Jeremiah 23:3-4 – The Flock Will Flourish.
3 “But I will gather the remnant of My flock out of all countries where I have driven them, and bring them back to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase. 4 I will set up shepherds over them who will feed them; and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, nor shall they be lacking,” says the Lord.
It could have been that the eyes in the Education class were starting to glaze over after one too many techniques and that Ed Gosnell knew his audience. He inserted a personal antidote and anecdote, an experience with a veteran teacher in a rural school in which he was trying to suggest some different approaches that might get better results.
The teacher's dry retort was, "You can't get chicken salad out of chicken shit no matter how much mayonnaise you use." I could have sworn, lamented Gosnell with the passion of an educator who had followed his calling out of the impoverished hills of East Tennessee, that he was looking toward the kids on the playground when he said that.
The ancestry of that teacher's condescending attitude is why Jeremiah 22:3-4 are displayed against the preceding verse. They declare the Lord's ascendancy as discipler, a capacity similar to that an opposing coach described in admiring Bear Bryant. He could take his'n and beat your'n. Then he could turn around and take your'n and beat his'n.
Give Judah's all-too-human spiritual leadership every advantage. Give them God's Word and Intimate familiarity with it. Place them midstream in a tradition of parents passing on the faithfulness of God with every wee one's incessantly inquisitive question. Place them in a setting where every landmark is a prompt and a reminder of how much and how practically God cares for His people. The recipients of all these advantages, judges Jeremiah 23:3, scatter the flock rather than care for and multiply it.
Give God as direct Discipler degrees of difficulty instead. Give Him a flock scattered rather than gathered, interspersed rather than insulated, as influenced by the foreign cultures among whom they are exiled as by any biblical heritage left uninterrupted. Which flock will flourish?
The one with the demographic advantages squandered, or the one that He gives a longing to hear Him from afar. Which shepherds, humanly speaking, will be found faithful? Those who seem to inherit their position and the pride to go with it, the likes of Pashhur who protect the most incidental aspects of the status quo because they are atop it, or shepherds by calling who have, like Moses their ancestor, have had to turn their backs on pagan acculturation and deliberately turn aside to hear what God might say?
God's flock will flourish, even as He calls them and culls them from the most unlikely places. He doesn't need excuses about the raw material He works with. He makes raw material. His promise of Romans 8:29 is unimpeachable no matter how far from ideal the setting in which it is enacted.
Whom He foreknew, before bad shepherds, before bizarre, defiant cultural assumptions, before a sense of present estrangement mixed with a wistful sense of what might have been, before all that He predestined His flock to be conformed to the image of His Son, that Christ might be the firstborn of many brethren.
Rich Mullins calls it. "Friendship, camaraderie, intimacy, all those things and loneliness live together in the same experience." When it doesn't seem like authentic community is possible anymore, when worshiping the nostalgia of a falsely remembered cultural hegemony would seem to be its poor substitute, THEN He makes a people out of those who were not a people. THEN He shows that He is, in fact, fulfilling His promise to Abraham for more descendents than there were stars in the sky.
When we break out, by our very heritage of disobedience from the cultural cocoon within which we assumed sanctification was probable, that is when He shows Himself faithful without need of cues and intermediaries. Christ is the Good Shepherd. He knows how to make the flock flourish.
It could have been that the eyes in the Education class were starting to glaze over after one too many techniques and that Ed Gosnell knew his audience. He inserted a personal antidote and anecdote, an experience with a veteran teacher in a rural school in which he was trying to suggest some different approaches that might get better results.
The teacher's dry retort was, "You can't get chicken salad out of chicken shit no matter how much mayonnaise you use." I could have sworn, lamented Gosnell with the passion of an educator who had followed his calling out of the impoverished hills of East Tennessee, that he was looking toward the kids on the playground when he said that.
The ancestry of that teacher's condescending attitude is why Jeremiah 22:3-4 are displayed against the preceding verse. They declare the Lord's ascendancy as discipler, a capacity similar to that an opposing coach described in admiring Bear Bryant. He could take his'n and beat your'n. Then he could turn around and take your'n and beat his'n.
Give Judah's all-too-human spiritual leadership every advantage. Give them God's Word and Intimate familiarity with it. Place them midstream in a tradition of parents passing on the faithfulness of God with every wee one's incessantly inquisitive question. Place them in a setting where every landmark is a prompt and a reminder of how much and how practically God cares for His people. The recipients of all these advantages, judges Jeremiah 23:3, scatter the flock rather than care for and multiply it.
Give God as direct Discipler degrees of difficulty instead. Give Him a flock scattered rather than gathered, interspersed rather than insulated, as influenced by the foreign cultures among whom they are exiled as by any biblical heritage left uninterrupted. Which flock will flourish?
The one with the demographic advantages squandered, or the one that He gives a longing to hear Him from afar. Which shepherds, humanly speaking, will be found faithful? Those who seem to inherit their position and the pride to go with it, the likes of Pashhur who protect the most incidental aspects of the status quo because they are atop it, or shepherds by calling who have, like Moses their ancestor, have had to turn their backs on pagan acculturation and deliberately turn aside to hear what God might say?
God's flock will flourish, even as He calls them and culls them from the most unlikely places. He doesn't need excuses about the raw material He works with. He makes raw material. His promise of Romans 8:29 is unimpeachable no matter how far from ideal the setting in which it is enacted.
Whom He foreknew, before bad shepherds, before bizarre, defiant cultural assumptions, before a sense of present estrangement mixed with a wistful sense of what might have been, before all that He predestined His flock to be conformed to the image of His Son, that Christ might be the firstborn of many brethren.
Rich Mullins calls it. "Friendship, camaraderie, intimacy, all those things and loneliness live together in the same experience." When it doesn't seem like authentic community is possible anymore, when worshiping the nostalgia of a falsely remembered cultural hegemony would seem to be its poor substitute, THEN He makes a people out of those who were not a people. THEN He shows that He is, in fact, fulfilling His promise to Abraham for more descendents than there were stars in the sky.
When we break out, by our very heritage of disobedience from the cultural cocoon within which we assumed sanctification was probable, that is when He shows Himself faithful without need of cues and intermediaries. Christ is the Good Shepherd. He knows how to make the flock flourish.
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