The Impotence of Fretting Text: Psalm 37:8-9
Introduction: The War for Your Heart
We live in an age of perpetual outrage. The world wants you angry, anxious, and agitated. It wants you to fret. Fretting is the low-grade fever of the soul, a constant, simmering agitation that accomplishes nothing but our own spiritual exhaustion. It is a rocking chair, full of motion, but going nowhere. And the world, the flesh, and the devil are all pushing that chair, hoping to wear you out.
The secularist looks at the state of the world, at the apparent triumph of wickedness, and his two options are either a cynical despair or a revolutionary rage. He sees the evildoers prospering, and he either concludes that there is no justice, or he decides that he must become the agent of that justice, usually through violent and godless means. Both paths lead to destruction. Both are forms of evildoing.
But the Christian is called to a radically different posture. Our response to the prosperity of the wicked is not to be found in hand-wringing or in fist-shaking. It is to be found in a quiet, rugged, and deeply rooted confidence in the character and promises of God. This psalm, and these verses in particular, are a potent antidote to the poison of our age. They are a call to put away the fleshly weapons of anger and worry, and to take up the spiritual weapon of patient hope. God is telling us to stop trying to run the world from our armchair. He has the whole thing in hand.
This is a command, not a suggestion. "Cease from anger." "Forsake wrath." "Do not fret." These are military orders for the soul. They are not gentle hints for our consideration. Why? Because God knows that these internal rebellions, these fits of pique against His providence, are not harmless. They are spiritually toxic. They lead, as the text says, "only to evildoing." They are the seedbed from which a thousand other sins sprout. And so, God in His kindness commands us to stop poisoning ourselves.
The Text
Cease from anger and forsake wrath;
Do not fret; it leads only to evildoing.
For evildoers will be cut off,
But those who hope for Yahweh, they will inherit the land.
(Psalm 37:8-9 LSB)
The Poison of Impatience (v. 8)
We begin with the divine prohibition in verse 8:
"Cease from anger and forsake wrath; Do not fret; it leads only to evildoing." (Psalm 37:8)
Notice the progression here. Anger, wrath, and fretting are all cousins. Anger is the internal displeasure, the hot indignation. Wrath is that anger expressed, boiled over. And fretting is the chronic, low-level version of it all, a constant chafing against the way things are. It is the spiritual equivalent of scratching a rash. It feels like you are doing something, but you are only making it worse.
Now, we must be careful. The Bible does not prohibit all anger. There is such a thing as righteous anger. Jesus was angry at the hardness of men's hearts (Mark 3:5). We are commanded to "be angry, and do not sin" (Eph. 4:26). But the anger described here, the kind we are to cease from, is carnal anger. It is man's anger, which, as James tells us, "does not produce the righteousness of God" (James 1:20). How can we tell the difference? Righteous anger is directed at sin and unrighteousness as an offense against God. Carnal anger is directed at inconveniences and insults as an offense against us. Righteous anger is constructive; it wants to heal and restore. Carnal anger is destructive; it wants to smash things.
The Psalmist connects this internal turmoil directly to an external result: "it leads only to evildoing." This is a crucial diagnostic tool. Your anger, your fretting, what does it produce? Does it lead you to your knees in prayer? Does it lead you to faithful, constructive action? Or does it lead you to slander, bitterness, gossip, foolish arguments online, and a sour disposition that makes you miserable to be around? Fretting about the political situation doesn't make you a statesman; it makes you a grumbler. Being angry about the moral decay doesn't make you a prophet; it often just makes you another contributor to the general nastiness.
This fretting is a form of unbelief. It is a declaration that God is not on His throne, that His timetable is wrong, and that His promises are not sufficient. When we fret, we are essentially telling God that if we were in charge, things would be running much more smoothly. It is a quiet, simmering atheism of the heart. And because it is rooted in unbelief, it can only bear the fruit of unrighteousness, which is evildoing.
