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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 DEC 20-9-15 ~1~ 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 DEC 20-9-15 ~2~ 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, DEC 20-9-15 ~3~ 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 DEC 20-9-15 ~4~ 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 DEC 20-9-15 ~5~ 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 DEC 20-9-15 ~6~ 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 DEC 20-9-15 ~7~ 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. DEC 20-9-15 ~8~