The Shepherd Relationship...

True spirituality is rather humbling. It actually degrades our self-dependence with every step we take toward Christ. We are all on a journey to becoming more dependant upon Him. Some truly struggle with Christianity for this very reason. But our Lord isn’t referred to as ‘Shepherd’ for nothing…
“The God who has been my shepherd all my lifelong to this very day, the Angel who delivered me from every evil, bless the boys.” ~Gen. 48:15
This was Jacob’s words of blessings to his grandsons. Jacob, the aged patriarch of the family was only days from dying. So Joseph brought his boys to be blessed by their grandfather before his death. The words of Jacob’s blessing over the boys captures something very great that he’d learned in his sojourn with God. The all important lesson he’d embraced and wanted to pass along was that God had been a ‘shepherd’ to him. That was the meaningful legacy he wanted to pass on to the next generations. As my father was nearing the end of his days I started to hear his summations too. I heard it again in the words of Melodee’s aging father two weeks ago. Fathers feel a need to ‘break it down’, to separate out the truly important things from the fray, and press them into the hearts of their children before they depart the earth. This was Jacob’s version of that. Can we hear the importance in his voice and embrace his final message? Can we enter into THE SHEPHERD RELATIONSHIP with Christ? ~verlon