know the words that was pretty good and if you didn't know the tune that was pretty good and if you knew the words and the tune that wasn't so good so Joseph Addison, a name that haunts me from my days as a 12-year-old reading Paul Graves' English essays when people like Joseph Addison and Charles Lamb contributed to the literary world of the early 18th century. My favourite one, for a very perverse reason, was Charles Lamb's little essay entitled, A Dissertation on Roast Pig, And at 12 years old, the idea of somebody called Lamb writing an essay on roast pig, somewhere or another grabbed my imagination and I've never forgotten it. Well, our passage today is probably for most of us also something that we've known since we were young boys and girls, the 23rd Psalm. And this is the English Standard Version, translation of it. Let me read it as we continue our little series entitled, Five Questions I Want to Ask God. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for His namesake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a me in the presence of my enemies, you anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever." The title today is, Can I Fully Trust You? Can I Fully Trust You? Those who know me best and I think love me best tell me that 50% of the time something is said, I react in exactly the same way with the word, really. And you can tell by the way the voice goes that there is a question mark at the end of that word, really. Can I really trust you? Of course, really is one of those words that doesn't actually mean anything. You're not adding anything to the question, can I trust you, by saying, can I really trust you? I suppose you're simply trying to emphasize that the trust is well-founded and well-based. Can I really trust you? And of course the answer I suppose all of us would give. It would be embarrassing, would it not, to give any other kind of answer when the question is about God. The answer is, it's got to be, yes. But notice, how many times have you said this to your children? The question is not, may I really trust you? Usually, of course, with children, you say, you can. The real question is, may you? But I think it's very easy for us deep down to read this question as though it said, may I? When what it's actually saying, the question it's really asking is, can I? Or to put it another way, can I really trust you? And I suppose reading the 23rd Psalm was a stupid passage to choose. Because we all know the 23rd Psalm and I suppose our instinct in thinking about the 23rd Psalm is not dissimilar to our instinct in responding to the question, can I really trust you? Which of course is why I chose Psalm 23. Do you really know Psalm 23? Many years ago I was either 23 or 24 fresh out of theological seminary and probably taking the ninth or tenth funeral service I'd ever conducted in my life and the first part of the services was going to be in the home of the lady who had died. She stayed with her grandchildren and there were grandchildren and great-grandchildren and they were all in an exceptionally musical family and I turned up in my Presbyterian minister's garb I knew some of the family very well but others had flown in and I was greeted at the door by a young member of the family I suppose he was maybe about five years or six years older than I was who was the most musically adept member of the family and they had an organ in their house and he met me at the door and said we're going to begin the service in the house by singing the 23rd Psalm and then he added for a reason I never dared ask anybody in the family he said we're going to begin with the 23rd Psalm starting at the second verse and my mind went completely blank I was kind of the Lord where does that where visually does number two come in and I said to him I said, how does the second verse actually start? And I saw the look in his eyes that was, you know, where did my parents get this boy minister from? He doesn't even know the second verse of the 23rd Psalm. And yet that's a parable of life, isn't it? But the 23rd Psalm, that if it tells us anything, tells us that we may trust him. Our very familiarity with it raises the question, but can I? That is to say, do I really trust him? And this is why David originally wrote this psalm, because he himself, if the rest of the psalms he wrote are anything to go by, often found himself wrestling with this question. often as he finds in his own experience and sometimes obviously his friends found in their experience when the promises that God has given to us don't seem to be working and the providences of God that surround us seem to run counter to the promises that God has given us And in a very interesting way that we don't have time today to reflect on, what David is actually doing here is himself going back to the experience of God's people in the past. There are at least a couple of places in this psalm where he's lifting ideas straight out of the history of God's people in the past. and trying to share with his contemporaries and then with us how he himself learned for himself that what others had done namely come to a marvellous confident trust in the Lord was something that he also by God's grace had begun to do. As you walk through this psalm There are many lessons to learn about what it means to trust God. I remember a friend saying that simply trusting God did nothing for him. What he knew he needed to trust were specific promises that God had given. and you notice how through this psalm that's what David is doing he's taking hold of specific promises God has given and he's saying I trusted God to fulfill these promises and these promises he did actually fulfill the first of them of course is obvious it's the promise that God gives to his people that he will meet all of their needs the Lord is my shepherd I shall lack nothing. