If you have your Bibles, let's go together
to these green pastures and this banquet hall
here in Psalm 23, Part 2.
We've heard it now twice, so I won't
read it again.
Let me bring you up to date what
we did last week.
Last week, we looked at the form of
this psalm, and we noticed that it starts
off talking about God as He, and then
starts in verse 4 to talk to God
as You.
And we reflected on the significance of that,
about how we ought not to talk too
long about God without praying to God.
Our theology ought to be mixed up with
a heavy dose of praying.
Another indication or implication of the form was
that it's very interesting that He switches over
to You from He right at verse 4,
where He's going through the dark valley.
And I suggested that the reason is that
when sheep walk through a dark valley with
their shepherd, they nustle up very close to
that knee, and that accords with addressing the
shepherd as You.
Whereas when we're in the green pastures, we're
prone to roam all over the place, and
the shepherd might be the He way over
there on the other side, which means that
there's a danger in the green pasture, just
as there's a danger in the valley of
the shadow of death, because the danger in
the green pasture is that we might fall
in love with the grass instead of the
shepherd.
Then the second thing we noticed was the
phrase, I shall not want, which was beautifully
paraphrased in the psalm.
He gives me everything I need.
It's not that we have no more wants.
It's that he gives us what's good for
us.
And then the last phrase we looked at
was he restores my soul.
And we talked about refreshment of spirit that
comes through the works of nature as we
behold them.
That's God's word, as well as the scripture
and his word of promise.
And in all of this, I stress that
the psalm is a very personal testimony.
It's I and you, not we, David alone
with his God.
And therefore, I try to make my message
in tune with that by stating things that
I had learned personally.
And I want to do that again tonight.
I was 22 years old before I first
saw one of the lines in this psalm.
Now, I'd seen it, but there is seeing
and then there is seeing right.
Verse three, he leads me in paths of
righteousness for his namesake.
I'd never seen for his namesake till I
went to seminary.
Well, yes, I'd seen it.
I'd read the words, but you can read
over phrases in the Bible a hundred times
and they never hit you for what they
mean.
I went to visit Mrs. Blomgren just before
her surgery on Wednesday.
She was she was getting her eye operated
on.
It was all bandaged over.
And I read to her this verse from
Psalm 119, verse 18.
Deal bountifully with thy servant that I may
live and observe thy word, open my eyes
that I may behold wondrous things out of
thy law.
And I said, isn't it isn't it true
that one of the best things about having
two good eyes is the Bible, being able
to read the Bible.
But isn't it true, too, that there is
another pair of eyes that God has given
us?
Paul calls them the eyes of the heart,
and he prays in Ephesians one that the
eyes of the heart might be enlightened.
And I think that's what the psalmist is
talking about.
May the eyes be opened that we may
behold wondrous things out of thy law.
Well, I hadn't seen that phrase there in
Psalm 23 as wondrous.
I'd been as deaf to that theme as
you could imagine.
But there it was.
He leads me in paths of righteousness for
his namesake.
The thought that God might have been causing
me to do right ever since I was
a little boy for his sake just never
dawned on me.
I just right over that phrase just never
even struck me, though I'd read it hundreds
of times.
So I want to zero in on that
phrase for a few minutes.
But before we get there, we better look
at the phrase before it, namely, he leads
me in paths of righteousness and asked how
God does that or what it is that
he is doing for his own namesake.
Now, the first thing we should notice about
this phrase, he leads me in paths of
righteousness, is that we shouldn't get the impression
that it's something to be taken for granted.
It sounds like it might be here.
God just does this sort of thing.
So you don't need to ask for it.
Right.
Well, wrong, because you just look in Psalm
27, verses four and five and listen to
what David is saying here.
Here he's praying and he says, make me
know thy ways, O Lord, and teach me
thy paths.
Lead me in the truth and teach me
for thou art the God of my salvation.
For thee, I wait all day long.
In other words, there he's praying for what
apparently in Psalm 23 is already an answer.
He has led David in paths of righteousness,
but we should not forsake the implication clearly
from Psalm 27 that we must pray for
that leadership and not just assume that it's
there.
But now the question I have, and I
think it's a very important one, we need
to ask how God does this.
The picture, of course, here is a shepherd
leading sheep along with his crook or maybe
with his call.
The sheep know my name and they follow
me.
But when we get out of the metaphor
of sheep and shepherd into our own experience
in our day and ask, how does God
lead in paths of righteousness?
We need to ponder a little bit and
poke around in the scriptures to see how
he does it.
