Psalm 23
Tom Shrader walks through Psalm 23, arguing that it is not a passage about death but one of the most life-affirming texts in Scripture, centered on the declaration that the Lord is a personal shepherd to His people. He explores the imagery of sheep and shepherd to illustrate human helplessness and God's sufficiency, showing that every benefit in the psalm flows from the foundational relationship expressed in verse one. The teaching calls listeners to root their hope in the character, promises, faithfulness, and sovereignty of God rather than in circumstances, people, or possessions.
“Our hope is rooted in the character of God, the promise of God, the faithfulness of God, and the sovereignty of God.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: New City Church
Recorded: Nov 27, 2016
Duration: 38 min
Themes: trust, hope, provision, shepherding, fear, rest, sufficiency, god's faithfulness, struggling with anxiety, facing death of a loved one, feeling hopeless, grieving, new believer, questioning god's care, going through hardship, adult
Scripture: Psalm 23, 1 Samuel 17:28, Genesis 48:15, Isaiah 40, Isaiah 53, Jeremiah (unspecified), Ezekiel 34, Psalm 145:18, John 10, Luke 2, Romans 10 (implied confession/belief passage)
Theological Themes: divine providence, imago dei, pastoral care, sovereignty of god, covenant relationship, human helplessness, sanctification, god's character
Full Transcript
Introduction: The Most Misunderstood Psalm
There are two passages that likely come to mind before all others. If I say Old Testament, probably the passage that would first come to mind would be the one we are going to look at — Psalm 23. If I said New Testament, you would probably say John 3:16. I wanted to look at Psalm 23. It started for me three or four years ago in studying it, teaching it, and then coming back to it again and again, seeing the power in our lives as we studied and looked at it.
The sheet you received when you came in today has Psalm 23 on it, but what I have added at the end of each phrase is a word. As we come back through it, you are going to see the importance of that.
Let me read through it:
*The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul. He guides me in the path of righteousness for His name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me. Your rod and staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You have anointed my head with oil. My cup overflows. Surely goodness and lovingkindness will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.*
In even a cursory reading, you see that the Lord is being compared to a shepherd. The Almighty God — the name that the Jews would not even speak — is spoken of in a personal, intimate way.
A Psalm About Life, Not Death
Growing up Catholic — grade school, high school, college — we had the 23rd Psalm, we had Bible, but we did not really study it. The 23rd Psalm was almost always associated with death or a funeral. What happened when I began to study Scripture and study the 23rd Psalm is I realized this passage is the furthest you can get from being about death. The passage is about life. That is the key in verse four: *even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.*
My father died ten years ago, and it was sudden. It was a Saturday night. He was watching Lawrence Welk, went upstairs, and fell over dead. I am not suggesting any cause and effect there at all — I still watch Lawrence Welk almost every Saturday. But it was sudden. We were not prepared. I got a call from my brother, and he said, "Dad had a heart attack. It's really bad, and I don't think he's going to make it." Ten minutes later, they said he did not live.
So I am preparing for this. I am flying back — it is Davenport, Iowa, so you have to go into O'Hare and then back down. I am getting myself ready, because I have the ability to jump into the middle of something like that and mess it up. So I am telling myself: just keep your mouth shut, go in, do your part, and be respectful.
We are in with the priest, and he said there are four boys — I am the oldest. He said that nowadays, when they do a funeral, they frequently have a family member speak, and asked whether one of us would like to. I had already determined it was not going to be me. All at once, all three brothers said, "Tom will." I said I did not know about that, and they said, "No, you can do that." The priest gave some tips — he said it would go better if I wrote it out rather than speaking extemporaneously, and that most people get very nervous. I told him I would be fine. He gave an order of service, and my brother said he thought I should be put at the end. I wanted no part of any of this, so I said I would do whatever they wanted.
Then we had to go to the funeral home. I am not an open-casket person — it gives me the heebie-jeebies. So we are going in, it is the four boys, and the funeral director is upselling me on the casket. I am thinking I do not want to be there. Dad is gone. Just do whatever needs to be done. Then it came time to pick the little card they would pass out at the funeral. My brother said he was sure I did not care about that part, and I said I did not. The director recommended one — a little card with my dad's name, his birth date, and the day he passed, and then the 23rd Psalm printed on it.
I said, "You know what? I really care about this, because that psalm is not about dying." I am on something of a one-man crusade to get the people of God to embrace the 23rd Psalm as one of the most pro-living psalms in all of Scripture.
Introduction: Why Psalm 23?
When Brian called and said we were coming into Advent and that I could do whatever I wanted, I said, let me do the 23rd Psalm. It is a flyover — we could easily spend a week on each of the six verses. But it is one of those things that when you see a movie and you like it, you want everybody to see it. I see the vitality of this passage, and I want you to be as excited about it as I am.
