God Actively Wants to Redeem Us
No matter what is going on in your life, God actively wants to be a part of it and God actively wants to redeem your life.
Believe me, I know that sometimes there can be A LOT going on in your life. AND when there is a lot going on and God chooses to remain silent or you are angry it is easy to turn away and go to the things that at least feel like they are helping.
I will insert exactly zero real life examples because I know you know them all.
Isaiah 53:6
All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s path to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on Him the sins of all.
God calls us sheep an awful lot and it always feels like a low blow because sheep are dumb. They follow a flock, they don’t know how to not do things that are bad for them or things that will literally kill them, and when I was twelve and my family was visiting Nigeria, I saw a sheep LIE DOWN in the middle of traffic.
Sheep are dumb!
I don’t know if you know this, but sheep aren’t actually dumb. Yeah, they are dirty and stubborn and don’t like to do anything on their own but they also have really complex social structures, best friends, the ability to solve mazes and puzzles (including, to the dismay of one village in Britain, the ability to foil a cattleguard), and, according to some researchers in Australia, they know how to self-medicate when they are sick. Sheep are not dumb, they just do whatever they want and don’t think about the consequences of their actions. Sound familiar? You can bet that when God called us sheep that God knew this and was not saying, “you have all gone astray because you are too dumb to know better.” It was something more along the lines of, “you have willfully chosen to go the exact opposite way of where I wanted you to go because you possess no impulse control and now if I don’t go find you, you will die.”
I do not think that is much better.
All of us, when we have gone astray in our lives, have made a choice to do what we wanted instead of following God. When I chose to pursue a relationship that God had asked me not to I was willfully going astray. The good news though, is that if we are sheep then God is a shepherd. God does not want us to die alone in the wilderness, so God literally goes out to find us.
Matthew 18:12-14
What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.
God knows that we are all going to go astray but God wants to be a part of our lives so badly that God goes out to find us. God does not passively wait with the good part of the flock for us to come waddling back. God goes out to where we are to bring us back.
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