Now, in my experience, I have never seen
a manifestation of God going before me at
a fork in the road.
I've never seen a cloud of fire, a
pillar of cloud like they had in the
wilderness.
That's not part of my experience, nor have
I ever heard an audible word that I
know was God speaking.
A lot of people talk in that language
and maybe I'm just callous, but that's never
been part of my experience to see God
in some clear manifestation showing me it's this
way and not that way, or to hear
a voice like my teacher at Wheaton said
he heard one day while he was shaving
in front of the mirror.
Go to Wheaton.
From Boston, he was in Boston.
Go to Wheaton.
God can do that if he wants.
He's just never done it for me, and
he doesn't do it for most people most
of the time.
The way he leads us is apparently differently,
and I think we can get a clue
from what David would say in Psalm 119,
105.
There he says, Thy word is a lamp
to my feet and a light to my
path.
And in verse nine of that same Psalm
119, how can a young man keep his
way pure by guarding it according to thy
word?
So one answer to the question, how does
God lead his people in paths of righteousness
is he has revealed a lot about those
paths of righteousness.
He's described what sort of paths are righteous
paths and told us to walk in them
so that we can read and obey.
Surely David did that often because he talked
about meditating on the word day and night.
But now that answer is only half the
answer, isn't it?
By itself, the Bible will not keep us
on track, no matter how wonderful the Bible
is and how we would be utterly lost
without it, it is not enough by itself.
And for two reasons, one, we make lots
of decisions in life which are not prescribed
for us in the Bible, hundreds of little
decisions every day and some big ones in
which we look in the Bible and there
are no sentences about that, how many children
to have, where to send your child to
school, where to go to work, this, that
just hundreds of little things that we have
to decide every day.
And we don't want to bracket those and
say, well, that's not part of Christianity.
I'll just make those decisions anyway, please.
And then Christianity is something else God has
to do with all those decisions.
But the Bible doesn't give explicit guidance for
every one of those little decisions.
And therefore, something more has to be said
if we're to walk in right paths in
those decisions, as well as the ones where
the Bible is perfectly explicit.
The second reason that the Bible by itself
is not enough to guide us in those
paths of righteousness is this.
A path of righteousness is doing the right
thing with the right attitude or a right
motivation.
It's not just a bodily action like don't
beat your wife.
It's having a right attitude towards your wife
as well.
But reading words on a page don't always
change attitudes.
You can read over what you ought to
feel like in the Bible a hundred times
and maybe your attitude, you come away from
the Bible.
It's just the same.
Something else has to come into play.
And I think that's why David said God
leads us in paths of righteousness and why
Paul said.
All who are led by the spirit are
the sons of God, we need not only
revelation coming to us from outside, namely the
Bible, we need transformation coming to us inside
from the Holy Spirit, the word and the
spirit together are the leadership that we need.
Paul says in Romans 12 to this very
familiar word, don't be conformed to the world,
but be transformed by the renewal of your
mind.
Why?
So that you can prove or better approve
of the will of God, what is good,
acceptable and perfect.
In other words, you've got to have something
happen up here on the inside, some changed
attitudes and changed feelings, or when little decisions
present alternatives, you won't know how to prove
which one of those is the will of
God.
So the Bible is the input into that
new mind.
And the spirit takes the word and begins
to shape our thinking, mold our emotions so
that even when there's no explicit command in
Scripture for this decision you're facing, you weigh
all the alternatives and you're weighing those alternatives
with the mind of Christ.
Paul says we have the mind of Christ.
And then when you make the decision, you
look back and you don't say, my, what
a smart fellow was I, but rather you
say, thank you for your word that informed
the principles of my life.
And thank you for the spirit that shaped
my emotions and my priorities so that I
made this decision your way.
And God then gets the credit for the
leadership, which means personally for me that I
have been driven basically for all of life
to meditate day and night on the word
and to pray continually that the Holy Spirit
would work on me.
You can't over intellectualize the Bible, you can't
over spiritualize your private experience with God, it's
both and not either or.
It has been in my experience and I
haven't found the two in conflict, but tremendous
compliments for guidance in life.
Now we can go back to verse three,
the last phrase and ask, why does God,
the Holy Spirit, and why did God inspire
the word to lead us in paths of
righteousness?
And the answer he gives is for his
namesake.
Now, a few weeks ago, back in my
study here, a former student of mine came
to talk to me.
Probably one of the best students I ever
had, maybe third or fourth best in six
years.
And I told him, I said, Bill, I'm
I'm preaching a series on this first message
is going to be God does everything for
his glory and the next one is going
to be.
