7-16-2019

 Good Morning All,

       Isaiah 53:6; “We have all strayed like sheep.  Each one of us has turned to go his own way, and the Lord has laid all our sins on him."

    We just returned from the National Youth Gathering in Minneapolis.  We took nine young people and we returned with nine young people, and it was the same nine; that is always the goal.  If you have never attended an event like this, you cannot really appreciate how true this statement is.  It is as close to chaos as I have ever been.  It always feels like you are just at the edge of everything flying completely out of control.  There were over 21,000 high school age students at this event.  All of them in the same building at the same time.  All of them going up escalators or down escalators or stairs or whatever to try to get to conference rooms that hold maybe 250 people at a time.  They are trying to figure out which floor the room is on and which way to go to get there.  The easiest thing for you to do is to lose one or two along the way.  This is my third one as an adult.  I am far from the grizzled veteran; some of those saints are on double digit attendance which means 30 plus years of gatherings. (Those folks are saints in my book).  But I confess, it is always fun to watch the first-time adults on about the second or third morning.  The first morning they come to the adult early morning meeting with their notebooks all marked and sure of the plan and by the third morning, their shirts are on inside out and all they want is lots of coffee.

   I sat by one of them the fourth morning and I tried to encourage him to hang on; it is really working better than you think.  He replied that he hoped so.  Then, to try and cheer him up, I told him that he should keep this experience in his head next time he led Bible study because this is as close to being a real-life shepherd as he would ever be.  He turned with a puzzled look and so I told him this analogy. 

   I don’t know your group but you have one or two kids who take off and must be the leaders and always the first in line even though they have no clue where you are going.  You have one or two who won’t pull their noses out of their phones and when they look up they have no idea where the rest of the group is.  You have three or four who get in the middle of the hall way, stop moving forward and just wander in circles plugging up the whole event.  You have two or three that stop and run to anything they think is cute, funny, entertaining or something they have never seen before.  He looked at me and asked how I knew his group so well; I told him, “They are all that way; they are all sheep who have turned their own way.”

   That truly describes all of us, even knowing God’s will for the world, we go our own way and do our own thing and soon we are completely lost even though we are surrounded by thousands of people.  All we like sheep have gone astray but God returns us to the flock, gently encouraging us to walk with him in peace and harmony.  All our failures are laid upon Jesus so that all his successes may be ours.  We have a real, present God who loves us enough to do the unimaginable.  He died that we might live and even though we fail often; he always wants us back.  This is who God is, loving and desiring our salvation.  So, listen to the true shepherd and be in his pastures of peace and drink of his waters of everlasting life.

Father, all of us have wandered off into the oblivion of this world and yet in your mercy, you call us back.  Keep us ever in your gracious arms and deliver us from all pain and all despair that we may never lost hope in you.  In the precious name of Jesus, we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret