Biography
Bruce W. Thielemann is Senior Minister, First Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Prior to this position, he served for ten years as dean of the chapel and associate professor of religion at Grove City College, Grove City, Pennsylvania. He previously held pastorates in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and Glendale, California. Dr. Thielemann is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. He is in great demand as a lecturer and preacher and his messages and tapes are distributed internationally.  [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Psalm or the Shepherd?"
I want to share with you today not a sermon so much as just some thinking together. Two men were arguing on one occasion over which one knew the most of the Bible. The argument went on for some time and then the first said to the second, “I’ll bet you $10 you don’t even know the Twenty-Third Psalm.”

The second man said, “I’ll take that bet.”

They put down their ten dollar bills, and the first one said, “All right go ahead, say the Twenty-Third Psalm.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the second man began, “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom...”

And at that point, the first man interrupted and said, “Here’s the money. I never thought you would have known it.”

Well, they didn’t know the psalm. But a lot of people do. As a matter of fact, after the Lord’s Prayer and John 3:16, the Twenty-Third Psalm is the most memorized passage in scripture.

But what I’d like to ask today is — do a lot of people know the psalm without knowing the shepherd?

The psalm was probably written by King David toward the end of his life. Oh, I know, it concerns the time when he was himself a shepherd boy out on the hills. But there is, and scholars agree on this, a sensitivity, a breadth, a volume of experience, a degree of recollection which would be quite impossible for a young shepherd boy, and therefore these words were probably written by a more senior saint. It doesn’t stretch the imagination at all to believe that David in his palace one night began to think of God’s direction throughout all the course of his days. And thinking of it and then picking up his harp and singing as he had all his life, he produced, under the inspiration of God’s Spirit, the psalm we’ve numbered “23”.

You know how it begins: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Shepherding was a rather low-class job in those days. The pay was very poor. And those who participated in it were considered to be ritually unclean. They could not participate in the worship services of that time. And shepherds were considered to be a rather unscrupulous lot. A shepherd, for example, was not permitted to give testimony in a court of law. What’s being said by the psalmist here is that God comes down to the very lowest level of life.

You know, sheep are not very bright and they require constant care, but God comes down to the level of the sheep, and extends that kind of care with a joy and a resourcefulness which are beautiful to behold.

When I was serving in the first church which it was my privilege to serve, a four-year-old boy said to me one Sunday morning, “Why is it that Jesus never smiles?”

And I said to him, “Why do you think Jesus never smiles?”

He said, “Well, I see him every Sunday morning and he’s not smiling.”

And I said, “Where do you see him every Sunday morning?”

And he said, “When he comes in to pick up the collection basket.”

You see, this youngster’s teacher was in the habit of saying, “All right, now we’ll give our pennies to Jesus,” and then the basket with the pennies was put on the worship center, and a little bit later, the church treasurer who was a very fine man but a very dour Scot, would come in and pick up the basket with the pennies. And the youngster made the obvious correlation — this must be Jesus, and he never smiles.

What the psalm says is that the Lord comes to the very lowest level of the human experience. He becomes a shepherd and he blesses those he meets with a smile of his love so that they never WANT for anything.

Now the psalm continues, “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” Sheep are rather lazy, and they have a tendency to lie down in the first pasture they come to the lowest pastures on the slopes. But the richest grass is to be found in the pastures higher up. So the good shepherd forces his sheep to climb higher. He does not let them lie down until they get into the green, the lush pastures.

What this is saying to us is that cheap religion is worth exactly what it costs that is, if one doesn’t strive for the heights, if one doesn’t make an effort to follow the shepherd wherever he leads, where there is no excitement in faith, no thrill, religion will become boredom.

I’ve encountered many people who have spoken to me about the boredom of their believing, and almost invariably when I question them, I discover that they risk nothing on the basis of their belief. And you see it’s only when you begin to risk, that you can begin to taste the lush greenness of God’s goodness.

I remember once at a prayer meeting in Korea, as I came out of the meeting, having spoken there, I met a young Korean leper. He was blind, he had no fingers, he had no toes, and he was reading braille. Now how does someone read braille who is blind and has no fingers and no toes? He read braille with his tongue. And when I asked him through an interpreter where he had gotten the patience and the courage, the tenacity, to have learned how to do that, his reply with a big smile was, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

He took on, you see, a big challenge, something which would seem to most of us to be altogether insurmountable. But experiencing that, is what gave him the fullness of the presence of Christ.

Now notice how the psalm continues. Next we read, “He leadeth me beside the still waters.” Now notice he doesn’t lead the sheep to those still waters but beside the still waters. You see, still waters are stagnant waters. Still waters are impure. They become poisoned and foul, so the shepherd does not allow his sheep to drink from that kind of water. Rather, he leads them beside that and on to the fresh water, the main stream where the current is running.

