Quarantine Devotion #3

Read Psalm 37:1-8

This whole psalm is chock full of prophecy, promises, attributes of God, and commands. I specifically want to focus on the first eight verses, which forms what scholars and those who attended Bible college would call a “sandwich.” I neither claim to be a Bible scholar, nor have I attended Bible college, but that sounded spiritual. . . right?

Anyways, verses 1-2 & 7-8 (the bread of the sandwich) give us the command to “fret not” about what the wicked are doing and tells us their fate. In the middle of the “sandwich” we are given three promises. God is telling us through David (the author of this Psalm) to not worry; he gives us instructions and then again reminds us that He will take care of everything.

Let’s look at the “middle of the sandwich”. These are not promising that you are guaranteed something (like John 3:16, for example, which deals with salvation), but they are conditional. This means that for the promise to be kept on God’s end, we have to do something on our end (a familiar example is in Matthew 7:7.) Many promises in the Bible are conditional when they discuss a way to gain blessings from God; He wants us to have them, but we must be obedient first. In Psalm 37, God gives us a command and then tells us what the reward is for our obedience, which correlates with whatever action God wanted us to do before providing us with the blessing. They’re pretty straightforward, but here they are:

Trust (v 3)

This one is actually multi-fold. Trust in the Lord AND do good. If we can’t trust the Lord to take care of us, then where else is our faith going to start? We tend to trust God to do big things but we don’t trust Him in the small things. It should be the other way around; Jesus tells us that those faithful in the least will be faithful in bigger things in Luke 16:10. We know God is always faithful. We struggle to trust Him to provide, but here we see that the result of trust is God coming through for us!

Delight (v 4)

When we are happy with where God has placed us (Phil 4:11) our desires become aligned with what God has in store for us. God is the one that gave us our dreams, gifts, and desires (obviously not the carnal ones) to help us realize what He wants us to do. Often throughout Scripture, He would speak to His people through visions and dreams to reveal His plan for them (Numbers 12:6; Job 33:14-15.) Now that we have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, I think that God gives us propensities and love for certain ministries that He wants us to participate in! God wants us to delight in serving Him (Col 3:23-24) and He wants to us the desires of our hearts (as long as they line up with what He defines as good for us; sometimes something is good, but it isn’t the right timing, for example.)

Commit (v 5-6)

This one is also multi-faceted; not only does it have two components on our end, but God promises several things as rewards. The original Hebrew word used here that translates to commit is galal, and it means to roll into and seek. It brings to mind 1 Peter 5:7 and this notion of “let go and let God.” Matthew Henry’s commentary puts it this way:

“We must roll it off ourselves, so as not to afflict and perplex ourselves with thoughts about future events (Matt 6:25); not to cumber and trouble ourselves either with the contrivance of the means or with expectation of the end, but refer it to God, leave it to him by his wise and good providence to order and dispose of all our concerns as he pleases.”

This is easy to write, but hard to live. Committing to God and actually walking out a life that honors God and values what He values can be difficult. But God has new mercies for us every morning (Lam 3:22-23) to try again!

These are like stages in a cycle. You first must learn to trust God (which can be scary in the human sense) before you can begin to truly delight yourself and find enjoyment in the things that God has for you. When you start to delight in the Lord you start to build up your trust and then you commit more fully. With the new commitment, you trust God in areas of your life that you haven’t before. In this fashion, I don’t think it’s steps to achieve, but rather a part of a cycle that helps us develop as Christians over the course of our lifetime.

Here are some things to think about:

-        In this season of life, which part of the cycle are you in? How can you make the most of what God is teaching you right now? What is one practical step you can take to trust, delight in, or commit to God more?