ShepherdLeader.com

I’ve seen a lamb butchered on a mission trip to Peru. We are planting a church up in the Andes mountains. We were there visiting a family preparing for a death feast – the feast held eight days after the death of a family member.

We came up the path to find the carcass being dismembered and the skin being cut off. The entrails were being washed in a bucket in the middle of a corral. There were flies everywhere. The family sat around and watched. None of them winced like we did.

It made me think about how sanitary life is here in America. This wasn’t my local grocery store deli case. This was real and visceral. This was rubbing shoulders with life and death. This was what it would have been like in the time of Jesus. People spoke the language of sacrifice and death. They would have understood at a gut level the blood of the lamb. We don’t.

Perhaps what amazes me most though, is that Jesus would have understood it too. He knew full well what His mission was when He left heaven to become one of us. He understood that He was to be the lamb. That He was to shed His blood. That He would be the sacrifice.

The lamb I saw didn’t know a whole lot better. It laid there barely moving, almost unknowing. Jesus was far more than that. As He said in John 10, Jesus laid down His life for me. He CHOSE to die for me. That’s why I choose to live for Him.

Not only did Jesus know what it meant to be a sacrifice (unlike those of us today who have never seen one), but he knew who would sacrifice him. This stuck me as I read the devotion today: "We rightly say that neither Romans or Jews killed Jesus...we each put the nails in his hands..."

Jesus not only understood and knew the deep pain of becoming human and suffering the death of the cross, but he also knew that each of us would be responsible for it. And yet, he loved us anyway, took the responsibility on himself. Not only was this necessary for our salvation, but it also gives us the supreme example of what it means to lay down our lives for our sheep.

When I was still in the corporate world - before going to seminary - a famous executive was quoted as saying, "If you are not willing to put your job on the line everyday to stand up for what is right, then you are not leadership material in this company." Are we fit pastors if we are not willing to make sacrifices every day for our congregation - even if they are the ones who may turn on us one day?