sheep Archives : Life with the King

May 21, 2026May 21, 2026

Grace for Sleep

How much does sleep impact your day-to-day life? Do you have to be intentional to get healthy sleep? For the majority of people living in Western culture, sleep is often talked about like a luxury, a commodity, or something to be envied. Sleep is a gift God gives (Psalm 127:2). It’s also been a huge struggle for me, as I wrote in Falling Awake. But today, I want to write a bit more about physical, literal sleep.

Have you ever experienced your eyes becoming heavy? All of a sudden, you can lose track of the conversation or tv show or song or task at hand, and just feel powerless to keep from falling asleep. As someone who has experienced insomnia for much of my life, this level of being tired is usually a welcomed state of being. However, there are times when being asleep is more than a little embarrassing, like with Peter, James, and John in the Garden of Gethsemane.

In both the Gospel of Matthew and Mark, we find the story of Jesus’ disciplines falling asleep in Gethsemane, after Jesus had told them to watch while He prayed: “And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, ‘So, could you not watch with me one hour?Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ Again, for the second time, he went away and prayed, ‘My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.’ And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. So, leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words again.Then he came to the disciples and said to them, ‘Sleep and take your rest later on. See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners‘” (Matthew 26:40-45). Jesus, even on the night He was being chased down for arrest, showed compassionate, loving grace toward the weakness of the flesh in his best friends.

He knew their spirits were willing to keep watch and pray, and their hearts were in the right place. However, their physical bodies could not keep up with their hearts and they, seemingly beyond their control, in weakness, “took their rest.” Paul wrote, “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). When we are weak and we surrender our weakness to Christ Jesus, in His great mystery He somehow becomes our strength.

In our weakness, we can surrender to be led by God, as a sheep to our Good Shepherd. The prophet Ezekiel used this analogy, “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice” (Ezekiel 34:16). Everything provided for the sheep is from their Shepherd.

It follows that rest and sleep are the gifts of God for us. Rest is built into the very Creation, darkness of night being a daily time for rest, and the slower seasons of plant productivity being a longer time for rest taken by the earth. In a culture of overwork and little sleep, it’s important to remember that the grace of God can be demonstrated to us by rest and sleep. If we aren’t paying attention, we may miss this facet of His grace for us.

I am not saying that trying to stay awake is always disobedience; it also can imply a great God-fearing desire or effort on the part of a person. King David said, “I will not enter my house or get into my bed, I will not give sleep to my eyes or slumber to my eyelids, until I find a place for the Lord, a dwelling place for the Mighty One of Jacob” (Psalm 132:3-5). When our work is for the Lord and we’re within His will and purpose for us, He will give us the strength we need to stay awake to accomplish it if necessary. But those periods require discernment. Those periods are often only for a season. Rest is a need, and a gift God wants to give us as our trustworthy Shepherd; resting in Him, we experience His peace.

God the Father doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t need to! It is because of His work that we can rest: “He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand.” (Psalm 121:3-5). That God is our keeper is such Good News! God shows us grace in every way, and one of them is to give us the assurance and rest of His strong Presence in our weakness.

I had a minor Peter, James, and John moment just this week. I fell asleep when I really needed to stay awake, and a domino effect of consequences followed. At first, I was upset with myself, but I soon realized God knew my heart, just like He knew that of His disciples’ that night in the Garden. He had already forgiven my weakness. I just needed to thank God for His understanding and let go to take the next step with Him.

While God made us all fearfully and wonderfully (Psalm 139:14), Jesus knew our weakness firsthand. Not only was He fully human, He saw how his best (human) friends couldn’t stay awake with Him. He knew then and knows now, we are jars of clay (2 Corinthians 4:17), not steel. “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:13-14). Even in Jesus’ most difficult moment of anguish in His life to that moment in the Garden of Gethsemane, He showed incredible grace for the fragility of our human flesh, and continues to show us His amazing grace for our weaknesses. Can I get an amen?

If you ever feel reluctant to give yourself grace like me, remember in Jesus’ grace, you are already forgiven. He knows you are human, and He knows your heart. Leave unforgiveness at the cross, and find rest in His presence and peace today.

“The Lord bless you and keep you;the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace” (Numbers 6:24-26).

Thank you for spending some of your time journeying with me. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Life with the King, and like & follow the Facebook page; it truly helps me continue writing this blog. Grace and peace.

May 14, 2026May 14, 2026

Obedience to God’s Voice

I’ve been trying to hone in on hearing from God. I’m asking Him questions like, “What do You want me to do in the moment? Should I take a walk or should I read? Should I work or rest? Should I keep quiet or speak up?” After a lifetime of doing what I wanted on my own strength, and regretting most of those decisions, asking God before acting is both a necessity and big challenge. Doing things differently than I’ve always done them is never easy, but it’s worth the struggle, even though I mess up all the time. Just today, I realized I’d done the opposite of what I was supposed to, after making the wrong choice. It ended up causing consequences that set my day back. I realized in hindsight that my decision was disobedient to God’s will for me in that moment. He had told me what to do, I knew in my spirit what it was, but I didn’t act on it. Instead, I thought about it more, and waited, and slipped right into disobedience.

