The Good Shepherd.6

"He calls them each by name, and leads them out to green pastures.

When he leads the sheep out to graze, he goes before them.

They follow him, comforted by the words that he speaks.

They will not follow a stranger; instead, they run from the sound of an unfamiliar voice."

--Jesus

Jesus goes before us.

But where is He leading us? In a very real sense it doesn't matter. To be with Jesus wherever He goes, to be content to munch away on the pasture He gives us at any moment is Life. To Trust Him is the essence of our relationship with Him.

Speaking of trust...

Our friend Kate is an avid trail horse rider and has had many adventures

while on horseback. One of her stories is about a young gelding she took across the state of Michigan on the famed "Shore to Shore" trail ride. During the course of the two week ride there had been considerable rain which made the trail muddy and often nearly impassable. She and her young ride came to a place where the water had formed a pond deep enough to reach his belly. She stopped for a moment to consider a rider in front of her's difficulty in getting up out of the water and looking for a better place to take her steed. Suddenly, a duck and her ducklings came swimming nearby her horse! The four-year old panicked and began flailing to try to run away! After finally getting him settled, he decided that he was NOT GOING TO MOVE! For fifteen minutes she coaxed and coaxed...to no avail. Finally she had to

dismount and lead the wild-eyed, panic-stricken horse through chest deep muck onto dry land! Fortunately, Kate survived this ordeal to be able to tell the story that night at the campfire. She concluded by saying "He just wouldn't trust me! I can take my older horses anywhere at anytime, but he is not there yet!"

The truth is, often times the only way

to build that trust is to go through the swamps together!

If there is a better way of describing our relationship with our Good Shepherd I don't know of one. He goes before us. In fact you could say that in giving up His part in the Godhead and clothing himself in the frailty of humanity he also learned the difficulties we experience in trusting our Master in those fearful places.

Like having your hands and feet nailed to a wooden post after being humiliated and beaten to a bloody pulp. Makes shrinking from a duck seem, well, silly...

Yet, how many ducks swimming nearby in our own swampy, scary places will it take to get us to remain calm and trusting until he can lead us to a better place: our own cross - the place of ultimate trust and devotion to the Father's Perfect Will - wherein we learn to die to our self-will and immerse ourselves in God's Goodness and New Life!

Quack, quack! See you on the other shore!

The Good Shepherd.5

"He that enters in
by the front door of the fold
is the shepherd of the sheep.

To him the doorkeeper
opens the door,
and the sheep thrill at
the sound of his voice."

--Jesus

Thrill at The Sound of His Voice:

The Adoration of God

Is there a more beautiful and poignant description in Jesus' words -to all mankind- of the kind of relationship our Creator longs to have with each of us?

George MacDonald has rightly said:

"The reason every human is born is to become a disciple of Jesus Christ!"

Oh that we could change the hearts of those ambivalent toward abortion:

every child IS wanted

by the Creator

to know the love

and adoration

and presence of God!

[tragically, monsters of death will always be among us until the establishment of the Righteous Kingdom]

In the timeless book The Practice of The Presence of God, Brother Lawrence,

a 17th century French monk, offers insights into developing intimacy with our Creator. In describing the impact of Brother Lawrence's life a friend wrote: "God desired to keep saints for Himself until the end of the world. These saints would pay Him a respect worthy of His grandeur and majesty and would be models of virtue because of the holy example they set...such a man was Brother Lawrence."

Here are excerpts from his insights on developing intimacy with God:

"All things are possible to him who believes; still more to him who hopes; still more to him who loves; and most of all to him who practices all three. All of us who believe and are baptized have taken the first step toward perfection [the perfecting Love of God].

First of all, we need to be considerate of God in everything we do and say. Our goal should be to become perfect in our adoration of Him throughout this earthly life in preparation for all eternity. We must make a firm resolution to overcome, with God's grace, all the difficulties encountered in a spiritual life.

