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Psalm 23 has to be one of the most famous pieces of writing the world has ever known. You hear it at weddings and at funerals — and yet it is not just for weddings and funerals. The promise that God makes, the words that David penned as a shepherd, are words of hope for every circumstance in life.
It is a passage I have turned to thousands of times in my own life, and in my role as a pastor — to bring comfort, hope, guidance, and direction. But tonight I want to take just a few minutes to reflect on one short line. It doesn't appear anywhere else in the Bible, only here at the end of verse two:
He restores my soul.
We live in a guilt-laden, shame-driven, anxious world where everything is pressing in upon people all around us. If ever there was a time that people needed soul restoration, it is now. And the good news is that God offers us exactly that — not just a reboot, but a complete root-and-branch renewal.
This phrase, restores my soul, has been lying heavily on my spirit for about six months. I keep returning to it, thinking about it, going away, and coming back again and again. Tonight I want to invite you into it — not as a sentence on parchment, not as a line sealed in a book by your bedside, but as a living, breathing promise for you today, wherever you are.
Over the weekend I had the privilege of sharing the good news of who Jesus is at an event in the Gloucestershire area, where we saw about thirty people make first-time decisions to follow Christ.
I was staying in a farmhouse, and last night was a still night. There was a full moon, and I looked across the fields and was reminded of the hymn many of you will know: "And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's green and pleasant land?" Now, I don't think they did — but that's another story. Still, the hymn has something evocative about it, because this nation is in peril. We are facing crises of conscience and identity.
The United Kingdom was not built on a bit of pantheism, or this culture or that culture. Whether you realise it or not, the underpinning of the society that has prospered in this country for hundreds of years is the Christian faith. And that faith is being eroded by many in our public life — though not by all. There are men and women of integrity and courage in both the Commons and the Lords who are seeking to uphold the truth that when Christ is at the centre of a culture, something shifts.
I put it to you that one of the reasons the United Kingdom and Western Europe face an existential crisis of identity is that they have moved away from their Christian identity. And I suggest that the only way we can be restored to stability and strength is to return to those core values once again.
If the church of Jesus Christ in the United Kingdom were to turn and call out to God, He would hear from heaven and heal our land. If our pulpits were more about virtue and less about virtue-signalling, we would see the goodness of God touching families and communities once again. I want to see Christ lifted up across the nation. I want to see His name honoured. I want to see His teaching embedded in our public life once more.
All of that would be of no good whatsoever if Christ did not also promise to restore your soul — if He did not promise to come and touch your life and your heart. What good would it be to have a nation rediscovering the promises of God, and for you to miss them?
So maybe God has brought you here tonight to offer you restoration in your soul. I pray that is the case — that He will touch you and transform you.
This is David's declaration that God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, will bring life and rescue to the soul — to the very centre of who he is. The Hebrew cannot be adequately translated into English, but the word restore is a promise:
When do you use the word restoration? Sometimes when your computer goes wrong there is a restore setting. I think a lot of IT engineers make millions of pounds from "turn it off and turn it on again." A system restore takes you right back to the default settings of the machine.
Maybe that's what our nation needs. And often, that is what our lives need — a default restoration.
Imagine what it would feel like to go back to innocence — back to the moment where you trusted people, where you saw possibility instead of peril, where you were not marked by cynicism, where greed and pride and avarice had not left their scars on your soul.
Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, once wrote to ten of his friends and said simply, "Flee, all is discovered." Within 24 hours all ten had left England. The thing is, he knew nothing about them. He had no gossip to spill. The evidence of a soul that needs restoring is that running.
Imagine for a moment that behind me was not a computer screen but a whiteboard, and I announced that over the next twenty minutes I was going to write all the secret things of your heart on it — but I'd take a coffee break first to give you the chance to leave. How many of us would still be sitting here? Not many. The reality is that even if we don't use these words, many of us are searching for a system reset.
There's a programme on the BBC called Fake or Fortune with Fiona Bruce, where they examine paintings to see whether they are fakes or forgotten masterpieces. Often they call in a restorer, who comes with water — sometimes ionised so it won't damage the canvas — and meticulously cleans the painting. To watch a dirty old painting brought back to life, the colours jumping off the canvas again, is the most amazing thing.
