I love watching my sheep give birth.
When I see one in labor, I sink down in the grass and wait. Rarely have they needed my assistance.
As the little lamb slides from warm womb into fallen world, before barely having a chance to seize her first breath of life, mama ewe begins her rigorous task of cleaning from nose to tail, freeing the small body from all dewy remains of the ruptured fluid sac. A newborn lamb will attempt to stand even under the pressure of her mother's dutiful licking and scrubbing, often plopping right back down to the ground upon a pair of wet, wobbly legs.
This miracle of new life never gets old to me.
"Nursing?"
Shivering and shaking, the damp baby is finally, for the time being, liberated from her mother's incessant tongue bath and encouraged by the gentle nudge of her nose on the hind parts to find the udder so she can begin to consume the nutrient rich colostrum and milk.
She awkwardly lunges and jabs forward with her small mouth wide open not unlike a baby bird in the nest gaping wide in hopes of a fresh worm. Only the lamb must be led to the goodness.
Searching blindly for something she's never experienced, but instinctively knows must exist because of the longing of hunger and thirst inside of her, the little lamb is propelled out of this deep need not to give up and to keep searching. I can always tell the second the lamb latches because that small tail starts wagging for all its worth while her head plummets the milk bag like a prize fighter in a boxing ring.
Her satisfaction and yearning and hope have all been filled. Nothing else would do.
And life begins to trickle down. The new little creature is now fully alive.
"Latched," I answer.
Weeks later the lamb stretches out in the sun with the other new members of the flock while their elders graze in the grassy fields. When she encounters those hunger pangs again or hears her mother's distinctive baa, she runs now on a pair of strong, solid legs to the life-giving meal.
She's transforming into a beautiful ewe.
Lambs don't look at the milk under a microscope. They understand in an animal sort of way that they need to intake the substance not only for survival but contentment.
You can certainly do your historical research and your theological homework. Read the skeptics. Don't shy away from the opposition. I did all this, but honestly, that's not why I believe the Bible is the only pure milk for an abundant life.
It was the Living Water that led me to the milk, the Living Water that literally is the milk and the meat. One and the same. ( John 1:1-5 )
Only then did the scalpel, the surgery, the healing, and the transformation begin.
To me it is so sad that in our country entire denominations disregard the Bible as being fully true.
In some cases, it is dismissed as a myth. In other churches, it is treated like a good book with some self-help strategies, sermons taught by a man named Jesus who was a good teacher, prophet, and rabbi, as they throw away those terribly offensive parts that do not apply to us modern people in our advanced civilization with our flimsy riposte to the theory of everything.
Only Jesus never claimed to be a good teacher, prophet, or rabbi. He claimed to be God himself. The Living Water.
Respectfully, I disagree with these churches. In removing the Bible or parts of the Bible, ( even though if one part isn't trustworthy to be divine then none of it can be trustworthy to be divine ), or saying the Bible is just a legend ( C.S. Lewis says it reads nothing like a legend ) or entirely metaphorical, then we have just stripped the Bible of its power. If we remove the doctrines of Christ: the doctrine of sin, the validity of the Bible, the virgin birth, the miracles, the atonement of Christ, his resurrection and second coming, as so many modern, progressive, mainline churches have done beginning at the turn of the twentieth century until now, what is left?
What hope do we have to offer the world?
"The sacraments, baptism and hymns," some say. Those are wonderful parts of the Christian faith, but without the underpinning of the doctrines of Christ in the Scriptures, these sacred traditions are entirely pointless. They are symbolic, put in place to be shared together as the Church lest we ever forget what Jesus Christ did for us at Calvary, serving our death sentence and breaking the power of sin over us, gifting us grace upon grace and mercy unending, uniting us back to our Father. "Praise God from whom all blessings flow!" Amen!
Without Christ's atoning work, these churches have nothing different to offer the hurting and the lost apart from what the world is already dishing up on a secular platter. The Apostle Paul strove to remind the Corinthians why Christ did not send him to baptize, but to preach the Gospel - "lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power." ( 1 Corinthians 1:17 ) We know that Paul did baptize a few new believers, but his emphasis is clearly on the atoning work of Jesus.
It's like continuously printing the American paper dollar over and over without the gold in some vault somewhere like Fort Knox to back it up. It's completely worthless, powerless.
One only has to be human to know we are needy creatures, born empty, searching for meaning, identity, satisfaction, morals, a way through suffering, justice, and hope. We grope blindly through life latching onto anything and everything to fill those longings. Spouses, children, romance, careers, addictions, talents, wealth, charities, prestige, homes, vacations, appearance, and the list goes on, etc and etc...
I've found Christianity and the biblical doctrines of Jesus Christ to fill every one of these empty spaces in my heart. Something can not be true simply because we would like it to be true, but if it quenches the yearnings inside of us and helps us answer the big questions of life, I'd say that's a gigantic clue. We should stay on that scent like a tenacious blood hound.
No other place in Scripture is the finding of this treasure so beautifully portrayed than in John 4 when Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well. She has had five husbands and the one she is now with is not her husband. Like everyone she is staring hungrily and hopelessly into the deep abyss of her soul, attempting to fill the vacuum with all the world says will stop the pain.
"...the well is deep," she tells Jesus.
And so it is.
He responds, "...who ever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
And she latched.
She found the milk.
She was never the same, and here we are today still reading and glorying in her wonderful testimony.
Evangelicals are not off of the hook. We may cling to the doctrines of scripture, but yes, we have work to do ourselves. It is vital to never turn away from the mirror and go our merry way. It's so interesting to me that in the chapter before this account, Jesus is conversing with the Pharisee, Nicodemus, the teacher of the law who has snuck out to meet with Jesus at night. Nicodemus is as empty and needy as the Samaritan woman, but he must keep up appearances. Evangelicals are tempted with becoming modern day Pharisees, and at times we have steered disastrously off track. This has hurt our witness terribly.
But Jesus promises that he is building his church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. We are his living stones, rough-cut and imperfect. And he will smooth us and shape us, and is more than capable and willing to administer his life-giving water to all the thirsty who will come.
To all those who will latch.
Come and be filled. 💜
