Orders will be processed after the Christmas Holiday.

Podcast: A Closer Look at One of the Most Famous Chapters of the Bible (David Gibson)

December 18, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Shepherd of Psalm 23

In this episode, David Gibson unpacks the images in Psalm 23 that have become so familiar to us (maybe overfamiliar), showing us what it truly means when the psalm says that God walks through the valley of the shadow of death alongside of us, setting up a table for us in the presence of our enemies.

The Lord of Psalm 23

The Lord of Psalm 23

David Gibson

David Gibson walks through each verse in Psalm 23, thoroughly examining its 3 depictions of the believer’s union with Christ as sheep and shepherd, traveler and companion, and guest and host.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:18 - A Precious and Beloved Text

Matt Tully
David, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

David Gibson
It’s great to be with you again, Matt. It’s a real pleasure. I love talking to you, so it’s a lovely thing for me to get a chance to do it again.

Matt Tully
Yes, it is. Today we’re going to talk about Psalm 23, perhaps one of the most famous—maybe the most famous—chapter of the Bible, both for Christians and I think a lot of non-Christians are even familiar with this psalm. But before we jump into the details, I wanted to start by reading a quote from the book; actually, the way that you open your new book on this psalm. I thought it was really insightful and impactful. You write, “There are some texts of Holy Scripture that are hard to preach or write about, not because they’re especially difficult to understand for the pastor or theologian but because they’re already so profoundly precious to the hearer and the reader. I suspect that this is more true of Psalm 23 than any other part of the Bible.” So I wanted to start us off by asking, Could you speak to the role that Psalm 23 has played in your life? Why would you say that it is precious for you?

David Gibson
Yeah, thank you. When the reader gets this book in their hands, you’ll read Sinclair Ferguson’s foreword to the book. And one of the things that was really beautiful for me in reading his foreword was his own description of how precious the psalm has been in his life.
And I think a lot of people will resonate with that because although he’s talking personally about him, it seemed to describe my own life as well. He described Psalm 23 as having been the soundtrack to his life. He was introduced to it as a young boy. He was given a picture book of Psalm 23, or a picture book of the Bible, that has a picture of David on the front—David the shepherd boy. And he describes his own kind of relationship with the psalm through that lens. And actually, when I read that, I thought my life was similar in a way. I grew up on Bible stories. I grew up particularly loving the David and Goliath story, and all the components of David’s life—that he’s a shepherd boy, he’s called to be king from that background, he’s brave, he’s strong, he’s courageous, the choosing the stones from the brook, and the fact that he’s wrestled and killed animals, and now he goes to fight Goliath. When you have that in your bloodstream, and then you get a little bit older and you discover that he wrote a psalm like this, like in verse 4, the most famous verse of the psalm: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” There’s something about that verse later on in life where we read it through the lens of our suffering, but there’s something almost that fits with David the warrior/shepherd boy. He’s not frightened of anything, he’s not fearful, he’s trusting. So I think later in life this psalm came to be a beautiful complement to this lovely picture that I had of David the warrior. And now here is David the shepherd who has this very real, very close relationship with God that is expressed in such beautiful language. So yeah, that’s a very long answer to your question, Matt, but a bit like Sinclair says, a lot of the beauty of the psalm for the reader is learned slowly over time, of coming to see more depths in the psalm and coming to see your own life experience played out in the psalm.

Matt Tully
And I’ve heard many people express that about this psalm, but also about the psalms more generally, that there is this depth of understanding and of meaning that can come out as we move through our lives and get older. It seems like primarily through the means of suffering, through the trials that we face in our lives. Have you experienced that for the Psalms as a whole, this progressive deepening of your understanding of what their message is as you’ve experienced trials?