And we ought to bring our lives into
alignment with that glory.
And the third one is going to be.
And that's not selfish of God to seek
his own glory.
That's loving.
And he said, are you still on that
kick?
You are saying that same thing six years
ago when you came to Bethel.
And I scratched my head, I said, well,
Bill, everywhere I look in the Bible, I
see it, I just see it everywhere, that
same thing.
And for twenty two years, I was so
deaf to that theme that I couldn't see
for his namesake right there in front of
my eyes in this song.
But when I was twenty two, here's what
happened, in case you're curious about that age,
I discovered Jonathan Edwards.
Now, some of you have heard of Jonathan
Edwards, that great 18th century hellfire and brimstone
evangelist who's got terrible bad press in English
literature classes, but really is the greatest theologian
philosopher this country's ever produced.
He wrote a book typically titled for Edwards,
A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God
Created the World.
And I read that my first year in
seminary and it revolutionized the way I've thought
about God ever since.
And that book, together with several other books,
have opened my eyes to what I think
is the unifying theme of all scripture, namely
that God is absolutely sovereign and that he's
at work all the time in every detail
of my life to display his glory for
the enjoyment of his people.
That's that to me is what pulls all
the pieces of scripture and they're so different
together.
And you'll hear it, of course, as you
have for six or eight weeks now popping
up in my messages again and again, because
I simply see it everywhere I read in
the scriptures and therefore hope anyway that I
haven't created an artificial theme to harp on.
Now, it's no longer surprising to me like
it was 22 years ago to discover that
right here in the middle of a psalm
that is world famous for the blessing it
has brought to man, that we find the
the inimitable signature of the sovereign God right
in the middle where he says it's all
for his sake, for my name's sake, I
am doing this.
Now, what difference has that made?
Practically speaking in my life, what difference should
it make?
Let me try to go at it this
way.
That's a little indirect, but I think I'll
end up answering that question.
As I pondered what the paths of righteousness
were, it occurred to me that paths of
righteousness are surely the same as paths of
love, right paths or paths of love.
Paul said in first Corinthians 16, let everything
you do be done in love.
So that you can't exclude paths of righteousness
from that.
So these are paths of love.
But now paths of love are paths in
which you're acting for the sake of other
people.
You're doing things for their benefit.
Now, that starts to sound like the way
everybody talks in the world.
Everybody who has a moral fiber talks about
doing good for people, whether they're Christians or
not, whether they're religious or not.
Most people would say you ought to do
things that are good for people and not
bad for people, which means that it is
possible to talk about doing good for people
in such a way that God kind of
drops out of the picture and we gradually
cease to be able to distinguish between a
Christian ethic and a humanist ethic.
The humanist didn't become God centered all of
a sudden to make us the same, but
the Christian often tends to become man centered.
Now, what Psalm 23, 3 did for me
was to put a huge roadblock in the
road to my tendency to become man centered.
To think only on an earthly level where
indeed much earthly good can be done for
man, but where sometimes God seems strangely irrelevant.
The roadblock was this.
It was the reminder that God is the
one who leads me into paths of righteousness
and God is the one whose glory or
whose name is to be honored.
It's for his namesake that he leads me
in.
In other words, I see from these last
two lines of Psalm 23 that God is
the initiator of my entrance into a path
of righteousness and he's the destination at the
end of this path of righteousness.
He leads me and it's for his sake.
He gets me started and he's my destination.
Like Paul says, from him and through him
and to him are all things.
Romans 11, 36.
And that is a great roadblock to a
merely horizontal or humanistic ethic that talks only
in terms of doing good to men and
leaves God out of account.
So for me, the road to a sentimental
morality that has man as the measure of
all things was once for all blocked by
this verse.
He leads me in social justice.
He leads me in personal righteousness.
He leads me in a good family life.
He leads me in an ethical practice as
a pastor, all for his sake.
You can't just leave it there on that
horizontal level.
Everything will go wrong if you do that.
And now the result of this roadblock has
been fourfold in my experience, and I'll just
mention these.
First of all, the result is that I
live with an almost constant God consciousness.
I just don't see anything out of connection
with God.
Walking back and forth between the church and
home, dealing with my children, writing messages.
And now that's, I suppose, a little bit
more easy for a pastor because most of
his job revolves around spiritual things.
But I think that should be the experience
of most people.
When you go to work, there should be
a God consciousness about the way everything is
going.
Secondly, the power of God in everyday life,
for me, grew or the evidence of that
power grew in direct proportion to my conviction
that he is at work in everything for
his namesake.