I think there is a parallel here to many people’s behavior in church. You have heard people say that the worst kind of fight is a church fight. I remember reading on one occasion about a man who said that he thought the church was like Noah’s Ark, in that if it were not for the storm outside, no one would be able to stand the “stink” inside.

Well, it’s true. There can be bitter battles fought in the church, but it is my observation that those battles are fought by people who seek to live out their whole Christian experience within the church. In other words, they are in the stagnant experience of knowing faith only within the confines of that building. And because that is their experience, they do not have a fulfilling sense of “”Christifying”” the world which is what we are, in fact, called upon to do. People who battle each other only do so because they are not in conflict with the things in the world that ought to be fought. They’re drinking from the poisoned waters of stagnant Christianity.

Do you remember what Jesus says in the last chapter of Matthew? He says, “Lo, I am with you always.” But he doesn’t say that to everyone. He says first, “Go ye into all the world, and lo, I am with you always.” To those who go, to those who follow him into the current of our time, with these he is always present.

Now the psalm continues — “He restorest my soul.” Now that word “restore” really means “to build up again”. A soul is very much like a muscle. If a muscle has become weak, you don’t coddle it and rest it in order to restrengthen it. On the contrary, you enter into calisthenics and exercises which are necessary to build that muscle again. Just so with the soul. If we coddle our souls, if we surrender to an easy spiritual experience, we cannot expect the kind of health that the soul is supposed to have.

Do you remember in the 42nd Psalm where the psalmist says, “Why art thou cast down, oh my soul, and why art thou disquieted within me?”

He goes on to answer his question, “Hope thou in God.” In other words he says, “Just when you feel like you’re without hope, act hopefully. Just when faith is low in you, do something that requires faith.”

If there is something of which you are afraid, do the thing that you fear and the death of fear is certain. In other words, our actions influence our attitudes. And at the very moment when we feel weakest, we should exercise ourselves spiritually. God calls us to that, and in this process, he restores our souls.

Now the next verse in the psalm reads, “He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” Righteousness means “right living”. What is being said here is that we are to follow the direction of God. If we get off into sidelines, they very quickly become slidelines. I’m sure as David was thinking back over his life, he could remember those times when he had been disobedient, and out of his disobedience had come the discipline which God gives. Where we make no effort to obey God, we cannot expect to be moving in righteousness.

Remember what Jesus said in John 10:7-14? He said, “My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.” They do not follow strangers. They flee them. “I am the good shepherd and my sheep know me.”

To change the metaphor altogether — if you are not rooted, you cannot expect to be fruited. If you are not moving within the will of God in obedience to him, you cannot expect to know that power which belongs to those who follow him. For such ones, Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been left untried and unwanted.

Now we come to one of the most beautiful phrases in the psalm, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

Now notice that the direction of the psalm changes here. Until this time we have been talking about God, but suddenly we are talking to God. In other words, in the earlier verses we spoke of “The Lord is my shepherd,” but here David addresses God directly, and in the remainder of the psalm he continues to do the same thing, “Thou art with me.”

This, in other words, is a personal address. And what has been an observation about God, now becomes a prayer to God.

There is a place, you know, in the Holy Land that is known as The Valley of the Shadow. We think of it, of course, as a time of death, and all of us have had the experience in life of going along and suddenly discovering it’s midnight, suddenly discovering that we have lost one whom we have loved a great deal.

When we are in the valley of the shadow of death like that, the psalmist says we are comforted by, and notice the second part of the verse, “Thy rod and thy staff ...”

Now the rod was a long stick which the shepherd used to beat off animals that might attempt to attack the flock. In that part of the world at that time, though not today, there were lions and bears and wolves, and others that would attack the relatively weak sheep. The shepherd had his stick, his rod, in order to defend the flock. But he also had something else that assisted him in protecting his own. And that is that he had a staff.

Now a staff or shepherd’s crook was a long pole with a hook on the top of it. And the function of this was to assist the sheep who had already gotten into some kind of trouble. Let’s say a sheep has fallen into a crevasse or into a ravine. He cannot get about. The shepherd extends his crook down into the hole with the hook first. He hooks it under the front two legs of the sheep and pulls upward. As he pulls, the sheep pushes with his hind legs, and in that way is able to come up out of the hole.

What we find here, you see, in the rod is that which protects us from outside attackers. In the crook, or the staff, we find that which protects us from our own mistakes and our own blunders.

I think of the rod most often as being conscience. We all have a conscience. But conscience is edified and given content by our experience and what we have learned of the things of God.

Yesterday, for example, when I was flying here to be with you this afternoon, I had an experience on the airplane that illustrates the point. The weather was very soupy. We weren’t able to see the ground until we were only about 500 feet from it. So here is this great airliner coming in with all those passengers and not being able to see a thing ahead, above, or below. Now the pilot could do what he did then because he was following a radio beam. If he went too far to the right, or to the left, if he was too high or too low — in either of these instances, he would discover a change in the sound of the beam. As long as he was on the beam, however, the sound was what it was supposed to be. He followed that beam and we landed successfully.

