The psalmist David records
the revelation of his relationship with God, predicated on his own experience. One
of the things that makes God so amazing is that he can come to you on your
level. You do not have to come from a religious tradition or a faith background
for God to reveal himself to you.
He can reveal himself to you
through a rock. He cans reveal himself to you through a piece of bread because
he is the rock of ages and the bread of heaven. He can take something you do
not understand and use it to reveal something you do not understand.
If God were to make himself
available on the basis of intellect, it would not just be because we do not
have the same intellect. God has not explained himself, but he has revealed
himself. He will reveal himself to a two-year-old as well as to a PhD holder
because he speaks in all languages, reaches all people, and touches every
heart.
God’s desire is to reveal
himself to everyone at every stage of our lives. This revelation is because we
need him every day msore than we have ever needed him.
Psalms 23:2, “He
maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”
1)
Allow the center of your heart to be still
There may be turbulence all around you, but he wants your
center to be still. You must have a calm place in order to deal with all the
chaos in your periphery. Do not allow the chaos around you to get in you. When
the chaos of life gets into you, it becomes detrimental because it begins to
deteriorate what God wants to do through your life.
Ships
do not sink because they pass through the water. They only go down when the
water passes through them. It is not what is going on around you that is giving
you the trouble. It is what is going on inside of you that is giving you the
trouble.
You
have the power to deal with the conditions and the circumstances around you. If
you could prevent what is around you from affecting what is inside of you, you
could operate from a still place. You cannot have still waters until you
release or let go of many of the things that are distracting and invading your
space.
David
was not the preferred son of Jesse. In fact, he was the ignored son. He was the
right son of his father, and it looked like his life was not going anywhere. He
was a shepherd boy with a destiny locked inside of him.
In the
early stages of his life, he was surrounded by mediocrity. Mediocrity is not a
bad thing; ordinariness is not a bad thing if you have greatness inside of you.
When you have greatness inside of you, and though surrounded by mediocrity, you
can still be tormented by what other people are satisfied with. However, there
is an inner knowing within all of us that we are people of purpose and that
something great is supposed to happen in our lives. The challenge is how do we
get those great things that we sense in our spirit to manifest in our lives
when we are constantly bombarded with adversity?
2)
Always believe you are on the way to greatness
When
the enemy knows that God is going to use you in a mighty way, he does
everything he can to upset the very genesis of your life. He tries to set you
on a path of destructive behavior to limit any self-esteem that you might have.
The Devil does not fight anybody who is not destined to go anywhere, but when
he senses that there is greatness inside of you, the attack comes early.
You
wonder why your life has been a constant fight and struggle. You feel like
giving up, and your life is crowded with ups and downs. That is not a sign of
weakness but a depiction of greatness.
David
has greatness down inside of himself, but he had to go through a process for
that greatness to be revealed. And over a period of time, God began to bring
forth his purpose.
I have
been on a tangent in my church about living on purpose because most people get
out of bed in the morning to see what’s going to happen. And there is an elect
group of people who get out of bed to make something happen. You have to decide
which category you are going to be in.
Either
you get up and sit on the side of the bed or say, “No, what am I going to do
today?” Or you wake up with an agenda and an urgency, direction, and focus.
When you have got direction, you resist distraction. You have got to know what
is and is not on your agenda before commencing your day at every sunrise.
David
came to a juncture where he understood that God was going to do something in
his life that which his background did not predict. No one would think that God
would make a king out of a shepherd boy.
3) Do not limit your vision to your situation.
Your
situation may not be an indicator of what God is going to do in your life. Your
situation and circumstance can be a direct contradiction to what God is going
to do in your life.
God has
a tendency to use the least likely people to do the most amazing things to the
degree that it baffles everyone how they got to do what they did. It is
absolutely a fact that if the Lord had not been on your side, you wouldn’t be
able to do what you did.
Anybody
who has been through what you’ve been through should have had a nervous
breakdown or blown their brains out. Anybody who had to fight the way you had
to fight all of your life should be dead by now, but here you are. When God is
for you, who can be against you?
It
doesn’t matter whether you’re the preferred son, or you were the preferred
daughter, or whether you came from an Ivy League school or not. When God is for
you, he will push you ahead and set you in position. That is the reason why
most successful people have haters. People do not understand how somebody like
their kind could end up in a fine place like that.
Do you
know the problem with haters? They think they are more qualified. They think
they have been groomed for it. But when you walk in divine favor, God can
execute a plan in your life that supernaturally imposes you into an excellent
position. Sometimes, you would not even know how you got there, but God can
beam you up.
In the
light of God, you can be beamed into a position and a situation that is beyond
human comprehension. Therefore, do not allow the turbulence of the times, the
wickedness of your surroundings, or the narrowness of your friends to deter you
from your destiny.
4) God is a mystery; everything will work out for your good
You
have to have a sense in your spirit and heart that you have a direction and a
purpose, and you are going to live on that purpose in spite of your
predicament.
God
reveals himself. He is something to be revealed and not explained. If you can
explain God, then it is no longer God. God is a mystery.
