Let's bow for a word of prayer together.
We just want to say Amen, Father, to
that, so that we all know that each
other feel that prayer.
We want you to live your life in
it, and make your glory shine.
And to that end, I pray you will
use your word tonight to spark greater faith
and greater obedience in all of us.
In Jesus' name I pray, Amen.
I had planned to talk tonight about Psalm
23, and then next Sunday about Psalm 19.
But along about 3 o'clock yesterday, I
realized that what I wanted to say from
Psalm 23 was going to take 60 minutes
or more.
So I'm not going to preach it all
tonight, but I'm going to talk about Psalm
23, Part 1 tonight.
And then next Sunday, a sermon probably called
The Shepherd and the Host, Psalm 23, Part
2.
There's a version of Psalm 23 you've probably
never heard before that I'd like to recite
for you to start with.
It goes like this.
Der Herr ist mein Hirte, mir wird nichts
mangeln.
Er weidet mich auf einer grünen Aue, er
führt mich zum frischen Wasser.
Er führt mich auf rechter Straße um seines
Namens willen.
Und ob ich wanderte im finstern Tal, fürchte
ich kein Unglück, denn du bist bei mir.
Dein Stecken und Stab, sie trösten mich.
Du bereitest vor mir einen Tisch im Angesicht
meiner Feinde.
Du schenkest mir voll ein Gutes und Barmherzigkeit
werden mir folgen mein Leben lang.
Und ich werde bleiben im Hause des Herrn
immer da.
The reason I know that hymn or psalm
in German is because I can remember back
in 1971 to 74 reciting that psalm to
myself hundreds of times.
As I rode my three-speed bike from
Breisingstrasse in our little flat there to Ludwig
Maximilians Universität along the Isar River.
And as those months drew to a close
of study in Germany in 1974 and the
stress of my oral exams loomed in front
of me, I said that psalm to myself
again and again.
And I can remember riding in the evening
through the English gardens there along the banks
of the Isar saying to myself, He makes
me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside the still waters.
English and German.
And the reason I recited them to myself,
these words, again and again and again, is
because what I found was that this scripture,
almost more than any other, seemed to become
a reality just by saying it.
The psalm itself became green pasture.
The psalm itself became still waters.
The psalm itself restored the soul.
I lived by it, I ate it, I
drank it, and sure enough, it came true.
In all the situations, the Lord was my
shepherd and I did not want.
It's a very, very personal psalm, isn't it?
There are no we's, no us's, no they's.
Only my, me, I, he, you, or thou.
It's an overflow of David's personal experience with
God.
And one of the reasons I think we
and all the history of the church has
been drawn to this psalm is because we
want desperately to feel that kind of authentic,
personal experience that David describes.
And when we hear a personal testimony about
somebody that's been on the inside, we feel
a little bit closer to it ourselves.
And that's what we hear when we hear
David say these things.
So in the spirit of the psalm, what
I want to do is be personal and
tell you what I've learned from this psalm
in three steps.
The things that have been shown to me
as very significant.
First of all, I've learned something from the
form of this psalm.
The first three verses of Psalm 23 are
addressed to God as he.
The Lord is my shepherd.
He makes me lie down.
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness.
Verses four and five switch over to you
or thou.
I will not fear for you are with
me.
Your rod and staff comfort me.
You prepare a table before me.
You anoint my head with oil.
And then verse six switches back to the
third person.
I shall dwell in the house of the
Lord forever.
Why?
What can we learn from that in itself?
This is what I take as a lesson.
It is not good to speak long about
God without speaking to God.
Every Christian is at least an amateur theologian.
That is, somebody whose obligation it is to
try to understand God's character and his ways
and then put it into words.
We're all amateur theologians.
And if we aren't working that way, we're
probably not saying anything of value to each
other and not helping each other's faith.
Because faith comes by hearing about God and
his ways and his character.
But what I learned now from Psalm 23
is that I should interweave through my theology
a lot of prayer.
I should frequently interrupt my talking about God
in order to talk to God.
Not far behind the theological sentence, God is
generous, should come the prayerful sentence, thank you,
God.
