The Flock of God

When sheep hear the familiar sound of their shepherd’s voice, they draw nearer to him and to one another. Today, listen as Sinclair Ferguson reflects on the beautiful pastoral imagery of the church as the flock of God.

This week on Things Unseen, we’re talking about the church. And yesterday I mentioned the composer Mussorgsky’s composition, Pictures at an Exhibition, and suggested this may be a good metaphor for reading the New Testament and looking one by one at some of the pictures it gives us of the church, to help us understand what it means to belong to a specifically Christian community. And we saw yesterday that the church is the body of Christ. The New Testament also tells us that the church is the flock of God.

And that’s a very much–loved picture, isn’t it? And I suspect it has a stronger emotional pull on us than body. Perhaps that’s more true of people who live in rural areas like much of my home country of Scotland, where you should drive through the fields you see filled with sheep, and it’s amazing to me to see how much time they spend eating. That’s a very interesting thing when we think about the metaphor of a flock for the church.

Or maybe we love the picture of the church as a flock because we are familiar with some of the great passages in the Scriptures. We perhaps love to sing the hundredth Psalm:

All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.

We are his flock, he doth us feed, And for his sheep he doth us take.

Or perhaps most of all, “The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want.” Or maybe the seventy-seventh Psalm, written by the melancholic Asaph, who strengthens his soul in God with the wonderful words that reassure him that the God of Israel’s past will be the God of Israel’s present, and the God of his present: “You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron” (v. 20). The thought obviously is this: if God can lead the giant flock of the exodus people and take them right through the desert and provide for them, then He can surely do the same for us and for me as an individual.

So, this picture of the church as a flock comes straight out of the Old Testament, but even more significantly, it also comes straight from the lips of the Lord Jesus. He said, “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11). We are His flock. I sometimes whimsically wonder if any of the Bethlehem shepherds who visited Jesus the night He was born brought any of their favorite sheep with them, or maybe a sheep that needed specially looked after. And I wonder if Mary ever told Jesus afterwards, “You know, You were surrounded by sheep the very day You come out of my womb, and You’ve been surrounded by sheep ever since.”

The great thing about the Good Shepherd is that He knows the needs of the whole flock. He knows each and all of His sheep by name and He calls us by name. It’s one of the signs that we really belong to the church, that we really are Jesus’ sheep, that we’ve heard His voice in the gospel and have begun to follow Him.

And here’s something else: when the sheep respond to the Shepherd’s voice, they inevitably not only come nearer to Him, they come nearer to each other as well. We all have one and the same loving Shepherd. We belong together only because He has called us together. And although we may not have common interests in life, we have heard the same voice. We recognize the same need for the same Shepherd to guard us, and we know that we have one Shepherd who will feed us and lead us. It’s the fact that we all depend on Him that makes us sensitive to and understanding of each other. And as we do that, we begin to know how the Lord Jesus will bless us both individually and especially together.

But this picture of the church as a flock also reminds us that like sheep, we are prone to wander. And it’s very easy for us to be critical and judgmental when we see a fellow believer wander off, isn’t it? There’s the tittle-tattle, and the gossip, and yes, the criticism. And we Christians can say some fairly ghastly things about our fellow believers’ failures. But the thing about the Good Shepherd is that He goes after His sheep, and He brings the wandering ones home, and we need to learn to do that as well. Of course, it’s also clear in the Gospels that the Lord Jesus recognized there are false sheep, wolves in sheep’s clothing, and He treated them accordingly. But it’s amazing the lengths He said He would go to make sure that none of His true sheep would ever be lost—and what that cost Him!

I often think of the words of the old song based on Jesus’ parable that tells us that when the Good Shepherd went out to find His lost sheep, that “none of the ransomed ever knew how deep were the waters He crossed; nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed thro’ ere He found the sheep that was lost. Out in the desert He had its cry—sick and helpless and ready to die.”

You know, when you think about the church as a flock, a flock that’s made up of sheep like that, every single one of us needing to be found by the Good Shepherd, I think we begin to see and to treat our fellow members in a very different and a much more loving way. So reflect on that today. The Lord is not only your Shepherd, He’s the Shepherd of the whole church. He’s the Shepherd of your church, and He’s the shepherd of everybody in it.