My Sheep Know My Voice

Good morning, church! It is always a joy to be with you in worship, and I'm delighted we're diving into this passage today from John's Gospel. It's one of those sections of Scripture that seems so simple at first glance—Jesus talking about sheep and shepherds again. But if we slow down a bit and really listen, I think something profound here speaks right into the heart of where many of us are living these days.

I don't know about you, but sometimes life can feel noisy, can't it? Loud. Confusing. It's hard to know who to listen to or what to believe. It's hard to feel safe, secure, and steady when there's so much uncertainty in the world. And yet, in the middle of that noise, Jesus says something so clear, so grounding. He says, "My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me."

The first thing I want us to notice in this passage—maybe the most foundational truth—is that Jesus is speaking, but not everyone hears him.

Let's look again at what's happening in the story. It's the Festival of Dedication, what we now know as Hanukkah, and Jesus is walking through Solomon's Colonnade in the temple courts. It's winter, and the people—specifically the religious leaders—gather around him and ask, "How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly!"

If I were Jesus, I might have rolled my eyes a little. By this point in John's Gospel, Jesus has been healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding the hungry, forgiving sins, and teaching with the kind of authority that could only come from heaven. He has already shown them and told them exactly who he is—just not in the way they wanted him to. But still, they say, "Come on. Just say it. Are you the one or not?" And what does Jesus say in return? He says, "I have told you. But you don't believe me."

You see, their issue wasn't that Jesus was being unclear. The issue wasn't that Jesus was being evasive. The problem wasn't on his end at all. The problem was with their reception. They had already made up their minds about what the Messiah was supposed to look like, what he was supposed to do, and how he was supposed to sound. And because Jesus didn't fit their preconceived mold, they tuned him out. It wasn't that Jesus wasn't speaking; they weren't listening.

Now, I want to sit with that for a minute because I think we can be just like them if we're honest. Can't we?

We say things like, "God, just tell me what to do! Please show me the path. Open the door. Write it in the sky. Speak to me in a dream. Just something!"

We want clarity. We want direction. We want a roadmap. We want answers.

And God says, "I am speaking. I've been speaking. But you've got to slow down enough to listen."

The issue for most of us isn't that God has gone silent. It's not that God has suddenly stopped communicating with his people. The real problem is that we've got so much noise in our lives that it's hard to distinguish the voice of the Shepherd from everything else that's shouting for our attention.

Let me tell you, friends—our world is loud. We are drowning in a sea of voices—social media, email alerts, text messages, the news, political commentary, advertising, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, Netflix, and all the internal noise of our anxious minds. We live in a culture that rewards hustle, glorifies busyness, and rarely—if ever—permits us to be still.

We are constantly being pulled in a thousand directions. And in the middle of that whirlwind, we cry out to God for a word, a sign, some divine interruption. But we often haven't created any space to hear him speak.

It reminds me of something I learned growing up in southern Indiana. Some of you have heard me talk about my childhood. We lived out in the country, in a farming community where the roads were gravel, and the neighbors were cows. And one of my favorite things to do was to walk early in the morning to feed the horses. We'd head out just before sunrise while the world was still waking up.

I remember those walks so vividly. The stillness of the morning. The dew on the grass. The crunch of gravel under my boots. And you know what I noticed? You could hear everything. The birds waking up. The frogs chirp down by the creek. The wind rustled through the cornfields. You could even hear a deer moving through the woods if you were quiet and paying attention.

But here's the thing—if you were talking the whole time or were distracted, stomping around, or checking your phone (not that we had phones in our pockets back then!), you'd miss it all. You'd walk right past the wonder and not even notice. God's voice is like that sometimes. Gentle. Persistent. Present. But not always loud.