It’s just like the devil - sows his lies into our life, and when you believe the lie, gets into your head. Then you act stupid. Do crazy things. “Why do you do that?” “I don’t know, I just want to do that.” So the sheep need to be helped.
Here’s another thing about sheep. There’re lots of interesting things about sheep. Here’s another thing about sheep – they have no defence against the predator. No defence. They got no sharp horns, they’ve got no sharp teeth. They really don’t have much defence against anything. It’s very like people.
The Bible likens us to sheep, likens the devil to a wolf or a predator – come to steal and destroy. When the predators chase the sheep, the sheep get highly distressed because they’re being hunted and they get into a panic.
So sometimes we have a problem in New Zealand where a dog will begin to chase the sheep, they begin to bite at them, tear at them. It’s incredibly distressful because once the dogs get a taste for the blood, they don’t eat the sheep, they just kill them. Something happens to some dogs when they get the taste of the sheep blood. They become extremely dangerous and they chase the sheep and then they’ll leave the sheep bleeding and dying across the paddock.
This is exactly like the devil – like a wild dog with a taste for blood pursuing people, destroying their lives, and leaving them bleeding, leaving them injured and wounded. Guilt and shame, grief and sorrow, damaged. If you look at a paddock where a wild dog has gone, you’ll see sheep lying on the ground and they’re bleeding, and because there’s no remedy, you have to put them out of their misery and kill them.
So in the same way, if you have spiritual lives to see, you’ll see people with broken hearts, broken lives, hearts full of grief, desperately needing help because they can’t help themselves. So the image of a sheep is an amazingly accurate image of what people are like spiritually, and our need for a shepherd. So Jesus describes Himself as the good shepherd, willing to give His life for the sheep.
If you read Psalm 23, you’ll see what a shepherd does. We haven’t got time to do that, I want to just stay on this story. There’s one more interesting thing about sheep. There’re lots of interesting things, I’ll give you one more thing.
Sometimes, the sheep when they’ve been well-fed and they lie down, if they lie down too long, they get an unusual condition. They become, we use the word ‘cast’. It probably can’t be described here so I’ll describe what they look like. They’re lying on the ground and they can’t get up, and if they get up, they’re all giddy and they fall over again. So when the sheep is cast, when it’s lying down like that, it can’t get up. It actually can’t get up of its own accord. It needs the shepherd to get it back on its feet again, hold it steady until it gets back going again. If it’s like that too long, it affects its whole balance.
See, we’re not made to lie down like that. We’re not made to be cast on the ground, unable to get up, unable to move, unable to serve God. We’re not made for that. Whatever has cast you down, whatever’s caused you to lie down and give up, if you stay there too long, it’ll get harder and harder to stand up. There’re many things that can cause us to lie down, many things that cause us to give up. We get offended, we have a disappointment, someone betrays us, someone hurts us, things we had hoped for don’t happen, and we start to draw back from God.
Instead of being alive and standing spiritually; instead of being in a place of faith and trust; instead of moving forward with God’s plan for our life; we quit and we give up. I see many people like that. They’re not lying on the ground, but they’re lying down inside. The fight is gone. The faith is gone. They’ve drawn back inside.