Finding Refuge in the Shepherd

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Well, many of you know that my grandmother has been living with my parents for the last several months while she’s recuperating from a stroke she had back in October, and she’s doing pretty well, by the way. But last Friday afternoon, my aunt went into her house to check on things. She walked in the door, walked in the front door, and noticed that the patio door had been pried off of its tracks, and there was somebody in the house.

She evidently could hear them in the other room. Now, when you walk in and you know that somebody’s in the house, and they’ve come in some way like that, prying the back door off the tracks, you automatically know it’s not somebody that’s supposed to be there, right? And fortunately, when they heard her come in, they went out a window or something, and police came and checked it out.

But you automatically, and that’s not the first time that house has been broken into, but you automatically know it’s not somebody who’s supposed to be there, because we have invented all sorts of ways to control access to places, haven’t we? We have keys, we have alarms, we have passcodes, we have the whole nine yards. You know, if somebody comes into the church building outside of regular service times and they unlock the door with a key and they enter the alarm code, it’s a pretty safe bet it’s somebody that’s supposed to be there.

We know that. On the other hand, if somebody comes in and they kick through the glass, this has happened before at a church I’ve pastored, they kick through the glass and they rummage around in the building without ever turning the alarm off so the authorities get called, you know they were not supposed to be there in the first place. You know, people have done this for years, even before we had widespread cheap access to keys and things, and before we had alarm systems. You know, back in the speakeasies in the roaring 20s, you’d open the little, I mean, I don’t know this from experience, but you know that because I wasn’t alive then.

But you open the little, we’ve all seen those movies, though. You’d open the little window, what’s the password? The Russian bear hunts by night.

All right, you’re good. Come on in. They did that on the little rascals.

You know, we did that growing up, playing army men. What’s the password? Even Corporal Klinger did it on MASH.

Oh, that’s the password, you know. And you knew that if somebody was in there and knew the password, then they were okay to be there. They had come in the right way.

Somebody who snuck in and came in the wrong way, you knew wasn’t supposed to be there. So we have all kinds of ways of making sure the right people have access to the right areas. And Jesus told a story about that.

And as we continue this series that I’ve been doing on us being the sheep of his pasture, we’ve looked at several stories from the Gospels about where Jesus uses the imagery of sheep. And again, I told you last week, I didn’t say, oh, that’ll make an interesting series. And next we’ll talk about donkeys.

No, there’s a reason for picking out these sheep stories, and it’s because when Jesus talked about sheep, this relationship between the sheep and the shepherd, he always used it to illustrate our relationship to him. And so we look at these stories, and if we understand these stories, it teaches us quite a bit about our relationship to him. We’ve been going through a series of these stories throughout the month of January, and we’re going to be in them just a little bit longer.

We’re going to look at a story in John chapter 10. We’re actually going to take a couple weeks to look at this story. But a story in John chapter 10 that Jesus told about sheep and about controlling access to the sheep pen and how we know whether somebody’s supposed to be in the sheep pen or not and what that tells us about our relationship with him.

So if you turn, some of you are already turning there, if you turn with me to John chapter 10. John chapter 10. This morning we’re just going to look at the first six verses of that chapter.

There’s a longer section here where he talks about sheep and the shepherd, and that’s what we’re going to look at over the next few weeks. But today we’re just going to focus on the first six verses. So Jesus told them, Truly I tell you, anyone who doesn’t enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in some other way is a thief and a robber.

The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.

And when he has brought all his own outside, he goes ahead of them. The sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will never follow a stranger.

Instead, they will run away from him because they don’t know the voice of strangers. And Jesus gave them this figure of speech, but they did not understand what he was telling them. And that happened quite a bit, that Jesus would teach and people just didn’t get it.

Either the Pharisees would misunderstand or sometimes his own disciples would misunderstand. And so he’d tell more stories to clarify these things. But when Jesus told them this story, you know, we go through that.

And basically he was painting a picture for them of sheep being gathered in a pen. And the one who comes in through the gate is supposed to be there. The one who leads them out through the gate, having come in through the gate, is supposed to be there and is supposed to lead them.

the one who speaks to them with the voice that they know and acknowledge is supposed to be there, but these that would come in over the walls, that would tunnel under, that would sneak through the hedges, whatever they were using to pin the sheep up, those who did not come through the gate were there for some nefarious purpose. And when he was telling this story, he was actually, if you go back to the end of John chapter 9, he was responding to the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees that we see there. Jesus had healed a blind man, and there had been some controversy with the Pharisees about it.

