I Am The Door Series

Who does the Bible say that you are? Many beautiful comparisons and images portray our identity in Christ. Who are you? You are the apple of God’s eye. You are the holy bride of the Lord. You are his vineyard, and his body, and his temple. You are his inheritance and treasure. And you are his sheep, the precious ones who belong to God’s pasture.

If we are sheep, we need a good shepherd. And God in his sovereign grace has given us a shepherd in himself! We know the much-loved Psalm 23: “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.” The same truth is in Ezekiel 34. The chapter is all about how God’s sheep were being forsaken and maltreated by their earthly shepherds, the leaders of Israel, but how the Lord yet searched out and preserved them. And today we’ll see how the sheep are so well cared for by our good shepherd, the Lord Jesus Christ.

In John 10, Jesus explores several different aspects of being the flock of God. He will speak about the sheep and what we do. He’ll speak about the thieves and robbers who threaten the flock. And then He’ll also speak about the gate of the sheepfold, and about the faithful shepherd of the sheep.

You might notice that in our reading we find very close together two of the seven ‘I am’ sayings, both ‘I am the door’ (in verse 9) and ‘I am the good shepherd’ (in verse 11). In our text, Christ portrays the intimate concern that He has for his people. He gives constant care for our well-being, so that we would experience the security of belonging to him and enjoying his salvation. I preach God’s Word to you from John 10:9 on this theme,

I am the Door:

1) as his sheep, we enter by Christ

2) as his sheep, we find pasture through Christ

1) as his sheep, we enter by Christ: If you took Jesus’s saying all on its own, without reading any of the surrounding verses, you’d be left with a curious image. ‘I am the door’—maybe you’d think of the screen door at the front of your house, or a heavy wooden door on hinges, or a sliding glass door. Is that what Jesus is like?

We’ve learned, of course, to see every text in its web of connections to the words around it. And in this case, when Jesus announces that He is ‘the door,’ He is using a familiar illustration. It’s an illustration that his listeners could’ve understood, but no, it’s not a reference to the kind of door that you can buy at the hardware store. For since the start of the chapter, Christ has been speaking about the sheepfold, and the shepherd, and his sheep.

Picture for a moment how sheep were taken care of in the time of Christ. Farmers today have pens or corrals for holding their livestock, and similarly, shepherds in Jesus’s day had enclosures for their sheep. Animal pens are built with posts and boards and wire today, but back then a sheepfold looked quite different.

In some cases, it actually wasn’t unusual for sheep to be held in the inner courtyard of the family home. A family might keep three or four sheep as a means of providing a regular supply of milk or wool or meat. For most families, these were valuable animals, so the sheep would be locked up securely within the house.

But out in the fields and paddocks, when a farmer had greater numbers of livestock, the sheep needed to be watched over in a different manner. The shepherds would find large caves in the mountains in which to corral the flock for the night. Or perhaps they would make a pen for the sheep behind a tall hedge of thornbushes—so it’d be hard to get in or out. And most commonly, shepherds would form an enclosure out of stones. Carefully stacking the rocks in piles, they would build walls that were high enough to keep the sheep inside.

During the day, the sheep would graze and be led to watering holes, but at night they’d be brought to their pen so they could sleep securely. The main purpose of these sheepfolds was to protect the sheep. It would keep them from hostile animals or other nighttime intruders, from wolves or lions, or perhaps people who were looking to steal. Corralling the sheep for the night would also keep them from carelessly wandering off and getting lost.

It was often the case that several flocks would be sheltered together in the same fold. Then in the morning, the shepherds would call their sheep, separate them from each other, and assemble their own flocks for another day of grazing.

With the sheep resting safely behind the stone walls, there was just one vulnerable place, a potential weak spot. This was where it’d be easiest for an intruder to get in, or for a sheep to wander out. And that was the opening for the gate, the door. When we say ‘door,’ it was really just a narrow opening in the stone wall. And for the sake of safety, there would be only one point of access.