The Gap in the Fence

A sheep that gets out by accident is one kind of morning. A sheep that has found the gap and been through it four times is a different animal, and any man who has run stock will tell you so.

The accidental one is a wire problem. Fix the wire, done, and she goes back to being one of the flock and nobody thinks about her again.

The other one has a mind about it. She has located that spot, and she knows what she is doing, and when you bring her back she stands there looking at you with that expression, and by the following Tuesday she is out again and the whole flock is learning it from her. That is not a wire problem. Everybody knows it is not a wire problem, and the men leaning on the gate will say so.

Ross has thought about that difference for two years, at four in the morning, when he is not really thinking about sheep at all.

Because what happened to him in the spring before last was not a drift. That is the thing he cannot get round and the thing he would not let anybody get round on his behalf. He did not fall into it, he did not get taken by surprise, and he was not worn down over months by circumstances he could put in front of you as an explanation.

He found the gap. He knew exactly where it was. He went and stood by it for a while first, in the way a man does, and then he went through it, and he knew what he was doing and he did it anyway.

And what he has believed ever since is not that God is angry. It is that the promises are written for the drifters. That there is real provision made for people who wander, because wandering is what sheep do and God knows it, and that a man who goes deliberately has stepped outside the class of animal the promise was written about.

If you did it on purpose, then this is your article and I am not going to soften what you did in order to comfort you, because you would not have it. But I want you to read the verse and look for the clause you think is in there.

Find the clause about the manner of leaving

And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.John 10:28

Read the whole sentence for the clause Ross assumes is in it. The one that says provided they only wandered. The one that says unless they went deliberately.

It is not there. There is no clause in that sentence about the manner of the leaving. There is a gift given, a promise that they shall never perish, and a statement about a hand.

And notice where the security is located. It is not in the sheep's intentions, which is exactly what Ross has been examining for two years. It is in the hand.

You are in a hand, and it is already His grip and not your intentions holding you there, and the verse has no clause anywhere in it about how you left. I am not going easy on a man who would spot it. It is written in John 10:28, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a promise about a hand and lays it on a man at four in the morning who knows exactly what he did.

Deliberate is a real category, and it is not the category that decides this

Now let me be honest with him, because he has earned it.

Deliberate is a real thing. Scripture takes it seriously and so does every man who has ever run stock, and I am not going to tell Ross that it makes no difference whether a man drifts or aims. It makes a difference to the damage, to the repentance, to what has to be rebuilt, and to what he will have to be careful about for the rest of his life. That is all true and it stays true.

What it does not do is change whose hand he is in.

Look at the flock in that chapter. Jesus is talking about sheep who wander and sheep who are stupid and sheep who are stubborn, because there is no other kind, and He does not sort them into two grades of promise. He says: they are Mine, and no one takes them out of My hand, and the reason given, two verses later, is that His Father is greater than all.

You are held by a grip that never once depended on the class of animal you turned out to be, and it is already stronger than everything. Scripture says my Father which gave them me is greater than all, and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand (John 10:29), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a two-handed promise hold a man who went on purpose.

What to do with a man who knows where the gap is

And here is the practical part, because a real shepherd would not stop at reassurance.

You do not leave a sheep like that alone. You mend the fence, obviously, but you also watch her, and you move her, and sometimes you put her in a different field for a season, and none of that is punishment. It is somebody who intends to keep her.

Ross has been treating his own knowledge of the gap as evidence against himself. It is not. It is information for a man who is going to spend the rest of his life a hundred yards further away from that spot than he used to walk, and that is not shame, that is husbandry.

You are being kept by someone who mends fences and moves animals, and the keeping is already going on around you. It is written that He gives them eternal life and they shall never perish, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the moving and the mending in a man who now knows where his own gap is.