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An Unusual looking Lamb 

We live in a village and the field next to our house is too rocky for cattle but, depending on the season, there are sheep, lambs or young rams grazing there. We sometimes take our 3-year old granddaughter for a walk to see the sheep and she always wants to feed them with a handful of grass that she has wripped from the ground. Of course she can never get anywhere near them because sheep are afraid of strangers.
 
The other day she came up with an idea. She said this to my wife. “Nan, if I wore my princess lamb onesie and went and lay down in the field very quietly, the sheep wouldn’t be scared and they would come up to me and I could feed them.”
 
This brought to my mind the way the book of Philippians in the bible describes Jesus. It reads that “He [Christ] had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! … He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion.”
 
Perhaps my granddaughter’s idea is similar to God’s thinking. What a friend we have in Jesus – willing to lay aside everything and become one of us in order to meet us wherever we are at and then to die in our place on the cross.


John Mainwaring