Turning Point

Guest (Male): What's the hardest part about fully trusting God? For many of us, it's learning to accept his timing instead of our own. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah turns to the 37th Psalm and considers what it really means to wait on the Lord, as he continues the series Making Sense of It All. Here's David to introduce the conclusion of his message, Trusting God in Times of Trouble.

Dr. David Jeremiah: Well, today we open our Bibles to Psalm 37 and this is one of the most powerful Psalms when you're going through difficulty. Each paragraph begins with an instruction, like trust in the Lord, delight in the Lord, commit your way to the Lord, rest in the Lord, wait on the Lord. These instructions are so powerful and they're played out in the Psalm, and we're going to talk about it today on Turning Point. So don't go anywhere. We're here to help you and encourage you as we study the word of God together.

During this month, we're making available as a special opportunity for you to get the copy of this book, 100 Bible Verses That Made America by my friend Rob Morgan. This book takes you into the scriptures that were called into play when certain decisions had to be made. It's amazing to see how much of what we now experience as Americanism is based upon what happened when people appealed to the scripture for their answers.

This book, 100 Bible Verses That Made America, is yours for the asking when you send your gift to Turning Point during this month. It's only available from Turning Point and it's yours for a gift of any amount in the month of July. We hope you'll take advantage of this opportunity to add this to your library, to your reading schedule for the summer in this 250th anniversary of our nation. Here is part two of Trusting God in Times of Trouble.

So here's the first thing: Are you delighting in the Lord? If you are, the Bible says if you delight in the Lord, he will give you the desires of your heart. When you delight in the Lord, he'll probably change your desires and he will give you the things that you really want that he really wants you to want, and when you get them, they'll be the things you always wanted. When you trust in the Lord and delight in him, he will give you the desires of your heart. Oh, I could give you some testimonies about that from my own life.

You say, "Well, that's true, Pastor, how does one trust and delight in the Lord? How does one delight in the Lord?" Well, I want to show you something that I think is a pretty neat little formula that will help you. That is over in the 119th Psalm, just a few pages over, and I promise as you're heading there, I'm not going to read this Psalm. It's the longest chapter in the Bible, Psalm 119. Somebody told me this is the Psalm you want to have read when they're about to execute you and they ask, "Is there any scripture you would like us to read?" This is the Psalm you want to have read.

But as you know, the 119th Psalm is all about the word of God. The word of God is mentioned in almost every verse. But interestingly enough, the word "delight" is found six times in Psalm 119. I want to run through these scriptures and you just if you've got your Bible open, you can just follow because I'm going to take them in order. Notice verse 16: "I will delight myself in your statutes." Notice verse 35: "Make me walk in the path of your commandments, for I delight in it."

Verses 69 and 70: "The proud have forged a lie against me, but I will keep your precepts with my whole heart. Their heart is as fat as grease, but I delight in your law." Verse 77: "Let your tender mercies come to me that I may live, for your law is my delight." Verse 92: "Unless your law had been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction." Verse 174: "I long for your salvation, oh Lord, and your law is my delight."

Now let me ask this question, class, did you get it? What is the psalmist delighting in, in Psalm 119? What is it? The word of God. He may call it the statutes, the law, he uses a lot of synonyms for the word of God in this Psalm, but what David is saying is that he has found his delight in the word of God. Now here is the formula for what you do when you're trying to delight in the Lord. I know this will be a bit convicting to all of us, but let's just swallow this pill a little bit together and recognize it's the truth. Here it is.

Your attitude toward the word of God is usually a mirror of your attitude toward the Son of God. Your attitude toward the Bible is your attitude toward Christ. In other words, if you say, "I delight in the Lord" and you never open this book, you're just fooling yourself because where do you learn about the Lord? You learn about him in this book, don't you? So when you delight in the word, that's how you learn how to delight in the Lord.

You know what will happen when you start to delight in the word? You will see him on every page, even in the Old Testament. He is prefigured and prophesied and pictured and his typology is all over the book. When you delight in the word, you will discover all of a sudden that you're delighting in the Lord. I don't know that you can do one without the other because the word of God, both the written word and the living word, are united eternally together.

Do you delight in the Lord? When you're going through difficult times, get your focus off of your problems and your focus on your savior and delight in him. That will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed upon him, Isaiah 26:3. Trust in the Lord is the first one. Delight in the Lord is the second one. Here's the third one: Commit your way to the Lord. This is verse 5. "Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in him and he shall bring it to pass." So we're going to say these three things together now, one right after the other. Are you ready? Here's our little formula: Trust in the Lord, delight in the Lord, commit your way to the Lord.

