The sheep with their little lambs passed me by on the road… (Thought for May 2026)

So reads the song ‘All in the April evening’. Well, it’s May now, but as we travelled around last month, we saw many sheep with their little lambs in the fields of Sussex and Kent.

And, surely we all think the lambs look so sweet, frolicking and gambolling, don’t we?

I’ve often mentioned about the time my big sister, Mim, when she worked as a children’s nurse on a farm near Bucks Green, falling in love with an orphan lamb the farmer brought into the house, and cared for it (as well as the children). The farmer gave the lamb to Mim and she brought it home one day on the bus. It was a sweet, innocent little lamb.

Of course, it’s the sheep, the ewe sheep that would have borne the lamb. And on our jour-neyings we saw fields full of sheep with their lambs.

The Bible mentions lambs many times. Checking on my Bible Gateway site, they are mentioned 191 times. The two books that have the most are Numbers, where the many offerings that were required by the Lord involved male lambs. Meanwhile in the New Testament the book of Revelation mentions the word lamb 31 times – but each time it’s Lamb with a capital ‘L’. That, of course is because this Lamb is a person, the Lord Jesus Christ.Himself.

All those lambs being offered in the Old Testament, under the old (Mosaic) covenant were in fact a picture of the One Lamb who would be the final sacrifice for all our sins, effective for all eternity.

It always amazes me when I read the incident recorded in Genesis chapter 22 where Abraham, at God’s command, takes his beloved son, Isaac to sacrifice him on an altar. The understandable enquiry from the boy – ‘Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ is met with the answer from his father, ‘God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son’. We know the rest of that story, but the significance of that reply was not just for Abraham and Isaac’s benefit, but for us all, that God would provide the precious Lamb, which was His own Son to be the only possible offering to give His people full forgiveness of their sins.

We often quote John 3:16, that ‘God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son ..’ God would provide for himself the lamb. Aligning ourselves with the Jewish people of the day, we killed Jesus (Acts 3:15), the author of life, but God Himself provided the sacrifice for us. What a wonderful God and Saviour we have!

I mentioned seeing the sheep and lambs in the fields. Isn’t it so gracious of God that through the sacrifice of His Son, the Lamb of God, we are counted as the sheep of His pasture

(Psa 79: 13CSB) ‘Then we, your people, the sheep of your pasture, will thank you forever; we will declare your praise to generation after generation’.

And, as Jesus said of himself, ‘I am the good Shepherd’, so it’s His flock we’re a part of, if we have responded to His voice.

I could go on, but just a reminder that Jesus instructed Peter, who assured his Shepherd that he loved Him in John 21: 15-17, ‘Feed my lambs; feed my sheep’.

May we care for one another, and particularly for the lambs – the young physically & the young spiritually in our corner of His pasture.