The Good Shepherd

 This past week we attended a memorial service for my cousin. He had a difficult fight with addiction in his life. He wandered away from God and family, and was wrapped in that horror for years. But God is so faithful. He brought my cousin out of his entrapment. Where years of trying to free himself had failed, God succeeded. God brought our cousin back, and he lived the last several years growing in God’s faith and freed from many of the things that bound him. He lived his life as a praise of what God had done, and now he is with our Lord, totally free and healed.

They key here is what God did. It is impossible for us to save ourselves from whatever binds us. Try all we want, we cannot free ourselves. But God can set us free. Even better, God is out there searching us out, collecting us, loving us, welcoming us into His healing power.  My cousin’s story is a modern day prodigal son story. You can read that story in Luke 15,  parables of lost things. Jesus tells of a lost coin, a lost sheep and a lost son. The lost represent us. The chapter begins with the religious leaders judging Jesus for welcoming and eating with sinners. The religious leaders’ attitude is most ironic, since we are all sinners, but like these leaders, some of us refuse to recognize that we are lost. Jesus lets them know, via this series of parables, that the religious leaders are right, sinners are most welcome in Jesus’ sphere. In every case there is “rejoicing in the presence of angels of God over one sinner who repents.” The overwhelming message is that God seeks and finds us sinners.

“The Lord is my Shepherd”. Psalms 23 beautifully portrays God’s care of His people. He supplies all our needs and in the end leads us through the Valley of Death. Back in Luke, this series on lost items begins with a lost sheep. A shepherd has 100 sheep, and one is lost. He leaves the 99 in search of the one lost. And when he finds the lost sheep, he goes home and celebrates “rejoice with me, I have found my lost sheep.”

John 10 talks of how a shepherd knows his sheep by name. The shepherd leads his sheep in and out through a gate. The sheep follow the shepherd because they know his voice. Jesus first says “I AM the gate, whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out and find pasture.” (John 10:9) He goes on to say, “I have come that they may have life and have it to the full”. (John 10:10).

Jesus then said, “I Am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” (John 10:11)

Here we have another wonderful picture of Jesus’ character. He is a good leader, worthy of following. He did lay down His life for us. He searches for us; He desires a relationship with us; He saves us. None of this is incumbent on our behavior or qualifications. We are just sheep, but our Shepherd goes above and beyond to make sure we are brought safely home. And each one is precious, worthy of being sought out, because He wants us.

“God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions (sins) – it is by grace you have been saved…For it is by grace you have been saved through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:4, 8-9) We are sinners, saved by God’s grace, period. Our only “job” is to accept the gift.

What a picture we see in the Luke parables. God is searching us out! He wants relationship with us. The only thing keeping that from happening is our resistance. When my cousin turned back around, there was God, waiting with open arms, like the prodigal’s father. The focus wasn’t on what my cousin had or hadn’t done. The focus was on what Jesus’ had done in my cousin’s place.

For most of us urban dwellers, the shepherd/sheep image isn’t really something we are familiar with. But it does paint a beautiful, pastoral image of creatures that totally depend on a shepherd to provide. And that is what we are, totally incapable of taking care of ourselves spiritually (and often physically). We desperately need a Savior, a Good Shepherd, who can lead us, and care for us and secure us in his safe enclosure. And note that in that enclosure we can find "life to the full", abundant life!

Over and over in the Scriptures we see the Shepherd/sheep metaphor about God and His people. Jesus, in making the claim that He is the Shepherd, took on that metaphor and in doing so told the listeners He was God. They were familiar with the Old Testament passages, including the familiar Psalms 23.

Psalms 95: 6-8 “Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker; for he is our God and we are the sheep of his pasture, the flock under his care. Today, if only you would hear his voice. Do not harden your hearts.”

Isaiah prophesied about the coming Messiah, coming to take on our sin and die in our place. “Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering…he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned in our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6)

We went for a walk after my cousin’s memorial. We walked past a field where there were eight new little lambs. My cousin now lives free from sin’s burden. Like those new little lambs, he is safe in the care of the Good Shepherd, as we all are, only now he is actually there with our Shepherd, new, free and bounding through heaven in joy. Praise God!