The Inheritance of the Meek
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Read Psalm 37 in full before proceeding. It is long; read it slowly, and notice how often it returns to the contrast between the brief prospering of the wicked and the lasting inheritance of those who wait for the LORD. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
Do not fret when wicked men seem to succeed! … But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace.
Psalm 37:1 (NET), 11 (ESV)
There is an ache that comes to almost every believer sooner or later, and it is older than the church and older than Israel. You try to walk the right way. You keep faith, you tell the truth, you deal honestly, and you watch the people who do none of those things pull ahead. The cheat prospers. The bully is promoted. The man who would step on anyone to get what he wants gets it, and gets to keep it, and looks for all the world like he is winning. And somewhere underneath, a question begins to whisper: is it even worth it? Does following the LORD pay, or am I the fool here?
The Psalter does not scold that ache, and it does not pretend not to feel it. It hands you a whole psalm built to answer it. Psalm 37 is the wisdom of an old man who has watched this very thing happen for seventy years and has come out the far side settled (not bitter, not naïve, but settled) and sits the younger believer down to tell him what he has learned. Do not fret. Do not envy. The wicked are not winning; they are fading. Trust, commit, be still, and wait, because the meek, not the ruthless, will inherit the land in the end.
This is the first of the wisdom psalms we take up, and it helps to remember what we said about that whole room of the Psalter. Wisdom psalms teach, often by laying the two ways side by side, the righteous and the wicked, and that is exactly what Psalm 37 does, over and over, for forty verses. It even teaches in an orderly, almost catechetical way: in the Hebrew it is an acrostic, its sections marching down the alphabet from one letter to the next, an A-to-Z of counsel on this one question. The very form preaches. Against the churn and disorder of watching the wicked prosper, the psalm answers with a calm, lettered, settled order; the form itself embodies the steadiness it commends.
And it helps to remember the danger we flagged in that room, too, because this psalm walks right up to it. Read carelessly, Psalm 37 sounds like a self-improvement program with a payoff attached: be good, trust hard, do not lose your temper, and God will hand you the comfortable life while your enemies get what is coming to them. Read that way it becomes pure law dressed as gospel, a prosperity scheme with the LORD as the rewards officer, and it will eventually break the heart of every honest believer who tried it and watched the righteous suffer anyway. We will not read it that way. We will read it for the Christ it carries and the gospel it finally rests on, and we will find that the psalm itself, by its last verse, will not let us read it any other way.
For there is a particular reason this psalm belongs to the Lord Jesus. Its most famous line, the meek shall inherit the land (v. 11 ESV; the NET’s the oppressed will possess the land is faithful to the Hebrew, but the older wording lets us hear the line Jesus quotes), He took up with His own lips, on a mountain, near the very start of His ministry: Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). He did not invent the Beatitude; He quoted Psalm 37. And He could quote it with authority because He is the meek One it describes (I am gentle and humble in heart, Matthew 11:29), the One who never once fretted at the wicked, never once envied them, never once grasped, and who inherited the earth not by seizing it but by being given it, having first been meek enough to be crucified on it. Psalm 37 is, before it is anyone’s wisdom for living, the portrait of the meek Heir. We will read it as His, and then as ours in Him.
Fret Not
The psalm opens with the command it will repeat like a refrain: Do not fret when wicked men seem to succeed! Do not envy evildoers! (v. 1). The word translated fret is built on the Hebrew charah: to burn, to grow hot. Do not heat yourself up. It names the slow inner combustion of a believer who broods over the prosperity of the wicked until he is smoldering, resentful, agitated, his peace burned away from the inside. And alongside it comes the second temptation, its twin: Do not envy. The two go together. To watch the wicked win is to be tempted both to anger at them and to envy of them, to hate what they have and to want it at the same time. The psalm forbids both, and it knows the human heart well enough to forbid them in the very first breath.
Why forbid them so sharply? Partly because they are pointless. For they will quickly dry up like grass, and wither away like plants (v. 2). We met that image in the very first psalm we studied: the wicked are like chaff the wind drives away. Here they are grass, green and tall this morning, cut and brown by evening. To burn yourself up with envy over grass is to spend your peace on something that will not last the week. But the deeper reason comes later, and it is graver: Do not be angry and frustrated! Do not fret! That only leads to trouble! (v. 8). The Hebrew is blunter still: it leads only to doing evil. The fretting is not merely a waste; it is a road. Brooding over the prosperity of the wicked does not stay still in the heart. It leads, it leans, it travels toward evil. The believer who feeds his resentment of the wicked will, given time, find his own feet wandering off the way of life and onto the way that perishes, because envy is how the righteous get talked into becoming the wicked. The psalm is not protecting our comfort. It is protecting our soul.
