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The Solution to It, Part 2
When The Upright Get Uptight
Ron Dunn
Psalm 37
It is a strange world we live in--a strange time.
It is interesting how things change, interesting that the things we once thought were the solutions to our problems have now become our problems.
I remember a number of years ago when somebody said the solution to our problem would be unhindered, free love.
If we would get rid of all our hang-ups, and get rid of all our antiquated, Puritanical ideas, that would be the solution.
Now it has become our problem.
It is that way in the human situation.
We always seem to run faster when we've lost our way.
Somebody described a fanatic as somebody who has lost his purpose and redoubled his effort.
That is a pretty good definition.
The Psalmist opens with this statement: Fret not thyself.
Immediately, that sets the theme for the whole psalm, the subject of it, the title of it.
He is saying to us as God's people to fret not ourselves.
The word carries with it the idea of a frustrating situation.
It really has in it the idea of heat.
We sometimes say, that burns me up; I'm all hot under the collar; I'm hot and bothered about this.
This is a good way of rendering what the Psalmist is saying, but he is addressing himself to people who believe in God, to Christians.
Yet they are not exempt from certain situations that cause them to be filled with fear, frustration and even a tinge of anger.
If you think about it for a little bit, you will agree that this is the reason any of us ever become anxious and fearful and frustrated.
It is because there is a great contradiction between our expectations and our experience.
There is a great conflict between the way things are and the way things ought to be.
These things the Psalmist is talking about are peculiar to Christians.
There are some things that upset us that wouldn't upset a lost person, some things that bother us that would not bother an atheist.
An atheist hardly ever looks at children starving to death and asks why God doesn't do something about it.
He doesn't have that problem.
You and I have to face that enigma.
If there is a God of absolute goodness and power, then how do you reconcile that with all the wrong in the world?
You and I as Christians know how things are supposed to be.
We ought to live in a world of justice and equity and fairness.
We have expectations, and they are legitimate expectations.
We expect things to be as God would have them to be.
We expect certain things of our life and our family.
We have legitimate expectations.
Those expectations are encouraged when we become Christians because we read so much in the Bible how all things work together for good, and how God will not withhold any good thing from those who walk uprightly with him.
So these are legitimate expectations.
When our experience does not match our expectations, the result is fretfulness, anxiety, frustration, and sometimes anger.
Why hasn't God made the wrongs right?
Why hasn't God fulfilled my expectations?
Why doesn't God take charge and do something about it.
In verses 1-9, the Psalmist indicates three things to us as believers that tend to cause us to be fretful and frustrated and angry: the inequities of life and the injustices of life.
Somehow or other I have the idea that God owes me.
Just seems like it ought to count for something that I am a Christian.
There ought to be some perks.. If I am a Christian, I ought to be exempt from some things.
It disturbs and confuses me when the same things that happen to lost people happen to me.
When our son died in 1975, we received quite a few cards and letters from people offering their sympathy.
We appreciated every one of them.
I remember one letter in particular that we received from a family in Memphis.
I had recently been in their church in a meeting.
When they heard about our son's death, they wrote a letter.
The first paragraph was what you would expect—the usual sympathy and condolences.
But the second paragraph started off like this: Bro.
Dunn, we know that you are a man of God, that you have given your life to Christ and committed to preach the gospel, and that you faithfully do it.
We do not understand how something like this could happen to you.
Well, I agreed with them.
I didn't understand it either.
Their letter sounded like they could understand if something like that happened to them because they were just people, but I was a man of God.
I think what was really causing them to fear was the fact that if this could happen to someone like me, heaven knows what could happen to someone like them.
Don't accuse me of being negative or depressing.
I'm just telling you the way things are.
You and I are human beings and are still part of this human situation.
It is true that the innocent are often hit by stray bullets.
Sometimes the moral suffer with the immoral, and the innocent suffer with the guilty.
We are part of this human situation.
As Paul says, the whole creation is groaning together, and we also who have received the first fruits of the Spirit groan within ourselves.
There are some groans that are native to our nature.
As long as we are in this body of flesh, there are going to be certain groans, certain travails, and certain problems.
Does the Bible have anything to say to us about this?
I know there are those who teach that if you and I just have enough faith and are filled with the Spirit of God, we can rise above all these things.
All we have to do is rebuke the devil, plead the blood, praise God, pray, make positive confessions, and we'll walk through life trouble free.
I've heard a lot of testimonies to this effect, but the truth of the matter is for one testimony I've heard like that, I can tell you a hundred more who have not had it that way.
And these folks are just as faithful as the others.
I've always been impressed with the eleventh chapter of Hebrews.
I love it when he really gets to sailing over in the latter part of that chapter and says and time would not permit me to tell.
Then he goes ahead, like a preacher, and tells.
He goes into all these wonderful things that these people have accomplished by faith, and how they have escaped the edge of the sword and had their children raised from the dead.
Then he says: and others were tortured, and sawn asunder.
He says it twice: and others.
Now wait just a minute.
I guess those and others didn't have enough faith.
No, he is talking about the same kind of faith.
You see, there is the faith that enables us to escape.
Then there is the faith that enables us to endure.
Now, of course, I prefer to escape.
And there are many times when God does allow us to escape, but there are times when we have to have faith—not to escape, but to endure.
Someone said to me when I was in the hospital: the trouble with you is you don't have enough faith to be healed.
I said, oh, no, I have enough faith to be healed.
My problem is I don't have enough faith to stay sick if that is what God wants.
Somehow I think it may take a little more faith to endure than it does to escape.
What if God doesn't right the wrongs in your life?
You won't need anything I have to say if God rights the wrongs in your life.
Praise God, I hope he does.
But does God have anything to say to you if he doesn't?
What are you going to do if God doesn't immediately right all the wrongs in your life?
Here is what God has to say to us when we find ourselves, as the Psalmist found himself, surrounded by things that are not as they ought to be, and when our experience doesn't live up to our expectations.
The four statements that he makes are in verses 3, 4, 5, and 7.
Trust in the LORD and do good; So shall thou dwell in the land and verily thou shall be fed.
Delight thyself also in the LORD; And He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
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