And finally, the Pharisees asked Jesus, well, you don’t think we’re spiritually blind too, do you? Basically, that’s my paraphrase of what they said. And Jesus, if you read between the lines there, basically says, you’re so blind, you don’t even know how blind you are.

That’s the point of it. And then he goes into this story, which seems to, we would almost think, okay, this is a totally different event when he goes into chapter 10 and starts to tell this story. But I believe it’s in response to what happened in chapter 9.

The Pharisees, God the Father had sent Jesus as this shepherd to lead Israel back into a right relationship with God. And the Pharisees were so blind spiritually that they didn’t even know who the right shepherd was to follow. And so they were wanting to follow all these other people that Jesus says, they’re coming in over the walls, they’re coming through the hedges, they’re thieves and liars.

They did not understand who Jesus is, who Jesus was. They didn’t understand that he was the shepherd that the Father had sent. They didn’t understand that he was the one who could lead them back to fellowship with God.

And quite honestly, the Pharisees didn’t seem to understand even their own sin and their own need for reconciliation with God. They either didn’t understand it or they didn’t want to understand it. Because when you look at the pattern over all of the Pharisees, these were people who prided themselves on how good they were and how religious they were.

The story I shared with you last week was about them complaining, oh, he eats with sinners. Oh, he spends time with sinners. How dare he?

Doesn’t he know that they’re those people? You know, you can just almost imagine the tone of voice as the Pharisees sort of clutched their pearls over the kind of people that Jesus was hanging out with. And Jesus told them the story about the 99 sheep left in the pen and the one that was lost and the shepherd goes to find it.

And he says, there’s more rejoicing in heaven over one lost sheep that’s found than over 99. There’s more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 who don’t need repentance. And what they didn’t understand was there are not people who don’t need repentance.

There aren’t any of us who are righteous and don’t need repentance, but that’s how they thought of themselves. And so these were people who prided themselves on, we’re so good and we’re so religious, we’re just like that with God, and yet their hearts were so far from them. Jesus told them on other occasions, you honor him with your lips, but your hearts are far from him.

He said, outwardly, you look good, you’re like whitewashed tombs, you look good and clean on the outside, but you’re full of dead men’s bones on the inside. These were people who were wrapped up in their appearance of good works. And they thought somehow that was going to make them closer to God.

They didn’t realize, or they didn’t want to realize, that they were just as sinful as those people they were pointing out and shrieking about. That they needed reconciliation with God just as much as those people over there. And when the shepherd came to lead them back to God, when the shepherd came to call them with his familiar voice and to call out to them by name, they didn’t even recognize it because they were so spiritually blinded.

They didn’t want to understand that they needed Jesus. So he told this story about the sheep and the shepherds. And I think part of the reason why he talked about sheep and shepherds so much is because it was something that people understood in that day and time.

I started watching a documentary this week about Jesus. Be careful if you ever do that, by the way. Be careful.

There’s some good information out there, but there are also some people that the History Channel or PBS or other networks, they’ll put up and say, Bible expert, Dr. So-and-so. And I’m listening to that guy thinking, that Bible expert has never seen a Bible in the wild, you know, in its natural habitat.

Has no idea what he’s talking about. So just use discernment. When I was watching this documentary about Jesus, and it was talking about Nazareth being about four miles from this major Roman city, And so Jesus wasn’t necessarily as country as we would think.

You know, he knew some things about the world from growing up. And I think, well, of course, he knew some things about the world. He made it.

But, you know, that’s what I believe. I don’t expect PBS to share that opinion. But here’s the thing.

So I think they were trying to say, maybe they were trying to throw into question some of the parables he taught because he used all this agricultural imagery. It doesn’t matter, though, if he grew up near a major city and doing carpentry work in a major city. You couldn’t live in that environment and not know something about sheep and about sowing seeds.

I mean, you were close to it, even if that’s not what you did all day every day. Sort of like we here in Oklahoma. We were just talking this morning about Brother Greg driving his tractor to Walmart or something like that.

High-speed chase with the police. I don’t remember. I just remember the police being involved.

No. No, I’m teasing Brother Greg. He was not involved with a high-speed chase in his tractor that I know of.

But we were talking about that this morning. He said, you know, it’s an agricultural area, agricultural state. Well, that’s right.

You know, we live in Oklahoma, and even if you live in the city, you know, you know people, usually, who work in some kind of agricultural-related industry. We hear about it on the news. We can’t drive from one town to another without seeing some of it.

We know, even if we don’t know from experience, we know a little bit about how this works. And the people of Jesus’ day, even if he was ministering in cities where they weren’t keeping sheep, well, let me put it this way, whether he was ministering in cities where they weren’t keeping sheep, or whether he was ministering out in the villages, the people were familiar with how this worked. That’s why he told these stories.

