Headed for Home

When I was aged nine to seventeen, my father was the minister of a church in a very small town in Ohio. It was a safe little village where the neighborhood kids were being group-raised by each other’s parents, knew the collective expectations, and enjoyed a great deal of freedom. We lived at the north end of Main Street, as did the Satchells and the Fraziers. Interestingly, all three of our dads had very loud whistles and used this superpower to call their own kids home as needed. We could all be piled up on sleds on a snowy day, having demo derby races down the Rowlands’ steep hill, and then we would hear a loud whistle in the distance. It was time for someone to go home. The Slutz kids (that’s me), the Satchell kids, and the Frazier boys didn’t all run home. Only the kids whose dad had whistled headed for home. 

As adults, we’ve marveled at this in our reflections because we thought nothing of the fact that somehow, we all recognized which dad had done the whistling. In truth, their whistles sounded very much alike. The other kids in the neighborhood had no idea who’d just been whistled home until certain members of our pack took off in response to it. I couldn’t help but think of this as I recently read Jesus’s self-description in John 10:2-4: “But the one who enters by the door is a shepherd of the sheep. To him, the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep listen to his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he puts all his own sheep outside, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice” (NAS throughout). 

This use of Shepherd and flock as a metaphor was used in reference to God Himself in Psalm 80:1-3: “Listen, Shepherd of Israel, who leads Joseph like a flock; You who are enthroned above the cherubim, shine forth! Before Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh, awaken Your power, and come to save us! God, restore us and make Your face shine upon us, and we will be saved.” Again, God is referenced as the Shepherd beautifully in Isaiah 40:11, “Like a shepherd He will tend His flock, In His arm He will gather the lambs and carry them in the fold of His robe; He will gently lead the nursing lambs.” 

Additional references in the Old Testament using this metaphor have the shepherd assigned to those God appointed to lead His people, though their performance ended up lacking. Jeremiah 23:1: “‘Woe to the shepherds who are causing the sheep of My pasture to perish and are scattering them!’ declares the Lord.” Again, in Ezekiel 34, we have a rebuke of earthly shepherds who have led poorly:  

Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel. Prophesy and say to those shepherds, This is what the Lord God says: ‘Woe, shepherds of Israel … Those who are sickly you have not strengthened, … the scattered you have not brought back, nor have you searched for the lost; … My flock was scattered over all the surface of the earth, and there was no one to search or seek for them” (Ezekiel 34:1-6). 

First, it was God as our Shepherd, then the performance of man as the shepherd, and then came Jesus. He promised personally to come and to seek and to feed and to provide fully that which is needed by the lambs. Jesus’ words in John 10:14-15 convey a love that surpasses comprehension if it weren’t for the fact that we’re experiencing it. “I am the good Shepherd, and I know My own, and My own know Me, just as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep.” 

John 10:4 declares the sheep know the Shepherd’s voice, and John 10:14 declares He knows His own, and His own knows Him. Ezekiel, as a prophet, has a messaging style that feels like a mallet just dropped, and I find it piercing in his writings when he records, “My flock strayed through all the mountains and on every high hill; My flock was scattered over all the surface of the earth, and there was no one to search or seek for them” (34:6). This image is an accurate representation of our world even today. Relativism and postmodernism scrub away absolute truth and dim the value of belonging to anything since, in such theories, nothing is for sure. All the while, the Shepherd is so real, His voice is recognizable, and He is knowable. He is the only one entering through the door into the sheepfold, while all other intrusions into the flock are thieves and robbers, says John 10. 

We can recognize the voice of the Shepherd because He has spoken actively. “For the word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, even penetrating as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). We can recognize the voice of the Shepherd because He has spoken objectively. In John 17:17, Jesus states, “Your word is truth,” and in 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul writes, “All Scripture is inspired by God.” We can recognize the voice because He has spoken historically. The inspired writers have recorded many of the thoughts of God, and these have been passed on to us with precision and accuracy. 

We know the Shepherd through the abundance of revelation in the world, in nature, in our lives, and in the undeniable embedding of His identity within us, as referenced in Romans 1:20 and Psalm 19. God’s retort to Job, beginning in chapter 38, is teeming with examples of His identity revealed. When it comes to our role in a world with lost lambs not even suspecting there is a “found” to be had, would that we are prepared to point out the voice of the Shepherd and express how we know Him to be. 

HV Morton, who lived from July 26, 1892, to June 18, 1979, was considered one of the world’s foremost travel writers of his time. British by birth, he was best known for his many books on London, Great Britain, and the Holy Land. He wrote dozens of books on culture, historical events, and travel, as well as published scores of articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers. In his 1935 book, In the Steps of the Master, Morton recorded the following event. “Early one morning, I saw an extraordinary sight not far from Bethlehem. Two shepherds had evidently spent the night with their flocks in a cave. The sheep were all mixed, and the time had come for the shepherds to go in different directions. One of the shepherds stood some distance from the sheep and began to call. First one, then another, then four or five animals ran towards him; and so on until he had counted his whole flock.” I agree with Morton’s use of the word, “extraordinary.” It is truly extraordinary that our Shepherd comes looking for His sheep, calling each one by name. I hear my name, and it is Jesus who is saying it. This invokes the same response my earthly dad got from me when it was his whistle heard by a group of kids busy being kids. That’s my call; that’s my name; I recognize the voice of the Shepherd. I’m headed home, and I’m going there running.