Good morning. Greetings from the Deep South. It is a pleasure to be here with you again today.
If I am unable to control myself and start looking like the cat that swallowed the canary, I have got to confess: I am the cat that swallowed the canary today.
Could we have the chorus up here? We are not going to sing.
Jesus, I am resting, resting,
In the joy of what Thou art;
I am finding out the greatness
Of Thy loving heart.
When I finish this morning, you will understand. That is my message.
But that is not only my message. I do not see Maury, but he asked for that hymn about, “Take My Burden, My Yoke Upon You.” Kit read from it and shared from it. That is my closing verse.
This weekend, virtually my entire message has been shared one way or the other—through brothers sharing yesterday, through fellowship with brothers and sisters here.
You know, there are teachers. I am not a teacher, but there are teachers, and they are a wonderful gift to us. A good teacher has a steady confidence—not pridefully or anything, but just steady confidence. But those of us who are exhorters, we are nervous as a cat.
I am always nervous when I start to stand up and speak to you folks, because I do well to think that I can stand beside you, much less speak to you and have something of importance to say to you.
Then I come, and I know with such great certainty this weekend that I picked the right subject, because everybody is talking about it. So that is a good feeling for a Southern boy who does not speak a whole lot.
The title: That You May Know Him. Does that sound familiar from what we have heard already this morning? That you may know Him.
I think I will share the point, just in case I fade away into some rabbit hole before I finish. I want to make sure I share the point of what I want to say today. It is simple, but it is life-altering. It is full of truth and power.
And this is the point: the more intimately, the more certainly, and the more humbly you come to know Him, the more likely you are to be among those who hear Him on that great day say, “Well done, My good and faithful servant.”
We can know all the tricks of the trade. Okay, let me find it again.
The more intimately, the more certainly, and the more humbly you come to know Him, the more likely you are to be among those who hear Him on that great day say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”
We are a supremely religious bunch, whether we will admit it or not. When you come to love the Lord and the Word of God, you do adopt a language that the outside world sees as religious. You adopt habits. You adopt a way of looking at each other and hugging each other.
I forget who it was yesterday. Right at the mealtime, a brother came up, and I assume he was probably an older brother, because I remember my comment to him after he hugged me: “You must have gone through the charismatic movement, because you know how to really hug a brother.”
It was right, all right. You know, hugging is a strange art. We get the polite, distant hug, brother to brother. Sometimes all we can get is a handshake. But to be able to just put your arm around a brother—and I am talking about another brother doing this—and give him a loving hug, you know, we are a weird bunch of people.
Those that walk with the Lord and with one another are different. The danger is that we do truly become religious—that we begin to think that our differences are what give us standing in the Lord; that we begin to think that we know about the Lord Jesus.
We know all the doctrines. We know whether we are pre-trib, post-trib, or mid-trib—you know, we have got it all worked out. You guys have sat under so much great teaching that you can simply pull up verse after verse, thought after thought, on questions that you might be asked.
But being able to do all that is no great big deal.
I studied at Troy State University, one of those fine major colleges in the southern United States. I took religion courses as just an aside. All my free courses that you could take, did it matter what you took? I took religion courses.
We had one religion teacher, and he was an old Methodist preacher. Bless his heart, he was a very liberal old Methodist preacher. He would ask me what I wanted to study, and so I would pick a topic, and we would do that as a course for a semester. We did it in his kitchen in the mornings.
I so thoroughly enjoyed my religion courses. But it was always so funny to him that I had no clue how I was supposed to act, because I did not grow up in church.
He was a very sophisticated Southern gentleman and pastor. He said the right things in the right way at the right time. And those of you that have been so merciful to me and put up with me all these years know that I do not know how to do that.
He and I had some wonderful and interesting times. In the midst of it all, he told me one time, “Don’t change.”
He told me, “Don’t let the seminary, don’t let the position, don’t let the prestige change who you are, John.”
He knew I was unformed. He knew I was searching. And his concern for me was that I would become religious—that I would learn the answers, not know the Lord, but learn the answers.
Let us read some Scripture. Mostly, by the way, my message today is just going to be reading Scriptures and then making a few comments on them, so we should get out of here fairly easily.
1 Corinthians 13:12-13
For now we see in a mirror darkly; but then face to face.
Now I know in part; but then shall I know fully, even as I also was fully known.
But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Colossians 3:1-11
If then ye were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of God.
Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are upon the earth.
For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.
When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with Him be manifested in glory.
But now do ye also put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, railing, shameful speaking out of your mouth.
Lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings,
And have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that created him.
Where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondservant, freeman; but Christ is all, and in all.
You are being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that created him.
1 John 3:2
Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be.
We know that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him even as He is.
The Scriptures are a wonderful revelation, if they be revelation to us. If they are knowledge to us, it is a wonderful knowledge. But it is not what they are there for.
