We are going through the book of John. Last week, we finished off the story of the blind man who was miraculously cured. Someone who was blind from birth. Jesus walked along the road, placed mud in the man’s eye, and said now go and wash, and he washed and he was healed. Not only was he healed of his physical blindness, we find that he was healed of his spiritual blindness. Even more importantly, by his healing, he exposed the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees, of the Jewish elite. Today, as we continue on and look at chapter 10, which is a continuation of the previous story. This is where Jesus begins to shift the metaphors from blindness to begin to talk about things like sheep and shepherds and gates and thieves and robbers and that sort of thing. What he is doing is beginning to let the Jewish leaders know that not only were they spiritually blind, they were bad shepherds to the sheep. Once again, we will be reading from John 10:1. We are going to look at the first six verses first. (Scripture read here.)
Once again, you can tell by those first six verses that this is about shepherds and sheep. Living in Pittsburgh, we maybe have a hard time understanding this imagery, but the image would have been very clear to the first-century reader. Really the picture is a picture of a sheep pen. I have never been to the Middle East. I have never seen these in action. Apparently, it is like a regular sheep pen where all the flocks would be gathered at night for protection. All the shepherds would come in and chip in and have a watchman there that night to protect the sheep from attack or from robbery or from wild animals. They would place a watchman there in front of the gate. The next day, the shepherds of the various flocks would come and begin to call their sheep out. Some knew them by name I guess. They would call them out by name and the sheep, because they would recognize the voice of the shepherd, they would follow the shepherd out because they heard his voice. They would not follow a stranger. Because this particular story follows the story of the blind man, really this is a subtle slam by Jesus to the Jews. What he is saying is that you Jewish leaders in particular have been assigned a responsibility to be shepherds of the flock. We see that imagery especially in the Old Testament in the book of Ezekiel and different places. You were assigned the responsibility to shepherd the people. To take care of God’s people. Instead of acting like good shepherds, you are actually like the thieves and the robbers that would come in some other way to try and gain control over the flock. They would come in by way of deception. They would come in by way of control. They would come in by way of legalism to try and get control over the flock. The blind man was an example of this. When he began to get free, they tried to control him and they were upset by that. Jesus, on the other hand, being the good shepherd, he comes in a straightforward way. He comes in through the front gate and gives the truth. That truth resonates with the flock, the people, and the flock follows him. Just like we saw the Samaritan woman follow Jesus. Just like we saw the blind man follow Jesus. Just like we see his disciples following Jesus. There is a ring of truth that resonates within the flock and they know the shepherd. They recognize his voice. They will not follow a stranger. They will follow the good shepherd. This is that first six verses. As we see in verse 6, they don’t really get this. He is using a figure of speech. He is using a metaphor to try and explain it so he decides maybe I need to come at it from a different approach. Instead of being the shepherd, how about if I take the role of the actual gate. We see this as we pick up on verse 7. (Scripture read here.)
We can see a shift in imagery. Jesus was the one who entered in the front gate as the good shepherd but now we see him taking the role on as the actual gate. This imagery would have resonated also with those first-century readers. Thinking again about what is going on here. When the shepherds would take their flock out into the fields and they would be in the field overnight, they would have to find some protection for their sheep. They would look around and in some cases they would find a cave or in some cases they would find maybe a man-made sheep pen that was left by another shepherd or they would have to make their own type of sheep pen. Then what they would do is put the sheep in there at night, and they would lay in front of the entryway. They would actually be the gate. Some versions actually say the door. If you are using the King James Version or the New American Standard Version, you will see that the word door is used. The underlying Greek word can be translated door or gate. What we are talking about is an entryway. The person would actually lay in front of the entryway and serve as a gate or a door. I actually found an image that maybe will help you out a little bit. This would be an example. A man-made sheep pen and then you see the shepherd here in the front acting as an entryway or acting as a gate in the entryway. That is the imagery that he is trying to create. Although we are not familiar or we can’t always connect with the sheep and shepherd imagery, I would think all of us here could connect with the idea of a door or gate. The purpose of a door or gate is to be a point of entryway; an access point to something. Some of you might be going down to the Steelers game today. You are going to have to go through a gate of sorts. If you go down to PNC Park for a Pirates game you would go through a gate. Some of you go to hockey games and you have to go through a gate. We also go through doors every day. We go through the door of our house. We go through the door of our workplace. We go through the doors of the church. Just like there were many doors and gates back in the first century, there are many doors and gates today for us. The difference is that Jesus is not saying that he is one of many doors or many gates. He is saying very clearly and very poignantly that he is the gate. He says “I am the gate.”