Now, what's the difference between trusting in the Lord and committing your way to him? Well, the word "commit" means to take something that you currently have and totally and completely release it to somebody else. Literally, what the psalmist is saying is you should take your way, your life, and give it over to God. Commit your life to him. Roll your burdens on the Lord. Give your stuff to God and don't hang on to it yourself.

This is a common truth both in the Psalms and in the New Testament. Psalm 10:14 says, "The helpless commits himself to you, Lord. You are the helper of the fatherless." Psalm 55:22 puts it this way: "Cast your burden on the Lord and he will sustain you." 1 Peter 5:7 is one of the first verses I learned as a little kid going to Sunday school and here it is: "Casting all your care upon him, for he cares for you."

When we commit our way to the Lord, we take all of the issues that we're dealing with in our own life, we take the inequities that we see in the world where bad people get promoted and we get passed over. We take the financial things that happen to us when we trusted people we thought were good and we discover they're not. We take all of that and while we try to do our best to manage it in the power of the Holy Spirit, there comes a point in time for all of us where we have to bundle all this stuff up and just say, "Lord, this is way too much for me. I'm just casting it all to you. I'm giving it to you."

I was going through what my wife still calls Black May when I came here some years ago, many years ago now. We had one month that was probably the worst month of our life, just some turmoil that happened. It's just kind of one of those things. And I was overwhelmed. I was 40 years old. I'm telling you, this was a long time ago. And I didn't know what to do. I remember going into my office one day and walking into my office and seeing my chair sitting behind my desk.

And I just kind of pictured, I said, "Lord, I'm not going to sit in that chair today. That's your chair. I don't know what to do with all this stuff. I'm just going to lay it out before you. I'm putting it on your desk, Lord. It's yours." I never felt such a sense of relief in my life to know these problems are not mine. I've given them to God. And when you commit your way to the Lord, he will help you. He will take you through.

Now, here's the problem that we all have, and you see if you're not like me: I give it to God and then about two hours later, I take it back. And I'm walking around thinking, "Lord, I thought I got rid of this." I found that you've got to keep doing that over and over. "Lord, I thought I gave this to you but I took some back, here it is again." And you just do it until after a while, you begin to realize that you've committed your way to the Lord.

When we commit our way to the Lord, we let him tell us the direction we're going to go. We let him tell us what we're supposed to do. And we let him help us know what we're to do with the troubles that are in our life. Release all these things to him. Let him take them all. So trust in the Lord, delight in the Lord, commit your way to the Lord.

Here's the fourth one: Rest in the Lord. And this is not about what some of you do in church. This rest in the Lord is verse 7. Notice what it says: "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." To rest in the Lord is to be silent before Jehovah God without clamoring or presumptuous indifference. I love this: Hush before God. Hush before him.

Sometimes you just have to get before the Lord, keep your mouth shut, and rest in the knowledge that he's in control, to wait for the resolution of the problem, knowing that God is in charge of the situation and not only is he in charge of the situation and the solution, he's in charge of the timing too. And notice in this verse, we have two ways we can deal with problems. We can either hush before the Lord or we can fret. "Do not fret." How many fretters do we have here today? Any fretters? Oh yes, it's a common practice. It's kind of the indoor sport for evangelicals, fretting.

Well, let me say just a word about that. The word "fret" is only found where we're told "do not fret." It's in Psalm 37 three times and it's over in Proverbs once. I want to show you where it is in Psalm 37 because you're open to that passage right now. Verse 1 says, "Do not fret because of evildoers." Verse 7 says, "Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way." And verse 8 says, "Do not fret, it only causes harm." And then Proverbs 24:19 says, "Do not fret because of evildoers, nor be envious of the wicked."

What David is dealing with is the same thing we deal with in our day today. He looked around at the world in which he lived and he was under tremendous pressure and pain and it seemed like all the bad guys were just nothing was wrong. It looked like all the sinners were prospering and all the saints were suffering. And David didn't understand that and he was tempted to fret, and so he uses this passage to say, "Wait a minute, don't do that."