Scripture shows us where that road ends in its very first pages. The first man to burn with this exact heat was Cain, whose expression grew downcast (who fretted, we might say) when his brother’s offering was accepted and his own was not. And the LORD warned him in words that could be a gloss on this psalm: Why are you angry, and why is your expression downcast? … sin is crouching at the door. It desires to dominate you, but you must subdue it (Genesis 4:6–7). Cain did not subdue it. He let the burning have its way, and it led, exactly as Psalm 37 says, to evil: to the first murder. That is the trajectory the psalm is trying to head off. The believer who feeds his resentment of those who seem to be getting away with it is standing where Cain stood, with sin crouching at the door. Do not fret! That only leads to trouble! is not cold advice. It is a hand laid on the shoulder, steering us back from a door we do not want to open.
So the first counsel of the psalm is a kind of holy refusal: refuse to catch fire over the wicked. Wait patiently for the LORD! Wait confidently for him! Do not fret over the apparent success of a sinner (v. 7). The NET renders the first command wait patiently; the Hebrew is dom: be still, hush, fall silent. There is a silence that is not defeat but trust, the quiet of a man who has handed the matter over and stopped arguing with God about the timetable. That stillness is the opposite of the smoldering, and it is the first thing the meek Heir will teach us.
Trust, Delight, Commit, Wait
If the first word is do not burn, the next is a string of better things to do with the same energy. Trust in the LORD and do what is right! (v. 3). Delight yourself in the LORD (v. 4 ESV; the NET turns this command into a result, then you will take delight in the LORD, but the Hebrew is an imperative). Commit your future to the LORD! Trust in him, and he will act on your behalf (v. 5). Four or five imperatives, piled up, each one turning the believer’s gaze away from the wicked and back toward the LORD. Delight yourself in the LORD: there is the word from Psalm 1 again, the blessed man whose delight is in the LORD’s instruction. The cure for envy of the wicked is not gritted teeth but a rival delight, a heart so taken with the LORD that the prosperity of the wicked simply stops looking like much.
And do not misread the promise attached to that delight. Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart (v. 4 ESV) is not a blank check for whatever the heart happens to want: the bigger house, the better position, the downfall of the man who wronged us. It is something stranger and far better. When a heart truly delights in the LORD, the LORD Himself becomes the desire of that heart; so that when He gives such a heart its desire, He gives Himself, which is the one gift that never disappoints. The promise is not that God will hand the delighting believer his wish list. It is that God will give him God, and reshape his wanting until that is exactly what he finds he was longing for all along.
There is a word about vindication tucked in here, too, and it is worth lifting out. He will vindicate you in broad daylight, and publicly defend your just cause (v. 6). The believer who has been wronged and then disbelieved, who watched the wrongdoer come off looking like the honest one, is told that he does not have to clear his own name. His vindication is the LORD’s to bring, and the LORD will bring it out into the open like a sunrise, in His own time. This is the patience the cross itself teaches. The Lord Jesus, falsely condemned, when he was maligned, he did not answer back … but committed himself to God who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23), and His vindication came at the empty tomb, brought forth by the Father as the light of Easter morning. The believer who commits his cause to God walks the same road: he sets down the exhausting work of defending himself, and waits for the LORD to bring the truth out in broad daylight.
Commit your future to the LORD is the richest of them. The Hebrew picture under commit is galal, to roll, and the Hebrew speaks literally of your way. Roll your way onto the LORD, the way you would roll a weight off your own back and onto someone strong enough to carry it. The believer who has been straining under the unfairness of it all, trying to keep the books balanced himself, trying to make sure the wicked do not get away with it, is told: stop carrying that. Roll it onto the LORD. He will act. Not you must act; he will act. The settling of the world’s accounts is His work, on His schedule, and the believer is invited to set the whole crushing weight of it down.
