CHRIST’S SHEPHERD SERVICE AND ITS RESULTS
J. N. Grace
I am sure that what has just been said is the truth; everything depends upon the place the Lord has in our hearts. In chapter 9 of this gospel the man had been cast out; he was not wanted, and I would think we have all had that experience. He was not wanted because he loved Christ. Little by little the truth as to who He was dawned upon him and he was true to it. Let us be true to our convictions as to the Lord. This man was true and he was not wanted, he was cast out. We can be sure that any who are cast out because of fidelity to the Lord have not got to find Him; He will find them. They are the kind of people the Lord wants; He wants their company; He wants to disclose something further; that is what He loves to do to hearts that have really come under His sway and have been loyal to Him. He has things to disclose, a little bit more about the glory of His Person. That is what we want, is it not? We want to know more of Jesus. And so this man was brought to do homage to the Lord, and then I think if we follow the sequence of these chapters we can say he found himself in the flock; he was not any longer alone. There is a certain way the Lord has taken in our exercises in these days to see to it that persons know what it is to be alone, alone with Himself.
We have been told long ago that we are not in a position to appreciate the assembly until we know what it is to be alone. This man was alone and Jesus found him, and I think he became conscious then that there were others; he belonged to the flock. In chapter 10 we get the flock, we get those wonderful words of Jesus, “My sheep”. It is fine, is it not, to have the sense of the Lord saying, “My sheep”? They are nobody else’s; the Lord has His rights over them and they are undisputed; if anybody interferes with the Lord’s rights over His sheep they have to say to the Lord. That is a very safe thing to get into your soul, that you belong to the flock, the flock of Jesus. No one can take you out of His hand. I think some are still a little fearful of things. No need to be fearful when you are in the hand of Jesus; no one can seize you out of His hand, and you learn that He is over all. It says in this chapter, ‘when He puts forth His sheep’, so, like the man at the end of chapter 9, you forget in one sense that the Jews cast him out, you come to the understanding that the Lord had put him out. I think we come to that—whether we left a situation, or whether we were thrown out, how thankful we can be that the Lord has put us out because He has something better in mind for us. There may be rest in the protection of the fold but the Lord says, That is not sufficient; it is only attachment to Myself that will keep you.
There is no doubt in this chapter where the Lord refers to Himself as the good Shepherd; it is really a reference to David, who hazarded his life for the sheep. We might say that love is behind it, but love is not exactly the subject of this chapter; it is care for the sheep. He puts them forth and He leads them out; He is going to protect them from the wolf. It is a wonderful thing to know the good Shepherd. He says, “If anyone enter in by me he shall be saved, and shall go in and shall go out and shall find pasture”. So we come back to the Person of Jesus and our own personal links with Him. As we enjoy our personal links with Jesus we have the consciousness that we are not alone; there is a flock, and the Lord is thinking of them all, He knows them by name. If we are unknown by anybody else we are known by Jesus and He knows us by name. That means that each one has a distinctive place in the heart of Jesus. That is very comforting, is it not, to know that He cares for us even if nobody else does, and He knows exactly all that anyone goes through; the ravages of the wolf. He knows all about it. He knows that the thief may come and steal, and kill and destroy. What scattering there has been; but, “I am come that they might have life, and might have it abundantly”.
Well, it is a very blessed thing to have the sense that the Lord knows His sheep by name and that we know His voice. I think we can get a sense when the Lord is speaking that there is something unique about it; it is the Lord, and you want to follow that voice. So we need to be on the alert to know what the Lord is saying currently. There is what He said last year, but there is what He is saying now, and we are to follow Him. Then He says, I have other sheep which are not of this fold. I am not speaking exactly of the teaching of the chapter, that involves, maybe, the Gentiles and the Jews and the remnant, but I think we can apply it today, and if we find the heart of the Shepherd we find that it is large enough to have many others in it too. Now we ought to be on the alert, I think, for other sheep that the Lord has in His heart. He is going to bring them in, because there is only one flock and there is only one Shepherd. Even if there are only two or three of us we are going to hold that in our hearts; there is one flock and there is one Shepherd. What we enjoy belongs to all, and the heart of the Shepherd carries every sheep; in fact, when we take other scriptures into consideration we find He carries them on His shoulders. Well, how wonderful is the care of the Shepherd! He carries the lambs in His bosom. How wonderful it is to think of the Shepherd who will carry us! We have to learn to walk and follow Him, but if we are feeling very weak, well, He will carry us on His shoulders and He will carry us in His bosom. Oh, there is not only His care but there is His love. We find ourselves in the flock, and as we do and experience the care and affection of Christ we are in a circle where love is operating, and that is chapter 11.
It says, “Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus”. He did not just love the three of them. He loved each of them; the Lord loves us personally. This is John’s way of presenting the truth; it is the Person of Christ, and it is the persons of His own that the Lord has His own direct relations with, every believer. He loves them and He cares for them, and what He has in mind is to bring them into the enjoyment of a family circle where love is known and enjoyed. It relates, of course, to the family of God, which is not a local thought; it is a universal thought, but still, we can make the bearing of it local because every universal thought when it comes to the matter of practice works in our localities.