Our Savior is not interested in smarter believers and followers. He is interested in those who will spend time with Him, see Him, let Him love you, and love Him. Getting to know Him is far more valuable than knowing everything about Him.
Spending the time—putting in the time with Him. I am a granddaddy. I have a six-year-old grandson. I do enjoy him.
One of the things I enjoy most about him is that he likes to spend time with me. I do not understand why, but he does, and it is a thrill for me.
It teaches me over and over again through my grandson how much my Father wants to spend time with me, and what valuable and precious time that is.
You know, we live in a fast-moving world. The pace of life increases every year. You younger guys, y’all go at a rate that, if we had had to go at when we were your age, we would probably have just given up and sat down somewhere.
I mean, with the technology, the knowledge, the opportunities, the challenges, and the subtle works of the enemy, life is so different now—so much busier, so much more challenging.
The problem is that we as believers begin to order our life by the natural life that we live.
You know, in Galatians it says, “Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” We have a life still, even after we come to Christ and come to the cross and realize that we have laid down the old life, the old nature. We still have a physical life. We still have a soul, emotions, and a mind. Those things need to be governed somehow.
What happens so very easily, for those of you in careers, those of you in school, those of you that are not, is that we begin to govern our spiritual existence on the basis of our natural life.
How devastating a blow that is to God’s intention for you and me. He never intended for us to feel the pressures of a lost world in our spiritual time with Him.
He intends for us to have a valley where we can go and be with Him.
Y’all remember the old hymn, “I Come to the Garden Alone.” When I first got saved and started going to church, I was already pretty much a fully formed sinner, and it took a long time to get out of that formation.
One of the first hymns I learned to sing without looking at the book was “I Come to the Garden Alone.” But it was so sappy, so hokey to me. I mean, it just grated on me.
Until I finally got past living out of my natural man and letting my life with Christ govern who I was.
See, as a young man, I was fully trying to be a Christian, but not accomplishing it. I was approaching things with the mind of somebody who had not yet been renewed.
All this emotion: “Oh, I come to the garden in the morning, while the dew is on the roses. And You know He walks with me, He talks with me.” I am sitting there thinking, “I ain’t never heard Him talk to me. I do not know where this garden is or where the paths are.”
And that was honest. I did not. I had not. I had been convicted by the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, and a preaching message that a man shared. I had realized my desperate need.
I had come in genuine desire and repentance, but I did not know anything. I did not have any experience. I did not have parents that I could look at and say, “Well, that is how it is.” I was just dumb as a rock.
But as I came to know the Lord and began to see Him instead of seeing about Him, that hymn got better and better.
That writer knew more later on. You know how your parents are smarter when you get old. When you are young, your parents are pretty dumb. But when you get to be fifty, you realize how smart we really are.
I began to realize there is a garden. There are paths to walk with Him. He does speak to us. That is His desire.
My message is Psalm 23.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside still waters.
He restoreth my soul;
He guideth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Everybody loves the Twenty-Third Psalm. Most of you learned it as kids and memorized it. We have heard it a million times.
But I do not know about you, the Twenty-Third Psalm has always, to me, been a message of how much blessing I have. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Who has got an argument with that? Don’t you want to not want?
But as I am sharing with you today, I want to speak that Psalm in the sense that it has for me now in my life, and what it has come to be to me now.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” In that verse, I do not see “I shall not want” so much anymore. I see, “The Lord is my shepherd.” It has become a revelation to me of who He is. He is my Shepherd.
You know, David wrote this out of experience—a lot of it. I mean, he was a shepherd. He knew what a shepherd needed to do. You will remember his testimony to Saul: “When I was keeping my father’s sheep, and a bear came and took one, then I snatched it back out of his mouth, and the bear came at me, so I clubbed him.”
He knew that he had no worries that really mattered, because his Shepherd was leading and guiding him and protecting him.
The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. There is no promise there that you are going to be wealthy. There is no promise there that your children are going to be the ones that hung the moon. There is no promise that you will not have conflict with brothers and sisters.
There is a promise that the Lord is your Shepherd. That is who He is to you. Most of you are nodding or dozing because you know this. It is not like I have got something new to say.
But the Lord is my Shepherd. That is why I shall not want. And that “shall not want” has nothing to do with my finances or my health. It has to do with my life in Christ, my spiritual life.
I shall not want. There will never be a day that the love of God is not full and rich for me. There will never be a day that He does not take into account my struggles and my sorrows.
Some of you, we have talked about it in the past: I spent seventeen trips to Haiti in my earlier life, working in the boondocks of Haiti, putting in wells, doing projects, but also sharing the Word and sharing with the young preachers there.
I met a lot of men who, if they came and lived among you, you would give them honor for the clarity of their love for Christ, for the clarity of their testimony and their witness to stand for Christ.
