A year ago, January 2025, was a bitter cold and difficult month for us on our little homestead. Besides the polar vortices and the negative temperatures, we had an older lamb get very sick and two ewes give birth. During this time, I developed bronchitis and coughed like a barking dog.
However, it doesn’t matter if you are sick; the animals still need to be cared for.
With the help of a Facebook friend, April Pope, my older lamb got better quickly. April has a lot of experience and knowledge with most livestock and has helped me more than once when I didn’t know what was wrong with one of my sheep or lambs.
But going back and forth to the barn on our slippery driveway and sidewalk was not the adventure I needed or wanted. One of our ewes had rejected her lamb after it was born. So, either my husband or I carried it back and forth from the house to the barn so her mother could feed her (even though she didn’t want to).
We have two German shepherds who walked with us on every trip to the barn and back.
Mike laughs when he sees me walking around the yard or up and down the driveway because I have a GSD on either side of me. He always says, “Someone would have to be crazy to mess with you with those dogs beside you.” Mia is always on my right and Sophie on my left.
Mia’s my velcro dog.
On one of our trips to the barn, my husband had the little lamb in his arms, carrying her back to the warmth of our house. I was not far behind him with the dogs when I slipped on the ice and started falling forward.
Mia moved her strong ninety-pound body in front of me, catching me within half a second. I never hit the ground. As I got my legs under me using her body to stand up, I marveled at her speed and ability to break my fall.
See, the reason Mia could help me when she did was that she walked so close to me and kept her eyes on me.
Scripture often recounts people who walked with the Lord as well as reminding us to walk with Him:
Micah 6:8 tells us to “walk humbly with the Lord.”
Genesis tells us both Enoch and Noah walked with the Lord.
Isaiah 30:21, “And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.”
Galatians 5:25: “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.”
Psalm 128:1: “Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in obedience to him.”
I learned an important lesson from Mia for my relationship with the Lord. Stay close to His side, keep my eyes on Him, go where He goes– turning left or right as He does, and stopping to rest when He does.
When I am that close to Him, He catches me when I fall. I can lean on Him to stand when my feet give out beneath me. And I need not fear because He is right there, “closer than a brother.”
We are His sheep, and He is our Good Shepherd. He carries us when we are weak, neglected, sick, or scared. And He protects us.
Yeshua loves us. He looks at us with love, not with condemnation or remorse.
Sophie has the biggest and most affectionate brown eyes. When she looks at us, we know she adores us. One time, I asked the Lord how He sees me. He responded with, “I look at you the way Sophie looks at you.” I love how He uses my dogs to teach me about His love and protection.
My husband and I are going through a nasty lawsuit with a renter who is suing us. It was a hard year, and it isn’t over yet. But all these moments that Adonai has given us as lessons from our homestead—dogs and sheep—sustain us and encourage us to keep moving forward and wait on Him to get us through our trials and tribulations. He is faithful, and we can trust in that faithfulness.
The moment we think we do, we are guilty of pride and arrogance. Pride is sin.
The Lord made it clear:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Is. 55:8-9.
It is impossible for us to understand the thoughts and ways of the Lord.
Yet we fight and argue over what we think our limited understanding of the Bible says God is going to do and how it all plays out. We must continually ask for revelation from the Holy Spirit as we study God’s Word for ourselves.
How often do we ask the Lord to correct any of our bad theology and the lies we have believed?
As humans, we all have some flawed theology, and are even deceived in some areas. There are things we know, things we are completely wrong about, and things we know nothing about. Only God knows it all. It’s not what we think is true; it’s what He says is truth.
The Gospel of Yeshua
They say you can’t take it with you…but there is something we can take with us.
People.
We can take our spouses, kids, sisters, brothers, neighbors, friends, co-workers, and people we don’t know yet to Heaven with us.
Instead, we fight and argue over:
The shape of the Earth,
The true name of the Messiah and the Father and how to spell it and say it
Whether annihilation awaits the non-believers or eternal punishment,
End-time doctrine—pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, or no rapture…
The timing of the resurrection,
KJV vs. ESV, NIV, NASB….
None of those things are the Gospel of Christ. But we argue over them like they save us.
