PODCAST TRANSCRIPT | Episode 63 – WHICH ARE THE SHEEP AND WHICH ARE THE GOATS?
FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell
EPISODE 63- WHICH ARE THE SHEEP AND WHICH ARE THE GOATS?
Rocky Barrett: Welcome to the podcast, From Our Home to Yours, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.
Nancy Campbell: Hello lovely ladies. I trust that you are walking in the joy of the Lord in your home.
Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re going through a bit of a tough time. Well I am here to encourage you today. That’s what these podcasts are all about: to encourage you as a wife and mother. So I trust you’ll be encouraged here today.
Don’t forget to tell other mothers and other friends about this podcast because every mother needs encouraging. We need one another. So let them know about it so they can be encouraged too.
I’d like to begin again today with a lovely poem. I actually posted this on my Above Rubies Facebook page. I think it is a very powerful poem.
It says:
I ran into a stranger as he passed by,
"Oh excuse me, please" was my reply.
He said, "Please excuse me too;
I wasn't watching for you."
We were very polite, this stranger and I,
We went on our way and we said good-bye.
But at home a different story is told,
How we treat our loved ones, young and old.
Later that day, cooking the evening meal,
My son stood beside me very still.
When I turned, I nearly knocked him down.
“Move out of the way,” I said with a frown,
He walked away, his little heart broken,
I didn't realize how harshly I'd spoken.
While I lay awake in bed,
God's still small voice came to me and said,
“While dealing with a stranger, common courtesy you use,
But the family you love, you seem to abuse.”
“Go and look on the kitchen floor,
You'll find some flowers there by the door.
Those are the flowers he brought for you,
He picked them himself, pink, yellow, and blue.”
“He stood very quietly not to spoil the surprise,
You never saw the tears that filled his little eyes.’
By this time, I felt very small,
And now my tears began to fall.
I quietly went and knelt by his bed;
“Wake up, little one, wake up,” I said.
“Are these the flowers you picked for me?”
He smiled, “I found 'em, out by the tree.”
“I picked 'em because they're pretty like you,
I knew you'd like 'em, especially the blue.”
I said, “Son, I'm very sorry for the way I acted today,
I shouldn't have yelled at you that way.”
He said, “Oh, Mom, that's okay.
I love you anyway.”
I said, “Son, I love you too,
And I do like the flowers, especially the blue.”
~ Unknown
Isn’t that so true? We can be so quick, so terse, and so indifferent to our loved ones around us. May God help us to remember that our words have such power.
They have the power to bring death. They have the power to give life. We all know the Scripture in Proverbs 18:21 where it says: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue . . ..” Every time we open our mouths, we either speak life or we speak death. So we need to be encouraged, don’t we?
Thinking about the power of our words, I think of a word that we most probably all use every single day of our lives and that is what we call our children. I think the most common word that parents and people call children today is the word “kids.”
We talk about our “kids.” We call our children “kids.”
Well, I don’t use that word anymore and I stopped using that word years and years ago.
I started off using it when I started raising our family and I really didn’t like the word. It was just coming into vogue when I started raising our children. I fell in with the vogue, just with what everyone else was doing.
Isn’t it amazing how we can be victims of the system? We do what everybody else does. We say what everyone else says. So I also called my children that word and got into a habit.
I began our life of raising our children in New Zealand because I am originally a New Zealander, although now I am a US citizen. We later moved to Australia.
It was when we were in Australia that I read an article about a sheep farmer in New Zealand. Now New Zealand is a sheep country. We don’t have so many today, but back in the prime, New Zealand had about 50 million sheep and only 3 or 4 million people.
I was very familiar with sheep because my father was a sheep man. He was the one who designed the way that sheering sheep is done across the world. It is called “The Bowen Technique.” His name was Ivan Bowen. He was the fastest sheerer in the world in that day. He has since passed away. So I knew lots about sheep.
Anyway, I read this article and it was about this farmer in New Zealand. He said that he had diversified into farming goats. But he noticed a difference in the way the goats mothered. He noticed that the goats mothered their little kids differently than sheep. He noticed that the goats would herd their little kids together and off they’d go foraging for hours, leaving their little kids.
He was very surprised by this because he noticed that the sheep were always with their little lambs.
