THE GOOD SHEPHERD
MIKE CUNNINGHAM
EASTER SUNDAY
MARCH 31, 2013

It only took about five minutes for me to realize that it was an answer to my prayers. I had been asking God to bless me with a special Easter message for a couple of months, and, as of Palm Sunday morning, I was still waiting for Him to respond. That afternoon I opened the gift that Laurette had given me after church and saw that it was just what I needed. The title of the book is, “The Lord Is My Shepherd” by Robert Morgan. I’ll be quoting excerpts from it today.

I hope I haven’t given any of you the impression that I was overly anxious and starting to worry about the sermon because nothing could be further from the truth, Another thing I want to bring to your attention is that although God gave it to me when I accepted the gift of forgiveness of my sins over forty years ago I’m sorry to say that it’s only been during the last several years that I’ve been using it properly. That’s why I believe that the gift of prayer is one of the most underutilized gifts that every Christian receives the moment of his or her conversion. In his book,”With Joseph in the University of Adversity,” Jerry Parks gives his formula for praying effectively.

My Prayer Prescription

The ingredients for effective prayer have been carefully tested and proven effective for a variety of ailments. For best results, take several times daily, and continue as necessary.

Directions for use:

Take daily, BEFORE MEALS, with several glasses of patience. If you miss a dose, you may safely double up. Best taken in kneeling position BEFORE symptoms develop. Most effective with regular use. If you do not see improvement immediately, you may need to supplement it with 1-2 tablets of trust supplied without cost from your Great Physician. Unlimited refills. NO EXPIRATION DATE.

Active ingredients:

Powered persistence……………………………………………………….14%

Thick and sticky faith……………………………………………….27%

Whole nuggets of specific request…………………….5%

Emulsified Gratitude toward God (EGG)…….….19%

Naturally flavored with the aroma of Christ’s will.35%

Sealed in the timed-release capsule of God’s Sovereignty……………………………………………….100%

CAUTION: WASH LIFE THOROUGHLY BEFORE HANDLING!

In this Easter message I want to remind you of the fact that Joseph and his entire family were shepherds and shepherdesses and that they tended flocks of sheep and lambs just as King David did when he was a young boy. In his equally insightful work, “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” Robert Morgan penned the following. “In Great Britain, many estates and manors keep sheep purely for ornamental purposes. It’s like a page from a children’s picture book or a television travel show-cotton balls on green; fat sheep on manicured grounds, grazing, resting, frolicking, baaing, nursing.”

“With Psalm 23, we can gaze out that evocative window every day. Even if you don’t own livestock, it’s possible to transport yourself instantly to green pastures, still waters, restored souls, overcoming cups, and righteous pathways. Now more than ever, we Christians need the peace and power of Psalm 23.”

“Many of us are far too busy. The stresses of life are wearing us down, little by little, and the noise around us can be an unending cacophony of confusion. Our lives-with all our electronic tethers, emotional entanglements, and financial pressures-are more demanding than ever. We’re simply not resting, not managing our clocks and calendars as we’d like, and as a result, we are often anxious and angry, even when we don’t realize it. We’re pulled in so many directions, as if we were twistable toys in the hands of a toddler.”

“But consider this: the six verses and about a hundred words of Scripture that make up Psalm 23-the passage that lovingly likens us to sheep-can improve the serenity of our lot every day, because every lot needs a good shepherd.”

“From the moment it was penned three thousand years ago, the Twenty-third Psalm has been the world’s best-known and most-beloved poem. It’s been engraved on the hearts of every generation from antiquity to modernity. It’s been quoted across the centuries and through the millennia. Its words have blessed millions of sickrooms, and thousands of classrooms. Its been quoted in hospitals, jails, homes, and churches; in open-air rallies and underground meetings; in seasons of peace and in times of war. It’s been whispered by the bedsides of sleepy children and spoken as the last words of dying convicts. It’s the most memorized and memorialized passage in the Bible.”

“In a hundred words, (only fifty-five in the original Hebrew) Psalm 23 sums up all our needs in life and all the abundance of God’s grace. It begins with “The Lord, and it ends with “forever.” What could be better than that?”

“Jon and Regina Buck are friends of mine in Roan Mountain. Jon is my barber. When I told them I was writing a book about the twenty-third psalm, Regina told me her story. She and Jon had long prayed for a child, but they waited several years before the baby came along. When little Jace did arrive, he came with a very serious heart defect demanding multiple surgeries. During the times of her greatest stress and fear, Regina told me, she would drive up to the grassy balds at the top of Roan Mountain and lie down in those rich alpine meadows, gazing up at the blue sky. Then her nerves would relax and her spirits revive.”

