Download Psalm 23 Theme - Doncaster Evangelical Church

Reading: Psalm 23
Theme: Personal Possession.
I thought I would start a series on something we all know Psalm 23. The idea sounded fine in my head – but then most
things do! The trouble with this psalm is that it is such a well
known and loved psalm and we have all probably read or
heard fine messages on it; probably have our own thoughts
and ideas on it and I stand every chance of trampling on
those precious thoughts and memories with my size 13s! I
also could fail to match the grandeur of what we have
already learned and been taught from this psalm. I know I
will not bring any radically new insights as I was not a
farmer or shepherd like Bill Dyer. The closest I came to
sheep was during the summers when I was 16, 17 and 18 and
I worked at a local wool depot taking in the fleeces from the
famers and having to grade them – I smelled of sheep and
the lanolin gave me the softest hands in the rugby team! Yet
as we look at this precious psalm I pray we will be refreshed,
encouraged, helped and strengthened by what we learn
together. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place
to start...! I want us to note 4 things from the first phrase in
v1, but only note 1 of those this morning:
1. Personal Possession.
Over the years I have noticed that Psalm 23 is very often
read at funerals. Most people born before the 70s would
know of this psalm even if they did not go to church
regularly, or were not religious and would know it read or
sung and at funerals they would get comfort from it. To
many it becomes a sort of pain and grief killer, an emotional
Paracetamol, to help ease and relieve their distress and
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sorrow at such times. Sadly it can be a short term relief and a
few days later it is forgotten. This psalm as a piece of
ancient Middle Eastern poetry is wonderful, but it remains
only words, fine words and sentiments, if there is no
personal possession of the relationship David knew and
wrote of “The LORD is my shepherd”.
David knew what it was like to be a shepherd - to know,
love and care for his flock, also the individual sheep within
his flock. Yes from time to time he may have had one or two
from someone else’s flock and cared for them (OT law made
it clear this had to be done), but his relationship with his
sheep and they with him was personal, they were his
personal possession. I need to say right at the start of our
studies in this psalm, that if you are not in a personal
relationship with God through the Lord Jesus Christ who is
ultimately the Shepherd spoken of here, then all the
wonderful things this psalm teaches of the care of this
Shepherd are not applicable to you, but irrelevant for they do
not apply to you at all and you can take no comfort
whatsoever from this psalm.
I’m not even going to say or suggest that you can choose this
Shepherd as your Shepherd or do anything to earn Him as
your Shepherd. That would be an unbiblical thing to say and
destroys the imagery here. Picture a farmers’ market and
there are hundreds or thousands of sheep and one says to the
other “I am going to choose that man over there as my
shepherd!” It is the shepherd who does the choosing the
Bible makes it clear that is what God has done - He chose a
people to be His and gave them to His Son and He would be
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their Shepherd and call them to Himself. Yet that does not
mean we do nothing. The Bible makes it clear we are to seek
God, to call on Him to receive us and if we find our hearts
and lives feeling our need of Him, then we can be sure that
He is at work and we are to seek, call, believe, but recognise
He calls us and would call us effectually through the
invitation, the message of the gospel as it is preached and we
hear and receive it.
The focus here is not so much the process, but on the wonder
that when we become a Christian, trust the Lord Jesus as our
Saviour, we are His personal possession and remarkably He
is our personal possession and we can say personally, from
our own experience “The LORD is my shepherd.” Do you
want this? Do you want to know the comfort, hope and
assurance of this Psalm is yours? This is the very beginning,
where you need to begin…
If this is true of us and we can say “The LORD is my
shepherd” then are we enjoying the awesome privilege of
such an amazing statement of assurance? It is so easy for us
as Christians to admire the psalm and all it holds out, but are
we at this moment actively delighting in personally having
the Lord as our Shepherd and that all His care spoken of
here is for us and our lives? This psalm is best tasted in and
from our own experience that the Lord our Shepherd is good
to us personally and always.
The trouble is that we can easily feel that this psalm is only
for great Christians, strong Christians, for mature Christians
and not for us with our doubts and fears, our highs and lows,
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our failures and struggles. Yet the Shepherd wants all His
flock to know and experience what is written here. It is not
just for super saints, or only for those in the Premier division
of being Christians. Not at all, for the Lord our Shepherd
wants all His people, all His flock to know and to delight in
Him, His care and provision for them. The matters revealed
in this psalm are for ALL who have trusted the Lord Jesus as
their Saviour and Shepherd. The matters revealed in this
psalm are to be the experience and part of the experiential
knowledge all Christians. There is no such thing as an
ordinary Christian - as we are Christians by the supernatural,
divine and extraordinary work of God the Holy Spirit and
we are all special to God as His people, as His children.
We may feel conscious of our weaknesses, failures and our
sins even, but it is wrong to conclude that we are doomed to
live below the poverty line in spiritual matters and benefits.
For if we can say “The LORD is my shepherd” then the rest
of the psalm is true for us and v6 is as true for us as is v1b
and everything in between. This psalm has been called the
psalm of faith; the psalm of personal trust in God; the sunny
psalm and even the nightingale psalm - as it sounds sweetest
in the darkest times!
