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 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.




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