THE SHEPHERD’S CONCERN FOR HIS SHEEP
We made a passing reference over the weekend to the couple described in the end of the gospel of Luke, who took the road to Emmaüs, disappointed that expectations they had had were unfulfilled. Those who know the scripture will remember that the Lord Jesus drew near to them and went with them, and in the course of the journey He showed them in all the Scriptures “the things concerning himself”, Luke 24:27.
I do not think it would have been possible on that journey to go through the whole of the Old Testament. What I understand may have happened is that the Lord Jesus gave them, no doubt with well-chosen examples, as it were, a key to the Old Testament – the means of understanding that it related to Himself. Many things in the Old Testament are direct references to the Lord Jesus, but there are many also which are indirect and incomplete. The epistle to the Hebrews, for example, shows that the sacrifices and shedding of blood speak of the sacrifice of Christ, but in themselves they could never take away sins. The Lord Jesus would have showed them that the Old Testament would not necessarily give them a complete picture, but if they understood that it was about Christ, then they would be able to see how far the various pictures helped them in their understanding.
There are also some people in Scripture whose characteristics are the very opposite of the Lord Jesus. You might wonder if any use can be made of these characters, but it is possible to learn by contrast. So, if we look at the prophet Zechariah, God speaks to that young man about a foolish shepherd: God calls him a “worthless shepherd”, Zech.11:17. There are four things that the foolish shepherd failed to do. God says, “I will raise up a shepherd in the land, who shall not visit those that are about to perish, neither shall seek that which is strayed away, nor heal that which is wounded, nor feed that which is sound”, Zech.11:16. These two on the road to Emmaüs might have realised that they had met the good Shepherd. He did not do any of those things, in fact He did the very opposite. Just think, that on that resurrection day Jesus spent hours trying to help them. He might have gone to Pilate and shown that his judgments had been overturned by God. He could have frustrated and confounded the Jews who thought they had done away with the Son of God. Instead of that, He spent two or three hours walking out into the country to gather two of His sheep back into the fold. The foolish shepherd had not sought those who were going astray, but those two on the road to Emmaüs were sought and found, and shown an excess of grace on that day. When they got back to Jerusalem and went to the disciples, they found that before the Lord came after them, He had gone after Peter. They were told that He had appeared to Simon and we know that Simon had committed a very grave sin; but the Lord had appeared to Him in resurrection, the good Shepherd.
I say all that because I want to draw a contrast here with the man who serves for wages. The Lord says one thing about him which I want to use. He says he “is not … concerned about the sheep”. My simple desire on this occasion, dear hearer, is that you might clearly understand that the good Shepherd is most certainly concerned about you. Just you. There are maybe one hundred and seventy people in this room; and what I am saying applies to every one of them, but do not think about the others. He is concerned about you. If I appear to emphasise the message to young people, I trust those who no longer consider themselves in that category will bear with me and support what I say.
I think it is true to say that, more or less subconsciously, young people are concerned about themselves. I do not mean to say in a selfish way – there are selfish young people, of course – but in a sense you have plenty to think about. You are growing up, and as you do, you become increasingly expected to stand on your own feet and make decisions for yourself. For example, employers try and find out whether the young people coming forward are thinking for themselves or whether they are still leaving their parents to make life decisions for them. As you grow up, the urge to establish an identity becomes stronger and stronger and there are various pressures in that process. One question is, what do I think about myself and what do I want to be? That is a big enough question, but it is running with another question, which is, what do other people think about me, and what do they expect me to be? I say these things because that is what adolescence is all about, trying to establish independence and identity, to stand on your own feet when the process seems to be bedevilled with questions and other difficulties. Do you trust other people with friendship and maybe more intimate relationships, and can you work out where other people are coming from when you are not quite sure where you are coming from? And then it may be the experience of all the young people here that, overlaid on that process, there are the promptings of the Holy Spirit in relation to your soul and its journey and destiny. You may not have identified the Holy Spirit as the source of those promptings. He may as yet be little known to you, and you may find that the first promptings feel unwelcome because they are not helping you with the other questions exactly; they are raising more questions. Where do I stand with God? Is what I am doing right? How can I stop these evil thoughts that I have? How can I break these habits? Are these aspirations going anywhere? Can God bless them? Another thing I would observe that adds a further layer to all this is that most young people keep all these questions to themselves. They do not talk to their parents about them, or to their peers, and they do not trust the Lord Jesus enough yet to talk to Him about them. No wonder they feel stressed!
