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Pottsville SDA Church

Dee Casper

Whose Flock is This?

Well, good morning and happy Sabbath, everyone.

We're going to cover something I have not actually shared in at least 5 years.

It may be closer to 6 or 7, but it was a very impactful moment in my life and a lot of lessons were learned during that season.

So I hope and pray that this will be a blessing to you, so let's pray.

Sweet Jesus, thank you for loving us so much.

Thank you for object lessons and for giving them to us as a gift and helping us to better understand truth through the experiences we have with them.

And so I just pray that you would speak to us, give me clarity of mind, the ability to be brief and to the point.

And Lord, I pray that this would stir us and shake us and awaken us to our individual roles in the furthering of your kingdom.

We're told in Desire of Ages, a commentary on the life of Christ, by the way, this message is called, Whose Flock is This?

And so we'll be addressing something here from my time with sheep.

It says, In Desire of Ages, a commentary on the life of Christ, page 254, that his, Jesus' messages of mercy were varied to suit his audience.

He knew how to speak a word in season to him that is weary.

For grace was poured upon his lips that he might convey to men in the most attractive way the treasures of truth.

He had tact to meet prejudiced minds and surprised them with illustrations that won their attention.

And through the imagination, he reached the heart.

He would use object lessons and things they could relate to, which lowered their guard and left these lessons upon their heart and mind that would not soon leave them.

His illustrations were taken from the things of daily life.

Although they were simple, they had in them a wonderful depth of meaning.

The birds of the air, the lilies of the field, the seed, the shepherd, and the sheep.

With these objects, Christ illustrated immortal truth, and ever afterward, when his hearers' chance to see these things in nature, they recalled his words.

Christ's illustrations constantly repeated his lessons.

Maybe you've had this, you know, you're out in the garden and God taught you a lesson about spiritual things while gardening, and now every time you see a tomato plant, you're always reminded of that lesson that God taught you, or in raising children, or in having animals, or something else, that God teaches you lessons through these things, that when you see something later, it always reminds you of these spiritual truths.

Well, I'm going to share with you my own experience with this.

I went through the ARISE program in 2010, just over 10 years ago, and as soon as I graduated from the Bible College, My dad and I had already kind of gone through some financial difficulties preceding this by making a stand for this message, leaving jobs on Sabbath and so forth.

Things got pretty hard for us, leaving jobs period because of Sabbath and all of that.

It cost us a lot and I shouldn't have touched that.

Of all things when you're gonna have a nervous twitch, don't touch cables that control the monitor.

So anyway, we went through some difficult seasons and my dad, while I was at this Bible college, ended up having to go to a homeless shelter.

And I myself joined him when I finished the Bible college.

So can you imagine going to a school of evangelism and a Bible college, Certificate of Excellence in Hand, receiving training from David Ashrick and a bunch of people in the Adventist Church, and now being homeless.

And when I went to this homeless shelter, their main hub was in St.

Louis, but they had satellite locations, and they had 1 out more in rural parts of Missouri.

And my responsibility of all things was to take care of sheep and of all things to feed them bread because in the winter times There's not grass for them to eat and so forth and we'll get more into that now.

But so here's just kind of some pictures.

I had to use my old laptop at that stage.

I didn't have a camera, no smartphone in that day.

And so these are just some pictures of the sheep.

It's a different type of sheep than maybe you were expecting, the white fluffy ones.

I don't know what breed or species this is but if you do, congratulations because I don't.

But I do know I took care of them and they won my heart.

So these are just some pictures of those cute little sheep.

These are the lambs and I think this 1 here is going to be a video.

Now to some people that sound can mean 1 thing or another but for me it's like music to my ears that you're taking care of them and hearing it every day and I would take care of them.

So these are just, they would come up to the fence line, we'd feed them.

Some would be a little more adamant than others as you can see, seeking special favor and attention.

We'll get into that here in a moment too.

So I explained why I was there, but I have a question for you.

So again, this guy's this hotshot, Fresh out of Bible college, his teachers are saying all kinds of nice things about him.

And then he finds himself homeless in the wilderness, taking care of sheep.

First of all, does that remind you of anybody?

How about somebody who really thought that they knew what they were doing, could take care of business and needed to be humble taking care of sheep in the wilderness?

Yeah, that was this guy right here, okay.

And So God said, okay, you think you can take care of things?

Let's go take care of sheep for a while and humble you, right?

Sometimes they do that, you know, they test on animals first, then they do it with humans just to, you know, make sure it's safe.

I think that's kind of the treatment that I got.

But what does sheep represent in Scripture?

It's told in Ezekiel 34, 31, that you are my flock, the flock of my pasture.

You are men and I am your God, and women.

Now what does bread represent in Scripture?

In John 6, 33, it says, for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, speaking of Jesus.

Even more clearly, he says, I'm the bread of life.

But the table of showbread in the sanctuary service, we know, or we were told, represents the Word of God, right?

And we're told in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

And in verse 14 of John 1, it says that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And, you know, the week before I left there, I was there for about 3 months, I read this text, 2 Samuel 7, verse 8, "'Now therefore thus shall you say to my servant David, "'Thus says the Lord of hosts, I took you from the sheepfold, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people, over Israel." I'm not saying that God was calling me to be a king or even, you know, a full-blown overseer of a congregation, but the point was, I brought you through this time with the sheep to prepare you for spiritual leadership, right?

I brought you through this process for this.

So the things that we're gonna learn here and that we're gonna hear about, the stories that I'll share with you, you need to kind of put on those spiritual glasses.

I remember doing a week of prayer at a little elementary school, and I was telling the kids, you know, make sure you put on your spiritual glasses.

And this 1 little boy, he put his fingers up like this for way too long, like 10 minutes into the message, he's still doing this and thinks it's the coolest thing ever.

So he shared a lot of things with me and showed me a lot of things in this time.

And many of them will be mentioned early on, but the final illustration is where we'll kind of make the point.

So we're gonna look basically at the role of the shepherd.

And then last, we're going to look at the good shepherd, Jesus.

We'll also see some bad examples listed in scripture.

By the way, this is an entire sermon on sheep and we will never touch Psalm 23, just so you know.

We're mainly going through Ezekiel 34 and John chapter 10.

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Whose Flock is This?

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