Morning, brothers and sisters.
Let’s turn to a few Scriptures, please. In John 10, starting with verse 1.
“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.
But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.
To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice; and he calls His own sheep by name and leads them out.
And when he brings out His own sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.
Yet they will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”Jesus used this illustration, but they did not understand the things which He spoke to them. Then Jesus said to them again:
“Most assuredly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep.
All who ever came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them.
I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.
The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.
I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep.
But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them.
The hireling flees because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep.
I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own.
As the Father knows Me, even so I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep.
And other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they will hear My voice; and there will be one flock and one shepherd.
Therefore My Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again.
No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This command I have received from My Father.”
Then let’s go to the Old Testament for a couple of verses. The prophet Hosea—Hosea is right after Daniel.
Hosea 2:15:
“I will give her vineyards from there,
And the Valley of Achor as a door of hope;
She shall sing there,
As in the days of her youth,
As in the days when she came up from the land of Egypt.”
Then Psalm 23:
“The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul;
He leads me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.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.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life;
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
And then one more verse, in Ezekiel 34:30-31:
“Thus they shall know that I, the Lord their God, am with them, and they, the house of Israel, are My people,” says the Lord God.
“You are My flock, the flock of My pasture; you are men, and I am your God,” says the Lord God.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we want to thank You this morning that You have opened heaven to us, not because we are anything or we have done anything, but because, out of Your great love for us, You gave us Your Son to open heaven to us.
And Lord, because You have opened heaven to us, we ask that You would speak to us from heaven. Speak to us from heaven, from Your Word, through Your Holy Spirit, Lord. Talk to us and tell us about You, and tell us about us as You see us and as we are to be.
Lord, we thank You for Your goodness to us and for Your grace. We are counting on You, and Your grace, and Your Holy Spirit to open our ears, open our hearts, open our spirits to You, and let us receive from You something eternal. Strengthen us in our inner man to help us, Lord. We ask this in Jesus Christ’s name.
As you know, I have been going through the Gospel of John. I am not going through it as a verse-by-verse study, but I have been taking a little bit of something from each chapter as we go through this. Today we are in John 10.
I want to look at four things in these few verses that I have read, but I want to put them in perspective first. Coming out of John 9 and into John 10, the Pharisees threw out a man who had been healed—a man who was born blind and had been given his sight back. They kind of excommunicated him, so to speak.
Toward the end of the chapter, they said, “Are You saying that we’re blind?” Jesus said to them, in effect, “When you say that you see, and you reject what you are shown, then yes, you are blind.”
With that in mind, Jesus continues. A lot of people look at John 10 as really beginning with the end of John 9. Jesus continues by saying, “I would like you to have your eyes open.”
There are four things I would like to pull out of these eighteen verses: Jesus gives another two “I am” statements. He says, “I am the door,” and He says, “I am the good shepherd”—or, actually, “I am the shepherd, the good.” Then we have a picture of sheep.
What is the Lord showing us about Himself and about us? We are going to look at the door, the shepherd, and the sheep.
When we are trying to get into something, we need a door, right? Thank the Lord that these doors were already built into the house. We did not have to claw our way through.
But generally speaking—naturally speaking, religiously speaking—we look at the door into salvation as something we do. That is what these Pharisees did. They looked at the way into salvation as something that they did.
Romans 10 tells us that the Jews have a zeal, but without knowledge, because they want to establish their own righteousness and do not take the righteousness of Christ. In a way, we try to create our own door to the Lord.
It is almost like those old cartoons—Droopy, Tom and Jerry, and things like that. The kids are going, “What are you talking about?” But you remember how they would paint a door black on a wall and open it, hoping someone would run into the wall. The one being chased would run through the painted doorway, but the other guy would try it, hit the wall, and fall down.
A door of our own making is like that. It seems like everybody else can get in the door we have made, but we cannot. The only way to get in is by climbing over the wall, and that again is our own effort.
To the natural mind and to the religious mind, when we ask, “What is the door into salvation?” we are always looking at our own effort. But the Lord comes in and says something very different.