Obedience has a bad reputation in Western culture. We hear constant messages implying that we must listen, not to God or anyone else, but to ourselves; messages like: be a leader not a follower, be yourself, march to the beat of your own drum, do your own thing, live by your own truth. Not all of the sentiment is wrong or bad. But what the culture in this world fails to realize is that listening to our own hearts without the authority of Jesus (who also holds our True identity) is dangerous, because our hearts are prone to be sinful. Our hearts often simply want what they want, and rarely actually align with Jesus without being submitted to His authority. Our hearts, when unchecked, will eventually lead us into sin, every time. Sin leads to death and destruction (Romans 6:16). The obedience of our hearts to God’s will for us through Jesus is the only way to life and fruitfulness (John 3:16, John 10:9, Acts 4:11-12). Living in obedience to God is by far the best life possible for us.

Human beings were designed to obey God, but in the sinfulness of the heart, that obedience can be replaced by idolatry so that we obey, or are subject to the authority of, a myriad of other things. However, it is God’s authority that we are made to live and thrive under. When God told Moses to appoint Joshua as his successor to lead the people into the Promised Land, He spoke of the role of authority in the people’s obedience: “You shall invest him with some of your authority, that all the congregation of the people of Israel may obey” (Numbers 27:20). Moses had authority to command the people only because it was specifically given to him by God to lead them. The very first thing recorded in Scripture that God said to man was in the form of a command, “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’” (Genesis 2:16-17). God’s authority over man is clear from Scripture, as the proper order. Messaging from the world has tried to twist this order, and nudge us all into playing God in our own hearts and lives, to do what we want to do, to live solely under our own authority.

Obeying God simply out of love and respect for Him and His loving, gracious character is where I want to be, and I have faith that we all can reach that place in our relationship with God at any time. But in my fallenness, I recognize that things can and do go wrong. When they do, it points us to Jesus, who is the solution to every single wrong thing in our lives.

In some seasons of following Jesus, it can be hard to hear God’s Voice. In my experience, I can hear His Voice clearest when I am living in obedience to what He is telling me to do. When we hear His Voice directly in our spirits, it can seem easy to obey. As I learned again just today, it’s not always as easy as it sounds. But He always gives grace. Jesus spoke about his followers listening to His Voice, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:14-16). Sheep know and listen to their shepherd. To live in obedience to Jesus, our Shepherd’s, Voice, we must lay down our lives daily (Luke 9:23), including our hearts’ self-centered desires. He graciously laid His life down for us first; His Voice is trustworthy!

It is in obedience to God that we may enjoy peace; “He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (Psalm 23:1-3). When we allow God to determine our actions, we are able to represent Him well, and be available to minister to others. He has given us His name, as we talked about last week in Called By Your Name, and He longs to guide us in the Way, living in obedience to Him.

May we all seek God and know His Voice, to guide us in all obedience, every day, every moment, all for His glory.

Amen.

“For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19).

“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart,” (1 Peter 1:22).

“Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine;” (Exodus 19:5).

October 9, 2025October 9, 2025

I Lack Nothing

There is nothing better than a fresh revelation of God’s love. It makes me feel like I’m invincible, like I’m free from the limitations of being a human in time, and like the things life throws at me that usually bring me down or make me spiral now just make me laugh at how much I was once affected by them. That’s what happened for me last weekend during a silent retreat.

I wrote about the practice of silence in my recent post, TSD: Silence. While I spent some of the time on the retreat in silence with others, the most impactful time for me was actually a time of revelation of God’s love through Scripture. I’ve studied Psalm 23 many times over the years and it amazes me how it continues to reveal new things. While it is such a short passage with only six verses, like all Scripture, it still lives, breathes, and speaks profoundly in the present moment. Verse one reads, “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.” (NIV)

“I lack nothing” is such a foreign phrase in society. We’re constantly reminded with ads and inflation just how much we (allegedly) lack on every level: health, experiences, and possessions. To say “I lack nothing” is a bold statement, and even something that could be taken as delusional or offensive by the world’s standards. David likely wrote this statement while in the wilderness fleeing from the danger of being killed. It begs the question, what standard is being used to confidently say something so outrageous?

Upon further reflection, I noticed I’d let this bold phrase overshadow what came before it, “The Lord is my shepherd.” What stood out to me was the possessive word, “my,” and that the sheep (narrator) claims the shepherd as his, rather than the shepherd claiming the sheep. If God is our shepherd, then we truly lack nothing of eternal value. Jesus says in Matthew 13:44, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” Living by God’s direction and influence is better than having all the things the world measures our value by; it is worth everything. True wealth is belonging to God and being led by Him as our Good Shepherd.