But if you went down to Haiti and lived among them, you would look at them and think of them as paupers. They had nothing, and they were just miserable people.
I met men whose children were hungry at night, whose hearts were broken because their wife was ill and there was no medical help for them.
Then I would come back to the States, and I would hear people preach that “I shall not want” means God will give me everything I want and need. “I’ll never be poor. I’ll never be crippled.”
These men I met are poor and crippled. Their hearts are broken for their children and their families. But they know the Good Shepherd.
When you sit down and break bread with them and talk with them, they are not talking to you about the misery of living in Haiti. They are talking to you about a glorious Lord who, in the midst of all these circumstances, is their hope and glory.
They have gotten to know Him instead of knowing the blessings that are promised.
Now, I am not diminishing the fact that the Twenty-Third Psalm clearly speaks of the blessings that are ours in Christ. It does. That was David’s intent in writing it. He was celebrating all that the Lord does for us and provides for us.
But if that is all we see in the Twenty-Third Psalm, we have not learned what David learned. We have not come to know Him through that Psalm.
“I shall not want. He restores my soul. He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.”
Which among us has never needed restoring? We all do from time to time. Sometimes it is because things overtake us unexpectedly. Sometimes it is because we dig our own hole.
We get distracted—a word we have heard a lot about this weekend—and we turn our eyes away. We begin to look at the world around us, and either desire for or fear of this world and the things of it begins to draw us out of our fellowship with Christ.
We begin to become religious again. We quit spending time in the garden.
Before long, our faith is our religion, and it is not satisfactory anymore. It does not satisfy us.
Many of us go shopping when that happens. “Well, it can’t be me, so it must be the fellowship. Certainly, if I have to listen to those rednecks from Alabama, I can go find something better.”
We are always in danger of that. It happens to so many believers.
Thankfully, most of you, when I look into your eyes, I know who you are. I know that you have made choices in your life to be faithful. So I am not sharing this as though you guys are coming up short in my mind.
But there are a lot of you that are younger, or younger in the Lord, particularly this side of the room. You are going to face a lot of tests that I never had to face, a lot of challenges I was never challenged by.
If you do not come to know Him, those things will overwhelm you. They will steal from you the joy of your salvation, because your eye will be fixed on the world.
No matter what you have been led to believe or think, the world hated our Lord Jesus; therefore, the world hates us. Now, it is not that everybody in the world is going to come and throw rocks at us, thank goodness.
Matter of fact, I think it is one of the great testaments to God’s greatness that He created beings who are capable of genuine civility, humility, and kindness even before they come to know Him.
I never cease to be amazed when ungodly men live godly-looking lives. You know, out of genuineness. You look at Mahatma Gandhi, a man who seriously considered Christianity and found it wanting.
Then you look at his life—the meekness that was in the man, the commitment to the betterment of mankind that he showed. That is a glory to what God created. It is a sad testament to what men have become in relationship to their Creator.
But all of us have that bit of goodness still in us because we were created in the likeness of Him who created us. We are coming to know about that, about the likeness of Him who created us.
Those first verses I read are so critical to this whole thought, because we see Him; we become like Him.
You do not become like the Lord Jesus from all the messages you have heard or all the messages you have given. You do not take on the character and nature of our Redeemer because you have gone to seminary or read philosophy.
You come to be the representation of the testimony of Christ because you see Him. You know Him.
It is knowing His love that brings in you love. It is knowing His glory that brings in you glory. Yeah, you have got glory.
There is in you a glory that shines to heaven. Angels take note of what God has done in us. It is an amazing thing.
We—limited, finite, sometimes useless, sometimes actually half-worthwhile people—have a glory because we have Christ, the King of Glory, in us.
We live in Him. We are buried with Him, risen with Him, hidden with Him in God. All these things of who the Lord is become evident in you when you know Him, when you see Him—not when you can recite Him.
So you guys develop some new habits. Some of you probably have quiet times; that seems like the term I hear young people use nowadays. But if you do not develop one, find a time every day, somewhere in your day, to step aside.
“He leads me in the paths of righteousness.” Let Him lead you in a path of righteousness one day. Let Him build righteousness in you, so it is not a work, not a rule that you follow, but an expression of who you become in Him—that you do what is right because He who is right is who you live in, not because of your rules.
Religion is nothing but us trying to please God so that we can feel good about ourselves. The Bible calls that works.
Faith is knowing and rejoicing even in the fact that while I was yet a sinner, Christ died for me, and accepting that as an eternal truth for yourself.
There may be some of you here for whom that is not true yet. I doubt it, but there might be some of you who have been fairly religious but have not quite ever broken through to that understanding—that it really is true that you are accepted in the Beloved; that Christ Himself shed His blood for you, that you might know how much He loves you, that you might be washed clean of your sin, and that you might walk with Him in the fullness of life.