It’s because they were things that people could relate to, things that they understood. and so he used these pictures of sheep as things we could understand to teach us about our relationship with God and for us to understand because we’re I think we’re a little more removed from the idea of sheep okay in their at least the way they they did it then in their day and age if you’re out in one of the rural villages there was probably a communal sheep pen for the village not everybody could build a stone wall for their own sheep. It was expensive.

Not everybody had the manpower. For some of you, it might have been just your family taking care of your sheep. And so some of these villages would have a communal sheep pen, usually in like a big C shape or a U shape.

It would be enclosed with a stone wall or hedges or something of that nature. This was a little bit before they invented barbed wire. So there’d be some kind of enclosure of that nature that would be open in one spot.

And if you were lucky, it might have a gate. But in some situations, the gate might be somebody. And what they would do is, you know, the people would lead, each of them would lead their sheep out to pasture, and they’d take them out to graze and do what sheep do.

And then at night, to keep them safe from sheep rustlers, and lions and tigers and bears and things of that nature, they would lead them all back into the communal enclosure, into the communal sheep pen. and they would either shut the gate or one of the people would take turns. Somebody would actually lie across the gate, the gateway.

They would become the gate. That’s going to be important for us to understand when we look at this passage a little later on. They would become the gate.

They would be responsible either for letting things in or opening the gate. And nobody would get in or out without going through that opening. Nobody that was supposed to be there would get in or out.

except through that opening. And the next day when the people would come, you’ve got sheep all mixed in together. It reminds me, as I was reading about what this is like, it reminds me of Chuck E.

Cheese or places like that. Where if you’ve not had the privilege of going to Chuck E. Cheese with hundreds of small children, they’re just everywhere.

I mean, I assume they spray for them and they just keep coming back. They’re just infested with children everywhere. And especially if you’ve got four, like, I mean, we go anywhere.

And we had a birthday party for Carly Joe yesterday, and it was hard just with that small number of children. Where are our four? You know, I’m doing headcount constantly.

Trying to separate all the sheep out of this big mess. It’s like calling children and trying to gather them out of that. You’ve got to get the right ones.

It’s not enough that you get the right number. You’ve got to get the right ones. So how do you do that?

How do you do that with the sheep? Jesus said the sheep knew the voice of the shepherd because they’ve spent time with that shepherd. They came to know that shepherd by his voice, and they would come to him when he called.

And if those weren’t your sheep, then they wouldn’t come when you called. Years ago, I used to have two rat terriers, dogs. One of them was blind, and her name was Sophie, but the kids called her so-so, and I started calling her so-so too.

And as far as a dog goes, she was just so-so. I know, that’s a bad joke, isn’t it? Anyway, she was blind.

She had great ears. She could be in the backyard, and I could walk to the door and not make any noise and just say, come so-so. And she’d hear me a long way off, and she’d come running.

Now, the kids would stand in the backyard. They’d stand three feet from her and scream, so-so, come! She wouldn’t come to them.

She’d just turn and look in their direction and throw them a glance like, I don’t work for you, and turn around and do what she was doing. The sheep were the same way. When they’d hear the voice of the shepherd, they’d come to that shepherd because they knew that shepherd.

They’d spent time with that shepherd. Somebody else tries to call those sheep. They’re not going to come because they don’t work for them.

And so that was the world of sheep care and maintenance that Jesus was talking about. And so he told the Pharisees to help them understand what he had come to do and their own spiritual blindness. He tells this story about the sheep.

And we know from the rest of the chapter that when he’s describing the shepherd, he’s talking about himself. Because he says later on in chapter 10, I am the good shepherd. I can’t wait to talk to you about that in a couple of weeks.

But he called himself the good shepherd. So as he’s talking about this shepherd that would come in through the gate, that would come in the right way, that would call out to the sheep and the sheep would know him, he was describing himself. and what we can begin to see if we understand this concept of the sheep pen, this communal sheep pen, what we begin to understand is the sheep were put in there for safety.

They were put in there for safekeeping to keep them away from things that would try to sneak in and get them and they were kept safe there until they were safely under the care of the shepherd. They wouldn’t come out for just anybody. They weren’t supposed to come out for just anybody.

They were supposed to wait and listen for that voice they trusted. They were supposed to listen for the shepherd. And as we see this picture of security being safe in the pen, being kept safe by the shepherd as he puts him in the pen, and being kept safe by the shepherd as he leads them out with him, we can understand that Jesus is talking about himself, and from this we see that Jesus is the shepherd that we should trust. See, the Pharisees were putting their trust in all sorts of other things the shepherd that God had sent.

