We Are Sheep In His Fold - Part 2

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. He leads me beside quiet waters. Notice he leads me. He's not behind us.

You see, we don't need a cowboy hurting us. We need a shepherd leading us. He's not behind you going, go, go, go. He's in front of you saying, come, follow me.

Remember what he said? Come unto me all you that are heavy laden. I'll give you rest.

See, why? I'm the good shepherd. I'll get you to lie down in a green pasture.

That's how you have to relate to me. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana.

Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's word meets our world. You see, if the Lord is my shepherd, there's nothing else I want. I don't need to have anything else because the shepherd is the one responsible for the sheep and the Lord is my shepherd. So I don't have to worry about anything like that. I don't have to crave anything. But do you? I mean, you know this. Your stuff isn't yours.

Ask any funeral director. Is your stuff yours? It's not yours. None of it's yours.

Max Lucado writes this. He said, You have a God who hears you, the power of love behind you, the Holy Spirit within you and all of heaven ahead of you. If you have the shepherd, you have grace for every sin, direction for every turn, a candle for every corner and an anchor for every storm. You have everything you could possibly need because the Lord is your shepherd. You couldn't have more.

The implication that's pretty clear. We should bleed contentment. You want to know what a contented person is?

Talk to a Christian. Somehow that makes us uneasy, doesn't it? See what?

Why are we not content? You see that we should just believe this. This should be work and we're Christians. The Lord is our shepherd. Then he says this.

He makes me lie down in green pastures. That's no easy task, by the way. Sheep have to have at least four conditions met or they won't lie down. They're afraid to lie down.

They won't. The first condition for a sheep has to be this. They have to be free of all fear. And remember, almost everything scares them. But they can't lie down if they're afraid. Secondly, they have to be free of any friction with other sheep. If they're not getting along with the other sheep, they won't lie down.

Just imagine what that would be like. Thirdly, they have to be free of flies and parasites. We'll talk about this a little bit later, but they're everywhere. And they drive sheep crazy.

And lastly, they have to be free of hunger. Notice what he says. He makes me lie down in green pastures. My shepherd does lie down.

I provided everything you need. Wow. Philip Keller says this. He's also a shepherd, by the way. He says green pastures did not just happen by chance. Green pastures were the product of tremendous labor, time, skill and land use. Green pastures are the result of clearing rough, rocky land and tearing out brush and roots and stumps, of deep plowing and careful soil preparation, of seeding and planting and special grains and legumes, of irrigating with water and husbandry with care.

The crops of forage, which would feed the flocks. In fact, the shepherd has to do all that work so that they have green pastures. And what he's saying here is the Lord is my shepherd.

He does the work. He's prepared all this for me. Isaiah 26 says this spiritually about us. You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you. You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you. The Lord is my shepherd.

I shall not want. Philippians 4. He says, Be anxious for nothing. That's great words to give a sheep. But in everything, with prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God. He says, And then the peace of God, which is above all comprehension, will guard your hearts. He's telling the sheep the same thing he's telling us, don't be wild, but I feel anxiety. Why? The Lord is your shepherd.

You see, he's meeting your needs. But that's hard for us and difficult for us. He says, Then he leads me beside quiet waters. I've said this before, but sheep are afraid of running water. If it runs a little too fast, sheep are afraid of it. They're afraid of everything. They sound a lot like us, don't they?

I mean, they're afraid of everything. And he says he noticed he leads me beside quiet waters. Notice he leads me. He's not behind us.

You see, we don't need a cowboy hurting us. We need a shepherd leading us. He's not behind you going, go, go, go. He's in front of you saying, come follow me. And what he said, come on to me, all you that are heavy laden, I'll give you rest. See why I'm the good shepherd, I'll get you to lie down in a green pasture.

That's how you have to relate to me. Corey Ten Boom said this, she said, When the train goes through a tunnel and the world gets dark, do you jump out? Of course not. She said, you sit still and trust the engineer to get you through.

And that's what we should do. Because the Lord is our shepherd. He then says he restores my soul. David had terrible days. David is no he's David understands depression. He understands fear.

David had a lot of difficult times. He knew what it was like to be dejected, and he said, Sometimes I just need to be restored. Psalm 42 says this, Why are you cast down? Oh, my soul. Why have you become disturbed within me?

Is your soul ever get like that? Cast down, disturbed? Yeah, that's an old English term, cast down, cast. If you use the old English word, there's often a way of describing sheep. They're called cast sheep. Now, you have to understand what's a cast sheep?

Cast sheep are this. Sheep can lay down on their belly. And they can lay down on their side. But if they ever get on their back. They can't get up. They cannot get up. They will just flail their legs. They'll go out as loud as they can, but they can't move. And in fact, what begins to happen to them, gas is built up in the rumen, in the sheep.

It begins to expand. It cuts off circulation to their legs. And on a hot summer day, the sheep is dead in hours. And in cold days, it takes days for the sheep to die. And the shepherd restores the sheep. The shepherd sees the sheep.

