Skip to main content

 HE IS THE SHEPHERD

If the Lord God, the Infinite, Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent Three-in-One is your loving Shepherd, then you can live fearlessly. Sheep follow, they do not need to know where they are going in order to get there if they are following their Good Shepherd.

I’m sure that the Shepherd will speak to His own about the direction they are to go, but knowing the “where” is not the thing that gives peace. It is in knowing the One who tells us “where” that gives us the confidence that we will indeed get “there” because of who He is. He tells us where He is leading, but not so we can then “take it from there.” How we get to where He is leading is not our purview. He doesn’t give us a “road-map”, but, as He did with Abraham, He gives us Himself.

He's given us His Word, preserved, written, utterly reliable and eternally true, to show us who He is that we might trust Him and His promises. The Word of God is living and active, penetrating, sharper than a surgeon’s scalpel, revealing, confronting, healing, and restoring. When the Good Shepherd is your shepherd, He has promised to lead you and to guide you.

He must be the One leading you and me for, apart from Him, we can do nothing. The new Life Jesus Christ lives in His followers by the indwelling Holy Spirit is radically different from the kind of life we lived before we surrendered to His rule and Presence. The life of a Christian is now the Life of Jesus being lived within us. We are always utterly dependent upon Him for every dimension of life.

The love and commitment of the Good Shepherd is so complete, so fierce that He will not support you living apart from Him. He knows that apart from Him, there is no true living, no true human flourishing. You are not your own shepherd. You cannot follow Jesus Christ relying on your own wiles, wisdom, or experience. Self-reliance is not a godly virtue. Loving trust because we have been so completely loved; submission and obedience because that is what will make for true living, true humanity, that is the ground of following Jesus Christ as Lord.

The Lord is my Shepherd…I shall not want.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

  PRAYER Jesus Christ NEVER taught on what we call "unanswered prayer." James wrote that a divided loyalty between trusting the Lord God for life and at the same time relying on the world's systems to get what you want will result in you not getting anything from God you may have prayed about. God will never reinforce the unbelief that flows from divided loyalty. THAT is not unanswered prayer. That is God saying, "No." to your request. God saying, "No." to your requests is not unanswered prayer. It is His grace. His "No" is just what I would want if I knew what He knows. The Lord also answers with, "Not now; not yet." because we are not yet prepared to receive what we think we need. God works in us both to will and to do His good pleasure. If I am praying for something God wants to do in me and the Holy Spirit is working in me preparing me to receive what God has in store, His "Not yet." is NOT unanswered prayer. As we see...
Post a Comment
Read more
 HIS POWER...HIS PROMISE Helping people walk in the Spirit the devotional below is seminal! The devotion below is today from Oswald Chambers. I makes me think of some I have known that have assumed that the Lord doesn’t want them empowered by the Holy Spirit or that He won’t manifest Himself in them because they have reasoned otherwise. Given ministry opportunities to have the Holy Spirit confirm the Word of God with demonstration of the Holy Spirit and power, they rely on how they feel, their experience thus far and not on the reality that the will of God in mission and ministry is either done in the Holy Spirit’s Power or not at all. Our capacity to do what Jesus does has nothing to do with our imagined capacity, but upon the indwelling power of God through is. Now to Him who is able to do far above and beyond what we could ever imagine or think, by His power at work in us now, to Him be glory…   Matthew 25:14-30 Jesus told the parable of the bags of gold as a warning ...
Post a Comment
Read more
  From Oswald Chambers today: "If the Spirit of God detects anything in you that is wrong, He doesn’t ask you to make it right; He only asks you to accept the light of truth, and then He will make it right. A child of the light will confess sin instantly and stand completely open before God. But a child of the darkness will say, “Oh, I can explain that.” When the light shines and the Spirit brings conviction of sin, be a child of the light. Confess your wrongdoing, and God will deal with it. If, however, you try to vindicate yourself, you prove yourself to be a child of the darkness. What is the proof that carnality has gone? Never deceive yourself; when carnality is gone you will know it— it is the most real thing you can imagine. And God will see to it that you have a number of opportunities to prove to yourself the miracle of His grace. The proof is in a very practical test. You will find yourself saying, “If this had happened before, I would have had the spirit of resentment!”...
Post a Comment
Read more