They were putting their trust in all these traditions and all these interpretations that were handed down to them from all their religious authorities, things that added to the law, this oral Torah that I told you about a couple weeks ago where they took their interpretations and their traditions and they put it right up here with God’s Word. And in many cases, I mean, that was bad enough, but in many cases they’d put it above God’s Word. And they were putting their trust in all these other things, all these other shepherds to guide them back to God.

So they thought by obeying these things that they were taught in their traditions that they could be closer to God. They were looking for that to be somebody that would come alongside them and shepherd them to God. And they thought they were fine.

They thought they were good people because of this. These people, these authorities, these traditions taught them that they could get right with God by doing what they said, and they were trying to drive the sheep. But none of these were the shepherds that God had sent to reconcile his people to himself, to bring them back to them.

Jesus called them thieves and robbers. Jesus said they were in the sheep pen trying to drive out the sheep, and they weren’t supposed to be there. They were thieves and robbers.

And the lesson there for us out of that is if we’re listening to some other shepherd, if we’re putting our trust in someone or something other than Jesus Christ to lead us back into fellowship with God, we are making a huge mistake. Don’t you put your trust in some church to put you in fellowship with God. Don’t you put your trust in some preacher, not even me, to put you in right fellowship with God.

Jesus Christ is the only one who can do that. Now you may say, then what’s the point of church and what’s the point of the preacher? Well, a good church and a good preacher are going to point you to Jesus Christ because he’s the one who can shepherd you back into fellowship with God.

But he’s got to be the one you put your trust in. He’s got to be the shepherd that calls you. If we put our trust in something or someone other than him, we’re making a terrible mistake.

Jesus said they were, if they were coming in, if they were sneaking into the sheep pen, trying to drive the sheep out, trying to gather some sheep for themselves, and they weren’t coming in the right way through the gate, they weren’t the shepherd that God had put there over the sheep, then they were thieves and robbers. And it’s a mistake to put our trust in the wrong shepherd. As we see in this passage, like a shepherd to his sheep, Jesus is safe.

We see that he’s the one that enters by the gate. He’s the one that the gatekeeper recognizes and says, oh yeah, you’ve got sheep in here. Come on in.

Come on in. Lead them out. Just like the shepherd is recognized as somebody safe for the sheep.

So is Jesus. We see in verses 3 through 4 that he’s a loving guide for us. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.

You’ve got to have spent some time with the sheep. You would have had to care about the sheep to know them all by name. Think about that.

If you’re just walking into a farm area, if I were to come to one of your homes where you keep cattle, most of them are going to look the same to me. I don’t know them. They don’t know me.

We’re not old friends, all right? But I’ve heard Brother Greg talk about his cattle. He’s named them.

He named one of them after one of my children because it was so wild. He knows his cattle by name. I know my children by name because I’ve spent time with them.

Other people that don’t know him just say there’s a whole bunch of kids running around the church. But I know them by name. I may have to go through roll call to get there.

But I know them by name. Think about this. He took the time to know these sheep by name.

That’s a shepherd who loves and cares about his flock. He calls his own sheep by name and he leads them out. See, these sheep loved him enough to follow him because they trusted him.

And when he’s brought all his own outside, he goes ahead of them. he’s willing to guide them where they need to be Jesus is a loving guide of his sheep he knows us and he knows where we need to go and he’s willing to shepherd us there and just like a shepherd to a sheep Jesus is trustworthy it says in verse 4 the sheep follow him because they know his voice they will never follow a stranger instead they will run away from him because they don’t know the voice of strangers they hear that they hear that voice that they don’t know and they don’t trust and they run the other way that the sheep know they can trust the shepherd. Let me tell you this, and I can tell you this on the authority of Scripture, and I can tell you this from my own experience, Jesus will never lead you in the wrong direction.

Jesus will never lead his sheep astray. Folks, Jesus is the shepherd we should trust. That’s the point he was trying to make to the Pharisees, that all these shepherds that they were looking at were thieves and robbers and liars, and they weren’t trustworthy, and Jesus is the shepherd that the Father sent to lead the sheep of Israel back into a relationship with Him. Folks, Jesus is the good shepherd.

He said that Himself. But we also know it’s true from looking at His life as we see it throughout the Gospels, the way He lovingly shepherded the disciples. We read about the disciples so many times, and who among us wouldn’t have wanted to wring their necks at some point, right?

These had to have been frustrating men. Now, on the other hand, we would have been just like the disciples. But we see Jesus loving them and pointing them in the right direction, showing them grace, showing way more patience than we would have.

