Comfort from the Shepherd: He Restoreth Our Soul
April 17, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
Psalm 23 (The Message)
God, my shepherd!
I don’t need a thing.
You have bedded me down in lush meadows,
you find me quiet pools to drink from.
True to your word,
you let me catch my breath
and send me in the right direction.
Even when the way goes through
Death Valley,
I’m not afraid
when you walk at my side.
Your trusty shepherd’s crook
makes me feel secure.
You serve me a six-course dinner
right in front of my enemies.
You revive my drooping head;
my cup brims with blessing.
Your beauty and love chase after me
every day of my life.
I’m back home in the house ofGod
for the rest of my life.

Good morning! Welcome to St. Luke’s! I’m so glad you’re here today and that you’re worshipping with us. If you would take the attendance pad that’s somewhere there in your pew and sign in, you can let us know you’re here. Especially if you’re a guest with us, a special welcome to you.
We have an orchestra every Sunday here ...we don’t really. That would be cool, but we don’t. This is a special day and these great musicians are here this morning. Our orchestra, our amazing choir, they have been in all three of our traditional services. It’s really awesome.
Join me in prayer. O God, open us up. You have something in these words, your word in the midst of these words. Open our eyes that we might see you at work around us and our ears that we might hear what you have for us. Open our hearts, God, that we might feel. Then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
A number of years ago a young man came into our office mid day. He had graduated from college and went to graduate school and was now working for an investment bank. He had been working seven days a week, eighteen hours a day for some period of time for months and months. He had reached the end of his rope. He had just reached that point where he was going to break.
Dr. Christians dealt with him most of the time. We got the Nick Finnegan Counseling Center involved and helped him find resources to help cope. I couldn’t help but think as I processed the fact that this young man had come into our church, the fact that he was sort of a caricature of who most of us are. Most of us want to be successful. We work hard, and we try our hardest to do what we need to do. We have high expectations for ourselves. We want to accomplish things. We feel like if we just worked a little harder, whether that be a little harder at home or a little harder at work, or even a little harder in our spiritual lives, somehow we would achieve more, and we would become enough. Somehow if we just worked at, it we would become enough.
So my message for you today is really pretty simple. It is that you are already enough, and there’s a time that you have to stop and realize that you’re God’s child, and you’re already enough.
I got somehow sucked into a documentary on PBS, a two hour documentary the other day on “Saving Otter 501,” yes, two hours watching them save a sea otter. I don’t know how I spent that much time, but none the less it was very interesting. On this Monterrey Bay aquarium they have a whole program designed to save the sea otters from extinction. And they find these otters that have washed up on shore, and they really trace one little otter, Otter 501. And they find him, and he’s picked up, and they take him in and have to work with him, constant care 24 hours a day someone’s working with him and grooming him to try to take care of him. I just kept thinking of the people who wash up on our beaches who are just exhausted like those little otters, just exhausted and someone needs to scoop them up and take care of them.
There are three words in the Greek language for life. You probably know this. There’s bios, which is our physical life, biology comes from that. There’s psyche, which is our inner life. The word psychology comes from that. And then there’s the word zoe. And that has to do with that abundant eternal life, the spark of God that has been put within us that is sort of life in its fullest. It’s a much gooier term, a little more difficult to get your hands around.
In the Hebrew language, which Psalm 23 is written, there are also different words for life, and we’re not as familiar with those. There is the one that’s used most commonly, the word chaim, which you would be familiar with if you watched “Fiddler on the Roof.” I think there’s a chaim song in there, “To life.” The other word is nefesh, and it’s translated about half the time as soul and half the time as life. And we think in Greek terms where the soul is separate from the body, and it kind of leaves the body. That isn’t a Hebrew understanding. The Hebrew understanding is that soul is that life force within us. It is sometimes translated as passion, or zeal. It is that twinkle in your eye. I’ll tell you actually the best image of the translation would be like we would say, “Man, that guy has real soul.” There’s something in him, there’s a power, a zest, a zeal, an abundant way of living that you think, “Man, that’s great.”
So the Scripture says, “He restoreth my soul, my life… he gives me back that sense of zeal.” Sometimes we need our life restored. We just get weary, we lose that spark.
