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.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. What powerful words written by King David more than 3,000 years ago. Hello, I'm Mark Rutland. Welcome to the Leader's Notebook.
Today's episode is the final episode in a series we've been doing on the Lord's prayer and the 23rd Psalm.
Been talking about my book 21 seconds to change youe World. If you have not heard any of the previous episodes on this series or if you missed some of them, they are all archived. I want you to have every one of them and listen to the whole series and I pray, really pray that it will be a blessing to you.
Beyond that, however, I want you to have the book on which this series has been based.
21 seconds to change your World is probably the most intimate and personal book I've written in the last 25 years.
I talk about how the Lord's prayer in the 23rd Psalm were healing and powerfully healing in my life at a time that I needed a new beginning in my prayer life. I want you to have that for your own self.
I pray that the 21 seconds book will be a blessing to you. I want you to have it. At the end of this podcast, someone is going to come on and talk to you about how to get it or to get multiple copies. I hope you'll buy a whole case of them or multiple cases and use them for your home, cell group or your study group or Sunday school class.
I just know it'll be a blessing to you.
I want you to learn to love the Lord's Prayer, that it will be useful daily, saying it over and over and over again dozens of times a day. I think there have been days of great need in my life when I may have said it a hundred times in the day, then saying it back to back, back to back. With the 23rd Psalm, I found that it was a devotional cocktail. The mixture of the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer that was a tremendous blessing has been and continues to be a great blessing in my life.
In this final podcast on 21 seconds to change youe World, I want to deal with how both of these classics end David's 23rd Psalm ends. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Jesus the prayer that Jesus taught us Jesus Lord's Prayer the Our Father, if you will, ends for thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever.
Both end with the Word forever.
Now let's look at this just a little more closely. The Lord's Prayer begins and ends by declaring the kingdom of God.
Thy kingdom come at the very beginning, Thine is the kingdom at the end.
Every word, every petition, all the faith and hope of the Lord's Prayer in between are bracketed magnificently by the joyful declaration of his kingship over us.
We pray for his kingdom to come on earth. We declare that his kingdom is even now in the earth that is in us.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven, above all things. And finally, the great prayer which we confess that the kingdom is his.
What liberty there is in being free of my own kingdom.
I do not have to build one. I do not have to protect, repair, own, pay for, or provide for a kingdom.
I cannot do any of those things anyway.
I had rather be a love slave in his kingdom than the Lord of my own domain.
Besides, what manner of paltry, pathetic kingdom might mine be?
His kingdom is his, and his is beyond anything that I can ever imagine.
The kingdom is his, the power is his, the glory is his. Everything is his.
And that is the good part, not the bad part.
We are such selfish, petty creatures that we lust to own everything we see.
From our earliest childhood, at the faintest sign of infringement, we clutch our toy to our breast and scream, mind, mind, mind.
When at last we cry out to heaven, yours, Yours, yours. Relief comes in waves.
Free of our own kingdom, we finally find his, and his is altogether good.
Now, David was a king. An earthly king, to be sure, but a king nonetheless. At the end of his great psalm, he rejoices the two greatest qualities of life in God's kingdom, goodness and mercy.
All the kingdoms of this earth have been remarkably free of both goodness and mercy.
The house of David was certainly haunted by all the tragedies of evil and cruelty. The most prosperous and prominent citizens in David's kingdom might hope for a life with goodness, at least moments of goodness, or what passes for goodness here and there along the way. If they transgressed the law, they probably had scant hope of mercy.
Yet King David says, as a sheep in God's pasture, he expects that for the rest of his life all the days of his life, goodness and mercy shall follow him on the pathway.
It is just proof of good tight poetry that David begins the psalm by talking about the good shepherd leading him, and then ends by talking about goodness and mercy following him.
But it's more than poetry.
David is making a strong theological point about living under God's shepherding kingship.
When we go our own way, wickedness and cruelty dog our steps.
When we follow where he leads, goodness and mercy follow us all the days of our lives.
I pastored a country church many, many years ago. Back in the early 1970s, there was a precious old farmer there named Harry. He was proud of his cattle and he loved to show them off, especially to his young city slicker pastor. We would ride in his pickup truck or just walk around the pasture.
He also had two big, not too civilized looking dogs that followed us everywhere. They never tried to bite me, but they did make me nervous and I wouldn't have dared approach them without Harry present.
But the moment Harry opened the truck door, they would leap into the bed.
They slept at his feet, ate from his hand, and I believe they would have killed anyone or anything that threatened old Harry.
The funny part is he named them Goodness and Mercy and he thought it was a terrific joke.
