The Lord is my Shepherd

What If You Already Have a Shepherd

There is a word that gets thrown around as an insult these days. Sheep. Sheeple. The implication is clear: someone who follows blindly, who has no original thought, who just goes along with the crowd. Nobody wants to be called a sheep.

And yet Psalm 23, arguably the most famous poem ever written, opens with exactly that image. "The Lord is my shepherd." Which makes us, by definition, the sheep.

Before dismissing this outright, it is worth sitting with what that actually means, because the picture being painted here is far more radical than most people realise.

The Metaphor We Get Wrong

Most people, even those who have never set foot in a church, can recite at least part of Psalm 23. It shows up at funerals, in films, on greeting cards. But familiarity can breed a kind of blindness. The words wash over us without landing.

The speaker in this talk made an observation that cuts through all of that: "I love to highlight what I call the God verbs. What is it that God does in this Psalm? He leads. He restores. He guides. He is with us. He comforts us. He prepares a table. He anoints us. He pursues us."

That is a lot of activity from God's side. And conspicuously little from ours.

This is where modern culture and Psalm 23 clash head-on. We live in an era that worships self-reliance. The narrative goes something like this: work harder, optimise more, take the best gym membership, book the best holiday to recover from the exhaustion, then repeat. As the speaker put it, "I feel exhausted just thinking about that way of living."

The psalm offers a completely different operating system for life.

More Than a Hired Hand

The Hebrew word behind "shepherd" is worth paying attention to. The phrase "The Lord is my shepherd" translates as Yahweh Rohi, and Rohi means something more than the English word shepherd might suggest. It does not describe a hired hand clocking in and out. It describes a livestock owner. Someone with skin in the game. Someone for whom the sheep are genuinely valuable.

"Sheep are precious. They are valuable to their shepherd. You are valuable to God. Sheep are known by their shepherd. They are marked by their shepherd. It is about ownership, identity, value."

This is not a cold, transactional arrangement. It is personal. The shepherd knows each sheep, marks each one, takes responsibility for each one. In an age where so many people feel anonymous, overlooked, or reduced to a data point, that is a striking claim.

The Effort of Surrender

Here is the part that makes most driven, ambitious people uncomfortable. The psalm describes green pastures, still waters, a restored soul. Beautiful imagery. But notice how the sheep gets there.

"All the sheep had to do was follow. All the sheep had to do was lie down."

The speaker called this "the effort of grace" and described it as surrender. Not passivity, but intentional yielding. Letting God be God. For anyone who has built their identity around being in control, around having all the answers, around making life work through sheer force of will, this feels deeply counterintuitive.

And yet the psalm does not shy away from reality. It does not promise a life free of difficulty. "Even though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death" is right there in the text. Dark valleys are part of the journey. The promise is not that you will avoid them but that you will not walk through them alone.

"You may be walking through a dark valley right now. You may feel darkness and effort casting their shadow over you. But there is a promise for us: Jesus, our Good Shepherd, will be with us."

The rod and staff that the shepherd carries serve a dual purpose. One is protection, fighting off the wolves and threats that come for the sheep. The other is a gentle nudge forward when the sheep gets stuck. When despair sets in and it becomes tempting to just stop and pitch a tent in the valley of self-pity, the shepherd gives a prod to keep moving through the darkness rather than living in it.

Feasting While the Battle Rages

One of the most arresting images in Psalm 23 comes in verse five: "He prepares a table for me in the presence of my enemies."

Not after the enemies have gone. Not once the coast is clear. In the presence of the enemies.

The speaker described a piece of artwork that was painted during a talk on this verse years ago. It depicted a family seated around a dining table, feasting, laughing, sharing stories. And all around them in the background were dark figures. Enemies. But those dark forces could not reach the family because they were surrounded by light.

"It is so defiant. So confident. As we do the feasting, God does the fighting."

There is something beautifully subversive about that. The response to threat and opposition is not to panic, not to scramble, not to devise a strategy. It is to sit down at a table and eat. To trust that the one who set the table is also the one handling the battle.

The God Who Hunts You Down

The final verse of Psalm 23 contains what might be the most surprising word in the entire poem. "Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life."

The English word "follow" is tame. The Hebrew word is radaf, and it means something far more intense. It means to pursue, to chase, to hunt down. The first time radaf appears in the Bible, it describes Laban chasing Jacob, and later Pharaoh chasing the Israelites out of Egypt.

"God is pursuing you. He is chasing you. He is hunting you down with all of his goodness and his mercy and his love."

The Victorian poet Francis Thompson wrote about this in his poem The Hound of Heaven: "I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind; and in the midst of tears I hid from Him."

God, according to Psalm 23, does not sit passively waiting for people to find their way to him. He goes after them. Relentlessly.

The Sheep That Was Found

There is a story from New Zealand about a sheep that was lost for six years. By the time it was found, its wool had grown so heavy, so matted and dirty, that the animal could barely move. It could not see properly. It was weighed down, trapped by the very thing that should have been shorn away years before. When they finally sheared it, they removed roughly 35 kilograms of wool. And the sheep could move again. Could see again. Could breathe again.

"For some people listening to this, that is a picture of you. You thought that freedom, doing your own thing in your own way, was going to bring you into the life you wanted. But all it has done is weigh you down."

There is no judgement in that observation. Just recognition. The shepherd does not berate the lost sheep for wandering off. He goes looking for it, finds it, removes the weight, and brings it home.

Something to Sit With

Psalm 23 is not a poem about religion. It is a poem about relationship. It describes a God who leads, restores, protects, feeds, and relentlessly pursues the people he loves.

The question it leaves us with is not really a theological one. It is personal.

If the shepherd is calling, what is keeping you from following?