Trigger: Rev Z calling Psalm 23 a "popular" passage for believers
Concerns: man-oriented popularity of Bible passages like Psalm 23, selective understanding and interpretation of the Bible
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When we listen to a sermon or take the admonition or advice of a servant of God (a preacher in this case), we assume that they are people who are defenders of the truth, expositors of the God's Word so that through the Holy Spirit's filling, they preach not by their own understanding, but by the power of God.
I Tim 4:16 "Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers."
Titus 1:9 "He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it."
These are the qualifications of church leaders and preachers, though they are also equally applicable to us because we are all servants of the Heavenly Kingdom. Does Rev Z have a good reputation? Yes he does, because we assume that if God keeps people in seminaries to teach others to rise up to serve God, we can trust that his words are true to the Bible, not contradictory. This doesn't mean that we are idolizing preachers over the Bible - I think it's a great tragedy when we can quote preachers and their ideas, but not the Bible (which I try to avoid). It just means that we ask God to ENABLE us to have faith to trust that each sermon is indeed from God and not from selfish sinful motives.
This also doesn't mean we take a blind stand and just accept what preachers say because 1. there are false preachers around, which is what the epistles and the Revelations and the Christians from the early church till now have been greatly concerned over. 2. God has designed us in such a way that our cognitive ability to internalize something requires us to re-process something. The Bereans of the early church were commended for learning God's Word "with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11). The following verse (v12) tells us that they did not examine the Scriptures just for examination's sake (perhaps to try and find fault and reason to reject the exposition Paul and Silas gave on God's Word), but resulted in being transformed to believe that yes! the King of Old has pardoned our sins, fulfilling His wrath by nailing Christ to the cross so that we can be faultless before Him because Christ has lived a blameless life on our behalf.
Psalm 119:27 says "Make me understand the way of your precepts, and I will meditate on your wondrous works." We by knowledge, know that yes, we are to listen to sermons because preachers are people of authority in the church whom God has ordained to help us understand His Word and Him, thereby walking closer with God. But I have come to realize that each time we listen to God's Word or someone's exposition, we are continually doing it by faith. It is by faith that there and then, as I hear the Holy Spirit convict me to think about my guiltless life because my Saviour died for me, that I believe that the Holy Spirit is working within me and He wants to change me in both my actions and my understanding of God through His Word.
Like the desperate father of the possessed boy who cried to Jesus, "I believe; help my unbelief!", we are constantly living by faith, even when listening to sermons, because the devil can distract us by making us focus on the technicalities (his voice is too soft, his pronunciation is weird) or criticize the content of the sermon, or being totally apathetic to what is preached, just wishing for the sermon to end asap. Any of the three ways is an outright rejection of God's authority as the All-Knowing God who is imparting knowledge about the mysteries of the kingdom and godliness to us because we are now made spiritually alive and favourable unto Him through Christ's cleansing. We are also rejecting the Holy Spirit's work out of pride, thinking that we know better, and that a sermon throughwhich the Holy Spirit works is too lousy for us to learn from it. That is just utter pride and a disgusting assault against God's power. Yet it's not just sermons, but song-singing through which we despise God's people. And we are all guilty of that. We are all prone to such distractions and thus rebellion, which is why each time of listening to the sermons is an act of faith, which we need to pray God to ENABLE us to perform.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having favourites - we being imperfect beings are necessarily constantly selecting parts of revealed truth, or what we deem as truth. To try and adopt an egalitarian approach is impossible: "Oh, there is no favourite verse because I don't think it's right to have favourites" or "I like all verses!".
Also, looking at the text, there are some verses that are purely narrative and carry no symbolic meaning, like Exodus 1:1 "These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household". They lead to the revelation of stories. If you agree with me on this point, we are already recognizing the hierarchy of verses in the Bible. As opposed to Muslims who vehemently believe that God is purely transcendent and depiction is thus utter idolatry and betrayal, Christ became flesh so that through Him our God is both transcendent and immanent. God reveals such immanence through the use of imagery and metaphors and parables - God as Judge, Father, Refuge; Christ as Lamb, High Priest, the Firstfruit; Holy Spirit as Seal etc. He relates to us through these ways because relating to our own lives is an effective way to help us remember our relationship with God, both in literary and oral cultures of the Western world and the Hebrew society.
Historically, we can see that some verses are more "famous" because they have been liturgised, like in Handel's Messiah that compiles different verses from the Bible for glorious song. Isaiah 9:6 is one example: "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given..." You can often observe that verses or phrases from the Bible that are popular because they have been canonized in literary works point towards Christ, the centrepiece of the Universe and the Bible. Again, there is hierarchy in the Bible. All revelations in the Bible pointing towards Christ, the most important, either in his incarnation or His future coming. In this way, popularity is not defined by man, ideally, because the Holy Spirit works through the canonisation of these verses and passages.
So I wouldn't say Ps. 23 is an issue. In it, God reveals Himself to us as an all-satisfying, always reliable and gracious Shepherd because it appeals so much to the agragrian and nomadic cultures of David's time. And today, we see so many parallels that even in modern, capitalist societies, we can attest to Heb 4:12 "For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." It is not the verses itself that are sacred, but through which the Holy Spirit works in us. If a Christian doesn't idolize Ps 23 as the only passage he wants to learn about or relate to, or judge other people for being somehow spiritually inferior because they don't see Ps 23 as their favourite, it's totally fine.
I Cor 7:17 says "Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him." Jerry Bridges paraphrases this very well: what the Spirit personally convicts, the believer can live by it. That means: what are the negotiables and non-negotiables in our faith? Christ and His deity and full incarnation and efficacy by His blood alone + inerrancy of the Bible etc are non-negotiables. But having favourite verses in different places of the Bible is a peripheral, through which there is no great cause for imposing our personal convictions on others as if the Bible has commanded it as truth (cf all the battles of Christian music).
IF i were to take issue with Christianese, I will take offense with phrases that have become so conventionalised we don't think before we say them, like "I live for God alone", multiple "O, Lord's" and "I just wanna" in our prayers, "have faith", "things will turn out fine", "leave it all in Your hands" etc. They become like the repetitive chants that Christ forbids against, because we don't think before we say them. But then again, I also wouldn't go around telling people off that they are wrong in this aspect unless God calls me to tell a certain person. It is the Holy Spirit who changes, and we can, by faith, believe that in time, believers change, because God has promised that He will "bring to completion" the sanctifying work He's started in us (Phil. 1:6).
Also, it would be wrong to appropriate verses for personal gains (popular or not), ie: judging other people according to what the Bible says for the sake of self-elevation and self-righteousness (which I have committed).
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