The Good Shepherd.2

"I am the good shepherd.

I know my flock and they know me, even as the Father knows me and I know the Father.

I am willing to give my life for the sake of the sheep.

My sheep recognize my voice.

I know them each by name, and they follow me. "

--Jesus

It's been said that in Europe a hundred miles is a long ways while in America a hundred years is a long time! And for most humans thirteen billion light years is an incomprehensibly long time and long way!

With a tip of the hat to young earth creationists for their sincerity and passion, more and more researchers in the geometric sciences agree that thirteen billion light years is, more or less, the breadth and age of the universe.

This same Jesus, the architect of Creation, produced the just right conditions in a vast universe for His crowning achievement: Beings fashioned in the Image of God! He chose to visit this planet and redeem people from their waywardness and self destruction and lead them to His crowning endeavor: Beings fashioned into the Nature of God.

I imagine the time He and the Father spent (who knows, perhaps many millennia) contemplating the things that must be said to humans to help them understand the Purposes of the Perfect Will.

When He came here, He described Himself and His work among humans in terms the simplest would be able to connect with from head to heart.

Good Shepherd
In preparation for this visit, the Creator made sure to fashion a "sentient" (what Hugh Ross would call "soulish") animal -sheep- that would point people to the tenderness of a loving caregiver. By observing a human shepherd's interaction with his flock we can understand Jesus' words describing His relationship with us!

Knowing the Flock
The Creator instilled in these soulish    animals a sense of community and belonging; qualities that would help people understand the special relationship each one has to the Shepherd and other sheep.

Give My Life
The Nature of Love is sacrifice. Jesus showed us what the Father is always doing: giving himself eternally for the good of people. The motivating force in the universe is Love and is the end to which All Creation is moving. 

One of the deadly consequences of Self-Consciousness and Self-Will is Self-Loathing - a genuine disbelief that someone could love me for what I am.

By dying for the very creatures who rejected their Creator He demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt what true love is and the eternal value He ascribes to every individual on this planet!

Voice Recognition
"Alexa, play my music!" "Siri, find this location." Artificial Intelligence has changed the way we live our lives! But they are soulless servants designed to only do our bidding without anything resembling (except a soft sounding female voice) freely offered loyalty and affection. 

The Creator's most challenging act of creating was developing a Being like Him capable of communication,  communion, and choice. 

Perhaps more challenging was that these creatures would be able to distinguish His voice in the midst of a din of noise these creatures would be capable of producing! 

Hope resides in His heart as He waits for people to answer His alluring call to Life!

Follow The Leader
Like sheep, humans can get lost rather easily. We need guidance to get to the right destination...most often not even sure what the right destination is. But the destination we are created for is to be at the Heart of the Father, to know our purpose and meaning and to be merry children around His throne!

He Knows Us By Name
"Take a number." Whether at the DMV or a fast food restaurant, we resign ourselves to waiting for our number to be called. As fickle as humanity is - some want to be noticed, some want to blend - the wonder of friendship with Jesus is that he cares about all that happens in our lives. Every event is an opportunity that, as our eternal Shepherd, He coordinates with to shape and refine us into His nature. Our names reveal something about the purpose for which we were created!

They Follow Me
The Shepherd has a right to expect the sheep to submit to his guidance, protection and provision. In a word, He has authority to care for the sheep. And the sheep have a duty to pay attention and follow where He leads and what He does to help them prosper. You could call it a Win-Win proposition! As this flock grows He gets the ever expanding Love for which He fashioned the universe, we get the home for which we long!

Words Mean Things
In the end, it wasn't so much what He said but what He did that demonstrated the Father's Perfect Love. His actions give the Ultimate Meaning to the things He said. May we, like sheep, live just like Him!

THE LIVING WORD.2

"These words that I speak are not my own, but come from the Father who has sent me.

They that hear the words that I speak, and believe in him who has sent me, will have everlasting life.

They will not be condemned but will pass from death to life."

--Jesus

God the Father has always desired and worked to explain how He would have us think of Him. From the moment we enter this world His revelation in nature begins its

work of helping us connect with our Creator. The unchangeable-ness of His nature, for example, can be understood in pondering the "solidity" of rock.

