The Lord is my Shepherd

"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 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." Psalm 23: 1-4

What a deathless poem the twenty-third Psalm is! It is the psalm of all psalms. Our Bibles would be robbed of their brightest jewel without it; and our memories of a garnered and cherished treasure. What a myriad multitude there would be, could we assemble all who have ever read or sung it! There would be the sufferer on the sick-bed shortening and beguiling his weary vigils by repeating its consolations. There would be the martyr chanting it at his stake as the flames wrapped their red winding-sheet around him. There would be the soldier in his bivouac on the eve of battle, pondering its majestic solaces, by the smouldering embers of his fire—or his Bible found among the heaps of the slain, with its leaf turned down at the song of 'the valley of the shadow of death.' There would be the shepherd, wandering by the green pastures and still waters, warbling the strains of the inspired minstrel of all time, who had thus sanctified his calling. There would be the bereaved mourner stooping over some withered flower—deploring some extinguished light in the earthly dwelling—singing of a house and home where he and his restored loved ones would dwell forever. It has been sung on the hills of prosperity and in the valleys of woe—by the tongue of prattling infancy—by manhood in its prime, and by old age with its tottering step, leaning on the rod and staff of which it touchingly speaks. Little did he who first swept its numbers on his harp, think of the legacy he had thus bequeathed to the Church of the future; when, in some bright moment of his own waning years, he lifted the curtain of life and reposed in thought on the fond images of boyhood, as by day he led his sheep along the mountain sides, and by night folded them in the sheltered hollows; taking these memories of sweet sunshine as hallowed symbols of the Shepherd-love and faithfulness of God. 

The images of this pastoral song may be of earth, but its pedigree is of heaven—it is a heaven-born psalm. Surely, Goodness and Mercy, the two guardian angels—sister spirits—spoken of at its close, must have fetched it on shining wings down from the upper sanctuary. For three thousand years has it gladdened, comforted, solaced the Church in the wilderness. "Its line has gone through all the earth, and its words to the end of the world." And the numbers now singing it in the Church below are nothing to the ransomed tongues in the Church of the firstborn, to whom its undying cadence is still dear. Let us at present gather around the opening sentence—the opening strain. "THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD I SHALL NOT WANT."