FRIDAY 20th
Psalm 79
NIV (v13) – ‘Then we your people, the sheep of your pasture, will praise you forever; from generation to generation we will proclaim your praise.’
ESV (v13) – ‘But we your people, the sheep of your pasture, will give thanks to you forever; from generation to generation we will recount your praise.’
It is a long time since I had some verses about sheep in a devotion! We are coming to an end of our second look at the psalms, this being the penultimate one for now. How good to have a timely reminder that we as the body of Christ are the sheep of his pasture. There is a generational connection here, in that as we saw yesterday, the words of the law were passed on from one generation to another so also is the praise from the lips of the people of God, as the previous generation had the word of God and knew the blessing of God and praised him for it, so does the next generation and so on. The praise which comes from the lips of those who are the sheep of his pasture is eternal praise to an eternal God.
In 2 Timothy we see something of generational blessing, as Paul identifies the sincere faith that he sees in Timothy something which was also in his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois, all sheep of God’s pasture, yet from three different generations whose lips brought praise to the eternal God. It is great to see the generations of a family continuing in the things of God, their example is a natural progression of generations, they were natural family, but, at the same time they were spiritual family. I personally think it is great to have a Church that is mixed with its age groups, the older generation right down to the youngest generation, being together, worshipping together, each generation praising God together and each generation that follows continuing the same practise.
When we first went to Rhyl back in 2006 someone in the Church came up to me and asked me a question in a rather unpleasant manner, and it was something like this ‘Are you going to do the same as ****** did in *****?’ Now I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, it turned out it was about a certain pastor (who I had never met and knew absolutely nothing about) and a certain Church (again which I had never heard of and knew nothing about) but what had happened was that apparently the pastor had decided he only wanted a youthful Church, so everything he was going to do was going to be oriented to the youth and the older folk could move on and find somewhere else to go. How sad! And yet it seems to be becoming common place, where the heritage and experience of the older generation seems to count as nothing to some in the younger generation, and there is one thing for sure I would never want to be a part of a Church where certain generations were not wanted, and what this person was asking me back then was never going to happen, I thank God for every generation in the body of Christ, for we need each other, the older generation needs the younger and the younger needs the older, the different generations need to be together, to worship together, to fellowship together, to be the sheep of God’s pasture together. We need each other, may we value each other in the body of Christ, may we value the experience and the wisdom of those who are older and at the same time may the older generation appreciate the younger and may we always seek ways to be an encouragement and a blessing to each other.
As the shepherd in Emmanuel, I want to put it on record, I appreciate, love and care for each one of you, the sheep that God has put under my care, from the eldest way up there in the nineties to the youngest just a few months old, God has brought us together, as sheep together, so that we may praise him together. May we always be united, together in the pasture where he has set us, as one for the praise of God, as one for the purpose of God and as one for the promotion of the gospel.