There’s a medical word that is used in psychology to diagnosis a symptom of depression, and the word is anhedonia. You can see in the middle of it the word that hedonism comes from. It means loss of pleasure. The things that used to really make you happy that you used to get joy and pleasure from don’t seem to do that anymore for you. So you have the symptoms of anhedonia. And sometimes it means that you do struggle with clinical depression, and you need to get treatment. There’s medicine and therapy and all sorts of deals to deal with clinical depression. I’ve walked that walk myself.
But sometimes it doesn’t mean that, sometimes it just means you’re worn out. You’re tired and depleted and exhausted, and you’ve been on the treadmill, and you need to have your soul restored.
Sheep always sleep on their stomach; they don’t lay on their side, so if you come across a sheep on the side there’s something wrong. The shepherd would even have to go stand the sheep up, because the sheep can’t get up when they get down on their side. So they’ll lay there and flail about until they’re just exhausted and will just lay there. They refer to a sheep that’s fallen on the side as a sheep that is cast, a cast sheep. The Psalmist uses that image in Psalm 42, “Why are you cast down, O my soul? Why are you disquieted within me?” Psalm 42 says, “I used to lead the procession into the house of God. I used to be so full of joy. Why are you cast down, O my soul? I’m depleted and I’m exhausted.”
The spiritual says, “I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.” Dorsey, the jazz musician, wrote a hymn that we sing as a Gospel hymn, “Precious Lord, take my hand. Sometimes I feel discouraged, think my work’s in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.” He restoreth my soul.
So how do we get restored? Let me just lift up two things that are in the Scripture right ahead of it. It says, “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He makes me lie down in green pastures.” It doesn’t say, “he lets me lie down” or “he encourages me to lie down” or “he makes lying down available to me.” No, it’s “he makes me like down in green pastures.” Look, it’s time to stop sometimes. All of us need rest.
The sheep would begin to graze at 4 a.m. and no one really knows why, how they know that’s the case. It’s always about two hours before dawn that the sheep begin to graze, so they can get something of the dew if there is any. There’s not a lot of dew in Israel, but if there is any, the sheep can get the dew off the grass as well. They graze till about 10 a.m. and then they stop. Before they can go somewhere and drink, they have to let their food digest in their stomach. So the sheep actually find a place and it makes them lie down. It forces them to rest.
Sometimes we have to be made to lie down. We know sleep is important, it’s good for memory. All the tests show that if you learn a task then sleep, you’re more likely to remember it than if you learn a task and try to remember it without sleeping. I find that interesting. Apparently it helps us order our brains. It’s good for mood, for weight, for blood pressure. My physician has said to me that not only do I have to eat less fat, but I have to sleep more. It’s good for your blood pressure.
So many things we know, but we just can’t seem to stop. The technology assaults us constantly. We’re going faster and faster and faster, doing more and more and more all the time. It’s not how we’re made to be.
Gordon MacDonald, the great Christian writer, writes these words: “God built a rhythm of rest and work into human existence. Rest wasn’t meant to be a luxury but rather a necessity for those who want to grow and mature.” He maketh me to lie down. It is a discipline that makes us decide “I’m going to go to bed.”
So I want to give you permission today to say, “No.” Unless it’s me calling. I want you to say, “no” to some things. You know you don’t have to do everything.
Part of the purpose of the Sabbath is to establish a right sense of our relationship with God. It’s not just to give us rest. I want to get this straight. It’s to remind us that God does pretty well without us sometimes, that we are not that important. That God has it well in hand, and we get to be a part of it. But there has already been a Messiah, and it isn’t us. So I want to give you permission to do some things better by not doing some other things. Say, “no.” I want to give you permission to stop.
I heard a great story this week about a college professor who walked into his class in late afternoon/evening and he was going to teach the class. He had windows all across the western side of his room and he looked out to see the sun was setting in a magnificent, beautiful sunset. It was stunning. He glanced over there and then at the students who had their laptops all ready to take notes. He said, “I want you to close your laptops. I want you to turn and look at the window, and we’re going to watch the sun set.”
