The Economy of Faithfulness Text: Psalm 37:25-26
Introduction: Two Economies
We live in an age that is simultaneously obsessed with and terrified by money. We have financial news channels that run twenty four seven, tracking every twitch of the market. We are encouraged to go into breathtaking debt for our education, our cars, and our homes. And at the same time, we are haunted by a deep and abiding anxiety about the future, about retirement, about whether our children will have it better than we did. The world offers two basic solutions to this anxiety. The first is the socialist solution: trust the State to be your provider, your nanny, your god. The second is the Mammon solution: trust in your portfolio, your hustle, your own cleverness. Both are forms of idolatry, and both lead to ruin.
The socialist promises security but delivers slavery and poverty. Mammon promises freedom but delivers a different kind of slavery, the slavery of perpetual anxiety and greed. Both systems are godless, and because they are godless, they are irrational. They are built on a denial of the way the world actually works. They see the world as a closed system, a zero sum game. For you to win, someone else must lose. For you to have, you must grasp and hoard.
Into this frantic and fearful noise, the Word of God speaks with a quiet, steady, and profound confidence. God has an economy. It is not the economy of Washington D.C. or Wall Street. It is the economy of faithfulness. It is an economy where the fundamental principle is not scarcity, but divine abundance. It is an economy where the path to blessing is not grasping, but giving. And it is an economy that is not measured in quarterly reports, but over the course of generations. This is what David, writing from a lifetime of experience, lays out for us in this psalm.
The Text
I was young and now I am old, Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken Or his seed begging bread. All day long he is gracious and lends, And his seed is a blessing.
(Psalm 37:25-26 LSB)
The Veteran's Testimony (v. 25)
David begins with a testimony grounded in a long life of observation. This is not a naive, youthful idealism. This is the hard-won wisdom of an old man.
"I was young and now I am old, Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken Or his seed begging bread." (Psalm 37:25)
Notice the timeframe: "I was young and now I am old." David is not talking about a bad week. He is not making a judgment based on a temporary downturn in the market. He is giving us the long view. Our culture is pathologically impatient. We want success now, comfort now, security now. But God operates on a covenantal timeline. He builds His kingdom slowly, steadily, generation by generation, like a great oak, not a mushroom. To understand God's providence, you have to zoom out.
And what has David seen over this long life? He has not seen "the righteous forsaken." Who are the righteous? This is not a man who is sinlessly perfect. The only man like that was the Lord Jesus. The righteous man in the Old Testament is the one who is in a right covenant relationship with God through faith and obedience. He trusts God's promises and seeks to walk in God's ways. To be "forsaken" by God is the ultimate curse. It is to be abandoned, cut off from the source of all life and blessing. David says that in the ordinary providence of God, this is not the destiny of His people.
But he gets more specific. He has not seen the righteous man's "seed begging bread." This is crucial. The promise is not individualistic; it is generational. It is covenantal. God's blessings are not just for you; they are for you and for your household after you. The modern evangelical tends to think only of his own soul, his own quiet time, his own salvation. But the Bible thinks in terms of families, tribes, and nations. What you do, how you live, whom you worship, it all profoundly affects your children and your children's children. This verse is a direct refutation of the idea that your personal faith is a private matter. It is not. It puts food on your children's table for generations to come.
Now, is this an absolute, exceptionless guarantee? Of course not. The Bible is not a vending machine where you insert a prayer and get a stock portfolio. The Bible itself gives us examples of righteous men who suffered want, like the apostle Paul. This is a proverb. It is a statement of the ordinary way God has structured His world. It describes the rule, not every conceivable exception. In a world governed by a good and faithful God, the pattern, the norm, is that righteousness leads to stability and blessing, while wickedness leads to ruin. To deny this is to call God a liar and to say that sin has no real-world consequences.
The Engine of Blessing (v. 26)
Verse 26 is the explanation for verse 25. It shows us the character of the righteous man that results in this generational blessing. The blessing is not arbitrary; it flows from a particular way of life.
"All day long he is gracious and lends, And his seed is a blessing." (Psalm 37:26 LSB)
The righteous man is not blessed because he is a tight-fisted hoarder. He is blessed because he is a conduit. "All day long he is gracious and lends." His hands are open. He understands that everything he has is a gift from God, and he holds it loosely. He is a river, not a swamp. God's blessings flow to him, and they flow right on through him to others. He reflects the character of his God, who is gracious and merciful.
This is the polar opposite of the world's wisdom. The world says, "Look out for number one. Get all you can and can all you get." This man is not a fool. He works, he saves, he plans. But his ultimate trust is not in his bank account. His ultimate trust is in God, and this frees him to be generous. He lends, not as a predatory usurer, but as one extending grace to a neighbor in need. He is a creator of wealth and a source of stability in his community precisely because he is not trying to be.
And what is the result? "And his seed is a blessing." Notice the shift. In the previous verse, his seed was not begging bread, which is the absence of a curse. Here, his seed positively becomes a blessing. Why? Because the father did not just leave them an inheritance of money. He left them an inheritance of character, of reputation, of wisdom, and of faith. He taught them by his example to be conduits, not cul-de-sacs. The children of such a man are themselves trustworthy, generous, and productive. They are a blessing to their communities and to the church. This is how Christendom is built. It is built one faithful, generous, open-handed family at a time, over many generations.
The Gospel Economy
As we read this, we have to ask ourselves how this is possible. Our natural inclination is toward fear, not faith. We are born clenching our fists, not with open hands. The natural man is a miser, spiritually and financially. The answer is that we cannot become this righteous man on our own. We need to be remade.
The truly and perfectly Righteous Man is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one who was truly forsaken by God on the cross, bearing the curse that we deserved, so that we would never have to be. As Paul says, "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9). He is the ultimate fulfillment of this psalm.
When we are united to Him by faith, His righteousness is counted as ours. We are declared righteous before God. But it doesn't stop there. The Holy Spirit begins to work in us, transforming our character to match our legal standing. He begins to loosen our grip on our possessions and our anxieties. He begins to make us gracious and generous, like our Savior.
Therefore, Christian generosity is not a grim duty we perform in order to bribe God into blessing us. That is paganism. Christian generosity is the glad and grateful response of a heart that knows it is eternally secure. Because we have been given everything in Christ, we can afford to be generous with the pocket change of our earthly possessions. Because our Father owns the cattle on a thousand hills, we do not have to live in fear of our children begging bread.
This passage is a call to repent of our financial idolatries. Repent of trusting in the State. Repent of trusting in your 401k. Put your trust in the living God, who provides for His people. And then, live like it. Work hard, be excellent at what you do, but hold it all with an open hand. Be gracious. Lend. Give. Invest in the only economy with a guaranteed return: the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. Build a legacy of faithfulness that will make your seed a blessing for generations to come.