In a recent sermon on David’s famous Twenty-third Psalm, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’, I sheepishly confessed that I had referred to the word ‘my’ as a personal pronoun, when in fact, it is a possessive pronoun. Believe it or not, there are eight different subcategories of pronouns in the English grammar: personal, relative, demonstrative, indefinite, reflexive, interrogative, reciprocal, and possessive. How exciting! But I think most of my listeners yawned at the point, or at least wanted to.

Yet the point is actually not pedantic. The word ‘me’ is a personal pronoun, but unless the ‘me’ becomes a ‘my’, there is no possession. And when the subject is salvation, non-possession is a serious miscalculation. The Lord is indeed a shepherd, whether we trust Him or not, and a good shepherd at that. But unless the Lord is my shepherd, all the good promises held out in the Psalm, namely comfort in the dark valley, and a forever dwelling in the house of the Lord, remain unclaimed.

Thankfully, a person is not saved by grammatical correctness, for who then could be saved? Not I. Or is it ‘Not me’? Thankfully there is a way to secure salvation by not using the possessive pronoun. John Newton discovered it, and put it like this: ‘Amazing grace how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see’. But who will not agree that his personal is also his possessive?