He always sees them. He goes over. He takes the sheep. He straddles it.

He turns it over. Then he picks it up and he holds it while its legs are done. While it's standing there, he begins to massage the legs of the sheep till blood circulates back in the legs. The sheep stumble a little bit and then off they go content again and away they go.

That's the image that David has in mind. The Lord's my shepherd. He turns me over. He holds me when I can't stand on my own. He rubs my legs and gets me going again.

What a beautiful picture this is. Many of us find ourselves on our backs, don't we? Flailing away. We have failing health, terrible diagnosis, broken hearts, empty wallets.

We find ourselves surrounded by hospital walls or divorce court and we're flailing. And he says, look, Castor cares upon me. Because I care for you. You see, I am the good shepherd. That's what he is telling us. Then he says this. He said he guides me in paths of righteousness or leads me.

He guides me in paths of righteousness. Sheeps are notoriously animals of habit. To their own fault, sheep will walk the same path to become so deep that they can't pass anymore. They'll eat in the same pasture till they eat all the roots off. And then they starve. They just do it over and over and over again.

They get that they do the exact same thing and they do it over and over and over. They run the pastures. But the shepherd. He takes care of the sheep. I read this week in Keller's book that shepherds change pastures for sheep every week. Every week you change his pasture.

You have to. He said, oh, eat everything down to the roots and so you have to just keep constantly moving the sheep. Because they don't know better on their own. It reminds me of the Book of Proverbs. There is a way that seems right to a man. But its end is destruction. We're creatures of the same kind of bad habits.

We do the same kinds of things. He does all this, it says, for his namesake. That's what it's all about. God has so many names in scripture. All of them give him glory. He said, the reason I'm doing all this, the reason the good shepherd lays down his life is for my namesake. For my glory. It reveals who I am.

That's what he does. And then verse four, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. That's a very famous verse.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. This happened to the sheep usually once a year. What it meant was in the winter, the fall, winter and spring, the sheep stay down low. When the temperature got hot, the shepherds took them up the mountain and up to the plateaus. And when they went up the mountain, they went through the valleys and they had all kinds of dangers in those valleys. You had you had obviously a problem with flooding in the valleys. You had poisonous plants that if they ate it, they would die. You had predators everywhere that would eat the sheep.

You had flies and parasites that would destroy the flock. And he says, yeah, but we've got to go through the valley to get up to the top. He said, even though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Notice he didn't say I don't go around the valley. He also said I don't stay in the valley. He said I go through the valley.

Why? My shepherd. He takes me through the valley.

He said that's what he does. He'll lead me to the higher ground. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. There's probably no universal fear that we you and I have greater than that. Dying.

Death. So much so, often we don't even want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it. That's OK. I understand that. But let me say something. Whether you talk about it or not.

The statistics on death are really impressive. OK. It's going to happen.

There's no way to avoid this on your part at all. It's kind of an interesting thought. He said, even though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, he said, how's that going to affect me? What's that going to do for me? Well, he said, you need to trust me, the shepherd. Jesus understood this in John 14. Remember, he said, Let not your heart be troubled.

What's he? Why do it say that to us? Because he knows we get all upset. He said, Believe in God, believe also in me. He said, In my father's house are many dwelling places. If it were not so, I tell you. But I go and I prepare a place for you. So that where I am there, you may be also.

What's he telling me? I got this. You see, I got this. Don't worry about the valley of the shadow of death. I've got this. I'm already I'll be on the other side, bringing you to myself. You see, I have this.

This is important to us. That's why when you look at the scriptures, it never says that a believer dies. It always says that a believer sleeps. And the reason it does is I don't really die. The physical body will die, but my soul and spirit will not.

I'll be absent from this body and present with the Lord. He said, That's right. It's all done.

I've taken care of it. And notice, because that's true. Notice the next part of the verse. He says, Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for you, he said, are with me. Why am I not afraid? I talk to the other sheep. They're not afraid either.

They're afraid of everything. I fear no evil because you are with me. Because you are my shepherd. I want you to think about that. If you're a child of God, you're not alone and you never will be.

Understand that. Never once in your existence, some heroine for all eternity, will you ever be alone. Not once, not ever.

That's what he is saying. People may turn against you, but God won't. Friends may betray you, but God won't.

You may feel alone, but you're never going to be alone. He said, That's it. The shepherd gives me the comfort I need. He said, Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. That's the only two things that the shepherd carried. One's a weapon. The rod. I mean, it's and it's a weapon handpicked by a shepherd. Rods could do a lot of damage.

It'd be a lot like a bully club. They carried a rod. That's how they defended the flock. When David said he killed the lion and the bear, he killed him with a rod. I mean, that'd be tough doing or sling. But the rod is about that long, very heavy, and they use it to fight off everybody.

