Comfort from the Shepherd: He Leadeth Me
April 10, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
Psalm 23 (NLT)
Last week we talked about God's provision, and this week we want to talk about God's guidance, how God guides us. We're going to read that Psalm together in unison, please open up your insert and follow along, and join us as we read this Scripture together in unison.

TheLordis my shepherd;
I have all that I need.
He lets me rest in green meadows;
he leads me beside peaceful streams.
He renews my strength.
He guides me along right paths,
bringing honor to his name.
Even when I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will not be afraid,
for you are close beside me.
Your rod and your staff
protect and comfort me.
You prepare a feast for me
in the presence of my enemies.
You honor me by anointing my head with oil.
My cup overflows with blessings.
Surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me
all the days of my life,
and I will live in the house of theLord
forever. (Psalm 23 - New Living Translation)


Last week we talked about our attitude, and when we say the 23rd Psalm as a prayer, what we're saying is, "God, I'm so grateful for the way you've blessed me."If you can imagine the 23rd Psalm as a sort of pattern or template for important decisions or thoughts that we have to make, the first one we talked about last week was to have an attitude of gratitude, of thanksgiving, of looking at life as blessed.
This week we want to talk about righteousness. "He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake." Do the right thing. Those are two pretty good steps on leading a good life, to see your life as blessed, and second, to do the right thing.We're going to talk about what is righteousness, how we find righteousness and why we find righteousness.


Let’s pray. O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel. Then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
When I was here as the pastor to youth, sometime between 1982 and 1984, I don't know when the actual sermon was preached, but Dr. Walter Underwood, who was the senior pastor, preached a sermon with an interesting illustration. It's one that has stuck with me ever since, just that single little snippet I come back to often.
He had walked into the office ofEmory Carl, who was an attorney, who was a member of the church and who passed away in 2002.He was in the waiting room, and he overheard Mr. Carl on the phone in his office.Mr. Carl was saying, "Yes, sir... yes, sir...that would be legal... yes, sir, we could do that. It would be legal for us to do that." Then he paused, and said, "But, sir, it wouldn't be right."

And at that moment Dr. Underwood knew that Mr. Carl would be his attorney, that this was a man who was going to do what was right.
We all want to do what's right. The Scriptural term, the Hebrew word for righteousness, is sedech, a concept that is very much like our English version of righteousness though it's really a bit fuller than that. Sedech means both a personal holiness, a spiritual piety if you will, righteousness as being spiritually correct and pious. It means being ethically right, and it also speaks to a social holiness, a matter of social justice, of being a part of living relationships in a just and right way.
One the reasons I'm proud to be a United Methodist is that our heritage has long had this sort of dual emphasis of both personal holiness and a social holiness. John Wesley talked about "spreading scriptural holiness throughout the land." And by that he meant both this personal holiness and a social holiness as he preached about the conditions that the coal miners had to face.It's this very broad understanding of doing what's right.
So we all want to do what's right.I was listening to an audio leadership development thing that was given to me by a member of our church. And the man who was preaching, or speaking, was talking about great leaders. He said, "Great leaders lead from a place of deep conviction. They get clear about what their deeply held beliefs are, what their convictions are. And those deeply held convictions and beliefs lead to principles, and those principles then get applied in leadership."


I thought to myself how we look for leaders who seem not to sort of waver but are operating out a place of deeply held convictions. They want to follow sedech - to do what's right.
If that's the case, if almost everyone you talk to, I don't care what their religion is, whether they're spiritual or non-spiritual, religious or non-religious, Christian or some other denomination, some other religion, they talk about doing what's right. If that's the case, why is it that so much of the time we don't do what's right,that so many people don't do what's right?
Well, I think there's a couple of possibilities.Sometimes we know what's right, and we just don't do it. We have a million rationalizations why it's okay, it's not that big a deal. I can use 50 cents of company postage, because it's only 50 cents. I'm not stealing $1000, I'm stealing 50 cents. So what's the big deal? In between services I got a text, "I have a company pen in my purse. I'm so sorry."
