The Gate for the Sheep

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Well, most married couples have discussions and maybe even arguments when it comes to sides of the bed. Have you ever had one of those arguments? For Charla and me, it got settled pretty quickly.

The first night of our marriage, we were on our way somewhere for our honeymoon, and we were on our way to Santa Fe, and we stopped in Amarillo. So we were in different places the first two nights. And she asked me, which side of the bed do you want?

And I said, I’ll take this one. She said, okay. So she assumed that side of the bed is where I always sleep.

Well, the next night we got to Santa Fe and the room was laid out differently. And I put my stuff on the opposite side of the bed. And she said, wait, I thought you took this side.

Well, I let her know I settled any argument before there was one. And I can say this a lot more easily when she’s not here. She’s probably watching.

I settled that argument before there was one. I said, I don’t have a side of the bed, you know, right side, left side. I sleep on the side closest to the door.

Whatever room we’re in, however the room’s laid out, I sleep on the side closest to the door. She said, okay. My wife knew I was crazy before we got married.

She didn’t ask a whole lot of questions, but a few days in, she finally said, okay, the door thing, what is that about? Why do you always have to sleep closest to the door. And I said, well, because I’m the man, I’m supposed to protect you.

And if somebody’s going to come in that door and they’re going to try to get you or try to hurt us, they’re going to have to go through me, which is kind of a silly thing to say anyway, because once I get good and asleep, you could send in a mariachi band and I’m not going to hear it. She’s going to have to wake me up anyway. So I said, you know, you’re, they’re going to have to go through me to get to And then we, you know, a few weeks later, she said, you know, I understand your deal about sleeping by the door.

I get that. But what happens if somebody comes in through the window? And I said, well, I guess they’re going to have to go through you because I can’t cover all the all the entrances.

But that ideally is the is the idea of somebody wants to come in and hurt my wife, hurt my family. I mean, ideally, as the man, I know some people are going to say, well, that’s sexist and outdated. Well, here I am.

I don’t know. But you should protect your wife. You should protect your kids.

They’re going to have to go through me. Well, Jesus told a story about how people were going to have to go through him to get where they were trying to get. If you would, join me in John chapter 10 this morning.

We’re going to look at this passage. We actually started looking at this passage a couple of weeks ago, and I told you as we came close to wrapping up our series on sheep and the relationship of sheep to the shepherd and what that tells us about our relationship with God, as we wrapped that series up, we were going to spend a few weeks talking about this passage in John chapter 10. And so I didn’t preach last week.

We had Brother Whitley from Brazil here, but the week before that, I introduced this passage to you with Jesus’ description at the beginning of John chapter 10 of the sheepfold and the sheep hearing the voice of the shepherd and not following a stranger, if you remember that, that the sheep would all be gathered in villages. They would typically have a communal sheep pen because it was a whole lot cheaper than everybody building individual sheep pens for their sheep. And they would put all the sheep together in this communal sheep pen.

And then the way you sort them out is the shepherd stands outside the entrance the next morning, calls out to the sheep, and the ones that know his voice follow him out. And if that sheep is not yours, it won’t go with you. And all of this was told in response to the Pharisees and their spiritual blindness.

We’ll get to that in just a moment. But we’re going to pick up this morning in verse 7 and go through verse 10 this morning and see some more of what Jesus says about this, about the concept of sheep and what it tells us about our relationship with him. So starting in verse 7, John chapter 10, verse 7, Jesus said again, truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.

All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep didn’t listen to them. I am the gate. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.

A thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance. Now, the reason I’ve taken a few weeks to go through this passage is, number one, there’s a lot to unpack here.

I felt like if I tried to do it all in one day as I initially had planned, that I would have kept you here through the Sunday night service. But also on top of that, as I read this, part of the trouble I’ve had in understanding this whole passage in John chapter 10 in the past was trying to lump all of this together. Now, Jesus tells all of these stories together at the same meeting with the Pharisees.

But these really are three different stories. The voice of the shepherd, the gate of the sheep, the good shepherd, as we’ll see next week. These are different stories.

And I think part of my confusion in the past has been trying to take them all together and trying to figure out how this works, that Jesus is both the gate and he’s the shepherd that stands outside the gate, and he’s the voice calling out to the. . .

And trying to combine these stories where Jesus is playing multiple roles, and it can just end up getting very confusing if you’re trying to take a microscope to every detail of the stories. And instead, what I’ve realized is you have to step back, and you have to realize that Jesus told each of these stories, and he plays a different role in each of the stories because he’s illustrating something different about the relationship. They’re not meant to be one continuous story.

