Four Psalms | Page 4

to their pasture and rest. The other ambiguous phrase is the vale of deep darkness. As is well known, the letters of the word may be made to spell _shadow of death_; but the other way of taking them is the more probable. This, however, need not lead us away from the associations with which our old translation has invested them. It is not only darkness that the poet is describing, but the darkness where death lurks for the poor sheep,--the gorges, in whose deep shadows are the lairs of wild beasts, and the shepherd and his club are needed. It stands thus for every dismal and deadly passage through which the soul may pass, and, most of all, it is the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There God is with men no less than by the waters of repose, or along the successful paths of active life. Was He able to recover the soul from life's wayside weariness and hunger?--He will equally defend and keep it amid life's deadliest dangers.
II. But the Psalm is not only theology. It is personal religion. Whether the Psalmist sang it first of the Church of God as a whole, or of the individual, the Church herself has sung it, through all generations, of the individual. By the natural progress of religion from the universal to the particular; by the authority of the Lord Jesus, who calls men singly to the Father, and one by one assures them of God's Providence, Grace and Glory; by the millions who have taken Him at His word, and every man of them in the loneliness of temptation and duty and death proved His promise--we also in our turn dare to believe that this Psalm is a psalm for the individual. The Lord is my shepherd: He maketh me to lie down: He leadeth _me_: He restoreth my soul. Lay your attention upon the little word. Ask yourself, if since it was first put upon your lips you have ever used it with anything more than the lips: if you have any right to use it: if you have ever taken any steps towards winning the right to use it. To claim God for our own, to have and enjoy Him as ours, means, as Christ our Master said over and over again, that we give ourselves to Him, and take Him to our hearts. Sheep do not choose their shepherd, but man has to choose--else the peace and the fulness of life which are here figured remain a dream and become no experience for him.
Do not say that this talk of surrender to God is unreal to you. Happiness, contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the soul. Lives are changed by a moment's listening to conscience, by a single and quiet inclination of the mind. We must submit ourselves to God. We must bring our wills under His. Here and now we can do this by resolution and effort, in the strength of His Spirit, which is nearer us than we know. The thing is no mystery, and not at all vague. The mistake people make about it is to seek for it in some artificial and conventional form. We have it travestied to-day under many forms--under the form of throwing open the heart to excitement in an atmosphere removed from real life as far as possible: under the form of assent to a dogma: under the form of adherence to a church.
But do you summon up the most real things in your life--the duty that is a disgust: the sacrifice for others from which you shrink. Summon up your besetting sin--the temptation which, for all your present peace, you know will be upon you before twenty-four hours are past. Summon up these grim realities of your life,--and in face of them give yourself to God's will, put your weakness into the keeping of His grace. He is as real as they are, and the act of will by which you give yourself to Him and His Service will be as true and as solid an experience as the many acts of will by which you have so often yielded to them.
Otherwise this beautiful name, this name Shepherd, must remain to you the emptiest of metaphors: this Psalm only a fair song instead of the indestructible experience which both Name and Psalm become to him who gives himself to God.
Men and women, who in this Christian land have grown up with this Psalm in your hearts, in all the great crises of life that are ahead shall this Psalm revisit us. In perplexity and doubt, in temptation and sorrow, and in death, like our mother's face shall