In his book on the 23rd Psalm, Max Lucado titles one section "The Grind of Uncertainty." He writes: "I've observed that few battles are more fierce than the grind of uncertainty. No doubt you've encountered one or more of its many faces as you struggle with career, direction in life, financial pressures, physical handicap, relational snags, and other things. It is for the dark hours of uncertainty that David penned a song we know as the 23rd Psalm."
David the Shepherd
The imagery of the psalm is between the shepherd — God — and the sheep — us. We are told in 1 Samuel 17:28 that David spent his youth tending, quote, "a few sheep in the desert." Humanly speaking, it is likely that he made observations and picked up lessons there, and when God moved him to pen the 23rd Psalm, he incorporated those.
Dave Roper writes this: "One day as David was watching his sheep, the idea came to him that God is like a shepherd. He thought of the incessant care that sheep require, their helplessness, their defenselessness. He recalled their foolish straying from safe paths, their constant need for guidance. He thought of the time and patience it took for them to trust him before they would follow. He remembered the times when he led them through danger and they huddled close at his heels. He pondered the fact that he must think for his sheep, fight for them, guard them, find them, find them pastures and cool ponds. Yes, he mused, God is very much like a shepherd."
David was not the first to use this imagery. Jacob in Genesis 48:15 said, "God has been my shepherd all my life." Isaiah in Isaiah 40 says, "The sovereign Lord comes with power, with His arms He rules for Him. He tends His flock like a sheep." Jeremiah observed, "My people have been lost, ruined sheep." And in Ezekiel 34, Ezekiel talks about sheep that have wandered and scattered, and how God searches, looks, and rescues.
The Key Word: Because
Here is the central point. Get out a sheet of paper, get your Bible, and at the beginning of verse 1 write the word *because*. This passage is true because the Lord is my shepherd. As you run down the list, because you have a relationship with the shepherd, you have supply and rest and refreshment and healing and guidance and purpose and testing and protection and faithfulness and discipline and hope and dedication and abundance and blessing — and you have them forever.
If you can say, "The Lord is my shepherd," that is not true of everybody. That is true of those of us who know Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior — who have come to that point in our lives when we have acknowledged that sin has separated us from God, and that Jesus came, lived, died, and rose again. That is Advent. That is Easter. Christmas is great — Jesus is born — but He was born to die. If we believe that God raised Him from the dead and confess that He is our Lord, we have life.
If those terms are new to you, that probably raises more questions than it answers. My request would be that when the service is over, there will be men and women at the front of the room — come and talk to them and ask what this is all about. But for those of you who said, "Not only do I get it, I've heard it a billion times, move on" — number one, shame on us if we ever overlook grace like that. But number two, you have this.
What You Already Have
I had a guy the other day who had his phone out and was doing all sorts of things with it. I said, "That's amazing." He said, "You probably have that on your phone too." I said, "I don't know." He said, "What kind of phone do you have?" I said, "I don't know, it's black." He said, "Let me see it." So he took it, and before I was done, it was baking cookies, the garage door was going up, everything was happening on this thing. Here is the point: Psalm 23 is what you already have. You may not realize it.
Notice the key word in verse 1 — *my* shepherd. Not *the* shepherd, not *a* shepherd. He is not talking about the traits of God in some abstract way. Because the Lord is *your* shepherd, you shall not want.
Then just by way of grammar, look at verses 2 and 3. He makes me lie down, He leads me, He restores me, He guides me. But then in verse 4, David changes *He* to *You*. It is as though David is writing to us in verses 1 through 3, and then in verses 4 through 6 he begins to pray. You protect me, You are with me, Your rod, Your staff, You prepare a place. It is at that moment of walking through the valley of the shadow of death that David says, I need You so desperately — not because I am dead, but because I am alive. Because of the grind of uncertainty.
Jesus Is All You Have
Perhaps it is in that moment when everything is stripped away. You do not know if Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have. If you have got a plan B and C and D and E all the way to Z, you have it in the back of your mind. But when you are down, when you are out, when you are out of every person, place, or thing — it is Jesus.
I don't need a thing. The New Living Translation, the Lord is my shepherd, I have all that I need. So the idea is not that you're going to get everything you want. The idea is that the shepherd will provide everything you need. I want Iowa to win a game. That's not a need. I want Sandy to be healthy. That's a legitimate desire. But God is saying I will provide what you need. And the challenge is to trust that.
The Shepherd and His Sheep
If the Lord is your shepherd, then in this imagery, you are a sheep. I don't know anything about sheep other than what I've read, and I've read a lot over the last twenty years. I have six characteristics about sheep — or really, six characteristics about you.
