Episode Transcript
[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.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: The remarkable coincidence, if you will, the God wrought coincidence that the 23rd Psalm written by King David and the Lord's Prayer given to us by Jesus, that they are probably, I think I can say this, arguably the two most prominent devotional classics in two of the world's major religions.
The fact that they were written given to us by men born a thousand years apart from in the same small village, it's just amazing.
Hello, I'm Mark Rutland. Welcome to the Leader's Notebook.
We're very near the end, just this episode and one more.
We're very near the end of a series of teachings based on the Lord's prayer in the 23rd Psalm. They derive largely from my book, my bestselling book, 21 Seconds to Change youe, Your World.
I want you to have this book. If you haven't read it and even if you have it maybe that you want to get multiple copies at this time for people that you care about. It's a great little book for study, particularly like a home cell group or something like that. I think you would love it. I think it'll be a tremendous blessing to you. I want it to be a blessing to you. And at the end of this podcast, someone is going to tell you how you can get that book and we want to get it to you quickly.
In this episode, I want to deal a little more. Been concentrating mostly on the language of the Lord's Prayer, but there are so many lines of connection, so many ways that the two great classics connect to each other. And today in this episode, I want to deal a little bit more with the 23rd Psalm.
How utterly intriguing it is, knowing that what we know about David, that in his most famous psalm he used the image of a shepherd to express the caring fatherhood of God.
Jesus said, our Father.
David said, the Lord is my shepherd.
Both are metaphors, of course, metaphors of a strong guardian, a loving watchman, a caring father whose eyes are on his own in a genuine and protective concern.
Even so, it is interesting to remember that Jesus spent his early days in a shop in a small town, working in close intimacy with his earthly father or stepfather, more precisely. And therefore he begins his prayer, our Father, which art in heaven.
But the lonesome hillsides of rural Judea were David's youthful workspace. He didn't grow up in a in a carpenter shop or a stonemason shop, if you will, roofless but for the canopy of space.
It was there that David, alone with his charges, the sheep, began to contemplate who God was to him.
It's interesting. Growing up in a shop with his stepfather, with his earthly father, Jesus expresses God as Father David envisions God as the great good, good shepherd.
Look closely with me at another interesting contrast between the Lord's prayer and Psalm 23.
Jesus said our Father.
David said, my shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd.
Clearly this is because of the different purposes of the two prayers. Jesus was teaching us how to pray. David was rather allowing us, if you will, to eavesdrop on his personal prayer.
Jesus prayer is more theological, teaching us from the very first two words, who God really is. Our Father Jesus. Use of the word Father in the Lord's Prayer is hugely important.
His use of our is also significant.
Father tells us much about who God is.
Our tells us much about who we are.
We are all in this together.
We are in this with Jesus, God's firstborn son. Jesus is including us in sonship.
By saying our Father, Jesus makes it clear that we are in the family.
The healing in those two words is incredible.
If we will just hear it and believe it. Our Father.
Roll that around on your tongue a few times.
Let it roll around in your brain and in your spirit, and realize how wonderful it is. You have a place at the table.
While I was preaching at a church in the south, the pastor asked if I would pray with a woman for healing.
The three of us sat in his office as she told of her battle with multiple illnesses, including migraine headaches, which she said were the worst of the lot.
They absolutely crippled her life, she said. They were painful, devastating, and chronic. She couldn't even hold down a job.
She could not really make her marriage work. It was in ruins. They were married, but it was just their relationship was in ruins because of these horrific headaches. Sometimes she just laid days and days and days in a bed or on a couch.
The pastor anointed her with oil. We prayed the Lord's Prayer, and we were about to pray for her healing when into my mind came a sort of mental image.
I'm not entirely willing to call it a vision. I know other people might call it a vision. In fact, I'm not at all sure what others mean when they say vision. All I know is What I saw was like a graphic thought, as if one might think of a horse so intensely that the picture quote unquote appears as a thought.
This, however, was so clear, so unbidden, that I thought it might be from the Lord.
What I saw was a young girl, maybe 9 or 10 years old, standing on the small back porch of a house with her little fists clenched against her chest. Tears streamed down her face, which was contorted in pain. She was not crying as if sad. She was crying angry, furious, hurt.
I saw her so clearly that what she was wearing even made an impression on me. It was a pretty blue dress with what looked like a little white lace collar around her little neck.
Now, before we pray, I told that woman, I want to share with you what I just saw in my mind's eye. I do not know for sure if this is from the Lord. If it means something to you, tell me and we'll pursue it.
But if not, we will let it go immediately and pray about your headaches.
I told her about the little girl.
I also told her about the blue dress and the white lace collar.
She looked up at me and said, I know exactly what that is.
She said, I'm the youngest of six children. The others, all the older ones were all boys.
The Next youngest was 10 years old. When I was born, she said, I knew from the earliest childhood that I was a mistake. My mother never loved me, never wanted me. I was an embarrassing inconvenience in her life.
She asked me, she said, do you know what it's like to know every day of your life that your own mother hates the day you were born?
On my 10th birthday, she said she got two presents.
One was a blue dress with a white doily collar that the neighbor lady gave her because she was sorry for the little girl.
The woman told me I put it on and wore it because it was pretty.
But actually it made me sad that it was from a neighbor and not from my mother who gave me Nothing for my 10th birthday.
The only other present she said, was a birthday card from an out of town aunt. In it was a ten dollar bill. A dollar for. For every year of my life.