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." And of course this is the great characteristic of a shepherd. I had an elder in the very first congregation. I served as a minister who was a shepherd and he not only was a shepherd but his house was halfway up a hill. and there was no road from the bottom of the hill to his house so whenever I went to visit him I would drive the car to the bottom of the hill and then I would walk up the hill and he would see me from the distance where he was with his sheep and I would watch him with his sheep and it was so obvious from the attitude of the sheep to him and the attitude that he had to the sheep that he was the good shepherd Remember how Jesus puts it, the good shepherd knows his sheep by name. I don't know about shepherds in South Carolina, but that was true of this particular shepherd. He knew the names of his sheep as intimately as he knew the names of his sheepdog. I never dared ask him, what happens to your sheep? I think they were turned into wool rather than turned into meat in his case. because he loved them so much and they would nuzzle up to him with a great sense of security. He was the shepherd who had provided everything they ever had. He was one of those shepherds who not only knew his sheep but he knew his sheep's parents and he knew his sheep's children. He just knew everything about them. He knew their temperament. And this is what David is saying here. He too was a shepherd. He knew something about these things. And he knew that God was this kind of good shepherd who knows his sheep intimately. Interesting, isn't it, that we want God to know us when we're in trouble. Indeed, we sometimes say, don't you know what's going on in my life? And we can spend the rest of our lives trying to dodge that kind of intimacy from him. And David, at whatever point in his life, I rather suspect later rather than earlier, has come to the settled conviction that he can trust the Lord absolutely to provide absolutely everything he ever needs. So that he'll be that kind of believer that says, Lord, if this is your providence in my life today, you know this is exactly what I need. And you can understand how marvelously that transforms daily life for him and for us. So he is our shepherd because he meets all of our needs. But then you notice he goes on to say in verse 3, that he is our shepherd because he restores me, says David, when I fall. Now one of the interesting things about these words, the Lord is my shepherd, is that David must have come across them very early in his life. I don't know if this is how it happened but you know the tradition of the Jews then and still is to take very careful record of your family tree of your lineage and I can imagine David as it were one of the elder brothers or perhaps his father scratching out on a tablet or in the sand or in the dirt a whole massive portrayal of young David's family tree and My grandmother used to have a couch I remember that had a design on it that was like a roadway and as a little boy of four I would climb up on the couch to see where these roads led to and how they met and was there another way round and I imagine David doing this with his family tree until he went back to Jacob and then perhaps asked his brothers or his father, can you read me the Jacob story? And the words must have stuck in his mind that almost the last words Jacob spoke were when Joseph brought his two boys to his father for the father's blessing and the father said, May the Lord who has been my shepherd bless these boys similarly. And I wonder if David just took that for granted until the events that we read about in 2 Samuel 11 and in Psalm 32 and in Psalm 51 took place in his life when the king broke every commandment in the book. He coveted, he stole, he lied, he intrigued, he engaged in murder. he blasphemed the Lord and now those words I suspect took on a different significance for him because they were first spoken by his ancestor whose name was Jacob who was called Jacob because he was a twister because he was twisted And because it took years of his life, of God working in his life, to straighten him out until that day you remember after wrestling with the angel of God through the night. We're given this picture of him limping into the future as the sun rose upon him. A changed and a restored man. If I could have a great painter paint any picture in the world for me that expressed what it means to live the Christian life, I think it would be that picture. Jacob limping with the sun rising into the future. And David must have had something like that order of experience when at last God broke through into his life and he confessed his sin and failure for what it really was. And discovered that the Lord was prepared to restore him when he fell. The Lord was prepared to restore him when he fell. Do you know the worst thing most Christian churches do? restore people who have fallen. And do you know why that's the worst thing most churches do? Because most of the people who are trying to do it don't know themselves how deeply they have needed to be restored. And God had to bring David down low. It took a year of having a personal counsellor in the room next door as a constant reminder of how David had failed. This prophet, Nathan. Until the word eventually broke through. Interestingly, not so much in a sermon as in a story he heard. You're the man. and he realised the finger of God was exposing his need and he needed desperately to be restored and it was only then that the words, the Lord is my shepherd really took hold of him and convinced him of not only the provision of God but the restoration of God and then it's in that light that he goes on to a third thing He says, verse 3, He leads me in paths of righteousness or the right paths for His name's sake. And of course this is how it happens. It's when by God's grace our sins are forgiven, our lives are restored and remade by His power that we begin to see what it means to walk in His way. Some of you know that I didn't become a Christian until I was in my teens and I remember in those years before I came to faith in Christ how I just found certain laws God had given to be a great source of irritation to me. I was like the typical child who sees the sign that says keep off the grass and everything in you wants to go and walk on the grass for no apparent reason except to be disobedient to the command you've been given and how different life becomes When the One who has given us His Word gives us the energy and power to live according to His Word and gives us direction from His Word to live for His glory. And we find, as Paul says in Romans 12, 1 and 2, that the will of God for our lives is good and perfect and pleasing. It becomes