Now we have to be careful, because here is exactly where the psalm could be turned into a ladder. A careless reader hears trust and do good and delight and commit, and he will give you the desires of your heart and concludes: so this is the technique; perform these spiritual moves correctly and collect the reward. But that is to read the imperatives as the price of the inheritance, and the psalm will not finally let us. These commands are not the rungs by which the meek climb up to their inheritance. They are the shape of the life of people who are already trusting, the posture of those who have rolled their burden onto the LORD and are now free to do good, delight, and wait without keeping one anxious eye on the scoreboard. The doing flows from the trusting; it does not purchase it. Hold that thought, because the psalm’s own last verses will prove it for us.
The Meek Shall Inherit the Land
Five times across the psalm, like a bell that keeps ringing, comes the promise: the meek, the godly, those who rely on the LORD will possess the land, or as the older translations have it, shall inherit the land (vv. 9, 11, 22, 29, 34). It is the psalm’s settled answer to the whole problem. The wicked seem to own the world; in fact they are tenants about to be evicted, and the inheritance belongs to someone else entirely. But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace (v. 11 ESV).
The word for meek is ʿanawim (the NET renders it the oppressed): the humble, the lowly, the bowed-down, the people with no power to seize anything for themselves. That is the scandal of the promise. In the world’s arithmetic, the meek inherit nothing; the earth goes to the strong, the grasping, the ones willing to take it. The psalm flatly contradicts the arithmetic. The earth, in the end, goes to the meek, precisely to the people who would never have taken it by force, because they do not seize it; they are given it. Inheritance is not something you grab. It is something you receive from a father. The meek inherit the land the way a child inherits a home: not by deserving it or winning it, but by belonging to the One who owns it.
We should be clear what meek does not mean, because the word has fallen on hard times. To be meek is not to be weak, spineless, a doormat for the world to wipe its feet on. Moses is called the meekest man on the face of the earth (Numbers 12:3), and Moses stood before Pharaoh and led a whole nation out through the sea. The Lord Jesus is the meek One, and the meek One braided a whip and drove the moneychangers out of His Father’s house. Meekness is not the absence of strength; it is strength laid wholly under God’s hand, power that refuses to grasp, that will not seize by force what it could only rightly receive as a gift. The meek inherit the earth precisely because they are the ones who would not take it, who kept their hands open instead of clenched, and waited for the Father to fill them.
And this is the line the Lord Jesus lifted out of this psalm and set in the heart of His greatest sermon: Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). Notice that He widened it. Psalm 37 says the land, meaning the promised land of Israel, and the Lord Jesus says the earth, the whole of it. The inheritance was never finally a strip of territory along the Jordan; it was the world, and more than the world. Paul says the promise to Abraham was that he would inherit the world (Romans 4:13); the New Testament ends with a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21) handed to the people of God. So when the psalm promises the meek the land, do not shrink it down to a comfortable retirement on this side of the grave. The meek may well struggle and go without all their days here. What they will inherit is the renewed creation itself, the earth made new, given to the lowly as a Father gives a home to His children.
And the first of the meek, the true ʿanaw, is the Lord Jesus. He is the One who was gentle and humble in heart, who did not grasp, who did not fret at the wicked even as they nailed Him to the wood, who when He was maligned did not answer back but committed Himself to the One who judges justly. He inherited the earth not by seizing it but by being meek unto death and then raised and given all authority in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28:18). He is the Heir. And the believer inherits exactly the way he was blessed back in Psalm 1: not by out-meeking the meek or out-waiting the patient, but by being joined to the Heir, a co-heir with Christ (Romans 8:17), receiving in Him the inheritance He receives from the Father. The meek inherit the earth because the meekest One inherited it first, and shares it with all who are His.
Better Is the Little
Between the ringing promises, the psalm keeps doing something quietly subversive: it keeps re-pricing things. The little bit that a godly man owns is better than the wealth of many evil men (v. 16). The world prices a life by the size of its wealth; the psalm prices it by whose hand the portion comes from. A little held by a man who has the LORD is worth more than a fortune held by a man who does not. We have heard this re-pricing before, in Psalm 16, where the LORD Himself was the psalmist’s portion, and a man whose inheritance was God counted himself richly given. The wicked have wealth and no LORD. The righteous have little and have the LORD. The psalm asks us, plainly, which of those two is actually the rich man.
