Stay Calm and Look Up

Dr. Michael Youssef, reflecting on a frequently shared verse in Psalm 37. Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. That verse is a wonderful verse. He will give you the desires of your heart. All you do is just name it, and you claim it, and it's yours. I mean, He just meant.

That's all you need to do. He will give. They conveniently leave out the condition that leads to God giving you the desires of your heart. They conveniently leave out the most important part of the verse.

When you delight yourself in the Lord, then and only then, He will give you the desires of your heart. Welcome to Leading the Way with pastor and author of more than 50 encouraging, challenging books, Dr. Michael Youssef. When life begins seemingly to unravel, someone always seems to throw that verse into conversation as a word from the Lord. Yet, like all verses, context is king. So today, Dr. Youssef takes you deeper, encouraging you to lean into the heart of God when troubling times come. Hey, and do remember that Leading the Way is listener supported. You can learn ways to stand with Dr. Youssef today. The number to reach a ministry representative at 866-626-4356.

Or online, ltw.org. Join me now as Dr. Michael Youssef begins this powerful teaching, stay calm and look up. David, inspired by the Holy Spirit, he gives us four reasons as to why those who know the Lord and love the Lord must stay calm and look up.

Four reasons. Stay calm and look up verses 1 to 3 because of what you cannot see with your physical eye. Secondly, verses 4 to 7, stay calm and look up because of what you already have. Thirdly, verses 8 to 11, stay calm and look up because of what is coming to you. Finally, fourthly, verses 12 to 20, stay calm and look up because of the coming judgment on the wicked. When you only see the success of the wicked, when you only see success of evil, and you cannot see anything else, we're basically like a person who's physically blind and he cannot see 24-7.

He lives in darkness 24-7. That's what happens. But if you start seeing with your spiritual eyes, you're going to realize that these people are not as happy as they appear to be. You will see that these people, deep down, they are miserable. You're going to see some things that you were not able to see with your physical eye, but you'll see it with your spiritual eyes.

You see, listen to me very carefully. When you see these people come on television, I'm talking about those lobbyists who are out there forcing the immorality and the turning upside down of biblical morality and forcing all of that on us and upon our children. When you see them on television and just want you to see them with your spiritual eyes, not with your physical eyes, you're going to see them absolutely seething with anger. They are burning from the inside with guilt, and it shows.

You realize that inside there is a volcano over against their transgression. You say, Michael, why? Why? I'm going to tell you why.

Don't ever forget this. Because they are created in God's own image, and because they're created in God's own image, no matter what they say in public, on the inside, they are eaten up with guilt. Why do you think they already started in the back yonder? We just want acceptance. We just want to accept of all of our lifestyles. We want to accept that everybody has accepted and finally got accepted. No, no, no. That is really not enough. We want approval, and so they got approval, but now it's not enough.

We want to highlight our immorality and immoral lifestyle to be a virtue. It never stops. It will never stop. It will never stop. Even if the government tomorrow says, yeah, that's a virtue, it's not going to stop. And that is why Psalm 37 verse 1, particularly 1 to 20, you find the word fret not three times.

Verse 1, verse 7, verse 8. Fret not. Fret not.

Fret not because of what you cannot see. In my personal opinion, I always make a distinction between my personal opinion and expounding of the word of God. David was saying to himself, why did I ever waste my time and my energy fretting over Saul?

Why did I even waste all that time about Saul's apparent success? Today, even secular psychologists have agreed that anger, envy, and jealousy, all of these things hurt the person who is experiencing them more than the object of their hatred. They really do. It devastates the person who is doing the anger and the hatred. It devastates them, and it can really destroy them. It can destroy them mentally, emotionally, psychologically, socially, but even physically.

I love the story of the mom of a teenage daughter, high school student, who was coming to her mom and she was really upset and crying and she's down and discouraged. She said, mom, why are the mean girls, the snobbish girls, they get the attention. They get the friends.

They get the popularity. They get the favor. Here's what that wise mom said. Listen carefully. It's truly wisdom. You keep on being good and godly. Trust me, what they have now will not last past the 12th grade.

You will see what I mean on the 20th reunion. I thought that is great wisdom. Stay calm and look up because of what you cannot see. Secondly, stay calm and look up because of what you have, verses 4 to 7. If you've ever analyzed the situation, whether that injustice happened to you or to somebody dear and near to you and you see the success of the wicked, you will realize this is how it sits in motion. They start with fretting, and fretting gives way to irritation, intense irritation. And if intense irritation not dealt with godly way and biblical way, it will lead to anger. And anger, if it's not checked and channeled positively, it will produce hatred. And beloved, I don't need to tell you that hatred has its own ugly consequences. Here's something else that you really need to do.

