“The Lord is my Shepherd” brought to life with David's Own Stories (Psalm 23)

Psalms, Christian Life
  • This is David’s best loved Psalm, but how did he come to write it?
  • We piece together stories from throughout his life that could have provided inspiration for each part of the song.

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Psalm 23
A Psalm of David
NET translation

  1. The LORD is my shepherd,
          I lack nothing
  2. He takes me to lush pastures to lie down,
          he leads me to refreshing water.
  3. He restores my inner strength.
          He leads me down the right paths
                for the sake of his good name.
  • I wonder when he wrote it?
    • As a shepherd boy, under a tree, playing his harp?
    • or as an old man, looking back on his life?
  • Some of the psalms tell us the circumstances in the title
    • but not this one, and maybe this is deliberate so that we can take it as our own in any season of our lives
  • But I like to imagine
    • he started writing it young, and it grew, as he had new experiences of God as a shepherd, he wove in more of his experiences
    • Finally the poetry was complete, and it turns out to be the best loved of all the psalms

Psalm 23

  1. Even when I must walk through the darkest valley,
          I fear no danger,
    for you are with me;
          your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
  2. You prepare a feast before me
          in plain sight of my enemies.
    You refresh my head with oil;
          my cup is filled to the brim.
  3. Surely your goodness and faithfulness will pursue me all the days of my life,
          and I will live in the Lord’s house forever.
  • What I want to do is to go through the psalm, verse by verse, and suggest an incident in his life that might be behind each verse.
  • David was once a shepherd himself
    • Just before his encounter with Goliath, Saul challenged him about how competent he was, and he replied:

1. The LORD is my shepherd

  1. But David said to Saul, “Your servant used to keep sheep for his father. And when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock,
  2. I went after him and struck him and delivered it out of his mouth. 1 Samuel 17
  • As a shepherd, David had fierce love for the sheep.
    • He knew what that meant in his own experience, so he decided to name God as a shepherd!
  • Relationship of value—the shepherd cares for the sheep because they are valued
    • Every one of us is precious to God in the same way
  • Can any of you think of a story Jesus told about the value of each sheep to the shepherd?

2. Provision

  1. The LORD is my shepherd,
          I lack nothing
  2. He takes me to lush pastures to lie down,
          he leads me to refreshing water.

%an unexpected feast in the wilderness%

  • So Abigail quickly took two hundred loaves of bread, two containers of wine, five prepared sheep, five seahs of roasted grain, a hundred bunches of raisins, and two hundred lumps of pressed figs. She loaded them on donkeys [and brought them as a gift for David and his men] 1 Sam 25
  • So maybe David wrote that line thinking about this event

3. Leading - on the very day Goliath came

  1. He restores my inner strength.
          He leads me down the right paths
                for the sake of his good name.
  • Jesse said to his son David, “Take your brothers this ephah of roasted grain and these ten loaves of bread; go quickly to the camp to your brothers. 1 Sam 17:17
  • The one lie Satan wants to spread above all others is about God’s character
    • He can’t be trusted. He is not faithful. He will abandon us.
  • Here is the story: David’s brothers were old enough for military service
    • They were there at this key battle
    • In God’s amazing timing, he arrived on this one day, at exactly the right time!
  • God’s “name” (v.3)
    • David was passionate about this. That is why he wrote the songs

…for the sake of God’s good name...

  1. This very day the LORD will deliver you into my hand...
    Then all the land will realize that Israel has a God [1 Sam 17:46]
  • And then we have:

4. The Darkest Valley

%(and this is why I don’t think he wrote the whole psalm as a young shepherd boy—he hadn’t really seen any darkness, but by the end of his life…)%

  1. Even when I must walk through the darkest valley,
          I fear no danger,
    for you are with me;
          your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
  • His Son Absalom led a rebellion and wanted to kill him.
    • God worked some amazing provision for him
    • A surprise ally turned up out of the blue and turned the tide of the war
  • But also the darkness of his sin—adultery & murder
  • The story of Nathan after Uriah/Bathsheba
  • Do you want a God who is going to steer you away from danger?

5. You prepare a feast before me

  1. You prepare a feast before me
          in plain sight of my enemies.
    You refresh my head with oil;
          my cup is filled to the brim.
  • David had to drop everything and run for his life, no provisions or anything

2 Samuel 16: David was on the run..

  1. When David had gone a short way beyond the summit, Ziba the servant of Mephibosheth was there to meet him. He had a couple of donkeys that were saddled, and on them were two hundred loaves of bread, a hundred raisin cakes, a hundred baskets of summer fruit, and a container of wine.
  2. The king asked Ziba, “Why did you bring these things?” Ziba replied, “The donkeys are for the king’s family to ride on, the loaves of bread and the summer fruit are for the attendants to eat, and the wine is for those who get exhausted in the desert.”
  • His cup is filled to the brim!

6. Goodness and faithfulness forever

  1. Surely your goodness and faithfulness will pursue me all the days of my life,
          and I will live in the Lord’s house forever.
  • David wants to build a house for God, a Temple (2 Sam 7)
    • I will build a “house”, a royal line from you that will last for eternity.
    • Jesus came from the line of David, born in Bethlehem
  • God makes us a similar promise in Jesus
    • We have an eternal destiny to live with Jesus for ever.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd: John 10

  1. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
  2. The hired hand, who is not a shepherd and does not own sheep, sees the wolf coming and abandons the sheep and runs away. So the wolf attacks the sheep and scatters them.
  3. Because he is a hired hand and is not concerned about the sheep, he runs away.
  4. “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me —
  5. just as the Father knows me and I know the Father — and I lay down my life for the sheep.
  • We are all going through different things in our lives right now
    • I am going to read the Psalm again, and I want you to identify which part matches what you want from the Shepherd right now:

Psalm 23
A Psalm of David
NET translation

  1. The LORD is my shepherd,
          I lack nothing
  2. He takes me to lush pastures to lie down,
          he leads me to refreshing water.
  3. He restores my inner strength.
          He leads me down the right paths
                for the sake of his good name.
  4. Even when I must walk through the darkest valley,
          I fear no danger,
    for you are with me;
          your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
  5. You prepare a feast before me
          in plain sight of my enemies.
    You refresh my head with oil;
          my cup is filled to the brim.
  6. Surely your goodness and faithfulness will pursue me all the days of my life,
          and I will live in the Lord’s house forever.