From the outset of our Christian walk,

we should remember who we are and that we are unworthy of the name of Christian, except for what Christ has done for us. In cleansing us from all our impurities, God desires to humble us and often allows us to go through a number of trials or difficulties to that end.

We must believe with certainty that it is both pleasing to God and good for us to sacrifice ourselves for Him. Without this complete submission of our hearts and minds to His will, He cannot work in us to make us perfect [in love].

The more we desire to be perfect [in love], the more dependent we are on the grace of God. We begin to need His help with every little thing and at every moment, because without it we can do nothing. The world, the flesh, and the devil wage a fierce and continuous war on our souls. If we weren't capable of humbly depending on God for assistance, our souls would be dragged down. Although this total dependence may sometimes go against our human nature, God takes great pleasure in it. Learning to do so will bring us rest.

The most holy and necessary practice in our spiritual life is the presence of God. That means finding constant pleasure

in His divine company, speaking, humbly and lovingly with Him in all seasons, at every moment, without limiting the conversation in any way. This is especially important in times of temptation, sorrow, separation from God, and even in times of unfaithfulness and sin.

***************************************

Take a moment to enjoy a

Musical Interlude: Tobymac "Everything"

************************************

"We must try to converse with God in little ways while we do our work; not in memorized prayer, not trying to recite previously formed thoughts. Rather, we should purely and simply reveal our hearts as the words come to us.

We must do everything with great care, avoiding impetuous actions, which are evidence of a disordered spirit. God wants us to work gently, calmly, and lovingly with Him, asking Him to accept our work. By this continual attention to God, we will resist the devil and cause him to flee (James 4:7).

Whatever we do, even if we are reading

the Word or praying, we should stop for a few minutes--as often as possible--to praise God from the depths of our hearts, to enjoy Him there in secret. Since we believe that God is always with us, no matter what we may be doing, why shouldn't we stop for awhile to adore Him, to praise Him, to petition Him, to offer Him our hearts, and to thank Him?

What could please God more than for us to leave the cares of the world temporarily in order to worship Him in

our spirits? These momentary retreats serve to free us from our selfishness which can only exist in the world. In short, we cannot show our loyalty to God more than by renouncing our worldly selves as much as a thousand times a day to enjoy even a single moment with Him.

I do believe that it is a common mistake of Spirit-filled people not to leave the cares of the world periodically to praise God in their spirits and to rest in the peace of His divine presence for a few moments."

What can you do this day to Practice His Presence and thrill at the sound of His voice! Let us be those Spirit-filled people who leave the cares of this world on a regular, daily basis to communion with the Shepherd of our souls!

[emphasis added to excerpts]

The Good Shepherd.4

"Still, there are many sheep that are lost outside the fold:

I must gather them as well.
They too,
will rejoice
at the sound
of my voice,
and will become members
of one great fold,
with one shepherd
to care for them
night and day."

--Jesus

"Casting all your care upon him; for he cares for you." 1 Peter 5:7

I've been thinking about how our "cares" usually aren't a simple, focused problem but rather layers of complexity with which we struggle. An incident with our second born son perfectly illustrates this.

Last fall, friends found Jesse in his home lying in a pool of his own blood! Their timely discovery and the care of the ICU unit of ProMedica hospital in Toledo saved his life!

Certainly our primary care was saving his life; there was an emotional roller coaster of attempts to locate and stop the internal bleeding. He went through 35 units of blood (our bodies hold 8-12 units at any one time.)

But then there were

• financial cares,
• and taking time off work to stay by his side cares,
• and Jesse's job related cares
• and dog care cares
• and what-is-the-purpose-of-this cares.

So casting our cares on Him is more than hoping Jesus takes notice of our problems or feels empathy at our struggles. 

It is trusting that He takes the complexity of our cares and orchestrates them to lead us to His higher ways!

"Is it enough that God thinks about you?
To be something to God--is that not praise enough?
To be a thing God cares for and would have complete for Himself--because it is worth caring for--is not that life enough?"

