[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website GlobalServants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: As I began to invest myself in, as diligently as I knew how, in learning, praying and finding the resource, the spiritual resource of the Lord's Prayer, it also seemed to lead me definitely straight to Psalm 23.
And I found that these two great devotional classics have much in common at a multiplicity of profound levels. Hello, I'm Mark Rutland. Welcome to the Leader's Notebook.
I'm in the middle of a series based on my book 21 seconds to change your world.
Now, certainly the greater emphasis of the book is on the Lord's Prayer, hence the title. It takes about 21 seconds to pray the Lord's Prayer. And I have shared why I began this journey with the Lord's Prayer and how rich it became to me and how what a great blessing it's been to me.
But as I began to reengage with the Lord's Prayer, which for some reason, maybe a multiplicity of reasons I had sort of set aside as I began to reengage with the Lord's Prayer, that seemed to lead me straight on to Psalm 23.
And I began praying them, if you will, back to back, over and over and over again. And it became a sort of a divine cocktail of the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer, mixing in my mind and in my spirit. And it is a wonderful, wonderful way to pray. I recommend it to you without any reservation. Pray the Lord's Prayer, then add Psalm 23, go back and forth, and as you do that, you will find some of the rich connections between the two.
Now, I've been teaching largely in this series, largely on the Lord's Prayer. Today I want to zero in a little bit more on Psalm 23.
First of all, I became intrigued with the ways in which Psalm 23 expands on the very economical language of the Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer is the briefer of the two, to be sure, but they are both very brief.
King David wrote Psalm 23 a thousand years before Jesus was born.
That fact only fueled my growing fascination not with the great Psalm itself, but also with the author.
Some poets who have penned deeply moving lines of great beauty were themselves somewhat drab and colorless characters.
Not so King David. As I became more fascinated with Psalm 23 and it became a rich part of my devotional life, I also became very intrigued with David himself. A more complex personality then this Bronze Age warrior king could never have been imagined by Hollywood's most creative minds.
I wrote a book called David the Great. And I urge you, if you haven't read it, I hope you will get it. You can get
[email protected] you can certainly get it at Amazon and any place. It has been a huge, huge seller for us. I'm very proud of the book and I thank God for it.
And that book is actually in a great part an outgrowth of my study and fascination and participation. Re engagement is the way I say it with Psalm 23.
Now, why would I call that book David the Great?
The honorific title the Great has been claimed for themselves by kings and tyrants, but it is more appropriately granted by history.
Alexander the Great is so referred to because of his conquests.
The only English sovereign in history to be honored with the title the Great was Alfred.
Among all the kings of Israel and Judah, only one is accorded the title the Great.
And it's a bitter irony, a bitter historical irony that that is Herod the Great.
In the first place, Herod was not precisely Jewish. He was an idumean, the grandson of an Arab sheikh. He was an evil genius. He was a builder of monumental accomplishments.
But he was also a quisling. He was a collaborator with the Roman occupiers.
He was a mass murderer. He was guilty of conspiracy, as I say, collaboration.
And he was such a murderous type that Caesar Augustus said of Herod, it is safer to be Herod's pig than his son. Herod killed so many in his own family.
So it is a bitter historical irony that he is called Herod the Great. But that's because of his building, certainly not because he was a great genocidal maniac.
The only king, the one king of Israel to whom the title ought to have gone was David of Bethlehem.
He was truly a Renaissance man, more than 2,000 years before the Renaissance began.
He was characteristic of that great period of time.
His rise to fame was meteoric.
As a youth, he became a military hero and the celebrated son in law of the then king Saul.
The various roles of his career include outlaw, mercenary, guerrilla chieftain, musician, king, founder of the city of Jerusalem, and the father of a dynasty.
David was a genius.
And as a breed, geniuses tend to be complicated. David was no exception.
Like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead. When David was good, he was very good, and when he was bad, he was horrid.
His most enduring legacy, however, was actually his poetry.
3,000 years. 3,000 years after he conquered Jebus and renamed it Jerusalem, his poetry is at the emotional and spiritual heart of two of the world's major religions, Christianity and Judaism.
His works are still studied in universities around the world.
Literary allusions to his poetry abound.
Many of his poems are still being put to music here now, even in the 21st century.
Beyond the beauty of his poetry, some of David's works are highly prophetic and even messianic.
Among Jesus last words on the cross was a quote from Psalm 22, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? In Hebrew, eli eli lama shabbachtani.
Jesus did not hang there in unspeakable nightmare of pain on the cross, thinking to himself at a cognitive level, how could I affirm the poetry of King David? It must have come up from inside of him spontaneously, in the moment of horrible pain.
Why would that be? Because the psalm itself was prophetic.