He is a
mystery that whenever he gets ready to communicate with you, he reduces himself
down into a form that you can understand because if he were to come to you in
the fullness of who he is, it would cause your brain to pop.
Your
mind cannot comprehend what Paul calls the manifold wisdom of God. God has so
much to him that he has to break himself down for our mortal minds to
comprehend. When you are hungry, he says, “I am bread.” When you are thirsty,
he says, “I am water.” When you are lonely, he says, “I am a friend.”
5) Do not resist being peculiar.
David
had no background to be king. He did not come from the upper echelon of Israel.
He came from common people, and his father was a common man. He was a shepherd
boy who smelled sheep dung and got flies around him.
When
God found him, he was dancing on the mountainside, and writing poems to God. He
was very peculiar.
One of
our great problems today is that we resist being peculiar. We seek to fit in
rather than to stand out, not realizing that nobody ever follows the ordinary
but the extraordinary.
And the
more you try to fit in, the less eligible you are to be extraordinary. It takes
courage to be extraordinary. You have to have the courage to be controversial,
to stand out, and to be different.
David
was different. It is sensitive enough to think he was soft and right in poetry
only. But he had a duality personality. He was lamb-like in his creativity but
a lion in his passion.
You
cannot be an ordinary person and have an extraordinary anointing. People who
walk in great anointing always stand out. John the Baptist came eating wild
locusts and honey. You have got to be willing to be different. Jesus hung out
with wine bibbers, and prostitutes. Then the people said, “How are you going to be a priest
running around with people like that?” If you want to fit in, God cannot use
you. But if you are willing to stand out and celebrate your uniqueness, God
will use you mightily.
You
might have changed your hair, and people did not like you. You might have
changed your clothes, and they did not like you. You even moved neighborhoods,
and they still did not like you. You never figure out why they did not like
you. They are not supposed to like you. You are not called to fit in but to
stand out.
6) Hand it over to God to control
Your
life may seem chaotic and overwhelming, like being spun around on a potter’s
wheel. However, just like the potter controls the wheel with his foot, your
life is in good hands and under control.
This
God reveals himself to David through something that the little psalmist could
understand. He says, “David, I am to you like what you are to the sheep.” And
David says, “The Lord is my shepherd.”
Somebody
else would say, “He is my peace and protector” Somebody else would say, “He’s
my kinsman and redeemer.” Somebody else would say, “He’s my buckler.” But God
is so multifaceted that he can show so many different sides of himself.
David
reached into the revelation of who God is based on his personal experience and
said, “The Lord is my shepherd.”s
You
should never be desperate for support. If they give you, good and fine, but if
they deny, no arguments. You won’t suffer from it because those people are not
your source. Everyone serves as a resource. If the resource shuts down here,
God will open another one elsewhere.
7) Learn to rest in green places
David
confesses that sometimes we are self-saboteurs, not resting in green places.
Sometimes, because of what we went through early, we do not rest in green
places. We might experience green places, but we do not always feel comfortable
in them. When you have been spawned in turmoil, you have an aversion for peace.
When
good times come, it’s natural to feel anxious. It can be hard to fully enjoy
them when you’re worried they won’t last. This feeling might stem from past
experiences of neglect, making it difficult to embrace moments of joy.
Love
seems strange. You’ll run away from people who love you and invest all kinds of
energy in people who don’t love you. In the end, when those people betray you,
you live in doubt and fear of true love, even when it comes by you.
We like
to shout about the good times. We like to sing about them. We like to hear
people preach about them. But when we get them, we do not lay down in them. We
do not own them. We often struggle to fully embrace the good things in life,
burdened by feelings of guilt, anger, and hostility. After fighting for so
long, it is difficult for us to let go and simply be at peace.
8) Allow God to make you rests
We have
been so used to noise and turbulence. Everyone is hooked up in drama but likes
the idea of calmness. But when the reality of calmness comes, we do not still
know how to lie down in it.
So,
David is confessing here when he says, “He makes it to me.” Have you ever had
God make you lie down?
God is
the one to force you to rest in the blessings that he has created for
you. He would force you to relax and lie down until you understand that
this blessing is yours. He would open up your heart to love again, to live
again, and stop faking.
Many
people are not present in the moment. They are pretending in the moment. God
will align your full self, and make you lie down in a calm space, and stop you
from acting like you are happy when you are not.
After
all the hell you have been through, it is time to enter into a season where you
can lie down in some green pastures and experience what God has for you.
Sheep
are heavily laden with wool. If you bring them to waters that are moving
rapidly, they will bend their nose to drink from the water, but the wetness of
the water with the heaviness of the wool will drag them under the current. They cannot drink in turbulent places. They do not birth
their young in turbulent atmospheres. They must find a calm place to deliver
what is inside of them.
He
brings you to a calm place so that you can re-fortify yourself. Because if you
are in constant turbulence, you cannot drink.
Peace be unto you
Many times, we get so wrapped up in achieving our goals that we miss the opportunity to stop and be thankful for the things we have achieved.