And it keeps insisting that the wicked man’s apparent strength is on a clock. For evil men will lose their power, but the LORD sustains the godly (v. 17). The wicked borrow and do not repay; the godly are generous (v. 21), which is its own quiet tell: the man with the LORD can afford to be openhanded, because his treasure is not the thing he is holding. What looks, from the outside, like the wicked winning and the righteous losing is, on the psalm’s longer clock, the wicked spending down a balance that will hit zero, and the righteous drawing on a LORD who does not run out. The psalm is not asking us to deny what we see. It is asking us to wait long enough to see how it ends.
There is a tell, too, in how the two men hold what they have. Evil men borrow, but do not repay their debt, but the godly show compassion and are generous (v. 21); all day long he shows compassion and lends to others (v. 26). The man whose treasure is the LORD can afford to be openhanded with everything else, because the thing he values most is not in his grip and cannot be taken from him; the man whose treasure is his wealth must clutch it, because it is all he has. The Lord Jesus would put it plainly: do not accumulate treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, but treasures in heaven, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21). The righteous man of Psalm 37 has already moved his treasure. That is why his little is worth more than the wicked man’s wealth, and why he can give it away with an open hand and not feel the poorer for it.
I Have Been Young, and Now Am Old
Then the old man speaks in his own voice, and gives the testimony of a long life. The LORD grants success to the one whose behavior he finds commendable. Even if he trips, he will not fall headlong, for the LORD holds his hand (vv. 23–24). Note the honesty of it: even if he trips. The righteous man does stumble; the psalm does not promise he will not. It promises he will not fall headlong, flung down to ruin, because a hand is under him. And then the famous, tender verse: I was once young, now I am old. I have never seen a godly man abandoned, or his children forced to search for food (v. 25).
We have to handle that verse with care, because it is a favorite of the very prosperity reading we have been refusing all session. Read as a flat guarantee (the godly never lack, the faithful never go hungry), it is simply not true, and a believer who has watched a saintly friend die destitute, or who has read of the church’s martyrs, knows it is not true. The psalmist is not handing us a mechanical promise that the righteous never suffer want; the Psalter itself will not allow that reading, for it is the same Psalter in which the most righteous Man who ever lived cries from a cross, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? This is wisdom literature speaking the way wisdom literature speaks, naming the long, broad, true pattern of the LORD’s faithfulness across a lifetime, the thing an old believer can honestly say he has watched God do, again and again, over seventy years: He does not in the end abandon His own.
And the verse reaches its real bottom only in Christ. I have never seen a godly man abandoned, and we have not, finally, because the one truly Righteous One was abandoned in our place, forsaken to the dust of death on Good Friday, so that the LORD could promise to all who are His, I will never leave you and I will never abandon you (Hebrews 13:5). The believer may lose everything the world counts; he may, like many saints, be forced to search for food before the end. But he will not be abandoned by God, because the forsaking that he deserved fell on the Righteous One instead. Verse 25 is not a promise that the believer will always have a full table. It is a promise that, full table or empty, he will never be abandoned by the God who abandoned His own Son rather than abandon him. And a few verses on the psalm says exactly that, lifted above all circumstance: the LORD never abandons his faithful followers (v. 28).
One more line from the old man’s testimony, because it is pure gospel hiding in a wisdom psalm: The law of his God is in his heart; his steps do not slip (v. 31 ESV; the NET’s controls their thinking loses the word heart that ties this verse to Jeremiah). Not the law merely written on tablets of stone and held over the man from outside, but the law written in his heart, which is precisely the promise of the new covenant the LORD makes through Jeremiah: I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and minds (Jeremiah 31:33). The righteous man of Psalm 37 is, at his deepest, not a man trying hard to obey an external code, but a man in whom God Himself has put His word: the work of the gospel, not the achievement of the moralist. His steps do not slip because the LORD is holding his hand and has written His own word into his heart.
Their Salvation Is from the LORD
The psalm gathers toward its end by watching the two ways arrive at their two destinations. The wicked, for all their menace (evil men set an ambush for the godly and try to kill them, v. 32), come to nothing. I have seen ruthless evil men growing in influence, like a green tree grows in its native soil. But then one passes by, and suddenly they have disappeared! I looked for them, but they could not be found (vv. 35–36). There is the whole prosperity of the wicked in two verses: enormous, leafy, dominating the skyline, and then simply gone, so completely that you cannot even find the place where they stood. Against that vanishing the psalm sets the lasting future of the godly: Take note of the one who has integrity! Observe the godly! For the one who promotes peace has a future (v. 37). The word is ʾacharit: an end, a latter day, a future, a posterity. The wicked have a brilliant present and no future. The one who promotes peace has a future, whatever his present looks like.
