...from the desk of Rande Wayne Smith D.Min., Th.M., M.Div.

I AM - 4

I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD

John 10:11-16

“I am the good shepherd, who is willing to die for the sheep. When the hired man, who is not a shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees a wolf coming, he leaves the sheep and runs away; so the wolf snatches the sheep and scatters them. The hired man runs away because he is only a hired man and does not care about the sheep. I am the good shepherd. "
“As the Father knows me and I know the Father, in the same way I know my sheep and they know me. And I am willing to die for them. There are other sheep which belong to me that are not in this sheep pen. I must bring them, too; they will listen to my voice, and they will become one flock with one shepherd.”

May the Lord grant that we may engage in contemplating the mysteries of His Heavenly wisdom with really increasing devotion to His glory and our edification.  Amen.

There are over 500 references to sheep in Scripture. Sheep were a common thing in the first century, and as a result, Jesus’ audience in Palestine had an easy time appreciating the role of a shepherd.

That’s not the case for us in Rolling Meadows. (Kathy’s office being the exception), how many of you, or how many of your neighbors, has sheep?

The 2 greatest heroes of the Old Testament were: Moses (the national deliverer), and David (the mighty warrior and king). Both of them had worked as shepherds for years and years.

And, not only were the greatest heroes of Biblical times shepherds, but God Himself is depicted in Scripture as a shepherd.

The Psalmist cries out:

“Listen to us, O Shepherd of Israel; hear us, leader of your flock.”

Isaiah says of God,

“He will take care of his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs together and carry them in his arms.”

Ezekiel, speaking the words of God, says, “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will find them a place to rest … I am a shepherd who does what is right.”

So shepherds were in good company, if their fraternity included Moses and David and God Himself.

And then when Jesus finally arrives on the scene, His birth is announced by angels, first of all, to a group of what? … (shepherds)

So when Jesus states, “I am the good shepherd” … there’s no doubt in anybody’s mind who He is claiming to be. And He says it not once, but twice in today’s passage.

Actually, in the original language His statement is even more pronounced. “I am the good shepherd, the good one.”

What does it mean for Jesus to be our shepherd?

We looked at some of His responsibilities last week when we saw that a shepherd lies across the opening of the sheep pen and becomes the gate. He protects His sheep.

We’re going to look at 4 additional things this morning.

first, the shepherd calls his sheep. “The man who goes in through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him; the sheep hear his voice as he calls his own sheep by name, and he leads them out. When he has brought them out, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they know his voice. They will not follow someone else; instead, they will run away from such a person, because they do not know his voice.”

Last week we talked about a sheep pen that was located out in the fields. It was one that each shepherd would build for his own flock, and he would use it during the summer months.

The sheep pen that we’re talking about today is different.

This one was located in the town or village. During the inclement months all the local shepherds would bring their flocks into this one common sheep pen and they would leave them there. Then, if the shepherds wanted to take their sheep out to graze during the day, they would come to the gate, and call to their sheep … and their sheep would come!

Now I hear this and wonder how would these sheep recognize their shepherd’s voice, come to the gate, and follow him out leaving all the other sheep behind? How come all the other sheep don’t follow him?

Jesus tells us what everyone in His first century audience would have known as a fact … sheep only respond to the voice of their own shepherd. (Isn’t this a wonderful illustration?)

The word “voice” is the key here, and Jesus uses it several times.

When I lived in Key West I had 5 indoor cats: PC, Sarah, Leah, Ruth, and Naomi. (Good Biblical names!) The house was always open, and people were coming and going all the time, but with the exception of PC, who was fairly social, no one ever saw my cats.

(You know the difference between a dog and a cat? When you call a dog it comes, when you call a cat, it takes your number and promises to get back to you.)

People would call my cats by name; they would call “Leah” until they were blue in their face, but she would never come. They were not Leah’s “shepherd.” (Believe it or not, she would come for me.)

My question is, is Jesus your Shepherd? Whether He is or isn’t can clearly be seen in your response to His voice. He has called you to follow Him. And if that’s what you have begun to do … you belong to Him.

But if you’ve ignored His call, if you have a deaf ear to His voice, it’s a good indication that you’re not yet one of His sheep. Because His sheep recognize His voice … and they respond.

During the course of the day do you have a sense that you’re responding to the Shepherd’s voice on a regular basis? That’s the indication of whether or not you belong to His flock.

By the way, He’s gone to great lengths to make you a member of His flock.

One of Jesus’ favorite parables is about a shepherd who leaves the 99 safely grazing sheep in order to go look for the one stray.

And when he finds it he’s so happy … he carries it back to the sheep pen and then calls all his friends. He wants to celebrate the fact that the lost sheep has been found. That’s how much Jesus wants you to be part of His fold.

