Psalms 23:5

Psalms 23:5

I. The table here comes in after the valley of sadness. Is there not a preparation even in that fact? When do we so want the table as when we have just been through severe experiences? It is true spiritually, as it is physically, and it is the law of God's government, "If any man do not work, neither let him eat." The table follows the valley.

II. What is the prepared table? I should by no means exclude from the answer the ordinary supply of our daily meals. There is the anticipatory mind of the Infinite everywhere. It is well to forget the material callings, the buying, and the ordering, and the preparing, to see nothing but a prearranged, and complicated, and accurate gift of God, and to feel only, "Thou preparest a table for me."

III. The whole of the twenty-third Psalm, however, is essentially spiritual, and David's prepared table was certainly a holy one. And to this every child of God will set his seal and add his witness, that God does most surely and most strangely provide spiritual food for us, just what, and just when, and just where we need. One day you may have felt a more than usual emptiness of heart and a craving after you knew not what, only it was an unsatisfied sense that something was wanting. Your soul was hungry. That very hunger was a part of a great preparation. It was that day that you opened your Bible, and it is astonishing what a power it carried, a thing hardly to be accounted for. It fitted into your thoughts; it suggested the ideas that you wanted. Was not that a table prepared?

IV. There is another table yet to be, when a prepared people shall meet at a prepared banquet and the appointed ones gather round their appointed King.

J. Vaughan, Sermons,6th series, p. 133.

References: Psalms 23:5. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxi., No. 1222, and vol. xv., No. 874; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xx., p. 13; Bishop Thorold, The Presence of Christ,p. 167. Psalms 23:5; Psalms 23:6. T. Hammond, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xx., p. 123; J. F. Haynes, Ibid.,vol. xxi., p. 409.