When God tells me that he's leading me
all the time for his namesake, that gives
me a sense that power is there in
all the little details of my life.
God is there that ties in with God
consciousness.
And since he's powerful, a sense of power
in the everyday affairs of life.
Then third, there's a sense of confidence that
comes from believing that God's honor or his
name is at stake in the paths that
I'm walking in.
And I think that comes clear when I
give you the fourth thing, my prayers for
my own sanctification and the sanctification of my
sons and my wife are much more fervent
and I think more effectual now that I
have this argument to come to God with.
I come and I say, God, help me
not to do that anymore.
Help me to get over that stupid tendency,
that bad habit for your namesake.
Your honor is at stake.
Lord, people will think worse of you if
I keep on in those bad habits or
that bad tendency, help my sons to grow
up into righteousness for your namesake.
And when I can add that for your
namesake, I know that God perks up his
ears because he's very much interested in his
namesake.
And therefore, my prayers are more fervent and
I seldom pray a prayer in which I
don't affix that for your namesake.
And I like to close the Lord's prayer
with yours is the kingdom and the glory
forever and ever.
Now, let's leave behind verse three, and I
want to deal just more briefly with verses
five and six.
We talked about verse four last week, so
let's look at verses five and six and
see if we can pull all this together
in a few minutes.
I think we have a picture here no
longer of God, the shepherd, but rather God,
the host.
God, look at the three things he does,
he spreads a banquet table before his guest,
that's the first thing he anoints us with
oil.
Now, you might think of several things there.
You might, for example, think of of the
anointing to be king.
I doubt that that's what's in view here
because of the context.
If you remember from Luke seven, when Jesus
went in to eat with the Pharisee and
the harlot came in and anointed his feet
with oil and wept over him and Jesus
was a little bit disturbed with his host,
told him a little parable.
But one of the things he said to
his host was this.
When I came in here, you didn't anoint
my head with oil.
But she has anointed my feet with oil.
Evidently, then anointing the head with oil is
what you do to a guest who comes
at a festive occasion.
And there are other places with a reference
to oil in the Psalms where it is
in the context of joy and festivity.
So I think he anoints my head with
oil means he's just a great host.
He leaves nothing undone at the party that
would make it better.
And then the third thing, he keeps my
cup full.
And you coffee drinkers always appreciate that at
certain restaurants that they just keep coming by
and pouring it in there and you can
drink yourself crazy with all that coffee.
I'm not sure what was in the cup
for David, but whatever it was, it must
have been good.
Now, perhaps a comment about before my enemies,
he he spreads this banquet in the presence
of my enemies.
Now, as I read a couple of commentaries
on this and I thought about it myself
and I came up with two possible meanings
for that, one seems to be this.
Maybe David is trying to get across that
the enemies are being kept away from messing
up this banquet.
He's not under attack.
In other words, he's safe from them.
So it's a picture of safety as the
enemies are there, but they're being held at
bay.
That's one possibility.
The other possibility is a picture of victory.
David has had a victory over some attacking
Philistines or something.
And all these prisoners of war have been
taken and they're forced to sit out there
and regret their activity while the victors enjoy
the spoils.
And I'm not sure which of those is
meant here, but either one connotes victory and
safety and security for God's people.
David, in that case.
Now here, let me give another word of
caution, this word of caution I gave concerning
the green pasture, the same here, it would
it would be so easy to take verse
five and extract it out of the psalm
and make that the norm of life, wouldn't
it?
Life is just a great big party.
But the main problem with that would be
that we'd be forgetting verse four, wouldn't it?
Namely, he's already said that he has walked
through the valley of the shadow of death.
I think, in fact, that what we have
here is David kind of moving from a
green pasture into a dark valley and out
again into a banquet hall with God.
And life is like that.
Life is not a party all the time,
but there are those times in life aren't
there.
And I think what David wants to say
is when they come, let's make sure that
God gets the credit and we acknowledge him
as the host in those affairs.
And I think also take our cue from
God that this is his ultimate intention for
his people, not the valley.
That's only a highway leading to the banquet
hall.
The supper that he's going to spread for
us in heaven, for example, and then verse
six is the conclusion that David draws from
all this experience, having been with God in
the green pasture and by the still waters,
having gone with God through the valley of
the shadow of death, having been served by
God, this great banquet.
He can draw the conclusion that goodness and
mercy are going to follow him every day
of his life.
And I put I was going over this
this afternoon, I put two big exclamation points,
because when I read that, it really lifted
my spirit.