It’s sort of like when I’m explaining something to Benjamin and Madeline, and they ask some really good questions. They keep me on my toes. They are some of the hardest people that I have to pastor just because of their questions.

You know, I have to make sure that I’m studied up and prayed up because I never know what they’re going to ask. But I’m trying to think of an example, but one’s not coming off the top of my head. But we have these conversations multiple times a week where they will both come and ask me a question, and I will explain it to them in one way.

And I see one of them, the light’s starting to come on, and one of them, it’s still night-night time. You know, they’re still not getting it. So I have to say, okay, let me try and explain this another way.

So I’m making, it’s all one event, but I’m telling multiple stories and using multiple examples to try to get them to understand in different avenues. Does that make sense? And I feel like that’s what’s going on here with Jesus and the Pharisees.

He’s trying to get them to understand his relationship to Israel, his relationship to God’s people, and they’re not getting it. So he starts telling a sheep story. And he tells the story about the sheep pen and the shepherd calling out to the sheep.

And maybe some of them are starting to understand, but for some of them it’s still night-night. The porch light’s not even on. And so he says, okay, let me try a different example.

And then he goes into this one. So if you’re confused about this, I’ve told you before, when we’ve looked at, for example, the story of the ten virgins, the ten bridesmaids, the five who had their lamps ready and the five who didn’t, part of the confusion that we sometimes have with these stories that Jesus tells, with these parables, is we try to lump them all together and we try to overanalyze every single detail. when some of the details are just there to move the story along.

And sometimes I think what is more helpful is if instead of trying to overanalyze every detail, if we step back and sort of take the 30,000 foot view and say, what is the main point Jesus is trying to make here? And in order to do that, we’ve had to separate each of these three stories. And so today we’re looking at this idea of Jesus being the gate.

Because again, otherwise you get confused. Jesus is the gate and he’s the shepherd standing outside the gate. and you get this very confusing idea of who Jesus is.

These are multiple examples. So the Pharisees, they still have not understood. As he’s trying to get them to understand his relationship to Israel, he calls himself the gate for the sheep.

Specifically here, he’s talking about the sheep of God’s pasture, the sheep of the Father’s pasture. And he says, I am the gate. I’m the gate.

I’m the way into that pen. I’m the way out to that pasture. And he’s responding to the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees in John chapter 9.

They are so blind to the things of God that they don’t even realize how blind they are. It’s like trying to explain to somebody who was born blind and has never seen light and has never seen color, has never seen the shapes of the world, trying to explain to them what sight is like. See, they’ve never known any different.

They don’t even know, at least at first. they don’t even realize what they’re missing. The Pharisees were so spiritually blind and so spiritually lost that they didn’t even have a concept of how blind and how lost they were. And so he says here, well, let’s take another tactic.

Let’s try something else. I’m the gate for God’s sheep. How does that grab you?

I’m the gate. If you want to know about God’s relationship to Israel, Israel are the sheep and I’m the gate and they come through me. And there were others who had presented themselves as the gate.

Now, they may not have ever used that terminology, but there were other people, certainly, who had presented themselves as though they were the way, or at least they knew the way, for Israel to be connected with God. And the Pharisees knew this because the Pharisees followed them. I won’t say the Pharisees followed every newfangled teacher who came along, but the Pharisees were incredibly tied up in their religious traditions and religious interpretations because they thought, oh, what this rabbi taught or what this interpreter taught or what this scribe has said about this passage, that’s the key.

And if we do all of these things, if we follow what they’ve said, then we’ll be in a relationship with God. These people for them were acting like the gate that the sheep could come in and out of God’s fold and God’s pasture from. They were acting like others could get them to God.

So Jesus was pointing out that there were false teachers. And we need to understand when he said all those who came before me were thieves and robbers, he’s not talking about Moses. He’s not talking about Elijah.

He’s not talking about any of the prophets of God. He’s talking about those who, like the Pharisees and influencing the Pharisees, changed the commandments of God and twisted them and made them subservient to the traditions of men. These were false teachers who said, come follow us, we’ll show you the way.

but their way ended in destruction. Jesus said, these who came before me, saying that they could get others to God through them, or through their way, or through their religious practices. He said, they’re just a bunch of thieves and robbers.