David Gibson
A hundred percent. I think it’s Calvin’s phrase that says, “The psalms are the anatomy of the soul.” There are certain things in the psalms that you just don’t get to experience just purely as a young man. There’s a huge amount that you can experience, mainly positive things like the longing for God. I think that was one of my earliest experiences of the Psalms. In the church tradition I grew up in, we used to sing the chorus, “As the deer pants for the water, so my soul longs for you.” And I can remember that young man’s awareness of the beauty of the Lord and wanting to be close to him and having this kind of deep longing for him. But of course, you then go through fifteen years of ministry, or you go through the long years of life, and there are wounds, there are broken relationships, there are questions that you don’t have the answer to. I don’t think lament psalms make a lot of sense to young people who haven’t suffered. But later on in life, lament psalms become incredibly precious, don’t they? And it becomes incredibly precious the idea that there are words in the Bible that God has given to us to express back to him the grief that we feel that kind of legitimizes the grief, legitimizes the anger and the sorrow. And the psalms have that full range of life. They have the triumphs, they have the failures, they have the sins, they have the sorrows, they have the defeats, the betrayals, the perplexity. And I think there’s probably not many believers who don’t find over time the psalms come to describe your whole life, not just the good times.

Matt Tully
In your book you note that Martin Luther, the famous Reformer, referred to the psalms as “a little Bible.” I wonder if you have thoughts on why he described them that way.

David Gibson
It’s such a beautiful phrase, isn’t it? I argue in this book that Psalm 23 is really an example of this par excellence. It’s a supreme example of this. Luther saw that in the psalms, the whole story of the Bible sometimes gets condensed into a single song or even into a single phrase. And it’s the idea that you don’t get everything, but you get the essence of it. You get the essence of something expressed in a really short space. I argue in the book that Psalm 23 is this beautiful summary of the Exodus story of redemption from slavery, being led through the wilderness, being refreshed, being fed, being cared for in the wilderness, your enemies being dealt with by the strong God who is leading you, and he is leading you to the promised land. And I think that means that in one particular psalm, you’re getting this kind of summary of the whole Bible story in one particular place.

Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s so good. Speak to that a little bit. What do we know about the historical background to this psalm? You mentioned David. It says right there in the very first verse, “A psalm of David,” but do we know anything else, or do we suspect anything else about what was actually happening in his life when he wrote this psalm?

David Gibson
It’s a really good question, and it’s actually a question I have to confess, and it’s something that you’ll see in the book, I don’t actually know the answer to. I haven’t majored in the book, in any way in particular, on the background to the psalm. There are particular parts of it that people think must be related to particular things. Verse 5 in particular: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” There are some incidents in the books of Samuel, for instance, where people think this is related to something that’s happening with David and with his son Absalom at the time. I’ve gone with what I think is a straightforward canonical reading, which is that we don’t actually know. Some psalms are very specific, aren’t they? Psalm 51 tells us that this was written in response to what happened with Nathan coming to David after his adultery with Bathsheba. I think it is part of the beauty of Psalm 23, and I argue this in a couple places in the book, that we don’t actually know too much about the context. It’s partly why the psalm has become so universally loved, that the imagery is not completely multivalent in the sense that it can mean anything. There are things that it doesn’t mean. But because it’s not tied concretely, as far as we know, to a specific context, it takes big Bible ideas and general themes and lets you feel the space within them. That means that people are able to say, Oh, well, I’m not going through exactly what David went through, but at least this is still relevant to me. Context can do that, can’t it? Context can make us think, Well, my circumstances are different; therefore, it doesn’t really apply. Because we don’t really know what exactly David’s context is here, there’s even more wider and deeper application to us I think.

Matt Tully
It’s just easier to jump right in and read these words and speak these words as our own words, in a sense.

David Gibson
Yeah, that’s right.

10:38 - Our Shepherd

Matt Tully
In our circles, we often talk a lot about how all of Scripture is Christ-centered, all of Scripture is ultimately about Jesus. And many interpreters, such as yourself, would say that in particular with the psalms, we need to understand them as ultimately pointing to Christ, pointing us to Jesus. And so I wonder if you could help us understand this psalm and how we should approach this psalm with that perspective in mind.

