When The Lord Is Your Shepherd Series

It’s Mother’s Day, May 12th.

And for me, that means we’ve been in the midst of the Covid-19 Crisis for 2 months.

Being a sports fan, the seriousness of the crisis hit home on March 11th. That was the day NBA player Rudy Gobert, starting center for the Utah Jazz, failed to show up for the tip-off of an NBA game as the opposing team and 15,000 fans waited. He didn’t show up for 20 minutes, players from the opposing team began to ask his teammates where he was, and then there was the shocking news. He had tested positive for the dreaded virus. The public address announcer then told the waiting crowd that the came had been cancelled. Twenty minutes later, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver announced the NBA season had been suspended indefinitely.

Ironically, it had been only two nights earlier, amid some Coronavirus concerns during a press conference after an earlier NBA game, that Gobert himself had mocked the suggestion that the virus could be of any real concern. After reporters questioned him following the game in the press room, Gobert got up and deliberately touched every reporter’s mic and recording device on his table before he departed for the dressing room.

Now, two months later, we know that Gobert was at that moment likely most contagious with the virus, because folks that have the virus are most contagious two or three days before becoming symptomatic. The NBA season may never be resumed. The question is when life will ever get back to normal as the nation has been on lockdown. The U.S. has become the center of the Pandemic, 75,000 people have died and the impossible choice that people face is whether to stay home and risk not being able feed their families versus going back to work and possibly bringing the deadly virus home to infect their loved ones.

Yes, it is a completely unexpected, uncertain and anxious time in the United States of America. Do we pay our bills and feed our families, or risk getting a deadly and very contagious virus.

So amid all the anxiety, we continue in our series in the Psalms—Hope in Anxious Times—and this morning we go to what was once a well-worn page in the Bibles of most Americans—where Americans went in times of anxiety and even deadly epidemics in our past history—Psalm 23.

Psalm 23 is a song of absolute trust, utter and complete confidence, written by the great Jewish patriarch David—a song that specifically talks about the fact that as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we can trust the Lord even then to protect, provide and bless, even eternally.

Unlike Psalm 91 last week, this Psalm is explicitly said to have been a Psalm of David. Before we examine what it says, it’s important to recall David’s unique qualifications as the writer of this Psalm. You might remember that David himself was a shepherd in his youth. When the prophet Samuel was directed by the Lord to find the new King of Israel to replace the erring King Saul, he was told that he would find him among the sons of Jesse. As it turned out Jesse had eight sons, and only seven of them attended the anointing ceremony—the first seven. David, the youngest of the eight, had been left to shepherd his father’s sheep. It was only as the first seven were rejected that David was called and the Lord directed his anointing as Israel’s next, and heretofore, greatest king. And remember the reason he was anointed as King—because he uniquely had a heart after God’s own heart. In other words, he had the same kind of heart God has toward His sheep—a heart that so loved his sheep that he was willing, if necessary, to courageously offer his own life to save them.

Then remember the defining event in David’s life. Again, his older brothers had been selected for military service by King Saul. David had likely been deemed to be too young for military service. He had been tending his father’s sheep with supplies for his brothers when the Philistine Colossus, Goliath, came forward to challenge Israel. David, upon seeing this uncircumcised Philistine defying the armies of the living God, then offered his services as Goliath’s challenger to King Saul, noting his unique qualifications. His qualifications: That he had slain both the lion and the bear who had dared attack his flock of sheep.

So David uniquely understood what it took to be a good shepherd, and a good sheep. He uniquely understood and personified the courageous, self-sacrificing love of our God for the sheep of his pasture, and he reflects that unique wisdom to us here, as he speaks of himself as one of the sheep who follow the Lord, His shepherd.