For the parent asked about a psalm on a footpath, with mud on both pairs of boots.
The psalm opens with a man who kept sheep saying that he has a shepherd, and that because of it he wants nothing.
David wrote it as somebody who knew the job from the inside. He had done the walking, the counting, the pulling of animals out of places they should not have gone. When he called God a shepherd he was not reaching for a pleasant image, he was naming a trade he had worked.
Your daughter has just asked you what it means, on a footpath, after rain, with mud up the back of her legs.
She's seven. There are sheep in the field on the left, which is presumably where the question came from, and a wooden gate about thirty yards ahead.
You say something about God looking after us, and it comes out thinner than you meant it to. She says okay. Then she asks whether sheep are stupid, which is a better question, and one you can actually answer with some confidence.
The shepherding was never yours to do, and the psalm names who does it. The Word says that the shepherd as God rather than as the parent, and the Spirit has been leading a family along a wet footpath.
The Job You Have Been Trying to Do
Say the thing you have been doing, because you have never described it to yourself in these terms.
Since you stopped going, you have quietly taken on the shepherding of your own children. Their spiritual welfare, their instruction, their protection from error, their eventual belief. All of it has come to rest on you, and you have accepted it without discussion.
That's why every conversation feels like an examination. A shepherd who loses a lamb has failed at his trade, and you've cast yourself in a role where every unanswered question is a lamb in a ditch.
It's a role with no days off in it. You can't be a shepherd on Saturdays only, which is why the feeling follows you into a walk that was supposed to be a walk.
You were never given that role. You have been carrying a workload that belongs to somebody else and grading yourself on results that were never yours to produce.
You have taken on a trade that was never assigned to you. It is written that gives the shepherding to God rather than to a parent, and the Spirit does that work through means you do not control.
The Lord Is My Shepherd
Here is the line itself, and it is worth noticing who is speaking and about whom.
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.Psalm 23:1 (KJV)
The Lord is. Present tense, already true, no conditions attached. David does not say the Lord will be if I arrange it, or the Lord is provided I keep him supplied with the right settings.
Your daughter, walking in mud beside sheep, has a shepherd. So do you. Neither of those facts was established by an attendance record and neither can be undone by one.
That's worth saying slowly, because the present tense is the whole weight of the line. Not the Lord was, in the years when you were going. Not the Lord will be again, if you sort something out. The Lord is, on a wet Tuesday, in the middle of whatever you've currently made of your life.
David said that about himself, in his own voice, and it reaches past him to a seven year old on a footpath without being stretched to do it.
Your daughter already has a shepherd, and it was never you. Scripture states it in the present tense, and the Spirit applies it to a child in muddy boots.
What a Shepherd Actually Does
Look at the trade, because the details of it are the comfort.
A shepherd goes and finds. He does not put up a notice and wait for the animal to present itself at a suitable hour. He goes out, in weather, and retrieves what has wandered, and he does it because the animal is his.
He also leads from in front and the sheep do not know the route. That is the whole arrangement. The sheep are not required to understand the plan, or to be able to explain it, or to answer questions about it on a footpath.
Your daughter isn't required to have a good account of God in order to be held by Him. Neither are you, and neither is the family member you haven't mentioned to anybody.
That's the part that catches people who care about getting it right. They assume that being held depends on being able to describe the holding, which would make the whole arrangement depend on articulacy. Sheep are not articulate, and the psalm chose them deliberately.
A shepherd goes and finds rather than waiting to be found. The written Word describes a trade of pursuit, and the Spirit is the one who does the going.
I Am Not Telling You to Do Nothing
Be careful here, because this could be misheard as an excuse and it is not one.
None of this means you sit down and do nothing. You talk, you answer, you pray with them, and you keep the subject alive in your house at the ordinary hours. That part is genuinely yours, and it matters a great deal.
Nor am I telling you that your answer about God looking after us was a good one. It was thin. You could do better, and thinking about it for ten minutes this week would be worth doing.
What I want off you is the shepherding. Not the talking. Not the care underneath it.
She Asked About Sheep Next
The turn is in what she said second, which you dismissed as a change of subject.
She asked what the psalm means, you answered thinly, she said okay, and then she asked whether sheep are stupid. You read that as the subject being dropped.
She was still on it. A seven year old who has just been told that God is a shepherd and that we are the sheep goes immediately to the obvious follow-up, which is what kind of creature she has just been compared to.
That is not a change of subject. That is a child thinking carefully about what you told her, in her own terms, out loud, in front of you. It is precisely what the passage is trying to produce and you walked through it without seeing it.
She was still thinking about it, and the second question proved it. The Word says that invites exactly that comparison, and the Spirit kept a seven year old turning it over beside a gate.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Speak it as a person already joined to Him rather than as one applying to be. The Spirit carries the words, and how God answers is not something anybody can hand you in advance.
Say it the whole way down the page.
The shepherding was never mine to do, and the psalm names the one who has been doing it. The Word says that the Lord is my shepherd, in the present tense, with no conditions attached and no attendance required. The Spirit applies that to a child in muddy boots as surely as to the man who wrote it. I am not the shepherd here. My daughter asked what it means and then asked what kind of creature she had been compared to, which is a child thinking hard about God on a footpath. I give the outcome to God and put down a trade that was never mine.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Psalm 23:1
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
