He calls you in loving, tender tones. He says, "Come to Me, and I will give you rest." He says to every one who will have Him as his Saviour, "I have called thee by thy name, thou art Mine."
In the old days, when there was a High Priest, he had a breastplate on which was engraved the names of the twelve tribes of the Children of Israel, and we are told in the fifteenth of Exodus that "they shall be upon Aaron's heart when he goeth in before the Lord."
This is such a sweet thought: that our names, if we love Him, are on the heart of Jesus, in the glory!
But there is another story that Jesus tells us about the sheep.
We have been thinking about the happy flock who are with the shepherd, feeding in green pastures, lying down by still waters, preserved from enemies, taken to the safe fold at night.
But our Lord tells us this story of one, out of the hundred sheep that the Eastern shepherd has, who had wandered away!
Perhaps he had thought there were fairer pastures than those which the shepherd had brought him to? Perhaps he thought that the waters in another field were more sparkling than those still ones where the shepherd had so gently led them?
Whatever was the reason, one of these sheep wandered away. At first, perhaps, only a little way off just behind a rock, or round the other side of a wood. But the farther off he went, the easier it became to wander away!
At length came the dark night, and as the shepherd counted his hundred sheep into the fold, he found one was lost!
Lost? The shepherd would not lose his sheep for anything!