Let me pause there for a minute. You may recall if you have been going through this series that there are several “I am” statements. The “I am” statements actually had a deep connection and would resonate with the Jewish leaders because they knew God as the great “I am”. When Jesus would say “I am” something, they were thinking he is saying something he shouldn’t be saying. We see back in chapter 6 where he said “I am the bread.” We see in chapter 8 where he said “I am the light.” As we will see next week, he says “I am the good shepherd.” As he says right here “I am the gate.” Listen up. I am saying “I am the gate.” I am not one of many gates. I am not even a nice gate. “I am The gate.” By saying that, he is implying a little bit of exclusivity. He is saying that basically he is the sole entry point to something. As we read on, the sole entry point that he is is to salvation. It is to being saved. He says “I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved.” Saved and salvation are churchy sounding words. We use them a lot. They basically have the same sense as if you would use them in a secular context. When we think of the word saved, it is basically being delivered from something. Being delivered from some sort of threat or harm or something like that. To be saved in a Christian context is also to be saved or protected from some sort of harm. In our case it is the penalty and consequences and the power of our sin, and then placed under the care of the big shepherd, the good shepherd, God. That is really what we mean when we talk about salvation in a Christian context. In fact, I pulled out one of my theological dictionaries and came up with a more technical definition which says “Salvation or being saved entails God’s deliverance of humans from the power and effects of sin and the fall through the work of Jesus Christ so that creation in general and humans in particular can enjoy the fullness of life intended for what God has made.” In a nutshell, salvation is what frees you from the power and the effects of sin on your lives and places you under the care of God so that you can live the full life that God intended for you from the very beginning. That is what salvation is. That is what being saved is. Jesus is saying I am the gate that provides the entry point to this salvation plan. The way he did it, he did it through the work of Christ which is the cross. It is through the cross, through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ on the cross that he became the gate. That he became the gateway. The funny thing is that it is the same thing by saying those things that would have really offended the Jewish people but by saying “I am the gate” are the very words that got him on the cross. They would have been offended by that. They were so offended that they placed him on the cross. They nailed his hands to the cross. They crucified him.
Those very words are the same words that get Christians in trouble today. Some people say you Christians think Jesus is the only way. The only way to God is through Jesus Christ. Many obviously don’t buy that. In the age of tolerance, suggesting that you just have to make your own way. Maybe mix some stuff together. Take a little bit of the Buddhist faith or Muslim or Mormonism or Jehovah Witness or New Age and mix it together and find your own way to God. That is the more tolerant view. If you say Jesus is the way that really smacks of intolerance and we don’t like that in this world. The problem with that is that it is not Christians who say it. It is Christ who said it. We say it because Christ said it. If you are going to be a Christian, then you have to believe it. If you don’t want to believe that, if you want to believe there are multiple ways to God, then go become a Unitarian. Don’t become a Christian. Christians believe that Jesus is the only way. In fact, if we read on to chapter 14, we see that Jesus wanted to make sure they didn’t miss something. He doesn’t just say “I am the gate.” He says “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” That is another one of his exclusive statements. Do you think Jesus is trying to tell us something? He is the only way. He is the only gate. He is the only one. The only way you are going to have access to the Father, to the God that everybody wants access, is through the Son, through Jesus Christ. He says that. We don’t like that. In fact, people say there shouldn’t even be a gate. There shouldn’t be a fence. Tear that fence down. Let everybody just come on in anytime. I know some of you might be going to the football game today. I have an experiment. In fact, if you don’t have tickets, here is what you do. Get in your car. Go down to Heinz Field and when you see the attendant looking for tickets say I don’t think this gate should be here. I am just going to walk on through. Try it. See how long before somebody grabs you by the back of the collar and says you don’t belong here. Tells you to get out, because you are not coming in the right way. The funny thing is some of you have paid hundreds of dollars to go to a Steelers game, a Penguins game. You would shell out a hundred dollars to see Ben Roethlisberger or Sidney play but you don’t think you should have to pay anything to see the King of the universe. You don’t think you should have to pay anything to stand in front of your creator. That should be free. You know what the problem is that people that say that, if they were to do some self-examination and sit in some quiet time and go deep in the recesses of your mind or soul and be transparent with yourself, you know you don’t deserve to be in the presence of God. If you are like me, you sin all the time in thoughts and deed. You think of a gate or fence and it scares you. The easiest answer is knock it down. Get rid of that fence. Get rid of that gate. Jesus all the while is saying you don’t have to get rid of the fence or the gate. Just come in through the front. Just come on in. I will open the door for you. Just come on in. People say there has to be a price. I pay a price to go to Heinz Field. There has to be a price. Jesus says there is a price. There is a big price but fortunately God shelled out the money. God paid that price with the life of his Son. It was paid.