The English word for "fret" comes from an Old English word "freaton" which means to devour, to eat, to gnaw into something. The Hebrew word David actually used as he wrote this in the original language is the word "kharah" which has at its root the idea of growing warm and blazing up. Now listen carefully to what this means. Put these two pictures together. Think of fretting as a rat inside your soul gnawing away at you. Think of Satan as an arsonist setting little blazes of distrust inside your heart.

David is saying something like this. He said, "I have been young and I am now old. I have seen many things, I have suffered many burdens, I've learned many lessons. But based on a lifetime of experience, my advice is: Kill off the rats and put out the fire. Do not fret, it only causes harm." When you think about gnawing and burning, what does it make you think of? Have you ever had an ulcer? Lots of people today ulcers are just eating them up.

I remember hearing someone once say to a patient, a doctor said to him, he said, "If you don't cut out your resentment, I'm going to have to cut out part of your intestine" because fretting is not only not a good thing spiritually, it's a very bad thing physically. And David said, "Fret not. Do not fret." Because if you put your trust in the Lord, you won't have to fret because God, you see, isn't finished with the wicked yet.

You may think that those guys out there who are doing all these bad things, who are ripping us off and all of this, "Why is God allowing that?" Well, just wait a minute. God isn't finished with them. In fact, if you go through this Psalm, you will discover God is in charge. Let me just read you some verses. Psalm 37:2: "For they shall soon be cut down like the grass and wither as the green herb." Verse 10: "For yet a little while and the wicked shall be no more. Indeed, you will look carefully for his place, but it shall be no more."

Verse 20: "But the wicked shall perish and the enemies of the Lord like the splendor of the meadows shall vanish." Verse 34: "When the wicked are cut off, you'll see it." Verse 35 and 36 says, "I have seen the wicked in great power and spreading himself like a native green tree. Yet he passed away and behold, he was not. I sought him, but I couldn't find him."

Here's a little parable that will help you see what I think David is trying to get us to understand. Suppose Rip Van Winkle, suppose he lived in Germany back in the 1930s and he had watched Hitler rise to power, spreading himself like a green bay tree and enslaving the small nations beneath his shadow. It would have been a time of terror and indeed it was a time of terror.

And so one day, sensitive Rip Van Winkle climbs a high mountain to get away from the chaos in the valley and see if he can see life in a little better perspective. And at the top of the mountain, he falls asleep for 20 years, oblivious to the horror and the suffering and the revolutionary changes caused by the Second World War. He descends the mountain in the early '50s and he's confused and bewildered by all the changes about him.

A vacant lot where his house once stood, a prison reduced to bombed-out rubble, a different flag flying on the city hall. Where are the brown shirts, the Gestapo, the concentration camps? Where are the armies of the Third Reich? Where is Hitler himself? The destroyer has been destroyed and Rip Van Winkle, whether he's a religious man or not, can echo the psalmist: "I have seen the wicked in great power, spreading himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away and he was not, and I sought him and I couldn't find him."

And we're reminded that even in this world today, sometimes Almighty God plays out the drama of justice in just one single lifetime. If you had lived in the early days of my story, you would have thought the world was plagued with the insensitive, wicked cruelty of Hitler for as long as you could see. One day Almighty God sitting on his throne in glory said, "That's enough," and it was over.

And one day, my friends, all of the evil we see in this world that so troubles us that we'd like to scream out at, we put our trust in the Lord and our trust is this: God is in control and one day you and I will wake up whether on this earth or in glory and it will be gone and we will be in the presence of the one in whom we have trusted forevermore.

So here's what David is saying: Trust in the Lord, delight in the Lord, commit your way to the Lord, rest in the Lord. Here's the last one: Wait on the Lord. Oh, I don't like this. "Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him," verse 7. "Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way." Let me just say this to you all: Time is nothing to God. It's nothing to him. And it ought to be more like nothing to us. God's never in a hurry, why are we? God is never early, he is never late, he is always on time.

And sometimes when we want these things to be resolved in our own schedule, we say, "God, why don't you hurry up and get this done?" And God isn't listening to us because he's not on our schedule. I hate to tell you that. God is not obligated to work out the issues of our life on our own schedule because God doesn't have a schedule like ours. God is not affected by time.

When you are waiting on the Lord, here's what you're doing. It doesn't mean you have to be passive and sit with your hands folded and not try to deal with some of the issues in your life. When you're waiting on the Lord, you're not lagging behind him, you're not walking ahead of him, you're not indifferent to what he's doing, you're not worrying about what he's doing or what he's not doing.