And right on the heels of the theological
sentence, God is glorious, should come the prayerful
sentence, oh, how I adore your glory, oh,
God.
And what I've come to see is that
this is the way it really must be
if our hearts are feeling the reality of
God and not just our minds are describing
it.
So even from Psalm 23, the form of
it, we are encouraged to experience God personally
because we are led first into talking about
God.
He is my shepherd, makes me lie down
in green pastures, he does this and that.
And then we are drawn, whether we like
it or not, into talking to God.
You will not leave me, you guide me
through this valley.
That's the first thing I learned from the
form.
The second thing I learned from the form
is this.
I asked myself, why does David switch from
he to you just at this point of
verse four?
Why didn't he just go on to say,
for example, even though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, he is
with me.
His rod and his staff, they comfort me.
That makes good sense, why not?
Why switch here to the more intimate you
or thou?
I think the reason is a universal fact
of our experience, isn't it?
Namely, the crises of life draw us closer
to God.
We are more prone to talk about God
in the green pastures and more prone to
cry out to God in the dark ravines
of the valley of the shadow of death.
We all know this is true.
I have a friend, Jeff Van Vondren, who
was in my Sunday school class, who used
to say to me, I've never learned anything
about trusting God from the easy times, only
the hard times.
And you ask June Backland now what her
experience has done for her relation to God.
And what she'll tell you is that she's
never been closer to God, at least if
she tells you the same thing she told
me.
And I said to June, I said, why
is it that we can't learn our own
frailty and how precious God is before we
get into a crisis situation?
Because June's experience is universal.
We would all be saying the same thing
she's saying if we were in her shoes.
I think Jeff's comment is an overstatement.
God does intend us to learn something from
the green pastures and the still waters.
He wants us to learn thankfulness.
I have a colleague over at Bethel, had
a colleague, Bob Stein, who just moved from
the college over to the seminary.
And Bob used to shake his head when
we had some faculty prayer meetings and say,
why is God making my life so easy?
I don't have anything to grumble about.
My kids are all healthy, they're all in
school, they all know the Lord, I'm as
healthy as I can be.
My wife and I are happy together, I've
got a great job here.
Why?
And then he would just stand back and
he would say, God must be trying to
teach me to be a good thinker.
And I've gotten good at it.
He is a good thinker.
And I think that's right.
Most of us in this room are in
that category probably, although many of us have
been through the valley recently and will go
through again.
But Jeff is right, isn't he?
That almost all of our experience teaches us
that when we go through the valleys of
life, we do draw closer to God.
It's the life and death experiences that cause
us to turn theological sentences into cries to
God for help.
And from this we can learn one other
thing.
We all know that there are dangers to
faith in the valley.
Many people are tempted to get angry at
God and resent Him, and some reject Him
because of suffering.
But there is just as great a danger
in the green pastures, isn't there?
Namely, the danger that we will love the
grass and not the shepherd.
The Bible warns about that.
That's probably why they said it's hard for
a rich man to get into the kingdom,
because the rich man is very prone to
fall in love with his riches.
When a sheep walks through dark valley with
his shepherd, what does he do?
He stays close.
He doesn't let that knee get far away.
You lose the knee, where are you going
to go?
You can't see where you're going.
You stay close in the darkness.
In the green pastures, he's wandering all over
the place.
Stumble off into the side.
There are dangers in the green pastures and
not just in the dark valleys, which is
probably why James said, The
second phrase from which I've learned a lot
is the phrase, I shall not want.
The second phrase in verse one.
The Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want.
Now, for a long time, I misunderstood that
phrase.
I, being a shepherd, I have not understood
the phrase, I shall not want.
I, being a good, ordinary American, took the
word want to mean desire.
That's what want means.
I want a chocolate ice cream cone.
That means I desire one, right?
So, I shall not want means I have
no more desires, right?
Well, the problem is that the word want
is ambiguous, isn't it?
In the Hebrew, praise God for the original
languages, I discovered that the word doesn't have
that ambiguity.
You know that we say things like, he
is not wanting.
And what we mean is, he doesn't lack
anything, right?
That's the sense in which want is used
in verse one of Psalm 23.
