Good day and welcome to your Kingdom Connection Devotional for Wednesday! On Monday we talked about the Lost Sheep and on yesterday we spoke of the Led Sheep referencing Psalms 23. Today we will move right into the LOVED sheep. Every single person, at some point in time, should stop and ponder the same question King David asked in Psalms 8:4-5
4. What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
5. For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
I'll never forget the time I was doing a devotional and it dawned on me how God did not make a plan of redemption for the angels! Those who fell with Satan are doomed eternally with NO opportunity to be forgiven. But with mankind NOT so! Our heavenly Father is so mindful of us that He sent His only begotten Son to us. This Son veiled Himself of His divinity and walked the earth as a human. The Word became flesh and it dwelt among us (John 1:14). Christ came to model what the lifestyle we should exemplify, inaugurate His Kingdom for the New Testament believers and redeem mankind. What a task for the Divine to do just for US! That my friends is LOVE.
All of these things are huge sacrifices that required the life, spiritually and physically of Christ. To stop being God and to take on the likeness of man is LOVE!
Philippians 2 (NIV) says it like this:
6 Who, being in very nature[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
He didn't stop with being in the likeness of man, He
became the Lamb that took away the sins of the world. He became a baby SHEEP!. He became the ultimate sacrifice that could redeem mankind by giving His life on the cross.
To get an understanding of what this means, Paul tells us in Romans 5:7
7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die;
yet perhaps for a good man someone
would even dare to die.
Paul is letting us know, every now and then some one will risk their life for a RIGHTEOUS man and fewer times than that will someone die for a GOOD man. Just think about who you are willing to give up your life for? Your children? And some parents are shaking their head NO! LOL Perhaps your best friend. But the list is short and those people are what we consider "priceless". But along comes Christ, sent by our heavenly Father to do verse 8!
8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us
CHRIST LOVES HIS SHEEP!!! It's one thing thin to have NEVER known God, to have never understood who He was and what He has done and be a disconnected sinner. He came for the lost. He came for the disconnected and ignorant. He came for all of us who live under the domination and bondage of Satan and sin- that's the sinner and love is the reason. Yet it doesn't stop there!
There are plenty of us who know of God. There are plenty of us who have tasted AND seen. There are plenty of us who sit up in a church RIGHT NOW and when He looks at us, we are, IN HIS EYES, wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked according to Revelation 3:17 and He stands at the door of THIS church/church age and He knocks on HIS OWN DOOR. Let's look at His love, in this regard now:
The LOVED Sheep
Talk To ME
MINISTER!