everything you are, have mercy I pray. Amen.
The truth about us comes out when we are praying. Not when we are praying aloud for others to hear, but when we are alone with God. He will never turn a deaf ear to someone who is telling the truth about his or her feelings. ‘God, I am angry that you have allowed this to happen.’ God listens and God cares. ‘God, this is a desperate situation and I need help.’ God listens and God cares. ‘God, I am bored, and praying is the last thing I feel like doing.’ God listens and God cares. ‘God, I’m not even sure you are there.’ God listens and God cares.
And now I am going to tell you the most important thing I have discovered in all my years, so with all my heart I hope that you are in a quiet place when you read it.
God loves you. He loves you completely and entirely. He will never love you more than he does at this moment. Even if you become a Christian tomorrow he will not love you more than he does today. He can’t, because he loves you perfectly already. His love is absolute and has no qualifications attached to it at all.
But this liberating fact does not stop there. The truth is that not only will God never love you more, he will also never love you less. If you don’t pray to him this week he won’t love you less. If you don’t open a Bible this year he won’t love you less. If you never go to church again he won’t love you less. That is the freedom of worshipping a God who loves with no conditions, the God of grace.
That is why our God is one before whom you can be completely honest. You see, in heaven we will meet people like the tax collector – who felt he was worthless, but whose integrity shines out in Jesus’ story. People like that are forgiven in the grace of God.
But in heaven we will also meet people like the Pharisee – who tried so hard, but whose love and humility were notably missing that day in the temple. People like that are also forgiven in the grace of God. That is the extent of how loving God is.
Anything you have done – a lifetime of churchgoing, the decades of goodness, the effort of trying to get things right – is unimportant right at this moment. All God needs is for you to come in humility, saying, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord.’ And he will draw you to his lovely presence, whether you deserve it or whether you don’t. Amazing!
| Be happy! Sit for a few minutes, holding out empty hands. Just like the tax collector, tell God exactly how you are. Tell him your doubts and your hopes. Tell him the secrets you wouldn’t tell me. Tell him you’re sorry today, if that’s true. Tell him you have nothing to be sorry about today, if that’s true. Tell him what you want. He knows already, but he will deeply value the honesty. |
Be Happy! Day 6
Make yourself known
| Jesus said again, ‘I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full … I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me – just as the Father knows me and I know the Father – and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.’ John 10.7–16 |
I don’t have much experience of sheep. I’ve been a Croydon man all my life, and you have to go quite a way from South London in order to get close to one. On a shelf in my bedroom I have a toy lamb that I have had since the day I was born, now patched and bald, but I don’t think that counts.
Having said that, it is my friend Paul’s twenty-fifth birthday today, and if I can get this chapter written in the next three hours, I am hoping to get thoroughly acquainted with a sheep at his barbecue this lunchtime. So I am going to say something that may be completely uninformed and insensitive, but everything I’ve glimpsed of rural life has led me to believe this: sheep are pig-ignorant. (I also think that pigs are sheep-ignorant, but that’s a subject for a different book.)
| Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Psalm 100.1–3 |
You don’t have to observe sheep for too long to work this out. Just watch them trying to decide which way to go when they have no one to guide them. They follow a leader from among themselves in what appears to be an orderly way. The problem is that their leader doesn’t know the way and is as likely to lead them to disaster as to security. That’s the context in which Jesus described himself as a good shepherd. He pictured his society as ‘harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’. I often think of his description of that generation when I look at our own. How did we get to a state in which we take moral advice from a runner-up on Big Brother, or emotional advice from an astrologer in a TV guide? If ever there was a time when we needed a good shepherd, it’s now.
| The king of love my shepherd is, Whose goodness faileth never; I nothing lack if I am his And he is mine for ever. Henry Baker, clergyman and hymn-writer, 1821–77 |
To get the hang of what Jesus meant you have to leave the lamb chops cooking on the barbecue and travel back 2,000 years. Picture sheep grazing on a hillside in the days of Jesus – the image that his original audience would have had in their minds. In the valley is a sheep pen with rock walls in the shape of a horseshoe, with a narrow entrance. It is evening, so the sheep have been led into the pen. The shepherd is lying across the entrance. He is asleep – well, it’s an exhausting job! But he has trained himself to wake at any moment should there be a disturbance. If a sheep nudges his body to try to escape, he’s wide awake, shoving it back in. If a wild animal or, worse still, a thief attempts to climb across him to find a free supper, he is instantly alert and ready to protect his flock.
The shepherd is a real human gate. He is literally ‘laying down his life for the sheep’. When Jesus says, ‘I am the gate for the sheep,’ that’s what his audience imagines. What a marvellous picture! It’s about security, but it’s also about freedom. For those whom life has cramped and confined, like sheep cooped up in a pen, Jesus is claiming to be the exit to the liberty of the pastures – out of oppression into freedom. For those whom life has frightened and bruised, he is the entrance into the security of the fold – out of loneliness into protection.
| Stay close to Jesus. Paul the Great, Egyptian desert father (hermit), about 300–50 |
As Jesus pointed out, there are plenty of people prepared to sell you these kinds of security and freedom. Hence the celebrities, the astrologers, and a forest of self-help books. But absolutely none have the integrity of Jesus. He called them ‘hired hands’ – not real shepherds at all. Hired hands run away when a wolf comes anywhere near. What Jesus meant was that a religious fraud offers us spiritual fulfilment for money and is absolutely useless when a crisis arises. But Jesus offers it for love and stays with us no matter what it costs him.
It sounds fantastic and life-transforming. It is fantastic and life-transforming. ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.’ Fabulous! How do we respond? Well, sheep can be obstinate creatures. And let’s be honest, so can we! But the astonishing thing is that a good shepherd does not love them even a tiny bit less because of that.
What does Jesus the good shepherd tell us about the relationship he has with his sheep? First, he identifies each of them individually. Now, when your closest encounter with a sheep is a kebab shop, that is astonishing. When I look at a flock of sheep, do I see twenty-three individual creatures whom I know by name and can identify by their particular bleat? No, I do not! I see a couple of dozen white woolly blobs. In contrast, Jesus