David Gibson
The subtitle to the book—the book is called The Lord of Psalm 23 and the subtitle is Jesus as Our Shepherd, Companion, and Host. And so I have three sections that I’ve borrowed from Alec Motyer, three parts to the psalm: the shepherd, the companion, the shepherd in the pastures, the companion in the valley, the host with the table. But I just detest the standard academic ambivalent caution about linking this to Jesus. I think it’s so clear that the Lord Jesus regarded himself as the good shepherd (John 10), that the divine name for the shepherd in Psalm 23:1, the Lord, Yahweh, the covenant God is my shepherd. Jesus is explicit in John 8 that “before Abraham was, I am.” He uses that divine name to identify himself. The leaders of Old Testament Israel were shepherds. Prophets talked about how the leaders of God’s people were meant to shepherd God’s people, but instead of caring for them, they fleeced them. Christ in his ministry is so crystal clear that he is the ultimate definitive leader of God’s people. He has come to do everything that the current leaders of Israel were failing in so awfully and so terribly. He has come to feed, nourish, protect, lay down his life for the flock in the way that shepherds were meant to do and they’re not doing. So I’ve just gone right from the very start by putting it in the title of the book, without any sense of embarrassment or needing to even really argue for it particularly. I do try to show why it’s right that we call Jesus our shepherd here, but I’ve just assumed what I think the whole Bible assumes, that God is the shepherd of his people, and where we see that most clearly and most beautifully is in the life and ministry of the Lord Jesus himself.

Matt Tully
You mentioned a couple of specific connections, but it’s less about there being some prophecy here that has some kind of direct historical fulfillment. And again, not saying that’s not part of this, but it’s almost a way of reading all of Scripture that’s informing that, and understanding what Jesus was saying about himself in the New Testament that kind of helps us to then understand how we should read this verse. And one thing I wanted to hit on, and you briefly mentioned this, was just those opening two words in this psalm: the Lord. Probably two words that we very quickly scan past. We are used to thinking of God, especially in the Old Testament, as the Lord. But you want us to camp on that a little bit; you want to unfold that a little bit more. Why is that worth focusing our attention on before we dig into the psalm?

David Gibson
Yeah, thanks for asking about that because if someone was to say to me, You recently preached on Psalm 23 and you’ve written a book on it. Everybody knows Psalm 23 and everybody’s heard sermons on it and so on. What, for you, is the standout thing that you learned from doing this? And I think it would be exactly that, that the opening words of the psalm—“The Lord is my shepherd”—should stop us in our tracks and say, Hang on a second. What did you just say? We move into the shepherding territory, not taking with us the astonishing claim that the one who is doing all of those shepherding things is Yahweh, the Lord of the burning bush who revealed his name to Moses in a way that said to Moses, I am who I am. I have no need of you, Moses, in order to be who I am. And as you stand there terrified, Moses, heading off to face Pharaoh and to deliver my people in this mission I’m giving you, there is nothing I will give to you that will in any way diminish me. And as you rescue my people, you will give nothing to me that I did not already have. So the significance of the divine name and the meaning of who God is—as the God who had no beginning and will have no end, the God who is absolutely self-sufficient—the fact that that One would be my shepherd is just truly mind blowing. It blew my mind as I began to get inside the psalm and inside the shepherding imagery. In other words, it’s a way of saying that there are no words big enough to describe how amazing your shepherd is. So having a shepherd is wonderful, isn’t it? And I try to illustrate that in the book in different ways. I give the example of my brother’s terrifying dog—a Bullmastiff dog that one weekend shepherded us. And we all have that, don’t we? A child with a father, someone with a policeman—somewhere where you were in danger, and there was a shepherd in some way there to take you through it safely. But imagine the shepherd that you have is the single most powerful, self-sufficient, eternal, beautiful, compassionate being in the universe. And I’m a Presbyterian minister. I should have known this. It’s the standard image, at least in the United Kingdom. I don’t know what it’s like in America, but the standard logo for Presbyterianism is a burning bush. It’s the sort of thing that marks the whole system of theology. Working on this book, I slowly came to realize the theology of the burning bush. The fact that the bush is burning but not using raw materials, it’s a picture of the fact that God needs no one and nothing. And the eternal God being my shepherd just blew my mind, just blew me away. And I tried to express it in sermons and tried to put it into the book that if you just race past those opening words, we’ve missed the wonder of everything else, really, that flows from them.

Matt Tully
I think sometimes people can hear teaching on God’s independence, like you’ve kind of just been talking about, and pulling directly from that name that he gives to himself, and it can sometimes, though, be a little bit unsettling for people. That radical independence, his complete and utter lack of any need from us, and knowing that we can give him nothing and he doesn’t need us at all, that can, in some ways, feel hard because it relegates us to a different kind of status than maybe we’re used to thinking about when it comes to God. In general, in maybe evangelical Christianity, we think that God loves us, he loves to hear from us, he loves our praise and affection and adoration, but there’s a certain kind of saying, No, he doesn’t need that at all from us. So how do you think about that? Do you understand the sense that sometimes that understanding about God can be a little bit unsettling?

