Abiding with the Good Shepherd
Guarding Our Inner Life — Step 3: I Will Cooperate... (Surrender)
Jesus "personally carried our sins in his body on the cross so that we can be dead to sin and live for what is right. By his wounds you are healed. Once you were like sheep who wandered away. But now you have turned to your Shepherd, the Guardian of your souls."
— 1 Peter 2:24-25
I have a confession to make: I am not a very good sheep.
A good sheep stays close to the shepherd, trusts the path he chooses, and doesn't wander off toward every interesting smell on the hillside. I, on the other hand, have spent a good portion of my life doing exactly that — wandering. Convincing myself that I knew a better route, that the grass over the next ridge was worth the risk, that I didn't really need anyone leading me anywhere.
That is what sin does. It doesn't usually announce itself as rebellion. It just whispers, "You've got this. You don't need to follow anyone. Do your own thing, in your own way, on your own terms." And like a sheep that drifts one step at a time, I would end up somewhere I never intended to be, wondering how I got so far from safety.
The remarkable thing about the Good Shepherd is that He doesn't write off wandering sheep. He goes after them.
He Never Stops Pursuing
Jesus didn't come to manage sheep who were already behaving themselves. He came looking for the lost ones — the ones who had convinced themselves they didn't need him, the ones tangled in the brush, the ones too tired and too far gone to find their way back on their own. That's the picture in 1 Peter 2:25 . Once you were like sheep who wandered away. Past tense. Because the Shepherd found you.
And He keeps finding us. Even after we've turned back to Him, there are days when the old pull returns — the temptation to handle things our own way, to trust our instincts over His leading, to step just a little outside the fold because we think we can manage it. The Shepherd knows that about us. He pursues us anyway.
Without Him, I don't just struggle — I am completely powerless to find my way back. Jesus made that plain: "Apart from me you can do nothing." ( John 15:5 ) Not very little. Not less than you'd like. Nothing. That is a hard word for someone who spent decades believing that willpower, cleverness, and determination were enough. They weren't. They never are.
The Hardest Word: Cooperate
Step 3 is built around a deceptively simple idea — cooperate. Surrender. Stop fighting the Shepherd and start following Him.
It sounds easy until temptation actually arrives. Because temptation doesn't knock politely and wait to be invited in. It hits at exactly the moment when the fold feels farthest away and going your own direction feels most reasonable. That's when cooperation becomes the hardest thing in the world.
The fold — that place of trust and obedience — is not a place of passivity. It's a place of active, daily choosing. I choose to follow even when I can't see where He's leading. I choose to lay down my own ideas about how to solve my problems, how to manage my pain, how to protect myself. I choose to let my life be hid with Christ in God ( Colossians 3:3 ), which means my plans, my instincts, and my self-reliance all get placed under His authority.
That dying to self is not a one-time event. It's a daily surrender. Some mornings it's easier than others.
The Beauty of the Fold
Here is what I have learned after over thirty years of practicing this imperfectly: the fold is the safest and most powerful place I have ever stood.
Not because nothing hard happens there. Plenty of hard things happen inside the fold. But because when I am there — genuinely trusting, genuinely cooperating — the Good Shepherd wraps His arms around me and gives me strength to do the very thing I could never do on my own. "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." ( Philippians 4:13 ) That verse used to sound like a motivational poster to me. Now it sounds like a lifeline.
The fold is where I stop white-knuckling my sobriety, my relationships, my fears — and start resting in the One who is "the Shepherd and Guardian of my soul." That title means something. A guardian doesn't just point you in a direction and wish you luck. He watches over. He protects. He stays.
I don't always know what the outcome of following Him will look like. That uncertainty used to terrify me. These days, it is slowly becoming the thing I trust most — because I have seen enough of where my own certainty leads.
The Good Shepherd knows the way home. My job is to stay close enough to follow.