Our Pastor has been preaching about Psalms 23 for the last few weeks, - I just love it when God brings two different unrelated things together to make a point.- Anyway, he told a story of some shepherds who wanted to take a break for some much needed breakfast, and left their 15,000 sheep alone for about 30 min. Well while they were gone one of the sheep decided to jump off of a cliff, and before the half an hour was up, all 15,000 sheep had followed suit, and jumped off the cliff, and four hundred and fifty sheep died that day.
This story shows us just how stupid sheep are. And yet God says that we are his sheep and he is our shepherd. The good thing about it is that God is the Good Shepherd and he never will leave us to go get some chow. We should all be thankful for that!! But my point is that part of the reason we are so much like sheep, is that we believe that we are smart, yes, even smarter than God, and we believe this because we all suffer from an exalted soul. We all have the tendency to think that we could handle things better than God, and we don't trust Him or look to Him for answers, when He is the very Creator of all things and has the power to overcome anything that we could ever encounter or need. This section of Roll Away Your Stone has dealt with the issues we all have with our exalted soul, and presents the only way to deal with it. Now our souls don't want to relinquish their power and the soul will fight every step of the way. But it all comes down to this. Jesus Christ came to earth, fully God and yet fully man, and he faced every temptation we face. Yet Jesus did not allow His soul to exalt itself and take control. Jesus lived a perfect life and did nothing that God the Father did not tell Him to do. So when Jesus went physically to the cross, it was not just His body, and spirit, that died, it was His soul. He won the battle for our souls. Jesus paid the price so that we would not have to physically die, but we all must take a trip to the cross and laydown our own wants desires and wills, our exalted soul, and let the Spirit of the Living God lead and direct us. It must be a daily sacrifice, we cannot go just once. But every day, sometimes multiple times a day. When we do this, the Holy Spirit is able to work in our souls and bring our souls into the proper place, a place of rest and peace. When our soul is in charge of the decision making, it is striving and working in a position that God never intended it to be in. Only when we bring it to the cross and lay it down, can we find the rest and peace that David is talking about in Psalms 23.
Here is a music video that says it all. Make this your prayer today!
