I Am The Good Shepherd

I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD

JOHN 10 :1-18

INTRODUCTION:

A shepherd was looking after his sheep one day on the side of a deserted road, when suddenly a brand new Porsche screeches to a halt.

The driver, a man dressed in an Armani suit, Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, TAG-Heuer wrist-watch, and a Pierre Cardin tie, gets out and asks the shepherd:

"If I can tell you how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?"

The shepherd looks at the young man, and then looks at the large flock of grazing sheep and replies:"Okay."

The young man parks the car,

connects his laptop to his mobile, enters a NASA Webster, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database with 60 Excel tables filled with logarithms and pivot tables, and

then prints out a 150-page report on his high-tech mini-printer.

He turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1,586 sheep here."

Rather surprised the shepherd replies, "That’s correct, you can have your sheep."

The young man takes an animal and puts it in the back of his Porsche.

Just as the man is about to drive off, the shepherd asks him:

"If I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?"

The young man answers, "Yes, why not?"

The shepherd says, "You are an IT consultant."

"How did you know?" asks the young man.

"Very simple," answers the shepherd.

"Firstly, you came here without being called.

Secondly, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew, and

Thirdly, you don’t understand anything about my business.

Now please can I have my SHEEP back?"

WE ARE NOW LOOKING AT JESUS STATEMENT “I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD”.

ONE BY ONE JESUS IS PLACING HIMSELF HIGHER THAN THE NATION OF ISRAEL’S PATRIARCHS.

MacArthur points out that Jesus is saying to them that He is greater than David. In John 6, in claiming to be the Bread of Life, Jesus claimed to be greater than Moses. In John 8, after declaring Himself to be the Light of the World, Jesus says that “Before Abraham was born, I am!

AND SO NOW JESUS SAYS “I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD.”

Good (kalos) means beautiful and valuable – Jesus is beyond being morally good but is also excellent and pre-imminent in every feature – incapable of doing anything bad. He is good in every attribute as God is good.

John 10:10: “I am come that you may have life and have it in abundance.

“to the full” – greek perissos

• exceeding some number or measure or rank or need

• over and above, more than is necessary, superadded

• exceeding abundantly, supremely

• something further, more, much more than all

BIBLICAL BACKGROUND:

In the beginning of Chapter 10, Jesus takes the opportunity to contrast the Good Shepherd with false shepherds, hirelings, thieves, and predators.

When Jesus said these words he was making two distinct and important points; the first one related to the blind man he had just healed.

(1) Before the man-born-blind was healed he was an outcast from the fellowship of believers and had to beg for a living. When Jesus’ men asked, “Is his blindness because of his sin or that of his parents?” That was no doubt what the blind man had heard time and time again. Instead of caring about his condition, people simply used him as a point of departure for theological discussions on sin and related illness. The standard Jewish notion was that illness was punishment for some past sin. (That was what Job’s friends told him when they found him in such a predicament. He was frustrated because he knew that wasn’t true). Sadly, when Jesus healed him, the man wound up cast out of the synagogue as a heretic for giving credit to Jesus as healer. The man went from outcast due to illness, to outcast due to beliefs in one day’s time. The leaders had cast out a sheep of the flock of Israel, not because he was a bad sheep, but because they were bad shepherds. Jesus made the comparison between the good shepherd and hirelings, thieves, and predators, to show that the shepherds of Israel were abusing the sheep.

(2) The second intention of Jesus’ words was to show that the Good shepherd (prophesied in Ezekiel 34) has finally made his appearance.

The Old Testament prophet, Ezekiel, in the 34th chapter of his prophetic letter contrasted the false shepherds of Israel with the true shepherd who would someday come to lead the sheep himself and to judge all false shepherds according to their evil deeds.

Ezekiel 34: 13 – 15 says this: “I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land. I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God.”