Psalm 23:6 says, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
God, the good Shepherd has called us to live in faithful expectation. It is really, really hard to do. We want to live in a world where all hardship and calamity is avoided. We want to live in a world where we are happy all the time and everything comes easily. Sadly, that is not the reality in which we live. We must face a world that will have ups and downs, a world that has good times and bad times. Through it all, we can trust that goodness and mercy will be there for us.
If you examine your life and think about the hardships you’ve faced you can see the lessons that you learned along the way. We can be hardheaded, dumb little sheep sometimes that refuse to learn by any other means than the hard way. We are allowed to make mistakes because from those mistakes we learn to lean on the goodness and mercy of the Shepherd. From those mistakes we can try and save other people from falling into the same hole we did.
No matter where we go in life, we can feel the assurance of having an eternal home with God. We are given the promise of dwelling in the house of the Lord forever. In the Old Testament, to share a table created a bond of mutual loyalty and trust. God has given us a seat at his table and so much more as we are invited to be guests in his home forever. We only need to accept the invitation placed on our lives.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.