Phillip Keller, a former shepherd, writing in his book “A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23.”
“I recall quite clearly how in my first venture with sheep, the question of paying a price of my ewes was so terribly important.
They belonged to me only by virute of the fact that I paid hard cash for them. It was money earned by the blood and sweat and tears drawn from my own body during the desperate grinding years of the Depression.
And when I bought that first small flock, I was buying them literally with my own body which had been laid down with this day in mind.
Because of this, I felt in a special way they were in very truth a part of me and I a part of them.
There was an intimate identity involved which, though not apparent on the surface to the casual observer, nonetheless made those thirty ewes exceedingly precious to me.
But the day I bought them I also realized that this was but the first stage in a long, lasting endeavor in which from then on, I would, as their owner, have to continually lay down my life for them if they were to flourish and prosper…. Christ chooses us, buys us, calls us by name, makes us his own, and delights in caring for us.
It is this last aspect which is really the third reason why we are under obligation to recognize his ownership of us. He literally lays himself out for us continually.”