Now if that beam had been coming from the top of a mountain, let us say, in following it, we would have surely gone to our destruction. The point is not only that you follow that beam, but that the beam be rooted and grounded in that which is good. In other words, the rod is to fill our mind with the things of God, so that when our conscience speaks to us, it speaks to us out of the riches of his truth and not from anything that will mislead us.

And when I think of the shepherd’s crook, his staff, I think of my dear friend, Ben Weir. Ben Weir was held captive by terrorists in Lebanon for eighteen months. And for fifteen of those months he was in solitary confinement. When I asked Ben how he was able to endure that, he told me of how they took him into a room, took his blindfold off, handcuffed him to a radiator that was there, and then left the room.

He found himself in a room that was bare of almost anything. There was a place in the ceiling where a chandelier had been torn away and three wires were sticking through the roof. There was a Venetian blind on the window. There was, for some odd reason, an old, dusty, taxidermy bird standing over in the corner. There was also a mattress on which he was to sit and also to lie, and the radiator. That’s all there was in the room. I said to him, “Ben, how did you endure in that kind of privation for fifteen months?”

He said, “Well, the first thing I did was to remind myself that those three wires coming down through the ceiling reminded me of the hand of God coming down to touch the hand of Adam. You remember the central medallion in the Sistine ceiling in Rome where God touches Adam’s hand? So I felt that was God’s hand reaching down to me.”

“And when I looked at the Venetian blinds, I counted all of the slats and there were many, many of them, and that reminded me of the cloud of witnesses watching me as I lived out my faith.”

“And then, when I looked at the bird, the bird spoke to me of the Holy Spirit of God who appears in scripture sometimes as a dove.”

“Slowly, but surely,” he said, “I made everything in that room, the cracks in the walls, the radiator, the mattress, every single part of it, speak to me of the goodness and the love of God. Then I reminded myself again and again of those passages of scripture which I had committed to memory and had hidden in my heart. And these are the things that enabled me to persevere for fifteen months — alone.”

He was in the valley of the shadow certainly if anyone ever was, but the rod and the staff, they comforted him.

The psalm continues, “He prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” You know, those fields in which the sheep would be brought were sometimes made impure by the presence of poisonous weeds. The shepherd would go in first and tear up all the poisonous weeds, putting them up high where the sheep could not get them. The table was prepared. The field was prepared for the sheep even when the poison was all about. I think of this every time I pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil.”

And then there’s that next line, “Thou anointest my head with oil.” The sheep would wound itself throughout the course of the day — briar, stung bruises, and the like. But the shepherd would anoint those wounds with healing oil, thus making the sheep whole again.

Then there’s that beautiful line, “My cup runneth over.” You know, sheep cannot lap. If you put milk into a very shallow saucer, a dog can lap it up. But a sheep cannot do that. A sheep must be able to immerse its snout in order to drink and that’s the reason the cup for the sheep must be a deep cup, and it must be filled to overflowing.

And then the beautiful lines with which the psalm concludes, “Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

I knew a farmer who had two sheep dogs and he called one “Good” and the other “Mercy” — Goodness and Mercy leading the sheep to the Lord’s house.

On the Northern Coast of Scotland there is a little town called Pittenweem and there’s a story that comes from there which I would like to leave you in closing. One Sunday morning, the local Domini or Pastor, was going to preach on the 23rd Psalm. There was a large crowd of worshipers there, and as the Domini led the service, he discovered a very famous professor of elocution sitting in the congregation. He invited that man to come up and read the 23rd Psalm, and he did read it magnificently. And when he was done, the Pastor got up to preach. And he preached on the 23rd Psalm. At the very end, he recited the psalm. He didn’t recite it in the King James version which had been read but rather in the Broad Scots, and he said:

“The Lord’s my herd, I’ll neer want
He hoots me hae lae doon
O’ot ower the knows and ’mang green bowes
Whar bonnie burnies croon.
My soul He waukens frae its dwann
Oot o’ the mirland weet
Intil richt roads for His nam’s sake
He airts my wandrin’ feet.
Na! tho I hae sae gang my lane
Doon through the deid wirth dale
I’ll thole nae skaith, for He is by,
His crook and kent neer fail.
My table He has hanselled weel
While faes did sit and glower
The oil o grace is on my heid
My bicker’s lippin ower.
Guid guiden and guid greenin s’all
Gang wi me late and air
And syne up in the Lord’s big hoose
I’ll bide for evermair.”

When he finished this, the congregation was weeping. When the service was over and as they were leaving, the little girl who had come with the noted professor from St. Andrew’s University, the elocutionist, said, “Daddy, why is it that when you read the psalm, everyone was impressed but when he said the psalm, everybody cried?”

And the professor looked at his little girl and said, “My dear, it’s because I know the psalm, but he knows the shepherd.”

That’s the question isn’t it — do you just know the psalm or are you a sheep of God that follows the shepherd?