INTRODUCTION
A couple of weeks ago, we started a new series for the afternoon services, looking at WHO JESUS IS.
In the Bible, God the Father and Jesus have many titles and descriptions. They tell us something about God the Father or Jesus. When Jesus was crucified, Pilate had a notice prepared and put on the cross. It said, ‘This is Jesus, the king of the Jews.’ That’s a great title and description for Jesus. In the broadest sense, Jews are God’s people. We are Jews! But I don’t want to go into the theology of that now.
Jesus put a lot of emphasis on who he is. Near the middle of Matthew, Mark and John, Jesus asks his disciples, ‘Who do people say I am?’ Then he asks them, ‘But who do YOU say I am?’ In John’s gospel Jesus makes seven famous statements that tell us who he is, for example, ‘I am the bread of life’, ‘I am the light of the world’ and so on. It's important to Jesus that we understand who he is.
‘Who’ questions are important. If you know that the woman you’re talking to at the surgery is a doctor, you’ll tell her about your health problems and you’ll probably take her advice about what to do. If you know that the man in the car with blue flashing lights is a police officer, you’ll probably pull over. But the most important ‘Who?’ question of all is, ‘Who is Jesus?’ If we know who Jesus is, we can relate to him correctly. And if we know who he is, we can do a better job of being like him. Today, we’re going to look at one of Jesus’ famous ‘I am’ statements in John’s gospel: ‘I am the good shepherd.’ I’m first going to give a bit of context, then we’ll look at what Jesus said.
The shepherd in the Old Testament
I want to briefly pick up a few things we can learn about shepherds from the Old Testament.
One thing we can say about shepherds in the Old Testament was that they were caring. David described God as his shepherd. God, as his shepherd, made him lie down in green pastures. He led him beside still waters. He restored his soul. He led him in paths of righteousness. God cared for David.
Another thing we can say about shepherds in the Old Testament was that they were tough. David told Saul that in his job as shepherd he’d fought with both lions and bears.
A third thing we can say about shepherds in the Old Testament is that God sees the job of being a king as very similar to the job of being a shepherd. God told David, ‘You shall be shepherd of my people Israel’ [2 Samuel 5:2].
A final thing we can say about shepherds in the Old Testament is that God promised that a day would come when HE would be shepherd of his people! God tells Ezekiel: ‘For thus says the Lord God … I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep…’ Then God continues: ‘And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them he shall feed them and be their shepherd’ [Ezekiel 34:23].
Ezekiel lived 300 or more years after King David. But God said that he would set his servant David over his people! The David who God is talking about is Jesus. He is the shepherd whom God would set over his people. So, when Jesus said, ‘I am the good shepherd’, he was fulfilling Ezekiel’s prophecy.
The shepherd today
There are hardly any shepherds in Britain today. But there are shepherds in other countries. Priscilla and I lived in Azerbaijan for many years. We lived in a part of Azerbaijan where the plains in the centre of Azerbaijan meet the Lower Caucasus mountains. Every spring, as it started to get hotter, shepherds would bring their flocks along a dusty road and take them to high pastures up in the mountains. Many years, we went up the same mountains and saw the shepherds. During the day the shepherds would be constantly with the sheep, perched on a little hillock, watching what was going on, in all weathers. There were wolves and bears in the mountains and the shepherds had large sheep dogs to guard the sheep at night. You really would not want to mess with those dogs.
So, shepherds today are very much like the shepherds in the Old Testament. They care for the sheep. They are committed to the sheep. And they are very tough and resilient.
What Jesus tells us
Let’s turn now to what Jesus tells us when he describes himself as the Good Shepherd.
The passage comes in the first half of John 10. Jesus starts by saying, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you…’ I don’t believe Jesus is introducing a new subject out of nowhere. He’s reflecting on something that has just happened. What happened in the previous chapter?
Jesus was somewhere near the temple in Jerusalem. He came across a man who had been born blind and healed him. But the blind man didn’t only get his sight back. He ‘saw’ something with his understanding. He ‘saw’ that Jesus was his Lord. However some religious leaders, Pharisees, heard what Jesus had done and they investigate. Some of them say, ‘This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.’ Jesus had done a wonderful miracle, but the Pharisees were nit-picking and criticising. They failed to understand Jesus’ sign. They get into an argument with the blind man and at the end they cast him out. I assume that means they cast him out of the temple.
What was really going on here?
I guess that we’ve all heard the word ‘influencer’. Influencers help companies sell products. Cristiano Ronaldo is top of the table for earnings as an influencer. It doesn’t real matter to us if Cristiano Ronaldo uses his celebrity status to sell things. But there are other kinds of influencers. The Pharisees were religious influencers. And they were influencing people to reject Jesus.