The artistry in a flower tells us something about His beauty. The vitality of water helps us taste a little of what the

"inventor and mediator of thirst and water" intends for our thirsty souls to find in Him.

Words mean things. That seems simple enough to understand, as concepts go. But for some reason, in today's turbulent political/social scene, people seem to be having a hard time understanding the meaning of words. More precisely, in a world rapidly resembling Orwell's 1984, words are being assigned new meanings while ignoring, vilifying, and repudiating their natural, historical and common meaning.

Have we lost the capacity to understand the meaning of things? Or the will? Or, could it be, there is no longer the kind of faith Jesus came to advance to be found on the earth?

Written oracles claimed by human beings to be the "Words of God," test our capacity, will, and faith to measure what they say, what we think they mean, and how accurately they depict our recognition of what we know to be like God. To embrace in our imagination the power to see the truth of a thing and to reject what we know to be false, is the development of faith.



Jesus, the perfect revelation of God, was sent that the Name of Truth could connect with man. The Son of Man leads each person to a higher plane: the moment when Truth goes beyond intellect, comes in contact with the will, and forces a choice to be True or False concerning the Life He reveals.

Putting into practice Jesus' words, given by God, reveals in each individual a perception of Truth (itself a gift from God) that acted upon transforms a man to a right relation to the Creator and the created. This is the perfecting of Life everlasting in the man!

"Man is man only in the doing of the truth, perfect man only in the doing of the highest truth:fulfilling his relations to the purpose for which God created him.
He has relations with his fellow man, closer infinitely than with any of the "things" around him, and to many a man far plainer than his relations with God. Now the nearer is plainer that he may step on it, and rise to the higher (but till then the less plain.)
These relations make a large part of his being, are essential to his very existence, and spring from the very facts of the origination of his being.
They are the relation of thought to thought, of being to being, of duty to duty. The very nature of a man depends upon, or is one with, these relations. They are truths, and the man is a true man as he fulfills them.
Fulfilling them perfectly, he is himself a truth, a living truth.
As regarded merely by the intellect, these relations are facts of man's nature; but that they are of man's nature makes them truths, and the fulfilments of them are duties.
He is so constituted as to understand them at first more than he can love them, with the resulting advantage of having thereby the opportunity of choosing them purely because they are true; so doing he chooses to love them, and is enabled to love them in the doing, which alone can truly reveal them to him, and make the loving of them possible.
Then they cease to show themselves in the form of duties, and appear as they more truly are, absolute truths, essential realities, eternal delights.
The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty...who forgets the name of it."

A young man I work with has fathered two children with a woman he did not marry and now no longer lives with. In fact, his relationship with his kid's mom is rather antagonistic. Each day presents more challenges testing his will and capacity to care for his children. His son, in particular, has some lifelong health issues he'll have to deal with for years to come.

I admire this man's devotion to his children, though as a "Christian" kind of frown on how he got himself in this predicament and wouldn't have prescribed it as a way to begin a life of fulfilling parenting.

I'm sure if he had to do it over he would have found a better way. But that is hardly the issue. The difficulties he faces, whether self-inflicted or not, and the way he is accepting his fatherly duties is helping to shape both his own character and the character of his posterity!

Those difficulties, in fact, make him more humble and receptive to a word of Truth from time to time. And open to the possibility that God is looking out for him and pleased that He is displaying true Fatherhood by fulfilling his duty to care for and protect his kids.

 For the rest of us...
Do we not take joy in the midst of severe crisis such as the recent hurricanes, wildfires and earthquakes in various places at the accounts of people fulfilling their duty to help and care for one another? Whatever problem we have with the political philosophies guiding modern journalism, we smile that they can't help themselves but to report the wonderful capacity of people to respond with earnest and tender help when duty calls!

Whatever the "professionals" may attribute that response to, we can with confident faith know that it is the God of Life who is continually working to shape mankind in His image!

His Words, His meaning, His Life!

adapted from George MacDonald's, Justice, Unspoken Sermons III