In 1959, the Milton Bradley Company commemorated its hundredth anniversary by introducing a “modern” board game: The Game of Life. The game featured a road from high school to retirement with lots of detours, dead-ends, and shortcuts. Advertising copy for the game advised players this way: “Land a great job, get married, and fill up your car with kids! Dodge bad luck and make a buck. End up with the biggest fortune, and you’ll retire in style as a winner!”

If only the real game of life was that simple! Unfortunately, the game of life is a little more complicated than the Game of Life. Life doesn’t fit into nice neat game board boxes. And the path is sequentially laid out.

Have you ever tried playing a board game without reading the rules? Our family does that all the time. We aren’t patient enough to actually learn the game before we start playing so we usually end up making up rules as we go along or we hit a point in the game where we’ve got to go back and read the rules anyway and we discover we’ve been playing the game the wrong way. For what it’s worth, we usually quit and start over again!
A lot of people approach life that way. They are playing the game of life, but they’ve never read the instruction manual. They don’t know the rules of the game. They aren’t even sure of the objective.

Here is the outline for our latest series at Discovery called Amazing Grazing based out of the 23rd Psalm.

AMAZING GRAZING
Part 1
Pastor Steve Lummer
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. -Psalm 23:1-

SOME LEADING QUESTIONS

1. WHOSE FOLLOWING WHO?
Exodus 13:17 “When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, ‘If the face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt.’ So God led the people around by the desert road toward the Red Sea.”

2. SHOULD I TAKE THE SCENIC ROUTE?
a formula: change of place + change of pace = change of perspective.

3. WHAT ABOUT YOUR MAP QUEST?
Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust in the Lord will all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him and He will make your paths straight.”

HOW TO KNOW THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD

I WILL have CONFIDENCE in my shepherd because I know Him.

I WILL be in LOVE with my shepherd because he takes care of me.

I WILL closely FOLLOW my shepherd because I can hear Him.

In the sixteenth century, the Renaissance astronomer Nicholas Copernicus challenged the belief that the earth was the center of the universe. Copernicus argued that the sun didn’t revolve around the earth, but rather that the earth revolved around the sun. The Copernican Revolution turned the scientific world upside down by turning the universe inside out. In much the same way, each one of us needs to experience our own Copernican Revolution. The paradigm shift happens when we come to terms with the fact that
the world doesn’t revolve around us. But that’s a tough pill to swallow. When we are born into this world, the world revolves around us.

We all need a Copernican revolution. We need to realize that the sun doesn’t revolve us.