This is the background to Jesus telling the parable of the Good Shepherd. Jesus didn’t start by saying, ‘I am the Good Shepherd’. He started by saying, ‘Truly, truly I say to you, the one who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber’ [John 10:1].
Jesus is telling a parable about the Pharisees who he’s just clashed with. He’s saying that they are thieves and robbers! They are trouble! A bit further on, Jesus says, ‘The thief comes only TO STEAL AND KILL AND DESTROY.’ Jesus sees the Pharisees as highly dangerous, highly destructive.
In Jesus’ day, people might have had a good opinion of the Pharisees. But Jesus didn’t want people to be mistaken about them. They were thieves and robbers. They were pushing people away from Jesus and throwing them out of God’s house!
There are religious influencers today too. Any number of people express negative attitudes towards Christian faith. Family and friends can. Academics and intellectuals can. The media does. Even people in church sometimes push other Christians away from the path of faith and obedience.
That’s the background, the context.
Thieves steal and kill and destroy. But Jesus isn’t like that. He is the Good Shepherd. He does the opposite. He cares for and protects people. He knows each of his sheep by name. He notices when one sheep goes missing. He’s tough. He is even willing to lay his life down for the sheep. What a great shepherd! But do we, as the sheep in his care, have to do anything?
There is a lot we can learn from Jesus’ teaching but I would like us to think about just three things we have to do. They come in just two verses, verses 4 and 5.
Follow the shepherd
First, there is the word ‘follow.’ The sheep follow the shepherd. They MUST follow the shepherd if they’re going to come under the shepherd’s protection. But where will the shepherd lead the sheep? A little earlier, I described shepherds in Azerbaijan, leading their sheep along dusty roads and then up rocky tracks into the mountains. Perhaps the sheep, if they could think, would say to themselves, ‘I don’t like the look of that mountain!’ There may be scary moments on those rough tracks. But the sheep are in safe hands. In a similar way, we may sense Jesus calling us to follow him in a particular direction. We may say to ourselves, ‘I don’t like the look of that mountain!’ But we are ALWAYS safest when we’re following Jesus.
The path the shepherds in Azerbaijan led the flocks along might have seemed risky to the sheep. And paths that Jesus leads us along might seem risky to us. Following the Good Shepherd calls for trust. God called Gideon to face an entire army with 300 men! But Gideon trusted God and did what God told him and as a result the Israelites overcame a much stronger enemy. Of course, we shouldn’t dive into risky situations. But IF JESUS LEADS US into a situation that looks risky, we follow. He knows the way.
Know the shepherd’s voice
Second, there is the phrase ‘know his voice.’ Apparently, sheep really can recognize a shepherd’s voice. We can’t follow Jesus unless we know his voice! But what does it mean to know the shepherd’s voice?
Think back to the blind man who Jesus healed. At the end, he called Jesus, ‘Lord’. He knew who was speaking to him. He’d thought about the evidence. He’d heard Jesus’ claim. And he’d worked out who Jesus was. We need to do the same. We can look at the evidence for the Bible. We can work things out. We can decide if it’s Jesus, Son of God, who is speaking to us in the pages of scripture. But we can also grow in spiritual discernment. Perhaps we’ve been praying about something and God opens up a possibility in a remarkable way. So we may think, perhaps this is something God is leading me into. Priscilla and I regularly pray that God will help us to grow in our ability to sense God’s voice.
Flee! Reject other voices
Let’s go on to the third thing. Jesus says, ‘A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.’
Jesus says that the sheep don’t follow a stranger. In fact, they flee from him! They don’t recognize the stranger’s voice. Sheep do this. Jesus wants us to do the same.
We hear the voices of Pharisees, the influencers in the world today. There are such people outside the church and inside the church. They encourage disobedience to God’s word or despondency or meanness or some other unchristian thought or behaviour. The Good Shepherd isn’t speaking through them.
When we’re chatting with a friend, Christian or non-Christian, we have to decide whether our friend is speaking Jesus’ words or if it’s some other voice?
When someone is preaching in a church or teaching in a Bible college, we have to decide whether they are speaking Jesus’ words. Does what they say line up with scripture, with Jesus’ teaching? If they’re not speaking Jesus’ words, what do we do? Do we go on listening? No. We flee! We get up from the bar. We quit the friendship. We stop watching the program. Sayonara. Bye-bye.
There’s a lot more we can learn from this passage, but this is more than enough for now.
Recap
Jesus described himself as the Good Shepherd as a response to the Pharisees, the influencers, who were turning people away from God. There are people like that today. We have a Good Shepherd who is loving, tough, and absolutely committed to us. But something is demanded of us. We must follow, trustingly. We must listen, carefully. And we must reject the stranger’s voice, emphatically.
Talk given at Rosebery Park Baptist Church, Bournemouth, UK, 18th August 2024, 4 p.m. service
