March 14, 2021 Sermon - John 10:27-39
We are drawing nearer each week to the cross. We’ve been on this Lenten journey together since Ash Wednesday, and many of us have been connecting each day through our Daily Lenten Devotional videos. If you’ve joined us for those daily reflections you have heard a lot of Scripture being read, passages that lead up to the cross, as well as thoughtful reflections by members of our church community.
And so, yes, we are drawing closer to the cross, to Good Friday where we remember our Saviour giving His life for you and for me. And today we’ve heard read some of the final teachings of Jesus, who knew of course that these would be among His final words in the last days of His earthly ministry.
So what does he say as He Himself is drawing near to His suffering, His agony, that ultimate expression of His love for you and for all of humanity that he demonstrated on the cross. I encourage you to hear these words as He intends you to hear them...He who was God-in-the-flesh, who knew that you would be following Him today, Who knew you would be listening to His Word today, Who, being God, directs these Words from His holy Word, the Bible, to you this day, March 14, 2021.
What does He say to you today? He says:
“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no-one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no-one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand”.
I gather that some or all watching this service, participating in this gathering today, need to hear this. When God speaks, those who are His sheep listen. Those who are His recognize His loving voice. There is a mutual knowing between shepherd and sheep.
The shepherd knows each sheep by name, knows them from birth, knows all their trials, knows what makes them unique and recognizable among all the others.
You see the shepherd was there at your birth. At your physical birth after he knit you together so lovingly and delicately in your mother’s womb; and he was present at your spiritual birth, that moment, whenever it was, when you said “Yes!” to Jesus. That moment when you first believed the gospel of God’s grace...when you realized that Jesus Christ loved you so much that he died for your sins, that He willingly laid down everything to give you the gift of salvation.
There’s a mutual knowing between shepherd and sheep. But whereas the shepherd absolutely knows each of us, we are learning to listen to His voice together as a church community.
How do you listen? Do you always find it super easy to hear God’s voice? On some days I hear pretty good. On other days honestly I don’t so I rely on Pastor Arleen, or Darlene or Joanne or Marjorie or another sister or brother to hear and express the voice of Jesus. The point is we listen together, and we grow together.
We are learning, but we listen to His voice and we follow Him. We are learning to follow Jesus and we are learning to depend on the Holy Spirit in the journey.
Jesus says: “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no-one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no-one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand”.
And this promise follows here. Jesus gives us eternal life. And he promises that in Him we shall never perish, we shall never be snatched out of His hand, no one will ever snatch us out of the hand of God the Father or of God the Son. Together, working in unity with the Holy Spirit, they secure our standing with God.
Have you ever wondered about where you stand with God? Have you made mistakes and then judged yourself so severely that you raised questions in your own mind about your salvation? If that’s you, you’re not alone. Very few followers of Jesus have not at some point done this. And so we worry and we fret about where we stand with the Almighty.
But this passage...when we take it to heart, what truth does it lead us to? Simply this: we are safe in the hands of Jesus as we walk with Him, even as we stumble when we walk, because as a sheep may stumble in a gopher hole or even fall into a ditch - sheep are particularly helpless when they fall into a ditch - the shepherd is with us always to lift us out of the valley we may be in.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. Psalm 23:4
Why is this important? Well, knowing this, not just understanding the words here in our heads, but knowing it deep in our hearts, we can know that we need not fret about ourselves, our own salvation, our own standing with God. It has been secured by Jesus. So, not needing to worry about these eternal questions for ourselves, questions that have been settled once for all by Jesus, we can focus our energies, our prayers, our efforts on other things. On others.
We become the hands and feet of Jesus, serving others, joyful in the knowledge of our deep belonging to God in Christ, and serving God in the various ways He has gifted us to serve. The greatest joy that there is in this life is in serving the Lord. Nothing comes close to that joy.
Do you wonder how you are supposed to serve God? Do you wonder about your spiritual gifts? The Scripture says that 10 Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. 1 Peter 4:10
Do you wonder about how God uses you uniquely, how he has wired you for joy in serving Him? Coming up soon we are running a course that will help you discover your spiritual gifts, your personal style and your ministry passions. I hope you check it out. You can register on our Linktree portal! There is no greater joy in life than serving God.
So because you are secure in God through your faith in Jesus Christ, you are free and you are empowered to serve the living God with your whole life for His glory and your fulfillment. Pretty awesome, eh?
The rest of today’s passage shows Jesus loving on those He came to save, but who were opening and actively rejecting Him. The Gospel of John gives us a heads up about this in chapter 1 v 10: He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
And then much of John’s gospel is simply illustrating this terribly sad truth. And now in chapter 10, the situation has reached a fever pitch. For the second time there is a plan afoot to assassinate Jesus.
Again his Jewish opponents picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus said to them, ‘I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?’
And here we have the conflict that Jesus faced laid out before us in stark terms. Jesus had done extraordinary miracles in full view of the pulbic - healing the blind, healing the man paralysed from birth, feeding the 4000 and feeding the 5000 with a few loaves and fish, quieting the storm, walking on water, cleansing the lepers, raising Lazarus from the dead.
All these things He did in the open, and they were good works, which Jesus refers to here. Their earlier objection a few chapters ago in John’s gospel, had been that he had healed on the wrong day - the Sabbath. If you can imagine witnessing a wonderful miracle of healing and then arguing about something so trial as the timing of the miracle rather than acknowledging the extraordinary witness it was to Jesus’ divinity. So Jesus says, drawing attention to their hardness of heart and spiritual blindness: ‘I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?
Some suggest that that is perhaps a little bit of holy sarcasm.