So we have the village of Bethany. The Lord loved to come to Bethany because He was welcome there. He came there into a place where He loved certain persons. You can be sure that in an area where the love of Christ is known the enemy will seek to invade it; he did; death came in. The Lord allowed it to come in, and He is with them, but He allowed it in order that, as He says, “the Son of God may be glorified by it”. It is something for us to lay hold of that whatever the Lord allows in His wisdom, His intent is that we should come to know Him better, and that some fresh glory of His Person may shine into our hearts, and that is what happened.
But when He heard that Lazarus was sick He waited two days. Just think of that, a little local company, shall we say, two sisters and a brother, and the brother dies. What a testing time for them, and the Lord waits two days before He goes to the place. We would like the Lord to intervene, just as Martha did. We would have said, I think, as Martha did, ‘Lord, if you had been here that would not have happened; it just would not have happened’. But the Lord stayed away because He saw that it was necessary that it should happen. It takes us a while, a long while I think, to arrive at the fact that certain things that the Lord puts us through are necessary in divine wisdom and that they happen because He loves us. That is the simple explanation of it; He loves us. But He can deal with the whole situation and we are to have the faith of that. Martha had, she said, ‘I know that if you had been here it would not have happened’. Mary says the same thing, and then when Jesus does come to the place, Martha says she knows Lazarus will rise in the resurrection in the last day.
The Lord says, “Believest thou this?” What she needed to be brought to was not that the Lord was going to do it in the last day, but that He could do it now, and she had to wait on Him in that respect. They loved one another—no doubt they did, these three, because they missed their brother, but what shines out supremely is that the Jews had to say, “Behold how he loved him!”—How He loved him! So they waited and Martha brings up this matter as to resurrection and the Lord says, “I am the resurrection”. The fact of Lazarus being raised would be one thing, but can we reach beyond that to the One who is able to do it, to the Person? That is what the Lord wanted to get at, “I am the resurrection and the life”. The glory of God shines in this section as He stands there.
Martha says, “He stinks already”; corruption had come in. I have no doubt that we reach that in our souls sometimes; our faith wanes and we give up hope and we think the position is hopeless. It is not hopeless in the presence of the Son of God. It could not be, because death has to flee in His presence. When Jesus arrives at the tomb something must happen; something must happen when Jesus comes in. When He says, “Lazarus, come forth”, the dead came forth, bound feet and hands with grave-clothes. O, dear brethren, we pray for the Lord to come in in respect to our brethren that are bound. If He does bring them forth they till might be bound hand and foot; there might be something for us to do in the way of liberating them. Have we the moral power, and affection for Christ in holding them in our hearts, so that we can do it? We may be tested on this, our ability to “loose him and let him go”. But if it is the work of God that appears, there is no need to fear, we can have confidence in the work of God under the hand of Christ as He begins to operate.
Then what happens? Martha has been adjusted; Mary has followed things intelligently, and Lazarus is in life. Are they enjoying things just for themselves? Are they holding what they have been through in relation to their relief? He came to Bethany, .where they made Him a supper. I think that is the great end that the Lord is at in all these exercises, to get something for Himself, and if there is a circle where we have been through exercises, and life has come in, then how are we holding things? We are holding whatever we have just to exalt Christ and, make much of Him. That is what happened here; it was not the Lord’s supper; that is what He has done for us, and it is the least we can do for Him, to do what He asks in remembrance of Him. But of this it says, ‘There therefore they made Him a supper’ (John 12: 2), in
Bethany, in the very place where all these exercises, so testing, had been gone through. It had resulted in the fact that Christ was everything to them, and there they made Him a supper.
That is what is going to happen here in Christchurch. The exercises that the Lord puts us through are going to result in all that we have and are being made available for Christ. It is striking, is it not, that they do not say much about it; some of us may be a bit more talkative than others, but that is not the point in this; each one fitted into his or her place. Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, and what comes out is the odour of the ointment. What that must have meant for Christ! “The house was filled with the odour of the ointment”, filled; this is Christianity, the assembly really. It does not go as far, you may say, in this section as the assembly, but nevertheless it is on the way to it in that what has come from the Person of Christ is finding its reflection in the hearts of those who want to make everything of Him.
We are not safe unless Christ has the whole situation in hand. The enemy will be dead set against that kind of thing. So it is striking that it is one in the very innermost circle who derides this service. The silence is broken by someone saying, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” Beloved brethren, the enemy is all the time on the line of lowering the level of things, and particularly as to the Person, of Christ. If he can becloud the Person of Christ and His work he has been successful in what he is at. But the Lord has His own direct service to us as the Shepherd according to John’s gospel. It is like what we had in Ezekiel, “Behold I, even I, will both search for my sheep, and tend them”
(Ezekiel 34: 11), and you can be sure that if we submit to His ways of care and love, and cultivate
our acquaintance with the Person of Christ, we shall find that we shall be together as one in our desire to make everything of Jesus just in the very locality where in divine wisdom He has set us.
Word in meeting for ministry, Christchurch. N.Z.
27 November 1979