Our lives are filled with numbers.

Each year we file our income taxes. Now that’s an exercise in numbers to end all numbers games. Pages upon pages of numbers: earned numbers, spent numbers, invested numbers, and saved numbers.

When it is finally prepared, we send it off to the Internal Revenue Service with our Social Security number on it. And the IRS takes all those numbers and puts them into a computer, along with the numbers of thousands and thousands of other people. And to them, we become a number.

The government knows us by our tax number. The state knows us by our driver’s license number. The bank knows us by our account number. And when we retire, we’ll be remembered by our Social Security number. And it goes on and on. In fact, sometimes I wonder if anybody knows us at all without a number!

And that’s why John 10:22-42 is so significant, because it tells us that God knows us. He knows us intimately, in fact, better than we know ourselves. And that’s important to remember. Although the image of sheep and shepherd may be foreign to our experience, the words of John encourage us to pay close attention to a truth that our human hearts long to hear.

Does the Shepherd know you?

There is an old story of a census taker who was making his rounds in the lower East side of New York, who interviewed an Irish woman bending over her washtub. “Lady, I am taking the census. What’s your name? How many children have you?”

She replied, “Well, let me see. My name is Mary. And then there’s Marcia, and Duggie, and Amy, and Patrick, and…”

“Never mind the names,” he broke in, “just give me the numbers.”

She straightened up, hands on hips, and with a twinkle in her eye, said, “I’ll have you know, sir, we ain’t got into numberin’ them yet. We ain’t run out of names!”

The image of God as the Good Shepherd tells us that is the way it is with God. He knows us by name.

So, who needs a Shepherd?

One Sunday morning, following the church service, a layman accosted the pastor and said, “Tom, this church has been insulting me for years, and I did not know it until this week.” The stunned pastor replied, “What on earth do you mean?”

 “Well,” said the layman, every Sunday morning the call to worship in this church ends with the words, ‘We are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand.’ And I have heard ministers over the years call the congregation, God’s flock.’

“Then this past week I visited the Chicago stockyards and discovered that sheep about the dumbest animals God ever created. Why, they are so stupid that they even follow one another docilely into the slaughterhouse. Even pigs are smarter than sheep, and I would certainly be angry if my church called me a pig’ every Sunday morning. So, I’m not at all sure I want to come to church and be called a sheep’ any longer – even God’s sheep’.”

The man had a point. But whether we like it or not, that is the language of the Bible: both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. We are called “God’s sheep.”

The favorite psalm of many people is the 23rd, and it begins by saying, “The Lord is my shepherd…” And if “the Lord is my shepherd,” then I am one of the Lord’s sheep.

Centuries before Christ, the prophet Isaiah said to his people: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6)

Sheep know their shepherd and their shepherd knows them. Do you know yours?

Have a great weekend!