David concludes from his experience thus far with
God that every day God is going to
follow him with goodness and mercy.
But now there's a picture here I want
to try to create for you.
That's a little bit obscured by the English
word follow.
I follow might connote to you might lag
behind and I'm trying to catch up with
this poor little dog called Goodness and Mercy,
and we're ripping out down the way and
he just can't catch up with us.
So, no, we just don't experience any goodness
and mercy.
That's obviously not what David means.
And the reason we know is not just
because of the context, but because the Hebrew
word Rodoff doesn't mean follow in the sense
of lag behind.
It's a very active word that means pursue
and almost everywhere else that it's used in
the Old Testament.
It means pursue to persecute.
It's the negative.
The Greek word for pursue also means persecute.
Now, here's the picture that comes to my
mind.
I got this partly from a teacher I
had once, and I thought it through myself
again this week.
Picture this.
David has created a picture, something like this.
Imagine yourself driving down the highway nonchalantly and
you're a little jalopy.
And all of a sudden you see in
the rearview mirror these blinking red lights.
And for some stupid, irrational reason, you decide
to run.
You push on the gas and tearing off
down thirty five W.
And he's after you and all the times
that you went over the speed limit come
before your eyes.
And as your conscience gets more and more
guilty, all the other sins you've committed start
passing before your eyes, coming up out of
your subconscious to make you miserable.
Well, finally, your car won't outdo that highway
patrol souped up car and he pulls you
off to the side, gets out of his
car and you're sitting there trembling.
And he walks up, says, I got a
guilty conscience there, huh, fella?
And and you don't say anything.
And he reaches into his pocket.
And he pulls out a wallet and he
said that motel you stayed at last night
asked me to try to catch you to
give you this wallet that you left on
the counter.
And you you just feel so stupid and
you blush and you get all embarrassed and
and then before you can say anything else.
And he said he's kind of laughing and
ticked all at the same time, he said.
And by the way, that drawing you entered
last night, that sweepstakes, they do that this
morning and you want a free trip for
two to Miami, Florida for you and your
wife.
And then you really feel dumb and he
said, you have to call in soon or
you won't get that prize.
Now, you and you start to feel good
and you crank up your car.
He says, wait a minute, buddy, you're under
arrest and in your heart sinks again.
He says, and you come with me.
I'm not going to let you follow in
the car.
So you get in the car with him.
And you pass, as it were, from verse
five to verse six, verse five says, surely
goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the
days of my life.
God is not only a shepherd, he's not
only a host, he is a highway patrol.
But verse six says.
The latter part of verse six, I want
to dwell with God in his house.
You go in this car now down the
road and all of a sudden you realize
he's not taking you downtown to that courthouse.
He's heading for the country.
And farther and farther, and then he turns
into this huge gate and you drive under
these 200 year old oak trees for five
miles and you come up before this beautiful
estate.
And you turn and say, what in the
world are we doing here?
And he says, well, this is my place
and I want you to come live with
me.
And you can see down there in the
valley, that's your bungalow under the willows by
the river.
You can have that.
Now, I'm going to go get your wife
and children and hopefully they won't run from
me.
Like you did.
And so he goes off to get them.
There's one problem with that analogy, at least
one.
The problem is this.
That analogy focuses way too much on the
building and grounds.
For David, it was God that he wanted
to be with.
Didn't matter so much that it was a
bungalow under the willow trees in the country
by a river with lots of big oak
trees and a palatial main house.
What mattered was God.
And we can see in Psalm 27, verse
four, that that's exactly the way David thought.
He says, one thing have I asked of
the Lord that will I seek after that
I may dwell in the house of the
Lord all the days of my life and
do what?
Behold, the beauty of the Lord and inquire
in his temple, not the beauty of anything,
but simply God.
So the whole song leads us to God
himself.
That's where we wind up, not a green
pasture and not a valley of the shadow
of death and not a banquet hall, but
simply God himself.
Let's pray, Lord.
We have to be careful.
In prosperity and in pain.
The prosperity might lead us to trust in
pastures and streams and full cups and enemies
at bay and rods and staffs guard us
from that and help every blessing you give
us to turn us to you and cultivate
in our hearts a strong delight in you
for your own self.
And then when the pain comes, grant us
not to let that threaten our faith either
or turn us against you.
Thank you for this song.
I'm sure we've just scraped the surface of
what you have for our soul sakes here.
May it be a well of water springing
up unto eternal life along with your Holy
Spirit in the lives of every person here.
I pray dismiss us now with your blessing
for this new week in Jesus name.
Amen.