I guess it was at that that these two savage looking dogs also gave me an insight into Psalm 23. I've never forgotten. Goodness and mercy followed him every day of his life.
David and Jesus, a thousand years apart, both conclude what are certainly the greatest devotional masterpieces.
With Forever, David says, I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
This is strikingly New Testament imagery. In John 14, Jesus uses a very similar image. In my Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you, I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there you may be also.
When it comes to prayer for healing, forever is our wonderful, precious, indispensable theological ace in the hole.
Please forgive such a secular metaphor as ace in the hole.
Forever is what we hold back while we pray for healing. Now, in the present body, there is a delicate balance in the healing ministry, and forever is the fulcrum on which it rests.
We anoint the sick with oil according to the Book of James. We pray in faith, we believe for their healing.
Why some tiptoe timidly into prayer for healing or even retreat from it is hard for me to understand. In the light of Jesus Emphasis on healing. Especially when the book of James is so clear in its instruction for ministry to the sick. Anoint them with oil and pray. Believe God for healing.
By the same token, some have no full bodied theology of healing because they also have no theology of death.
Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a believer.
When we pray for God's will, we are praying for healing.
When we say forever, we have to mean it.
Someone once pounced on me after a healing service with what he thought would be a devastating question. How do you know that these healings you prayed for and saw tonight, how do you they aren't temporary? He asked.
I'm 100% sure they're temporary, I answered him.
He was shocked.
He said Jesus miracles weren't temporary.
I said, sure they were.
Every miracle Jesus worked was temporary. He turned water into wine, but after it was drunk, it changed again.
He raised Lazarus from the dead. But later Lazarus died again.
Then he went to heaven again.
The man was absolutely flabbergasted at this. He said, well, I don't even know what to say to that.
I do. I answered, forever.
No matter how good temporary is, after temporary comes forever.
There will be nothing temporary about forever. But until then, everything is temporary.
It's sometimes the duty of a minister to sit with the dying.
The first time I was called on to perform that lonely job, I was a very young pastor. I had never actually seen anyone die. I'd never been in the room when someone passed through the doorway of death.
An elderly man in my church had been hospitalized for weeks until his family was exhausted.
Late one night, seeing how badly they needed sleep, I urged them to go home. And I told them I would stay all night myself. And if anything happened, the night nurse would call them.
Of course, after days in the hospital, that was the very night he died.
In the wee hours of the morning, I heard the death rattle in his throat and I called the night nurse and she said, yes, he's dying. I'll go call the family.
When she left the room, suddenly he sat bolt upright in the bed. It nearly scared the wits out of me. He looked at a blank hospital wall. He raised his hand and he said, oh, beautiful.
And he laid his head on the pillow and breathed his last.
I've never seen a look of such radiant excitement as there was on that old man's face.
I am convinced that he saw forever.
He was not afraid or confused or shaken.
All he could do was exclaim, beautiful.
I don't know what forever will look like. I've never Claimed. I know, but I know he saw it, and that's the best word he could use to describe it. I also know this.
We are in the stream of forever now.
Heaven will be ours, but goodness and mercy are following us this very minute.
Jesus ends the Lord's Prayer with, thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
What magnificent words.
What brilliant, transcendent hope and joy. David and Jesus combine to tell us that the kingdom of God is in the earth, the earth of us now. And when that earth is no more, we will dwell in the kingdom of God eternally. His kingdom is in us. We are also in it, and we shall be in it eternally.
The kingdom is his, not ours.
And we rejoice to proclaim that if the kingdom is his, and it is, then so are all the power and the glory forever.
Forever and ever and ever. Amen. Amen and amen.
Well, that's it, my friend. That's the end of this series of podcasts on the Lord's prayer and the 23rd Psalm, based on my book, 21 Seconds to Change your world. I want you to have that book, and I want you to get it for friends of yours, for your classmates, your colleagues, your cell group.
In just a few moments, someone's gonna tell you how to get that book and how to get it in bulk, quantity if you want it.
Meanwhile, I want you to close this whole series with me. In every one of these episodes, we've prayed the Lord's Prayer. Now we're gonna do it one more time. But I'm believing this is not the last time you'll pray the Lord's prayer, but that it's going to be one of many, many, many times, many times a day that you'll pray the Lord's Prayer and then punctuate it with the 23rd Psalm.
Let's pray together as we close this podcast. Not just say it, not just repeat it.
Let us pray the Lord's Prayer.
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.
This has been the leader's notebook, and I'm Mark Rutland.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: To order a copy of 21 seconds, please visit the store at Dr. MarkRutland.
Enter the promo code. 21 seconds 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.
