Simple Faith

Guest (Male): Coming up today on Simple Faith with Pastor Bill Henry.

Bill Henry: Even if we go astray and we start going off the path of righteousness, because the Lord loves us, we're told earlier that his rod and thy staff they comfort me. Why? Because the Bible tells us that the Lord corrects those whom he loves. When he loves us, he's not going to let us to keep going off on the wrong path. He's even going to rebuke us or correct us.

Guest (Male): Jesus is truly the good shepherd, but is he your shepherd? Can you confidently claim that kind of relationship with the Lord of glory? Is that kind of privileged care by God for you even possible?

Psalm 23 is no doubt one of the best-loved texts in the entire Bible. It describes how we can come under the shepherd's care and it's our focus today with the message first presented at his home church, Simple Faith Calvary Chapel. Here's Pastor Bill Henry in Psalm 23, verse 5.

Bill Henry: Psalm 23, a Psalm of David. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. If you look again at verse 5 with me, the first part of it, we're going to be honing in on verse 5. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.

Our good shepherd is preparing a table before us in the presence of our enemies. In Micah chapter 5, in verses 2 through 5, we read this: But you, Oh Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from among you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from old, from ancient days. Therefore, he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has given birth.

Then the rest of his brothers shall return to the people of Israel and he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God, and they shall dwell secure for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth and he shall be their peace. You see, beloved, in Christ Jesus, Christ is our peace. Jesus Christ is our good shepherd.

As we look even in verses 2 and 4 there in the book of Micah, it says that he's the ruler and that he's the shepherd of his flock. Then we read in Matthew chapter 2, verse 4, it says they told him in Bethlehem of Judah, so it is written by the prophet, "And you Oh Bethlehem, the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my flock."

Jesus said of the people of Israel in Matthew chapter 9, verse 36, "But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion for them because they were weary and scattered like sheep having no shepherd." Turn with me, please, to John chapter 10 as we come into Jesus speaking about himself. John chapter 10, starting in verse 11: This is Jesus speaking. "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep."

"But the hireling, he who is not of the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them. The hireling flees because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my sheep and am known by my own, as the Father knows me, even so I know the Father and I lay down my life for the sheep."

"And other sheep I have which are not of this fold." That's most of us here today, the Gentiles. "Them also I must bring and they will hear my voice and there will be one flock and one shepherd." Coming back, putting this psalm back in focus here in Psalm 23, Jesus is our shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd. This is Jesus Christ, our good shepherd.

In Jesus, we shall not want. In Jesus, he makes us to lie down in green pastures. He leads us besides the still waters. Jesus restores our soul. Amen? He leads us in the paths of righteousness. Even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil for Jesus, our good shepherd, is with us. Now we come to this morning's portion of scripture. Thou, Jesus, preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.

As we come to the cross of Christ and we find new life in God's grace as we are born again of the Spirit of God, we become the children of God. Metaphorically, we become the sheep of God and he, our good shepherd. Part of what he does for us as his sheep is to prepare a table before us in the presence of our enemies.

What exactly does that mean? When you really take a step back, I've always thought of, well, it's having this big feast table and all us Christians are sitting at this table and all the bad people are around us like they're eating and I can't eat, and just this weird kind of picture. To be honest, as I read many different commentaries, almost every single guy had a different opinion on what it meant.

Some were saying that it's the Lord helping us to eat even now that we're here upon the earth in the presence of our enemies. Well, that's true. Or he prepares the table and bids us to sit down with him. Well, that's true. Another was speaking about how it would be in the afterlife and he was pointing to Lazarus and the rich man and how Lazarus was over here and the rich man was over across this gulf and was watching Lazarus in Abraham's bosom and looking on from afar.

There are a couple of other thoughts as well. Yet, it wasn't until I went to the one commentary that I've mentioned before about a man who was a shepherd of sheep for many years and then later became a pastor. He wrote a great commentary. What he wrote actually made sense in the context of a shepherd and his sheep and then spiritually the application is pretty bomb, in the words of our young culture today. I'll get a hard time for saying that later on. "Dad, you're not allowed to use the cool words that we use. It makes them uncool."

I'm going to borrow from him for a little bit, so I'm going to paraphrase from what he said because I think it was just so awesome about seeing this. If you remember last week when we were looking at verse 4 about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil and how in the late spring, early summer, the shepherds would bring their flock through the valleys as they would go to higher ground.

They were getting away from the dry ground and trying to find more moist grass and better things as they would go up. They would get to the high land through the dark valleys. It was interesting because he was talking about how the experienced shepherd would, a few weeks before they were going to make this trek with the sheep, go out and explore and make sure that everything was still as it had been.

He wanted to check that the paths that they were going to go on weren't washed out or that there weren't other things happening. They'd make sure they were clear and ready to travel. He wrote that they would especially be looking for poisonous weeds and plants that had come into the bloom during that time of spring that the sheep could eat and get sick from or even die from. They might even end up taking a different route if there were too much of these plants growing in a certain area.