But it goes further and deeper, still. Not only can we claim God as ours as David did in Psalm 23, but God also calls us His. Psalm 23 implies that we belong with and to God, assuring a place in His own house for us (verse 6). Other Scriptures speak of this profound, protectively possessive love: “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). We are never too far gone for God; He formed our bodies and souls, and there is nothing that can keep His love from us (Romans 8:38-39). During my retreat time, the identity and inheritance God gave not just David or Israel, but to me (and to you) as well became so glaringly clear where things had felt muddled and a bit hazy before.

Perhaps the most beautiful and thought-provoking passage of God’s love for me and you is, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; . . .” (Song of Songs 6:3). In line with the possessive love expressed in other Scriptures, not only is God’s love protective and fatherly, it also speaks of partnership. After all, Jesus is coming for His bride. That is where all of our stories are headed. Jesus has already sacrificed His life out of love for her, the church, of which you and me can choose to be a part.

We are not merely slaves or servants of God, but He graciously invites us to also be partners with Him in the Kingdom. He desires to work with us. He subjects Himself to us, telling us in Scripture that He is ours, even though we are the ones who don’t even deserve to be His lowest servants. Where can love like this be found on earth other than Jesus? There is real Life with the King.

Psalm 23 verse 6 says, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” We can have confidence of living in the shepherd’s own house, not as a slave or servant, but as the beloved of God, the church, belonging to God’s own family. What a privilege is offered to us to be adopted as His family, “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,” (John 1:12). God has a place for His children in His house forever! He invites us to this, because whether we recognize it or not, He is ours and we are His. What better news could there be? What else could we need in light of eternity? In the care of our shepherd, we truly lack nothing. Amen.

“And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying,

‘To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!‘” (Revelation 5:13)

August 21, 2025August 21, 2025

Characteristics of God: The Goodness of God

Like the worship song implies, God can and should be praised all day long for His goodness. But do we? I fall short time after time to give God the praise and worship I know He is worthy to receive. I ignore Him, go my own way, and simply disobey far more often than I’d like to admit. My own lack of surrender is heavy on my heart today. I have touched on the topic of goodness in previous posts such as Human Goodness, and The Profound Sufficiency of Christ, but today, God’s goodness is front and center.

Life with God does not mean we will feel happy all the time. It involves feeling the pain of life when God feels far away, when prayers feel blocked, or when the weight of conviction feels suffocating. It’s all part of it. Life with God is not easy. Because of God’s goodness, however, we can still take heart! “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord” (Psalm 27:13-14).

In Psalm 23, David pours out a song to God that ends with the promise of God’s goodness: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23:6). Goodness is what comes of walking with God like a sheep with their shepherd. If we’re the sheep, we just don’t do so well when separated from our shepherd. We need God, and when we walk with Him through our lives, we experience His goodness.

Goodness is a characteristic of God. God is the embodiment of goodness; Scripture reveals that throughout history, He seeks and works things out for the best for everyone. He is kind to us when we have been unkind, merciful to us when we haven’t shown mercy, and faithful to us when we haven’t been faithful in our devotion to Him, all because He is so incredibly, miraculously, unfathomably good! He gives us His abundant goodness because that is who He is–loving and generous and faithful to give us many chances to turn to Him and come into agreement with the way He made us and the purpose for His creation. His best for us is realized when we choose Him as our Shepherd. In His great goodness, He wants the best for us. He wants us to be His because being under His care is where we thrive best.

On the days we feel heavy with the weight of our human limitations, it’s often because we’re paying too much attention to ourselves, instead of God. What would happen if we focused on Jesus instead? What good would it do our hearts to imagine Jesus sitting next to us, no words needed, just His eyes looking into ours with His loving goodness, without any condemnation (Romans 8:1)?

He does not want us to sit long in the heaviness of our own shortcomings. He invites us to simply and humbly accept that He paid for it on the cross. What profound goodness is found in this! His blood is sufficient, and our debt is paid. In these days when I glimpse the depths I’ve been saved from, I appreciate His goodness all the more fully and deeply. He is the only place we find refuge from our sin. “But my eyes are toward you, O God, my Lord; in you I seek refuge; leave me not defenseless!” (Psalm 141:8) What a good Father God is, that He is a place of refuge from all the heaviness, shame, and sin that would seek to destroy us.

May we fix our eyes on His goodness, and may we be open to receive the great goodness of God in our lives and hearts today. Amen.

“I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13).

“For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all“(Romans 11:32).

“What shall I return to the Lord for all his goodness to me?” (Psalm 116:12).

Thank you for spending some of your time journeying with me. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe and like & follow the Facebook page; it truly helps me to continue writing about Life with the King. Grace and peace.