Psalm 23: All the Days of My LIfe

All the Days of My Life | May 5, 2024

Today Pastor Dale continued our series in Psalm 23 and we saw, right in the middle of this “comfort Psalm”, the Psalm of rest, assurance and refreshment, that we will face tough times. We will struggle, maybe even suffer, even when we are following him. Though we may resist these ideas, we’ve probably all come to realize that discipline and redirection has benefits for all of us. 

The Lord’s Shepherding plan is this: 
He wants us to learn all we need to learn 
He wants to form something deep, beautiful and powerful within us. 

That still leaves the questions, why pain? It is in the darkest valley where we learn to know ourselves, to really understand what is in us and shaping us. Valleys reveal our fears, our lack of faith, hidden denials. The truth is, many of us would prefer a life of easy victories: growth without crisis, healing without pain, the resurrection without the cross. But what if God is actually found in our hard times? 

It’s often in the valley and in the struggle, when we move from talking about God to talking to God. When we look back and pause, we have the opportunity to discern God’s presence in those events that have made us or unmade us. In that, it is possible to see God’s amazing presence being with us through the toughest of times and to honestly say “Even in the darkest valleys, you are with me”. Pastor Dale encouraged us with a few thoughts:

1. To get out of it, you have to go through it, but don’t do it alone. Share with someone: “I have this weight I am carrying, can you, or someone you know help me with this?”. This always starts with prayer together.   

2. This process is also for our kids. Our children have to go through it. It’s vital to let them feel the weight of a struggle. Be there with them so they have a tangible example of what God’s presence is like. 

3. Be the presence of Jesus with others as they go through it:

• Ask “Is there anything I can do for you?” 

• Listen to what God is bringing to mind as you talk with them 

• Remember that God is doing his best work in these tough times

All the Days of My Life | Apr. 28, 2024

This morning we were blessed to come together, engage with our Heavenly Father, and learn more about who God is and the refreshment he offers us as we continued our series in Psalm 23. Pastor Dale taught us about nephesh, the Hebrew word for “soul”. In the Bible, people don’t have a nephesh, they are a nephesh––a living, breathing, physical being.

The nephesh we discussed today is connected to our identity - who we are and the battle for that place. Every person experiences moments when they’ve said or reacted to others in ways we wish we hadn’t. While these moments nag at us, the greater issue is when those moments turn into a path, that turn into a way of life. We create these paths for ourselves that can be incredibly difficult to get out of, ways of thinking, ways of behaving, that we think are righteous.

A shepherd is good when they keep moving you to different places, even though it may be a difficult path to get there. Often, fear can grab hold of us as our shepherd seeks to move us from one pasture to another. The fear can hold us emotionally captive where instead of self-confidence and freedom, we experience anxiety and paralysis. Instead of hope and joy, we hold onto an inner emptiness and sadness. Instead of living in the house of love, where God dwells, we live in a house of fear.

Without even noticing, we can build our lives on the opinions of others, and not on the path God leads us on. We ask ourselves questions and tell ourselves stories that can trap us in a spin cycle of emotional poverty. The invitation of Jesus is the invitation to move out of the house of fear and into the house of love. The paths of righteousness The Shepherd leads us on are not just a set of moral thoughts, or modifying our behavior. His path delivers our lives, our souls; it frees our nephesh from being crushed by fear. 

The challenge for us is to let go of fear and claim the deeper truth of who we are or could be. When we make space for God in our lives and listen to His loving voice, we can start to realize perfect love and gradually let go of our fears.

Pastor Dale’s encouragement - every time we feel afraid, open ourselves to God’s presence with the community of God’s beloved and with meditative prayer on God. It is by doing these things, our souls can be restored.

Today Kristi took us through verse 2 of Psalm 23, “He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters”. In this verse, we find an invitation from God into a time of rest. A time where we relinquish striving and producing, achieving and consuming, and enter into a space where we are satiated and restored through nothing that comes of our effort. In our culture, this can seem an impossible task. There is a reluctance and for some even a fear of stopping. What is it that makes us reluctant? 

Kristi shared lies we may be telling ourselves that may be underneath this reluctance.

The lie - I hold all things together. The truth - God holds all things together.

The lie - My identity is in what I do. The truth - My identity is in Christ.

The lie - Stopping prevents me from functioning how I need to. The truth - Stopping allows me to function in health and wholeness.

When we buy into any of these lies, we trade the truth of God’s promised provision for the lies the enemy offers. God not only invites us to stop striving, He also offers us rest. The renewal and restoration we need, comes from something deeper than just stopping for a while. It’s not a day off that sustains our soul, it’s the type of rest God invites us into that does that, a true Sabbath rest.