Restitution of All Things
We are called to share and teach the Gospel by first introducing them to Jesus so they can have eternal life through His death and resurrection. Jesus shed His blood so we can have abundant life. He died because the blood of perfect animals wasn’t enough to restore all of humanity and the universe. The Blood is why God will make a New Heaven and a New Earth. That is part of the Gospel and our goal as believers is to live with the Father forever on His New Earth, which is Heaven. God will restore all things to their original state before sin.
The Gospel is the restitution of ALL things. That’s the Good News—the news we should flood social media with and talk about.
When my son was seven or eight, he asked if a particular family member loved Jesus. We said, “No, he doesn’t believe in Jesus.” He burst into tears. He wept over this family member possibly not going to Heaven one day.
It convicted me. How often we weep and pray over those who may not go to Heaven with us?
Which is better, everlasting punishment in the Lake of Fire or an actual second death that removes them from the universe forever? Are we really arguing over which way is best for God to punish the ones we love and will never see again unless their hearts change?
Does He Know You?
Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-23 ESV.
These verses should concern us all. Are we doing the will of the Father? It is not enough to say, “I know Jesus.” He. Must. Know. Us.
Are we walking so close to Him that we turn right or left when He does? Or stop and rest when He does? Is His Word something we study and love? Do we obey Him? Do we hear His voice?
The prince of this world wants us to think way too highly of ourselves. He wants us to be unteachable, rude, and full of head knowledge instead of heart knowledge. His goal is to divide us by pitting us against one another. We can have different opinions about scripture; let’s not make it an argument, especially if it is not a topic that does not affect our salvation.
The older I get, the more I realize how brief life is. The Lord has humbled me in more ways than I care to share. Don’t make Him humble you; there’s a lot less grief if we humble ourselves before Him and let Him correct us.
Today, Rachel and I discuss worship, the Psalms, and Hope Acres–Matt and Rachel’s campground in Utah.
Welcome to Grafted: Jewish Roots of Christianity. This week my guest Rachel Lish talks about walking away from the Mormon church and being healed from depression.
Rachel and Matt are worship leaders who lead a traveling ministry and own a campground called Hope Acres, where visitors can vacation and celebrate the Lord’s Feasts. A gifted psalmist, Rachel began writing music at just five years old. Although she was raised in the LDS church, she left it in her teens to follow Jesus.
Rachel loves to share her story of incredible healing from depression, offering hope and encouragement to others through her testimony.
Welcome to Grafted: Jewish Roots of Christianity. My guest is Dejah Phillips.
We are discussing misunderstandings of Scripture from the Nephilim to Shabbat. We take a look at scripture through the lens of Hebrew culture, history, and language.
Dejah is a digital creator with a strong presence on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, amassing a following of over 80,000. As a Messianic Jew, Dejah views social media as her mission field, where she passionately shares her insights on a range of biblical topics. Her content delves into subjects such as the sons of God, demons, and the Nephilim, with a focus on addressing cultural misunderstandings of Scripture. Through her engaging and thought-provoking posts, Dejah aims to educate and inspire her audience, shedding light on often overlooked aspects of biblical teachings. She has a bachelor’s in education and a master’s in reading. She studied Jewish and Christian theology, world religions/history, and had missions training.
Welcome to Grafted: Jewish Roots of Christianity! My guest today is Simonette Cherepanov.
Have you seen Disney’s Inside Out 2? Simi talks about that movie as it relates to our emotions and thoughts. We also discuss how Yahweh described Himself in Exodus 34 and why this should give us peace.
Simonette is a pastoral counselor who emigrated from Venezuela to the United States with her husband and children when she was thirty. With a diverse professional background, she has worked as an EMT, an EKG tech, and a phlebotomist. She is also a dedicated teacher of the Creation Gospel by Dr. Hollisa Alewine.
In her forties, Simonette returned to school to earn a Bachelor of Science in Ministry Leadership and became an ordained minister. In her sixties, she pursued further education to become a Brain Health Professional and is currently working toward a doctorate in Creation Therapy. Additionally, Simonette is the Founder and CEO of Seven Lamp Wellness dot com where she continues to integrate her passion for spiritual and physical well-being.