 -George MacDonald

We rejoice that Our Shepherd cared to keep our son alive. We rejoice to be privileged to hear and see His voice in the tender care of the people who saved Jesse's life. We hope to be the kind of followers that the Shepherd can use to attract others to the flock.

What a Shepherd, what a Savior!

The Good Shepherd.3

"I give them eternal life.

They will never be destroyed, nor can anyone tear them out of my hand.

My Father, who gave them to me, is greater than any kingdom or power; and no force is able to pluck even the weakest from his mighty hand."

--Jesus

In my role as pastor I had the privilege of officiating many wedding ceremonies. In those precious moments

watching two human beings make the most important promise of their lives - to live together as One - I don't recall one couple ever vowing together to make each other miserable!

And yet it doesn't take Americans very long to make each other miserable in

their marriages...about 7 years is the average before the end of a life together, once filled with hopes and dreams, comes to a crashing halt!

So perhaps that is why we, generally speaking, have a difficult time understanding words that promise an experience that can withstand the onslaught of doubt, fear, temptation, anger, resentment, accusation, deception and disappointment that we contend with in trying to safeguard promises from one human to another!

"I give them eternal life." What human being really knows what that means? Especially when we struggle so much with the life we do know about? But Jesus isn't calling us to a place, He's calling us to a Person - the Universal Promise Maker and Ultimate Promise Keeper! 

The closest we can get as humans to understanding this idea is, in fact, marriage! When we make those vows to another human being we have no idea what the future holds! We can imagine the future we'd like but it surely isn't one we're guaranteed. I once viewed a college student's research project about the "secret" of marriages that had lasted over 50 years. Everyone of these couples had survived tragic events that had served to make them stronger as individuals in faith and temperament thus ensuring a stalwart, enduring friendship. Events like the loss of a child, economic downturns, financial struggles, natural disasters, and even infidelity!

But I've also witnessed the destruction of those who stop believing in one another and begin to "hedge their bets" against infidelity, tragedy and a general feeling of unhappiness. Isn't the ultimate "hedging" some sort of "pre-nuptial" agreement that deliberately broadcasts that we're so convinced of the unreliability of long term human commitment we're just going to flat out ensure marital failure? How does that ensure failure? Because rather then stating at the outset of the journey that I promise to "give what I can as long as I can", we say "I'll get what I can as long as I can", we send a clear message that I'm in this for me not you.

But the Designer of Marriage viewed it as a covenant not a contract. In a contract, built on distrust, the terms try as best they can to define the minimum obligations and responsibility by the participants. In other words, contracts are a 50/50 agreement: I'll do this if you do that. If circumstances change, I'm no longer obligated.

A Covenant is built on mutual trust and responsibility. It is a 100-0 proposition which says: I am all in, I'll do my part even if you don't do yours! Even if circumstances change, I will do what I said I would do!

In this context, the struggle we have to understand Promises Made/Promises Kept, a conversation with a divorced co-worker takes on more meaning. After five years she still struggles with the bitterness of broken promises. Her attempts to establish a relationship with others is often co-opted by her conscious and unconscious fear of failure and has the potential to destroy the work she's put into building a good family.

Her good friend, a pastor's wife, has tried to help her with her struggles but has been rebuffed in her sage advice time after time after time.

However, the pastor's wife, consciously or unconsciously, describes her own insecurity when she confessed she doesn't know with certainty whether she is going to heaven or not!

"No One Is Able To Snatch Them Out Of My Hand!" And, just in case we didn't get it the first time, Jesus bolstered the message: "My Father, who gave them to me, is greater than any kingdom or power; and no force is able to pluck even the weakest from his mighty hand."

What part of "can't snatch" do we not understand??!!!

Let us confess: we are the weakest when our faith eyes grow dim due to the churning waters of heartache and disappointment which snatch our attention away from Him. We sink and wallow in the despair of our pain forgetting that the Man of Sorrow completely understands and cares for us and does not allow us to endure more than that which helps us grow stronger.