You need to stop this process dead in its tracks. What generally happens is in the time of fretting, we all of a sudden become blinded at all that we have. All we can think of, all we are fixated is this problem, is this thing, it just makes you angry, this thing is making you fret, and all of a sudden you forget all your blessings.

You forget what you have and you focus, you got a fixation on this thing that is making you angry. I've counseled many multimillionaires through the years. I will never forget, not in this church before the church of the apostles, I was in another church and then I was counseling a multimillionaire, a guy so blessed of god. And then I was talking to him and he was telling me that he's about to go to the poor house.

Well I said, well just explain that to me, how come? And I listened, I listened, you know I'm not very patient, I confess that publicly and openly, but I was and I really was listening carefully. And I found out he was constantly comparing himself with somebody who's richer than he is. And he's fretting, I'm going to the poor house. Beloved, when a believer starts fretting at the success of the wicked and they forget that they have Christ which is everything, it gets you into trouble. Every time, verse 4, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. That verse is a wonderful verse. He will give you the desires of your heart. All you do is just name it and you claim it and it's yours.

It's all you need to do. They conveniently leave out the condition that leads to God giving you the desires of your heart. They conveniently leave out the most important part of the verse. When you delight yourself in the Lord, then and only then he will give you the desires of your heart. Question, what does it mean to delight yourself in the Lord? What does it mean to delight yourself in anybody? Think with me. Think of those romantic days. I really trust and hope that romantic days never stop. Remember when you delight yourself in somebody else?

What happens? You want to do what that other person wants, right? When two people are in love and I've seen it through the years of course in premarital counseling in the old days when I used to do weddings and man, they just saw in love and their head is in the cloud and they're falling over each other to please each other. When I delight myself in the Lord, it means that I want to do what He wants me to do. I will go where He wants me to go. I'm going to please Him above all else. If my desire is His desire, if my delight is His delight, therefore He will grant my desire which is His desire to begin with. Beloved, this love relationship with the Lord, the non-believers and the nominal Christians will never understand.

They really won't. This delighting oneself in the Lord can never be comprehended by the ungodly. And so they call us names and they falsely accuse us of things of which we are very innocent. Verses 5 and 6, commit your ways to the Lord.

Trust in Him and He will act. He will bring forth your vindication as the light and your righteousness as the noonday. Today we're so used to headline news that are fake and not true. And then the apology comes on page 27 in a very small print.

Not long ago, I have a dear friend who lives in Sydney, Australia. He's a very successful businessman. But his success and his blessing is the only reason he lives to do this is to give money to kingdom work.

He literally lives to give money away. That is the desire of his heart and lo and behold, somebody falsely accused him and dragged him to court. He knew he was innocent. Everybody around him knew he was innocent. Even the people who took him to court knew he was innocent. But nonetheless, the headline news in the papers made him look guilty. I remember calling him and said, I'm going to pray and I'm going to claim Psalm 37 6 until God vindicates you. And sure enough, ten months later, ten months later, the court threw the case out.

It was a fraud. Today there may be someone here and you feel that you're not getting your just reward. Or you feel you've been passed over for a promotion. Or you feel that you got a raw deal. Or that you're suffering injustice of any kind. Or you're being a victim of rumors and gossip.

Or you are saying to yourself, nice guys finish last. And you are carrying this huge burden and others appear to have it easy. Here's the truth. The judge of the universe is watching you. The judge of the universe is making sure that you will be openly vindicated one day. He will publicly exonerate you one day. He will publicly justify you one day. You will be generously rewarded one day. You will be lavishly blessed one day. Stay calm and look up.

Say it with me. Stay calm and look up. For what you cannot see. Secondly, stay calm and look up because of what you have. Thirdly, stay calm and look up because of what is coming to you.

Verses 8 to 11. You will not be merely vindicated. You will not be merely exonerated. You will not be merely justified. But you will be rewarded.

You will be rewarded. You will inherit the whole earth. That's the new earth. Remember the Bible talks about the new heaven and the new earth.

The whole new earth is yours. And those who caused you to fret. Those who caused you envy.

Those who caused you anger. There will be like a puff of smoke. Gone. And while you will have it all.

There will be like soot. I know. Listen to me. You know that what we see is an invasion of an extreme secularism in our culture, in our society. And you know what the word secular means, this world, this life. This is now, here and now. And you see the emphasis everywhere you go.

It's now, here and now. And even preachers today, they are only preaching messages about the here and now. They're just focusing on this life and focusing on this life. And there's nothing wrong with this life. Let me tell you, I preach about this. But that's not all that there is.

If there is, we're wasting our time. It's hard. It's hard even for believers to buck the system and swim upstream. It is hard. It's not easy.

I know that. It's a whole lot easier to go with the flow. It's a whole lot easier because it's hard to see beyond what's in front of us. And we find that our circumstances and the circumstances of this life consumes us. The cares of this life occupy our time and our energy and our efforts and our mental capacity. The desires we want to see fulfilled in this life cloud our vision of the life to come.

