Do I find love so full in my nature,
God's ultimate gift,
That I doubt His own love can
compete with it? …
Would I fain in my impotent yearning
do all for this man;
And dare doubt he alone shall not
help him, who yet alone can?
Could I wrestle to raise him from
sorrow, grow poor to enrich,
To fill up his life, starve my own out,
I would—knowing which
I know that my service is perfect.
Oh, speak through me now!
Would I suffer for him that I love?
So wouldst thou—so wilt thou!
Thus have felt and known the unselfish of all ages. It is not only from their depths, but from their topmost heights—heaven still how far!—that men cry out and say, There is a rock higher than I! God is stronger than their strength, more loving than their uttermost love, and in so far as they have loved and sacrificed themselves for others, they have obtained the infallible proof, that God too lives and loves and gives Himself away. Nothing can shake that faith, for it rests on the best instincts of our nature, and is the crown of all faithful life. He was no hireling herdsman who wrote these verses, but one whose heart was in his work, who did justly by it, magnifying his office, and who never scamped it, else had he not dared to call his God a shepherd. And so in every relation of our own lives. While insincerity and unfaithfulness to duty mean nothing less than the loss of the clearness and sureness of our faith in God; duty nobly done, love to the uttermost, are witnesses to God's love and ceaseless care, witnesses which grow more convincing every day.
The second, third and fourth verses give the details. Each of them is taken directly from the shepherd's custom, and applied without interpretation to the care of man's soul by God. He maketh me lie down—the verb is to bring the flocks to fold or couch—on pastures of green grass—the young fresh grass of spring-time. By waters of rest He refresheth me.[1] This last verb is difficult to render in English; the original meaning was evidently to guide the flock to drink, from which it came to have the more general force of sustaining or nourishing. My life He restoreth—bringeth back again from death. He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake, not necessarily straight paths, but paths that fulfil the duty of paths and lead to somewhere, unlike most desert tracks which spring up, tempt your feet for a little, and then disappear. Yea, though I walk in a valley of deep darkness, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff are not synonymous, for even the shepherd of to-day, though often armed with a gun, carries two instruments of wood, his great oak club, thick enough to brain a wild beast, and his staff to lean upon or to touch his sheep, while the ancient shepherd without firearms would surely still more require both. They will comfort me—a very beautiful verb, the literal meaning of which is to help another, choked with grief or fear, to breathe freely, and give his heart air.
[Footnote 1: The Greek reads: epi hudatos anapause˘s exethrepse me]
These simple figures of the conduct of the soul by God are their own interpretation. Who, from his experience, cannot read into them more than any other may help him to find? Only on two points is a word required. Righteousness has no theological meaning. The Psalmist, as the above exposition has stated, is thinking of such desert paths as have an end and goal, to which they faultlessly lead the traveller: and in God's care of man their analogy is not the experience of justification and forgiveness, but the wider assurance that he who follows the will of God walks not in vain, that in the end he arrives, for all God's paths lead onward and lead home. This thought is clinched with an expression which would not have the same force if righteousness were taken in a theological sense: for His name's sake. No being has the right to the name of guide or shepherd unless the paths by which he takes the flock do bring them to their pasture and rest. The other ambiguous phrase is the vale of deep darkness. As is well known, the letters of the word may be made to spell shadow of death; but the other way of taking them is the more probable. This, however, need not lead us away from the associations with which our old translation has invested them. It is not only darkness that the poet is describing, but the darkness where death lurks for the poor sheep,—the gorges, in whose deep shadows are the lairs of wild beasts, and the shepherd and his club are needed. It stands thus for every dismal and deadly passage through which the soul may pass, and, most of all, it is the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There God is with men no less than by the waters of repose, or along the successful paths of active life. Was He able to recover the soul from life's wayside weariness and hunger?—He will equally defend and keep it amid life's deadliest dangers.
II. But the Psalm is not only theology. It is personal religion. Whether the Psalmist sang it first of the Church of God as a whole, or of the individual, the Church herself has sung it, through all generations, of the individual. By the natural progress of religion from the universal to the particular; by the authority of the Lord Jesus, who calls men singly to the Father, and one by one assures them of God's Providence, Grace and Glory; by the millions who have taken Him at His word, and every man of them in the loneliness of temptation and duty and death proved His promise—we also in our turn dare to believe that this Psalm is a psalm for the individual. The Lord is my shepherd: He maketh me to lie down: He leadeth me: He restoreth my soul. Lay your attention upon the little word. Ask yourself, if since it was first put upon your lips you have ever used it with anything more than the lips: if you have any right to use it: if you have ever taken any steps towards winning the right to use it. To claim God for our own, to have and enjoy Him as ours, means, as Christ our Master said over and over again, that we give ourselves to Him, and take Him to our hearts. Sheep do not choose their shepherd, but man has to choose—else the peace and the fulness of life which are here figured remain a dream and become no experience for him.
Do not say that this talk of surrender to God is unreal to you. Happiness, contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the soul. Lives are changed by a moment's listening to conscience, by a single and quiet inclination of the mind. We must submit ourselves to God. We must bring our wills under His. Here and now we can do this by resolution and effort, in the strength of His Spirit, which is nearer us than we know. The thing is no mystery, and not at all vague. The mistake people make about it is to seek for it in some artificial and conventional form. We have it travestied to-day under many forms—under the form of throwing open the heart to excitement in an atmosphere removed from real life as far as possible: under the form of assent to a dogma: under the form of adherence to a church.
But do you summon up the most real things in your life—the duty that is a disgust: the sacrifice for others from which you shrink. Summon up your besetting sin—the temptation which, for all your present peace, you know will be upon you before twenty-four hours are past. Summon up these grim realities of your life,—and in face of them give yourself to God's will, put your weakness into the keeping of His grace. He is as real as they are, and the act of will by which you give yourself to Him and His Service will be as true and as solid an experience as the many acts of will by which you have so often yielded to them.
Otherwise this beautiful name, this name Shepherd, must remain to you the emptiest of metaphors: this Psalm only a fair song instead of the indestructible experience which both Name and Psalm become to him who gives himself to God.
Men and women, who in this Christian land have grown up with this Psalm in your hearts, in all the great crises of life that are ahead shall this Psalm revisit us. In perplexity and doubt, in temptation and sorrow, and in death, like our mother's face shall this Psalm she put upon our lips come back to us. Woe to us then, if we have done nothing to help us to believe it! As when one lies sick in a foreign land, and music that is dear comes down the street and swells by him, and lifts his thoughts a little from himself, but passes over and melts into the distance, and he lies colder and more forsaken than before—so shall it be with us and this Psalm.