His death on the cross sealed His 100% covenant commitment. His resurrection ensures our 100% security. In Him, author and perfector of Faith, our covenant relationship begins, like marriage, the moment we say "I will" to His invitation to follow.

What is our part in the Covenant? Like sheep, we are called to Follow, i.e., do wholeheartedly what and where He tells us. As MacDonald points out: "If you can think of not one thing this day you have done because the Master said "Do this" or not done because He said, "Don't do this," you have good reason to believe you are not His disciple! Obedience is not perfection, it is trying. And trusting that the Good Shepherd will help us in our trying to get better and better! He always has in view the Perfecting of Love in and through us and knows precisely what and when it will take to get us there!

That, my friend, is Eternal Life! It is something we begin to understand in the here and now, not by becoming sheep herders, but by understanding the truth of the marriage covenant.

The husband, as representative of Jesus, the Head, creates an atmosphere of love and trust through sacrifice and service, that allows His wife to achieve Radiant Beauty. The wife, representing those of us on our way to glory, overcomes her natural inclination to fearfulness and self-will, opens her heart more and more to her husband's direction, discipline, protection and provision for her, allowing God to use that safe environment to help her become all she is meant to be.

• When a husband is secure in his wife's respect for his God-endowed
  
  role;
• When a wife is secure in her husband's Godly love for her;
• When a marriage is living out it's God-centered purpose: creating the ideal laboratory for God's Perfecting love, 

a hostile thought of breakup or divorce has a snowball's chance in hell of surviving! 

It surely is a mystery, but one that leads us to a greater understanding of what it means to be unsnatchable in the Father's hand!

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 Father.9

"When at last you lift up the Son of Man (on the cross), you will know who I am, realizing that I did nothing according to my own plan or authority, but delivered to you the words which my Father instructed me to proclaim."

--Jesus

Many of us contemplate the purpose and meaning of our life on earth. Just the other day a co-worker, a lady in her 40's, told me she is still trying to figure that out about her own life. It is the primary quality that separates humans from all other sentient or "soulish" creatures: we want to know the why of our existence.

And as we lose our grip on this world, through weariness and decay, the method and time of our departure comes more into focus.

Proudly displaying her block M...for Mavis!

My sister Mazie's health has been declining rapidly over the past few months, so death has come more into focus for us lately. In addition to wrestling with "quality of life" questions posed by her caregivers, I've pondered the meaning and purpose of her life. Before her decline, she was a very intelligent and capable Downs Syndrome person. My favorite story about her was an exchange she had with our mom years ago. After watching a TV commercial featuring the "Mentally Retarded" (this was pre-politically correct programming) she turned to mom and asked, "Am I retarded?" My mom returned, "Do you think you are?" "No", was the simple answer from an unencumbered spirit. "Neither do I", replied Sacrificial Love (the woman who refused to put her "retarded" baby in an institution, a common practice of the day).

Sacrificial Love is probably the best way to describe the truth of Mazie's life on earth, the meaning and purpose of why God put her here. At her graduation ceremony many years ago the school displayed a slide show of the two graduate's accomplishments. The first featured a young man's hand crafts. But the focus of Mazie's "accomplishments" were pictures of an arm around a friend, cleaning up after lunch, helping with projects, serving without fanfare. As I watched, I sobbed deeply at the wonder of a life devoted to caring for others so effortlessly.

At a recent visit with Mazie at her care facility, my teenage granddaughter shared with the nursing staff her impressions of Mazie. "Whenever she came to our house she would always look for things to help with like doing the dishes or folding clothes or making beds. She just loved to serve us."

I never recall her grumbling or complaining (except when we limited her intake of Diet Pepsi...) about any task. Just her presence and zeal for serving others could be quite convicting, believe me!

She, of course, learned sacrificial love from my mom who learned it from her Savior, Jesus, when she opened up her heart to Him after the devastating loss of her husband, our dad, when he was only 31 years old.

