Episode 1321: The Lord is my Shepherd

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1,321 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. I'm

[00:00:08] Matthew Diebler: Matthew Diebler. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to focus on the calling of God is key and one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this.

[00:00:29] The Inspired Stewardship podcast with my friend Scott Maderer.

[00:00:42] Scott Maderer: So a lot of times we solved that problem by just settling, settling for less satisfied with being half empty content, with feeling that ache in our heart that we can never fill. But the idea here, here instead is to learn to live with God. Learn to live with [00:01:00] what is good. Good enough is good enough.

[00:01:05] Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling. In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, you'll learn to invest in yourself.

[00:01:24] Invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:36] In today's spiritual foundation episode, I talk about Psalm 23. I share how we often dismiss our own suffering, and I also share how we need to be filled so that we want the right things in the right way. Psalm 23 is probably one of the best known things from the Bible. You've probably heard it before, but it goes like [00:02:00] this.

[00:02:00] The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me besides Stillwaters. He restores my soul. He leads me in right path for his namesake. Even though I walk through the darkest Valley, I fear no evil for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of mine.

[00:02:24] Enemies, you anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows. Shirley, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life Long.

[00:02:40] On the one hand when we think about suffering and look at it's something that's easy to talk about. It's easy to relate to. We all have experience with suffering at some level, or trauma. I talk about this and with a lot of different guests on the podcast about trauma, big T trauma, little T [00:03:00] trauma, suffering.

[00:03:01] Things that have happened on our journey, but we often do a comparison thing when we're thinking about our own suffering. We either decide that our suffering isn't as bad as someone else, or it's maybe worse than other people's, and then we feel guilty for thinking about it or naming it. We tend to downplay our own suffering, but the truth is our trauma, our pain is our pain.

[00:03:26] Our suffering is our suffering. Our journey is our journey. Regardless of whether it's big or small or big tea or little tea or Big S or little less it, it's still real and it still shapes who we are and how we respond to the world and how we think and feel about things. And it seems to be that this is something that is referenced here in this song.

[00:03:55] Yeah. There's also passages from Peter where Peter tries to get people to [00:04:00] understand that suffering is suffering and it's God's presence that allows us to endure it. It's God's presence that doesn't reduce the suffering. It doesn't reduce the pain. Instead, it helps us understand it in some way. It help us recognize that there's someone there with us, there's a guardian that cares for us in the form of the shepherd.

[00:04:23] And that's what the psalm is referencing too. Yes. Shepherding and being a sheep herder is something that isn't probably as familiar to most people today. But I think that image of being a shepherd or a sheep dog or taking care of sheep is something that we've heard and seen and we get it.

[00:04:46] And part of the reason we get it is because of the story of David. David from the Old Testament, the King of Israel, a war hero, a builder of palaces, and a writer of Psalms, or at least [00:05:00] we attribute a lot of the Psalms to Dave, David and the truth is we don't actually know which ones were written to by David and which ones were attributed to him, and someone else may have put his name on them.

[00:05:13] But a lot of times we attribute them to David and we feel that David maybe wrote it and you can picture in this case, if David, as the, a young boy was out watching the sheep, watching over the sheep for his father and his brothers, and maybe he hit upon this short little tune and this little message in the psalm.

[00:05:39] Maybe he, he runs home that afternoon, that evening and he comes in and he says, Hey guys I wrote a new song. And the brothers are like, yeah, and split off and go their own way. His dad, Jesse, is I really don't have time to listen to it right now. The same way we do sometimes when our kids are excited about something [00:06:00] and David goes outdoors and sits on the back stoop and maybe plays and sing the song for the.

[00:06:09] The sheep dog that's laying there. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside Stillwaters. He restores my soul. He leads me in right past for his namesake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

[00:06:31] You prepare a table before me in the presence of mine. Enemies, you anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows, Shirley, goodness and mercy shall follow me all of the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life. Long. And maybe his mom heard it, his dad, his brothers came down and they heard it as well, and they responded to it and feel the emotion of the [00:07:00] moment.

[00:07:02] And David and the dog, maybe just look at each other for a moment. A at least we could imagine it happening that way. Who knows if there's really any truth to that or if David wrote it later in life or if somebody else even wrote it. But this passage has become one of the most remembered parts of scripture about the world.

[00:07:22] You hear it at funerals, you hear it at other places, and maybe. It was written and they felt that in that moment that this is going to become a picture of God and our relationship with God. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. Does that mean wanting is bad that we're not supposed to want and I don't think it is.

[00:07:47] I think instead it's because if we recognize this relationship with God, then there's nothing to want anymore. The deepest longings that we have the [00:08:00] strongest wantings are satisfied by that relationship with something bigger than we can comprehend. And we call that father. And that's what the passage goes on to talk about this guiding hand that helps us see the world that's right in front of our face.

[00:08:16] But because of our fear and ignorance and our selfishness, we don't really see it. And in the meantime, Before we see it. We want, because we want stuff. We want things. We want to fill that aching hole and that need that we have by comparison. If we looked like her, if we dressed like him, if we drove a car like that person, if we had that house or that job or made that amount of money, then all our wanting would be done.

[00:08:49] But I can tell you that's not true because. Those needs, and those wants only fill in the short term. They last a little while, but then [00:09:00] they become normal again, and we want something else. So a lot of times we solve that problem by just settling for less satisfied with being half empty content, with feeling that ache in our heart that we can never fill.

[00:09:17] But the idea his here instead is to learn to live with God. Learn to live with what is good. Good enough is good enough, but instead here the 23rd Psalms points out that means that we'll have a banquet that is overflowing the table. We'll have overflowing cups, we'll have peace in our heart and will be pursued by goodness and mercy.

[00:09:44] It's not about not wanting because you've settled, not wanting because you're just taking good enough. It's about not wanting because you're completely filled with the love of God all the way to the top, and now it's spilling over. [00:10:00] It's about learning to want the right way, learning to want that relationship with God.

[00:10:08] Thanks for listening.

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