BRING THEM IN

Are you like me in that when you are having your prayer time you think of people you haven’t seen in decades? That’s how it was with me this morning. Second and third cousins, nieces and nephews, neighbors from two states back…

I especially zeroed in on descendants of both sets of my grandparents, some of whom I’ve never met. I wondered, do they know the Lord? Will I see them in Heaven someday? Not that I’m on the committee to decide who goes to Heaven, but I wonder, so I prayed, “Bring them in, Lord.”

Then, as so often happens, the chorus of an old hymn begins to play inside my head: “Bring them in, bring them in, bring them in from the fields of sin…bring the little ones to Jesus.” That made me nervous. Am I judging them for being in “the fields of sin?”

I felt a little better reading in the first verse, “…calling the lambs who’ve gone astray,” which might imply the lambs are part of the family who just took a wrong turn.

The title of the hymn is “Hark! ‘Tis the Shepherd’s Voice.” I told you it was an old hymn. The implication is that the Shepherd is telling us to bring them in.

Hymns are not Scripture, but the third verse, “Out in the desert hear their cry, out on the mountain wild and high; Hark ‘tis the Master speaks to thee: “Go find my lambs where’er they be” lines up very nicely with Matthew 28:19 “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”