Now these thieves and robbers, kind of like the ones that he said snuck over the wall, sneaked over the wall, in the first story, they’re thieves and robbers. They didn’t come with any good purpose in mind for the sheep. And we know that can be the case too.

There can be people who hold themselves up as religious teachers, as authorities on how to have a relationship with God, and they don’t teach the truth. And some of them are there not out of a sense of what’s good for the sheep. They’re not there for the benefit of the sheep, but they’re there for their own benefit.

They’re there to use the sheep for their benefit rather than to be used by God for the benefit of the sheep. I can’t believe anybody could do that. Go turn on TV when you get home.

watch about three minutes of some of the TV preachers. No more than that. Some of them.

There are some decent Bible teachers on television. But most of what you’ll find broadcast, especially when they spend an inordinate amount of time talking about give this money, plant this seed of faith with your money, send your money to God, but it’s always with His name on the check. Let me buy a second airplane so I can go preach God’s word.

You know what? I’ve preached God’s word. I’ve never had a private jet in my life.

I wouldn’t know. It can be done without a whole fleet of private jets and a fancy mansion. But there are people out there, just as there were in their day, there are people who were more interested in fleecing the sheep than shepherding the sheep.

Jesus said, those who have come and told you they know the way, we’re there for their power and their benefit, not for yours. They’re thieves and robbers. But in contrast to these teachers, these people who said they were the way, Jesus said he was the gate.

And I’ve already reminded you about the sheep pen. They’d have the communal sheep pen. It would be enclosed all the way around.

It would be stones. It would be an earthen wall. It would be maybe some thick hedges with thorny things to keep sheep in and predators out.

And it would have an opening in one spot where they would either put a gate or, more likely, they would have one of the shepherds, they would take turns, they would have one of the shepherds or somebody else as a guard lay across the entrance at night when all the sheep were in. And if you were going to get into the sheep, if you were going to get into the pen, you literally had to go through him. That person literally became the gate.

And Jesus, knowing they would understand this picture, Jesus said, I am the gate. It was something they would have understood very clearly. You want in here, you have to go through me.

He said he was the gate. If you want in this pen, you have to go through me. So as he’s talking to the Pharisees about their relationship to God, about Israel’s relationship to God, to then turn right around and call himself the gate and say, you’ve got to go through me.

What he was doing was identifying himself as the only way to God. He said, there’s not another way. There’s not another legitimate way into the sheep pen.

I’m it. I am the gate. I get, well, I’m amazed sometimes at people who say, well, Jesus never claimed to be God.

He never claimed to be the only way. I can take you page by page and show you that he did. As a matter of fact, this is one of the things I’ve been working on with my kids this week.

Here’s this story. Did Jesus ever claim to be God? Absolutely, right here.

Did Jesus ever claim to be God? Look at this story, right here. This is one of those times.

And there are people who profess to be Christian teachers who will look at Jesus’ statement, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes unto the Father but by me, and they’ll say, that’s not what he meant by that. I don’t see how you can take that any other way than Jesus claiming to be the only way to the Father. But all right, let’s say you don’t think that’s what he meant by that.

Okay, let’s say that for the sake of argument. How else do you interpret this story? Talking about their relationship to God, talking to these people who were supposed to be the religious leaders of Israel, and saying all these other ways you followed in the past, they were taught to you by thieves and robbers.

I am the gate. Because again, remember that guy who slept across the entrance to the sheep pen. If you wanted in there, whether you were a sheep, whether you were a wolf, whether you were a shepherd, whether you were a sheep wrestler, if you wanted in there, you had to go through him.

I can’t understand it any other way than Jesus saying, I am the only way to the Father. I’m the only way into the relationship with him. If Israel wanted to find God, Jesus said they had to go through him.

and by the way just because I’m emphasizing Israel he was talking about Israel because he was talking to the Pharisees but the same thing is true of us don’t for a minute think well Jesus said there’s only one way for Israel okay I go back to that other verse in John where he says no man comes under the father but through me Jesus is also the one who described other sheep when talking to the Pharisees said there are other sheep out there he was talking about the Gentiles he was talking about you and me, those who are not part of the nation of Israel, not part of that bloodline. He said, even for us, we were the other sheep that would come to the Father through him. And he said, no man comes to the Father but by him.

But specifically to the Pharisees, he said, if Israel wants a relationship with God, they have to go through me. The Pharisees were so blind. They thought they had found all these ways to God.

