“Make me know Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths. Lead me in Your truth and teach me, for You are The God of my salvation; for You I wait all the day”Psalm 25:4-5.

 

Psalm 25 

When I was a small child, my family raised two sheep. One was jet black, and the other was pure white. We called the black sheep “Bonnie” and the white sheep “Sugar”. They were beautiful, sweet, friendly and… NOT famous for their thinking skills. But I loved those sheep and as long as we took care of everything for them, they survived and flourished. I never guided sheep on a mountainside journey, but I learned enough about them as a child to be certain that, without a guide, they could never survive.
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“The Lord also will be a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble; and those who know Your name will put their trust in You, for You, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek You” (Psalm 9:9 & 10).

Psalm 9

 

I hired the defensive coordinator of my college football team to come to Missouri to help me run our summer sports camp just after I graduated. I was so young and inexperienced. I knew he could bring some much needed wisdom and discipline to our staff. Coach Utley was the toughest coach I’d ever met, but he was loved by our team for his contagious personality and his caring heart for the players on his defensive front.

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“Oh, give ear, Shepherd of Israel, You who lead Joseph like a flock; You who are enthroned above the cherubim, shine forth” (Psalm 80:1).

 

Psalm 8

 

Through the reverence of your imagination, hit the pause button of your mind and go on a journey with me. Travel to the ancient holy land and ascend to the side of a rugged mountain, halfway between Jerusalem and Jericho in the desolate, arid wilderness of southern Israel. Then, on one of the hillsides, you will notice a small herd of sheep and a faithful shepherd keeping watch over the flock in the late hour of the quite and peaceful night. As the lambs rest faithfully in one of the rare grassy patches of nutrition and comfort, the shepherd looks up into the autumn sky and beholds the magnitude and majesty of the billboard above him.

In the vast expanse of stars, planets and darkness, the shepherd sees the signature of God as the Creator displays His wonder in the giant billboard in the sky.

The shepherd begins to sing in amazement, “Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth Who have displayed your splendor above the heavens! God of wonders beyond our galaxy, You are holy, holy. The universe displays Your majesty, You are holy, holy.”

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“It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).

 

Psalm 6

Born in 1822 on a plantation (a slavery compound in Dorchester County, Maryland), Harriet Tubman will forever be praised as the “conductor” of the underground railroad that emancipated as many as 300 slaves from lives of terror and bondage to a walk of freedom and humanity. As a 12-year-old, Harriet began her sacrificial love of justice when she witnessed a slave driver about to throw a heavy object at a fellow slave. Harriet stepped in the path of the object and intercepted the throw in her skull causing a lifetime of headaches and narcolepsy.

She once said, “You’ll be free or die…I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.”

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“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber” (John 10:1).

 

Psalm 4

 

One cold and rainy night, a dear friend found a two-or-three-day-old fawn lost, and probably dying, in a drainage ditch. My friend knew of my heart for wounded and orphaned animals and came to me with the wet, shivering, helpless spotted doe. I warmed a bottle of goat milk and tried to place it into the terrified baby deer’s mouth. The fawn let out a deafening cry of horror as, drop-by-drop, I forced the healing formula in her system.

Three days later, the little, spotted girl was following me like a puppy dog and downing bottles of life-giving milk like a hungry child. Four months later, I set her free to join the wild herd that lives in the woods near my house.

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