David Gibson
In my research in the book for Psalm 23, I discovered the most wonderful book by a man called Kenneth Bailey, who many people will have read and been helped by a lot of his work on the Gospels. He was an expert in Middle Eastern culture, and he’s provided the same kind of insight on Psalm 23. He wrote a book called The Good Shepherd that traces the shepherd motif through the Bible, and he adds his Middle Eastern knowledge to it. What Kenneth Bailey says is that when you read the Psalms, and this is his phrase, that the images that are used for God have “a distinctive homeland security ring to them.” So in other words, he says the metaphors for God—our God is a shield, a high tower, a fortress, a high place, a refuge, a rock, stronghold, a horn of salvation—they’re all images exactly like you say of this powerful, self-existent, self-sufficient being. But Bailey says the psalms also use three other metaphors for God. They’re not the only metaphors. There is Psalm 23, God as a shepherd; Psalm 131, God as a mother; Psalm 103, God as a father. And Bailey says it is no accident that when the Lord Jesus comes to Luke 15, when he. is really narrowing in his critique of the Pharisees and their corruption of the gospel, what are the three images that Jesus centers on? A good shepherd, a good woman, a good father. And it’s a way of saying that all those images of strength—the self-sufficiency of God, the eternal deity of God, the fact that God is able to be God without us—when you tie that truth about God, when you say that’s who the Lord is, but then you say, But the Lord is my shepherd, you’re saying that the self-sufficient God is not the self-absorbed God. The self-existent God is not the self-interested God. The God who is so strong also clothes himself with pictures of the closest, tenderest care for those who are so weak. So it’s the marriage of those two things. If all you had was “I am who I am” and you didn’t have further metaphors to show what that relationship looks like in relation to his people, you might end up with that kind of caricature that God is distant and self-absorbed. Martin Luther, who we’ve been talking about, he says that by talking about the Lord as my shepherd, it’s a way of God putting all the resources of his infinite fullness at the disposal of finite creatures. Here’s what he says, he said, “The other names about God sound somewhat too gloriously and majestically, and they bring, as it were, an awe and a fear with them when we hear them uttered. This is the case when Scripture calls God our Lord, our King, our Creator. This, however, is not the case with the sweet word shepherd. It brings to the godly, when they read it or hear it, as it were, a confidence, a consolation, or security, like the word father.” So it’s a beautiful combination of those things, isn’t it? It’s strength as well as tender care.

21:46 - Our Companion

Matt Tully
That’s so beautiful. We’ve been talking about this idea of the shepherd, this metaphor of a shepherd that the psalm opens with. But you mention there’s two other kinds of roles that Jesus ultimately is playing in this psalm, the second one being a companion. We see that in the middle of the psalm. I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit. What is he getting at with that picture? How does that then connect to perhaps the most famous phrase of the psalm, “the valley of the shadow of death”?

