Sermons, Articles, and Other Things

There are two comments that we can make about this verse as an introduction. First, this kind of situation would have been quite unusual in Judea where David grew up. Most of the countryside there is desert and for most of the year there is not much water to be found. No doubt, David was aware of more lush areas throughout his kingdom where there would supplies of water for most of the year, if not all of it as there would be beside the Sea of Galilee. So it looks as if David is saying that this experience of lying down in green pastures is quite rare, is from another world, one that is not like the natural world. Instead it is a supernatural world that he has in view. Second, the verse does not say that the shepherd leads the sheep to green pastures after a trying day in the desert away from them. Instead he says that what the shepherd does is make the sheep lie down in green pastures all the time, and in the rest of verses 2 and 3 he uses the same form of structure when he says th...

James, as we have seen, is a pastor writing to encourage believers to serve God in difficult circumstances mainly caused by persecution. His advice is that such times are not periods when they can slacken their commitment to the Lord and his requirements. Trials will be difficult but they are not sent in order to see if believers will lose their devotion, although that is an obvious danger. Instead trials test the genuineness of their faith. There are many ways in which such genuineness will show itself, and James here considers how obedience to God’s law is a means of showing that they are the real thing. Such obedience will give assurance to themselves and confidence to others that they are genuine disciples. The fact that James continues his attack on favouritism tells us that it was an existing problem or that it was a potential problem. He has already shown that it was sinful to show favouritism against the poor, many of whom had been chosen by God. Now he proceeds to sho...

Sometimes a sentence can seem so unrealistic that we are tempted not to take it seriously. Perhaps that is how we respond to the claim of the psalmist in this statement. If he had said ‘I shall not want sometimes’ or ‘I shall not want most of the time’, then we would think his words as more realistic. But are those alternatives statements of faith or statements of fact? ‘I shall not want’ is a statement of faith. The statement ‘I shall not want’ we can describe as the link between the opening statement, ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ and the various details mentioned in the rest of the psalm. Of course, the term ‘want’ means ‘lack’ here and not ‘desire’. It is a deduction of certainty based on a permanent relationship with the Shepherd, and from this deduction several specific statements could be made, which the psalmist did do, and in doing so provided a wonderful picture for us of the true spiritual life as a sheep in the flock of Jesus Christ. It is helpful to go through the remain...