They thought they had these shortcuts. I say shortcuts. It was actually a really complicated way to get to God, trying to follow all these impossible laws.

But they thought they’d found these shortcuts. If they could just be good enough, and if they had just the right bloodline, and they did all the right things, then they could have a relationship with God. They thought they’d found a way to God, but those who had led them were thieves and robbers, Jesus said.

Thieves and robbers who wouldn’t fool his true sheep. and that leads me to believe that once we know jesus once we have come through the right gate once we know him for who he truly is and once we have that relationship with the father through the son we don’t have to look around at all these other ways all these other professed entrances into the sheep pen and be fooled by them now as a believer you don’t have to go looking for other ways to god once you’ve found the way once you found the gate you’re not going to be fooled by the imposters. And then he said that if anybody came to the Father through him, verse 9, I am the gate, he says it again, if anyone enters by me, he will be saved.

If anybody comes to the Father through Jesus, if anybody walks through that gate, he says they will be saved. There is salvation in Jesus Christ and in no other. If they walk through that gate, they’d find the salvation that eluded them any other way.

Think about that way of salvation, that imaginary way of salvation where you think you’ve got to earn your way in. If it’s based on your earnings or what you can deserve, are you ever sure that you’ve done enough to earn it? Are you ever sure you’ve been good enough?

Think about that for a minute. If having a relationship with the Father, if being saved, if eternity in heaven was based on what you could do and how good you could be, Are you absolutely sure you could be good enough? I’m not.

As a matter of fact, I’m absolutely sure I could not be good enough. But think about the fear that exists in that mindset. I’ve heard people from other religions talk about this view, that it depends on if the good outweighs the bad.

Well, how can you ever know for sure? I’ve been there when a friend has asked somebody, Well, how can you ever know for sure that the good has outweighed the bad? He said, well, we hope.

I’m sorry, eternity is a long time to wager on we hope. It turns out this way. But Jesus said, you come through me.

If they come in through this gate, they will be saved. We have the assurance of salvation through that gate, through Jesus Christ. Not only do we experience salvation, we experience the security, the assurance of our salvation. We experience the security of God’s sheepfold.

He said, if anyone enters by me, he will be saved and he will come in and go out. That coming in, don’t get the idea that, oh, in the sheep pasture, once we come through the gate, in the sheepfold, we’re saved. Outside there, it’s bad.

That’s not what he’s describing. He’s talking about coming in in the sense of this relationship, belonging to the shepherd, belonging to the Father, coming through Him, through the gate, into the sheepfold. And when we’re in the sheepfold, we have the security.

It illustrates the security of this relationship with God. And He doesn’t say going out of the sheepfold into the pasture as though it’s a bad thing. He says we will come and we will go.

That doesn’t mean coming in and out of a relationship with God. It’s a good thing. There’s the security of God’s sheepfold, and there’s the provision and the abundance of God’s pasture.

And he says we enter in through the gate and we get all of that. We get to continue coming in and going out and experiencing all that God has for us as long as we’ve come in through the gate. That’s Jesus Christ. We’ll experience security in God’s fold.

We’ll experience rest and provision in God’s pasture. And we’ll experience life in God’s presence. Because he takes it back to those thieves and robbers.

He said, a thief, verse 10, comes only to steal and kill and destroy. He said, those who would lead you down any other path, they don’t have anything good planned for you. They don’t have anything good to offer you down any other way.

It may look good, but nothing good lies down that road. He said, they’re thieves and they’ve come to to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance. This idea of abundance means beyond what we can measure, beyond what we can anticipate, beyond what we can imagine.

And I was looking at the Greek of this this week, and I don’t know if this will mean as much to you as it did to me, but when he says they will have it and they will have it in abundance. That phrase in the Greek, as near as I can tell, and I’ve looked at some, with Greek, I’ve told you before, I know a little bit, and I know what I don’t know, and I usually, which is a lot, and I know where to look to find out what I don’t know. But I looked at this and read what some others had to say on it as well, and it sounds like it’s a phrasing that indicates it’s an ongoing thing just piled on that they will have it, and have it, and have it, and have it, and oh, did they stop having?

No, they still have it. They continue to have it. That he will continue to heap on us life in abundance.

We will experience abundant life in his presence. And I don’t think that means just in heaven. Although, should you use phrases like just heaven?

I don’t, that’s just heaven. Heaven’s going to be spectacular. But I think that means here on earth we experience abundant life.

