The Shepherd's Song [Paperback]

Lynn Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1996

"If you want to be stirred, motivated, challenged and changed, then your wish is about to be granted. . . . This book is going to touch your heart and shape your character."--Max Lucado, foward.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lynn Anderson has been in the ministry for over thirty-five years and currently serves as president of Hope Network, a ministry dedicated to coaching, mentoring, and equipping spiritual leaders for the twenty-first century. He received his doctorate from Abilene Christian University in 1990.

Anderson's lifelong career of ministry has involved speaking nationwide to thousands of audiences and authoring eight books -- including The Shepherd's Song; Navigating the Winds of Change; Heaven Came Down; They Smell like Sheep, Volume 1; and If I Really Believe, Why Do I Have These Doubts?

He and his wife, Carolyn, live in Dallas. They are the parents of four grown children and the grandparents of eight wonderful grandchildren. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In midwinter of 1809, at a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky, a baby boy was born to the subliterate Lincoln family. They called the boy Abraham. Abe Lincoln! The world at large paid little mind to this obscure but history-changing child. Far bigger attractions held global attention—it was in that year that Napoleon marched iron-shod through Austria, crushing all resistance and threatening the order of the Western world.

In the year 1020 b.c. another significant birth had gone virtually unnoticed. Few took note of a redheaded little boy, born to a poor sheepherder named Jesse, near the vague parameters where the humble village of Bethlehem dwindled into desolate pasturelands. Hebrew eyes followed a far more dramatic figure. Roadways rang with war songs of the massive, swaggering, charismatic new King Saul. Yet while Saul drifted unwittingly toward disaster, God was quietly shaping the heart of the eighth and unknown son of Jesse, who would become one of the most colorful and visible figures of history. They called him David.
King David!

This book aims to lead twentieth-century, fast-lane people to points of intersection with David. The reader, hopefully, will spot himself or herself in the wide range of emotions and experiences of this struggling man.

David's era strikingly parallels our own.

Decline, disillusionment and danger: three words of our times. Decline? People are living in a world with no stuffing, a society in decline—and they feel the life running out of them. Disillusionment? Nothing works. Nothing will change. No one means what he says. Danger? We are worried sick about unemployment and so terrified of AIDS that we burn down the houses of school children. Elderly urbanites die of heat suffocation, afraid to turn on the air conditioner lest they cannot pay the bill, and afraid to open the windows lest they be robbed. How do we find the heart to go on?

Those same three conditions—decline, disillusionment and danger—also marked the times when David stepped from the pastures to the palace. Decline. In those days the Hebrew people were descending the lower slopes of long spiritual and social decline. Joshua and Moses were forgotten. The public conscience seemed numbed by the lust-driven religions of Canaanite neighbors. After three hundred years under an assortment of judges, pure chaos prevailed. "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:25 kjv).

Decline fed disillusionment. Leader after leader began well and ended badly. The fans screamed for a new quarterback and got one—but Saul, "the people's choice," turned out to be a psychotic and murderous blunderer.

Decline and disillusionment were surrounded by danger. From the Aegean Islands, a warlike maritime people had migrated to the coastal plain of Palestine. These Philistines established five city-states, ruled by five shrewd and bloody princes. Their booming economy was capped off by a monopoly on iron and blacksmiths. Israel had only bronze and wood.

The plains trembled under thousands of thundering Philistine chariots; wheels armed with spinning swords were capable of cutting down whole Israeli divisions, like mowing grass. The Philistine infantry must have resembled mobile forests of steel as weapons flashed in the desert sun. The Israelites, on the other hand, were armed only with slings, arrows, assorted farm tools, a few knives, and instruments of bronze. In fact, at one point, in all the hosts of Israel only two warriors wielded iron swords: Saul and Jonathan (1 Samuel 13:22). Even the deadly accurate Israeli arrows could not pierce the metal Philistine armor.

Israel's hosts huddled on the hillsides in terror, watching the awesome panorama unfolding on the Philistine plain. No doubt stark panic spread across the camps of Israel, tugging at the tent flaps and tightening throats. Finally, the filthy pagan enemy massacred much of the ragtag Hebrew army and carried the sacred Ark of the Covenant, the very dwelling place of God, into the land of the Philistines.

Decline. Disillusionment. Danger. The time was right for God to intervene and to make His choice (1 Samuel 13:14). Our man David was given the nod of God—but why?

Many know King David only for his bright hour with Goliath and his dark hour with Bathsheba; yet the Old Testament uses sixty-six chapters to unfold his saga. The New Testament mentions him no less than fifty-nine times, and only God knows how many of the psalms flowed from David's pen.

Millions of birth certificates of all races bear the name David or Davita. Novels, poems, paintings and movies about David touch all continents. Fluttering over every flagpole in the independent state of Israel is the Star of David. And in Florence, Italy, every day, people from all over the world pay money and wait in line to see a fourteen-foot marble colossus, shaped four hundred fifty years ago by the twenty-six-year-old hand of Michelangelo, depicting the spirit of David.

Such legendary proportions are misleading, for they balloon David larger than the flesh-and-blood reality portrayed in Scripture.

David was not a "biblical character." There are no biblical characters. The people in the pages of the Bible were ordinary human beings like you and me, who just happened to be around when the Bible was being written. David is no different. In fact, the human spirit resonates so universally with the heart of David precisely because he was a street-level, earthy man. It is not his gargantuan mythological proportions but the plain profile of his humanness that makes David "the man for all men."

How will this give me the heart to keep going?

Read on!

Product Details

• Paperback: 230 pages
• Publisher: Howard Books (April 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878990624
• ISBN-13: 978-1878990624
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,091,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful study on the life of King David, March 19, 2002

By 

Diana D Sharp (Weatherford, TX United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Shepherd's Song (Paperback)

An easy read that draws you in and holds you long after you've finished the book.This is the best study of David's life that I've ever read.It goes into depth on David from his youth to death not just his shining moment with Goliath and his dark one with Bathsheba, and holds a mirror up to our own lives as in relation to his.It makes David real to you and shows how much we can still learn from his example.And shows how the God who shaped David will shape you too.It's written from a christian perspective.It was fist released under the title "Finding the Heart to Go On."

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For those who want to develop a Godlike heart., March 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Shepherd's Song (Paperback)

I read this book nearly two years ago and based a Sunday School adult class on the practical lessons each chapter contains. One of the most popular classes at our Church. The reader comes to understand how a man who sinned so grievously, time after time could be reffered to by God himself as "a man after my own heart". By discovering how God could possibly see David as a man after God's own heart, the reader comes to understand that he too can have a God like heart even though he makes mistakes.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shepherd then and now, June 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Shepherd's Song (Paperback)

The Shepherd's Song is written in an engaging style making it easy to read. It brings scenes and events from David's life alive and then shows how the same struggles are ours today. This book takes you beyond seeing David as a dirty, shepherd boy watching sheep and writing songs to the man his own mighty men feared. The Shepherd's Song reviews David's failings and his restoration by God's grace when David turned in repentance and sought the Lord's will. In reference to David's adulterous affair, the author states we are a very deceptive people--how often does the phone wake you and you tell the other person "no you didn't wake me."

This is a good book for independent reading. At the back of the book discussion questions are divided by chapter, so Sunday School classes or small groups could use it as a study.