- Lesson Seven in the Connect360 unit “Psalms: The Believer’s Prayer Book” focuses on Psalm 37:1–40
Growing up, I can remember telling my grandmother about something one of my cousins had done.
In her loving way, she would tell me: “Don’t fret about it. Just go back outside and play.”
Most of the time, that’s all I needed. I just needed to be reminded not to worry.
Psalm 37 begins with that same admonition: “Do not fret.” When you read it, you probably read it to mean, “Don’t worry.”
In Hebrew, the word means to be anxious or worried, but in the vast majority of the 146 times it’s used in the Old Testament it refers to being angry.
So, a good way of looking at this may be to think of pent-up frustration to the point where you’ve “had it up to here.”
In the first nine verses of this psalm, David said, “Do not fret” three times (37:1, 7, 8). Why? Because he was well aware of the temptation to worry, be anxious, and get fed up with the way evil persons seem to continually have success.
David endured King Saul and others pursuing him and trying to kill him for years, even after he was anointed as the next king of Israel.
He certainly wondered why he had to keep putting up with their evil, especially when he was living faithfully before God.
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Thankfully, David was clear on what God’s people should do instead, noting four primary responses to the Lord.
First, he stated, “Trust in the Lord.”
This is the basis for everything else that comes after, because without trust, the other three cannot materialize.
This is a key theme throughout the book of Psalms. Of the 116 times this Hebrew word is used in the Old Testament, 45 of them occur in Psalms.
The book of Psalms promotes trust and the blessings that come with it.
At its heart, trust is a freeing concept. It frees you from having to control situations because you can entrust them to someone else.
This kind of freedom is especially important in situations where you truly cannot control the outcome anyway, like David was experiencing in this psalm.
If we can learn to trust with things outside our control, we will begin living in greater levels of freedom, which will help us enjoy the better things God has for us, which David focused on next.
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