II.
Jehovah Mine.
1. "The Lord is my shepherd." Here is the link that connects our hearts with the living God. It is a grand thing to consider how far out His shepherd-care extends. Man never yet lighted upon an unblest spot where no token of it could be seen. It meets us everywhere, and every hour. "The Lord is good to all ; and his tender mercies are over all his works." The lilies of the field, the birds of the air, the young lions in the tawny wild, all tribes of living and sentient creatures that people this earth, all the isles of light that shine in the blue immensity of heaven — the Lord careth for them all. We are astonished, overwhelmed, lost, when we think of the boundless extent of the fields into which His care reaches forth. But here our minds are called back from wandering out into His wide dominions,
^ Joseph Parker.
PSALM XXIII. I 389
and we are directed to repose our own personal confidence in this great and unsearchable God, and to say, He is my Shepherd ; mine, because He has given Himself to me ; mine, for my heart trusts Him and clings to Him ; my Shepherd, caring for me, loving me, keeping me.
^ We enter the Christian life by an act of simple appropria- ting faith. In a sense, all faith is " appropriating." Mere intel- lectual faith is the act of the mind by which it lays hold on a truth and makes it its own. But the highest reach of this faculty of faith is when we face God's largest lessons, and lay them to heart as true for us. Then, not only intellect, but will and desire make these truths ours. Perhaps the practical meaning of this appropriating faith has never been more clearly explained than in the early history of the eminent American preacher, W. M. Taylor. When he was a boy he heard a sermon in which the preacher dwelt much on the appropriating act of faith. He asked his father what it meant. Strange to say, that father had asked much the same question when he was a child, and now he repeated his mother's answer for his own boy's guidance : " Take your Bible, and underscore all the ' my's,' and ' mine's,' and the ' me's ' you come upon, and you will discover what ' appropria- tion ' means." We wish we could induce every reader of these words to spend ten minutes in this simple exercise now. Take the Psalms. " The Lord is my shepherd." Is that true ? True now ? " He restoreth my soul." Do you believe it ? Now ? Assuredly, if Christians would exercise this direct personal trust in the loving promises of God, it would mean a marvellous access of spiritual confidence, and power, and conquest.^
Happy me ! 0 happy sheep ! Whom my God vouchsafes to keep, Ev'n my God, ev'n He it is That points me to these paths of bliss; On whose pastures cheerful Spring, All the year doth sit and sing, And rejoicing, smiles to see Their green backs wear His livery : Pleasure sings my soul to rest, Plenty wears me at her breast. Whose sweet temper teaches me Not wanton, nor in want to be. At my feet the blubbering mountain Weeping, melts into a fountain, ' J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 37.
390 A PERSONAL PROVIDENCE
"Whose soft silver-sweating streams Make high-noon forget his beams : When my wayward breath is flying, He calls home my soul from dying, Strokes and tames my rabid grief, And does woo me into life : When my simple weakness strays (Tangled in forbidden ways), He (my Shepherd) is my guide; He's before me, on my side ; And behind me, He beguiles Craft in all her knotty wiles; He expounds the weary wonder Of my giddy steps, and under Spreads a path as clear as the day Where no churlish rub says nay To my joy-conducted feet, Whilst they gladly go to meet Grace and Peace, to learn new lays Tuned to my great Shepherd's praise.*
^ "My Shepherd" — as if this individual Psalmist had appro- priated the Deity. Yet it is quite in accord with the deepest experience and the most ideal observation. Of the sun in the heavens every little child might say, as he bathes his little fingers in the great flame, " The sun is my sun " ; and yet it is everybody's sun, and the little child's sun all the more truly because it is everybody's light. He does not take God away from others ; he makes others feel how tender and how near God may be, though we have been searching for Him with lamps and candles and lanterns, whilst He was blazing upon us from every star that gleamed in the under heavens which we call the sky .2
^ When preaching to children from home, Dr. Wilson often related Lady Boyd's story of " Jamie, the Shepherd Boy," because he found that it " told " better than any of his other stories. It runs thus : A minister was visiting an ignorant shepherd boy on his death-bed. lie gave the boy the text, "The Lord is my shepherd." He bade him notice that the text had five words as his left hand had five knuckles. He repeated the text slowly, appropriating a word for each knuckle, and getting the boy to fold in a knuckle as he repeated each word. The minister told him that the fourth knuckle represented the most important ^ Richard Crashaw. '^ J. Parker, City Tevjple Pulpit, vii. 271.