Today, we move onto verse 3 of Psalm 23.

He restores my soul;
He leads me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.

If you learn one thing reading through the Bible, it’s that God places a value on name and honor beyond what we can understand.

From the beginning, he has wanted people to call on his name. Because to call on his name was to seek him. His name and his nature are inexplicably intertwined.

That’s why one of the ten commandments says “you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” God’s name and his character are reflections of each other. That includes the names of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Naming God is calling on God. And when he leads his children and guides them, he is doing it for his glory.

According to the Shorter Catechism, written about 400 years ago and paraphrasing Solomon’s words in Ecclesiastes 12:13, declares that the primary goal of people is glorify God and keep his commandments. Or in the words of Israel’s wisest king, “When all has been heard, the conclusion of the matter is fear God and keep his commands because this is the all of humanity.”

Everything people do or should do is related to God’s name and his glory. In a way, you can say that is why Adam and Eve were created. Their presence was in God’s image. An image is a reflection or a representation. As their descendants, we should reflect God’s glory by honoring him.

But how does that relate to this verse? God does what he does and it reflects back on the character of him and the veracity of his name(s). He does what he does with those who love him because their love and obedience glorify him and so he makes sure to guide them. Similar scriptures say:

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. And Make me walk in the path of your righteousness (Psalm 119)

You enlarged my path under me so that my feet did not slip (2 Sam 22 and Psalm 18)

You show me the path of life (Psalm 16)

Show me your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths (Psalm 25)

He guards the paths of justice and preserves the way of his saints. (Proverbs 2:8)

And many many more.

So God provides guidance and restoration for his children. He does this because their obedience honors his name.

The French I memorized used to confuse me a bit because it is so much different. Most of the translations pair up nicely, but not this one so much.

Il ranime mes forces, il me guide sur la bonne voie parce qu’il est le berger d’Israel. (He reinforces my strength; he guides me in the good way because he is the shepherd of Israel.)

I guess restoring my soul and reinforcing my strength, if you’re talking spiritual strength makes sense. And guiding in the good way and paths of righteousness align. But for his name’s sake versus because he is the shepherd of Israel? It seems odd.

Or does it?

If you think about the how and why Israel came into being, what God’s involvement was in singling out Abraham and then Isaac and then Jacob who he renamed Israel, the translation has a bit of logic.

God hand-picked the lineage to be a nation of priests, of prophecies and of his name. He chose Israel to give birth to his son. He chose Israel his spiritual descendants.

So yes, acting as the shepherd of Israel is acting for the sake of his name.

May we, every day and in every way, walk in the paths he has chosen. May we choose to honor and glorify our God.

On multiple occasions, my sisters and I have commiserated with each other about the elusivity of sleep. It seems like when we are the most tired, it is the most difficult to come by. On the other hand, when we have no time to sleep, when we are at work or driving or something else that requires our concentration, we have difficulty keeping our eyes open. And this whole thing has gotten worse as we head toward the upper end of middle aged.

But as sheep of the heavenly father, our shepherd promised us rest. He promised peaceful places for us to lie down.

So where’s the problem? Why do so many people in the western world have difficulty with rest? Why do so many think of a good night’s sleep as a far-fetched dream?

The simplest answer is because we don’t.

Huh?

We do not make rest a habit. We don’t take our Sundays off. We don’t shut down as the lights dim outside. Instead, we keep pushing ourselves for the next achievement, the next task done, the next enjoyment pursued. We have, as a society, never learned to rest. We have never learned to embrace the stillness and the quiet.

And we are paying for it.

Thankfully, for those of who follow God, (or at least try to) we have verse 2 of Psalm 23. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters (NKJV). Or the French, Il me met au repos dans des prés d’herbe fraîche, il me conduit au calme près de l’eau. (He puts me to rest in fields of fresh grass, he directs me to calm areas near the water.)

Both of these, include the idea of God’s intent and God’s power. He is putting us into the green pastures to make us rest.

