Good Shepherd

What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, ...and when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. Luke 15:4,5 NKJV

I was drawn to this passage for a few reasons. There are three ‘lost’ messages of redemption,  in Luke 15and each one a treasure of truth. This time, the lost sheep caught my attention. Like you, I have heard many sermons preached on this passage, but sometimes something new jumps out at you. A nugget unseen before, and such is the Word of God. It may not be new to you, but I saw it afresh.

We call Jesus the ‘Good Shepherd’, so the name implies that there are other, not so good, or even bad shepherds. But shepherds nonetheless. Also, sheep are fickle creatures, and tend to follow the crowd at one extreme, and stray away from the flock at another extreme. They can’t be trusted to know their own minds, and so need a shepherd to keep an eye on them. That’s where the big difference lies between the bad shepherd, and our ‘Good Shepherd’, Jesus. I am glad for the shepherding of a God who cares.

The solitary sheep gets lost, or strays.  butoh does the shepherd know? The other sheep certainly don’t or can’t say, so we can’t rely on the other sheep to notice one is missing and speak up for it. In this passage, there is only one shepherd, and no backup. On a human level, the shepherd has to sleep (unlike our Good Shepherd) so we hawillllow for the straying sheep to go unnoticed for a while. However, there is no room for doubt in this parable, that as soon as the shepherd saw that one of his flock was missing, he went looking for it. Not because he was told to, not because it was his job, but because it was his calling. It was his sole responsibility, and he couldn’t delegate that to another. There was no other.

We are in the fortunate position that we know the end of the story, but ask yourself this: What would have happened if the Good Shepherd didn’t notice or care about the missing sheep? After all, he had another 99 safe sheep in the pen. The safe sheep far outweighed the lost one, so why did he bother? I think (for what it’s worth) that our Good Shepherd is not just doing his job, he is following his heart, and his heart could not rest until he had ‘laid it (the lost sheep) on His shoulders’ and took it home. Final thought: Is ‘home’ referring to a place in this life, or does it refer to heaven? The shepherd who secures both, is indeed a ‘Good Shepherd’. Before we jump to the obvious conclusion, who else do you think Jesus was referring to as the shepherd in this parable? The first answer has to be Himself as the ‘Good Shepherd’, and us as the sheep, but is there another level to the story? How about our responsibility as ‘Little, Trainee Shepherds’? Just another thought!