Shepherds and Sheep
Gathering
Leader: We gather together in Jesus' Name
All:Help us to explore, discover and learn together
Engaging
Can anyone describe what a sheep looks like? Now can anyone describe a goat? If I showed you a picture of a sheep and one of a goat, do you think you could tell them apart easily? You probably thought those questions were really easy, but in some countries it is actually quite difficult to tell sheep from goats because they are nearly the same. In India the sheep all look like goats, and the easy way to tell them apart is to look at their tail; if their tails hang down they are sheep, if they stand up they are goats. In Israel in the time of Jesus(and now)it was the same as India, all the sheep and goats looked almost exactly the same, they all look like goats (or so we would think)!
In England when you want to move sheep around what do you use?(sheepdogs, trucks)In India shepherds work differently; they don't need to use dogs, they stay with their sheep all day and look after them. When they need to move them around, they call the sheep and the sheep follow them. All around Vellore you can see shepherds looking after sheep like this; you can watch them leading them along the side of the road while lorries and buses thunder past. The sheep even trust the shepherd so much that they will follow him right through the centre of a busy town, without taking any notice of the noise of the pedestrians and the traffic all around them. You wouldn't be able to do something like that in England because the sheep would scatter all over the town! Can you imagine how dangerous that would be, and how frightened the sheep would get?
There are a lot of stories about sheep and shepherds in the Bible, one of the best known is a story Jesus told about a sheep which got lost . This shepherd had one hundred sheep. Just like the Indian shepherds, he stayed with them all day, he led them around to find the best grass for them to eat and took them to the streams so they could drink. At the end of the day he would shut them up safe in a big sheepfold, and he would sleep in the door of the fold, so that wild animals could not get in and attack the sheep. But one day was different, as the shepherd counted his sheep into the sheepfold he realised that there was one missing. He left his friends to look after the other ninety nine sheep, and retraced his steps to find the one sheep he had lost. You may think sheep all look the same, but because the shepherd knew his sheep so well he knew exactly which sheep was missing and where he had last remembered seeing her. He kept looking in the ditches and in the thorn bushes, over the cliff edges and in the streams, until at last he found his sheep. He was delighted to have her back, and I expect the sheep was pretty pleased too!
(Check it out: Luke chapter 15 verses 3-7)
Jesus told this story to help people understand what God was like; he explained how God was like the shepherd, because He loved all His people and did not want to lose any one of them, just as the shepherd did not want to lose any of his sheep.
Jesus is sometimes called the Good Shepherd(John chapter 10 verse 11). Perhaps we find this a difficult idea to understand because our English shepherds work in a different way from the shepherds Jesus knew, but in India this is much easier to understand because their shepherds work in a similar way to the ones Jesus saw. A lot of Indian churches have a picture of Jesus as the Good Shepherd in them to remind Christians of how much Jesus loves them and cares for them, just as the shepherd spends all his time looking after his sheep.
Responding
Pray for people who are feeling lost and miserable, like the sheep in the parable. Think about how you could help people who feel lost and miserable in your class or in your school.
Sending
Leader: Go in peace to discover God's world and your place in it.
All:we go in Jesus' name.