Now as I read those words something clicked in my brain and I thought, “Wow, this is interesting!”
But before I got carried away with my thoughts, I thought I had better check it out if it was really true.
So I went to my father. I thought that he would be someone very knowledgeable on this, seeing he had shorn about a million sheep in his lifetime and really knew about sheep.
I said to him, “Is this true?”
He said, “Yes, it is true, Nancy, about the goats and also sheep. A mother ewe, will never ever go any further than ear shot from her little lambs.”
I thought as I realized this: Is this why we call our children “kids” today? We have become a goat mothering society!
This is what so many mothers are doing today. They gather up their little children and drop them off at daycare and school and everywhere. They’re dropping off their little children for the day while they go out to their career or their job and do their thing.
Now that is goat mothering. The word “kids” was not originally in the dictionary to mean the word for children. Go back to Webster’s 1828 dictionary and you will not find it there. Of course it is now in our dictionary today as we have continued to add so many new words and of course so many humanistic words to our dictionary and this is one of them.
This is a word that now just fits with our society of goat mothers who will leave their children and come back to them later on in the day.
I have actually experienced this with my own eyes. I remember going back to New Zealand, and of course I have been back so many times since originally leaving.
One time I was walking around the fields with my father and he was checking out the sheep as a real shepherd does. He was always watching over the sheep. It was lambing time, springtime, so he was checking out the lambs.
He said to me, “Oh Nancy, if the ewes are in good health, we have no problem with the lambs. They just birth their babies and we come out and we find the little lambs are born. They’re all safe and they’re all wonderful. It’s only when the ewes are in bad shape and they have not been on good grass that we have problems with the birthing. We have to go and help them pull out their little lambs. We have little babies that die.”
I thought that was an interesting statement too. I think if that’s true in the animal world, that it’s true in the human world.
The healthier the mother is, the better she will enjoy her birth and have a more natural birth without intervention and be more able to give birth. So I think it is very important that we as mothers, childbearing mothers of course, that you do look after your health.
Dear lovely mothers, who are still in your childbearing years, please look after your health. Eat wholesome foods. Throw away the junk, all the white flour. I hope you don’t have white flour in your pantry, and I hope you don’t have white sugar. I mean, that is a poison. It’s known to be a poison and it destroys the B vitamins in your body and you as a mother need all the nutrients you can have because you have a huge job as you mother your children, nurse your babies, and give birth.
Your body was created for this task, but you are meant to be in good shape. Maybe you’re listening to me and you notice my voice. I do have a cold, but I’ll get rid of it. I always say, “Things come, and things go!”
But I do feel that it is important for all of us, especially you childbearing mums, that you keep up your immune system and you don’t eat the junk foods and all the white processed foods and all the packaged foods. Keep to good wholesome foods out of your garden if you can and eat lots of vegetables and fruit. You just don’t fill your pantry with all this other junk.
When I go to the grocery shop, I rarely ever go down the isles with all the packaged food and the tin food. There’s hardly a thing that I get from those isles, only certain basic foods that are healthy.
I don’t even go looking because you can be tempted by this and that. In fact, I can get my groceries very quickly. I know what I want, and I whiz down those isles and I get what I want, mainly in the frozen section and the fruits and vegetables section, maybe one or two other things. I just get them and I’m out of there. I don’t like to be tempted by all these other things.
Actually, when you get home and you have time to read the ingredients, wow! You can’t even read half those words and if you can’t read those words, they’ll be bad for you. They’ll be cancer forming.
Often you will read “fructose corn syrup” and all those kinds of words. Look, if you see fructose corn syrup there on the ingredients, you throw it back on the shelf and never buy it. It’s just not good for you at all.
In fact, you never want anything with sugar in your house. I just don’t have it and I haven’t had it for years and years and years.
Anyway, that was a little by and by about the healthy sheep. When they are healthy, they give birth to their lambs no problem.
My father also said to me, “Nancy, the sheep will never go any more than ear shot away from their little lambs.” That’s sheep mothering, ladies. We have to decide who are we? Are we a sheep mother or are we a goat mother?