David Gibson
What I argue in the book, again following Alec Motyer, is that although the Lord Jesus is clearly a shepherd in verse 4—“your rod and your staff, they comfort me” is shepherding imagery—the emphasis is now very heavily on the fact that the shepherd is personally known by me and is with me. So you notice in verse 4, and it has been third person up until this point: “he makes me lie down,” “he leads me,” “he restores my soul,” “he leads me.” But almost you don’t notice that in verse 4 that the sheep now turns and addresses the shepherd directly: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.” So just in the pronouns that are used, there’s this turning towards and no longer just walking behind someone or beside someone, but there’s a kind of turning to someone. There’s almost a facing together. Alec Motyer says that means although we’re still in the realm of shepherding, the imagery is pointing us really strongly to this idea of a companion being with you. My brother, Johnny, who’s the Hebrew expert, he helped me to see that that little phrase “you are with me” is the exact middle point of the psalm. In Hebrew thought, as many people know, the center is everything. You don’t build logically to an argument at the end; you work to the middle and move out. And Johnny, again, has said that if you take Luther’s phrase about how all the psalms are a little Bible, and I’ve used this phrase in the book, then here is a little Bible within a little Bible. This little phrase “you are with me” is the whole story of the Bible in a nutshell, isn’t it? God was meant to be with Adam and Eve in the garden. Heaven and earth were together, meant to be together. They were meant to be in fellowship. And it just keeps running all the way through the Bible. It’s what God, again, what the Lord says to Moses at the burning bush, “Don’t fear; I will be with you.” That’s what the Lord Jesus says to his disciples before he leaves: “I will be with you. When I leave, the Holy Spirit will come so that I’m still with you.” At the very end of the Bible, the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven to earth so that the dwelling of God is now with mankind forever, perfectly. So I think you’ve just got this most beautiful idea right in the center of the psalm. The Lord Jesus our shepherd is with us, and he is with us in the place where we most need him to be, in the darkness, which you have in this phrase “the valley of the shadow of death.” It’s a really contested phrase in terms of its meaning. Hebrew scholars are really divided. There’s a lot of disagreement about whether it’s just meant to be general darkness, a valley in this an undefined valley. I follow many others who’ve said actually there is this idea of impending death in some way. Whether your death is three weeks away because of a diagnosis you’ve been given, or whether it’s simply the fact that because we are Adam’s children and we are born under the curse, the reality of death is coming to us. At some point in your life you will realize that you are living and walking through the valley of the shadow of death. We all are. Some of us are very aware of it. Some of us aren’t aware of it at all. But we all come to recognize at some point that that’s where we are. The valley of the shadow of death, when we arrive there, is a place where we are most aware of our limitations as a human being, most aware of our inability to fix ourselves, our circumstances, the loved ones who are dying and who we cannot stop dying. The valley of the shadow of death is that place of ultimate human weakness, despair, desolation, sense of helplessness. And it is at that very point that the whole psalm centers down, the whole story of the Bible centers down to those beautiful words, “you are with me.” So I think it’s a profoundly beautiful moment in the psalm, that you reach this face-to-face confession of faith.

26:41 - Our Host

Matt Tully
And as you said, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed before the way that the psalm does change from being us speaking about God to speaking to God in that really direct and personal way. That’s just a really amazing, beautiful transition. So then the final picture here that we see in verses five and six is maybe the least clear to me, at least. It’s this idea of a table prepared. It seems like a feast of some sort, right? A table to sit down and eat together. A table of bounty and our cups overflowing. But it’s in the presence of my enemies. I think it just feels a little unclear. What’s going on here? What should we understand that to mean in this context? And then how do we think about that for ourselves in our own lives?