That's the way this worked. They use it to fight off every single person or anything that threatened them. Every so often, the sheep would see the rod in action. They were afraid of it, of course. But he would bring each sheep up and hold the rod over it. It said it was going under the pass under the rod and the sheep would get real timid and stand still. And then he would examine the sheep for anything could be wrong with it.

It was called passing under the rod. He looked at every single sheep. To make sure he knew every sheep by name. See, that's not only the sheep know him, but the shepherd knows the sheep. Not only do we know the Lord, but he knows us. You know, one of the great verses in the Bible when it comes down to how God knows me comes out of the Book of Isaiah.

And God says this to me. He said, I have written your name on my hand. Whose name do you write on your hand?

Someone you love. He said, I've written your name on my hand. What a beautiful imagery of how intimate God is with each and every one of us and how that works on our behalf. He also says your staff. He said, I get comfort from your staff. It's a symbol of God's concern. The staff is taller.

It has a curve on the end and he uses it for a bunch of things. When you are born in a flock, one of the most things you have to be careful with is they can get separated from their moms. And so what the shepherd would do is to take the staff and he would just push it and guide the ewe back to his mom, right up against their mom. The reason is, if he handled the ewe, his scent would be on the ewe and the mother may reject the ewe because of his scent. So he used the staff to gently move them. When he moved sheep into places where they'd go through narrow, he'd tap them on the side with the staff just to keep them going exactly where they should have.

That's why he talks about this is so comforting for me. Sheep would get stuck in precarious places. And he said he'd lift me out of there with his staff.

And then he says this. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Now, we keep thinking, what is sheep doing at a table? But I think that's because we misunderstand the table that he's talking about in the same imagery is the flat plateau high in the summer mountains. If you knew Spanish, the Spanish word mesa, we use that word, we'll say it's a mesa, that Spanish word for table.

Same idea. He said, you prepare a table up in the high mountains for me. He said, that's what you do.

You prepare a table, he said, before me. In the presence of my enemies. They're there, but I'm not afraid because the shepherd's with me. Remember when Jesus said to Peter, Satan desires to sift you like wheat?

It's quite a statement, he said, but don't worry about it. I prayed for you. I'm a good shepherd. Satan will not get you. You resist the devil will flee from you because of me, not because of you. And then he says he has anointed my head with oil. My cup overflows.

You think that's that's a nice thing. Oil is symbolic of the spirit of God. It's very practical. When summertime came, the sheep had to experience a warble flies, bought flies, heel flies, nose flies and deer flies. By far the most notorious are nose flies. Nose flies go in the nose of sheep and they lay their eggs inside the nose. Then the larva come out and go toward the eye, up the nose, and they eat the inside of the nasal passages of the sheep, make sheep go crazy. Sheep kill themselves, beating their heads against rocks because of the agony of the nose flies.

The other thing that really bother them in the summertime was called scab. And it's a parasite that gets on their faces. And it's very contagious among sheep.

So when one sheep has it. So what does the good shepherd do? He anoints their head with oil. He covers their head with oil. He covers their nose with oil so that the nose flies in the scab have no effect on the sheep. And he has to do this on a consistent basis all summer long. But he does because he's the good shepherd. You see, he does that to protect his sheep.

It's an amazing thing when you think about it, what he's able to accomplish. He then says, verse six, surely goodness and loving kindness will follow me all the days of my life. Why that we're loving kindness is my favorite word in the Hebrew Old Testament. It's the word chesed. It means, wow, goodness, mercy, love, grace, forgiveness, loyalty. That's what the word means. We don't have an English equivalent. So we call it loving kindness, which doesn't help. It's that great word. He said, surely goodness and loving kindness will follow me all the days of my life.

Why? Because the Lord is my shepherd. You see, without the Lord, the sheep are in a very precarious spot in life. They really can't live life to the fullest of all.

But with a really good shepherd, they can. He said, I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. What an amazing, wonderful thing to say. That should be the summation of your life and mine. Surely goodness and loving kindness will follow me all the days of my life. And I'll dwell in the house of the Lord forever. I am one content sheep.

And so should you be. Not because of me, but because of the shepherd. Let's pray. Father, once again, you give us a picture of who you say we are. Once again, we are left with how special we are in your sight. We are the sheep of your pasture. And even though all of us have gone astray and did what we wanted, our shepherd came and died for us.

What a wonderful, revealing thought that is. But he didn't leave us after he died for us. He's decided to be our shepherd all through this life. He is our shepherd. He is the one who protects us. He is the one who guides us. He is the one who feeds us. He is the one who sustains us. Father, what a wonderful image this is that as the sheep depend on their shepherd, we should depend on our Lord Jesus Christ. Father, I pray that each of us begin to bolster our own self-esteem when we see all these wonderful things that you say about us. Not because we deserve them.

In fact, the opposite is true. It's because of your grace and your love for us that you have bestowed on us such wonderful identities. Father, we are proud to be sheep in your form. In Jesus' name.

Amen. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.

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