Sadly as believers, even as the sheep of His pasture, we can
have eye trouble and we focus on self and allow our own
sense of unworthiness not only to rightly hinder us from
trusting ourselves, but to prevent us from trusting our God
and delighting in all He is to us. When the Lord set His love
on us in eternity past and then brought us to know that love
in our being effectually called to trust Him in our lives as we
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heard the gospel, He took no account of our worthiness or
unworthiness. He loved us and loved us as we were - sinners
without hope or God in this world and in our salvation He
poured out, lavished on us blessing upon blessing and this
included all of His love and mercy. Our salvation while here
on earth includes knowing, enjoying and delighting in all the
blessings of the love of our heavenly Father and of the Lord
as our Shepherd.
Some of those blessings and privileges are listed, opened up
for us in the rest of this Psalm are true of us if, and only if,
“The LORD is our shepherd” - then we should recognise, to
a greater or lesser extent, that everything else in this Psalm is
true of us. Yes we will feel the intensity of these truths to a
greater or lesser extent at various times in our lives, but they
will remain true for us whether we feel them or not because
our Shepherd is constantly watching over and caring for us.
In many ways the rest of the psalm is a commentary, an
outworking of this opening statement to help us realise it and
we could read it “Because the LORD is my shepherd,
therefore…”
Psalm 23 is about the Lord and what He does for us as we
belong to Him, as we are His personal possession. David
does not mention, like some people always seem to do, what
he has done and is doing for the Lord, but here his focus is
on what the Lord has done for him and David is delighting
in the Lord’s work for him. As to when David actually wrote
this Psalm we are not told, but he readily and easily related
to the biblical picture of the Lord as a Shepherd from his
own shepherding experience. As David mused, thought on
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this, it is as if he is absorbed with God and His love and care
lavished upon him and this Psalm bursts forth from a
grateful heart.
There are times when we can identify with David’s
sentiments. There are times when we read these truths and
other truths in God’s word and we say “Yes, that’s right!”
For we find we have experienced those things. I read of a
preacher who read out Psalm 23 in a service and began by
saying “Do you know who wrote that psalm?” One man in
the congregation answered and said “Yes - I did!” The
preacher was taken aback and said “Look, it is written by
David.” “Oh he penned the words, but I know it by
experience so well, that I must have written it!” To him, to
countless others through history this Psalm is a personal one,
because they know and experienced its truths and wonders
personally. I ask again “Do you personally know the Lord as
your own Shepherd and also His love and care?”
David expressed the Lord’s care and love for him in those
terms, but even those terms do not adequately express the
wonder of having the Lord God as our own Lord, Saviour
and Shepherd. David at the time of his writing this Psalm
was engrossed in and with God. If we had to write a psalm
as believers at this moment, how and what would we write?
Wouldn’t this be a wonderful Psalm to be able to write out
and sign our name to from our own experience? Perhaps,
even as a Christian, you may not even be in a position to
delight in the joyful truths expressed in this psalm. It could
be that we may be cold of heart, even clinging onto wrong
thoughts, desires, practices and we are in need of the
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Shepherd’s corrective care. Sadly it may be that we are in a
dark valley and imagine, maybe feel He is not there with us
or our loved ones as we go through hard and dark times.
Maybe we feel useless, a failure and even this lovely Psalm
does nothing to encourage us. I want to urge each one of us
not to worry and not to panic about it.
We could be quite jealous of David being able to write such
a psalm. Yet we are to realise that David lived a long life,
and in that life he went through many varied experiences and
if you look at the other Psalms he wrote, you will see that he
experienced hurt, fear, doubts, failures, there were Psalms of
confession, longings and yearnings after God, psalms where
he mourned over not knowing God’s presence. Remember
that in all his life and walk with God he only wrote one
Psalm 23! We are not to use that as an excuse, but to pray to
the Lord our Shepherd that He would give us the
exhilaration of the assurance and joy of this Psalm 23. In our
Christian life we will have seasons of joy, rejoicing and
singing; but we will also have seasons of hurt, darkness,
sorrow and tears in our life. Yet one day we will look back
and v6 will be our theme - goodness and mercy have
followed us all the days of our life. I know that, because that
is what the Lord our Shepherd has promised and assured us
here in this Psalm and it will happen.
The blessings spoken of here are not for David alone, but for
all who trust the Lord Jesus as their Saviour, as their
Shepherd, but only for those. It is a personal possession. To
be able to say “I and my beloveds and He is mine”, to know
you are loved with an everlasting love is something thrilling
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and amazing. It is only a little word, a tiny word, but the
word “my” makes all the difference. It is not the Lord is a
Shepherd, or can be a Shepherd, or even can be my
Shepherd, but it speaks of the assurance of personal
possession “The LORD is my shepherd” - to delight in
possessing and being possessed by such a wonderful
Shepherd. My longing and prayer is that all of us here would
come to know the Lord as our own personal Shepherd by
trusting the good Shepherd who laid down His life to rescue
His sheep on the cross of Calvary.
I will end there this morning, but next time we will see:
2. Polarised Parties.
3. Perplexing Picture.
4. Position Placed.
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