“The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd sacrifices his life for the sheep.” (John 10:10-11 NLT)
How we view others, whether individually or collectively, is a reflection of what’s in our heart. In my city it’s not unusual to drive by “tent cities” of homeless people, or to see several homeless people huddled together in their sleeping bags and/or cardboard boxes under a bridge. Often at a traffic light people with signs will approach your car asking for money.
The last church I served was in a transitioning community with many homeless and needy people. It wasn’t unusual to have up to a dozen people knocking on our church door every day (and they wondered why I had no time to study ☹).
Initially I tried to help as many as I could, but the needs were so overwhelming I finally ran out of resources, which was a good thing, because it forced me to listen more carefully to their stories and, by God’s grace, gain discernment as to who needed help and who was a shyster. The danger, of course, is to look at every person asking for help as a fake or swindler, which isn’t true.
We love to categorize or label people, it makes life so much easier, but we miss Jesus when we do that. Rick Warren wrote: “What’s in our hearts often determines what we feel when we look at people. When we see a crowd, we can easily get irritated or impatient. But when Jesus saw a crowd, ‘he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’ (Matthew 9:36 ESV). That’s the same way God looks at you: with compassion. He doesn’t put you down. He lifts you up! No matter how angry, hurt, or betrayed you feel, Jesus will always respond with compassion. He knows how helpless we are without him, ‘like sheep without a shepherd.’”
It’s interesting how many times the Bible speaks of Jesus-followers as “sheep.” Sheep aren’t the sharpest pencils in the box. They don’t get lost because they run away, they lose their way because they just wander aimlessly until they finally look up and discover they’re lost, and they don’t have a clue how to find their way home. If the shepherd didn’t find them, they’d become prey to the first predator.
Are you seeing yourself yet? That’s why it’s such good news that the Lord is the good Shepherd. If you’re a believer in Jesus today, regardless of what you may think, it’s not because you searched for Him and finally found Him, it’s because you were hopelessly lost, and He found you.
Until that becomes crystal clear, we’ll look down from our ivory towers of perfection at those poor, lost, and lonely peons who wander aimlessly, failing to see that they were you and me before the Savior found us. By God’s grace we can learn to see ourselves in the faces of a lot of the aimless, frightened, and lonely people in our world. And when we do, that’s when the Holy Spirit can use us to show compassion and empathy, like He showed us when we were lost and unworthy.
It’s only by God’s grace and mercy that we can get out of our cocoons of self-centeredness and our false sense of superiority to finally see ourselves as the sheep we are and begin to see others as the lost sheep they are, in desperate need of the Shepherd to whom we now owe our allegiance.
Remember these piercing words in John 15:5: “For apart from Me you can do nothing.” The thief’s purpose is to blind us to the needs of others, but our good Shepherd’s purpose is to open our eyes to those who need “a rich and satisfying life” like we now have and like they can have if only someone like us would introduce them to the good Shepherd.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 