I read a piece about shepherding written by Phillip Keller, a man who apparently has been a shepherd. He writes that sheep require very careful attention in regard to their pasturing. If you leave them to their own devices, turn them out into a pasture, leave them, and then come back a week later, they will have destroyed the land. The sheep will trace and retrace the same pathways until they become eroded gullies. They will eat the grass down to the roots and then tear out the roots. They will create eroded landscapes that can’t regrow and renew, which will attract parasites. Soon the sheep and the land will both become sickly and useless. The sheep must have a strong shepherd who will move them along and lead them on the right paths to new, fresh pastures so that both the land and the sheep can prosper and be healthy and well.
You and I, too, left to our own devices and running on only our own desires, can lay waste to ourselves, our health, our relationships, and even our city. Our landscape can be devastated by our relentless needs and wants. Without firm guidance from the Shepherd, we run into trouble.
Just think about what could happen in your life if you had no Shepherd leading you, no inner prompting from the Lord about the still more excellent way you could be walking, no conscience to tell you when you were being selfish, no word telling you that your body was a Temple of the Lord to be tended and cared for, and no knowledge that you were made a child of God, created in His image and intended for good works. What if you never thought of others as part of the flock with needs of their own but viewed them instead as competitors for the same pasture? You would view them as a bother or, even worse, an enemy! And what would you make of other flocks? Would you think of them as inferior or dangerous? What would the Good Shepherd say?
Did you notice that part of what the Good Shepherd does for the flock is move them along onto new paths and into new pastures? The Good Shepherd knows that to keep us and our world healthy, we need to move into new places, out of the ruts and habits that don’t serve us or others. Change and renewal and new perspectives are what the Good Shepherd wants for us. We aren’t supposed to stay unchanged through our relationship with the Shepherd. If we follow Him and trust Him with all our hearts, then He will lead us onto new paths and into fresh pastures.