David Gibson
Here is where I think I would want to plead my argument that the fact that things are undefined and we don’t know exactly what the context was in David’s life helps us hugely. So this is an example where commentators go to town particularly on what might have been happening in David’s life and so on. But I think this is like, and I try to argue this in the book, this is like Paul’s thorn in the flesh. If we knew that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was his singleness or his eyesight problem or whatever the range of options are, you might think you’ve got a problem in your life, but if you don’t have Paul’s short sightedness you don’t really have a thorn in the flesh and you don’t really suffer in the way that Paul suffered. But the simple fact is we don’t know what it was, but we all know what it’s like. We come to know at times what it’s like to be pushed nearly to breaking point because of something that God is doing in our lives to wean us off our own self-strength. I just think it’s like that here. Commentators go to great lengths to talk about tables that sheep would have fed from and all sorts of different things. Are the enemies wild animals? Are these enemies David’s enemies? I think it’s much more helpful simply to realize that you don’t live long in the Christian life without coming up against serious opposition, whether it is the world, the flesh the devil, or whether it is literal enemies, whether they are sitting on the second row in church. Maybe you’re a pastor for forty years, and the enemies are there for forty years. That happens to some people in ministry. Whether it’s a particular season of church life, denominational conflict. You don’t walk along with Christ through this world without having enemies, and the Lord Jesus is explicit about that, that if “you love me, the world will hate you.” You don’t live long in this world with Christ without having enemies. And I think Psalm 23 is a way of saying wherever you locate those enemies, first of all, from verse four, you are not alone. The Lord Jesus is with you. And more than him being with you, he will sustain you in the face of those enemies. He does not leave you simply to go it alone. He will feed you. He will nourish you. I think you see this in the ministry of the Lord Jesus himself. One of the things I point out in the book, and it’s really interesting, C. S. Lewis (who we all love) hated this verse in Psalm 23 because he said verse 5 is irredeemably spiteful. Here is somebody humiliating their enemies. They are being fed in the presence of their enemies while their enemies look on. This is them kind of looking down on their enemies and gloating over them. And there’s a kind of grotesque spitefulness to that. I argue in the book why I think that is so profoundly mistaken, and one of the ways I think you see that it’s mistaken is that the ministry of the Lord Jesus himself shows us the shepherd feeding his people in the presence of his enemy. So in Mark 6 you have Herod, the false king in the background. He’s beheaded John the Baptist, and he’s beheaded John the Baptist because John is associated with Jesus. So you’ve got this looming terrible figure of Herod in the background. But what does Jesus do while Herod is in the background? He feeds his disciples, he gets them to sit down on green grass, and he feeds them, he cares for them. All the way through his ministry while his enemies are watching and preparing his death, Jesus is eating. He’s at this person’s house having a meal, and they’re plotting to murder him. He goes to the next person’s house, they’re plotting to murder him. At the last supper that he has with his disciples, Judas is planning to kill him. But Judas goes out into the night, having had his feet washed and his belly full, Jesus is eating to warn his enemies, to win his enemies. He’s preparing a table in the presence of his enemies. He’s not gloating over them. He’s not trying to humiliate them; he’s trying to win them. He’s trying to woo them and warn them and to say, Here is a table where you can be friends with me. So that’s one way of thinking about the language. That’s a way of thinking about it in relation to who Jesus is. But I think for us, verse five is a picture of the fact that whatever you are facing and going through in life, Psalm 23 and the ministry of the Lord Jesus himself shows us that he will nourish us and sustain us and keep us and we do not live alone. We do not go through life facing our enemies alone without him.

Matt Tully
That connection to the Last Supper of Jesus and how so literally it is a working out of what David is saying here in this psalm is just really, really striking and pretty incredible as we think about how Jesus fulfills this in different ways. David, maybe to close us today, would you mind praying for us, praying for our listeners? Those who might be listening right now who would say that, for various reasons, they in particular feel like they are in the valley of the shadow of death. They read these words and they desire the closeness, the shepherding that God is talking about. I wonder if you could just pray those words over them today.

David Gibson
Thank you. I’d love to do that. Heavenly Father, we want together to thank you that your word is so profoundly beautiful. It’s not simply true. We cherish its truth and we love how clearly you speak to us, but we thank you too for the beauty of your words. And I want to thank you for the beauty of Psalm 23, these glorious words that have comforted your people for generations. And here we sit together today, listening in so many different parts of the world. We are not known to each other, and yet we are your people in your hands. And I want to thank you for your sheep who are listening to these words who belong to you. Lord Jesus, we want to thank you that you are our shepherd. We thank you that you shepherd us from your eternal strength, from the glory and majesty of your divine nature, and yet you have not stayed far off from us. You have come close to us. You have entered our world. You have lived our life. You have not simply, even as glorious and wonderful as it is, you have not even simply died our death, but you have, on the way to the cross, walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Those walls of darkness and blackness that so often threaten to engulf us, you know them. You have tasted them, experienced them, seen them. You held onto your Father’s words, the promise of your Father’s love. And so we pray, Heavenly Father, for wherever these words today find us, whatever we’re facing, whatever we’re going through, we do want to pray that, Lord Jesus, your rod and your staff would comfort us. We want to thank you that you are ahead of us. You’ve gone ahead to prepare a place for us, that your house is where we will dwell forever. Thank you that goodness and mercy, only goodness and mercy, will follow us and pursue us all the days of our life. And I want to pray for listeners in particular who cannot see that yet, who feel that only badness and injustice is following them, and where the darkness seems all encompassing. I want to pray that you would draw alongside these fellow sufferers and comfort and hold and keep them until the valley lifts, until the darkness is removed, and until we see you and live with you and love you perfectly in your house forever. So hear my prayer and our prayer for one another, we pray. We bring it in your precious name. Amen.

Matt Tully
Amen. Thank you, David, so much for walking us through this beautiful psalm and helping us to see it afresh today.

David Gibson
Pleasure. Thank you very much for having me, Matt. It’s been lovely to be with you.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.