When Jesus says, “There are other sheep which belong to me that are not in this sheep pen,” … He’s talking about us. “I must bring them, too; they will listen to my voice, and they will become one flock with one shepherd.”

Jesus is all about building a flock. This congregation is His flock.

If you think you’re following Him but are not actively participating in His flock, you’re kidding yourself. Following Jesus means not only stepping out of the world, but it means stepping into His community.

Secondly, the shepherd leads. That’s interesting, and it’s not how I picture it. When I think of shepherds moving sheep I imagine the sheep being driven. The shepherd is behind them with a couple of sheep dogs barking and snapping at the heels of the sheep, pushing them along.

But in Jesus’ day, it was customary for the shepherd to go ahead of the flock … leading them. And to lead means to feed, guide, comfort, doctor, and discipline the sheep. Maybe the best way for us to appreciate those concepts is by looking at the 23rd Psalm.

Most of you know it. It begins

“The LORD is my … (shepherd).”

This wonderful Psalm is filled with descriptions of what the sheep needs.

first of all, leading involves feeding. Leading involves seeing to it that the sheep find green pastures.

If sheep are left too long in any particular pasture, that pasture gets overgrazed, then the grass disappears, the land erodes, which brings on parasites which will be ingested by the sheep and infect them. So a shepherd has to constantly keep his sheep on the move … leading them to one pasture after another.

And when a shepherd moved his flock to a new pasture he had to prepare it. That meant removing all the rocks. It meant making sure there was a source of water. It even meant sowing new seed so that old grass would be replaced. It meant weeding the entire pasture so there was no poisonous plants. That’s all part of feeding the sheep.

The second part of leading is keeping the sheep pest free. It’s relieving the sheep of their irritations.

Sheep can be driven to absolute distraction by flies and tics and gnats and mosquitoes. Sheep will lose all their sleep over these pests. They have to stand on the feet … stomping their legs … shaking their heads … going to a tree or bush and rubbing up against it. Sheep have been known to bat their heads on the ground trying to get the flies out of their nose. So they have to be regularly disinfected … dipped or sprayed. The shepherd takes a special oil mixture and shoves it up their nose to prevent flies from going up there.

In the 23rd Psalm, when it says, the shepherd “anoints my head with oil” … it means that he is getting rid of the insects. He’s taking care of the scabs on the sheep, the irritations.

The 3rd aspect of leading is that the shepherd is responsible for recovering the lost sheep … which by definition is every sheep from time-to-time.

One serious problem for sheep is that they will occasionally become “cast.” That term is for a sheep that has rolled over on its’ back and cannot get up again by itself.

It can’t get up because it’s too fat, it has eaten too much, or because its’ wool is dirty and matted and holding him down. Or it can’t get up because the sheep just lacks the coordination to do it.

And if the sun is brutally hot on that particular day gasses begin to work and circulation will stop and the sheep will die within a few hours time. So the shepherd needs to regularly count his sheep.

And if he’s missing a sheep he’d rush out to find it in order to beat the vultures. The shepherd would straddle the sheep and lift it and massage its’ legs to get the circulation going.

And if the sheep was still wobbly, he’d have to carry it back to the rest of the flock.

A final aspect of leading means disciplining those sheep that repeatedly got themselves into trouble. (Now this is not one that strayed once or twice, but one that consistently got into trouble.)

Sometimes the shepherd would actually break one of the sheep’s front legs, and then he would carry that sheep around until the leg healed. And during that time, not only would the sheep be prohibited from wandering off, but it would bond with the shepherd.

And so by the time the leg was healed, and the sheep was put back on the ground … it didn’t want to go far away. It wanted to stick close to the shepherd.

If you think about those things … it’s what our Good Shepherd does for us.

We can identify with this can’t we? We want to be fed. We go to our Shepherd because of the irritants of life; the things that bug us; the problems we face.

We stray off; we get ourselves in trouble … often because we’re fat and sassy. We’ve got so much materialism going on that we get ourselves separated from our Shepherd and He has to come looking for us. And if we’re consistently troublemaking, then we need His discipline.

Jesus promises to do all that as our Shepherd.

So, when our Shepherd leads, will we follow? Do we keep our Shepherd in sight? Do we refuse to let Him out of our course of vision throughout the day?

I confess this is an area in my life that I’m really working on. I want to make certain that every decision I make, every expenditure of money, every investment of time, every goal I set, every conversation I have … is led by my Shepherd.

I want to be in touch with Him. I want to be reading His signals. I want to be following His path.

We have a great Shepherd, a good Shepherd. The challenge for us is how close are we following? Throughout the course of the day are we checking up with Him on a regular basis? Are we seeking His direction?

Here’s a 3rd quality … the shepherd sacrifices.

If we had to pick out the dominant theme behind the Good Shepherd imagery … this would be it.