Jesus, as perfectly obedient son of the Creator God, contemplated the time and method of his parting this planet. Crucifixion, undoubtedly the most grisly and public form of capital punishment devised by mankind, was a well established industry after centuries of practice.


But as was his practice, he never focused on himself but rather on the meaning and purpose of his life: to deliver the words his Father God had instructed him. This Word, this Logos brought order to the chaos of the world. Centuries later Jesus Christ still impacts the world, because simply by believing in the Name of Jesus order comes into the chaos of every individual who trusts in him! He is the Truth of God revealing the Perfect, Sacrificial, Love of the Father for the world!

I have benefited greatly from that Truth: order from the chaos of losing my dad, the sacrificial love of a mom who refused to cave into fear, and the convicting spirit of my servant sister! The Truth of our existence, like Jesus, Mazie, mom and all who follow Him is what we reveal about our Creator to a world desperately in need of saving...or clean dishes and made up beds!

The Father.8

"I have said this from the beginning: there is much in your lives that I could condemn,

but I have come with another message,

given to me by the One who is the truth.

This is the message that I speak to the world."

-Jesus

"If our Lord God in this life—in das Sheisshaus *—has given us such noble gifts, what will happen in that eternal life, where everything will be perfect and delightful?" 

—Martin Luther

For those, like me, not entirely familiar with the specifics of the Reformation, Eric Metaxas, in his book Martin Luther, recounts that the moment that changed the world is not without amusing irony.  While sitting on a toilet meditating on Romans 1:17 "For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith," Luther suddenly realized that he'd been angry at God for demanding a righteousness he desperately wanted but fell woefully short of in his self-abasing efforts to achieve.  More so, he realized he was part of an organized deception to convince people they could purchase that righteousness through a system that had usurped Jesus alone as mediator between God and man.

The moment was not lost on Luther nor the place where the revelation occurred. That place, to be precise, was a "Sheisshaus" - German vernacular for "shithouse, lavatory, sewer." If God would meet Luther while attending to the unsavory business of defecating, was it not a simple and profound reminder that God Himself had entered this "Sheisshaus" to redeem and resurrect its inhabitants? Compared to the glories of heaven, this life is a "Sheisshaus" filled with sin, misery, death and "shit". "For God to come into this foulest world is for Him already to come most of the way into Hell. This world is the antechamber to hell and eternal death, and unless we allow the God of life to come here, we do not allow Him to redeem us.  He cannot redeem and resurrect what is not foul and dead, but we are both." 

All mankind's monuments hailing human attempts to be "good without God, to impress God and be like Him without His help" are "far worse than excrement could ever be, for they pretend to be good and beautiful and true and holy, but in reality" hide the devil's sinister and diabolical counterfeit to the glory of God.

Metaxas expands: "The specific point here is that the infinite and omniscient and omnipotent creator God of heaven did not descend to earth on a golden cloud. He came to us through screaming pain, through the bloody agony of a maiden’s vagina, in a cattle stall filthy with and stinking of dung. This is how humans enter the world, and if God would enter the world as a human being, he must enter it that way. It was the only way to reach us where we are and as we are, and because of his love for us he did not shrink from this approach, vile and difficult as it must be. Luther saw in this the very essence of Christian theology. God reached down not halfway to meet us in our vileness but all the way down, to the foul dregs of our broken humanity. And this holy and loving God dared to touch our lifeless and rotting essence and in doing so underscored that this is the truth about us. In fact, we are not sick and in need of healing. We are dead and in need of resurrecting. We are not dusty and in need of a good dusting; we are fatally befouled with death and fatally toxic filth and require total redemption. If we do not recognize that we need eternal life from the hand of God, we remain in our sins and are eternally dead. So because God respects us, he can reach us only if we are honest about our condition." Ibid, page 123 (emphasis added)

This is the message Jesus still speaks to the world! Meditate on that today, toilet or no toilet!