The Lord Is My Shepherd

I think the reason Psalm 23 has outlasted almost every other poem ever written is that the man who wrote it knew the job from the inside. Before David was a king, before he was a giant-killer, he was the youngest of eight brothers, left out in the fields with the flock while the grown-ups got on with things that mattered more. When the prophet Samuel came looking for a future king, nobody even thought to call David in from the sheep (1 Samuel 16:11).

So when he says “the Lord is my shepherd”, he is not borrowing a gentle, greetings-card image. He is describing a job he had done with his own hands, in the dark, against real teeth. He later tells King Saul, almost in passing, that he had killed both a lion and a bear to protect the flock (1 Samuel 17:34 to 36). A shepherd in the Judean hills slept across the gateway of the fold, carried a club for the predators and a crook for the strays, and counted heads by lamplight. The work was constant, unglamorous and often dangerous.

That is the life David hands to God and says: this is how you treat me. Not as a distant manager of the universe, but as the one who is awake while I sleep, who comes out into the dark after me when I wander, and who would put his own body between me and the thing that wants to destroy me.

In Hebrew the opening line is only a handful of words, and the first of them is the name. Where our English Bibles print “the LORD” in small capitals, the Hebrew has the personal name of God, the four letters we usually write as YHWH, the name he gave Moses at the burning bush. David does not begin with a title like “the Almighty” or “the Most High”, true as those are. He begins with the name that means God is near enough to be spoken to.

Then comes the word for shepherd, and tucked inside it is that small, world-changing pronoun: my. David does not say the Lord is a shepherd, a tidy fact about how the universe is run. He says my shepherd, and the sentence turns from theology into relationship. It is the difference between knowing there is such a thing as a doctor and being able to say “this is my doctor, she knows my name”.

The second half, “I shall lack nothing”, grows straight out of the first. It is not a promise of comfort or wealth. Sheep with a good shepherd are not given everything they might fancy, but they are never short of what they actually need: grass, water, rest, safety, a way home. David is making a quiet, daring claim. If God himself is the one keeping me, then at the level that truly counts I am already provided for, even on a day when it does not feel remotely like it.

There is something easy to miss here unless you know the world David lived in. All across the ancient Near East, “shepherd” was a title for kings. Pharaohs and Mesopotamian rulers called themselves the shepherds of their people, the ones who fed and defended the flock of the nation. It was the language of authority, not just affection.

So when David, himself a king, calls the Lord his shepherd, he is doing something humble and bold at once. He is saying that he, the shepherd of Israel, is himself only a sheep, and that the real King is God. The crown does not change his status before heaven. He still needs leading, feeding and finding, like everyone else.

The prophets later turned this same picture into a warning and a promise. Through Ezekiel, God speaks against the “shepherds of Israel”, the leaders who fed themselves and let the flock scatter, and then he says something extraordinary: “I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out” (see Ezekiel 34). The shepherd of Psalm 23 is not content to delegate. He comes himself.

For a thousand years Psalm 23 was sung without anyone being able to point to the shepherd. Then, in a courtyard in Jerusalem, a carpenter’s son from Nazareth said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11).

It is hard to overstate how startling that was. Jesus takes the most loved psalm in Israel, the one every child knew, and quietly stands in the middle of it. He is claiming to be the LORD of the opening line. And then he proves the claim in the only way that would settle it for ever, not by argument but by dying for the flock and rising again.

This is why Christians have read Psalm 23 at gravesides for centuries. The line “I shall lack nothing” reaches all the way past the last thing we are afraid of. If the shepherd has already gone through death ahead of us and come out the other side, then even there the sheep are not abandoned. The psalm that begins in a green field ends in the house of the Lord for ever, and the one who carries us the whole way has a face and a name.

I find this verse hardest to believe on the ordinary days, not the dramatic ones. When the money is short, when the diagnosis is uncertain, when the to-do list is longer than the hours, “I shall lack nothing” can sound almost like a taunt.

What helps me is to remember that the sheep does not arrange the pasture. It does not lie awake working out where the next field of grass will come from. Its whole job is to stay near the shepherd and keep following. The provision is his problem, not the sheep’s. That does not make me passive, any more than a sheep is passive when it gets up and walks where it is led. But it does take the unbearable weight of being my own provider off my shoulders and put it back on his.

So I have learned to pray this verse slowly, almost one word at a time, especially when I am anxious. The Lord. Is. My. Shepherd. By the time I reach “I shall lack nothing”, I am usually not asking for more things. I am asking to trust that the one who has me is enough.