David was writing about things that he couldn't have known, couldn't have understood, describing the nightmare, the horror of death upon the cross, and then speaking these words, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
So it was definitely messianic and prophetic of the means and manner of Jesus death. And Jesus quoting it spontaneously on the cross affirms that.
Having said that, however, David's masterwork of all of his poetry is without a doubt the piece we now call Psalm 23.
I hazard to say it is the most memorized, most quoted, most beloved passage in the entire Old Testament, perhaps in the whole Bible.
In 118 words in the King James Version, David captures the essence of Judeo Christian thought relative to our joyful dependency on a loving and personal God who is at once our guardian and provider.
How strange to listen to a warrior, a man who shed rivers of blood in multiple military campaigns and who was himself guilty of conspiracy and murder.
Use language that excels Shakespeare's in both emotive sensitivity and creative energy.
Forget the religious or spiritual Implications of Psalm 23 if you're a complete secularist, if you have no interest in scripture at all or in the life of King David, it is in itself a poetic masterpiece.
It is also profoundly theological.
The combination of that is no easy task.
If for no other reason than Psalm 23, David is certainly Israel's greatest king.
David lived and wrote in an age that saw God largely as a distant impersonal unapproachable and mysterious God, even to the point of being, well, frightening.
David's sense of intimacy with God and his calm assurance of God's providential personal concern sound far more like Jesus than Moses.
Psalm 23 is probably the most powerful and enduring poem ever written.
I think I can state that categorically.
I'm going to read it, and I want you to recite it with me. If you haven't learned it, I hope that you will in the next few weeks or days memorize Psalm 23.
Certainly by now you've memorized the Lord's Prayer.
I want to urge you to start praying them back to back.
But right now let's begin with the 23rd Psalm.
I'm going to read it, and I want you to say it with me. And say it as a prayer, not simply as the recitation of a poem like you did in high school.
This is a prayerful affirmation of God's goodness and mercy usward now in our lives, right now in the existential realities of our day, but also eternally.
And here is David's great psalm.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
What a powerful poem. What a powerful prayer.
I'm glad that you joined me for this episode of the Leader's Notebook. I'm also glad you are joining me in praying these two powerful prayers.
That's Psalm 23.
Now, as I get ready to close, I hope that wherever you are right now, you can bow your head and pray with me. Let's pray together.
The Lord's Prayer.
Wonder why people quit praying it as much as they used to. It used to be the most common prayer prayed in Sunday morning services and now in many churches. It's never used liturgically and in many individual lives. It's never used personally and privately devotionally. What a loss. What a terrible, terrible loss.
I wonder why.
I think it is because people began to pray it as by rote they just began to repeat the Lord's Prayer rather than praying the Lord's Prayer.
For Protestants, it was often lost because of liturgical sameness. Just droned through in a Sunday morning service. And for some Catholics, I have a Jesuit friend who told me that for some Catholics, it became identified with punishment because of the issue, the process of confession. You know, you go into the confessional if you're a Catholic, you know, father, forgive me for I've sinned. And then you tell him what you've done. And he would say, say three Hail Marys and five Our Fathers. The Five Our Fathers are the Lord's Prayer. And it can often sound to a Catholic like the Catholic version of writing on the blackboard. I will not talk in class, so push past all that. Push past the liturgical sameness of it. Push past everything you've known about the Our Father or the Lord's Prayer and pray it. Really pray it with me.
We'll pray at first, and then yet a second time.
We'll pray straight on through the Lord's Prayer. So here's the Lord's Prayer. And then. And then straight on through Psalm 23.
We'll pray them together. Make it as prayerful as you possibly can. Right where you are.
Join me. I know this is an unusual podcast, but pray it with me. Make this a moment of prayer of these two great passages of scripture thinking, if you will, of the two men who wrote these two men born in Bethlehem, a thousand years apart, one 3,000 years before our time, and the other 2,000 years before our time.
And they wrote these two great devotional classics. Now we're not going to repeat them. We're going to pray them back to back. The Lord's prayer and Psalm 23.
If you can, wherever you are, bow your head, even if you're running and downloading this podcast through your earbuds. Why don't you see if you could pull over to the side of the track, pause a moment, and close your eyes and let us pray.
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
Now, before we say Amen, say the Lord's Prayer with me. Pray it.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Amen.
Now stay tuned. Someone is going to tell you exactly how you can get this life changing book world changing book 21 seconds to change your world.
I hope that you will get it. I hope it will be a blessing to you, and I hope that it guides you back into a renewed friendship with these two precious friends of mine. The Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23. Until we meet again. This is the Leader's Notebook and I'm Mark Rutland.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: To order a copy of 21 seconds, please visit the
[email protected] Enter the promo code 21seconds to receive $5 off of each book. Or you can call us toll free at 888-823-8772. Thank you for listening to the Leader's Notebook.