a pleasure to please Him. But you notice that even in this discovery David is not saying the pleasure to please God that had come into his heart was something that necessarily made life straight forward for him Because in the very next breath he says even though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death or as it literally is the valley of deep darkness I will fear no evil, for you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me." Whenever I read these words, I do actually remember speaking to a friend at the memorial service for his, I think, 18 year old daughter, in which he'd been carried through with his family with visible dignity and grace. And I never forget him saying, as we shook hands and exchanged a few words, that his words to me were, we know now there is nothing left to fear. We know now there is nothing left to fear. And that's what David is saying. In the security of the Lord's grace, we know that there is nothing left to fear. The older I get, the more I spend time with people, the more I become convinced that many people are a mass of fears. An absolute mass of fears. that we found coping mechanisms to store up in our own hearts and never let go of. They never come out. The worst thing in the world we think that could ever happen would be that somebody else discovered that my heart is a dungeon of fears. And you see David is teaching us that those fears can be calmed But there is only one who can calm them, and we need to come to trust him. And then he says, if there is provision, if there is restoration, if there is direction in the Lord, there is also marvellous preservation. Verse 5, look at the kind of preservation that we experience, he says, in the presence of our enemies. The Shepherd prepares a table before us. The Shepherd prepares a table before us. Isn't that something? You know, what we want when we are in the presence of our enemies is to get out of there. What He wants is to say to us, I can cope with you just here and with them. and with them and if that's true David goes on to say then in the midst of my enemies I experience my head being anointed with oil and my cup overflows surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life do you notice incidentally how Joseph Addison got it wrong in that verse we were singing I mean, the words we were singing were true enough words, but they're not the truth that the 23rd Psalm teaches. He says, through every period of my life, your goodness I'll pursue. That's not the really important thing. The really important thing is that his goodness pursues you. And isn't that interesting? I wonder if he was conscious he had got it wrong. Why do I say that? Because many people do get it wrong. They think that's what the life of faith is. I'm pursuing His goodness. And eventually, I'll maybe manage to catch up with it. David is saying, Buster, you have it exactly the wrong way round. for those who belong to him it's not that they are pursuing his goodness that may be true in some sense but it's not the most important truth the most important truth is to sense that his goodness is pursuing you I wonder if any of you have ever been in the presence of somebody you believed loved you so passionately you felt I've got to get out of here I just cannot handle this degree of intense love for me. And that's how actually most of us live. There is an intensity of love in the heart of God for his people that is in a way far more frightening than the intensity of his holiness. And David had discovered that it wasn't worth fighting the love of God. I often say, you know, when somebody says to you, the God I believe in is a God of love, don't put it this way, but understand they're usually lying through their teeth. Because they're running away from Him. And David said, I too ran away from him and all that was involved in submitting to his love and saying to him, what do you do when somebody loves you that passionately? You either spend your life pursuing them in response or running away from them in fear. There was a girl in my class, I guess she was maybe eight when I was seven and she told everybody in the class that she was going to send me a valentine card. And she was, in the words of one of my friends, undoubtedly the ugliest girl in the world. And I fled from her love. I remember getting up early to make sure I was the first person to the mailbox when her card did actually arrive. And I knew just by looking at it who it was from. I dare not mention her name. You may be related to her. And I ran as fast as I possibly could from her passion for me. Eventually, thankfully, it went out and I was safe. But you see, you're not safe from the passion of God until you turn around and say, take me. I can't run from you any longer. Take me. I'm yours. And you see, that's what then leads us, David, to the confidence, surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and never come to an end. And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Do you notice that unlike that other passage in the Bible we all know off by heart, the Lord's Prayer, the pronouns here are all in the singular. Isn't that interesting? They're all in the singular. They're all in the singular. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. There is great blessing in being in the family. But it's almost as though David is saying the only way into the family is by the use of the first person singular. I, I, I will trust him. Nobody really knows you do they? Those of you who have been married 40 years you say I'm still getting to know him. But He knows you through and through. Does He love you with a passion? Then why resist that passion? Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, thank you for words that are so familiar to us and yet we find ourselves again and again asking how deeply they have penetrated into our hearts and into our loves and into the way we live. As we thank you for the provision that we enjoy, the freedom we enjoy, the company we enjoy together here today. We pray that your company the freedom of trusting you, the provision that you make for us. In Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, will mean everything to us. Bless us and lead us, we pray. Restore us. Fill us with good things. For Jesus, our Saviour's sake.