Psalms 37

REMEDIES FOR DESPONDENCY

‘Trust in the Lord, and do good: dwell in the land and follow after faithfulness.’

Psalms 37:3 (R.V.)

One of the many dangers that we have to guard against in the spiritual life is the danger of despondency. This depression of soul is no new thing in the history of man. We find it in Holy Scripture. In this thirty-seventh psalm the Psalmist tells us that he himself has seen the ungodly in great power, and moreover flourishing like a green bay-tree. To the devout Jew this problem of the prosperity of the ungodly was one of the unsolved difficulties of life, and of course the problem was all the more difficult for him because there was no revelation of a future state of rewards and punishments. But for us the future life is no longer a dream. We know that God will in His own good time, if not here, at any rate hereafter, see that all wrongs are righted and all injustices redressed.

I. Faith.—Surely you and I can ‘trust in the Lord.’ In the old Catechism, which most of us probably learnt once and may have forgotten since, we are reminded that our duty towards God is to put our whole trust in Him. That surely means to stake everything upon Him; not merely to trust Him when all our life seems to be bathed in sunshine, not to trust Him merely when everything we do seems to turn out successfully, but also in those dark and gloomy days when the horizon becomes clouded and the sky is black with failure or sorrow.

II. Patience.—And this means that great demands will be made upon our patience. You and I being weak—miserably weak—are so wanting in patience. Because we cannot do what we want to do at once, we give up through impatience. We sympathise with the servants in the parable who wanted to pull up the tares at once. We are all too apt to lose sight of the fact that evil has a place in this world and in some mysterious way a work to do.

III. Works.—But not only does the Psalmist tell us that we are to trust in the Lord, but he says also that we are to do good. Go out into the pathway of duty and do that which lies right to thy hand—and do it with all thy might. Surely it is exactly what God told Elijah to do. ‘Return on thy way’—it is no use hiding under a juniper-tree and bemoaning your failure. Is it not true that many of us regard our religion as something almost entirely negative? We think that if we can abstain from the grosser forms of sin we are doing all that can be expected of us. We are content if we can go through the world without, as we say, ‘doing any harm.’ But we are not put in this world simply not to do harm. We are put into this world to do good. Is any one in this world a little better for our having been here? It is very interesting to know that our Lord summed up all the Commandments in a form no longer negative, but strictly positive—‘Thou shalt love.’

IV. Leave results to God.—Then to come to the closing words of the text. God is not asking from us anything in the nature of success; only faithfulness. ‘Be ye faithful unto death,’ not ‘be successful.’ God in His great mercy is asking from His children something that is within grasp of all. Do not let us get into the habit of thinking that God is a hard taskmaster. He is just asking of us that each in his position in life will do his best. There is nothing that appeals to us like success, but that is not what God wants. God looks deeper than that. He looks into the heart. He does not trouble Himself about the outward result; He serutinises the motives. He marks the efforts, even though they are crowned with failure again and again. Is there any text more full of comfort, more stimulating to effort, than this, spoken of a poor simple woman at whom the world pointed the finger of scorn, ‘Let her alone; she hath done what she could’? If you and I do what we can, never mind the failure; we can leave results in God’s hands.

—Rev. H. C. Frith.