And then the psalm lands, and where it lands settles, once and for all, how we are to read the whole thing. After forty verses of trust and do good and delight and commit and wait, after all the imperatives that a careless reader could pile into a ladder, the psalm puts its full weight not on anything the righteous have done but on what the LORD does: The salvation of the righteous is from the LORD; he is their stronghold in the time of trouble. The LORD helps them and delivers them … and saves them, because they take refuge in him (vv. 39–40 ESV). The salvation of the righteous is from the LORD. Not from their fretting less, not from their patience, not from their good behavior outlasting the wicked, but from the LORD. It is His salvation, His helping, His delivering, His saving.
And He is named here with a word the believer has sung before: he is their stronghold in the time of trouble (v. 39 ESV). A stronghold: a fortress, a high keep to run into when the enemy is at the gate. It is the same confession Luther turned into the Reformation’s battle hymn out of Psalm 46, a mighty fortress is our God. The righteous are not their own stronghold; their patience is not their fortress, nor their good behavior their high wall. The LORD is the fortress, and salvation is found by running into Him, which is exactly where the psalm’s last word will send us.
And mark the very last word of the psalm: the righteous are saved because they take refuge in him. There is chasah again, the word that closed Psalm 2, How blessed are all who take shelter in him!, and opened Psalm 16, for I have taken shelter in you (the NET renders chasah as take shelter in both places). The whole long wisdom psalm, which could so easily have been read as a program of self-made righteousness with a payoff attached, comes to rest on the one thing that is the opposite of self-made: taking refuge. Hiding in the LORD. Running to Him for cover and being saved by Him, not by the running. The psalm tells us to trust and do good and wait, and then tells us, in its last breath, that what actually saves us is not the trusting and the doing and the waiting, but the LORD in whom we take refuge. That is a wisdom psalm preaching the gospel with its dying word.
Reading a Wisdom Psalm for the Gospel
So gather it up. Psalm 37 is the answer the Psalter gives to the oldest ache of faith, the prospering of the wicked and the struggle of the righteous, and the answer is not an explanation but a horizon. Do not burn yourself up; do not envy; the wicked are grass, here this morning and gone by evening, and you are watching the brief afternoon of people with no future. Trust, delight, commit, be still, wait. The meek will inherit the earth, because the meek One has inherited it and shares it with His own.
And read this way, the law in the psalm does its proper work. Do not fret. Do not be angry. Do not envy. Held honestly up against our own hearts, those commands accuse us, every one, because we do fret, we do envy, we have spent more hours than we will admit burning over people who wronged us and got away with it. The psalm’s imperatives expose the resentment we have been nursing and the trust we have been withholding. That is the law, and it is meant to drive us somewhere: not to try harder at not-fretting by sheer willpower, but to the One who never fretted, the meek and lowly Heir, and to the refuge the psalm names in its last line. We do not conquer our envy by gritting our teeth. We take refuge in Christ, and find that the prosperity of the wicked has quietly stopped looking like much, because the man who has the inheritance does not need to envy the tenant who is about to be evicted.
There is real medicine here for the believer in the long middle of the ache, where the wicked are still prospering and the vindication has not come. The medicine is the long view and the strong refuge: the world’s accounts are not yours to balance; roll that weight onto the LORD, for He will act; be still; and wait for the One who was meek enough to be crucified and is now the Heir of all things, in whom your own inheritance is kept safe past the reach of every wicked man. The next psalm will take the very same question and refuse to stay calm about it. Psalm 73 nearly loses its faith over the prosperity of the wicked before it finds its footing again. Psalm 37 is the steady counsel of the old believer who has come through. Psalm 73 is the honest struggle of the one still in the middle of it. The Psalter, in its wisdom, gives us both, and we will need both.
Gathering the Threads
We came to Psalm 37 with the oldest ache of faith (the wicked prospering, the faithful struggling, and the whispered question of whether it is worth it), and we found the Psalter ready with a whole psalm to answer it, the settled wisdom of an old believer laid out in an orderly, alphabet-long calm. Do not fret; the word means do not burn yourself up, and the fretting is not merely useless but dangerous, a road that leads toward evil. Do not envy grass that withers by evening. Instead trust, delight, commit (roll your way onto the LORD), be still, and wait.