The headline news constantly grabbing our attention all the time and the here and now even threatens to devour us. David said, think about this, everything that you ever wanted or desired is really yours but not yet. Everything that you have envied others for is really yours but not yet.

Everything you wish for is yours but not yet. As long as you remain meek, that is having your strength under control, you will inherit the whole earth. And Jesus said that in the Beatitudes.

Same thing. So what is the meek? A lot of people think a meek person is a weak person.

Far from it. It doesn't mean that at all. Moses was called the meekest man in the world.

And you know what he did? He stood before the most powerful man on the face of the earth at that time and he demanded that this man obey God. How about that for weakness, right? Meekness makes you bow before God but stand tall before men. Meekness makes you bend your knees to the Lord but stand firm and resolute before the culture and men in the culture.

Meekness makes you trust in God even when you're surrounded by people who are not trustworthy. Stay calm and look up for what you cannot see. Secondly, stay calm and look up because of what you have.

Thirdly, stay calm and look up because of what is coming to you. Finally, stay calm and look up because of the penalty of the wicked. Here's David telling us that if we can see, if we can see what God sees, only if we can see what he sees, we would not waste a minute of our lives. We would not waste any of our energy, not a single minute of our time fretting, envying the wicked and their apparent success. If you and I could see what God sees, we too would laugh at the wicked just like God does. You would laugh even at your own waste of time and energy fretting. You, too, would laugh at the foolishness of the wicked.

You, too, would laugh at the cruel joke that Satan is playing on the wicked. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever overreacted, I mean really overreacted, to some information that you received? I mean, you really flew off the handle, as you say, only to discover later that that information was erroneous, that was wrong information.

Answer the question to yourself. You don't have to tell me. Think of how you felt when you realized that that was false information. And you felt that you made a fool of yourself, right?

Now don't laugh because I've been there a few times. And that's exactly what happens when we envy or fret or become angry over the success of the ungodly. Listen to me. You have the wrong information because you have partial information.

You have the wrong information. Begin to look at things from God's perspective, not from your own. In fact, instead of envying them and being angry at what they're doing, you know what we need to do? We need to weep for them.

And I mean that with all my heart. We should be weeping over the horrible fate, their dreadful end. We should be weeping over the terrible coming judgment on the wicked because of their coming torment. That will not be for a period of time.

That will be forever and ever and ever. I know we don't weep over sinners in the church anymore. These days, professing Christians either join the sinners or envy the sinners. Someone said that there are more tears shed in the movie theaters over imaginary tragedies than in the churches where there are real ones.

Sir Winston Churchill once said, men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened. Beloved, we live in a time when we have totally, I'm talking about our culture as a whole, totally confused fiction with reality. There are some people living in the unreal world, and yet what we think is real and permanent, God scoffs at.

Why? Because he knows that what we see is not real and it's not permanent. God knows the end of the wicked. He knows the judgment of the wicked. He knows the eternal fate of the wicked.

And if God can laugh at the foolishness of the wicked, at least you and I can stay calm and look up. Amen? Take a moment and reflect as I come to an end. I just want you to reflect just for a moment. I'm not talking about reflecting on history centuries ago. I'm talking about just a few decades ago. And most of us have not lived those days, but we know it in history. Ask yourself the question, where are all the mighty and powerful people? Hitler used to have millions of adoring crowds saluting him and bowing to him.

Mussolini was feared by millions of people. Where are they now? Where are they now?

Well, their bodies are rotting in the ground and their souls are being tormented in hell right now at this moment while the righteous are rejoicing in the presence of Jesus right now. Stay calm and look up. You're listening to Leading the Way Audio with Dr. Michael Youssef. It's available anytime on the web, the Leading the Way app, through your favorite podcast app or site, and more.

So get the details at ltw.org. Now, in the next few moments, allow me to tell you a little bit about Dr. Youssef's most recent book, Never Give Up. I know that many of you have already ordered this book. Maybe you've even finished reading it, but many of you have not. Let me tell you, Never Give Up is a powerful, emotional journey right into the heart and the emotions of the apostle Paul as he candidly faced the reality of his own impending execution because of his faith. Paul poured out his heart to Timothy, and Dr. Youssef guides you to a place where you experience those words on an even more passionate level. Now, if you've already ordered or received or read your copy of Never Give Up, then you know how the life-impacting content really is.

Get a copy to share with a family member or with a friend. And if you haven't read it yet, order Never Give Up today. You can learn more about Never Give Up when you visit ltw.org or when you call us, 866-626-4356. That's ltw.org and 866-626-4356. This program is furnished by Leading the Way with Dr. Michael Youssef.