Psalm 23:6 Goodness and mercy

Many of us have memorized the 23^th psalm, and for good reason.  It’s short, easy to memorize, and it presents in an outline fashion some important facets about our life with God. 

I titled this lesson ‘Goodness and mercy’, because we remember those words from the psalm, but if I were to translate that verse, I would not use those words.

Psalm 23:6 (NASB95)  ⁶ Surely goodness and lovingkindness will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

I don’t remember the last time I heard the word ‘goodness’ used in a sentence.  If you saw the Hebrew word by itself, you would translate it as ‘good.’  So, to me, saying that goodness will follow me doesn’t mean as much as saying that ‘good will follow me.’  I want to know that I am not screwing up my life.  Good is coming out of it.

The second word is mercy.  I wrote about this recently in another article.  Mercy means to help a person in need who might otherwise not be able to help themselves.  The person need not be emotionally involved when they help that other person.  It’s just the right thing to do.  In the article, I wrote of compassion, where a person feels another person’s pain and then acts.  Not because it is the right thing to do necessarily, but because they share that person’s pain.

Here the word translated as ‘mercy’ means lovingkindness.  The person who shows lovingkindness also shows mercy, but they actually care about you, and show it kindly. 

But that isn’t the best part.

These things, good and lovingkindness, don’t just follow us, they pursue us.  That’s the Hebrew word translated ‘follow.’  Pursue.  It’s saying that God wants to do good things in your life and is working on it.

A big question that Christians have is how involved is God in their life.  We don’t see Him, we hear from Him from time to time but never as much as we want to.  Is God waiting for us to make the first move?  Does God spend more of His time waiting for us to pray for things before He acts, or is He always working in our lives in the background?

These are questions I have been asking a lot in the last few years.

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that a lot of Christians reading this will not feel like God is working in their lives or that good and lovingkindness is pursuing them.

Go back to verse 4:

Psalm 23:4  ⁴ Even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

This tells me that these experiences are not automatic.  Do you see good and lovingkindness pursuing you?  Christians don’t automatically approach dangerous situations without fear.  It’s a decision they make at some point in their life when they believe that God really wants what’s best for them and God will protect them.  And I think we need to believe in God’s care before we really see it.

A good first step starts right here.  Can you believe that God wants you to know good all your life and that He always treats you with kindness?  It may sound obvious, but you have to dig down real deep and see what you really feel about this.  I didn’t say what you think about it, but what you feel about it.  That says whether what you think has gone down into your soul, and you have found your rest with God.

Then go back through the rest of the psalm.  Do you sense God leading you?  Are you finding rest?  The very act of calling God your shepherd shows a level of spiritual maturity that I think many Christians never attain.  It means you’ve given up the idea that your life is in your hands.  That your place in life is ultimately dependent on what you do, your choices, your efforts, your skill set. 

It’s a freeing feeling to think of God as your Shepherd.  The hard part is thinking that He wants good things for you.  You’re afraid that if you just let go and trust God that many of the things you really want in life you won’t get.

If you’re not there yet, you need to look at what the Bible says and at some point, you have to decide if you’re going to believe it.  Oh, we may believe the part about having eternal life. because that is a long way off for most of us.  But verses like this, I suspect we won’t really be conscious of good and lovingkindness pursing us until we take that step and believe it.  It’s then that we become conscious or more conscious of God working in our lives on a day-to-day basis.