Waiting for the Lord. The word "wait" is found two other times in Psalm 37. Verse 9: "The evildoers shall be cut off, but those who wait on the Lord, they shall inherit the earth." And Psalm 37:34 says, "Wait on the Lord and keep his way and he shall exalt you to inherit the land." So trust in the Lord, delight in the Lord, commit your way to the Lord, rest in the Lord, and wait on the Lord.

I want to tell you that the Lord Jesus loved Psalm 37. Did you know that? Because one day when he was speaking and giving us the Beatitudes, he quoted one of the most important verses in the Psalm that we have studied today. You see, there are many today who are saying the righteous are being defeated. They're saying in essence that the righteous is foolish and there's no reward for being righteous.

They see the success of sinners and the suffering of saints and they reason that virtue has no reward and vice has no punishment. It makes no difference how you live, they say. It doesn't pay to be good. I hear that, and so do you, and in its own way that comes through in our conversation. But now the psalmist makes this great affirmation, so great that Jesus echoed it in his Beatitudes. Look in your Bibles at verse 22. Here's what the psalmist says: "For those blessed by him shall inherit the earth, but those cursed by him shall be cut off."

And the Lord Jesus going into Psalm 37 giving us the Beatitudes of Matthew chapter 5 said, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." And one of the reasons we don't get it is because we don't understand that meekness is not weakness. Meekness is power under control. Meekness is having all that you need to do whatever needs to be done, but understanding the importance of being restrained.

There never was anyone who was meeker than the Lord Jesus himself. We would not believe these words had we not watched him live. Even from the lips of Jesus, we would question the validity of these words. But listen to me, let me remind you of who he is. He who could have entered the world as royalty came as a baby in a barn. He who could have commanded a conquering army rode into the city on the back of a borrowed donkey.

He who could have crushed men into submission appealed to them with words of sweet reasonableness and loving acts of mercy. He who could have destroyed his enemies with a single stroke allowed them to lead him like a lamb to the slaughter. Yet let me ask you this question: Who has inherited the earth? Christ or his enemies? Who alone continued his triumphant march through the centuries while kingdoms and empires and thrones and dictators have risen and fallen again, but here stands Jesus triumphing over it all?

The meek inheriting the earth. Jesus of Nazareth, you see, is history's supreme vindication of a Hebrew psalmist who once dared to predict that the meek would inherit the earth. Because of Jesus, the most righteous man who ever lived, crucified by the ultimate concentration of human wickedness and raised from the dead to the throne of the universe, we can believe that in God's world it does pay to be good.

Jesus shows us the way and he says that while it seems as if wickedness is triumphing, just wait, just watch. One of these days the scripture says every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Hallelujah! What does that mean to you and me? We're on the winning team. We are. Some days you get discouraged and get a little bit disoriented, but when you begin to trust in the Lord and delight in the Lord and commit your way to the Lord and rest in the Lord and wait on the Lord, you will see Jesus high and lifted up with his arms stretched out over all the chaos of this world and he is in control. Hallelujah. Amen.

Dr. David Jeremiah: Before we say our final goodbye today, I want to say just a word about our cruise to the Caribbean which takes place right after Christmas. In fact, immediately after Christmas on the 26th of December we leave and we return on the 2nd of January, which means we spend New Year's Eve together on a beautiful cruise ship. And we'll be going to Grand Turk, San Juan, St. Thomas, Half Moon Cay along with some great musicians and the teaching of the word of God. You don't want to miss it. It's a great way to wind down after a busy year and get ready for the New Year. Find out a little bit about it at davidjeremiah.org.

Now, here we are at the end of this message getting ready for the next time around where we're going to talk about when trials become our teacher. And where else could we go but the book of Job to learn from that? We'll talk about that tomorrow, I hope you'll be with us. Until then, this is David Jeremiah. I'm here every day, Monday through Friday, and this program is called Turning Point. We teach the word of God every day. Join us as often as you can and thanks for being with us today.

Guest (Male): Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Senior Pastor Dr. David Jeremiah. Drop us a note and let us know how God is using this ministry in your life. Write to Turning Point, P.O. Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163. Visiting our website at davidjeremiah.org/radio or calling 800-947-1993.

Ask for your copy of Robert J. Morgan's book 100 Bible Verses That Made America. It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also view over 1,200 of Dr. Jeremiah's sermons on any screen anytime you like on our Turning Point+ streaming service for a monthly gift of any amount. Visit turningpointplus.org for details. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue the series Making Sense of It All on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.