This verse works as a call to worship, said together at the start of a service. Nobody in that room is claiming their own circumstances are sorted. They are claiming, out loud and as a body, that the one they have gathered to worship is the shepherd David describes, and a congregation can carry a sentence that a single frightened person cannot.

Handing the same line to one person, in private, in the middle of their crisis, is a different act. Say it to a family behind on the electric bill, or to someone in the queue at your own church’s foodbank, and it can land as a verdict rather than a comfort: you must not be trusting God enough, or you would not be short. I have used it that way myself, in a hurry, because it was quicker than actually helping.

The shepherd David has in mind did not spare his flock the feeling of want. Judean summers were dry, and a bad week was a bad week. What never failed was the man walking ahead of the sheep towards water and refusing to stop until he found some. That is what the line promises: not that you will feel no lack, but that nobody is walking away from you while you feel it.

So I would say it in the liturgy without hesitating. I would hold it back as advice to someone mid-crisis, take them a casserole, and let the verse do its proper work in worship instead.

Preach verse 1 on its own and you have handed people a slogan. Read it as the heading it is, and the rest of the psalm becomes David working out what “lack nothing” would have to include if it were true. The spine of a talk is already there, without inventing anything.

• Verse 1 makes the claim: nothing genuinely needed will go missing.
• Verses 2 and 3 answer for the body and the mind, with green pastures, still waters, and a soul restored.
• Verse 3 also answers for direction, the paths of righteousness, so the sheep is never left guessing which way to walk.
• Verse 4 answers for danger. The valley of the shadow of death does not put the sheep outside the claim.
• Verse 5 answers for dignity: a table laid in front of people who wish you harm, oil on your head, a cup that runs over.
• Verse 6 answers for time. Goodness and loving kindness follow all the days of a life, and the psalm ends in the LORD’s house for ever.

A talk built this way never has to argue that the claim is true. It only has to show a congregation that David tested his own six words against exhaustion, guidance, enemies and death before he let them stand, and came back to them unchanged.

Something worth noticing if you are preparing this for a group: Psalm 23 does not arrive out of nowhere. Turn back a page and Psalm 22 opens with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, the words Jesus later cries from the cross (Matthew 27:46). Then, straight after that, the shepherd.

I would not claim the psalms were arranged to make that point. I genuinely do not know, and anyone who tells you flatly that they were is going further than I can. But the order is there on the page, and readers have leaned on it for a very long time. It means Psalm 23 is not the poem of a man who had never felt abandoned. It sits next door to the loudest cry of abandonment in the book, and still says “I shall lack nothing”.

Worth telling a group who suspect this psalm belongs only to people whose lives are going well.

Jesus does not leave the good shepherd standing on his own. In John 10 he sets a second man beside him, and the contrast is the point of the whole speech: the hired hand sees the wolf coming and runs, because the sheep are not his own (John 10:12 to 13).

For years I read that as a swipe at bad clergy and left it there. It is sharper than that, and it cuts closer to home. The hired man need not be lazy or unkind. He might be good with his hands, know the field, know where the water still is in August. What he has not got is anything of his own at stake. He is paid the same whether the flock comes home or ends up scattered down a hillside in the dark, and when the wolf actually turns up, that arithmetic does its work in about a second.

I picture him doing the sums out there: a hundred sheep that belong to somebody else, one wolf, one club, and a wife at home. Nobody sensible would blame him for walking away. Which is what makes the good shepherd’s refusal strange rather than merely nice. It is not that he is braver at the same maths. He stands in a different relation to the animal altogether.

So the comfort David is reaching for here is not mainly warmth, and that surprised me the first time I saw it. Warmth can be perfectly real and still be outrun by fear. What he is claiming is that God has something of his own invested in him: bought, kept, counted, not a shift on a rota that a qualified stranger could cover. That is why the wolf never becomes a calculation.

It is also the thing “I shall lack nothing” is resting on. A hired man’s flock lacks plenty, because he has already gone by the time it matters.

The psalm never says this out loud, and somebody should. A flock in David’s world did not exist purely to be protected. It was there to be used: wool, milk, meat, and once a year a Passover lamb, brought into the house on the tenth day and kept until the fourteenth, without blemish, its blood put on the doorposts and its body eaten before morning (Exodus 12:3 to 10). Read that slowly and the shape of it is grim. Those four days of keeping the animal close were not a kindness. They were quality control. The care and the knife were one trade, and you could check a lamb over daily precisely because it was headed for a table.