Now when I realized this I thought, “Oh my, I don’t want to be part of the goat mothering company so I’m going to get rid of that word ‘kids.’” So I made a point in my mind that I would not use that word again and I haven’t used it for years and years and years and years. I’m glad to have it out of my vocabulary because I believe when we speak that word, for every word has power, we are speaking into our precious children the character of the goat.
The goat has different character than the sheep. Of all the animals in the whole of the world, what animal did God use to call us, His people? He chose the sheep. Isn’t that amazing? Of all the animals God made, why did He choose sheep, to call us His sheep?
Oh my, I haven’t got time to tell you everything today, there is so much! You can go on to my webpage. I think I have a title of articles called “Sheep and Shepherding.” There are a number of articles there that you can read about shepherding and how we as mothers are shepherding mothers.
And we also are meant to be sheep. Sheep are very submissive animals, opposite to the goats. The goats are independent, and they are proud and destructive.
I wonder if any of you have ever had a goat. Some of you may farm goats.
I remember when we grew up, we had a pet goat. It was my brother’s goat and he called her Jilly. He had this goat for years and years and years.
I don’t know why we kept it because this goat was always getting us into trouble with the neighbors. We were the most unpopular neighbors because of this goat. But somehow my father had a soft spot for my brother and he just didn’t want to hurt him, and he kept this goat.
Well this goat, it would get into the neighbor’s gardens. It would eat their beautiful trees, and it would even tear the clothes off their clotheslines.
Oh goodness me, you can’t believe how destructive goats are! Goats will eat anything. They eat the shrubs and they’ll eat anything they see, whereas the sheep they will only eat the fresh tender grass.
They also need a shepherd to look after them because if they get stuck in a thorn bush or something happens to them, they don’t know how to look out for themselves. They don’t know how to get out of a problem.
I can remember walking through the fields with my father and there was a sheep. It was stuck in a thorn bush. My father said, “Come on, Nanc, we’ve got to get this sheep out of here! Come on, help me pull it out!”
Because that sheep was stuck, it didn’t know how to get out. We had to pull it out and when we got it out, it just got up on its four legs and off it trotted away. It was fine. But if the shepherd had not come along, if we had not come along, that sheep would just have stayed there till it died.
And so sheep need a shepherd. These are some of the reasons we are called sheep.
Another reason is that sheep always want to gather in a flock. We are also not only called sheep; we are called God’s flock. We are the sheep of His pasture, the flock of His pasture. He wants us to be together.
God wants us as a flock. He doesn’t want us to be independent like the goat. The goat not only is very independent and destructive, but proud. They always want the highest place.
We used to keep our goat out in our back paddock. “Paddock” is not an American word, but it is a field or a grassy place. Jilly used to be out there. Of course, she was always getting through the fence or jumping through the fence or getting out to the neighbors and doing something. In fact there were times when my mother would come into my brother’s room and find this goat lying on my brother’s bed. This goat could get anywhere!
Well, usually though, you could look out to the paddock or the field and this goat would be standing out on the highest place in the field. If there was some sort of little thing it could stand on, well it would get up and stand on it because that’s where they want to be—top dog. They want to be in the highest place.
And so, what are we speaking into our children when we call them kids? Not only are we aligning with the goat mothers, but also, we are speaking that character into our children.
I believe God wants us to speak His character into our children. The sheep, the little ones, are called lambs. There was a time when mothers used to call their little children “lambkins” or “little lambies” until the word “kids” came into vogue.
Really, it’s a much nicer word. Somehow, have you noticed, that it’s very easy to yell at “kids”— “Oh, you stupid kids, what are you doing?”
Somehow you can yell at them. Have you ever tried to yell at lambs?— “You stupid lambs!” No, it doesn’t work. Those words don’t go together because when you speak the word lambs it brings tenderness, it brings softness.
But more than all these things, we really need to go to the Word of God. That’s really what got me convicted.
We go to Matthew 25:31-46. It would be good to read this whole chapter sometime after you’ve gone through this podcast, but I will just read you these words:
“When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left . . .. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous [the sheep] into life eternal.”
And so we see in this Scripture how there is coming a day when God is going to separate the goats from the sheep.
If we go to the Middle East, the Middle Eastern shepherd often has goats and sheep together. In fact mostly they will have a little flock of goats and sheep. I have been to Israel many times and looked out and seen the Bedouin shepherd’s little flock of goats and sheep following on behind them. That’s a typical Middle Eastern scene and a typical Biblical scene.
