“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul; He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. ” Psalm 23:1-3 

Psalm 23

 

In perhaps the most widely-known poem of all time, David combines his childhood background of life as a shepherd and his soulful connection with God, the central focus of his life.

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“When he puts forth all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.​” ​John 10:4

Psalm 24

 

When David asked, “Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? And who may stand in His holy place?” (Psalm 24:3), there is a very good chance that he was reflecting upon the passage of the Torah , which he had surely memorized, where Moses had climbed Horeb, “the mountain of God”, and encountered God in the “burning bush”. It was here that Moses talked to God. It was here that God spoke to Moses. It was here on the holy mountain where God’s voice spoke to Moses and said, Reverence, respect, fear, awe…you can ​feel​ the emotions consuming Moses as he heard God’s clear and certain voice.

3500 years later and halfway around the world, we can hardly get our minds around the magnitude of this moment when God spoke to Moses and proclaimed, “​I AM WHO I AM”​​ .

So, God asks you and I today through this Psalm of David, “Who can approach God and converse today? Who can hear from God ​clearly​? Who can communicate with God and hear His voice without static and interruption?” No sooner did David ask this gravitas question than he had answered it himself… “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood and has not sworn deceitfully” (Psalm 24:4).

“This is holy ground.” Come to God in reverence and awe. Keep your hands clean. Keep your mind clean. Keep your heart clean. Keep your vocabulary clean. The Shepherd who gave you His sacrificial blood to make you clean also gave you His Holy Spirit to empower you to follow Him and live that way. The closer a lamb is to his shepherd, the easier it is to follow him.

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“For dogs have surrounded me; a band of evildoers has encompassed me; they pierced my hands and my feet ” (Psalm 22:16).

Psalm 22

 

Eight hundred years before the cruel and brutal Assyrians and Romans began to sentence men to the historical crucifixion where metal nails would be driven into a man’s hands and feet to impale him to a Cross until he had cried out his exhaustive scream of pain and anguish, David prophesied the death of our Shepherd in graphic detail.

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