Now don’t confuse that with, oh, that means my life’s going to be perfect. No, it means the spiritual life, the joy of being filled by his Holy Spirit, the joy of walking with him, the joy of knowing him, that we are going to experience that spiritual life in abundance until it overflows. We have all of that, that security, that provision, that rest, That abundant life, but we only have it if we come in through the gate.

If we come to the Father through Jesus Christ. Jesus is the only gate through which we can enter God’s fold. That’s not just true for the Pharisees. That’s not just true for Israel.

That’s true for us today. Jesus is the only gate there is for us to enter if we want to be part of God’s flock. There’s no, even today, there’s still no shortage of people offering other ways.

And we think, oh, it’s so bad, it’s so confused. Now everybody just has all these crazy religious ideas and philosophies, and it’s just worse than it’s ever been. No, they were doing the same things in Jesus’ day.

And the good news from that is that Jesus speaks to the problem posed by that. This isn’t some new modern problem that Jesus was unaware of. Oh, what happens today happened back then, and Jesus still said, I am the gate.

don’t look at all these other ways that people are offering don’t look at any path that says well you got to pay part of the way yourself my wife was at a get together last night with some old friends and some extended family and they were talking about somebody that they knew she called me afterwards and and was asking questions about it because they were talking about some different religions and well did I tell them right about this I said well you told them mostly right about this but we were talking about how there are all these ways that people offer and all these ways that people have to follow and yes they they believe in Jesus and they love Jesus they just don’t think Jesus paid at all they think they’ve got to go down the road and they’ve got to add something as they’re walking along we’ve got to travel this road where we have to do something where Jesus did part of it but we’ve got to send ourselves over the top as far as earning our our place with God folks if if the gate we’re trying to travel through is in any way, shape, or form, is in any way, shape, or form a gate of human works.

I’m saying, oh, you just have to be good enough. Then we’re not going in the right gate. Jesus is the gate.

Our only hope is to walk through that gate, to trust entirely, to trust completely in Jesus. Jesus called all these other leaders who professed all these other ways to God. he called them thieves and liars.

That’s not Jared’s narrow-minded Baptist opinion. That’s what Jesus said. You don’t like it, take it up with him.

He called them thieves. He called them liars. He called them robbers.

And where he came to bring us spiritual life, they just came to profit off of our spiritual destruction, to fleece the sheep. Folks, if we want that relationship with God, The answer today is the same as what the answer was 2,000 years ago. If we want that relationship with God today, we have to come into the fold through the gate, which is Jesus Christ. And what that means is realizing that we are shut out from a relationship with the Father, realizing that our sin has separated us from Him.

We are not part of His flock. We are not part of His fold by default. We are separated from him because our sin is offensive and rebellious toward God.

All of us have sinned. If you’re wondering what I mean by sin, anytime we’ve disobeyed him, it has put a barrier in between us and him. The only way for us to get into that sheepfold, the only way for us to join his flock, the only way for us to come into a relationship with the God who is our shepherd is to come through the gate who is Jesus Christ. Meaning, you and I cannot be good enough on our own to come into a relationship with God.

We cannot do enough good things. We cannot earn our way in because it will never erase the sin that’s on our record. So the only option, there were only two options.

One, for us to remain separated from God from here on out, both in this life and in eternity. Or, God could deal with the problem of our sin himself. And so he sent Jesus Christ, God the Son, to come to earth, take responsibility for our sins, and be nailed to the cross, and shed his blood, and die in our place.

And when he did that, he paid for my sins, and he paid for your sins, and he paid for them in full. He did what we could never do. He accomplished what we could never accomplish for ourselves.

And he today is the gate. He is the only way in. For us to walk through that gate means to stop trying to find other ways to God, stop trying to earn our way through good works, stop trying to get to God through these other religious philosophies, and simply realize that we are separated from God and the only way to Him is by trusting entirely in Jesus Christ and throwing ourselves on the mercy of God because Jesus has paid for our sins.

And this morning, if you realize you’ve sinned against God and you realize you have no hope of a relationship with him, that you can’t get there on your own, if you understand that and you believe that Jesus Christ died to pay for your sins and rose again to prove it, then this morning you can ask God’s forgiveness and be saved. But only by going through that gate, only by trusting in Jesus Christ alone. Folks, today, today is the day to walk through that gate and take hold of that abundant life that God has promised.

To find that security and that peace and that rest with Him, to find that life that He offers. Today is the day to walk through that gate.