Gps (God’s Positioning System) - Psalm 23:3b Series

Psalm 23 A psalm of David.

1The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, 3 he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. 4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. 5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. 6 Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

Introduction

Divination

A reporter investigating the citrus industry went into an area where he found a man sorting oranges. The oranges came down a conveyer belt, and the man would put the large ones in the large holes, and the small in the small holes, and the bad ones in another hole. After watching this man perform this painfully boring job for a while, finally the reporter said, “How can you stand this job? Just putting oranges in holes all day long day after day?” The guy answered, ‘You don’t know the half of it. From the time I clock in till the time I leave it’s nothing but decisions, decisions, decisions!” Some jobs require more difficult decisions than others, every one of us makes decisions every moment, and those decisions — even the little ones, determine our future.

I remember back in 2000 a man made a decision to go to McDonalds in Boulder, and that decision cost him his life. A car crashed into the McDonald’s and killed him. You see, it’s not just our decisions that determine what will happen in the future, it is our decisions combined with the other unforeseen events that will take place. So how do you make decisions that will have good outcomes when you don’t know what unforeseen things the future holds?

That is a question that has captivated mankind for centuries, which is why there has always been divination. Divination is the attempt to find out what will happen in the future, so you will know how to make decisions. Leo Oppenheimer, in the department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago has studied ancient cuneiform writings of Sumaria, Assyria and Babylon, and he says that about 90% of all the writings found — secular and religious — have to do with divination. If you can just get a little bit of inside information about what is going to happen in the future, if you can somehow find out that a car will crash into the McDonald’s, you can choose Burger King that day. If Jeff and Lauri would have known to just take a different exit last Wednesday, their car wouldn’t look like a crushed pop can right now and Lauri wouldn’t have a broken ankle. And so throughout history people have been listening to astrologists, reading tea leaves or tarot cards, palm reading, Ouija boards, crystal balls, fortune tellers, channeling, psychics, – whatever they can do to somehow get some guidance so they can get a leg up on the unknown. All of that is divination, and divination is strictly forbidden in Scripture.

Deuteronomy 18:10 Let no one be found among you who . . . practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. 12 Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD

Even in our culture, where we pride ourselves on being scientific and rational, these things abound. And they always will. People will always be involved in divination, because our decisions, combined with the other things that we can’t foresee that will happen in the future, determine our destiny.

All of this gives rise to one of the most powerful appetites of the human soul – the desire for guidance. We learn very quickly in life that our decisions matter, and wrong decisions can have lifelong consequences. But we can’t see even one second into the future, we don’t know what other factors will arise, we cannot possibly gather all the relevant data for every decision, and so we are always in desperate need of guidance from God.

Review

We are in the midst of a study through the 23rd Psalm, which is a description of several of the benefits that come from having a shepherd/sheep kind of relationship with God. If the Lord is your shepherd, you will lack nothing that you need to do His will. He will supply everything you need. And the first thing you need is rest – so He will make you lie down in green pastures. The next thing you need is nourishment and satisfaction of your deepest appetites and cravings – so He will provide spiritual food and drink. He gives you renewal and restoration for your soul when it runs dry. That is where we left off last time – at the beginning of verse 3. The next benefit is that thing all human beings are so desperate for – guidance.