Four Simple, Beautiful Words: “You Are with Me”

God with Us

Martin Luther says that “the Psalter is a little Bible, and the summary of the Old Testament.”¹ That’s a lovely phrase, for it shows how it’s possible to see the whole story of the Bible encapsulated within smaller parts of the Bible. And if Luther was right to say this about the Psalms, then I want to suggest that Psalm 23:4 is itself “a little Bible” within the little Bible of the Psalms within the whole Bible. It is a beautiful truth that the message of the whole Bible can be summarized in four simple words: “You are with me.”²

You are with me.

• In Eden, God lived with Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:8).
• On Mount Horeb, God promised Moses that he would be with him in Egypt (Ex. 3:12).
• At Mount Sinai, God came to live with Israel in a tent, and he spoke with Moses “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Ex. 33:11).
• In the promised land, God came to live with Israel in a temple (1 Kings 8:11).
• In Jesus, God came to live with his people—as Immanuel, “God with us” (Matt. 1:23; John 1:14).
• When Jesus prepared his disciples for his departure, he promised to send his Holy Spirit so that he could come and live in us (John 14:15–17).
• Jesus promised his disciples, “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20).
• In the new heavens and the new earth, God will once again live with his people. This is how Revelation climactically puts it: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Rev. 21:3).

I hope that as you read this list you are able to draw deep comfort from the fact that God’s presence with his people is the whole Bible in a nutshell. Psalm 23:4 is comforting not for the uniqueness of what it says; rather, we should find it comforting for the beautiful way it manages to say in so few words what the whole Bible says in so many words. You have a shepherd who is with you. The Lord Jesus, your shepherd-king and Savior, is with you in your valley, and he will always be with you, for as long as you are there. He will never leave you or forsake you there.

With Me in the Valley

David Gibson

In this concise booklet, David Gibson examines the believer’s union with Christ as the sheep and the shepherd depicted in Psalm 23, offering readers comfort in the hope of trusting him.

It is my conviction that many believers do not really understand the depth of God’s love for them expressed by the fact that, in the Lord Jesus, God is with us. We assume that God is with the church in general or with others in the church in particular but not with us. No, we think, he can’t really be with me. And as we say this, we cut ourselves off from the whole trajectory of Scripture’s story, which is not just that God formed a world and then filled a world but that God himself came to his world and came to be known in as close and personal a way as a sheep knows its shepherd, a traveler his companion, a guest his host, a bride her husband, even a servant his master. The story of the Bible is that God has come to us in Jesus such that we are able to say to him, “You are with me.”

Indeed, this is why in the New Testament the apostle Paul never talks about people being “Christians,” as if who we are is a label or title we wear. Instead, Paul speaks about believers being “in Christ,” a statement that much better reflects the ultimate truth of our status. Our union with Christ is no less of a reality about us than our sex, nationality, age, height, or any other defining features we may wish to list. Indeed, some of these things can change with time, but our union with Christ does not. He is “with” us because we are “in” him.

As is so often the case, some of our Puritan forebears understood this better than we do. In his wonderful work The Heart of Christ in Heaven Towards Sinners on Earth, Thomas Goodwin provides a profound meditation on Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet and his Farewell Discourse in the upper room. Goodwin sees the Lord Jesus here condescending to “the laws of bridegrooms”—he reads chapters 13–17 of John’s Gospel as the outpouring of Christ’s heart of love for his disciples and the pleasure and pain of his respective presence and absence as the thread that runs through the chapters.³ Goodwin meditates on these words of Jesus: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3). For Goodwin, Christ is like a husband who first makes everything ready in his father’s house and then comes in person to fetch his bride, “and not to send for [her] by others, for it is a time of love.”⁴ And then Goodwin says, amazingly,

It is as if he had said, The truth is, I cannot live without you, I shall never be quiet till I have you where I am, that so we may never part again; that is the reason of it. Heaven shall not hold me, nor my Father’s company, if I have not you with me, my heart is so set upon you; and if I have any glory, you shall have part of it.⁵

These striking words are Goodwin’s attempt to penetrate the stunning reality of John 13–17, chapters revealing that what the Father, Son, and Spirit share among themselves, they have chosen to share with us. Their love for one another is the love they have for us. Their desire to be in one another’s presence overflows in the same desire to have us with them in their presence too. In John 17:24 Jesus prays, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am.” Goodwin’s language strains at the very borders of what we can possibly say about how loved we are: “Thou has set my heart upon them, and hast loved them thyself as thou has loved me, and thou hast ordained them to be one in us, even as we are one, and therefore I cannot live long asunder from them; I have thy company, but I must have theirs too; ‘I will that they be where I am.’”⁶

You have a shepherd who is with you.

So often we disqualify ourselves from Christ’s presence, and we think he cannot be with us because we presume that his love for us is based on us, on what we are like, on what we have done or not done. But it is not. It is a profound truth, more profound than we realize, that the love of the Father for the Son, and the love of the Son for the Father, is the same love of the Father and the Son for us (John 17:20–26). The fellowship between the persons of the Trinity is a fellowship we are drawn into where the love bestowed on us is a love that already existed without us. We did not create that love or call it forth because of something special in us; no, it is love that already existed without us that we are invited to share in, love given to us, and so the love of the Lord Jesus for his disciples displays his very heart toward us in his desire to be with us.

Stunningly, we may say that if the Son wants to be with his Father, then in the same way he also wants to be with his people.

The Lord, your shepherd, is with you.

This article is adapted from With Me in the Valley: The Comforting Presence of God in Psalm 23 by David Gibson.

David Gibson (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is minister of Trinity Church in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is a coeditor of From Heaven He Came and Sought Her, and his publications include Living Life Backward; The Undivided Life; and The Lord of Psalm 23. He is married to Angela, and they have four children.

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