The Lord is my shepherd, a more literal
translation would be, I have no lack.
Not no more desires.
I knew that I had desires.
I got hungry.
I desired my kids.
I desired my wife.
I desired God.
Desires aren't done away with when the shepherd
comes.
Well, that solved one problem, but it created
another problem, didn't it?
What do you mean, David, I have no
lack?
The Lord is my shepherd, I have no
lack.
No lack of what?
Well, that created a new problem.
Do God's sheep lack nothing?
We know from looking at the Psalm that
that's not true.
At least in one sense, it's not true.
All you have to do is read a
little bit farther.
You've got him in the pasture and by
the still waters, but pretty soon, there he
is going through the valley of the shadow
of death.
Now, I presume that when you're in the
valley of the shadow of death, you lack
life.
And you lack the green pastures and you
lack the still waters.
And there are dangers on all sides.
There are some lacks, aren't there?
So it can't mean lack nothing.
In fact, just plain old common sense would
teach us that you can't have everything all
at once.
You've got to lack something when it's something
else there.
Blessings have to wait their turn, don't they?
But that still left me with a little
bit of a problem.
And I think the solution that I came
up with is this, and see if you
don't think this must have been David's intention.
What he means is not that we lack
the fulfillment of every single desire that pops
into our heart, but that we lack nothing
that the shepherd thinks is good for us.
Wouldn't that be what he means when he
says we have no lack?
And I had that confirmed for me when
I looked down at verse four and pondered
it a little more.
The picture we have in verse four about
the valley of the shadow of death is
a situation of extreme danger in which the
sheep's life is threatened on all sides.
And he would be in danger of dying
if the shepherd weren't there to protect and
to guide with his rod and his staff.
The rod for defense and the staff for
guiding that poor dumb creature along.
But I asked myself, why is that sheep?
Why would a sheep be in a valley
so full of danger?
Well, now one possible reason we could say
the stupid animal has strayed.
We have all gone astray.
In other words, he sinned and got himself
into this pickle.
I do not think that's what David has
in mind here.
The reason I don't is because we don't
have a picture of a sheep straying into
a thicket or into a cliff or into
a dark valley and then being rescued out
by a loving shepherd.
What we have is a sheep walking through
a valley and the shepherd going with him,
leading him.
And we can see that if we look
at the relationship between verses three and four.
This was new, a new discovery that I
got yesterday as I was pondering this.
He leads me in paths of righteousness for
his name's sake, even when I go through
the valley of the shadow of death, you
are with me.
You see how closely those two statements are
connected?
In the King James I think it's, yea,
though I go.
That's an ambiguous word, that yea.
It means also or even.
So that even the valley that you're walking
through is one of those paths of righteousness
which the Lord is leading you along.
The Lord didn't stop leading the sheep when
he got to the valley of the shadow
of death.
Which means he didn't get him there or
he didn't come there because of sin.
So why did he come there?
Why would a shepherd lead a poor, weak,
vulnerable sheep into such a dangerous situation?
And the only reason that I could think
of that a shepherd might do that is
to get somewhere better.
Maybe you ran out of grass over here
and the other pasture is over there.
And in between there's this very dangerous valley
that you have to go through.
I think the longest poem that I've ever
written, I wrote in 1971 and it was
called Cienega.
And I wrote it as an overflow of
joy that I had with Noel on a
camping trip before the boys were born.
In the San Bernardino Mountains when we were
out at Fuller.
And I can remember planning this trip and
getting in the car and driving up to
these mountains.
And then looking at these camping maps and
knowing that it was supposed to be that
way.
So we turned onto this dirt road and
it went on and on.
And we started getting windy and narrow and
bumpy.
And we crossed two creeks.
And I said, I look in that creek.
You've got to be kidding.
I'm going to drive this Mustang through a
creek.
But it was real rocky so I drove
it through.
And pretty soon we were going around these
curves and you couldn't see around them.
There was no turning back.
It really got dangerous.
I was starting to feel really frightened.
How would we ever get out of here?
We were miles out of anybody's shouting distance.
Why?
Cienega.
That's why.
There was a campground back there that we
had heard was beautiful.