When we think of all the things the Lord has said—“I am the way, the truth, and the life”—how many of us think of “I am the door”? I do not think we even consider it. What does that mean?
Well, a door is a way in, is that right? It is a way in, and it is also a way out. So what is He saying? In John 10:9, He says:
“I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved.”
Now, what does He mean that He is the door? What kind of door is He? I read a verse from Hosea. In Hosea, it says, “I will give you the Valley of Achor as a door of hope.”
Before we get into the Valley of Achor as a door of hope, biblical hope is an expectation—something you can expect to happen or expect to be there because of the person who is giving it to you. If someone gives you a promise, you have a hope, an expectation, that it will be fulfilled.
So Hosea, the prophet, speaking for the Lord, says, “I will give you the Valley of Achor as a door of hope.” Now, what is the Valley of Achor? It is very significant. Does anybody know where it is in Scripture?
Joshua—very good. If you were in my classroom, I would give you a cheese. I reward right answers.
Joshua 7 has to do with the sin of Achan. After the Israelites came into the land, they had victory at Jericho. Then they went to the city of Ai to attack it, and they were defeated.
The reason they were defeated was because Achan took some of the things under the ban when they took Jericho. He took a Babylonian garment and some gold, and he hid them. Because of that, Israel was stopped and could not go further. The city of Ai beat them up.
They came back saying, “What are we doing? What is happening?” The Lord said to Joshua, “Something that is banned is in the camp, and it needs to be discovered.” They cast lots, and it fell to Achan’s family. He confessed, and he was judged for his sin. They stoned him and his family, and raised up a mound as a sign of sin.
Now, what does this all mean? Jesus says, “I am the door, and whoever enters by Me will be saved.” The door we enter through has to be a door of judgment. We enter in through a door of judgment.
That is what we were talking about this morning at the Lord’s table. It is a door of judgment. There is no forgiveness for your sins without judgment. God cannot forgive your sins without judgment, but the judgment fell on His Son.
We look at forgiveness today, and it is not hard for many of us to forgive, especially if we are in a good mood. “Oh yeah, I’ll just let it slide.” Or sometimes we wait until the other person is in a good mood and ask, “Will you forgive me?” “I do not even remember that.”
But God, who is righteous and holy, cannot let things slide and keep His righteousness and holiness. Sin has to be judged.
In order for Him to judge our sins and for us not to die, the Lord Jesus became the vessel upon which judgment was poured out. A sister prayed that the blood does not just cover, but washes. It does more. In that cleansing, it is able to cleanse because the full wrath—the full judgment—of God has already been spent.
That is the wonder and beauty of the cross: He who was without sin became sin, that God could judge sin in the flesh. God had to judge sin, but thank God, He poured that judgment out on the Son.
In this way, we see that Jesus is the door, because judgment has been rendered. Judgment has been executed. There are people who think that they are trying to get away from judgment by living righteously. You are never going to do it, because once you fail, judgment should come upon you.
But God has made it so that judgment has fallen. I have shared this before: I was golfing with my friend Jerry Lindenberg. I am a melancholy person. I know a lot of you guys think I am very exuberant, but I am really a melancholy person. I get depressed really easily. You can ask my wife that.
We were on the putting green, and I was feeling bad because I had not lived up to what I thought I should be as a Christian. I was complaining to Jerry, and he looked at me and said, “Jim, judgment’s passed. Get on with it.”
That was like a word from the Lord to me. We do not think of it that way. We think the hammer is ready to come down, just waiting on a hair trigger—like the sword of Damocles, waiting to fall. Some of us think the Lord is just waiting to judge us.
But He has judged us. That is the beauty of it. He has judged us in Christ, and because of that, we are free from that judgment. Praise the Lord for that. We are free, and we should live as though we are free.
Another thing about the door: not only is it a door of judgment, but it is now a door of access. We now have access to the Father, and there is nothing hindering us from coming into His presence.
