Ps 23 Misunderstood but well-known (iii)
Lesson Three
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his Name's sake
There is a sense in which we could respond to this verse with almost a dismissive Gallic shrug. If the Spirit is communing with our spirits, the result of which is flowing out through our souls and bodies to the world, that this is a statement of the obvious!
But that is to underestimate its importance. We can make a fundamental mistake when we’re in the clinch of lesson 2, when we need out souls restoring. If we’re not careful, the gospel is transformed into a self-help, self-improvement, self-healing project as if it is all about me. It becomes self-centred and not God-centred.
The Christian life is risky. As the Spirit re-writes our operating system - our spirits – by writing the Law of God on our hearts this will have a radical effect on what we do and what we don’t do. More and more, if we allow the Spirit to work in us, we start living more and more like Jesus who combined a message of righteousness with compassion.
Perhaps most strikingly we see this is how He dealt with the woman caught in adultery.
After her accusers had all left having failed Jesus’ test ‘let him who is without sin cast the first stone’ He turns to the woman and says ‘where are your accusers? Has no-one condemned you?’ and she answers ‘No-one Lord’ and he said to her ‘Neither do I condemn you’
We like to stop reading the passage at that point. But we know that Jesus went on to say to her ‘Go, and sin no more.’
And it will be like that for us. No-one is fooled. Sin is sin. It is destructive. Adultery is just one manifestation of sin.
Look at her first words: ‘Lord…’
The Lord is my shepherd.
And so as he reveals our sins to us, He does not do so to condemn us but to have compassion and to lead us back to the paths of righteousness.
The danger is still not passed for the disciple. Maybe we have had a period in our life where we have known the restoration of the Lord. Precious times. And maybe the Lord has shown us our sins and has led us back to the path of righteousness. Equally precious. We are not told in scripture whether the woman ‘sinned no more’. The immediate challenge for her would have been to end the relationship she had with the married man. Not easy, especially if she loved him. We don’t know the story. But life’s issues and the consequences of our choices are not trivial, they’re often intricate and profound.
But still, even if we’re living free from sin, we are still in danger of making the gospel all about its good news for us. The whole sentence end with ‘…for His name’s sake’.
When our souls are restored, and when we leave sin for righteousness, it is good for us, but there is a higher purpose other than our well-being.
The River Jordan flows into Lake Galilee then further south into the Dead Sea. The water flows down from Mount Hermon in Lebanon and, as we know from the New Testament, many of the disciples were fishermen eeking out their living from the shores of Lake Galilee; it teams with life, and fish. Fresh water flows in and out of the lake. Reaching its lowest point, the River Jordan continues on its path until it pours into the Dead Sea. But there’s no ‘out’. The water flows in and stops. As fast as the water flows in, it evaporates concentrating the salt content of the water, killing the fish. That is why it is dead, there’s no outlet.
If we treat what we receive from God, that cool fresh water of His Spirit to refresh and renew and restore our souls as simply for us, we will be just like the Dead Sea. What God has in mind is beyond us. His purposes are higher. We must become like Lake Galilee, water flows in, life is restored, and the same water, the same Spirit must flow through us to others.
The calling on Israel is to be a ‘light to the Gentiles’. In periods of history when they made it about themselves as the chosen people and turned in on themselves, the life that should have flowed to the nations ceased. When Jesus preached to his home synagogue (Luke 4), they were outraged as he picked out story after story of when God touched and blessed the lives of Gentiles through the lives of the Jews. They didn’t mind so much him proclaiming himself as Messiah but when He stated that the anointing was to reach out to the surrounding nations, that’s when the true condition of their hearts was revealed.
His name’s sake. ‘Sake’ means cause or purpose. In my childhood prayers in school assemblies often ended ‘…for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen’.
It is only now that I am beginning to let those words sink in.