get to the end of the book and see the final chapter being written, or you have to wait until you see the final curtain come down before you can judge what the author has written, and it is the same way in our life and in our world. We have to wait until the final act, we have to wait till the final curtain, and then we can have a conversation about whether this was all really worth it or not, and I promise you we will say that it was.
The author tells us not to fret in verse 7—“Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way”—and it's the same word used in verse 1. It's the same word repeated in verse 8. We saw a couple weeks ago that thirty-five out of the ninety-three times that that word fret is used, it means to become hot or angry. It describes burning or being kindled, to burn with anger. The noun form of that is used in Psalm 2:5 where it describes the anger of God that terrifies the wicked who cast off His cords and want to be free of His fetters. One commentator describes this as heating oneself into vexation. Do not heat yourself into vexation. This is what fretting is. Fretting is lighting the fire under ourselves and then complaining when we are too warmed by it. It is heating yourself into a state of indignation. It can be used to describe the anger of man and the anger of God.
And when it is used in a context like this, it is suggested that it expresses a passionate intensity, a consuming indignation, and a frustration about the power and the rule of God. So it is not just the anger of man that is in view here, it is the anger or indignation of man toward God over how He disposes of His creation and how He rules in the affairs of men. This is the type of anger that looks at an injustice and says, “God is to blame for this, and so I'll bring Him in on the dock, as it were, and judge Him and try Him and accuse Him and expect God to give a defense of Himself before me for how He has ruled in my affairs.” That is what it means to fret, to be angry and anxious and to be indignant over what God has done.
And we are tempted to fret because of him who prospers in his way (v. 7). That is really what causes the vexing. It's not necessarily the presence of the wicked that makes the righteous fret. It is the prospering of the wicked that makes the righteous fret. It's the success of the wicked that makes the righteous fret. That's what causes us angst. Nobody worries about an evil man who fails with his plans. We laugh at that. When an evil man does something that is evil and he plots and schemes and plans out his course and then he tries to execute it and he fails in it and it falls down upon his own head, when the man is caught in his own net like a bird and he sets up the gallows to hang somebody else on, like Haman set up gallows to hang Mordecai, and then he is hung on his own gallows, nobody vexes or frets over that. We laugh at that. We think that's justice, poetic justice. That's the kind of thing we like to see, and we wish we could see that more often, but we don't see it that often. And so when the wicked prosper in his way, as verse 7 describes, that's what causes us to fret. It is when the wicked succeed and gain by their evil, that's when the righteous are tempted to fret. That is what is vexing. That is what is fret-worthy. I'm not sure if fret-worthy is a word, but it should be. It's fret-worthy.
Spurgeon said this: “The ground for grief is that the ungodly appear to achieve their end, the reason for comfort is that our end shall be achieved also, and that in the best manner by God himself.” In other words, what Spurgeon is saying is what causes us to fret is that it appears as if the wicked are succeeding in this life in their evil schemes, but our comfort is found in the reminder that it is ultimately the righteous that will succeed in their way, and God Himself will see to that. And He will make sure that the righteous succeed in their way, the way He has planned, and He will do it Himself in the best way possible.
But, you say, what if the righteous plan and their own designs, their own plans, fail? Listen to Spurgeon again: “Determine [now this is good sound advice] to let the wicked succeed as they may, that you may treat the matter with indifference and never allow a question to be raised as to the righteousness and goodness of the Lord. If the wicked succeed in their devices and your own plans are defeated, there is more love of God in your defeats than in the success of the wicked.” In other words, one of the ways that God loves His people is by seeing to it that their plans which do not please Him fail because He accomplishes something through the failure of the plans of the righteous that is for their good and for His glory. And the success of the wicked is no indication at all as to God's love or approval of their ways or of their persons. So, Spurgeon says, let the wicked succeed and determine in your heart not to raise any question at all about the righteousness or the goodness or the love of God. That is what the psalmist is saying when he says don't fret because of him who prospers in the way, instead rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him.