Maybe that's what you need. Maybe the God colours in your life have been dulled — by disappointment, by regret, by someone hurting you, or simply by life. God Himself, by the power of the Holy Spirit, can restore you to the original version of how He intended you to be.
There is also the restoration of justice and systems — let's put this right, let's sort this out, let's fix this. All of those meanings are captured in that one line: He restores my soul.
The Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, and it means life — the very centre of gravity of who we are. For Jewish and Christian spirituality the soul is not some ethereal, abstract thing; it is the essence of who you are.
So when David says He restores my soul, he means that God gets to the very heart of David and makes him David — not the David everyone else wants, not the David everyone expects, but the David God made him to be. God restores his identity, his purpose, his personhood, his peace. He removes the things that are so dangerous to him and He gives him back his life.
I have been a follower of Jesus for forty years now. I made my commitment to Christ on the first Sunday of February 1986. For forty years I have witnessed Jesus restoring my soul — and He is still doing it. I am not the perfect article. I don't have it all together. But I have discovered in Christ Jesus a Saviour who is constantly restoring me, constantly renewing me, meeting me exactly where I am.
Back in 2002 my father dropped dead, and the bottom dropped out of my world. Ours had been a complex and difficult relationship, and for months afterward I struggled to understand why God would allow it to happen the way it did. I got very angry at God. I shouted at Him. I railed against Him.
The breakthrough came one morning as I sat in my study in Bournemouth. A question rose in my heart, and I felt it was God asking it:
One day, Malcolm, I will answer every question you have. And on the day I answer them, the questions will no longer matter. So I am giving you a choice today: will you trust me even though you do not understand me — or will you keep fighting with me?
I made a decision to trust Him even though I didn't understand Him — to stop running down the rabbit holes of why, because none of them brought satisfaction, and none of them brought my father back. And the moment I stopped indicting God, I started receiving something from Him: restoration.
About six months after my father died, I climbed into the pulpit in Bournemouth and preached on Psalm 23. Line by line, step by step, God brought me back. He restored my soul.
Then when my nephew took his own life in 2014, it was Psalm 23 that I preached on. When his father, my brother-in-law, took his life eighteen weeks later, I returned to Psalm 23. When my sister-in-law took her life, I returned to Psalm 23. When my big brother Colin died suddenly, I returned to Psalm 23. When my mother choked to death, I returned to Psalm 23. And when my next big brother died of cancer six weeks after his diagnosis, I returned to Psalm 23.
So when I tell you that He restores your soul, I am not giving you a theory. I am telling you that these words have picked up this devastated life and reshaped it. They have helped me understand that the sorrow, pain, despair, and confusion we feel do not need to define us — they can refine us. But that depends on what we do with them. Will you let Him restore your soul?
There was a time when I was chief executive of a large UK charity that helped churches get involved in communities. One of the trustees came and asked me to agree to a contract that would involve disavowing my allegiance to Jesus. There was a school in Luton they wanted us to run, and they asked us to put together a curriculum.
We did — a Christian curriculum. They came back and said, "We love the content, but could you take Jesus out of it and just make it religious?" I said, "No, I can't do that." We can teach other faiths — of course we can, we live in a pluralist, multicultural society with much to celebrate. But I believe we should also teach the core foundation of how we came to be what we now call the United Kingdom.
They said, "If you can't take that out, we can't fund the school." I said, "Then don't fund the school." The board member said, "Then you have a choice to make, because we are going to accept the funding." So I resigned. I walked out of my office in central London and got on the train home.
(No, no — don't applaud me. Many of you make decisions like that every day. I'm just one example.)
On the way home I wondered how I would tell my wife — we had a mortgage we would not be able to pay at the end of the month. And on that train from Waterloo, the Holy Spirit said to me, "I will restore your soul. I will guide you through this." And I have to tell you: never once did we lose our peace. Never once did we lose our sense of well-being.
We had to move out of our house because we were going to lose it. God gave us the opportunity to move into a manse and help a tiny church, and we rented our own house to cover the mortgage. Our children were twelve, ten, eight, and seven.