And it was worth the trip.
We got back there and it opened up.
And there was a stream and a pool
and big green trees.
And there had been a recent forest fire.
So the mountain was split right in half
with black trees on this side and green
trees on that side.
I can remember crawling up there and getting
black all over.
Well, anyway, you write poems about things that
have moved you deeply.
And that was an illustration to me as
I look back yesterday of why in the
world the Good Shepherd would leave sheep in
dangerous valley.
The answer is to get to Cienega.
To get to new and better pastures.
And I think that's the way God works.
Now, therefore, I learned from verse 4, this
valley verse, that I indeed as God's sheep
might have to lack many things.
Didn't Jesus say the Son of Man has
no place to lay his head?
The foxes have holes and the birds of
the air have nests, but the Son of
Man lacks.
And if you want to follow Him, it's
going to be that way.
But, if I understand the meaning of verse
1, I have no lack.
What he means is, I don't lack anything
that the Shepherd thinks is good for me.
Doesn't Psalm 84.11 say, No good thing
will the Lord withhold from those who walk
uprightly.
And doesn't Paul say in Philippians 4.19,
My God will supply every need of yours
in Christ Jesus.
I leave in His hands what He considers
to be.
The last phrase that I want to talk
about, that has been really helpful to me,
is the phrase, He restores my soul.
That can mean two possible things.
It can mean, the Hebrew word shul means
to turn.
He turns my soul.
It can either mean, turns it out of
a path of sin to righteousness.
That is, He corrects me.
He restores me to the path of righteousness.
The other possibility is, turns it from dead
lifelessness back to hope, joy, and refreshment.
He refreshes my soul, which is the way
I think most people usually read it.
But, not wanting to just let tradition determine
what meaning I think David intended, I tried
to poke around a little bit to see
just how that verb was used elsewhere.
I found this text in Lamentations, verse 16
of chapter 1, which says, My eye runs
down with water because far from me is
a comforter, one who restores my soul.
You see, back to back with the word
comforter, and the same phrase in Hebrew, one
who restores my soul.
And then I noticed that down in verse
4, David had said, Your rod and your
staff, they comfort me.
And that's the same word.
So I said, well, probably then the tradition
is right.
And this does, in fact, mean refresh.
The Lord refreshes my soul.
I think that's what it means.
Proverbs 18, 14 says this, A man's spirit
will endure sickness.
But a broken spirit, who can bear?
I was walking out of the hospital the
other day with Glenn out of the mental
ward over there.
And that text came to me, and I
said to him, it's a world of difference
to visit and minister to somebody whose body
has been broken and whose spirit has been
broken.
What can you do when the spirit has
been broken?
If the body's just been broken and the
spirit is strong in the Lord, like June,
you go in there and you get ministered
to and they get ministered to.
You go to somebody whose spirit has been
broken, whose mind has snapped, and what can
you do?
The link, the link with life and power
seems to be gone.
The very will is broken.
But short of that, every one of us
knows experiences in which the spirit is broken.
Every one of us knows what it means
when the soul just is deflated, like that
beach ball that my boys play with when
the air goes out of it, or like
that little inner tube when they hang it
up at home.
It's just flat.
It's lifeless.
It's dead.
There's nothing in it.
You've got no motivation to even move.
What do you do?
Every one of us knows those times, and
I think David did, and that's why he
talked about God's restoration of soul.
I've tried to analyze myself.
What is it that I need in those
times?
And I think I've narrowed it down to
three things.
First of all, I need in those moments
of deflation and powerlessness and brokenness of spirit
and depression, I need relief from the anxious
cares that have made me feel hopeless.
Sometimes the demands upon our time and the
demands upon our mind, combined with repeated hindrances
after hindrances to doing those demands, become so
great they're like scraps around your head or
around your soul that just squeeze all the
life out and just leave you completely lethargic,
with no motivation to do anything.
And what you need is for somebody to
snap those tight bands of anxiety and pressure
and pour in some cold, cool water of
hope.
That's one thing.
I need relief from anxious cares.
The second thing I think I need, see
if this doesn't ring true with you, I
need to see some beauty.