We find ways to say, "But the Scripture says... he who is faithful with little will be faithful with much... and vice versa." So we find all sorts of reasons. And sometimes we just don't want to. Every religious teaching says that what's right for us to do is to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, visit the one in prison, and house the homeless - every faith. But sometimes we think, "I just want to spend my money on something else. That’s not my job, man." You know its right. If I ask you, "Is that the right thing for us to do, you'd say, 'Yes, that's the right thing for us to do. That's what Christian people should do.'"We might argue about whether it's the government, or whether it's the church or whatever, but everyone would say we ought to help people. "Helping people is the right thing to do, but maybe not me."So sometimes we know what the right thing to do is, but we don't do it.
Let me say that as I've grown older I find myself in gray more often, not just in hair color, but things that seemed black and white when I was younger don't seem so much black and white anymore. Maybe when I was younger, I was more passionate or something, and now I'm more tempered.I feel kind of like one of those rocks that have had water flowing over it, and it kind of rubs off the edges a little bit.
So there are people who pour into my office, saying things like, "Pastor, I'm in a marriage that is not good. It's not good. We've been incounseling for years, and it's not getting any better. We've prayed about it, and we've worked at it. No one's cheating on anyone, and noone's abusing anyone, but it's justnot a holy marriage, and it's not honoring God. And yet at the same thing it doesn't seem the right thing to do to divorce. I don't see that that's the right thingto do. So Pastor, what should I do?"
Or maybe a young girl who comes and says, "I've fallen in love with this young man and he's awesome. He’s awesome, and I love him so much. But he's not a Christian. And yet, he's the best person I've ever met in my life. He is more like Jesus than any of the Christians I have ever dated. He is so much like Jesus. And yet I want us to grow up in faith together. I know he's going to ask me to marry him, and I don't know what to do. Help me, Pastor, will you?"
Recently a man comes to my office and says that his company is struggling, and he's trying to decide whether to lay off a whole bundle of workers. He said, "If we can keep them, we're not going to go bankrupt by keeping them. But I can't decide if my biggest responsibility is to the shareholders and to maintain shareholder value, or is it to my employees and my colleagues? What does the Bible tell me about this, Pastor?"
Well I can tell him that it's not in Leviticus. I don't know. We want a check list - to say, "Do this. Do this. Do this." And it doesn't sort of jump out at us as we struggle to figure out what is the right thing to do.
I will tell you that in my personal life there have been decisions that I don't know what the right thing to do is. I pray about it, and I pray about it, and I read Scripture, and I ask God what to do. I find myself wrapped around the axle about it. And finally I keep waiting for this clear voice to say, "Do this! This is the right thing to do." And the voice never comes. So finally you have to just make that decision. And you step out, and as St. Augustine said, "You sin boldly."What he means is that you just trust the grace of God and do the best you can and know that God is a God of grace and love, and you go for it. But the wholetime you think, "I'm not sure this is the right thing or not."
And I will tell you that there are things that ten years ago were deeply held convictions for me, deeply held convictions that now I've come to believe were not right.So this idea that everything is so clear and if we'll just do what's right because we know it's right and so easy, it's just not right. Here's why I tell you all this. Because yes, we want to do what's right but the truth is we need a shepherd. We need a shepherd.
Can you imagine how conflicted the disciples were?I've been thinking about this recently. So they've been taught since they were little what's right and what's wrong, according to the law. Then here comes Jesus, and he says, "We can heal on the Sabbath. It's not a big deal."And he says, "Let's eat with sinners and tax collectors."
We're so used to that, we've read about it so much that we don't even realize. Can you imagine that if you're a good religious Jew, and then this rabbi comes in and says, "No, no, you can do these things. That's what we do," can you imagine the conflict that you'd experience?Look, we need a shepherd, someone we can say, "Okay, I need help."We need to learn to follow the shepherd that God has sent. So what does it mean?