The Great Reversal (v. 9)
Verse 9 provides the reason for the command in verse 8. It lays out the two destinies, the two ultimate outcomes that should govern our entire perspective.
"For evildoers will be cut off, But those who hope for Yahweh, they will inherit the land." (Psalm 37:9 LSB)
This is the long view. Fretting is a disease of the short view. It is spiritual nearsightedness. God's cure is to lift our eyes to the horizon. He says, "Look at the end of the story." The evildoers, the ones who seem so powerful, so successful, so permanent, have an expiration date. They "will be cut off." They are like cut flowers in a vase, they may look vibrant for a moment, but they have no root. They are severed from the source of life, and their withering is inevitable. Their prosperity is a mirage, their power is temporary, and their end is destruction.
Why would you envy a man on death row just because he has a better meal than you tonight? Why would you fret over the trajectory of a rocket that is destined to explode? The wicked are like grass, green and lush today, but cut down and withered tomorrow (v. 2). To fret over them is to have an utterly skewed sense of reality. It is to judge by the snapshot, not by the video.
The contrast could not be sharper. While the evildoers are being cut off, what is happening to the righteous? "But those who hope for Yahweh, they will inherit the land." Hope here is not a flimsy wish. It is not crossing your fingers. The Hebrew word means to wait with confident expectation. It is the posture of a child who knows his father is coming home with a gift. It is an active, patient, and certain trust in the person and promises of God.
And what is the promise? They will inherit the land. Jesus quotes this very psalm in the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Matt. 5:5). This is not some ethereal, disembodied promise of floating on a cloud when you die. The word is "land," "earth." This is a concrete, historical, and cultural promise. It means that God's people, the meek, the humble, those who trust in Him rather than in their own anger, are the ones who will ultimately possess and shape the future of this world. History belongs to the hopeful, not the fretful.
This is a postmillennial promise baked right into the Psalms. The future does not belong to the tyrants, the godless, the mockers, or the wicked. Their empires are sandcastles. The kingdom of Christ, however, is a mountain that will fill the whole earth. This inheritance begins now. As we cease from our anger and put our hope in God, we begin to take spiritual and cultural ground. We build families, churches, schools, and businesses that are rooted in the reality of God's Word. And this patient, generational work is how the meek inherit the earth. It is not through political revolution, but through spiritual regeneration and faithful obedience, one life, one family, one church at a time. The future of this planet belongs to Jesus and to those who hope in Him.
Conclusion: The Gospel Cure for Fretting
So how do we do this? How do we practically cease from anger and cultivate this rugged hope? The answer is not to simply try harder. The answer is not to grit our teeth and tell ourselves, "Stop fretting!" The root of our fretting is unbelief, and the cure for unbelief is a fresh apprehension of the gospel.
The ultimate evildoer was cut off at the cross. On that hill, the wrath of God that we deserved was poured out on His Son. All the injustice, all the wickedness, all the evil that makes us righteously angry and tempts us to unrighteous anger, was judged there. God is not indifferent to evil. He hates it so much that He crushed His own Son to defeat it. When you are tempted to fret that justice will not be done, look to the cross. Justice has been done, in the most profound way imaginable.
And at the cross, the greatest hope was secured. Because Jesus was "cut off" from the land of the living, we who hope in Him are guaranteed to inherit the land. He was forsaken so that we would never be. He endured the ultimate wrath so that we could be delivered from it. He lost everything so that we could inherit everything.
Therefore, when you feel the heat of anger rising in your chest, when you feel the cold grip of anxiety and fretting closing around your heart, you must preach the gospel to yourself. Remind yourself that the wicked have already been judged at the cross. Remind yourself that your inheritance has been purchased and guaranteed by the blood of Christ. Your hope is not in your own strength, or in the shifting political tides, but in the risen and reigning King Jesus. He is the one who inherits the nations, and we inherit them in Him. So cease from your anger. Forsake your wrath. Do not fret. Put your hope in the Lord. The future is His, and because you are in Him, it is yours as well.