“Because of the man who carries out wicked schemes,” verse 7 says. Notice there's a contrast, by the way, between the ways mentioned in verse 7 and the way mentioned in verse 5. In verse 7 there is the wicked man who prospers in his way and in verse 5 there is the righteous man who commits his way to the Lord. Two ways, the way of the wicked and the way of the righteous. Where have we heard about that before? Remember Psalm 1:6: “The Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” The book of Psalms has this theme woven through it. There is the way of the righteous and there is the way of the wicked. And here you have contrasted in these first eight verses the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked. The righteous man, the righteous person, commits, rolls his way onto the Lord and trusts the Lord in His good timing to work out everything for his good according to His purposes. The wicked man may prosper for a while in his way, but the measure of righteousness and wickedness is not which path prospers in the short term, but which path will prosper in the long term.
This is why the psalmist says in Psalm 1:6, “The Lord knows the way of the righteous.” Because we commit our way to Him, we can expect and trust in Him, waiting patiently for Him to settle out everything that concerns us, which is why verse Psalm 37:5–6 says if we commit our way to the Lord, if we trust in Him, “He will do it. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your judgment as the noonday.” He will establish the verdict. He will vindicate His people. He will settle accounts. He will make sure that every last sin is punished and every last deed of righteousness is rewarded and that in the end the righteous will prosper and the wicked way will perish. The Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked perish. And so Lamentations 3:25–26 says, “The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him. It is good that he waits silently for the salvation of the Lord.” That's Lamentations 3. So we must wait patiently.
Second, we must walk peacefully. Verse 8: “Cease from anger and forsake wrath; do not fret; it leads only to evildoing.” So here's the prescription. Cease from anger, forsake wrath. There is never a justifiable reason for anybody to be sinfully angry over anything. Nothing justifies sinful anger. That doesn't mean that we don't fail in that way. It doesn’t mean that we are not tempted to be angry. It doesn't mean that we don't lose our patience or our temperament, but it does mean that it is never excusable because we are always commanded to cease from anger and forsake wrath.
The type of anger that is described here in verse 7 is the kind of anger that is inherent in the word fret, which again means to light a fire under yourself, to churn under yourself in an indignant wrath or anger toward God for His dealings with humanity in this world. Thus the command to cease from anger and forsake wrath is sandwiched in between the mentions of fretting in verses 7 and 8. “Do not fret,” verse 7; “cease from anger,” verse 8; “do not fret,” verse 8. We are to turn away from wrath and forsake it, to abandon it, to mortify it, to kill it, and to put it off, and to take no part in it, and it needs to be abandoned just like any other sin. Just like you battle the sin of lust or greed or selfishness or pride, so it is that you must battle the seed and the sin of anger.
“Do not fret,” verse 8 says, because “it leads only to evildoing.” Fretting really is opposed to everything else that we've read in these first eight verses. It is opposed to your peace, to trusting in the Lord. It robs you of your ability to delight in Him. It makes you resentful toward the Lord and not able, therefore, to enjoy the lot that God has given to us and to dwell in the land and to cultivate faithfulness. Fretting makes resting in God and being patient impossible.
How does fretting then lead to evildoing? And this I think you will see between verse 8 and verse 1, that the author is now coming full circle with an idea. It's not just that “do not fret” brackets this section, but the author begins with a warning and ends with a warning that are really two complementary warnings. How is it that fretting leads to evildoing? Fretting makes one angry at God, which quickly becomes angry at those who prosper in this world. Sinful anger leads to hatred and eventually murder of the heart. Sinful anger keeps us from loving our enemy, loving our neighbor. It distracts me from trusting God. It brings anxiety, worry, and angst. It keeps us from doing good and cultivating faithfulness and living in the land and enjoying what God has given to us. Anger or fretting creates envy, jealousy, greed, strife, covetousness, and it makes you angry and resentful toward those who ought to be our mission field instead of our enemies.