Another thing that they would be looking for were any open signs or droppings of some kind of predators that would be looking to get the sheep and do damage to the sheep. Sometimes they'd go hunting and try to get them. One other thing they looked for were these things called applands, or table lands. Table lands, wait a minute, table lands, that kind of comes into our scripture a little bit.

Basically what they were, were small plateaus or mesas that were flat areas with few trees and bushes that are great places for sheep to come and eat and rest while under the watchful eyes of the shepherd or shepherds. They'd try to look for a flat area, a plateau or a mesa, so that they could come and there's no bushes, no trees, so they could keep a good eye on the sheep.

Some here might know what mesa actually means in the old Spanish. It means table. Hold on a second, table, "Thou preparest," all this stuff. It was so interesting because the shepherd went on to talk about how even when they went to the mesas, they would check for several things. They would check that the water supply was still good. In other words, no debris was floating in the water or dead animals or whatever, and they would try to clean that up as best they could.

They would also go and check again to make sure even in the mesa that there were no poisonous plants. If there were and it wasn't too bad, they might come back with a few other people and spend a day, two, three days just picking up the weeds, these certain weeds especially that could easily kill the sheep.

Lastly, to prepare the mesa or the table, they would check again for any signs of the enemy. Again, any signs that there were any kind of beasts that wanted to do the sheep harm, like wolves or bear or even wild dogs, and if they could, they would hunt them down and kill them so they wouldn't get the sheep.

What I love about this is if you take a step back and now apply this spiritually to our lives, our Lord Jesus Christ, our good shepherd, is always going before us as he's leading us on those righteous paths. Notice that he is preparing. "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemy." The Lord, our Lord Jesus, is always going before us, preparing the way. He's always going, no matter where we go.

Our God, our good shepherd, is going before us, making sure that as we studied earlier, he's leading us on the righteous paths. We already know that, but also that he's making the paths safer for us, that he's making the mesas that he's going to bring us into to rest and to grow deep in him. He's making sure that they are safe for us as well. He's preparing those places for us.

Now, it's interesting, notice these prepared paths. This is especially going to be true for us if we're actually following the paths that he's given us through his word. As we're following the paths of righteousness that we studied earlier within this psalm, as we're walking along those paths, we will come to the Lord's mesas, if you will. Those are especially prepared for us.

Look back at verse 3, it says, "He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake." As we follow those paths of righteousness, we're going to come to these mesas, these times in our lives where he says, "Hey Bill, I want you to sit to rest and to learn and to grow and to be ministered to now. I want you just to and I have come before you, I've prepared this place."

Here's the awesome part, because even if we go astray and we start going off the path to righteousness, because the Lord loves us, we're told earlier that his rod and thy staff they comfort me. Why? Because the Bible tells us that the Lord corrects those whom he loves. When he loves us, he's not going to let us to keep going off on the wrong path. He's even going to rebuke us or correct us, discipline us if necessary, because he wants us to come back to the places he's prepared for us.

It reminds me of Ephesians chapter 2, verse 10, where it says we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. God goes before us. Doesn't that bring some comfort to you? For me, I'm just like, "Wait a minute, you go before me. This is radical, Lord. Not only are you living inside of me, you're going before me to prepare the way."

Sometimes we have to be careful of putting God in the proverbial box. Each one of us has our own box. It might be some of us have a larger box, some of us have a smaller box. Well, this is God and he's kind of confined to this. A lot of times we'll confine God even to time. I remember when I was a young Christian and I was sharing with another friend of mine who was an older Christian and I was saying, "Hey, it's a bummer that the Lord doesn't know what's going to happen in the future because it would be so neat if he could tell what's going to happen in this and that."

My friend goes, "What are you talking about? God is outside of time. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever." God is outside of time. When they told me this and taught me this biblically, I was shocked. A lot of us don't realize that God knows our tomorrow. He knows what we're going to do tomorrow. He knows what we're going to say. He knows where we're going to go. He knows the rest of the paths of our lives that we're going to walk on.

My old pastor, Pastor Chuck, used to use the illustration of when you go to a parade and you get a seat and you're sitting at the parade and the Rose Bowl Parade, where we live in Southern California, was always a really big thing and a lot of people still watch it on television today. When you go to a parade, you sit at one place and you see what's happening in front of you. You kind of can see a little bit back here and a little bit, but that's it. That's us in time.

But God is almost like in the Goodyear Blimp, if you will. He sees the beginning, the end, he sees all in the middle. He's outside of this. What I love is he's going ahead of us and preparing. God is omnipotent, he's all-powerful. He is omnipresent, he is everywhere. He is a God who is in complete control.

You look in the world around us and sometimes you wonder, "Man, things are falling apart." But when you open your Bible and you read, it's like everything's falling into place. God is in control and we need to understand that. What I love about that is there's a peace that comes with that. There's a security that comes with that. "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies."

