Who is your LORD?\u00a0 Who do you worship or serve?\u00a0 Do you know Him personally?\u00a0 Do you fellowship with Him often?\u00a0 How do you perceive Him?\u00a0 Do you know anything about His character, His attributes, His Ways?\u00a0 My LORD is Jesus Christ.\u00a0 He is my Shepherd and a very good one too!\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sometimes our view of Jesus is often too small, too cramped, too provincial, too human.\u00a0 And because it is, we feel unwilling to allow Him to have authority or control – much less outright ownership of our lives.\u00a0 We lack in trusting Him and being able to experience a walk of faith that we are called to because we don’t know who He is.\u00a0 When looking at sheep management, the lot in life of any particular sheep depended on the type of man who owned it.\u00a0 Some were gentle, kind intelligent, brave, and selfless in their devotion to their stock.\u00a0 Under one management sheep would struggle, starve, and\u00a0suffer endless hardship.\u00a0\u00a0In another’s care they would flourish and thrive contentedly.\u00a0 Under God’s care He invites me to consider myself His sheep – His special object of affection and attention.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The relationships given to us to communicate how we are to relate to our Heavenly Father are that of a father and his children and of a Shepherd and his sheep.\u00a0 These concepts were first conceived in the mind of God our Father.\u00a0 They were made possible and practical through the work of Christ.\u00a0 They are confirmed and made real in me and you through the agency of the Holy Spirit.<\/p>\n
You and I were bought with a high price.\u00a0 Not only did He create me but He bought me again at the incredible price of His own laid down life and shed blood.\u00a0 Therefore He was entitled to say, “I am the good Shepherd.\u00a0 The good Shepherd\u00a0lays down His life for the sheep.”\u00a0 I belong to Him simple because He deliberately chose to create me as in the object of his\u00a0own affection.\u00a0 he literally lays Himself out for us continually.\u00a0 He is ever interceeding for us; He is ever guiding us by His gracious Spirit; He is ever working on our behalf to ensure that we will benefit from His care.<\/p>\n
An interesting mark of sheep is that they don’t “just take care of themselves” as some might suppose.\u00a0 They require, more than any other class of livestock, endless attention and meticulous care.\u00a0 It is no accident that God has chosen to call us sheep.\u00a0 The behavior of sheep and human beings is similar in many ways.\u00a0 Our mass mind or mob instincts, our fears and timidity, our stubbornness and stupidity, our perverse habits are all parallels of profound importance.\u00a0 Yet despite these adverse characteristics Christ chooses us, buys us, calls us by name, makes us His own, and delights in caring for us.<\/p>\n
If you know anything about real, live sheep management, you know that each shepherd has his own distinctive earmark which he cuts into one of the ears of his sheep.\u00a0 In this way, even at a distance, it is easy to determine to whom the sheep belongs.\u00a0 It is not the most pleasant procedure to catch each ewe in turn and lay her ear on a wooden block, then notch it deeply with the razor-sharp edge of the knife.\u00a0 There was pain for both sheep and shepherd.\u00a0 But from the mutual suffering an indelible lifelong mark of ownership was made that could never be erased.\u00a0 And from then on every sheep that comes into that shepherd’s possession would bear that shepherd’s mark.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There is an exciting parallel to this in the Old Testament.\u00a0 When a slave in any Hebrew household chose, of his own free will, to become a lifetime member of that home, he was\u00a0subjected to a certain ritual.\u00a0 His master and owner would take him to his door, put his ear lobe against the door post and with an awl puncture a hole through the ear.\u00a0 For then on he was a man marked for life as belonging to that house.\u00a0 For the man or woman who recognizes the claim of Christ and gives allegiance to His absolute ownership, there comes the question of bearing His mark.\u00a0 The mark of the cross is that which should identify us with Him for all time.\u00a0 The question is – does it?<\/p>\n
Jesus made it clear when he stated emphatically, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.\u00a0 Basically, A person exchanges the fickle fortunes of living life by sheer whimsy for the more productive and satisfying adventure of being guided by God.<\/p>\n
Can you say as David did, “The Lord is my Shepherd!”\u00a0 Are you thrilled to belong to Him?\u00a0 It is then that we flourish and thrive no matter what life my bring to us.\u00a0 Get to know your Good Shepherd!<\/p>\n
Dana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Who is your LORD?\u00a0 Who do you worship or serve?\u00a0 Do you know Him personally?\u00a0 Do you fellowship with Him often?\u00a0 How do you perceive Him?\u00a0 Do you know anything about His character, His attributes, His Ways?\u00a0 My LORD is Jesus Christ.\u00a0 He is my Shepherd and a very good one too!\u00a0 Sometimes our view of Jesus is often too small, too cramped, too provincial, too human.\u00a0 And because it is, we feel unwilling to allow Him to have authority or control – much less outright ownership of our lives.\u00a0 We lack in trusting Him and being able to experience a walk of faith that we are called to because we don’t know who He is.\u00a0 When looking at sheep management, the lot in life of any particular sheep depended on the type of man who owned it.\u00a0 Some were gentle, kind intelligent, brave, and selfless in their devotion to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}