Number one, sheep are dumb. You'll find a dog trainer and a cat trainer and a dolphin trainer. You're never going to find a sheep trainer. They're dumb. They are defenseless. They have no claws, no fangs. They can't outrun you. They have no sense of direction. They're lost. They're extraordinarily dirty and smelly, with thick wool that they can't do anything about — bugs and burrs and sticks hanging on them. They are stubborn. They are easily lost. As Isaiah 53 says, we like sheep are prone to wander. And they have a mob mentality.
I was reading a story of a man who was a shepherd, and a friend came to visit him with a chihuahua. The chihuahua jumped out of the car and caused a sheep stampede, sending the sheep running in every direction. If we're really honest, we know we may not have the courage to say we're dumb, but we know we're not as smart as we think we are. We know we're not as strong as we think we are. We know we can't clean ourselves up. We know we're stubborn. We know we get lost.
In the midst of all of that, the shepherd comes along — the perfect shepherd — and says, you're okay. As you try to do it your way, with your plan, your guidance, your strength, the shepherd says, we'll do it my way. So the challenge is to become a student of the shepherd, to grow in your understanding of who the shepherd is.
The Character of God
God, in the Jewish mind, was a distant, removed God. They wouldn't even say the word Lord. If the scribes were going to write it, they would have to cleanse themselves first. This holy God — the One they wouldn't even mention — that God is your shepherd.
Max Lucado writes this: "He is also an uncaused God. Though He creates, He was never created. Though He makes, He was never made. Though He causes, He was never caused. You and I are governed by weather. The weather determines what we wear. Terrain tells us how to travel. Gravity dictates our speed. Health determines our strength. God our shepherd doesn't check the weather — He makes it. He doesn't defy gravity — He created it. He isn't affected by health — He has no body. Unchanging, uncaused, ungoverned." These are only a fraction of God's qualities.
I have one slide I want to put up, and I'm going to leave it up for our whole time together. Our hope is rooted in the character of God, the promise of God, the faithfulness of God, and the sovereignty of God. Our hope is rooted — and you could go to the last word of those four lines — in God. His character, who He is. His promises: "You shall not want." His faithfulness: He never wavers. And His sovereignty, which is about His power. He is in absolute control.
God's Faithfulness Through History
I'm teaching two weeks from today at Scottsdale Bible Church, and I have one line out of a verse in Luke 2: Jesus is born. That's what I have to work with. And what I'm trying to draw from that are some of the practical realities of that moment — one of which is the character, promise, faithfulness, and sovereignty of God.
I love doing this with my Bible. Page one and two is about creation. Page three is about the fall. The rest of this book is God fixing it. The rest of it is about restoration and redemption, about God's perfect plan. As early as page three, God prophesies that there will be a virgin birth, and for thousands of years He works that plan. He is a faithful God.
You Shall Not Want
Because the Lord is your shepherd, you shall not want. I'll be honest — that doesn't necessarily line up with my personal experience, in the sense that there are things I want. I want Iowa to win a game. I want Sandy to be healthy. I want our marriage to be good. But let me read three other translations of Psalm 23 verse 1.
The NIV says, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want." The Message says, "God, my shepherd, I don't need a thing." The New Living Translation says, "The Lord is my shepherd, I have all that I need." The idea is not that you are going to get everything you want. The idea is that the shepherd will provide everything you need. Wanting Iowa to win a game is not a need. Wanting Sandy to be healthy is a legitimate desire. But God is saying, I will provide what you need. And the challenge is to trust that.
Fulfillment Found Only in Him
And if we are looking for fulfillment in life in a person, place, or thing other than Jesus, we are destined to be disappointed. One author writes this:
"Our discomfort is God's doing. He hounds us. He hems us in. He thwarts our dreams. He foils our best-laid plans. He frustrates our hopes. He waits until we know that nothing will ease our pain, nothing will make life worth living except His presence. And when we turn to Him, He's there. He's been there all along."
Psalm 145:18 says, "The Lord is near to all who call on Him." As you read through that quote, it runs counterintuitive. He hounds us? He hems us in? He thwarts our dreams? He foils our plans? He frustrates our hope? What kind of God is this? He is a God who loves you, who says, I don't want you to trust your dreams, your plans, your talents. I want you to trust Me.
The Lord is my shepherd. And because that is true, you have all the rest of what follows. Because the Lord is your shepherd, you shall not want. You will have rest, refreshment, and healing. You can read through the psalm and you will have them — forever.
The Lord Is My Shepherd
The New Living Translation puts it this way: "The Lord is my shepherd, I have everything I need." That's the story. At this moment, on November 27th, 2016, your perfect shepherd tells you that you have everything you need for this moment. Now, you may be looking ahead and saying, "But what about tomorrow?" He is not dealing with tomorrow right now. We will get to tomorrow when we get there. You can have rest, relaxation, comfort, protection, and healing — all of that — because the Lord is your shepherd.
