All over our country, the government is shutting down churches, or ordering Christians not to meet in groups of more than ten people.
In New York City, Mayor DeBlasio promised to target houses of worship, particularly synagogues, for holding meetings. He threatened to shut down those meeting houses permanently. He sneered, "you'll have to find some other way to practice your religion."
Psalm 100 refers to the Lord's people as His own flock, His own sheep. As the Scottish Psalter puts it, "and for His sheep He doth us take."
It is God's choice, and not our own, that He has taken us as His sheep!
Praise God, the government cannot regulate or limit the size of God's flock!
This metaphor of God's sheep runs all through the Scriptures. In John 10, Jesus tells the unbelieving crowd that they do not believe on Him because they are not His sheep.
Note well what Jesus is saying: lost man cannot decide to join Jesus' flock. Indeed, the only people who can ever trust in Jesus are His sheep.
And the Father gives the sheep to Jesus. God the Father decides who will be the sheep given to His Son, the Good Shepherd.
And when God delivers a person into Jesus' care as the Good Shepherd, that person comes to trust in Jesus, and the Good Shepherd covenants to keep that person safely unto everlasting life in Glory.
But then we learn that our Good Shepherd gave His life to save His sheep. Nobody expects or requires a common shepherd to die for his sheep, but our Good Shepherd did so to save us!
It is not lions or wolves that Christ died to save us from.
It was our crimes Jesus died for. He shed His blood at Calvary to satisfy God's justice and rescue us.
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John Pittman Hey was born in 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi, to Godly parents who from the beginning raised him in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. With child-like faith he came to Christ on his fourth birthday at his mother's knee. He received his education at church...
