Sheep are smelly and dirty – You gotta love ’em

During last year’s Christmas program, our kids sang about smelly, dirty sheep. That’s what they are smelly and dirty. Idealized pictures of sheep with snow white wool are works of fiction. Sheep are dirty and smelly. My grand kids sang that and so it must be true. 

So when Jesus tells Peter to “Feed My Sheep” He is asking alot. Shepherds were on the lowest rung of society at the time and place those words were spoken. Shepherding was a dirty, smelly thankless job. 

But Jesus loves His Sheep in that dirty, smelly condition. His arrival was first proclaimed to shepherds alone at night with their dirty, smelly charges. He  surrounded himself with dirty, smelly human sheep. OC describes them as “extraordinarily funny sheep, some bedraggled, dirty sheep, some awkward, butting sheep, some sheep that have gone astray!”

The kids were right; dirty, smelly sheep. 

But when the Holy Spirit comes He unites us with a God who loves those dirty, smelly sheep enough to die for them. He loves them with a love that is “impossible to weary.” And that love is inherited by us, when we become His. 

Do you feel that “impossible to weary” love for the dirty, smelly sheep in your life? If you do, take no credit, it is a gift of God through the Holy Spirit. If you don’t . . . you gotta wonder why.