Psalm 23, Part 2 - Follow The Shepherd


Where are your still waters?  Where are your green pastures?  For some of us it may be along a lake or a riverbank where the water is as slick as glass or a field of green, maybe filled with colorful flowers.  For me, still waters are anything but still, my still waters are crashing with wave after wave hitting my green pastures of sand and shells.  Still waters and green pastures are about places of peace and refreshment…and while I will admit that sitting on a boat in the middle of a river or lake on a cool fall morning is peaceful and refreshing, trust me, real green pastures, dotted with ragweed this time of year are anything but peaceful and refreshing for me.
Last time we gathered together, we began exploring what it means to live with the Lord as our Shepherd.  Just why has this Psalm, one of a hundred fifty we have in the Bible, become the one that so many of us, so much of the world, has adopted as the one we know better than any of the rest?  Is it because Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd and so we connect the two?  It is because the images within this Psalm resonate beautifully for us?  Is it because this Psalm covers a broad swath of our lives—from need to rest to guidance to darkness to protection to provision?  Or is it all of these…and more?
We began by considering what it means to say, “I shall not want.”  We counteracted the idea that it was an eleventh commandment mean to be added to “The Big Ten” and it got left out because God and Moses ran out of room on the stone tablets and couldn’t shrink the font to get it to fit.  To say “I shall not want,” is not a commitment to make ourselves void of all desires to avoid sinning.  We also considered and eliminated the idea, that this verse, coupled with Jesus’s words about “seeking, asking, and knocking” and the promise that whatever we prayed for and asked in His Name we would receive, is about God granting our every wish.  As we listened to translations other than the King James and Revised Standard (and their newer versions) we heard a different translation of the phrase…rather than “I shall not want,” we heard, “I lack nothing” and “I have everything I need.”  Rather than this verse meaning that we will have everything we ever want, it is about realizing that God has provided everything that we truly need.  God doesn’t grant our wishes like a genie in a lamp, but God does provide all we need.
One of those things that we need is rest and peace.  How many of you have ever had those days, those weeks, those years, when you felt all you really needed was some rest and some peace and everything would be okay?  We find ourselves in the midst of one of those times now.  As we continue to live in the aftermath of Florence with blue tarped houses, roadsides littered with debris, homes and sanctuaries still uninhabitable. For nearly two months now we have longed for rest and peace.
Yet hurricanes are not the only things that weary us.  There are things that happen in our daily lives, times of personal and family crisis that no one else knows about that wear us down, leaving us physically, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted—longing for still waters and green pastures.  We have work, community, household demands that leave us feeling completely drained.  We rush from a day of handling complaints over the phone and filling out one requisition after another or lifting and carrying load after load of building materials from one site to another to pick up the kids and help them with their homework or to mow the grass and trim the shrubs…then we prepare supper, either from our own labors or someone else's…from there we rush to parent-teacher conferences, taking our children to music lessons or sports practice…if it is not one of those, it is a Homeowners, community, or even church meeting…then it's back home to take care of laundry and the days dishes.  This doesn’t even include the unexpected…like the call to tell you about “Aunt Sally,” or the call from the doctor’s office confirming the diagnosis you didn’t want to hear…
We want to scream…God…bring on those green pastures and still waters…and I don’t care if they have ragweed or water moccasins…We want to cry out with the Psalmist:
“Give ear to my prayer, O God; do not hide yourself from my supplication.  Attend to me, and answer me; I am troubled in my complaint.  I am distraught by the noise of the enemy, because of the clamor of the wicked.  For they bring trouble upon me, and in anger they cherish enmity against me…Fear and trembling have come upon me, and horror overwhelms me…I would hurry to find a shelter for myself from the raging wind and tempest.”[i]  This sounds like a person in need of green pastures and still waters…he has enemies attacking and later on he expresses anguish as a friend betrays him.
And God hears those cries and brings us to places of green pastures and still waters, without the allergens and poisonous snakes.
He invites us to come and find rest:
God’s word invites, “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.”[ii]
Jesus invites, “Come to me, all of you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”[iii]
Beyond inviting, God’s Word commands that we experience the still waters and green pastures.  In the longest of God’s Top Ten—The Ten Commandments, God says, “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work.  But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.  For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.”[iv]
That Sabbath day of rest is not about God demanding that day of us because He needs us to stop and worship Him, it is about God giving us a gift that we need, it is about God providing still waters and green pastures in the dry, taxing desert of our week.  Jesus makes that clear: “’The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not mankind for the Sabbath….”[v]  God did not create the Sabbath because He needed it, He created it because He knew we needed it.
Cast your burdens…
Come to me…I will give you rest…