If you have not broken through to that yet, all I can say, I guess, is, please do.
I was a wretched fellow, and thanks be to God, somebody took the time to tell me the truth of Christ.
Of course, it is harder for you guys who were good kids. Some of us grew up in such a way that we knew, before we were convicted by the Spirit, that we were wretched people. But, oh, what a wonderful thing it was to come to know the Good Shepherd.
“He makes me lie down in green pastures.” He does not come over here and say, “Would you like to lie down?” The Scripture says He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He has laid me aside many times, and I suspect most of us with any age or experience have had that experience. We get a little distracted, a little full of ourselves, a little discouraged, and the Lord just sets us off in a corner somewhere and lets us sit there until we begin to look at Him.
Then we realize how much He loves us and how little of what I can do matters—that I really do not have to prove myself. All I have to do is accept what He has done for me.
Some of us, you know, He has to make us lie down. But He leads us beside still waters. He does not make us go beside the still waters; He leads us beside them.
The interesting little contrast there to me is that we do not like to lie down, so He has to make it happen. But most of us do enjoy a good walk along the riverbank. We like to take a walk along a glorious path, to walk down beside the Lord Jesus and know our Father is standing there next to us and walking with us. It is just a good feeling. It does not take quite so much work to get us to do that.
But the point is still the same. It is still very simple.
You have to step aside. You have got to lie down in green pastures. You have to walk beside still waters. You have to let Him prepare a table before your enemies and set you at it, so that you can know Him—so that He becomes your reality.
So that it is not theology. It is not Boy Scout merit badges. It is the true and living God whom you see, whom you know, daily in your life.
That is what brings us through to victory. If we do not know Him, we can know all about overcoming life. We can read the books. We can learn the techniques. But we will not get to where we are going until we get to know Him.
Because it is about Christ, not me. It is about Him who has loved us, not us.
When we come focused and learn to spend our time in His presence, to accept who He is—the Good Shepherd—and not kick against the pricks, when our eye is so enamored with the beauty of the Lord that the world no longer wins it over, we find that surely goodness and mercy follow us.
In this theme of seeing the Lord in the Psalm, one of the things I have always enjoyed about the Twenty-Third Psalm is that “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,” because following is coming behind.
Now, if it said, “Surely goodness and mercy is upon me all the days of my life,” or, “before me all the days of my life,” that would read totally different to me.
What I read when I see this is that the One who is good, the One who is merciful, is the testimony that comes behind me—that I am not leaving a trail that is a John Smith trail.
The trail behind me is, “Jesus is the Son of God, full of love and mercy for you.”
“Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” I am not saying that He is not saying in that verse that it is upon us. That is what He is saying. But it also can be seen, and I believe it is true, that for those who see the Lord, who know the Lord, His goodness and His mercy are their testimony.
It is what follows them all the days of their life, and what other men can come and taste of and touch and be reminded: Jesus is the glorious One, not me. Jesus, not us. Jesus.
Is that our testimony daily?
So, you know, it is not a breakthrough message. It is just an encouragement to you to recognize that getting to know Him is not simply singing songs, reading Scriptures, and going to meetings.
It is you as an individual separating yourself off and spending time in the Word, in prayer, in worship—all by your lonesome, in groups of two and three—so that He can reveal Himself and build in you that kind of testimony.
That goodness and mercy, the very person and characteristics of Jesus Christ, will follow you. Men behind you will see them and be touched by them.
You remember, most of you will, in the Scripture, the woman that touched the hem of His garment? Created the whole handkerchief-selling industry.
She touched the hem of His garment. Could it be that someone walks behind you? Someone comes along after you who does not yet know the goodness of the love of God.
Because you know Him, you look like Him, you talk like Him, you act like Him as a result, because He is in you and you are in Him. It is His character that is being formed and expressed in you.
Could it be that someone touches that and comes to a hungering and a thirsting that they might be filled?
Father, we are so grateful that, as thickheaded as we can be, as dumb as we are, for each and every one of us that are Yours, You sent somebody somehow that was trailing a testimony of Your goodness and Your mercy behind them.
We were drawn. We wanted what we saw and tasted and touched, and we came to You. We found the Good Shepherd.
Lord, help those of us that have known You for years to keep our eye focused on You, that we not be turned aside by the distractions, the worries, and the fears of the world, but that we might walk in faith and confidence that no matter what may come, You will always be our Good Shepherd.
You will always be the Lord who provides, the God who foresees, who knows in advance what we will be facing and makes preparation.
Lord, we thank You for what You have done for us and for these others that are younger and still learning some of this.
Let Your time with them be so sweet that they long to get right back to it. Let it not become a burden, but the joy of their day to come to the garden alone.
We thank You in Christ’s name. Amen.