We heard the bell that rings five times through the psalm: the meek shall inherit the land. We saw the Lord Jesus lift that line into the Beatitudes and widen it from the land to the whole renewed earth, and we saw that He is Himself the meek Heir who inherited not by seizing but by being given, and who shares the inheritance with all who are joined to Him. We watched the psalm re-price the world (better the little of the godly than the wealth of the wicked) and handled with care the old man’s testimony that he had never seen the godly abandoned, finding its true bottom not in a prosperity guarantee but in the Righteous One who was forsaken so that we never finally will be. And we watched the whole psalm land, in its last breath, not on our trusting and doing and waiting but on the LORD: the salvation of the righteous is from the LORD … because they take refuge in him. A wisdom psalm that preaches the gospel with its dying word: law to expose our fretting and envy, gospel to send us to the refuge, and the meek Heir at the center of all of it.
For Discussion
Psalm 37 opens by forbidding two reactions to the prospering of the wicked: fretting (burning with anger) and envy (v. 1). Read verse 8. Why does the psalm treat these as dangerous and not merely understandable, and what does it mean that fretting only leads to trouble, or in the Hebrew, only to evil?
The psalm is full of commands: trust, do good, delight, commit, be still, wait. Read verses 39–40. On what does the psalm finally rest the salvation of the righteous, and how does that last word keep all those commands from becoming a ladder we climb to earn the inheritance?
The Lord Jesus took verse 11 into the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:5) and called Himself gentle and humble (Matthew 11:29). How does reading the psalm’s meek in the light of Christ change who the inheritors are and how they come to inherit?
The session argued that the inheritance of the meek is not a comfortable life now but the renewed creation to come (compare Romans 4:13 and Revelation 21). Why does that eschatological reading matter for a believer who looks around and sees the wicked comfortable and the faithful struggling?
Verse 25 says, I have never seen a godly man abandoned, yet Psalm 22 has Christ crying, why have you abandoned me?, and many faithful people have suffered real want. How does the session hold these together, and how does Christ being forsaken secure the promise that the believer never finally is (compare Hebrews 13:5)?
Psalm 37 offers the steady counsel of an old believer who has come through; the next psalm, 73, wrestles the very same question from the inside and nearly loses its faith. Why might a believer need both kinds of psalm, the settled wisdom and the honest struggle?
Looking Ahead
Psalm 37 answered the prospering of the wicked with patience and the long view, from the outside, calmly. The next session takes up a psalm that asks the same question from the inside, and does not stay calm at all. Psalm 73 is the confession of a believer who came within a step of throwing his faith away over exactly this: But as for me, my feet almost slipped; my feet almost slid out from under me. For I envied those who are proud, as I observed the prosperity of the wicked (Psalm 73:2–3). Where Psalm 37 says Do not envy, Psalm 73 admits, I envied, and tells the story of how close it came to ruin.
And then it tells where the turn came: not in an argument that finally added up, but in a place. Then I entered the precincts of God’s temple, and understood the destiny of the wicked (Psalm 73:17). The believer who could not reason his way out of the ache found his way out by going into the presence of God, and there saw the whole thing differently. Psalm 73 is the wisdom of Psalm 37 learned the hard way, from inside the struggle, and it climbs to one of the most astonishing confessions in all the Psalter, Whom do I have in heaven but you? On earth there is no one I desire but you, which we will take up next.
Read Psalm 73 in full before the next session. Watch for the turning point in verse 17, and notice how differently the psalm sounds before that verse and after it.
Closing Prayer
O LORD our God, You see how easily our peace is burned away by the sight of the wicked at their ease: how quickly we fret, how readily we envy, how long we will brood over those who have wronged us and prospered. Forgive us the resentment we have nursed and the trust we have withheld. Quiet our hearts. Teach us to be still before You and to roll onto You the weight of a world we were never meant to set right ourselves, for You will act, in Your time and not ours.
Make us meek with the meekness of Your Son, who did not grasp, did not envy, did not revile in return, but entrusted Himself to You and was given the inheritance of all things. Hide us in Him, our refuge; write Your law on our hearts; and keep us waiting in hope for the day when the wicked are grass long withered and the meek inherit the earth made new. For our salvation is not from ourselves but from You, and we take refuge in You, through the same Lord Jesus Christ, the meek and lowly Heir, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.