Jesus is the good shepherd. He’s a friend of the sheep. He’s a comforter.

And he’s a refuge to all those who will hear his voice and follow. Because as the Father sent the Son to be the shepherd, to lead the sheep back into a relationship with him, the son, the shepherd, stands at the sheep pen and calls out to us by name. And when we hear his voice, we ought to follow.

Many in this room have heard his voice and followed. I was five years old when I heard his voice. Now, when I say that, I want to be clear.

I don’t mean that I heard God’s voice audibly, that I heard Jesus’ voice audibly. I mean, when I was five years old, I was sitting in children’s church, and I heard a man talk about sin and our separation from God, And even though I’d grown up in church, and even though at five years old, I mean, come on, how much trouble could you really get into? Okay, with strict parents that you were afraid of, how much trouble could you really have gotten into?

And still, I understood. When I say I heard his voice calling, I mean, I understood the conviction that I felt in my heart that meant I was going to be separated from God because of my sin, that I already was, and that I would remain separated from God because of my sins all throughout eternity. and I heard and it clicked with me.

I understood for the first time this message that I’ve been hearing bits and pieces of all along that Jesus Christ died to pay for my sins and that if I would acknowledge my sin and I’d believe in Him as my one and only Savior and I’d ask God’s forgiveness because of what Jesus did on the cross I would be saved. I understood that and in my heart I heard the call and I trusted Christ as my Savior. And many of you have heard that same call.

may not have been at five years old in children’s church, may have been at 25 or 35 or 55, may have been sitting in your car, may have been somewhere where you weren’t supposed to be, but you heard the call and you followed the shepherd. You followed the only shepherd who could put you in a right relationship with the Father. To those of you who’ve done that, let me issue you one more challenge.

The shepherd doesn’t stop leading us at salvation. I’d ask you, is there something today the shepherd is calling you to do? And have you gone out and followed his voice where he calls?

And to those of you who’ve never trusted him as your Savior, to those of you who’ve never heard that call, never responded to it, hopefully telling my story makes it a little clearer. I’m not saying you’re waiting until you hear the voice of Jesus with your ears. But it’s that conviction in our spirits.

It’s that time where we hear that we’ve sinned against God, and we’re separated from Him now, and we’re going to stay separated all the way to hell because of our sin. And we feel the weight of that sin. We feel the weight of that conviction telling us that we’re not right with God.

And maybe you’ve tried. Maybe you felt that weight of conviction and you thought, well, I’ll go to church. That’ll fix it.

Have people come from time to time and say, I need to get baptized. Great. Why do you want to get baptized?

Because I need to get things straightened out with God. Great. I can tell you how to get straightened out with God, but baptism is not going to do it.

People try to do all sorts of religious things to deal with that conviction. People try to give money. They try to go to church.

They try to be a better person, not realizing that we can’t ever be good enough to change the fact that we’ve sinned. And we can work ourselves to exhaustion, like the Pharisees, following all these rules and trying to be just good enough for God to accept us. And we can work ourselves into exhaustion and it never make a dent in our sin and never make one iota of a difference in our eternity.

We can work ourselves into exhaustion all the way to hell. All the while, the shepherd is calling us. The only one who can lead us back into that relationship, into that fellowship with God, is calling us to follow Him.

And this morning, if you’re sitting there thinking, I need to be right with God. I need that relationship with God. I know I don’t have it.

You’re not going to find it in church attendance. You’re not going to find it in baptism or any other religious ritual. You’re not going to find it in giving money, trying to be a better person. Jesus Christ died on the cross to deal with the problem of sin that’s what separates us from God.

We cannot have fellowship with God while that sin remains unpunished and undealt with. So Jesus Christ went to the cross and he took responsibility for our sins. He was nailed to that cross and he shed his blood and he died to pay for every sin we will have ever committed.

And then on top of that, he physically, he literally and physically rose from the dead three days later to prove it. And because he’s dealt with our sin once and for all, because he’s paid for it on the cross, he offers us forgiveness. When I talk about the shepherd calling out to us and leading us into a relationship with God, what’s necessary is for us to understand our sin and acknowledge we need a savior and trust in the one who’s calling out to us.

Stop trying to do it yourself. Instead, trust Jesus Christ. Trust him as the shepherd, the one who’s able to lead you into a relationship with God. Believe that he died to pay for your sins in full, that he’s the only one, and ask God’s forgiveness on that basis.

And our good shepherd, Jesus Christ, will put us, will put you today into a right relationship with the Father who sent Him so that we could be reconciled to Him.