That unsettles me and I do not want to smooth it away. David was not naive about what happens to sheep. He had kept them. He knew exactly which economy he was borrowing when he handed God that title, and it was not a sentimental one.

Centuries on, Isaiah describes God’s own suffering servant in the same terms: led like a sheep to the slaughter, silent, not opening his mouth (Isaiah 53:7). Those two pictures sat badly together in my head for a long time, as though scripture could not make up its mind whether being a sheep meant being kept or being killed.

I no longer think they compete, because Jesus took both and refused to tidy either one away. Shepherd in Psalm 23, lamb in Isaiah 53. The sheep lack nothing because the shepherd walked into the lamb’s place and let the four days of watching end the way they always ended.

Ask a child to draw a sheep and you get something cheerful and faintly gormless, and honestly that is nearer the mark than the Sunday school picture, though not as an insult. A heavily fleeced sheep that rolls into a hollow or against a slope can end up on its back, legs in the air, and be unable to get itself upright again. Shepherds call it being cast. Left long enough it dies, no wolf and no thief anywhere near it, purely from being the wrong way up. I have not got a study to hand you for that, so take it as the kind of thing shepherds say, said most often about the heavy wool breeds.

I want that told to children plainly instead of the fluffy version. Not “sheep are lovely and clever”, because they are not especially either, and the Bible chose the comparison with its eyes open. Tell them the sheep on its back cannot right itself, cannot fight anything, cannot even shout. It just goes quiet. And then its whole life hangs on a man walking a field for no better reason than that the animal is his.

That is what David is admitting about himself when he takes the word for his own. The claim underneath the six words is not “I am worth the trouble”. It is that the trouble is somebody’s job, he does it well, and my own contribution to being saved is embarrassingly close to nil. I resisted that for years, because I would much rather be the clever sheep. There is no such thing.

Psalm 23 ends with the sheep indoors, in the LORD’s house. Turn the page and Psalm 24 opens with the earth belonging to God, and then a question with nothing gentle in it at all: who may go up the hill of the LORD, who may stand in his holy place? The answer is a person with clean hands and a pure heart (Psalm 24:3 to 4).

I would not claim anyone arranged them to be read together, and I do not know that they were. But they are neighbours on the page, and for years I thought they were arguing. Twenty three is grace the whole way down: the finding, the feeding, the carrying. Twenty four sounds like a man on the gate asking for your papers. So I kept one and skimmed past the other, which is the sort of thing you can do for a decade without ever admitting you are doing it.

I have stopped. The sheep carried the whole way is the same sheep expected at the hill with clean hands and a heart that has not been split down the middle, and the shepherd doing the carrying was never indifferent to what his sheep get up to. Being kept and being changed are not two offers to pick between. Take either and you have taken both, which is more demanding than the psalm sounds when we read it at funerals, and better than it sounds when we read it as a checkpoint.

I want to say plainly what this verse does not let me get away with pretending. Some people who trusted the Lord as their shepherd have starved. Some have died of thirst in places nobody came looking for them. Some have gone missing on a hillside, in a war, in a hospital corridor, and the shepherd, on any ordinary reading of events, did not arrive in time.

I have heard this explained away too quickly more times than I can count, usually by someone whose own stomach was full while they said it. I am not going to do that here. If “I shall lack nothing” means every genuine physical need will always be met in this life, the verse is simply not true, and I would rather say that plainly than defend it with a reference.

What I have come to instead is smaller and less tidy. The claim was never that this life would be free of loss. Even the sheep in a well kept flock die, of age, of accident, sometimes of a neglect nobody meant. What the psalm insists on is that the shepherd’s care does not end where the ground does, and that no sheep, living or dead, has ever fallen out of his sight. I cannot prove that to someone standing at a grave that should not exist, a child’s grave, a grave that came out of hunger that should have been fed. I can only say I have not found a truer place to stand than beside them, still holding the same six words, without pretending they have already stopped hurting, and without walking away to find a happier conversation instead.

These are good on your own, or to take into a small group. There are no clever answers expected, only honest ones.

• Where in your life right now are you trying to be your own shepherd, arranging the pasture yourself?
• David could call God “my” shepherd because he knew him personally. How would you describe the difference between knowing about God and knowing him?
• “I shall lack nothing” is about needs, not wants. What do you genuinely need today, underneath the things you think you want?
• If the shepherd has already gone through death ahead of us, what fear does that quietly take the sting out of for you?

If this has been a help, you might like to read it alongside Psalm 23:3 and the other verses about comfort, or sit with the words on your own using the verse of the day.