Good News About the Good Shepherd

All right, so good news about the good shepherd.

Good news about the good shepherd.

First of all, the good shepherd leads his sheep.

The good shepherd leads his sheep.

Did you know you can't drive sheep? Like you can drive cattle, that's a whole thing, a cattle drive, right? If you've ever watched a Western, you've seen them talk about a cattle drive.

If you are on a farm and you need a bunch of cows to go in a barn, you can get around behind them and you can yell and hoot and holler and slap them on the flanks and they'll shuffle into the barn.

We had friends growing up who raised pigs and I remember seeing them trying to get a pig onto a trailer to take them to market.

This little piggy did not go wee-wee-wee all the way home.

And I mean, those are big, ugly beasts and our friend would have to like get in behind them and like knee them and push them and shove them and they'd just snort and grunt.

You had to work pretty hard to drive this thing into a little chute that would take it onto a trailer.

But you can't actually drive sheep.

My buddy Neil grew up on a farm and I was talking to him last week and he said one of his clear memories growing up with his dad, their farm had cows and it had pigs and it had chickens and it had sheep and he said you could drive the cows, you could drive the pigs, but he said the sheep, if you tried to get behind them and yell and hoot and holler and swat and whatever else, they would just scatter in every direction except the one you were trying to get them to go in.

He said what his dad did with the sheep was totally different.

He'd just get a little bucket of oats and if he needed the sheep to come in from the pasture, let's say they were in the far corner of the pasture, he would just step into the door of the barn with this bucket of oats and just go, come on guys, come on sheep.

And they would just all happily trot along and they would follow him right into the barn.

You lead sheep.

You don't drive sheep.

The good shepherd leads his sheep.

That means the Lord doesn't work on fear and punishment.

He doesn't try to scare you into doing something.

He leads you into following him somewhere.

Jesus goes first.

He never asks us to go somewhere he hasn't already been.

He calls us to turn away from sin, yes, but he's already lived a perfect sinless life.

He calls us to submit to the Father at any cost, but he already laid down his life for us in obedience to the will of the Father.