PhilipKeller wrote a book 35 years ago called A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. He was a sheep rancher, and hetalked about sheep. And what he said was that if you put a sheep on a patch of land they will graze that patch of land till it's bare, completely bare. Then they won't go anywhere, they'll just stay there on that bare patch of land. They won’t move. You have to take and move them over to a better patch of land, and then they'll eat there. They will walk the exact same pathway even though it leads no place. They will go down into dangerous places where it's so clear that they couldn't possibly get out of, butthey’ll justgo down there.
So we need a shepherd - we're just like those sheep. We’re creatures of habit. We keep doing the same things we've always done, and what we need is a shepherd to guide us.
Now to follow the shepherd, the one who leads us, means three things. If you're a note taker these are three things in point two. First, it means that we follow the pattern that Jesus taught us when he came. He said, "Here's how you live."Our shepherd came to live among us. John 10 talks about Jesus as the Good Shepherd who came to live among us. You can't shepherd sheep from the ranch house. You can't open the window and say, "Y'all go over there!"You have to go down and be among the sheep, and Jesus came to be among us to show us how to live. And our tendency is to live one way and Jesus says, "That's not going to work. This is the way we live."If someone strikes you on your right cheek, your tendency is to do what?To hit him back. Jesus says, "That's now how we live. Let me show you how we live. If someone strikes you on the right cheek you offer him the other cheek as well. Someone hurts you. Do you seek revenge? No, what we do is we forgive 7 times 70. If someone asks for your coat, what do we do? We offer him our cloak as well.It's a counter-intuitive way of life. It’s not built into who we are. The shepherd has to show us how to live if we choose to follow the shepherd, to live as the shepherd showed us.Can you imagine what would happen if we as followers of Jesus actually decided to live like Jesus showed us?My goodness!
Here's the second thing. To follow the shepherd means to have such a close relationship with that shepherd that you can follow his voice even without command. So it's not that the shepherd says, "Do this! Do that!" It's that you follow his voice. That's what John 10 says, the sheep know his voice.
When I pray I keep wanting to hear thisbig "Yes!" or a big "No!"or "Do this! Do that! Don't do this, don't do that!"I pray, and I study the Scripture, and it really seldom comes for me, I'll be honest with you.Here's how it works best for me. You remember that game we played as kid where you say, "Hot!" or "Cold!"Someone hides something, and we try to find it, and when we get near it they say, "You’re getting hot!" Or if we go away from it they say, "You're getting cold!"That's the way it works for me. So I pray, "God I'm not sure what to do." So I don't hear anything and so I go, "All right."And he goes, "No, no, cold!"So that wasn't a good plan. It didn't work well. So I try something else, and it gets better. It's almost like you can feel the prompts.
Here's another illustration. I keep looking for analogies to help us grasp this. I've had four daughters get married and we have receptions, and we get music and people dance. The vast majority of people dance like I do which is badly. You just go out and you move your body.


I saw on TV the image of one that reminds me of how I dance. The dance is called "The Inflatable Man" which is like the little guy on the top of the deal that kinds of flops around with the wind. That's kind of like my dancing. I watch my poor kids as they’re at their event.
But then you always have that annoying couple who know how to dance. They come out, and you're out there looking silly, and they obviously have done this together for years and years every Friday night. They know how to dance and just move smoothly and at first you think, "Aw, come on, you're making us look so bad."But then you watch them and you think, "That's so beautiful." It’s clear that one of them is leading - I'm sure it's the guy – and they're moving around. That's the way it's supposed to be I guess. But it's like you can't even tell. They are so fused together, their relationship is so connected. You don't hear the one leading say "Left! Right!" There’s not that. They just move.