You say what do I have to do? Not a whole lot. There is a passage that talks about this. In Romans it says you have to do two things. You have to do something with your mind and your mouth and you have to do something with your heart. In Romans 10:9 this is what it says. Paul makes this very clear. “If you confess with your mouth ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” It is not an option. It is a promise. Just like the promise Jesus said when anybody who comes through the gate he will be saved. It is a two-fold thing. You have to grab it with your mind and be willing to confess it with your mouth publicly confess at some point that you have made Jesus Christ Lord of your life. Not that you just confessed it. Not that you just did it out of pressure or compulsion. You believe it. You believe it in the depth of your soul because there is something about it that just resonates true. You heard the shepherd’s voice. You heard the call and you are responding. If I confess with my mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in my heart that God raised him from the dead, he is no longer in the grave, he has been raised up into the heavenlies, I believe that and consequently I will be saved. That is cool.
Now what happens when I do that and I go through the gate? What can I expect? He goes on to say that you can expect to find some sort of a pasture or grazing area. He will come in and he will go out and he will find pasture. But I don’t want to talk about that today. We will talk about that next week. What I want to talk about is the idea that you will come in and go out. I want to talk about the idea of freedom. People have this misconception that if you become a Christian, it is a life of restriction. It is a life of rules and regulations. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke, and I don’t chew, and I don’t run with those who do. That is what many believe the life of a Christian is. I have to do all these things. Jesus says no you don’t. I did all those things for you. When you come in through that gate, he doesn’t hand you a list. You might get a Bible, but he is not going to hand you a list. He is going to give you his Spirit. He is going to give everything you need. He is going to give his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, called the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the Living God, to actually come in you and do the thing that you are no longer equipped to do. That you couldn’t do in the first place and that is gain access to God. When you come in and you get the Spirit of God, then you begin to be led by the Spirit because you cannot walk in the darkness by yourself. You now have the Spirit walking alongside of you showing you how to do and how to act. He is your list if there is a list. Really what is happening though is people, when they become a Christian, for some reason they think they have to go back to a performance-based mentality. The performance was not good enough to get you through the gate in the first place but then you get through the gate and all of a sudden you go back to doing a performance-based faith. I am not good enough. I am not being a good enough Christian. You are right. You are not. You never will be. It doesn’t matter what you do. You are never going to be good enough if it is something you are operating by your own standards. If you are trying to do it by your performance. If you are trying to gauge by your performance. That is why he gives you the Spirit of Christ. He gives you the Living God within you in order that, if you live by the Spirit, he will lead you. As Paul says in Galatians, then you will no longer gratify the desires of the sinful nature. He says live by the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. In other words, that is why you have to stay close to the Spirit. The Spirit is going to shape you. He is going to form you according to his will. You shouldn’t wake up every day as a Christian and say where is my list of dos and don’ts and what are the sins I need to avoid today. No. Walk by the Spirit. Let the Spirit fill you up. What happens is you begin to start experiencing freedom because now you are not bound by law and regulation. You are bound by the Spirit of Christ who lives in you who can do more than you ever exceedingly thought you could do because he is the one that has your best interest in mind. He wants to give you that fullness of life.
Some say that is good but I still need a list. I have people that come up and say Chuck I am a Christian and I don’t know if I should take this job in a casino or if I should be a bartender or quit my job as a bartender. What do you think? I say I don’t know. Do you have an opinion? Not really. There is no place in the Bible that says don’t work in a casino or don’t work in a bar. The bar is not the issue. The issue is whether or not you being led by Christ. Are you being led by the Spirit? I have a friend back in Oregon who can go sit at the bar, have a Pepsi or a Coke all night long and share Jesus with everybody at the bar. Not once touch an ounce of liquor. He is being led by the Spirit. He is fully led by the Spirit and it doesn’t even cross his mind to have a drink. On the other hand, I have another friend who he better not be a 100 yards from a bar. He is a Christian but he hasn’t learned how to be led by the Spirit because the sinful nature, the desires, still have a grip on him. He is trying to be led by the Spirit but he is not read to walk into a bar and try to share Jesus because what will happen is he will get sucked into the situation. Pretty soon, he is doing destructive things to himself and to his family. Do you get the difference? It is all by being led by the Spirit. Live by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. You have the Spirit of Christ in you to get through a day if you are being led by the Spirit. You are allowing the Spirit of God to form you and shape you and mold you into the fullness of the person that God has intended you to be from the very beginning.
In summation, the problem is we see this in John 10 where basically we know that we are trying to do the right things. We are trying to be led by the Spirit. All the while, we have this opposition coming at us. We see that very clearly in John 10 where he says “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.” This is one of my favorite verses in the Bible because to me it is a very clear description of two missions. The thief. He is not talking about thieves and robbers. He is not talking about the Pharisees at this time. He is talking about Satan. Whether you believe in Satan or not, he is talking about an evil. A thief that would seek to rob the Christian of everything that God desires to give that person. The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. That is his mission. To be honest, he does a great job at it. He has done a great number on a lot of you here. Jesus, on the other hand, says my mission is a little bit different. I come to give you life. It is called Zoe. It is not just biological life. It is real life. It is spiritual life. I come to give you Zoe life. And not partially. I come to give it to the fullest. Overflowing life. More than you can handle. Those are the two missions that are going on.