To enter into a true Sabbath rest requires preparation. So what does it look like to prepare? Kristi shared four steps to help prepare.

1. Choose a day to begin and schedule in some periods of rest. Start with an amount of time you can commit to, even if it's just a couple of hours and work your way up from there. 

2. Once you know when you’re going to take a period of rest, schedule in a few smaller windows of time as you approach it, 10-15 minutes of time where you’re committed to eating and drinking from God and His word. 

3. Be honest with yourself on what's likely to derail you and create a plan to move past those things, keeping the mindset that you aren’t saying no to whatever comes up, but instead saying yes to being at rest with God.

4. Come up with some ideas on how you want to spend this time of rest. You can spend time in prayer and scripture of course, but that’s not all it has to be. There's room for things that bring you pleasure and delight, for physical rest, for enjoying the beauty of creation. 

The rest God invites us into is so much less about how we should or should not use the time, and so much more about the posture of our heart. Sabbath rest should be focused on God’s goodness, His provisions, His gifts and His grandeur. It’s a rest, in which we calibrate our minds to intentionally look for His goodness and glory in everything and as we do so, experience His grace and love.

We invite you to look at your calendar today and choose a day when you will begin the practice of sabbath rest.

All the Days of My Life | Apr. 14, 2024

This morning, Pastor Dale continued our new series in Psalm 23. The Psalm begins with the declaration, "The Lord is my Shepherd." We looked at two questions related to this declaration: 

1. Why would I want the Lord to be my shepherd?

2. Am I willing to accept that I am a sheep?

We know our life experience is one of growth and change; that the nature of the human soul is dynamic and not static. As these changes occur, we are being formed. The question is, "Who or what are we being formed into?"

As John Mark Comer writes in his book, Practicing the Way: 
"We are being either transformed into the love and beauty of Jesus or malformed by the entropy of sin and death. “We become either agents of God’s healing and liberating grace, or carriers of the sickness of the world.” To believe otherwise is an illusion, and to give no thought to this is to come dangerously close to wasting your life."

Being formed into the image of Jesus isn’t something we do as much as something that is done to us by God himself, but we are not off the hook. Godly transformation isn't something our Father will force on us. We have a responsibility, an action item. We are to cooperate with God’s transforming grace. 

To cooperate with God's transforming grace, we can begin with an honest assessment of where we are today. What word would you place in this blank?

____________ is my shepherd

As we learned through our study through the gospel of Mark, we get to know what God the Father is really like through Jesus; what he said and what he did. As we look at Jesus' life we see Jesus is a shepherd who wants the role of Shepherd in our lives as he sees peace even in the midst of chaos. He is a shepherd who provides that peace, gives the peace, sends people out in peace. He is a shepherd like Psalm 23 who will be there “All the days of your life.”

He not only is the Shepherd, Jesus also knows what it’s like to be a sheep. He was the most vulnerable of all the sheep, the lamb for sacrifice. He experienced being led by a shepherd and took on the role of the lamb, fully living Psalm 23:1, “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing."

The second question we asked ourselves, are we willing to accept that we are His sheep? Are there areas of our lives where we are trying to lead instead of being led by our Shepherd? Are we looking to our Shepherd to see where He is leading, trusting in His provision, aware of His presence? 

We invite you to sit with the Father and as you read and meditate on Psalm 23 and seek His input on these questions and what steps He's inviting you to take to be formed by Him this week.

All the Days of My Life | Apr. 7, 2024

This week, Pastor Dale started our new series looking at Psalm 23. In the beginning of the Psalm, we are met with a striking phrase: I lack nothing. Often we use "lack" to give us an edge, to drive us forward, to motivate us. The motivating piece we get from lacking is to somehow have it fulfilled. What we "want" is to "not want" anymore, and we end up connecting that to "I have no need because I have it all."

As Pastor Dale pointed out in Matthew 19:16-22, Jesus is calling us to so much more. Instead of pursuing stuff, status, or even religion to fill that lack, Jesus asks us to give up everything. He says, "I am enough, simply rely on me. With me, you never run out." A life without lack is rooted in our knowledge of God. What we place our minds on becomes the reality of our lives, so if we place our minds on God, the reality of God fills our lives. We cannot experience the riches of His glory however unless we leave Him the necessary space in which He can express Himself within us. "Give up everything, then come follow me."

Pastor Dale invited us to make a commitment over the next 50 days: to set our minds on God and see what happens. He invited us to read the creed of Psalm 23 out loud every day, paying attention to what the Holy Spirit brings up in you, listening to what God is saying to you, and taking a posture of submission to Him as He shepherds you.