If you think about it, illnesses and injuries come our way to force us to slow down. That’s what I immediately think of when I hear “makes me lie down”. God allows circumstances into our lives to remind us of our limits. And to remind us that he created us with those limits so that we will depend on him.

As I said last week, sheep are stupid. They can keep going until they fall over. They can wander off a cliff or get themselves stuck in any number of situations. The Shepherd doesn’t want that. He has found the best pastures for us. Pastures provide both food and shelter. The second half of the verse provides for our water. In other words, all the basic needs are met.

But we are stupid sheep. We’re no different. I’m no different. When what I want to do gets impeded, I try to find another way to do what I planned. Whether it means extra caffeine or working late or pushing past exhaustion until the adrenaline kicks in, there are ways to humanly get our achievement fix. And that works… until it doesn’t.

At the beginning of September, I injured my knee. I was doing the recommended exercises and it was starting to feel pretty good. So I decided to do a light, but normal day’s exercise.

Big mistake.

It felt fine while I exercised or I would have stopped. But the next day, I woke to it being swollen and the pain continued to increase. Two days after exercising the pain got so intense that I almost passed out.

Thus, I finally went to a specialist today.

On the plus side, I have “boring bones” (his words), but I’m scheduled for an MRI tomorrow because he thinks I tore my cartilage.

In other words, I am being made to lie down.

Knowing I serve a good and holy God, I have to trust that I need the peace and quiet. I need some more time with the Shepherd.

For a while now, I have wanted to deconstruct Psalm 23 on my blog. One verse per week. That means, for the next six weeks, I don’t have to decide what I’m writing about. That’s huge.

But in light of the chaos that is currently our world, I have been turning to this psalm even more.

Text-wise, I will primarily rely on New King James Version and occasionally Bible en Français Courant when I want to bring in what I learned from the French translation. So why these versions? That’s easy. I memorized Psalm 23 in both of them. So they feel more depth when I hear them because I have internalized them.

That all means that today is verse one. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Or « Le Seigneur est mon berger, je ne manquerai de rien. »

You have probably heard the English one a lot. You may even have it memorized. But what does it mean and what can you unpack from it?

There are whole books written on Psalm 23. There have been songs using it. I am not going to try to reinvent the wheel. Remember, this is simply a blog.

When I can’t sleep at night, I recite Psalm 23 over and over. Sometimes in English. Sometimes in French. Sometimes I get stuck on a verse (in either language) and will recite what comes before it a gadzillion times until I finally remember (or fall asleep trying). But verse one? I remember that always.

I am not a shepherd. The closest I got to the occupation was using my car to help a shepherd drive his sheep while I was in Germany. But I can tell you this with absolute certainty. Sheep are dumb.

They have an unerring tendency to go where they shouldn’t go or even where they don’t want to go. They need a shepherd. They cannot survive on their own.

We are them. We need our divine shepherd and we cannot survive on our own apart from him. We may think we can. After all, we’re not going far. Just to that little patch of grass. But the next thing we know, we’ve fallen over a cliff and are bleating pitifully for his help.

The French and the English for the first part mean the exact same thing. We can depend on God as our Shepherd. He knows our weaknesses and our failings and will preserve us—as long as we remember we are his.

The second part, I like the English better because it can have more than one meaning. The French means “I will lack for nothing.” And yes, there is that meaning within the English. And yes, that is encouraging to know that God provides for his sheep. The apostle Paul and King David both talked about God’s provision in even the direst situations. But in light of the American consumer culture, I like the second part as a command. “I shall not want ____________.” Fill in the blank.

I shall not want what my neighbor has. (There’s one of the ten commandments that deals with that, right?) I shall not want what I see advertised. I shall not want the next gimmick. I shall not want whatever God does not bless me with. I shall not want what is God’s. I shall not want fame, fortune and everything that glitters.

But above all that, I shall not want what this world has to offer, because I was designed for a different world altogether.

And God, as my shepherd, is guiding me there.