We're called on to give ourselves so completely and fully to this relationship we have with our shepherd, to spend our energy, our hearts, our time, to study the Scripture, to pray, to give ourselves fully to the work so that that relationship becomes close enough, and we just find ourselves following. It's not a matter of laws that you have to check off. It's a matter of having that relationship in which the Holy Spirit fills you and you move, you and God together. That's the goal - what it means to follow the shepherd.
There's one other thing, and I don't want you to miss it. In the New Testament righteousness is not something that we gain by being good people. Righteousness is a gift bestowed upon us by Christ. When you are in Christ you are deemed righteous. You are clothed in the righteousness of Jesus. When God looks at you, God does not see sinner Tom, God sees the righteousness of Jesus, of Christ within you. Philippians 3:16 says it this way, and this is a verse that has meant so much to me. Paul is speaking of the righteousness of Christ in the chapter ahead. He says, "Only let us live up to that which we have already attained."
You are righteous. Now go live that way. You have been declared pure and spotless. Now go live.You see, to be lead in the "paths of righteousness" is to livethe righteousness you have been given as a gift.
One more thing before we close. Why? Why do we do this? Why be righteous? Why walk in the "paths of righteousness?"Is it so that your life will prosper?When we were small our parents told us, "Just tell the truth, and do what's right, and everything will go better."Maybe not. That's not why, that's not what this Scripture says.
Do you do it because that way you'll go heaven? I hope we've been in a grace-based church long enough to understand that this isn’t the case. But what we were taught - Mother Teresa is up on top and Adolph Hitler on the bottom as good people to bad people, and somewhere about half way up there's a line. You have a sort of line in the middle, and if you're above the line, then you go to Heaven and if you're below the line you don't. Somehow that mythology got built into our mindsets.
You don't try to be righteous so you can go to heaven. Why? What does the Scripture say? "He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake," for him, not for us. Matthew 5:16 says, "So let your light shine before others, so they will see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven." Not to you, but to your Father who is in heaven.
In our church in Sugar Land we built a new lobby. The church was upstairs on kind of the top of a hill they'd built. They put the sanctuary up on top of it, and you actually walked up some steps on the outside at first, and you walked in from the outside. That wasn't really very good so we wanted a lobby, a narthex, so we built one downstairs on the bottom, and we had these steps that went up to a little landing and then into the sanctuary.The problem was that because of the height of the sanctuary, to get the lobby in and to have it kind of nudge underneath the sanctuary, you had to go three feet underground. You had to go down three feet. So when you came in to the lobby from the outside you came in and went down three steps to the lobby.
So we hadn't been open for a week, and when you came it in it was a big beautiful incredible room. You'd walk in and say, "Wow!" but you were looking up and didn't notice the three steps, so you'd fall. In the first week five people fell like that.So immediately we had to put out yellow caution tape. Then we put bars in so that people like sheep would walk in and bump into the bars. They they'd have to walk around them to get to the steps, because it was such a bad system.
But what we want when people see righteousness is for them to look up, not to look at us but to look at God.
As a pastor I've spent time with families when someone dies, and we talk about the person who's died. I'm now at the point where I think a bit about what my children will say when they meet with a pastor about me,when they gather together to talk about Pop, what are they going to say? I'd like to believe that they would say, "You know Pop. He always did the right thing." They're not going to say that. Honestly, I've been transparent enough with them about my life, and they're not going to say that. But here's what I do hope they say."You know Pop. The shepherd never let him go. The shepherd always brought him back to the right paths, never abandoned him. Always led him. What a great shepherd."
"He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake."
Let's pray. Lord God, we confess to you that we don't always do the right thing. Sometimes we know what's right and we don’t do it, and sometimes we're not even sure what right is. Sometimes we think we know what's right, we're just sure of it, but the truth is that it's not what you've said to us, it's what we've chosen to claim. Forgive us, God, we're like sheep, and we need a shepherd. So take hold of us, and guide us. Show us the right way. Help us to grow so that we might attain the righteousness that you have given to us as a gift. We promise that we will give you all the glory. In the name of Christ we pray.Amen.