Day 3 – My Shepherd - 2

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. Ps 23:1

As we saw in our last lesson, God is a glorious shepherd, but we can only experience the fullness of His glory if we allow Him to lead us. This is not just a one-time decision: throughout every day, we are faced with opportunities to follow the leading of our Shepherd or to reject that leading. Following Him usually takes a deliberate choice because our natural tendency is to go our own way.

Isaiah spoke of this tendency not to follow Him: “All we like sheep have gone astray; We have turned, every one, to his own way…” (Isaiah 53:6a).

But God loved us so much that He responded with a sacrifice. He Himself became the sacrificial lamb, and took our sin upon Himself: “…and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6b). He had to become one of us to save us.

And so God the Son – Jesus – came to earth as our Saviour. He was “the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29). Unlike any other human, He lived a faultless, sinless life. Because he was the perfect sacrificial Lamb, He was able to pay the penalty for our imperfections – our sin. He did this when He died on the cross.

That sacrificial Lamb has now risen with new life, and has become our Great Shepherd, and we owe it to Him and to ourselves to follow Him very deliberately. It’s when we do this that we can experience the blessings in Psalm 23.

Consider:

How have your choices shaped your life?

How could your life be different if you had not followed God’s leading as much as you have?

How could your life be different if you had followed God’s leading more than you have?