The shepherd always goes out in front of his sheep. He leads his sheep. That’s the Bible picture. It is a little different from how we shepherd in New Zealand where we have huge flocks of sheep and thousands and thousands of sheep. The shepherds have to go out on their horses to round up all the sheep to bring them in for shearing, and for dipping, and for branding, and so on.
But the Middle Eastern shepherd, he just has a little flock. As you look out, because you’re not right up close, you can’t tell the difference between the goats and the sheep.
The goats over there are little bit hairier. Unless you are right up close, you couldn’t really tell the difference.
God is speaking here, and He says the goats and the sheep, they’re all together and often people don’t so much notice the difference.
In fact growing up in the church, there are sheep and there are the goats, but in the end time God is going to separate the sheep and the goats. The sheep go to eternal life, the goats go to everlasting punishment.
God uses many different illustrations. He uses the tares and the wheat. The wheat is growing up, but along with the wheat, the tares are growing up with it. They’re not the wheat, but they look a little bit like the wheat.
In fact, in one of Jesus’ parables, they said, “Why don’t we pull out these tares and get rid of them?”
Jesus said, “No, if you pull them out now, you’ll upset the wheat and pull them out, too. Wait till the end of time and I will separate them.”
He also talks about the separating of the good fish and the bad fish. So throughout the New Testament there are these stories of how there are the good and the bad together and often the bad is not too bad because it looks pretty much like the good. But in the end God is going to separate.
Now, I want to be part of the right company. So I thought, “Okay, I’m just not having anything to do with the goat company so I will get rid of that word ‘kids.’”
Here’s another Scripture, back in the Old Testament, Ezekiel 34:17 (GNT): “‘Now then, my flock, I, the Sovereign Lord, tell you that I will judge each of you and separate the good from the bad, the sheep from the goats.”
Zechariah 10:3: “ . . .I punished the goats: for the Lord of hosts hath visited his flock,”
There’s a day coming where God visits and does this separation.
Anyway, that’s my reasons, lovely ladies, of why I decided to kick that habit.
I wonder, do you want to do that with me? Maybe you could just talk about it with your friends and say, “Hey, why don’t we try and help one another and when we hear each other calling our children ‘kids,’ well, we can say, ‘Hey, why don’t we call them children or something else’”?
Sometimes we do need help to knock a habit. Really, that’s all it is. It’s just a habit that we’ve gotten in to because that’s what everyone else calls them, but we don’t have to be like everybody else, do we?
Now one of the good things about sheep I mentioned before and that is that they love to be together. They are a flock. God loves us also to be together. He loves us to be together as families. He loves us to be together as God’s people.
He says, “I want you to come together and not forsake the assembling of yourselves with one another’ (Hebrews 10:25). God loves that togetherness because we are a flock.
But that good point of wanting togetherness and remember that’s the opposite to the goats who want independence, so do remember in our families, lovely ladies, as we are building godly families, remember that togetherness is how we build.
I often think as we are deciding, “Well, what should we do about this?” or “What should we do about that?” One of the ways you can make a good and wise decision is to say, “Will this keep our family together?”
If it’s something that will keep your family together, do it. It’s a good thing. God loves family togetherness. He wants us to be a flock. We are mothers of our little flock.
But if this thing you’re thinking about doing, or someone is trying to get you to do it, or your feeling pressured from people to do it or even society to do it, if it’s something that’s going to fragment your family or cause your family to go in all different directions I would say don’t do it.
The wise decision is the decision that keeps your family together. The foolish decision is to go ahead with that which will fragment your family.
We often find in a little practical way we face this at our family meal tables. Oh, Satan doesn’t want us to sit together around our tables as families. He doesn’t want that. Goodness me, that’s just too much of familyness and he doesn’t want familyness!
But God wants it. That’s the picture He gives of the family, the mother in the home and the children all sitting around the table. That’s the picture of Psalm 128:3. But, the devil doesn’t like it and he’s going to try and stop you from doing it.
There will be so many things, oh goodness me, I think you could count ten things on your fingers now of things that are going to pull you away from trying to sit together as a family every evening and even for breakfast and every meal in your home.