And anger and fretting will eventually tempt you to compromise the truth and your own integrity to right the wrongs that you feel that you have endured. You will end up doing what the wicked do in order to get what the wicked got. That's what fretting does. When you fret, you become angry that I don't have this, and so you will end up doing what the wicked do in order to get what they have. Our sinful hearts then convince us that this was the necessary and right way to right a perceived wrong. We may be tempted to use violence as a solution to deal with the wicked when God doesn't deal with them, to vent our anger and our wrath upon the wicked, to blow up on social media over something that is going on out there in the world that we can't change, that we have no part in. That's why James 1 tells us, “Everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger; for the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God” (vv. 19–20). And Ephesians 4:31 says, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.”
Fretting begins with a murmuring disposition, thus the command in verse 7 to rest in the Lord, to be quiet or damam before the Lord and to wait patiently for Him. It begins with this murmuring disposition of heart. Spurgeon said, “Many who have indulged a murmuring disposition have at last come to sin in order to gain their fancied rights.” Right? The murmuring disposition is where it begins, and then once we have allowed that, we are willing to sin in order to gain what we fancy that we deserve. Anger leads on to other sins, and the murmuring spirit leads to transgression. It starts with somebody thinking or saying in their heart, “I deserve this thing. This thing is not given to me; I don't enjoy this thing. And these people or those people or this person has an obligation to give me this thing. And if they don't give this to me, then I'm going to be angry over that, and then I will murmur over it and eventually convince myself that I can sin against that person or others in order to get what I perceive that I deserve or that I need.” So, a spouse thinks that the other person owes them something, and you want that thing, then you fret over not getting it, anger stirs in you, and you murmur over it and stew in it, become indignant and embittered over it, and then along comes another person who will provide you what you are seething over and think you deserve and think you should get. And then you are willing to sin over that thing in order to get that thing.
Fretting leads only to evildoing, and here's where we come full circle. Verse 1, you start off fretting because of evildoers, and in verse 8, your fretting makes you an evildoer. Do you see the circle? Fretting leads only to evildoing. So, we see somebody who prospers in their way and in their sin, you get angry over that, and then you won't delight in the Lord, you won't commit your way to the Lord, you won't trust in the Lord, you won't wait patiently for the Lord, you won't do good and dwell in the land to cultivate faithfulness, you won't find your rest and your satisfaction in Him, and instead you will get angry and seethe over that, and if you don't forsake that wrath, then you will end up committing sin and becoming the very thing that you loathed in the beginning.
So you start off loathing the evildoer and resenting what they are doing and how they are prospering in it, and then by the end of that cycle you become the very thing that you hate. You have turned into the enemy. As the great prophet Harvey Dent once said, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” That's what you end up with. I fret and I get angry and then I become the very thing that I loathed in the beginning. And so you can see that fretting is no answer to the injustices of the world. You become the thing that upsets you. A sinful response to evildoers will turn you into an evildoer and therefore, verse 8, “cease from anger and forsake wrath; do not fret; it leads only to evildoing.”
Why should we forsake those things? Why should we put off those things? Why do we not want to become an evildoer? Look at verse 9: “Evildoers will be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord, they will inherit the land.” I want you to notice in verse 9 there is a promise regarding the evildoers mentioned in verses 1 and 8—“evildoers will be cut off”—and there is a promise there for those who wait for the Lord, as mentioned in verse 7—“those who wait for the Lord, they will inherit the land.” We'll deal with verses 9–11 next time because ultimately those verses describe a promise to the righteous, the destinies and the ultimate end of both the righteous and the wicked. For what are the righteous to wait? We are to wait for the promise of the land. What do the wicked get? The wicked get their due, which is they will be cut off. And that promise of the land, the wicked being cut off, and the righteous inheriting the land, that is traced all the way through Psalm 37. That is the central promise, the central prosperity that the righteous enjoy in the world that is to come.