Dear young person, struggling with these things, Someone is coming after you, Someone is seeking you. He seeks you because He has a claim to you; and He wants to introduce Himself as the answer to all your questions. As He follows your track, He knows where you have been. He knows the history you have so far built up. He knows about the things you are pleased to have accomplished, and He knows about the things you wish you had not done. He knows about the places you go to, He knows about the places you wish you had never been to. He does not only know about what you have done, He knows what you have thought. He knows when you have not been honest with other people, and He knows when you have not been honest with yourself. There is nothing you can hide from Him. But He keeps on coming. He is not put off by the things He reads, as it were, in your track. He is not going to say you are too bad. He is not going to say that you have gone in a course of self will, and must reap the fruits of it, if that is what you chose to do. That is what the world says. The Lord Jesus would never say that. He comes after you, beloved, because He is concerned about you.
We may not think so much about these things when everything is going well, but sometimes they hit us when something happens that is not well. I have been affected by a poem that was written by an American woman. She was on her way to a Governor’s ball and her companion in the railway carriage was a young widow in tears. The woman heard the widow’s story from her, and by the time she arrived at the ball and sat down in front of the mirror to get ready, she felt so empty. It seemed such a shameful thing to plunge on with such an empty entertainment when she had left someone who now had nothing; and she wrote a poem:-
‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth
But has sorrow enough of its own.’3
The Lord knows that, beloved. He knows there are things you cannot share, He knows that there are things that you would like to share, but you do not feel able or confident to do it. Beloved, He is right up behind you because He is concerned about you. He is not only concerned about how you may feel about yourself, He may not be at all concerned about how other people think about you, but He is concerned about how God regards you. You may have become rather conscious of that, and the more gospel preachings you come to, the more your conscience seems to be awakened, and you think of things that do not look the same under the light from God. Things that you laughed at with friends, you now wish you had not accepted. God would press His claim upon you until you recognise that those were not just mistakes or things that were not wise, they were offences, offences against the God whose righteousness must be upheld. They are offences against the God who must call every offence to account, and a God before whom the penalty for every offence against Him is death.
The good Shepherd knows that is what you face. He knows it better than you. He knows how God feels about the things you have done, He knows you underestimate Him. Mr Darby said that ‘A single sin is more horrible to God than a thousand sins – nay, than all the sins in the world – are to us’4. Do you ever feel ashamed that you have forgotten things you did that you should not have done? God has not. Beloved, you need Someone who is concerned about you, because your condition is lost. You have lost control of where you are going, and you have lost control of where you stand before God. There may be others, maybe ninety nine percent of others in whose company you are, that are safe, but you are astray. Not necessarily in grossly bad things or in harmful and prejudicial things as you might think, but you are astray nevertheless, and you are vulnerable; you are not safe. The message in the glad tidings is that there is Someone who knows all that and, although you do not know where you are, He does, and He is concerned about you.
He says, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep”. What a Person to be concerned about you! Other people may be anxious about you, they may see that you are stressed and anxious, but who would lay down their life for you? “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep”. That is what I want to convey. Dear hearer, it is not only that He is concerned about you, but He values you. I think that is another question that people often wrestle with; what is their sense of self-worth and what do they think they are worth to those with whom they come in contact? Does my school teacher value me? Does my employer really value me, or am I some disposable human resource? Is he concerned just about how hard I work, or is he also concerned about why I cannot work as hard as I would like to? Is he concerned about the things that get in the way of doing what I would be willing to do? The good Shepherd is incomparable because He alone would lay down His life for you. What does that tell you, beloved, about what you are worth to Him? A lot of people undervalue themselves, a lot of people underestimate themselves. They would rather just make the numbers up, and even if they are, as we say, the life and soul of the party, it is out of a kind of false hope that people will appreciate them. If they were to ask themselves, Who really values me? my answer must be that the good Shepherd really values you.
