All We Like Sheep

 

Scripture: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." — Isaiah 53:6

Devotion:

Sheep are not complicated animals. They do not scheme or plot. They do not rebel with great dramatic flair. They simply... wander. They put their heads down, find a patch of grass that looks good, and drift. One step at a time, one distraction at a time, until they look up and the shepherd is nowhere in sight.

Sound familiar?

Isaiah does not say some of us have gone astray. He does not carve out exceptions for the especially devout or the theologically trained. All we like sheep—every one. The word is total. The scope is universal. There is not a person who has ever lived — apart from one — who has not turned to his own way and wandered from God.

And here is what makes that so insidious. We rarely feel like we are wandering. We feel like we are making reasonable choices. Sensible priorities. Understandable compromises. The sheep does not think it is lost. It thinks it has found better grass.

That is exactly how sin works. It does not announce itself. It nudges. It suggests. It offers something that looks perfectly reasonable in the moment. And before long, you are far from where you ought to be, wondering how you got there.

But do not stop at the first half of this verse. That would be a tragedy. Because Isaiah does not leave us standing in the field, lost and without hope. He pivots to something staggering.

The LORD laid on him the iniquity of us all.

All that wandering. All that turning to our own way. All the accumulated weight of every foolish choice, every willful rebellion, every quiet drift away from God — he laid it on his Son. Jesus did not merely sympathize with our lostness. He bore it. He took the full weight of where our wandering deserved to take us, so that we could be brought home.

This is the gospel in one verse. We strayed. He was struck. We were the ones who turned away, and he was the one who paid for it.

So what do we do with this? We stop pretending we have it together. We stop trusting our own sense of direction. We keep our eyes on the Shepherd — in his Word, in prayer, in the fellowship of his people — because the moment we stop looking at him, we start drifting toward something else.

You are a sheep. That is not an insult. It is an invitation to stay close to the one who laid down his life to bring you home.

Stay close.

Prayer:

Lord Jesus, we confess we are prone to wander. Thank you that you did not leave us to our own way. Keep our eyes fixed on you today. When we drift, draw us back. You are our Shepherd, and we are yours. Amen.