Psalm 100, ‘Shout joyfully to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness; come before Him with joyful singing. Know that the Lord Himself is God; it’s He who’s made us, and not we ourselves; we are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, bless His name. For the Lord is good; His lovingkindness is everlasting and His faithfulness to all generations.’
In our western mindset…or our Greek philosophical, intellectual mindset, Jesus’s command to “make disciples” can simply mean teaching people certain beliefs about God, helping them believe and trust in Jesus as their Lord and then educating them in doctrinal truth.
Are all these things true and important? Absolutely they are, without question, but this can very easily become little more than a mental exercise, and the people with the most amount of knowledge are seen as the most mature Christians and better disciples. Unfortunately, this can just lead to competitiveness among believers. It can lead to power grabs and political machinations within church bodies and arguments over who’s right and who’s wrong and this doesn’t necessarily lead to transformed lives.
However, an eastern view of discipleship is much more synonymous with the Gospel. The eastern view not only emphasises the understanding that Jesus died for our sins and that belonging to Him requires repentance and faith in Him alone, and holding to sound doctrine and teaching, but additionally, it also emphasises that Jesus lived transparently before His disciples so that He could demonstrate to them how they should live. Then Jesus’ disciples were able to make disciples which required them to not only understand the fundamental technicalities of the Gospel and doctrine, but they also were to live their lives transparently so as to teach them how to live out their faith in Jesus in a practical sense every day.
It’s not just about a transfer of information and knowledge but also about exemplifying a practical living example of transformation. It’s not one or the other…it’s both! This is definitely not a “Do as I say” method of discipleship, it’s a “Do as I do” method of discipleship.
God never wanted to simply fill the world with people who all believed the right things…yes…God does want us to believe rightly according to His Word…but He ALSO wants to fill the world with people who will literally, physically live their lives so that they reflect Jesus in every moment of every day. This is what ‘Walking in the dust of our Rabbi’ is all about. Learning from Jesus our Rabbi, what He taught AND emulating Him so that our physical conduct, behaviour and conversation reflect Him accurately.
It’s no accident that the Bible uses shepherding to describe the relationship between God and His people, in fact the picture is a beautiful metaphor for God’s kind of discipleship. In so many countries of the world sheep are kept in fenced-in pastures where a shepherd or farmer isn’t required most of the time and the sheep are left to themselves. With that understanding, it’s easy for a Christian in the west to simply think that the great commission is to just get as many sheep into the pen as possible. Get em’ saved and let em’ go!
However, this is not the case in Israel…grass isn’t that plentiful, the soil is arid and pasture has to be found and that means that flocks are pretty much on the move a lot of the time. While in Israel, I’ve seen shepherds move their flocks around local neighbourhoods, out on the hillsides…I’ve even seen shepherds move their flocks through the city of Jerusalem along the main road out the front of the Garden of Gethsemane, right along the side of the Kidron Valley! The sheep are only kept in pens or enclosures at night or in winter but during the day the shepherd is with them and he moves them about from pasture to pasture. Shepherding in Israel is a very active and constant vocation.
A lady by the name of Judith Fain who is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Durham spends several months each year in Israel and one day while walking on a road near Bethlehem, she watched three shepherds converge with their separate flocks of sheep. The three shepherds knew each other and stopped to talk and while they were chatting, their sheep intermingled to form one big flock. She was wondering how these shepherds would be able to separate their sheep and was amazed when each of the shepherds called out to his sheep and at the sound of their voices, the sheep separated from each other and simply followed their respective shepherds. It would appear that some things in Israel haven’t changed for thousands of years.
What’s makes us – Jesus’s disciples – different from all others is not the ‘pen’ we live in but the Shepherd we follow. Once when I was in New Zealand we saw a farmer herding his sheep with his amazing sheep dogs and then we watched him sheer a sheep. The sheep didn’t want to be shorn but when the farmer grabbed the sheep, the sheep just submitted and didn’t try to move or escape…she just laid there against the farmer trusting him completely while the farmer dragged her around lifting her legs and turning her around until she was all neatly shorne.
Sheep will always follow a shepherd but they must be sure they’re following the Good Shepherd and not a false or deceitful shepherd…the Bible calls them hirelings. They’re in ‘the game’ for what they can get personally, not because they care for the sheep! Wandering sheep who follow wandering shepherds get lost and dirty, they hurt themselves, they wander into dangerous places where they’re vulnerable to attacks from predators and also to being stolen and deceived by other false shepherds.
Our Good Shepherd leads His sheep out into the world and He’s always on the move. Our Good Shepherd (our Rabbi) expects us – His sheep (His disciples) to follow Him even to the ends of the earth if need be, but to do so, we have to learn to recognise His voice, follow where He leads and imitate Him so we can show the world around us who we belong to and who we emulate and what His Good News is.
In the next program we’ll look at how the relationship between the shepherd and his sheep is actually a very personal kind of connection as opposed to a distant one. Sheep farming in Australia is very different from sheep shepherding in Israel and the Middle East, and the personal and very close relationship that the Bible describes between the Good Shepherd and His sheep is a beautiful picture of what we can expect for our own relationship with our Messiah.
Shalom
Mandy
