Feed My Sheep

I've been listening to a series of sermons by Andy Stanley about prayer -- I'm sure it will lead to a blog entry or two -- but I wanted to talk about something else first.

He mentions the passage of scripture in which Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray (Luke 11:5-13). He tells them to be persistent in prayer.

Jesus compares God to a man who has bedded his family down for the night. His neighbor, who has a friend who has come to visit, keeps knocking on the man's door, asking for bread. The point of the parable is that God wants us to keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking.

Thinking about this parable, I wondered if it could lead us to a different analogy. Understand, before I talk about this, that I don't think that this is the meaning that Jesus had for the parable. Thinking about the parable, though, I thought about the following.

Imagine for a moment, that you are the man at home in bed with the whole family tucked in. Your neighbor has a visitor, a person needing bread, and he comes to you to supply it. You don't want to be bothered with getting up out of your warm bed to go to the door, but the neighbor is so persistent that you finally do.

What if we are the man in bed and God is the neighbor. He's come to us to move us to provide bread for the needy visitor. He knocks and knocks -- seeks and asks. We try and try to ignore him, so send him on his way, to tell him "NO!" None of that works, and God is highly persistent.

"Feed my sheep."
"Feed my lambs."
"Feed my sheep."

Someone's knockin' on the door
Somebody's ringing the bell....

Images: Sunset behind palm trees, a bee I captured today, and some kind of bird. Anybody know what kind of bird? I would love to know.