May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts
be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. AMEN.
Let us pray! O God,
it was through Your Son’s humiliation on the Cross of Calvary that our world
was lifted from sin to salvation and You rescued us from sin, death and the
devil. Grant to us clear understanding
of the joy found in Your Son Jesus Christ Who is our Good Shepherd Who guards,
protects and cares for us sheep in His fold known as the church. Enable us to know You, hear Your voice and
embrace Your will for our lives, for all of us saints gathered here at Emmanuel
this morning. AMEN.
When we hear the 23rd Psalm from this morning, we
are comforted by the words, the images it creates in our minds and especially
the promises that God makes to each of us.
Clearly the poetic nature of King David writing this Psalm was derived
from his experience in his life. In the
recent History Channel television series entitled, “The Bible” they used this
Psalm when David was facing Goliath and the Philistines. Yet, what is more important for us today is
not the text itself, but the concept of relationship.
Each of the texts we have heard read this morning talk about
a shepherd. Whether it is their job
description or how the shepherd feels about the sheep from Ezekiel, the
promises that God makes in the Psalm of leading, protecting, providing and
showing mercy or from the epistle how we are like sheep that have gone astray
from 1st Peter, or our Gospel that spells out to what degree the
shepherd will go to protect and provide and how the hired hand will flee. These texts deal with relationship between
shepherd and sheep and apply to and for each of us today, not only with our personal
family but also with our relationship with the church, but specifically our
relationship with Jesus Christ our Good Shepherd.
If our relationship with Jesus Christ is dead, decaying,
deceiving or destitute than our lives will likely be the same. Just as when farming if the soil is not tilled
between crops, nourished with fertilizer before planting, cared for during the
growing season by spraying for weeds or kept from to much traffic by the tractors
or combines during harvest, the yield for the crop in the future will be
diminished. Our relationship with Jesus
Christ is the determiner not only of our destination of heaven or hell, but
also our lives that we live on a daily basis.
When we have a good relationship with Jesus Christ as is manifest with
daily prayer, scripture reading and conversations with God, our attitude and
outcome of what we do will show it. When
our relationship is nearly dead, we do not have conversations, but dictations with
God of ‘I want more rain’ or ‘the moisture was not enough’, our lives and
especially our attitudes will be clearly disconnected from the church and God. And our relationship with not only God
Father, Son and Holy Spirit will be unhealthy, but not be what God wants it to
be. Therefore the fruit of spreading the
Gospel message of Jesus Christ for those who are still in the valley of the
shadow of death will be elusive, just as a good crop is with little or no preparation
and our lack of faith in God.
God is calling us to a deeper relationship with Him. This relationship is not about us and our
selfish desires or our perceived need for rain, healthy crops or kids that mind
us, it is about God and His blessing.
Last week we heard how God blesses us through our relationship with Him
through Word and Sacrament of both Holy Baptism and Holy Communion and how on
Easter we could answer the question, ‘So What’ about the resurrection. But today we need to understand God is
calling us to a deeper relationship, not only with each other, but especially
with Him as our shepherd.
As a Pastor, I get calls or visits to help people. Most people who walk through my door or give
me a call think the problem is with either the other person, or they don’t have
the needed information in order to succeed, whether it is marriage, work,
family or their own feelings. There are
even some people who sit in the pew today and are too afraid to ask for help,
because, either they are a man and they can’t show or admit weakness or lack of
knowledge whether dealing with family, spouse, work or even their relationship
with God. Or to ask for help is the long
held belief that there is supposedly a stigma for admitting that they are human
and that they are broken and they need help.
But what I find after talking with most people is that the largest
number of people who come need help with relationship. Whether the relationship is between husband
and wife, parents and children, between members of the body of Christ or even
between relatives, siblings or classmates, they feel a personal disconnect or a
discontent within themselves and with the person or the situation and know
there is something that is askew.
What is vastly true and unmistakable is that we live in a
broken world where relationships have been broken from the entrance of sin in
the Garden of Eden through the Exodus from Egypt into the promised land, to the
coming Messiah and even with His disciples after His death and resurrection as
well to us today. Our world is broken
and cannot be fixed by ‘self-help books’, seminars or the latest greatest self-actualization
or new age exercise from the internet, television or talk show hosts, like Dr.
Phil or The View. These shows and hosts are
entertaining and sometimes do have a nugget of worth, but they still miss the
intrinsic aspect of relationship that is in our DNA. It is the relationship between Creator and
created, our relationship between God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and we His
creation that live in this world.
If we really want to change, we have to go to the source
that can change our relationship, and that is Jesus Christ. Two weeks ago we celebrated the resurrection
of Jesus Christ from the dead and how our relationship with God through Jesus
Christ was no longer only of the Son of God here on earth walking among the
people of God, teaching, healing or helping.
With Jesus Christ death on Calvary, the relationship radically changed
to one of pure dependence upon that one act of humility, grace and love that
Jesus displayed by allowing Himself to go to the Cross. When Jesus bowed His head the veil of the
temple was torn, the connection between God the Father through His Son Jesus
Christ to us was cemented and no longer nor was it ever that we could win our
salvation, bridge the gap nor connect ourselves, Jesus Christ became the
connection for us. Jesus bridged the gap
between God and Man for all time and all place.
With our being baptized into Jesus Christ life, death and
resurrection, God the Son, changed our relationship with His Father and Him and
thus with all of humanity for all time and all place. Our daily lives filled with sin, bound to
death and only self-centered could now be confessed, forgiven because of the
blood of the Lamb of God and radically changed our trajectory. No longer are we bound by our sin to death,
but through the Blood of Jesus Christ offered on the Cross we are set free to
have a loving forgiving relationship with the Great Shepherd and with all of
God’s Children.
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