The shepherd trilogy1/31/2024 ![]() He is with me.’” īeloved brethren, be assured that such a testimony also will be true for you at your last hour. I am seeing into heaven and I can see the Saviour. Next, he shares of another minister he had visited weeks before his death: “His wife and son (also a minister) … told me that two hours before he died, he sat up in bed … and a light came on to his face and he said to his son sitting beside him, ‘Get your mother, bring them all down. I have always been afraid secretly-never admitted it, but I have always secretly been afraid that I wouldn’t get grace to die … Don’t be afraid of death, it’s going to be wonderful.’” I can see my mother and I can see your mother.’ … Then he smiled again and said, ‘Do you think I am seeing into heaven? I think I am.’ He said, ‘I have been on the doorstep for three weeks … and I am going to go over it today.’ Then he said, ‘For … 40 years I have prayed for grace to die like a Christian. It’s a very beautiful place, and I can see people and I know a lot of them. (I had noticed a strange light in his face as soon as I went into his room.) … ‘I cannot see that now at all … I’m looking out of the window and it’s as if I was looking into an orchard. “He was very weak, but he looked at me and said … ‘What do you see out of the window, Douglas?’ So I looked and told him, ‘Well, I see the sheep just beginning to come down.’ … He said, ‘It’s strange, you know’-and a smile came over his face. First, the morning of his own father’s death: MacMillan offers two touching stories that bear such testimony. ![]() ![]() When McNeill’s friend recited the first part of Psalm 23:6 in the Scottish Psalter, “Goodness and mercy all my life Shall surely follow me”, the lad “propped up on his elbow, and with a gleam in his eyes, as though a great light were breaking, finished the Psalm: ‘And in God’s house for evermore My dwelling place shall be.’ … he fell back, and … passed away.” One day, he laid down to die in a room alone and unresponsive. John McNeill tells of a young boy who casually attended Sabbath school. Verse four proclaims: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. And while the Psalm is guaranteeing God’s guidance through this life, it especially points to His sure shepherding through death into the next life. Psalm 23:6 promises such assurance: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever. For as MacMillan reminds us, “A life that is being led by Jesus and is following Jesus has not only direction but destination.” And He will always take you through everything focusing on the Celestial City. You have never gone through anything without Jesus. Douglas MacMillan’s professor taught: “One is the psalm of the cross, the next is the psalm of the crook, and the third is the psalm of the crown.” Notice that just before and after Psalm 23 are the prophesies of Jesus dying as the Lamb of God and ascending into heaven as the eternal high priest. The Lord Jesus came to earth to personally guide you into heaven through His death, resurrection, and ascension. To get the sense of sensing Christ’s constant nearness, note that verse one begins more literally, "The Lord is the one shepherding me.” Psalm 23 shows that Christians can comfort themselves with assurance of perseverance due to God’s ever-present, personal care while Jesus, “that great Shepherd of the sheep,” leads them by the hand through this life into the next. They will walk along this way almost as though it were ‘hand-in-hand’.” In his book, A Shepherd Looks at the 23rd Psalm, Phillip Keller shares that, “Sometimes … a shepherd will actually hold his staff against the side of some sheep that is a special pet or favourite, simply so that they ‘are in touch’.
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