Insightful Musings on the Scriptures
by
Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67
Greetings, dear ones.
This has been a big day for us. I had Becki checked in at Meridian Park Hospital at 6:15am this morning. By 10:30am she was finished with an incredible demonstration of high-tech surgery performed by Dr. James Ballard and his team who removed her God-made right hip joint damaged by arthritis, etc., and replaced it with a man-made joint. They have this procedure down so well, it only takes about one hour. Amazing. It remains to be seen whether she’ll be released to come home tomorrow—but most likely on Wednesday.
I’ll pick up little Nicholas tomorrow morning at 6:15am. Then I’ll pick up our daughter Jill at the airport about 11am, flying in from New York.
It’s about time to lay my little bald head on a pillow. Good night. God bless.
Love, Dad/Ray.
There is a huge amount of good advice in this short exhortation given by Paul to the Ephesian believers who met him at Miletus. The advice is built on a metaphor—on the importance of accepting certain protective responsibilities in the same way that a shepherd guards the sheep that are delegated to his care. Notice that the shepherd must first oversee and care for himself—“Keep watch over yourselves.” It’s not valid to insist that the shepherd in the real and practical sense should be so preoccupied with the care of his sheep, so totally serving and self-sacrificing, that he takes little or no care for himself. After all, smart wolves know that if they can take out the shepherd, they can knock off the sheep with little resistance. What good is a dead shepherd anyway? So in the sense that Paul intends, a wise shepherd will also recognize that he himself is a sheep. Based on the view that all believers are shepherds to some degree, each of us is responsible to shepherd ourselves.
Of course our responsibilities do not end with ourselves, but extend to those whom God has placed around us, or under our care. No one is “an island unto himself,” as though his choices and behavior affect only himself. No one can say, “I have influence over no one but me.” Paul said, “Keep watch over…all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers.”
Let’s not miss a major motivation behind these responsibilities. It has to do with ownership. Both ourselves and those whom we oversee are the property of someone else. We are not our own. They are not our own. We and they are His—those whom “He bought with his own blood.”
This is definitely not a casual ho-hum assignment of little consequence. It’s serious stuff. “I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. So be on your guard! Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears” (Acts 20:29-31).