Speaking 'Shoat'

Excellent blog post , here are a few of the paragraphs:

I finally understand why Jesus didn't allow His time to be monopolized by Pharisees. He simply dismissed them and walked away. He wasn't willing to water down the message so they could get it and He wasn't about to try to explain it to them because doing so is impossible. He actually protected the message from the Pharisees in the same way that I might protect my children from an unsafe person. The problem with today's institutional system of American Christianity is that we have taken a heart-message and we've turned it into a head-religion. Because we need the money to make the Church payroll, we have found a way to include both those who get it and those who don't. We have successfully moved the sheep and the goats into the same house. The real catastrophe is that they've started breeding with one another and now we have a generation of "Shoats," people who half get it and half don't. The result of this is that the message becomes compromised and contaminated. I now understand fully why Jesus was so protective of in the first place.


Jesus identified the goats right away by their response to His teachings. In fact, His teachings were delivered in such a way that they would specifically root out the goats from the sheep. If you close your eyes and listen to the sound of sheep and goats, it's almost impossible to tell them apart. We actually used a baby goat in our Church Easter Pageant one year because we couldn't find a baby lamb, and you know what? Not a single person knew the difference. Jesus, however, found a way to catch the goats and winnow them. He placed "goat traps" all around the message. It had no effect on the sheep but would stop the goats dead in their tracks. When Jesus was finished with His sermon, He would walk through the field and collect all the goats that were caught in the goat traps and dismiss them. The goat traps were nothing more than illustrations that the goats couldn't swallow. While everyone else chewed them up, swallowed them and went on to see and experience the glorious truth that He came to show them, the goats grabbed their throats, doubled over along side of the road, gagging and coughing on an illustration and ended up missing the entire heart of the message. When confronted by one of the sheep as to why He did this to the goats, Jesus said, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand." (Luke 8:10)

It was brilliant. He spoke in metaphors and parables because "head-thinkers" can't get beyond them in order to behold the truth. Metaphors and parables become a vault that protects the truth from those who would certainly defile the message if they came anywhere close to it. The metaphor would be so outlandish that only the heart-people could see past it. While the head thinking goats were choking to death from trying to figure out how a man could crawl back up into his mother's womb, how gross it would be to eat Jesus' flesh and blood, the heart-thinking sheep were frolicking in the grass of salvation and relationship with God. Unfortunately, today's version of Christianity has adopted both head and heart principles so that everyone can join, even with partial understanding. The results are devastating. No one frolics in the grass of salvation. Instead, they merely stand in line at the feeding trough with hollow looks in their eyes, waiting patiently for their pastor to dump the slop in front of them. ...

"Shoats" are an interesting breed. Some are sheep who were raised by goats and others are goats who were raised by sheep. In my opinion, the latter are the most impossible to deal with. I have found that the best way to separate the sheep-shoats from the goat-shoats is to set them all free. The goats-shoats will either attack you out of anger for opening their cage, or they'll run back into a life of sin. The sheep-shoats, however, will thank you and immediately recognize their need for freedom. They'll run nowhere. They will simply graze close to the shepherd because that's where they choose to be.

Another way to separate them is to speak the language of love. Only sheep recognize this language. It's totally foreign to goats. Sheep-shoats recognize it in their hearts even though they've never spoken it before and goat-shoats get angry when they hear it because their head cannot understand a word of it. The truth is encapsulated "in love" so that those who do not love cannot retrieve it.

If you are worried that you might be a goat-shoat, you probably aren't. The very fact that you even care is proof that you have sheep blood running through your veins. If you're angry because you think I'm accusing you of being a goat-shoat, and you need to see a Scripture with the word "shoat" in it for you to grant validity to this post, you're probably a goat-shoat.

I believe that the Free Believers movement taking place all over the world is a great way of separating sheep from goats. ONLY sheep can survive outside the pen. The goats cannot follow us to where we are because they'll run out of breath or starve to death. Surviving in the wild takes all heart in order to make it. It's either sink or swim out here. Learning to live in the wild is one thing, but reclaiming your identity as a heart-thinker sometimes takes years.