Sermon Series: He Calls His Own Sheep By Name

I Shall Not Be in Want

Isaiah 40:6-11; Psalm 23:1b

January 15, 2006

Dr. Larry D. Thorson

^{Isa 40:6} A voice says, “Cry out.” And I said, “What shall I cry?”

“All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.

^{Isa 40:7} The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the LORD blows on them. Surely the people are grass.

^{Isa 40:8} The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.”

^{Isa 40:9} You who bring good tidings to Zion, go up on a high mountain. You who bring good tidings to Jerusalem, ⁹³ lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the towns of Judah, “Here is your God!”

^{Isa 40:10} See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power, and his arm rules for him. See, his reward is with him, and his recompense accompanies him.

^{Isa 40:11} He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.

^{Ps 23:1} The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.

Today we’re in the second of an eight week series entitled “He Calls His Sheep By Name”. It’s a study about sheep and their shepherds. The Bible says in so many places that we are like sheep, followers in need of a shepherd. Among most flock there are sheep who want to be leaders, they want to shepherd the other sheep but they don’t have the well being of the sheep in mind. It’s important for sheep to learn the voice of their shepherd early on and follow that voice only. My desire in this study is that we meet the Good Shepherd, Jesus the Christ and learn to recognize and follow his voice only.

We pastors are not the Good Shepherd. Just ask the fine folks of Plano, Texas how good their shepherd was in abandoning them for archrival California. We’re more like border collies. Our job is to do what the Good Shepherd orders us to do and usually that is to keep you rounded up and moving within hearing distance of the Good Shepherd.

The most famous sheep reference in the Bible is the 23^rd Psalm. You have to use your imagination when reading the 23^rd Psalm because David wrote the first half of it from the perspective of the sheep. It was as if he was a sheep talking through a fence to an abused sheep owned by someone else in the next pen. As a sheep he was so proud and happy that his shepherd was the Lord. We’ll learn the reasons why in the Psalm.

The first reason he was so happy we learned from Jesus in John 10 is that the Lord is a good shepherd because he always looks out for the welfare of his sheep. You may have heard the saying that a parent is only as happy as her saddest child. A good shepherd is only as content as his least content sheep. Jesus is that good shepherd because he’s always looking out for your welfare not his.

Now that may not seem like a big thing to you who were raised by loving parents and married a loving spouse. But some people spend their whole life being treated as a commodity rather than as a person. Hardly anyone bothers to learn their name. I remember eating in my parents’ favorite restaurant years ago and noticing that even though they had eaten their probably at least twice a month for ten years, no one knew their names. They had come to expect that living in the big city of San Jose. I thought how sad. That restaurant is gone now. But the Good Shepherd calls his sheep by name.

This morning we move on in the 23^rd Psalm but before we do I have to clear up a misunderstanding from the way I originally memorized it. I brought with me this morning a Bible which says it was presented to Larry Dean Thorson by Pastor C.F. Crouser on December 2, 1956 on the occasion of his baptism.” I was two months and one day old when I received this Bible. It’s a King James Version. It didn’t get much use because my family didn’t go to church much in my early years. The 23^rd Psalm in the 1507 Elizabethan King James English reads like this “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” That’s what I memorized in the third grade.

The problem with saying “I shall not want” is that it sounds as if having wants is a bad thing. Harold Kushner describes in his book “The Lord is My Shepherd” an encounter he heard between a dying woman in a hospital and her pastor. The pastor not knowing what to say in the awkwardness of the situation opened his Bible, reached out to take her hand, and began to read the 23^rd Psalm; “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Kushner says “The woman’s eyes flickered open for a moment as she summoned up the energy to whisper, “But pastor, I do want!”

Generations of people heard these words and thought that if they had enough faith in God, all desire and longing for more would be extinguished. But that woman lying on her deathbed in the hospital had lots of wants like living to see her grandchildren grow up and marry.

A translation closer to what David meant is “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want”. Imagine being a sheep with lots of good, green grass to eat on. There’s a watering hole with plenty of clean water for you. At night there’s a safe pen to protect you from jackals. You’re living the dream. But next door the sheep are walking on dirt in crowded conditions and a mud hole for drinking. They’re pathetic to look at. You think, “because the Lord is my shepherd, I have everything I need.” That’s contentment.

The message of the 23^rd Psalm is that if you don’t have something, no matter how much you crave it you don’t really need it. If you needed it, God would have provided you with it. Like the sign in the small town general store that said “If we don’t have it, you’re better off without it.”

The problem today is that if one store doesn’t have it, probably another one in town does and definitely the internet will. My first church out of seminary was located in an aging mill town of Danville, Virginia, population around 40,000. Once a big tobacco processing and textile mill city both industries are in the process of disappearing from American shores. There was a lot of poverty there. We needed a car so we bought a brand new, stripped down two door 1983 Ford Escort with a 4-speed transmission and no air conditioning. We loved that little car and because it was new, it was so much nicer than a lot of cars in town. But then we went on vacation to see my parents in San Jose where we were bombarded with ads for BMW’s and Mercedes and suddenly our little Escort didn’t look so good. Those advertisers are paid a lot of money to entice us and make us want to buy their product. They know we are what I call entice able creatures and that’s another thing that makes us similar to sheep.

