Imagine that God gave each of us a flock of sheep and told us, “If you love me, keep my sheep.” Now imagine that each of us has our own set of challenges that makes keeping track of every single sheep very difficult, if not impossible. Maybe some of us have to search far and wide for anything that is suitable for our sheep to graze on, while others seem to enjoy wide expanses of verdant fields. But maybe those with green pastures have to deal with frequent storms, or wolves, or bandits. It doesn't do us any good trying to figure out why other people seem to have it so easy keeping track of their sheep when we seem to have a much harder time with our own. First of all, we don't know all of the facts. Just because we always seem to catch them when times are good does not mean that they haven't spent many a sleepless night slogging through mud searching for a lost sheep, just as surely as we ourselves have done on many occasions. It also doesn't do us any good berating ourselves that certain of our sheep tend to slip our grasp so much easier than others. After all, if God gave us the sheep and six of them stay by our side always but we just have the devil of a time keeping the other four in line, it's not going to be a very good showing of our love for God if we just say to Hell with those other four, God, I only love you 60%. When we hear the phrase keep the commandments, we might tend to think that the commandments are these inanimate slabs of carved stone that we can keep in a safe place and they will always be with us as long as we don't deliberately pawn them off. But the commandments are much more like sheep. No shepherd ever wants to lose even one of their sheep, but the sheep sometimes wander off despite their best efforts. This happens to us all the time as we try to keep the commandments. But we will not get that sheep or that commandment back if we simply curl up into a ball and curse ourselves for being such bad shepherds. And as noble as our efforts are to try to find every last sheep all on our own, there is a much easier way. Christ is the good shepherd. He can help us find our lost sheep and He can help us keep the commandments. He will not condemn us. He knows the sheep He has given us. He knows which ones were going to give us a hard time no matter how hard we tried. But He will be with us. He will help us keep our sheep and He will help us search for the ones we have lost until we can find them again.