Since the beginning of time, God has created you and has desired that every human would basically have a full, abundant, prosperous, healthy life. In fact, he had our best interest and he still has our best interest in mind. The only condition was that while he gave us that life, he said live under submission to me. Live under submission to the creator. That makes sense but yet people decide no. I want to go my own way. What happened is they went their own way and it didn’t work out. Then we see in the middle of it, we have this evil presence, Satan or whatever you want to call it, that stands in the opposition to bringing us back home. To getting us back in line with our intended purpose. Then several thousand years ago, Jesus steps in and says I can fix that problem. He dies on the cross. He deals with that situation once and for all. He begins the restoration process to come back into the fold. The Bible is not that complicated. I know a lot of you read the Bible and say this doesn’t make any sense. Just keep this in mind. The entire Bible is a restoration story. It is like we were in the garden. We were doing what we were supposed to do. We were living under submission to God. We went our own way and all the Old Testament and the New is a restoration process to bring us back to Revelation when we are back where we are supposed to be in the care of the Good Shepherd. In the care of the Father’s arms sitting there in his comfort, in his protection and back again to the place of worship. That is all it is. We left the tree of life. We are going back to the tree of life. We left worship. We are going back to worship. In the middle of it, why Christians aren’t living that abundant life is because they forget this. They are oblivious to it. To be honest, that is one of Satan’s biggest tactics. Just pretend there is no evil out there. Just pretend that it is all just psychological babble. There is no real evil out there. It is all in your mind. Just pretend that. What happens is Satan has a field day. He just goes rampant. He just goes crazy. He just weaves this path of destruction through the lives of the people and life of the church.
I was thinking about it this morning. In closing, the sad thing about being a pastor or being a minister, and by the way you are all ministers whether you accept the position or not, you are actually supposed to be ministering and pastoring other people in the flock; but whether you accept that or not, the most frustrating thing about that is that I would say, if I include the sermon prep time and the preaching of the sermon, 75% of my time is cleaning up the mess that Satan has left in the lives of people and the life of the church. All that time. Does that resonate true? The phone calls. The emails. People leaving their spouses. All this stuff is going on. We spend our time cleaning up the disaster that Satan has wreaked on the lives of individuals and the lives in the church. That is frustrating. In fact, it is incredibly draining. It is draining for me because as a pastor if my job is restoration, speaking truth into people’s lives and speaking restoration and recovery into their lives and trying to get people back to the fullness of God and their intended design, I am going to be attacked. I am. When I get a sermon that takes me to the morning of that doesn’t want to come out, I know it must be a good one; a message that Satan doesn’t want me to preach. This was one of them. At 4:30 in the morning was when I finally got to the second half of my sermon. Why wouldn’t I be under attack? It heightens the awareness that evil is real. If I have a word or truth or Christ has a word of truth or Debbie in song, if we have words of truth that are going to give life to you people, that are going to force you to begin to make you change your ways of living, change your life, make the decisions at work, make the decisions at home and begin to step into that abundant life, why wouldn’t the adversary want to come out and destroy us? He doesn’t want you to be healthy. He doesn’t want you to have life. He would rather keep you down and keep you thinking about all the junk in your brain that you can’t get rid of. All the negative thinking. I am a loser. I can’t do this. I am no good. I am never going to be any good. Because you know what? That keeps you from being good and effective in the kingdom of God. As frustrating as it is to deal with that stuff as a pastor or as a minister, there is no greater joy, and it is what keeps me preaching, than to see somebody get it. The light goes on and they say I don’t understand all of it, but I got enough of it to walk through the gate. I have enough of it to confess with my brain. I get that. I actually think I am beginning to believe it in my heart because it resonates true and I haven’t heard anything anywhere as good as this gospel of Jesus Christ. I am going to walk through that gate. You don’t know what a joy that is because what you usually see is an immediate change. There is nothing more powerful than a changed life. Like we saw with the blind man. I have changed. Not only do you see that. What gives me the joy is to see a Christian that has been operating led by self instead of the Spirit all of a sudden get it and say I have been trying to do it this way all along. I have been trying to come along. I have been trying to do things through performance to be a Christian but performance isn’t working so I am just going to be led by the Spirit. I am just going to allow the Spirit to form me according to his will and shape me into the image of Christ that he designed me to be. What you see is you begin to see that their eyes are open and they begin to taste the Lord. See that he is good. See that there is something beneficial about this life. Not only begin to taste it. They begin to experience the full and abundant life that God wanted to give them since the very beginning of time. The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. Jesus says I have come to give life and to give it to the full. Let us pray.
