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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Psalm 23:1

“The Lord is my shepherd,”; last week we talked about who/what do you believe. The Lord, Jehovah, is He the one you believe in? Is He your God? Now all of us need to answer that question. You see this is a statement, “The Lord is my shepherd“, this is what he believes. The psalmist is not wishy washy or maybe he believes, on some days, but on other days not so much. Our God is Lord over every thing, even time…; all the time, so for us we need to recognize this and also recognize the 3 persons of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Then also we can say this, the beginning of Psalm 23, “ The Lord is my shepherd”. Now there is also the word, shepherd, that we need to associate with God in this statement. What is a shepherd? One who takes care of sheep; I just said that off the top of my mind. Not to far off, a shepherd is one who tends sheep. Also has the idea of, guiding and guarding…Before we go too far let’s see the word picture (allegory) that is being revealed. That is that God is a shepherd; which makes us sheep. Now sheep need the shepherd, they are lost without Him. They tend to wander and get in all kinds of predicaments. Isn’t that true of sheep? Isn’t that true of us? So we must recognize in our own lives, deep down, we need the shepherd, we need Jesus Christ. If we really think about it we all know that we can’t do it on our own…but more than that, that people and things can’t take the place of being taken care of (tended) by God, His son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. So again, are you going to let Jesus be the shepherd of you? It is some times easy to say that phrase, but is it your desire, my desire to have the Lord as our Shepherd? In John 10, the parable of the good shepherd, verses 11-14 “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and is not concerned about the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me.” He is good!!!

Into Psalm 23

What I would like to do, is to start a new series on Psalm 23. Yes I did some of this a while back but it would be good to go through the whole Psalm. The first would ve an introduction if you will and then we will start the Psalm 23. What do you believe? And with that we can also ask the question, what don’t you believe? Why are those 2 questions so important? Well the first is important as to believing in truth, facts….versus not believing in truth, facts…Or secondly we could believe in things that are not true, facts.. and not to believe in the truth, fact…Sometimes it is very easy to get confused in what we believe and what we don’t believe. Sometimes we believe something, a truth, but in actuality we don’t believe all of what it means…and sometimes we want to mix the truth with non-truth to fit our own desires or reasoning. Sometimes we compromise the truth, to fit in with society…compromise in some areas is not good. In Ex.3:16 “The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob has appeared to me” God tells Moses to say to the elders this; the history of the one true God. It is important that we also believe in the one true God. So often in the Old Testament we see the phrase God of Abraham….This is the God we believe in. Now let’s go forward to the New Testament and also look at the Lord Jesus. In Matt.3:17 “and lo a voice out of the heavens, saying, This is my beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased.” Now we can read a lot more in the Gospels about our Lord. We must remember that He is the Son of God, He is God….and we must never diminish His position of God and the things He said or the things He has done or the things He is going to do. If we look around today we don’t see a lot of idols (statues) around; some but not many. But there are a lot of religions around pulling or trying to pull us into compromising our faith; that is to accept that there are other god’s just like the one true God. Now I’m not talking about being radical…but rather to be on guard, to hold fast to the one true God and His son Jesus Christ. To follow Him and Him alone.