Psa 23 - The Lord Is My Shepherd
I like to draw silly faces. Here’s one. Can you guess who this might be? Yup. That’s right I drew a silly picture of myself. How can you tell? Mustache, beard, glasses,... That’s right. I drew those things so that you would know that the picture was a picture of me. Now none of us has ever seen God face-to-face. But this past week you learned that God draws Himself with word pictures in the Bible, so that we know who He his. Do you remember on the second day that Jesus fed 5,000 people and their families? That’s written in the Bible so that we would know that Jesus can provide for us. It’s a picture written out in words. What do you think this Bible verse tells about God: “God shows His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Why it tells us that God loves us even though we have sinned against Him! It tells us that Jesus died for us, because God loved us. It goes on to say that we shall be saved through Him. God said it. Believe it. Then you know why we sing, “Have no fear little flock.” Jesus is our savior. Let’s pray: “Thank You God for showing us in the Bible that You love us and that You are God our Savior. Amen.” You can sit down again.
In my office I keep pictures of my grandchildren. They are great pictures, but those pictures are already a little out of date. All of them are taller now and older. One of my favorite pictures was take many years ago at a Christmas gathering. I like it because everyone is in it including me. (It was the first time I got the timer to work just right on my camera.) That picture represents how we looked way back then.
3,000 years ago, God inspired King David to write Psalm 23. It is very old. A lot has changed since then. But in Psalm 23, God gives us a picture that shows us how He is. Unlike me and you and my grandchildren, He never changes. In Psalm 23, God painted a word picture. And while we change all the time, yet somehow, God painted us into that picture, too. When we hear Psalm 23, we find the family portrait of the eternal God and His eternal children.
When God likens Himself to a shepherd, He is painting the picture of a person who cares for us, who will never leave us, who will protect us and provide for us. We don’t have too many shepherd around us here in Arizona, but most of you know what they are. They tend the sheep. They take care of the sheep. They make sure that their sheep have food and water. They stay with the sheep out in the fields, guiding them to green pastures during the day, leading them to quiet waters, protecting them at night from the wild animals.
There are a number of such shepherd pictures of God in the Bible. In our Old Testament reading from the book of the Prophet Ezekiel, we heard “A shepherd seeks out his flock … so I will seek out My sheep … I Myself will be the shepherd of My sheep.” In the Book of Isaiah, it is written that God will “tend His flock like a shepherd; He will gather the lambs in His arms.” Jesus told His disciples, “I am the Good Shepherd.” And as the children recited from Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
When God calls Himself a shepherd, and especially when He puts us in the picture as His sheep, He wants us to consider how He cares for us. “He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.” This is a picture of God feeding us and making sure we have water, not just with earthly food, but more importantly with the food that keeps us alive forever. Elsewhere in other pictures Jesus speaks of the Bread of Life, which gives eternal life, and the Living Water, which wells up to eternal life.
These are pictures of the working of the Holy Spirit through the Word and through Baptism and through the Lord’s Supper. Apart from these, we would not have eternal life and we could not appear in the unchanging picture of God’s family. Apart from these we would be the sheep that Isaiah wrote about: We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way.” We would be sheep without shepherd, out on our own, trying to survive ourselves, and all the while dying from our own stubborn refusal to go down the righteous paths of the Lord and easy pickings for that “roaring lion who seeks whom he may devour.”
It might not seem to us that we have often stubbornly refused God. We can’t really see it clearly ourselves, but think on the Ten Commandments. God gave them so that we might know just how wayward we are. How often have we been bad? How often have we not done everything that we should have done? How often have we lied or coveted or lusted or hated someone who wronged us? How often have we thought that it is not important to listen to God’s Word with other believers as God tells us we should? We have wronged God, and God is perfect, and God sees everything, and God always keeps His Word. “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, … the soul who sins is the one who will die.”
How can this possibly be consistent with God calling Himself our Shepherd? How can God call us His sheep? Jesus explains it, “The Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.” And to understand that statement, we must understand who Jesus is by faith. Jesus is God with the Father and the Holy Spirit. They are the one God. Three in one. And Jesus came down to this earth, where there really are no permanently green pastures and still waters. He came to become the the Lamb of God in our place. He came to be that one obedient sheep who walked the path of righteousness for our sake. And He came to be that sacrificial lamb to pay for our sins. He became the soul that sins, not because He ever sinned, but because He took all our sins upon Himself to die with them to pay for them fully.
This week we learned this in our studies. On Tuesday we heard that Jesus is our Good Shepherd. On Wednesday we saw Jesus do what only God can do, the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000. On Thursday, we heard how Jesus plants His Word in our hearts when we hear Him. On Friday we heard that He does all this because the Father wishes to forgive us and welcome us to our heavenly home. And yesterday, we heard about the resurrection, when Jesus cast aside death to prove that He had done everything needed to get us to heaven.
Listen to the Good Shepherd. He never changes. He will lead you down paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.” When you are with Him, you will say, “I will fear no evil for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, the comfort me.”
This Psalm that the children learned: You have probably heard it mostly at funerals. But think about why you should hear it at Christian funerals. Jesus Himself is telling us that He will never leave us nor forsake us, even in death. Jesus Himself is telling us that He has called us by name and that He will save His flock. There are many things that we would like to have in this life, but when the coffin or the tomb or the urn comes our way, none of that stuff will matter. Only this, that “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.” And even now when we live knowing that death one day will come, we can say with David and Christians throughout time and in eternity. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.” Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever because of what our Good Shepherd did for us on the cross.
Treasure up those pictures in your hearts. For they will never change. Amen.