Phillip Keller in his book A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 tells of one sheep that was particularly entice able—a ewe that he called Mrs. Gadabout. Keller’s pasture was on the seashore. He put his fence right out on the sand, out into the surf so the sheep could come down to the ocean. He thought they couldn’t get around it and into the next pasture. The fence was dividing his from someone else’s flock.

But Mrs. Gadabout, somehow or another, found out that she could get around that fence at low tide. She kept getting out, night after night; and he would have to go get her. He said from his point of view there was no reason for her to do that because his pasture was nice and green and the guy's next door was terribly brown. It was not a matter of quality. It was simply something that was ingrained in the personality of this sheep—that she wanted what she saw. The way it looked to her, greener pastures was always across the other side of the fence.

He said that this was one of the best ewes he had ever owned. She was big, sturdy, strong, and never got sick. She had lambs that were prizes to behold. Then he found out that she was teaching her lambs how to get around at low tide too. He decided that the only thing he could do was to get rid of her, because eventually she would probably teach the whole flock how to escape. He said one morning, despite his feelings of affection for this very fine animal; he got rid of her. It was better for her to go than it was to have her teaching the whole flock how to escape.

But I don’t think being entice able is a bad thing. God designed us to want more. That’s how we’ve come up with the cure for the diseases that we have. I like how Kushner says “if there are empty spaces in your life, dreams that never came true, people who were once there but are gone now, the purpose of those empty spaces is not to frustrate you or to brand you as a loser. The empty spaces may be there to give you room to grow, to dream, to yearn, and to teach you to appreciate what you have because it may not have been there yesterday and may not be there tomorrow.” P.36

I like Kushner’s version of the second line in the Psalm “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall often want. I shall yearn, I shall long, I shall aspire. I shall continue to miss the people and the abilities that are taken from my life as loved ones die and skills diminish. I shall probe the empty spaces in my life like a tongue probing a missing tooth. But I will never feel deprived or diminished if I don’t get what I yearn for, because I know how blessed I am by what I have.” P.36

“I shall not be in want.” This past week a number of highly talented college underclassmen declared their eligibility to leave college and play professional football. I saw an article in the LA Times where Matt Lienert, 23 year old quarterback for the USC Trojans has hired a marketing company to market his name and face. That together with the NFL football contract he’ll sign experts say could net him 40 million dollars right out of college this year.

I can’t even imagine making 40 million dollars in a year. I can’t imagine waking up in the morning and driving by a new car dealer, pulling in and writing a check for any car I wanted on that lot, Then jumping in that new car and driving toward the ocean where I see a hilltop villa with 10,000 square feet of living space, tennis courts, 12 car garage, with views of the ocean and being able to call my accountant to pay cash for the house on a whim. What a dream.

My imagination has often thought that it would be so nice if someone like Matt Lienert would join our church and tithed on that 40 million dollars. Imagine a million extra dollars in our budget every year. I’d be urging us to buy land and on it build a new Valley Restart Shelter on five acres with landscaping, fountains, apartments for the homeless and a beautiful dinning room. We’d build houses for Habitat in our valley. We’d build houses in Tijuana. I’d have big plans.

But that’s not God’s plans or God would provide what we needed to fulfill those plans. For a number of years Martha and I lived on a faith salary; that is we lived on the amount of mission support money we could raise while I was working in a rescue mission. We did that in San Jose where everything is extremely expensive. We never got rich but somehow the money to pay the mortgage and buy groceries and clothes was always there. We were never in want.

In Chino Hills we started a new church with little money, people or land. Land was so expensive there that having a capital campaign to buy it wasn’t even practical. So the leaders decided that for a capital campaign they would raise money to build houses for the poor in Tijuana. We did that from the very beginning when the church started. In five years we never, ever missed a paycheck, a rent check or went without something that we needed. God always provided what that church needed.

I look at this church. A year ago right now you were looking at a $30,000 potential deficit for 2005. We finished the year in the black. God provided what we needed. I believe that if we say “The Lord is my shepherd” we also have to say that my shepherd will provide everything that I need but not necessarily everything I want. Contentment doesn’t mean that we don’t want more.

Our prayer team that meets on Wednesday mornings at 9:15 has been learning about prayer that changes things. The first step to prayer that changes things is to discern what God wants and then to pray that want into completion. We have normally prayed for people’s healing which we will continue to do. But we’re now starting to seek God’s vision for what could be done here. The first thing that has surfaced are the chimes in the carillon. At one time bells rang in our neighborhood gently reminding people who live around here that God is present.

On Christmas Eve a man called our church and Pastor Scott answered the phone. The man lived in the neighborhood and his brother had recently been killed somewhere in the LA area. He said he remembered hearing the bells from our church and wondered if we could ring the bells in honor of his brother. It was a strange and unusual request but it came at a time when the concept of our carillon bells playing again was surfacing in our prayer meetings.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want because he provides everything that I need. Can you say that about your personal life? Do you believe that the shepherd will provide everything you need? When you needed a pastor did God provide a pastor for you, even quickly? When you needed money to pay the staff salaries and the utilities did God provide what you needed?

But you have to step out in faith and trust the good shepherd. If you haven’t given up control of your life to Jesus why not do it today and now. Say “Lord Jesus, I know that you are the Good Shepherd and will provide everything that I need. I give you my life, my resources including my money and trust that you will always provide me with what I need. Thank you, I receive you as my savior, amen.”