You’ve got to watch out. This is why we have to be strong as mothers. Look, to be a great mother you can’t be wimpy. You can’t just let people take over. You can’t let society take over what you’re going to do.
You decide what is best for your family and you do it, no matter what. We have to make the wise decisions and the right decisions.
But this wonderful and positive thing about sheep and being a flock and that they want to be together can also have a very negative situation too.
Let me just end with this story. I read recently how years and years ago in 2005 the BBC announced a story on their media program of 400 sheep in East Turkey that all fell over a cliff to their destruction.
Can you imagine 400 sheep all falling over a cliff? I mean, you can imagine one having to fall over a cliff, but how come 400?
That wasn’t the end of the story because it wasn’t only 400 that fell, it was another 1100. It was a flock of 1500 sheep and every single sheep fell over that cliff.
Now the 1100, actually they were able to save, because when they fell over the cliff their fall was cushioned by the sheep that already had fallen to their destruction.
So dear ladies, how come 1500 sheep all fell over the cliff? I’ll tell you why. Because sheep are followers. Sheep follow one another. Sheep become victims of what all the other sheep are doing.
Did you know that we, because we are sheep, and God knows we are sheep, we are also prone to do that?
That’s why in John chapter 10 Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice and they run from the stranger.”
We’ve got to be sheep who are so sharp and so close to our Shepherd that we hear His voice and will go the right way. Because if we get away from the Shepherd, then we start to listen to the voice of the stranger, the alien, the society around us. Then we can start going the wrong way.
So what happened here is most probably one of those sheep were getting close to the edge of a cliff. He didn’t realize it and probably got too close and he just fell over.
These sheep didn’t just fall over all together, no, one by one.
But you see, because the sheep are a flock they are close and the next sheep goes over to see what happened to the poor sheep he was next to and oops, he’s over the cliff, then the next one it just comes over the cliff.
So the sheep, because there’s 1500 of them, they are away, away out there, but their gravitating to that cliff, not knowing they are gravitating to destruction. They’re following each other and don’t even realize where they’re going so in the end, they were all over the cliff.
My husband has told me a very similar story because, although I was the daughter of a world champion sheep sheerer in his day, my husband was part of a sheep farming family. They also farmed cows, they were dairy farming, but they were sheep farming as well.
When they had this big sheep farm in Waitotara in New Zealand, my husband told of how amazing it was how if one little sheep found a hole in the fence, that eventually all the sheep would get through that hole.
So the sheep can be grazing on the hillside, eating the beautiful green grass that grows in New Zealand and one little sheep finds a hole in the fence and goes through into the next paddock, or as you would say, pasture or field.
The other sheep a way, way out there on the hillside, because we have thousands of sheep in New Zealand in a flock, they have no clue what’s happening to that little sheep. But because they’re together, because they’re a flock, they are gravitating slowly, little by little towards that hole in the fence. It may even take a day or two or three days, depending how many sheep are in the flock.
But eventually all of the flock, all those sheep, will be in a different pasture. They will have all gone through that little fence because they just followed one another.
Dear, darling ladies, isn’t that just like us today? Many of us don’t know we’re even living a humanistic lifestyle because that’s what everyone’s doing. That’s what is going on around us.
That’s what everybody is doing in the church. We just follow one another. We don’t check out the Word. Oh my, if we check out the Word of God, sometimes we find, oops! I’m in a wrong field. I’m in a wrong pasture. I better get back to where I’m meant to be.
Let’s be sheep who follow the Shepherd closely to hear His voice. Let’s not get too far away because then we’ll be listening to the stranger and we’ll get in the wrong pasture and be following everyone else.
“Lord Jesus, we thank You so much for the way You teach us. “Thank You for teaching us that You want us to be sheep. You don’t want us to be goats. The goats don’t belong to You, it’s the sheep who belong to You. We want to be Your sheep, Your true sheep who listen to Your voice.
“We want our little lambs to grow up to be Your sheep. We don’t want them to be goats. We don’t want them to be part of the goat company. We don’t want to be part of the goat mothering company. Lord God, help us to be sheep mothers, tending to our flocks, never leaving them, always close, never ear shot from our little lambs.
“Help us to be who You want us to be. We ask it in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.”