Green Pastures and quiet waters and Irish hills all come to mind when I think of Psalm 23. But the reality of this little, oft-quoted gem is far from peaceful, European pastoral scenes. The text juxtaposes images that seem dissonant but have to be held together if we’re going to rightfully understand this text. The first is a shepherd leading a flock of sheep somewhere- somewhere that will be like green pastures and quiet waters, somewhere in which my soul will be restored. The second is the valley of death and surrounded by my enemies (who presumably want me dead). In the world of this Psalmist, these aren’t two different worlds. They are one and the same. Our Shepherd leads us into the most difficult and painful of circumstances AND our Shepherd has promised to bring life to our souls.My mother’s bible has the difficult observation written in its margins: “He often leads us where we do not wish to go.” My mother understood this juxtaposition better than most. She endured a great deal of pain as she watched my Father slowly die. He died well, loving his God, loving his family. But he died young and painfully. My mom leaned heavily into this Shepherd God. She found comfort in the promise that this Shepherd God who led her and her sick husband precisely into this valley surrounded by these devastating enemies, was with her, her son, and her dying husband. And while there were tears, there was also incredible joy. Profound joy. I remember the laughter far more than I remember the tears.

Psalm 23 isn’t about Ireland and Coffeemugs and really kitschy art. It is about the profound promise of God. He is our Shepherd. He leads us. He often will lead us where we do not want to go. But it is a journey leading to one glorious destination: the restoration of our souls and the joy of His presence forever.

Jesus was led by this shepherd into a dark valley- the valley of death. He suffered there. He died there. He died there, in our place, and one glorious result of that death is that we can suffer with hope. We will not die here. Our God has become our Shepherd. He leads us to green pastures. He leads us along quiet waters. He will restore our soul.

In Psalm 21, the psalmist begins by extolling the great blessings of God that have been bestowed on His King. To this King has been given all authority, all glory and all power. To this King has been given “length of days, forever.” To this King, every desire of his heart has been granted. The first seven verses announce in sweeping and grand terms the glory and absolute authority that has been bestowed upon this particular King. All of His desires are fulfilled. All of His plans are accomplished. Now this King is Jesus. He is the only one whom adequately fulfills this text. But here lies the rub in this text: The language is so sweeping that it not only challenges our claims to any sort of autonomy, it crushes them. Herein lay the claims of Jesus and how they subvert and challenge the most foundational understandings of freedom and happiness in our society. Most of us don’t want a King to begin with, particularly one as supremely authoritative and powerful as Jesus. We like the pomp, the circumstance and the parades, but we don’t want anyone whose will is always accomplished whose purposes are never thwarted and whose glory is incomparable and will never end. We want a Jesus who advises us, who exists to help us attain to the desires of our hearts. We want honor. We want glory. We want authority. We want our plans to succeed. And far too often the aims and agenda of a totally free, totally glorious King conflict with our aims and our agendas. In verse 8, the Psalmist uses a surprising phrase in beginning to describe those who face the wrath and judgment of God: “… Those who hate you…” Hate. I’m struck by that word. The conflict described in Psalm 21 is not an exclusively moral one. It is a personal one. We see the strength of God bent wholly in the work of exalting Jesus, honoring Jesus, serving the purposes of Jesus and the problem is not that we do wrong things- no the problem is that we see this strength and we hate it. What is ascribed to Jesus the Great King we long to have for ourselves. The rule of Jesus will either be for you something to joyously marvel at or it will be a despotic terror. But if it is a despotic terror it will not be because there is something wrong with King Jesus, its simply that rightful authority and power always feels despotic when placed on the shoulders of those who hate all authority. How much of our public life is marked by this singular divide: Do we love the authority of Jesus or do we hate it? How many of our personal struggles are defined by this simple question: Is the authority given to Jesus good news to you or is it utter folly and something to be despised? In Psalm 21 this is the most important question dividing the Psalm. The only power sufficient to diffuse this conflict is that which comes to us in the Gospel. In the gospel we see both the way Jesus wields his authority and the kind of King that he is. His authority is wielded to suffer in our place. He bears the penalty for our incipient treason. And we see vividly the goodness of a King who wields such authority to rescue His people. He is the only ruler who both can claim the kind of throne the Father gives & he is the only ruler who can be trusted with the kind of throne the Father gives.

I’m a young pastor. Our church started 5 years ago and prior to the weekly work of preparing sermons here, the most I preached was once every five or six weeks at other churches we were a part of in other cities. I estimate that in the last 5 years I’ve preached somewhere around 240 sermons at Park Church. This is nowhere near the sermons that pastors whose ministries have spanned 20 or 30 years have had to prepare and deliver week in and week out to their congregations. And yet, I can hardly imagine what these past five years would’ve been like if it weren’t for 3 years spent in graduate school specifically learning how to query and mine the text of the bible.

My first semester of Greek (which I had to retake), our professor introduced us to the concept of being “first-handers.” This meant becoming readers of the bible who did not ultimately rely on commentaries, scholars and other preachers to interpret a text but who had the tools to wrestle with the meaning of a text on its own terms. I know of few things more pertinent to the vitality of a pastor’s ministry than this skill.

Over the past couple of years I’ve worked with numerous church planters who have solid theology. They’ve read the “right” books. They’ve been influenced by the “right” teachers. They have great plans for planting their church. They have a good team around them. They are even gifted communicators. But I’ve struggled with a growing concern. Few of them are “first-handers.” They can deliver a decent, theologically accurate, and emotionally engaging sermon. They can apply insights from reading other writers or listening to other preachers. But the hard, often laborious work of mining the text of Scripture, wrestling with an argument or the turn of a phrase is foreign to them-and even worse is often seen as an unnecessary and academic distraction from the real work of pastoring. For far too many of us expository preaching has come to mean using the text as a diving board-failing to help our people to trace and see the force of an argument largely because we don’t have the ability to do it ourselves. I fear that we are growing an army of preachers who are going to run out of things to say.

In such a pastor’s preaching there will come, eventually, a shallowness and a simple inability to explore with and for their people the depths of beauty and reality that saturates the text and fills out the doctrine they may be able to articulate accurately. Preaching is reduced to proof-texting the doctrine or application we want to teach. We attach a handful of stories and then leap from the text into our message. I don’t know how long such a ministry can survive and I’m not sure what sort of depth and holiness and passion for mission can be sustained by such preaching and I’m afraid that we’re going to find out in a few years.

Pastors, give yourself to learning and growing in this skill: We must query the text. We must wrestle with the text. It is not so simple a matter as articulating a predetermined theological agenda using texts to buttress what you want to say. It is wrestling along a text to learn the layers and nuance and depths of what the Author is saying. It is learning to not simply teach what the text is teaching, but how the text is teaching it. We are doing more than simply establishing propositions from the text, we are trying to see not simply what but how-and to help our people do the same. There is no short cuts to this work. Church planting is hard. Pastoring is hard. There are endless demands on your time, and a thousand projects and meetings to have. Establish this discipline. Learn it and spend the rest of your life developing this skill. Explore the heights and depths of the text for yourself. Doing this will demand that everything else (including the actual work of sermon prep) be put on hold. It will require you to stare at a text for hours, asking questions, making observations, and praying (always praying) and refusing to move on to work on your actual sermon. Learn to breathe the text, feel the text and be crushed by the text. Then you can think about how to preach it, but until then any work on a sermon will lack the experience of meeting God in His word and hearing Him speak there. Unless that kind of life becomes a rhythm for you, you’ll eventually run out of things to say.