The proof of it is that Jesus laid down His life for you, and He did it in the most terrible, awful circumstances. Nothing could turn Him away from paying the price by which you would become His. Nothing! We speak about the agony He passed through in Gethsemane and of that commitment which was affirmed on that occasion. It had been made, as far as I can see, before the ages of time as one divine Person committed Himself to become Man to accomplish the divine will, in divine counsel. We often say that sin did not catch God by surprise. Your sinful state is not an unexpected problem for God. Before you were ever born, God had the answer to it, and it was not simply a theoretical answer. It was a commitment; “Lo, I come (in the roll of the book it is written of me) to do, O God, thy will”, Heb.10:7. When that commitment was made, what it would cost Him to become your Saviour was clear. He committed Himself without expecting that the cost might go down or depreciate, not expecting that the cost could be avoided in any way, but knowing with divine certainty that the cost would be paid in full. In Gethsemane, Satan made his final attempt to frustrate that commitment, so that the price would not be paid, and he flooded in upon the Lord Jesus the horror of the wrath of God and the awfulness of death and the grave. No wonder a holy Man shrank from the awfulness of it! But in obedience to the will of God, and in love for you, He said “but then, not my will, but thine be done”, Luke 22:42. From then on, Satan was defeated and salvation for all who trust Him was assured. There in the agony of that dark evening in Gethsemane, the Lord Jesus stated before His God what you mean to Him and what He was ready to do for you. On the cross the following day He did it, and in hours of horrible darkness on the cross, He bore the unmitigated wrath of God so that your debt might be paid. “I lay down my life for the sheep”.
Dear hearer, He is concerned about you. He is not only concerned about your circumstances and about the problems of life, the questions that Monday may raise and the questions you are hoping will not come up when you go back to school or to work. He is concerned about your everlasting soul. It is in jeopardy in the presence of God, and He has done the only thing that could be done, He has made a spotless offering in the presence of a God exercising and pouring out His judgment so that you, His loved one, might go free.
What else can I say? What I would just add is this. If He has done that for you, can you not trust Him for everything else? Could you? Is there anything else besides your sins that you cannot take to Him, that you do not want to talk to Him about, that you do not trust Him to answer you fairly and rightly? Are you afraid to make confessions about your faults to a Saviour who shed His blood for you? Why would you do that? He knew all about what you would do. We have had that in the preaching at home, He “understandest my thoughts afar off”, Ps.139:2. He knows now what you will think this time next year, if you are spared. He knew it all when He suffered and died for you. Everything for which an account had to made to a holy God, He bore, if you will put your faith in Him. Beloved, you are in a safe place if you let Him pick you up.
I am reminded of the parable in Luke 15 and, in referring to it I would like also to recommend to you that you read about the time when Mr Darby was helped to use that story for the salvation of a shepherd boy in Ireland who was dying from having gone after one of his father’s sheep. You can look it up on the internet under ‘How the lost sheep was found’; it will take you five minutes to read it. The boy was told how the Lord Jesus left the heights of glory, He left the warmth and comfort of the Father’s house. He exposed Himself to the contradiction of sinners, He exposed Himself to a life of reproach and abuse. He was a houseless, homeless stranger because it was the only way to reach you, and it was the only path that brought Him to the place where He could save you. Mr Darby asked the shepherd boy, 'And how did you get it home?’ And the boy answered, ‘I did not like to trust it, and besides, it was dead beat and tired, so I laid it on my shoulders and carried it home that way'.
I say this to you, beloved: He does not trust you to find your own way, but you can trust Him to carry you home. You can trust Him! There is not a soul who has trusted Him that He has ever betrayed. Never! Why would Someone who has died for guilty sinners let them down? Why would He do that? Beloved, you mean so much to Him. He cannot let you go and He has the power to hold you whatever force or power might attempt to take you from Him. My simple appeal is, as we have in the hymn, ‘Simply trust Him, that is all’ (Hymn 439). May He bless the word.
Preaching of the gospel, Calgary
2 July 2017
D.A. Burr