One particular week we had absolutely nothing to eat and no money. We used to walk the children to school through a field and a bit of farmland, past a pear tree and an apple tree. On the way back one day my wife found the windfall fruit that had dropped, and — like Susanna Wesley — she gathered them up in her blouse and brought them home. We had flour to make pastry. On her way upstairs she found a one-pound coin, went and bought a tub of double cream, and when the children came home they had apple and pear tart for dinner. Twenty years later we told them that was all we had that day — that we weren't trying to be special, we were trying to survive.
I tell you that story because, through all those years of difficulty and uncertainty, our children never felt the sting of it, because as God guarded and restored our souls, He was protecting our children. He is faithful.
We don't live in the time of David; we live three thousand years after him, and two thousand years after the birth of David's greater Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And He is the One who now restores our souls. He said to those who followed Him:
Come to me, all you that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Here is the irony, friend: He has carried the weight you are trying to carry. He has paid for the mistakes you are still regretting. He has taken the shame that is sucking the life out of you. He has given promises to guide you through every situation you may face. But He will not force them upon you. He asks you to trust Him — to lay your life down at His feet.
Maybe you feel a bit like that painting, and what you actually need is for God to be gentle with you. Maybe you have carried the strains of life for so long that they have become part of your portrait — and if God removed them too suddenly, you wouldn't cope. So maybe tonight He simply wants to come and gently restore you.
I love the way the Bible ends. In Revelation 21 and 22, John sees a world with no more sin, no more shame, no more darkness, no more fear, no more death. And there is a little line I don't know if you've ever noticed:
And he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Do you see the individualism of that — the gentleness, the sensitivity? One of the psalmists says God has stored your tears in a bottle. There is not one thing you have gone through that God does not see. There is not one scar He does not understand. There is not one wound He is unable to heal.
Or maybe you need Him to do a system reset — to go back to the default setting and start again. Maybe tonight is less about a gentle restoration and more about surrender: laying your life before God and saying, "Take me as I am and do something with my life."
Or maybe God has you here because of what you are going to restore. Maybe He has placed a dream in your heart, a vision. Maybe you want to change this country, write songs, write laws, invent or discover things. Maybe you're a businesswoman or a businessman, an entrepreneur. Why could the president of a great corporation twenty years from now not be sitting in this room? Why could a future prime minister of the United Kingdom not be sitting here?
What could God do with you if you said to Him tonight, "Use me as a restorer"? Because when God does a work of restoration in us, He also wants to do a work of restoration through us.
A few months ago I was back at the Palace of Westminster. Standing in the lobby, where you can see the patron-saint symbols of each of the four nations of the United Kingdom, I wept. And I prayed:
Would you, by the power of your Spirit, restore righteousness in this nation once again? Restore righteousness in our parliamentarians, in our judicial system, at our borders, in the dignity of work, in our education and health systems. Would you take this broken nation and fix what is broken?
I believe He is going to do it — and I think we will be surprised by how He does it. I believe God has placed Kensington Temple in this nation for such a time as this. Come September we will launch the Centre for Pentecostal Public Theology, working with whoever wants to work with us for the common good. Because here is what God says in Isaiah 58:
Is this not the kind of fasting I have chosen: to break the chains of injustice and to remove the yoke of oppression?
And then He says: "Then you will be called the restorer of streets with dwellings."
I think God has a restoration mantle He wants to place on some of you — restorers of biblical education, of the dignity and purpose of women, of whatever it is God wants to use you for.
In 2021 I was sitting in the rubble of the events of my life, and I said to God, "I feel like I'm sitting in the midst of shards of broken glass." I closed my eyes, and God gave me a very clear and simple vision. The glass surrounding me — the disappointment, sorrow, struggle, and uncertainty — was lying on the ground around me. And as I looked, the glass formed a stained-glass window. What looked like rubble, what looked like discarded pieces, was stunningly beautiful.
To surrender to Christ is not a mystical thing — it is to come into this restoration project. It is to give Him the broken pieces of your life and allow Him to do something with them.
