‘The LORD is my shepherd;
I shall not want.’ Psalm 23:1
As the summer began I reflected on the pages of this
newsletter on the need for rest. I quoted from a book called ‘The Art of Rest,
where the author Adam Mabry said this; ‘Can
you imagine a church which said no to the stressed out stereotype of Western
cultural life? With deep peace and triumphant tranquillity, what a blessing we
could be.’
I wonder how many of you tried to imagine that church. I
wonder how many of you have given some thought to what the ‘unforced rhythms of
grace' might look like as we begin another busy church year. What will it look
like to rest in God with deep peace and triumphant tranquility as
organisations get up and running, school terms start again and life speeds up
all the way to Christmas Day when we fall asleep on the settee in front of the
Queen’s Speech?
As I have been thinking about this, I have been led to the
most famous psalm in the Bible. The words quoted at the top of this article are
perhaps the nine most well known
words in Scripture. We sing or read them at funeral services. We have all kinds
of versions and paraphrases that we know how to sing depending on our age
bracket. There is the metrical psalm version that we often sing at a funeral
service. There is the ‘The King of love my shepherd is’. And there is the newer
version that declares in its chorus ‘I will trust in You alone’.
But it seems to me that there is a reason why this psalm is
so well known and so well loved and it goes way beyond the fact that we sing it
when a loved one has died. In fact, to restrict this psalm to funeral services
seems to me to do it a serious disservice. David’s shepherd psalm is not primarily
about death, it is about life. It is about every season of life and how, if the
LORD is our shepherd, we are fully equipped to face every season of life. We have
everything we need or want if we have him.
Really?
The idea of saying ‘I shall not want’ or ‘I lack nothing’ in
our world seems ridiculous doesn’t it? Because we all want something. We want
the summer holidays to start all over again. We want this, that or the other
thing for Christmas. We want a good harvest. We want a new car, a new house, a new TV, a new games console. We want five minutes of peace. We want our family life to be happy and our family members
to be healthy.
But David says ‘I shall not want’. There is nothing that he
wants outside of the knowledge that the LORD is his shepherd. He has found the
life of contentment that we all seek and he has found it in God. Like Paul the
apostle 1000 years later David has learned the secret of being content in every
situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.
And the secret is this. ‘The LORD is my shepherd’. If I have
him, I have everything I want. I am fully satisfied and fully saved. I have no
fear of anything, even death, and I have hope in every situation, even when
surrounded by enemies.
Over the Sunday mornings in September in Ballygrainey we are going to
examine this Shepherd psalm in some more detail, teasing out what it means to
be fully satisfied in God, to experience his presence in the darkness and to
know the overabundant, overflowing grace of our Shepherd King in our lives. I may even post some of those reflections here. My
hope is that we are equipped to rest in Him in the midst of the busyness, to
live our lives without fear or anxiety but to know that we are protected,
loved, led and satisfied in Him and in Him alone.
Yours in Christ the Good Shepherd,
Graeme