But the Bible does not gloss over difficulty. Jesus tells the disciples the night before He goes to the cross, "In this world, you will have tribulation." Paul writes autobiographically, and I will read to you from The Message, Eugene Peterson's translation. He says, "We've been surrounded, battered by troubles, but we're not demoralized. We're not sure what to do, but we know that God knows what to do. We've been spiritually terrorized, but God hasn't left our side. We've been thrown down, but we haven't been broken." Why? Because the Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
My feelings may be different from what I know, and this is really important. If you have heard me teach before, chances are high you have heard me say it: what I know trumps what I feel. What I know is the character of God, the promise of God, the faithfulness of God, and the sovereignty of God — and that trumps what I am looking at right now in my circumstances.
The Shepherd Is Greater
I have made two observations, and I think they are worth holding onto. Number one: the shepherd is greater than what you do not have. You might be sitting here having had some extra time to think over the holiday, and you may have had some things that were lacking. But the shepherd is greater than the car you do not have, or the job you do not have, or the promotion you did not get, or the scholarship you did not get, or the family you do not have. The shepherd is greater than all of that. He does not want any of those things to creep into your life and become substitutes for Him. Those would be called idols.
Number two, and this is the flip side: the shepherd is greater than what you do have. The shepherd is greater than the broken relationship, or the rebellious child, or the absentee dad, or the business challenge, or the cancer. When I came here this morning, I drove in from Gilbert — up the 101, the 202, off at 7th Street, left on McDowell, and over here. If I had turned right instead, I would have gone to Good Samaritan Hospital. It was New Year's Eve, 1979, that my daughter Sarah was born there, and it was January 6th, 1979, that she was readmitted to the NICU for a week.
About fifteen years ago, on a Christmas afternoon at 3 o'clock, I was there with a woman and her husband who had just lost their baby. When you walk the halls of that maternity ward and you see a black rose on the door, that is a tough thing to face. I have been in that hospital at least three times for something like that. But God is bigger than the cancer, or the death, or the NICU. That is what He is saying to us — that is our comfort.
The Shepherd Knows His Sheep
In John 10, where Jesus says, "I am the good shepherd," He says, "My sheep hear my voice. They follow me." Here is something I learned about sheep and shepherds. At night, they would put the sheep in a pen — an area perhaps the size of this platform, with a low wall and one gate, one door. Sheep are not particularly dangerous animals; they are not going to jump much. So a low wall was sufficient.
When morning came, all of the different pens would unload their sheep into one herd, and throughout the day the shepherds would be spread out across the land with all the sheep commingled together. But at night, the shepherd would go to the gate of his pen and begin to call out. His sheep would hear his voice and follow him home. Every night, with his rod and staff, he would go through and look for any injuries, binding them up if any sheep were wounded.
As you are sitting here this morning, you need to hear the Lord's voice saying to you: "You are my sheep, and I am your shepherd. You can trust me."
Songs of Trust
There is a gentleman out in the East Valley who used to lead Sunday night worship at a church back in the days when Sunday night services were common. Every once in a while on a Sunday night, I find myself thinking I would love to go to one of those old-fashioned Sunday night services — where they bring out the piano, pull out the hymnal, and someone calls out a number. You flip to it and sing. It may not always be the greatest voices and harmonies, but there is something special about it.
There were two songs that someone would call out almost every week at those services. One of them was "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms": *Safe and secure from all alarms, leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms. Oh, what a fellowship, what a joy divine, what a blessedness, what peace of mind, leaning on the everlasting arms.* The song is all about the storms of life.
The other one they would sing — and this is really hard to do when things are tough — went like this: *When upon life's billows you are tempest tossed, when you are discouraged, thinking all is lost, count your many blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.* That is really true. And maybe that is exactly what you needed to hear today.
Everything You Need
Perhaps this is a reminder for you, or perhaps it is the first time you have seen it this way. "The Lord is my shepherd" is not merely a sentiment for a greeting card. It is your relationship with the Creator God of the universe — and because all of that is true, you have rest, refreshment, healing, guidance, and purpose. What else do you want in life? Yes, there is testing. But you also have protection, faithfulness, discipline, hope, abundance, blessing, and security — and here is the best part — forever.
Do you know Christ in a personal way?
The Lord Is Our Shepherd
Paul tells us, and Jesus tells us as well, to do this in remembrance of Him. Take that bread and that cup and eat it to remind us of Jesus' body and blood that was shed so that we could have eternal life. That makes Him your shepherd — that unbreakable relationship you have with the Creator God of the universe.
Father, thank you for this awesome and amazing truth. Thank you that the Lord is our shepherd, and because He is, we have all of these unbreakable, perfect benefits in our life. Thank you for Jesus. We pray to you in His name, amen.