I think that it is more accurately just the grief-filled response of Jesus who had made it so incredibly plain and easy for them to see that He was sent from God, and yet their very best thinking in response to all the beautiful and extraordinary healings that Jesus had done is to want to kill Him.
So the people say: ‘We are not stoning you for any good work,’ they replied, ‘but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.’
He showed Himself to be God. He actually proved it through His miracles, and yes, He did state it in the clearest way that they could have possibly understood it when he said in John 8: 58 “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” He uses the name God gave Himself to Moses. And He also states His pre-existence and thus His divinity in the same breath.
But despite the abundance of evidence Jesus had shown them, their hearts were hard. So hard that they wished to murder Jesus on the spot. That’s pretty cold.
Jesus then says something that seems strange at first glance. Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your Law, “I have said you are ‘gods’ ”? If he called them “gods”, to whom the word of God came – and Scripture cannot be set aside – what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, “I am God’s Son”?
Say what? This requires a bit of probing. When I first read this it was a head-scratcher, and it didn’t help that I had made friends with a fellow studying for the priesthood who told me that this means we are all gods. He was confused and came up with a way of looking at this that was truly wonky.
Bear with me. The website gotquestions.org is helpful here.
The Hebrew word translated “gods”, that Jesus refers to here, found in Psalm 82:6 is Elohim. It usually refers to the one true God, but it does have other uses. Psalm 82:1 says, “God presides in the great assembly; he gives judgment among the gods.” It is clear from the next three verses that the word “gods” refers also to magistrates or judges.
So calling a human judge a “god” says three things: 1) he has authority over other human beings, 2) the power he wields as a civil authority is to be feared, and 3) he derives his power and authority from God Himself, who is pictured as judging the whole earth in verse 8.
The whole point of Psalm 82 is that earthly judges must act with impartiality and true justice, because even judges must stand someday before THE Judge. Verses 6 and 7 warn human judges that they, too, must be judged: “I said, `You are gods; you are all sons of the Most High.' But you will die like mere men; you will fall like every other ruler.”
This passage is saying that God has appointed some to positions of authority in which they are considered sort of as gods among the people. They are to remember that, even though they are representing God in this world, they are mortal and must eventually give an account to God for how they used that authority.
Jesus’ point in all this is this: You charge me with blasphemy based on my use of the title “Son of God”; yet your own Scriptures apply the same term to judges in general. If those who hold a divinely appointed office can be considered “gods,” how much more can the One whom God has chosen and sent (verses 34-36)?
Jesus defended His claim to be the Son of God on biblical grounds—there is a sense in which influential men can be thought of as gods; therefore, the Messiah can rightly apply the term to Himself. Human beings are not “gods” or “little gods.” We are not God. God is God, and we who know Christ are His children. Again, if that interests you or confuses you, check it out on gotquestions.org
Finally for today, Jesus makes another appeal, “Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.’
His desire is that they believe, because He came so that they would be saved. His heart bleeds for his enemies, and make no mistake, they have set their hearts against Jesus and they are His enemies.
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[a] and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. Matthew 5
But here we see Jesus doing what He taught...loving His enemies. Do all that he can to demonstrate His love and His power, yet they would not believe.
The end to this whole dialogue is this: Again they tried to seize him, but he escaped their grasp.”
??John? ?10:27-29, 31-39? ?NIVUK??
So this is the weight that Jesus carried with him as he proceeded to the cross. These are His thoughts as He makes that terrible journey. Those He loved so much that He came into the world to show the heart and mind of God, hated Him. Those He came to lay down His life for in the most radical act of love possible, dying for their sins, hated Him.
Those whose sin He took upon Himself along with the sin of the world, BECOMING SIN for us, they hated Him and plotted His death. They hated Him and they plotted His death. They were His enemies, and He laid down His life for them.
But here’s the thing, those folks were just like all of humanity. None of us can truthfully state that out of the purity of our own hearts, with the purest motives anyone can imagine, we came to God. If we think that, we’re living in a fantasy world. We must listen to the Scriptures that lay bare our true state and our true need for Jesus
Romans 5 is helpful here:
6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11 Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. Romans 5
This puts into perspective for me that God’s kind of Agape love is so far beyond human behaviour that it is only in and through Him that we can love with His kind of love. As God’s enemies we were reconciled through the death of Jesus. The ultimate peace offering was Jesus.
In Jesus, God pronounces the truth of our sin and our guilt; God gives the sentence for sin - “For the wages of sin is death...”
So picture Jesus as judge up in his judgment seat. He states the simple truth about each and every one of us. Guilty of sin. And He pronounces the sentence, which we’ve just seen. And then this judge comes down from his judge’s seat and stands right next to you and me, and He takes our just penalty upon Himself. “I will pay the price, says Jesus. I will suffer the penalty you deserve.
And here the verse is completed:
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:23
Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift, delivered personally to you as you heard or as you are hearing the gospel. If you know this gift, along with each of us who follows Jesus, determine to live your life for the glory and honour of the gift-giver; choose to daily refresh your passion for, your love for Jesus Christ, WHO IS the Lover of your soul, who calls you to live a life worthy of the Lord.
If you don’t know this gift, will you consider the giver and the gift today? Will you make the choice to trust the Saviour today? Will you ask Him to forgive you for your sins, thank Him for dying on the cross for you, and receive Him as your Master and Lord?
Would you then live your life for the glory of the One who gave up His life for you on that first Good Friday, only to take it up again 2 days later, defeating death, dealing a death blow to Satan, the enemy of your soul.
Those who Jesus loved and came to, for the larger part, rejected him. And yet, and I end with these words
12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