When I have an emptiness of spirit and
a blankness of soul and no motivation, nothing
is beautiful.
And beauty is powerful.
I need to see some beauty.
I'm not going to talk much about this
now because in two weeks I want to
talk about Psalm 19 and call it Sky
Talk, where the heavens declare the glory of
God.
And I want to talk more about this
concept of beauty in our life.
But I must say at least this.
Every one of us in this room has
felt the healing power of nature, haven't we?
That's why you leave and go away on
vacations and get away from the city with
concrete all around.
Nature seems to heal.
We've all sensed what I sensed that I
referred to this morning.
I finished up yesterday afternoon about 5.30
here and I'd had the curtains drawn all
day.
And I walked down and went outside and
I just almost exploded.
I hadn't seen the air like that for
a long time.
It's so lucid.
Those apartments over there were just like they
were right there.
And as I walked home I was just
laughing.
It was amazing.
And I need very much to see beauty
because beauty has that effect.
The sight of some stupendous beauty restores the
soul.
And the third thing I need is to
feel the greatness of a power outside of
me flowing into me.
I think God created us to be conductors
of a tremendous power flowing from himself like
an electrical cord.
And if we don't have that power from
outside of us flowing into us, invigorating us,
nature won't get very far either.
If we try to make nature our God
like some of the romantic poets did, it
will peter out on us.
God is going to roll up the sky
like a garment and cast it aside someday
and show us what it stood for.
What it was a symbol of, the real
thing in the new heaven.
So until then, I think we need not
only to behold the works of God in
creation, but especially the word of God.
Psalm 19, verse 7 says this, The instruction
of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul.
Same phrase, Psalm 19, verse 7.
The instruction of the Lord is perfect, restoring
the soul.
Nothing, not even nature, can break those suffocating
bands of anxiety off of my mind and
soul like the promises of God.
Neither Valium nor any other tranquilizer is half
as good as hearing God say, Be content,
Piper, with what you have, for I will
never leave you nor forsake you.
So the writers of the Hebrews goes on
and says, Hence, we can confidently say, the
Lord is my helper, I will not be
afraid, what can man do to me?
Hebrews 13, 5 and 6.
Don't, don't, you morons, don't turn to drugs
to restore your soul.
Turn to God and his works in creation
and his words in the scriptures.
Well, that's the beginning of what I've seen
in Psalm 23.
I want to talk next week about the
rest of these phrases in the psalm, but
let me just sum up what we've seen
tonight and then we'll close.
I've learned from the form of the psalm
that we shouldn't talk very long about God
before we turn to talk to God.
We ought to stir in a big hunk
of prayer into the stew of our theology
and our talk about God.
And the second thing I learned from the
form of this psalm is that the crises
of life, verse 4, draw us closer to
God than do the green pastures.
And there's danger in the green pastures, just
like there are in the valley.
Then that phrase, I shall not work.
What I've learned there is we got to
trust God, not for every possible pleasure we
can imagine, but that he will not deny
us any good thing, anything that the shepherd
thinks is good for the sheep.
He may have to take us through a
rocky valley, even the valley of the shadow
of death.
We are going to die if the Lord
doesn't return.
And everybody in this room, there will be
no escape.
And that's going to be a valley that
every one of us has to go through.
But don't ever think that this psalm ceases
to have application there because we're being denied
something.
We're not.
There's a pasture on the other side.
There's Siena again.
And finally, he restores my soul.
And from here, I've learned that every one
of us gets into those frames of mind.
Every one of us gets depressed and loses
motivation and feels deflated and hopeless and anxious.
And we ought to remember that it's God
to whom we turn first of all.
God in nature and especially God in his
word.
It's the promises that lift those burdens better
than anything else.
Let's pray together.
Lord, it was a singular stroke of grace
when you inspired David to write this psalm.
Millions of people have comforted their hearts, both
in the green pastures of bounty and in
the dark valley of dying with this psalm.
It's been printed on funeral folder after funeral
folder and read by those of us who
skip and jump on our way home after
a hassle.
Thank you for it.
What can we say but help us live
in it and not distrust the promises that
are here?