My mother snatched this out of my hand. The woman told me, saying, what does a 10 year old girl need with $10? And she handed it to my 20 year old brother and she said, I jumped up and ran onto the back porch. When she said this before my very eyes, this woman closed her eyes, clenched her fists against her chest and screamed pitiably in the voice of a small Child, I hate you.
She kept repeating it. I hate you. I hate you.
The pastor and I watched this outburst in amazement.
Suddenly the woman opened her eyes and stared as if seeing us for the first time.
Then she said in her own voice, softly, come to think of it, I've been pretty much sick my whole life since that day.
You ever hear anybody say you make me sick?
Well, it can actually be true.
That very day she began a journey of soul restoration, which has continued through the years. It began with the Lord's Prayer. It has continued with the Lord's Prayer, first forgiving her mother, then forgiving God, and finally, herself. It continued through discovering her father's adoptive love that it was greater than her mother's wretched woundedness. She discovered that her mother was also a hurting person.
And she discovered that hurt people, hurt people.
She experienced a gradual but total deliverance from the migraines. It took months and months, but it did happen.
As her soul was restored, so was her health and, praise God, finally her marriage.
Many spend their entire lives drinking from toxic rivers of rejection rather than from the still waters of healing acceptance. If the Father of Lights has welcomed me in, who can banish me to the darkness outside?
If the Son has taught me to say with him, our Father, then it must mean that we, Jesus and I together, as well as all believers everywhere, that we share a common father.
If Jesus says I should say Our Father, it must be because I have been accepted into the family.
That being the case, who can ever reject me?
Rejection is swallowed up in acceptance, loneliness in familyhood, and orphanhood in adoption.
David takes the truth and makes it deeply personal.
David says, my shepherd, if we are to find the sweetest comfort in the Lord's guardianship, it must become personal.
I've always been confused by folks who find offense in the phrase my personal Lord and Savior, as if it meant mine and mine alone and no one else's.
Since God is our Father, he must therefore be my father as well. My Father and, as David says, my shepherd.
As a graduate seminary student years ago, I took a course in hymnology.
As I remember it, I had to satisfy some requirement in music, and hymnology was the only and best place for one who is completely tone deaf to hide.
In one lecture, the professor quite lost himself in a rant about how he hated the words to certain hymns.
One old hymn in particular bore the brunt of his attack. He savaged the words as being cloying and decried its subjective romanticism, whatever that means.
He despised, actually despised, the way it made God seem to be somebody's personal friend or even love her.
He said he detested the arrogance that would dare to claim no one has ever experienced the kind of intimacy with God that the writer had.
I tell you, I waited in breathless, horrified expectation, waiting to find out the name of this musical monstrosity. So I would never sing it again.
But I was flabbergasted when he revealed the hated him.
The words he so thoroughly denounced were the words of Charles Miles. Sweet old song. I wonder if you remember it. I come to the garden alone While the dew is still on the roses and the voice I hear falling on my ear the Son of God discloses he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own and the joy we share as we tarry there none other has ever known.
What that music professor failed to understand was that Miles was not claiming to know God as no one else ever has.
He was saying no other relationship, no human relationship, can lend the joy to life that comes from intimacy with God.
Perhaps the professor did not understand that intimacy itself, at any level, human or divine, let alone intimacy with God, is so powerful and precious.
David, for all his weaknesses and failures which he had, did understand intimacy with God.
In fact, his words in the 23rd Psalm bear a striking similarity to Charles Miles hymn.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Jesus speaks of our relationship with God in terms of a father and his children.
Jesus the rabbi said our father.
David the King was certainly no rabbi.
He was, among many other things, a gifted poet. David's 23rd Psalm is not telling us who God is, but how who God is made David feel out of his bucolic childhood, farm childhood. David uses a different metaphor, that of a shepherd and his sheep.
David's willingness to call himself a sheep is not exactly self exalting.
Having spent his entire life around sheep, David must have known that sheep are among some of God's stupidest and most defenseless creatures.
Sheep depend upon someone, namely their shepherd, to guide them, to tell them where to eat, to show them where to sleep, even to get them to a place where they can drink.
The shepherd must fight for them and defend them against predators, often at some risk to himself.
Sheep cannot manage to find their own way home from a worn out, depleted pasture onto fresh grass.
What a blessing is ours. In cobbling together the somewhat disparate metaphors employed by David and Jesus, when we look at them together, there is no contradiction.
Hardly.
Instead I can now see that God is my Father and my Father, shepherd and my shepherd Father.
He loves me as only a father can, and leads me as only a shepherd does.
In the two metaphors of God seen together, we discover a lovely revelation of who God is.
We also see a beautiful picture of who we are. We humble ourselves rejoicing just to be sheep in his sheepfold, guarded by his strong hand and provided for by his tender care.
He responds by saying, yes, you are the sheep of my pasture, but far more than that, you are the children of my household.
I hope that you've enjoyed this teaching today on the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer. I'm going to invite you now to pray the Lord's Prayer with me, not repeat the Lord's Prayer. Pray it with me as we have in every episode of this series on the Lord's Prayer, and then to say with me Psalm 23 back to back. I've used it this way for years in my devotional life, and it's just been such a rich blessing to me.
So if you can, where you are, close your eyes. If you're not, then just as you drive or wherever you are, pray the Lord's Prayer. If you need to pray it silently, mentally, then do that and then follow it straight away with the 23rd Psalm.
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.
Amen.
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 shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Stay tuned now, and someone is going to tell you how you can get your copy and many copies of this book. 21 seconds to change the World. I want you to have it.
This has been the leader's notebook until we meet again.
God bless you. I'm Mark Rutland.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: To order a copy of 21Seconds, please visit the store at Dr.markrutland.com. 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.
