Joseph Prince sermon What To Do When Walking Through A Trial: In the shepherd’s psalm, Psalm 23, it is a picture of the Lord Jesus, Psalms 22 is a suffering of Jesus. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Right? It starts with that and then we have Psalm 23, Through the death of Jesus, we are now living, today, in Psalm 23.
Psalm 24 says, Lift up, you everlasting doors, And the King of glory will enter, That’s the second coming of Jesus Christ, So we are now in Psalms 23, it says; The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, I shall not lack.
Notice that, as we are going through, what we call, good times, we say: “He makes me to lie down in green pastures, He is in the third person, He leads me beside the still waters, He restores my soul, He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake”.
It is like we are talking to someone about the Lord, We are speaking of Him in the third person,
By the way, this term: ”paths of righteousness” is very interesting because when you go to Israel and look at some of the hills and mountains, they have lines around them. Now, the geographical movements of the earth or the winds do not do this naturally.
It is actually done by the sheep and the flock, in fact, for even thousands of years in Israel, where the sheep will go around the paths of righteousness.
Righteousness is not a verb, Righteousness is a noun, Righteousness is not something you do, Righteousness is something that you are, That God has made you to be, he did that When Jesus came, Notice that as we are going through good times, we can afford to say “He” in the third person, But the next verse says: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil;”
Now watch this “Yea, though I” It doesn’t mean that you purposely walked in it But even if, Thank God that we are walking through and not walking to stay in the valley of the shadow of death.
The shadow of anything bad cannot hurt you, so it’s called the shadow of death Because Jesus conquered death So for the flock, it’s only a shadow of death in appearance, But we’re going through And it is a dark time, It is not a good time, a valley speaks of trials.
Perhaps you’re going through a valley right now, But notice what the shepherd does, He leads them, there’s also something else about
Israeli shepherding, When it comes to nighttime, they lead, from the front; they don’t lead from the back. They lead from the front and the sheep follow them, the sheep know his voice.
As for the voice of a stranger, like Jesus said, they will not follow. He will lead and then sheep will follow him and the sheep finds security by looking at where he is.
Pastor Joseph Prince has asked us to like sheep’s look up to our shepherd who is Jesus in trying times and he will definitely lead us out of the shadows.