“Resting in Psalm Twenty-three is exactly like that,” she said. “Lying down in God’s green pastures is no less real than lying in the grass at the top of the Roan. There is complete silence. No traffic, no talking, no blaring speakers or animal noises. The grass blows in beautiful waves as the wind shifts. The ground is soft, and the view incredible in every direction. I understand the peace and strength of the creation that God has bestowed on us.”

“When the Lord is our Shepherd, that is enough. He is enough. Enough to meet our needs, calm our nerves, clear our vision, restore our souls, ensure our future, and bless our day.” “So take a moment, open the windows, read aloud these timeless words, and practice for yourself the peace and power of Psalm 23 and its all-sufficient Shepherd.”

Psalm 23:1-6 (NKJV) 1 A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

2 He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters.

3 He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake.

4 Yea, 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 runs over.

6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the LORD Forever.”

“In his book, God’s Psychiatry, Dr. Charles Allen told of a man who came to see him. This fellow had risen to the top of his company, but along the way he had lost his peace of mind. He was a worried, tense, sick man. He’d been to doctors and taken bottles of pills, but nothing helped. Dr. Allen took out a sheet of paper and wrote a “prescription” for the man. He prescribed the Twenty-third Psalm five times a day for seven days. He insisted the man carry out the assignment to the letter. Upon awakening each morning, the man was to read through the psalm carefully, meditatively, and prayerfully. Immediately after breakfast, he was to do the same, then after lunch, again after dinner, and finally the last thing before going to bed.”

“Allen gave the prescription with the confidence that it would work, because he had given out that same advice many times, and it had never failed. “That prescription sounds simple,” he wrote in his book, “but really it isn’t. The Twenty-third Psalm is one of the most powerful pieces of writing in existence, and it can do marvelous things for any person. I have suggested this to many people, and in every instance where I know it was tried, it always produced results. It can change your life in seven days.”

“Try it for yourself and make Psalm 23 your psalm.” “Make the Good Shepherd your Shepherd. You can’t say, “The Lord is my Shepherd” unless you also say, “The Shepherd is my Lord.” The Lordship of Christ is the willingness to follow the Shepherd wherever He goes, as the old hymn says: “His faithful follower I would be, for by His hand He leadeth me.” It takes commitment, brings contentment, and takes us on an adventure retracing the route that leads from our home below to our home above.”

Phillip Keller writes in his book, “A Shepherd Looks At The 23rd Psalm” that, “Obviously, David, in this Psalm, is speaking not as a shepherd, though he was one, but as a sheep; one of the flock. He spoke with a strong sense of pride and devotion and admiration. It was as though he literally boasted aloud, ‘Look at who my shepherd is-my owner-my manager!’ The Lord is!”

“After all, he knew from firsthand experience that the lot in life of any particular sheep depended on the type of man who owned it. Some men were gentle, kind intelligent, brave and selfless in their devotion to their stock. Under one man, sheep would struggle, starve and suffer endless hardship. In another’s care they would flourish and thrive contentedly. So if the Lord is my Shepherd I should know something of His character and understand something of His ability.”

“In Christ He demonstrated at Calvary the deep desire of His heart to have men come under His benevolent care. He Himself absorbed the penalty for their perverseness, stating clearly that ‘all we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all’ (Isaiah 53:6).”

“Thus, in a second very real and vital sense I truly belong to Him simply because He has bought me again at the incredible price of His own laid-down life for the sheep.’ So there remains the moving realization that we have been bought with a price, that we really are not our own and He is well within His rights to lay claim upon our lives.”

“I recall quite clearly how in my first venture with sheep, the question of paying a price for my ewes was so terribly important. They belonged to me only by virtue of the fact that I paid hard cash for them. It was money earned by the blood and sweat and tears drawn from my own body during the desperate grinding years of the depression. And when I bought that first small flock I was buying them literally with my own body which had been laid down with this day in mind.”

“Because of this I felt in a special way that they were truthfully a part of me and I was a part of them. There was an intimate identity involved which, though not apparent on the surface to the casual observer, none the less made those thirty yews exceedingly precious to me.”

