“Dear Little Flock,
You’re all wandering away from me, like sheep in an open field.
You have always been running away from me.
And now you’re lost. You can’t find your way back.”
–The Jesus Storybook Bible, Sally Lloyd-Jones
You’ve been running away, and now you’re lost. That’s the substance of the Bible’s message to us. From the Garden of Eden to today, each of us has been running. As the prophet Isaiah puts it, we’re like sheep, each of us thinking we know the best way and choosing our own path.
You probably don’t have a lot of experience with sheep. I know I don’t. But those who do say that sheep are particularly unruly animals. They are notoriously dumb: they’ll walk right into harm’s way, sometimes into moving streams or right off the edge of cliffs. They can only see a few feet ahead of them, which doesn’t even matter because most of the time their heads are hanging straight down. Sheep are not animals of forethought and keen insight. They are basically always thinking one thing: “Where is the next bite of grass?”
That may not be the most flattering image for humanity. But it is an incredibly compassionate one. God sees us and says, “You may not be very clever. But I can see that you’re confused and wandering. So I’ll send you a Shepherd, someone to love you and carry you home to me.”
The gospel is not a story of how we went searching for God; it’s the tale of how he came searching for us. The Bible is not the record of man’s attempts to find God, but God’s attempts to find man. And why would he do it? As Isaiah says, “Because you are precious in my eyes, and I love you” (Isa 43:4). I don’t use the word “precious” for many things in my life. My wife, my children…and that’s about it. The people in my life that are precious to me are so dear to my heart that I would sacrifice anything to save them.
I’ve got four kids. One year, when we were at an amusement park, I lost sight of one of them for about a minute. (Parents, ever been there?) What do you think my response was? I didn’t say, “Well, I’ve got three more. Still pretty good.” No, I went crazy trying to find my daughter, because she’s precious in my eyes. That’s the depth of emotion God has for his lost world.
Isaiah puts it like this: “Can a nursing mom forget her newborn child, and have no compassion on the child she has just borne?” My wife developed a crazy spidey-sense when we had our babies. At the slightest whimper she was out of bed and up the stairs. But God says, “I am more in touch with you than a newborn mom is with her own baby!”
And God’s love goes deeper still. Not only would he come after his sheep; he would come to die for them.
Shepherds don’t do that. It doesn’t make sense, because the life of a sheep doesn’t compare to the life of a human. If someone risked his life to save his friend, we’d commend him: How brave! But if someone risks his life for a stray dog, we’d probably scold him: That dog isn’t worth your life.
Why would God, the Creator, give his life for us, the creation? This is crazy kind of love—and all for people like us who don’t even love him back. We watch teenage girls today swoon over Zac Efron or Justin Bieber, and we want to say, “Sweetheart, give it up; he ain’t ever going to even know who you are.” (Or we sheepishly remember our own teenage years, when we were convinced that Donny from New Kids on the Block or Kelly Kapowski from Saved by the Bell was going to notice us. But, well, they didn’t.) As you get older, you learn it’s just not wise to love people who will never love you back.
But that’s God’s love. The most amazing thing in Scripture is that we see God loving people—giving himself to people—who don’t love him back. And coming after them. And then laying down his life for them.
What kind of love is this? Are there truly any words we have to describe it? The more I reflect on the love of God for me, the more I am stunned and left speechless. Charles Spurgeon probably said it best: “If there is one subject that makes me back away from this platform utterly ashamed of my poor feeble words, it is this subject. This love of Christ is the most amazing thing under heaven, if not in heaven itself.”
For more, be sure to listen to the entire message here.