The Good Shepherd is the shepherd who is willing to die for the sheep. (This truth is repeated several times.)

This is the shepherd who understands that the sheep are depending upon Him. This is the shepherd who understands that the sheep have no other line of defense. Sheep have no defensive armor.

Do you know what sheep do when they’re in trouble? They run … and they’re klutzy runners.

Philip Keller, who is a shepherd, tells the story where a friend came to visit him. And she brought her tiny Pekingese dog. This little dog yapped a couple of times and 200 sheep stampeded … so scared were they of that little puppy.

He tells of another occasion when a cougar stalked his sheep. It never attacked a single one, but the next morning, there were 9 dead ewes, they had literally become scared to death.

The good shepherd understands that the sheep depend upon him for defense.

I grew up seeing Bible pictures of mild mannered shepherds holding cuddly little lambs close to their chests. Get rid of that idea. These guys were not sissies.

David tells in 1 Samuel 17 how he killed a lion on one occasion and a bear on another in order to protect his sheep.

Let me tell you another thing about the shepherd who is willing to die for the sheep … it is only the shepherd who has a personal investment in the life of the sheep that will stick it out when things go bad. When danger occurs it is only the shepherd that has a personal investment in the flock that will stay.

Jesus describes the shepherd who has been hired for the job. “The hired man runs away because he is only a hired man and does not care about the sheep.” He’s going to take off when it gets tough. If this guy is going to choose between his salary and his life … forget the money.

Interestingly, the rabbis of Jesus’ day actually spelled out the legal requirements of a hired shepherd in a book of rules, called the Mishna.

The Mishna said if one wolf attacks a shepherd is required to stay and defend the flock. But if 2 wolves attack the shepherd can run.

When I read that I thought I bet there were a lot of shepherds who had trouble with double vision. The minute a wolf attacks they look out and say, “Hey, I think I see 2! I’m out of here.”

Jesus says that He would never do that because His sheep belong to Him. He’s not a hired man. He will stay, even if it costs Him His life.

A 3rd insight about the shepherd that is willing to die for the sheep is that he only risks his life for the sheep as a last resort. The job of the shepherd was not to die for the sheep.

The job of the shepherd was to live for the sheep. If he did something stupid, risking his life, and lost it … his flock was unguarded. So we don’t often hear of shepherds who had laid down their lives for their sheep.

If a shepherd actually did that he would have to be certain that he was taking his adversary out in the process.

Friends, what does that tell us about Jesus? Why did Jesus go to the cross? He didn’t go to the cross as a martyr. He didn’t go to the cross to demonstrate by way of example how much God loves us. Well, that may have been part of it.

The reason that Jesus went to the cross was to take out our enemy … the fiercest enemy of all.

Jesus literally threw Himself into the jaws of our enemy; He took the just punishment our sin deserves. If there was any other way He would have taken it. As we were talking last week, this is what makes Jesus unique.

If you want to know why He is the only way to God, it’s because there is no other “shepherd” in history who has died for the sheep. Jesus is the only one. He said, “I’ll take your place.”

The shepherd sacrifices Himself.

Here’s a 4th activity of the Shepherd. The shepherd knows his sheep. “As the Father knows me and I know the Father, in the same way I know my sheep and they know me.” A shepherd and his sheep were unusually close.

In 2007 we typically raise sheep as a food source. They end up at the butcher shop and become lamb chops or mutton roasts.

But in Jesus’ day they were principally a wool source. So a sheep would live for years and years and become best friends with the shepherd because they spent lots of time hanging out together.

Jesus said, “As the Father knows me and I know the Father, in the same way I know my sheep and they know me.”

The incredible point that Jesus is making here is not that His sheep know Him and He knows His sheep but that the model of the intimacy that He desires with us is the same sort of relationship He has with His Heavenly Father.

That takes my breath away. Jesus says I want to be as close with you as I am with my Heavenly Father.

This is a shepherd who knows His sheep. This is a shepherd who wants His sheep to know Him.

I want to conclude in a different way this morning. There’s a question at the bottom of your outline. “What is it that your Shepherd knows about you today that encourages you to know that He knows?”

Some of you might be encouraged by simply realizing that Jesus knows the stress that you under right now. Or it is good to be reminded that God knows how lonely you feel today. Or God knows how desperately entangled you are in this or that sin.

What is it that your shepherd knows about you? You just need to remind yourself that He knows. I want you to come up with 2 of those.

And the flip side of the question is … “what do you know about your Shepherd that is a source of great comfort to you today?” What have you learned about Him even this morning? (i.e. that the shepherd sticks with you, that he won’t turn and run.)

I want you to come up with 2... 2 things your shepherd knows about you … 2 things you know about your shepherd.

Let’s take a moment and do this and reflect on them.

MARANA THA