“But the day I bought them I also realized that this was the first stage in a long, lasting endeavor in which from then on, I would, as their owner, have to continually lay down my life for them, if they were to flourish and prosper. Sheep do not ‘just take care of themselves’ as some might suppose. They require, more than any other class of livestock, endless attention and meticulous care.”

“It is no accident that God has chosen to call us sheep. The behavior of sheep and human beings is similar in many ways. Our mass mind (or mob instincts), our fears and timidity, our stubbornness and stupidity, our perverse habits are all parallels of profound importance. Yet despite these adverse characteristics Christ chooses us, buys us, calls us by name, makes us His own and delights in caring for us.”

“It is this third reason why we are under obligation to recognize His ownership of us. He literally lays Himself out for us continually. He always intercedes for us; He is always guiding us by His gracious Spirit; He is always working on our behalf to ensure that we will benefit from His care. In fact, Psalm 23 might well be called ‘David’s Hymn of Praise and Divine Diligence.’ The entire poem goes on to recount the manner in which the Good Shepherd spares no pains for the welfare of His sheep. It’s little wonder that the poet took pride in belonging to the Good Shepherd. Why shouldn’t He?”

“In my memory I can still see one of the sheep ranches in our district which was operated by a tenant sheep-man. He never ought to have been allowed to keep sheep. His stock was always thin, week and riddled with disease or parasites. Again and again they would come and stand at the fence staring blankly through the woven wire at the green lush pastures which my flock enjoyed. Had they been able to speak I am sure they would have said, ‘Oh, to be set free from this awful owner!” “This is a picture that has never left my memory. It is a picture of pathetic people the world over who have not known what it is to belong to the Good Shepherd… who suffer instead under sin and Satan.”

In another one of his books, “A Shepherd Looks at the Good Shepherd” Keller writes that “It is only the person prepared to become open and available to God, who positively responds to God, who positively responds to truth as it is revealed in Christ, the Great, Good Shepherd who will hear His voice. To hear Him is to ‘recognize’ that this One is in truth none other than God Himself.” “Evidence of this will be apparent in a deliberate and eager willingness to do whatever He requires. This ‘running’ to do His bidding demonstrates faith and confidence in Christ of a potent sort. To believe in Christ is to know God!”

“He is my life; I am His, He knows me; I know Him. He is mine; I am His.” This is a precious relationship. The acute awareness that He knows me and I know God in Christ is the most profound and potent influence I am privileged to know as a man. In its awareness lies great rest.”

Robert Morgan explains that “The journey starts wherever you are. My friend Clint Morgan, who travels the world for global missions, told me of a young man he met in Tajikistan who was assigned to work in a notorious prison near the city of Kudjand, but he got off to a rough start. Arriving at the prison, he was escorted to a dark room occupied by an old murderer sitting cross-legged on the floor. “What do you want, boy?” snarled the hardened man. The young fellow was so unnerved that he dropped his Bible. As he picked it up, it opened to Psalm 23, which he proceeded to try to read. The old man responded by taunting him, “What are you going to do, boy, try to turn us all into sheep?”

“No, stammered the worker, “I just want to tell you how to find green pastures. He returned home with a stabbing sense of failure but returned the next week. This time he walked into the room to find it packed with prisoners. In the middle of them sat the murderer. He said, “Son, we want you to tell us how to find the green pastures.” “As best he could, the worker shared the message of the Good Shepherd. As he finished, the elderly convict said, “Young man. I want to go to those green pastures’-and then he inexplicably fell over dead. The dramatic news resulted in great curiosity, and large numbers of prisoners came to hear the message of the green pastures. Many became Christians; as they were released from prison one by one, they went forth preaching the Gospel.”

“Years ago in college, I came across a story I’ve never forgotten. At a social gathering in London an actor was asked to give a recitation. He quoted Psalm Twenty-Three with pauses, inflections, and a remarkable tone of voice. A murmur of admiration ran through the crowd. An aged minister then rose to recite the same passage. When he finished, all eyes were filled with tears. Later the actor approached the minister and said, “Do you know the difference between my recitation and yours? I know the psalm, but you know the Shepherd.”

“May God help us to know both! And then you can say with me come what may: The Lord is my Shepherd-That’s Enough!”

The clock is ticking. No one knows when their end will come. As part of their Christ-like nature, Christians will always want to take advantage of every opportunity to bring glory to God by doing their utmost to lead lost sheep to “The Good Shepherd!”

Lord willing, next week…