Remember the sabbath day…
“In grassy meadows he lets me lie. By tranquil streams he leads me to restore my spirit.”
Why is it that if God provides and even commands these opportunities for grassy meadows and tranquil streams, we constantly feel overwhelmed, tired, and worn out?
There's an old phrase that many of us, if not all of us are familiar with, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.”  Or in this case, “You can lead a sheep to water, but you can’t make them drink.”
God provides us with the Sabbath.  Now, most Christians have moved that day set apart as sacred from the Jewish celebration of Sabbath, which means “seventh day,” to the first day of the week, Sunday, remembering that Jesus rose on the first day of the week.  Yet how many of us truly observe this time of green pastures and tranquil waters?  How many of us truly take the time to stop working for an entire day and devote it to worship, family, and rest?  I’ve had folks that talk of having to work for thirty or more days without a day off—sometimes it was difficult to know whether they were bragging about their endurance or talking about how weary they were.  They chose to not stop and take a sabbath rest, to skip by the green pastures and still waters…and just keep right own laboring.  Others might stop for an hour or two and head right back to work, thinking, a little glimpse of the pastures and water will do me and I really have too much to do to stop for an entire day.  Other times we might let extra demands creep in and still that time away…at times the church has been guilty of not letting folks take that Sabbath—a day of worship, family, and fellowship—that is why I would discourage and avoid committee meetings on Sunday afternoons or evenings.  When we refuse stop and observe the Sabbath and take the gift of rest God offers, we are saying, “No thanks God, you have offered me this opportunity and gift, but I don't really want to lie down in your grassy meadows or sit by your tranquil streams.”
God invites us to cast our burdens, Jesus tells come to him when we are weary and unload our burdens and take up his yoke.  God offers us this opportunity of lying in the green pastures and still waters with these opportunities.  Yet sometimes we refuse or only halfway appreciate the gift.  How many times do we bring our burdens, our heavy loads, and lay them before the throne of God, enjoying the rest for just a moment, and then when we get up to leave whatever time of prayer we are offering them to God, rather than leave the burdens with Him, or take up the easy yoke that Jesus offers, we pick those heavy loads of stress, worry, and anxiety up again and take them with us once more, possibly feeling more weighed down that when we first walked in—choosing to be weighed down, refusing the still waters and green pastures that God so freely answers.
My brothers and sisters, we cannot ignore the opportunities that God gives us to take a Sabbath break.  It is a precious gift from God that He gives us for a reason.  God wants to give us rest, He seeks to restore us.  Why?  In order that we might respond to the calling that He is placing upon us.  The green pastures and still waters are a temporary stop in the desert of life.  They are an opportunity to refuel and refresh ourselves, they are not an invitation to retire from life itself.  We are restored because God is preparing us to labor in His Name.  We might come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses…yet in the end, He bids us go…
We most often hear verse three in the language of the King James and Revised Standard, “He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His Name’s sake” or “He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.”  If you are like me, you haven’t thought much about this part of God’s leading in our lives, or simply thought of it in terms of God setting us on the right path---helping us turn from the sinful ways of our past to living obedient lives.  That is part of it, but as we talked a few Sundays ago about hungering and thirsting for righteousness, the righteousness of God is found in God’s efforts to restore our world to its original design at the point of Creation—a world free of sin, disease, and scarcity.  As God sets us on paths of righteousness, God sends us be part of, as the New Jerusalem Bible translates it, his saving justice.  God gives us rest that we might be part of His efforts to restore all the world.
It is where last week ties into our last gathering and answers the question that we left hanging.  We talked about how we do not lack anything we need…that whether it be clothes, shelter, food, safety, or opportunity, God is our shepherd and we do not want, we do not lack anything we truly need.  Yet we acknowledged that there are those throughout the world, from Mexico Beach to Cedar Island to Indonesia to the Philippines, and everywhere in between, where people do not have clean clothing, a roof over their heads, enough food to eat, or the security to live from day to day.  God gives us rest in order that we might labor for Him, that we might work alongside Him to truly make His presence known, that we might look into the world, see the need, and pursue (and offer) God’s saving justice.  We are to be about clothing the naked, providing shelter for the homeless, giving food to the hungry, finding refuge for the oppressed, and so on.  It means that we are to be about the work of God, responding to injustice wherever we see it, in the same manner that Christ would respond…we are to be the presence of the Great Shepherd, offering His love and His grace, that all may be able to say, “Yahweh is my shepherd, I lack nothing—I shall not want—I have everything I need.”  We offer them places of green pastures and still water that they might rest alongside us and join us on the paths of God’s righteousness.”
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.


[i] Psalm 55:1-3, 5, 8
[ii] Psalm 55:22
[iii] Matthew 11:28-30
[iv] Exodus 20:8-11
[v] Mark 2:27

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