So they all turned, and he said, “Put your phones away, we’re going to watch the sun set.” He said, “It was beautiful, magnificent, and I looked at the students, and you would have thought they were going to die, to just have to sit there for twenty minutes and watch the sun set.” You know what? That would have been me. I would have thought, “I want to watch the sun set,” but then I thought, ”But, I could be doing this, or I could be doing that.” I want to give you permission to stop. God maketh us to lie down in green pastures.
Here’s the other thing. “He leadeth me beside the still waters.” Sheep won’t drink from running water, so they have to find where the water pools up and let the sheep drink at that place. He leads us to that place where we can be replenished, refreshed.
I wonder what refreshes you. Maybe being with friends. I hope you have some people who refresh you. Every Wednesday morning at 6:30 we have Men’s Life in the Fellowship Hall. Actually it’s on hiatus till the fall. It just finished. But all these guys gather round tables in the Fellowship Hall every Wednesday morning at the crack of dawn, and I teach for a little while. But I recognize that most of the guys, I would say almost all of the guys, are not there because I’m teaching them something but because of the guys around their table, the people who refresh their souls, their friends, the people with whom they can talk about things that matter, people who will encourage them and lift them up.
Sometimes we need a Stephen Minister. The Stephen Ministry program is one of our ministries here at St. Luke’s which is just a one-on-one caring ministry. It’s people who meet with you once a week and seek to restore your soul, to refresh you, just to listen.
I think I’ve told you before that I have a friend who was in Vietnam. He was a marine, and the Marines are served by the medics from the Navy. And the Navy medics are called corpsmen. And that whenever a soldier was wounded, the other soldiers would come to the side of the wounded soldier, and the call would be, “Corpsman up!” In other words, “we need a medic!” Not “Soldier down” but “Corpsman up!” So he and I had kind of a code that when we needed to talk to one another we’d send an e-mail saying, “Corpsman up! I need someone, just need someone who’ll listen, because I’ve got some stuff to gripe about. I’m wounded here. I need a little help.” Sometimes we need a friend to restore our souls.
But what the Scripture actually says is that God himself will restore our souls. What we need is to drink from that water that will never make us thirsty again. Jesus finds the woman at the well in the Gospel of John and says, “I will give you water so you will never thirst again.”
Dr. Martha Vaughan is here, and on Sundays after church she’ll often tell me on the way out, “Oh, pastor, I was so blessed by today’s sermon.” And I always say, “Thank you, thank you.” It’s always awesome, I love it when she’s coming through, because I know she’ll say, “Pastor, I was so blessed.”
But about half the time she will say “Pastor, are you drinking enough water?” First, I thought, “That’s a weird question.” But you know, I’ve come to understand it’s not just about physical water. I’ve come to understand that the question is, am I drinking the spiritual water that will restore my soul?
The truth is that in the church business this sometimes feels more like work than worship. It’s what I do for a living. Sometimes reading Scripture is more like planning a sermon, or a Bible study than restoring my soul. At some point you have to step aside and say, “What are you doing to restore your soul, to worship, to bask in the very presence of God?” So you focus again on your personal prayer life, not praying for the church especially, but just for yourself, for your family, for the people you love to focus on reading Scripture not for a lesson, but just for your soul.
Those little sea otters? It’s kind of weird the way it works. First when they started rescuing these sea otters they would get in the water with them, play with them, and try and act like they were mamma sea otters, so they could show them how to function and survive. But it never worked. The sea otters would develop this connection with their trainer and would never be able to be on their own in the wild. They never seemed to be able to separate.
So they wear these masks like you see a surgeon or a welder wear, to cover their faces. They also wear big gowns, and they’re not allowed to talk at all to the otters. And they don’t name the otters. That’s why it’s Otter 501. It’s because they don’t want to develop any kind of bond with the otter. They want to wait until the otter can do that with a surrogate mother otter when it’s old enough.
Our God isn’t anything like that. Our God wants us to develop that kind of bond with him. It’s because he’s never going to set us loose in the wild on our own. He’ll always be with us, always be connected, and always be there to restore our souls.
So, friends, if you are depleted and weary I pray that God might pour himself into you and restore your soul.
In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.