Let's apply this spiritually, just of what we just learned about mesas and table. Now think of this table as a mesa that the Lord is leading you to. Notice, before me in the presence of mine enemies. Just as the shepherd checks the table or the mesa for his sheep, so too our God, the good shepherd Jesus Christ, goes ahead and as he's preparing, he checks for things too. There are three main things that they check for.

Number one, they check the water. They check for the water supply as we talked about earlier. They make sure that it's clear, that it's vibrant, that it's healthy for the sheep. Now, we already talked about the water if you look back in verse 2 within our text here in Psalm 23, where it says, "He leadeth me beside the still waters." I'm not going to cover that again this morning. You can go back and listen or watch to that study.

But our shepherd does check the waters. He makes sure they are clean, that they are good to drink because they're him. He is our water. He fills us with living water. I love that picture. So that's the first thing. The second thing is he checks for poisonous weeds and plants. Let's look at this a little bit spiritually, but let's first talk about sheep.

Sheep are basically very dumb or dull creatures. How do you guys like being called sheep, by the way, in the Bible? I'd rather be called a lion or a tiger or something. But one thing I love about sheep, if you think about it, even for their dullness or their dumbness, it's always like a sweet dumbness. It's a sweet dullness. It's just kind of this innocent dop-de-dop-de-dop. We'll just go wherever we're going to go, eat whatever we're going to eat.

That's the thing, they're pretty stupid. They could come up and they'll see these flowers. It was interesting, the one writer who was a shepherd would talk about this certain kind of weed and there was the yellow form of this weed with yellow flowers and they were okay to eat, but if it had a white flower, it was a poisonous weed. But the sheep didn't care what color it was. It was bright, let's go eat it.

This is how stupid sheep are. They could come up, there's a whole group of them and it's like, "Hey Joe, you want to eat those? Check those out, see if it's pretty good." Joe says, "Yeah, I'll eat some of those white ones." Joe eats it, all of a sudden the poison within the weed paralyzes Joe. He flips over and he's dead. Marv right next to Joe says, "Well, I'm going to give them a try now too." He gets paralyzed, he falls over dead. Mary right there goes, "Okay, it's my turn. I'm going to try some." And that's how sheep are.

It's interesting though, again putting this spiritually, sometimes we can be that dull spiritually as well. Somebody will come up to us with a strange doctrine or they'll come up to us with gossip or some legalistic thing. "Oh, can you believe they're wearing their hair like that?" "No, I actually can't believe they're wearing their hair like that. That's wow, I don't know if that's very biblical or they're not very spiritual." But it's poison.

It's poison. It comes in in so many different fashions. I remember years ago meeting somebody who I really looked up to as a Christian and I'd known them for a year or so, and all of a sudden I come up and they're smoking a cigarette. I was like, "Oh, they're just not as spiritual as I thought they were." The Lord brought me to his word. It's like, "Bill, I'm sorry, where does it say that part about not smoking cigarettes? Oh, that's right, it's not in here."

It was poisonous. It brought these poisonous thoughts that weren't biblical thoughts, and we have to be careful with that. It's interesting, Jesus warned us throughout the scriptures about poisonous foods. We're warned throughout in the New Testament, the Old, but let's just focus on the New. Jesus warned Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, John, they all warned about false teachers who would bring poison into the church.

They would bring false teaching and it could bring death into our church. An example of this would be the Galatians. "Oh, foolish Galatians! Who has so easily bewitched you?" They're turning away from the grace so quickly and going back to the works. I was reading in the book of Acts the other day where you had these guys that were coming in. "Okay, it's great that you believe in Jesus, but now you need to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses and all this."

And it turns into this big argument with Barnabas and Saul, or Paul, at this time. They go back to the Council of Jerusalem. I love when Peter stands up. He's like, "You know guys, are you guys nuts? You're expecting them to keep the very laws that we can't keep ourselves?" And it's just like, but again these false teachings, these poisons can come into the church. Now here's the interesting thing, in the last days we're told that even this is going to be more so.

Guest (Male): This has been Simple Faith with Pastor Bill Henry from Simple Faith Calvary Chapel in Vancouver, Washington. It's our sincere hope and prayer that you've been blessed by the word you heard from Pastor Bill today. If you'd like to share today's message with someone, it's available at our website to either watch or listen, and you can even download an audio MP3 version.

We have a large number of Pastor Bill's messages archived and you can find them all at simplefaith.org. That's simplefaith.org. Click the media tab and if you'd like to contact us, just click the contact tab on our website. There's a tab at the top of our homepage where you can also send us a prayer request. You can also call us at the church at 833-BY-GRACE. That's 833-294-7223.

And if you'd like to write to us, our mailing address is Post Office Box 55, Battle Ground, Washington 98604. Here at Simple Faith Calvary Chapel, we have two services on Sunday morning at 9:00 and 10:45, and a great time of study in God's Word Wednesday night at 7:00 PM. We'd love to have you come visit us and make sure you say hi to Pastor Bill and let him know you listen to Simple Faith.

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