Sermon 3—A Shepherd’s Psalm

Psalm 23:1-6

1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2 He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. 3 He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.

4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over. 6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

You will notice that in the first part of the chapter, David speaks of the Lord in the third person. Look at the opening lines from the first 3 verses.

Psalm 23:1-3

1 THE LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

2 HE makes me to lie down in green pastures.

3 HE restores my soul.

But even though he speaks of the Lord in the third person, David is not offering hearsay, or mere theology. He’s speaking from the vantage point of personal experience. He’s describing a world that he lives in day by day. A world where it is not at all unusual for God to interact directly with an individual’s life. And not just in church, but in the rough and tumble of real everyday events.

Now it was a rare thing for David to have any kind of direct visible or audible interaction with God. He wasn’t like Moses, where God spoke to him face to face all the time. And much of the time it seems that David got direction from the Lord through the prophets he rubbed elbows with, like Nathan.

But all you have to do is read a few chapters in the Biblical account of David’s life, and you see how God was quietly working in the background. Always working. And that is the point of this Psalm. David is testifying of the Lord’s faithfulness through all the circumstances of his life.

But there is a third thing which I would like to emphasize this morning. Something that we really didn’t get to touch on the first time through. It’s found in the first part of verse 3:

He restores my soul.

And given the context in which it appears, I have always taken the word “restores” to have mostly to do a hungry, tired sheep finally getting to eat a good meal and get some rest. You can almost hear that sheep give a slow sigh of relief as he enters this green pasture with the cool brook of water running through it. That’s what it means when he says his soul is being restored. He’s recovering from the journey.

But then it dawned on me that there is another whole other side of the story to this idea of restoration, especially when you are dealing with sheep. You see, sheep are well known for having a particular problem, which is spoken of in the book of Isaiah. A famous passage, I’ll read only a few words of it.

“All we like sheep have gone astray…” That is the besetting problem with sheep. They go astray. They wander off. And I want us to keep that in mind as we delve a little deeper into this part of Psalm 23— “He restores my soul.”

I looked this verse up in all of the major English translations. Generally, they translated the first phrase in one of three ways, using a different key word. They are as follows:

• He RESTORES my soul.

• He REFRESHES my soul.

• He RENEWS my soul.

Now each of these translations emphasizes a particular aspect of the original word, and in each case they all fit well enough with David’s description of the Lord’s provision of grace in life of the believer. In fact, I think it would be entirely appropriate to use all three of these translations sequentially, and read the verse this way. “He restores and refreshes and renews my soul.”

But when I turned to the Hebrew dictionary to look up this particular word in the original language, I discovered something that was left out in virtually all of the translations. It appears that when this word is translated literally, it describes something being turned around. In precisely the same way that a car makes a “U-turn”.

Of course, we’re talking about sheep here, and not cars.

But you get the idea. And I got to thinking, that sometimes the most fundamental thing that happens in the process of our souls being restored or refreshed or renewed is being brought up short, and redirected back to where we are supposed to be.

You see, there is a paradox at work behind all of this wandering, if you can view things from God’s perspective. When He created everything, He placed humanity at the apex of creation. In that regard, we were endowed with the potential of reflecting God’s own nature better than any of His other creatures. Human beings were gifted with an astonishing capacity for creativity.

Every person has an inborn ability to think creatively. To conceive of things without having learned them from others, when thoughts and ideas seemingly come out of nowhere. The capacity to think things that literally no one else has ever thought before. That is buried deep within your DNA as a human being.

And it is that innate creativity that has allowed human beings to break through barrier after barrier down through our relatively brief history on this planet.

God alludes to this very early on in mankind’s history. In the first few chapters of Genesis, there is a tremendous sweep of events. The creation of the universe and of humanity. The fall of our race into sin. And the subsequent progression of sin and violence, when things reached a point of no return. That’s when God swept the deck clean, and started all over again with Noah and his family. And then after a long stretch of time, a different kind of progress was made. It had to do with rapid technological advancements.

Genesis 11:1-6

1 Now the whole earth had one language and one speech.

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.

3 Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar.

4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”

5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.

6 And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.”

Many other translations render that last phrase this way:

Genesis 11:6b

“After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them!”

Now building a primitive high rise might not seem that impressive to us in our day and time. But God recognized the pool of genius that was bubbling up within humanity. And rightfully so, because He put it there. And so he took steps to slow the process down. But that’s a sermon for another time.

Suffice it to say that being made in the image of God gives us the ability to imagine, to think originally. Each one of us has the ability—on some level—to live up to the name that Walt Disney gave his associates who helped develop Disneyland.

That is you, my friend. It shows up in all kinds of ways. But there is within you the same kind of genius, just waiting for the right circumstance to show up.

Turn to your neighbor and say, “We’re geniuses.”

But creating a species with such a large capacity for independent thinking and creativity carried an inherent risk—what if they started to think the wrong things? To do the wrong things? To go the wrong way? And that, of course, is the sad history of our race.

The prophet Isaiah captured the thought rather succinctly.

Isaiah 53:6a

All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way.

And that, my friend, is why we desperately need the Shepherd or our souls. To bring us back to the right way.

Because even in the life of someone like David, there was need for an occasional reset. Even a great man like him could potentially wander off the path of righteousness. Sad to say, David did exactly that. But the Lord didn’t leave him in that state of affairs. God went after David’s heart again, and won him back to the true path.

And so David knew that the phrase, “He restores my soul,” could mean a lot more than merely feeling refreshed. Sometimes, that restoration was something on the order of a rescue operation.

Over the long course of his life, David could look back and remember times when God brought his soul back from the brink. And we can do our souls a lot of good if we follow the same practice.

I used the metaphor recently of driving down the road of life with your eyes glued to the rear-view mirror. That’s a dangerous way to drive, but taking a quick glance in the rear-view mirror is a good practice in your car and out on the road of life. And it’s especially important to remember the things God has done.

It’s like Asaph said in one of the Psalms he wrote:

Psalm 77:11-12

11 I will remember the works of the Lord; surely I will remember Your wonders of old. 12 I will also meditate on all Your work, and talk of Your deeds.

So back to the Shepherd’s Psalm. David is rehearsing certain things in his mind. He has thought over the things God has done for him in the past. He’s considering the goo things God is doing for him in the present.

Psalm 23:5

5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over.

Remember that old hymn, “Count your blessings”?

Count your blessings name them one by one. Count your many blessings see what God has done.

David was always doing that. And notice, now he’s speaking in the first person. Have you ever counted your blessings to the Lord directly like that? Give it a try. It will change your whole outlook.

You know, we have a responsibility to perpetuate what might be called the “collective memory” of our own spiritual heritage. Contrary to what your grandparents or parents may have told you, religion is not supposed to be a private matter. We are supposed to pass on to our children and our grandchildren the things that God has done for us.

Kids love to hear stories of your life. You have a tremendous power in your hands for good, just by telling your kids or your nieces and nephews or grandkids the things that God has done in your life.

And then finally, David looks to the future.

Psalm 23:6

6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

He’s not minimizing the struggles of being human. Life isn’t easy for any of us, even if you happen to be a king like David was. But he never turned into a cynic, in spite of the twists and turns of life. Because he knew that all the while, God was at work. Mostly in the background, mostly unseen. But God’s goodness and God’s mercy were the foundation of David’s life. He trusted the Lord. He had his ups and downs. But he always came back to being a man who trusted the Lord.

And with that attitude, he could say with confidence—"I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”