In Revelation 3:8, when He is talking to the church at Philadelphia, He says, “I have set before you an open door.” Why has He set before us an open door? Why has He opened it? Because He wants you to come in. That is why it is open.
This door that Jesus is has become not only the door of judgment through which we enter; it is now a door of access. We have access to the Father. We can have fellowship with the Father. We can know the Father because He has opened the door to us.
A lot of us are just afraid to come in because we still think He is mad at us, or we think He will look at us and say, “Well, this is wrong with you. Why do you dress like that?” But no. He has opened the door that we can come in.
When you read in the Scriptures that Jesus cried, “It is finished,” and the curtain of the temple was torn from top to bottom, the Lord was saying, “I have opened up Myself to you. Come in.”
Paul wrote to the Corinthians that it was not that he had not opened himself to them, but that they were not opening themselves to him. He was talking about giving, but it is the same with us. If there are closed doors, they are doors we have closed.
We are people of privacy. “I want my privacy. I want to be left alone.” And we close doors. But brothers and sisters, the door is open. The door that Jesus is, is an open door into fellowship and into the very presence of God the Father.
We cannot change ourselves. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians: how are we transformed? It is by being in His presence. That is what transforms us.
The door is open. Now, a third thing about the door: it is not a one-way door. It is not just a door in, like a lobster trap. The Lord does not say, “I got you now.” It is a two-way door.
Jesus says in John 10:9 that the one who enters “will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.” The pasture inside is fellowship with the Lord. We eat; we drink in who the Lord is and what He has done for us.
But there is pasture outside too. What is the food that is outside? Look at John 4:31-34. Jesus was in Samaria, talking with the Samaritan woman. He had sent the disciples to get food.
“In the meantime His disciples urged Him, saying, ‘Rabbi, eat.’
But He said to them, ‘I have food to eat of which you do not know.’
Therefore the disciples said to one another, ‘Has anyone brought Him anything to eat?’
Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work.’”
This is a door of service to the Lord. We go in, we find fellowship with Him; we go out, we serve Him. How is that pasture? It is food to do His will.
Food strengthens us, does it not? That is why we eat. Our bodies need to survive, and they need to be strengthened. In order to be strengthened, it is not just that we go in and have fellowship with the Lord, then close everything else off and become almost like hermits or monks.
We go out. We go back into the places where we live, the villages where we live, and we do His will. How do we know what His will is? We know it by coming in and having fellowship with Him, because the door has been opened.
Ephesians 2:10 says that we are His workmanship, created for good works in Christ Jesus, which were prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Where do we find out what those good works are? By going in and having fellowship with Him.
Is that not how the Lord Jesus lived His life? Out of fellowship with the Father, He went out and did His Father’s will everywhere He went. It is the same for us.
The door is open, but it is not just that we go in. The door is also that we go out, and in going out we serve the Lord our God by doing His will. That is true food to us. That is real food. For some of us, it is food we have never tasted.
For some of us, it is food we are afraid of. I told you, about a year ago, that I did not eat a tomato until I was about twenty or twenty-one years old. Tomatoes—vegetables, man. I am a meat-and-potatoes guy. I mean, it is even a different color: red. We eat something red?
But when you eat it, you find out, “You know, this really is good.” Some of us are afraid because it looks different or we have never had it before. But to taste that food is to want more.
The Lord wants us to have fellowship with Him in that inner court, but He also wants us to share fellowship with Him in doing His will. There is fellowship with Him in doing those things.
We find His life and His strength helping us, whether it is talking to your neighbor, doing something with the congregation of saints, going out and preaching the gospel somewhere, or whatever it is. There is service the Lord wants us to do. We are not all called to the same service.
But in the service we are called to, we find there is strengthening, because it is food—the strengthening of the inner man. Then we find out that the outer man really does not matter. The Lord said that the flesh profits nothing; it is the Spirit who gives life.
Secondly, we look at Him as the good shepherd—or, as T. Campbell Morgan says, “the shepherd, the good.” I looked it up in my little Greek lexicon to see whether he was right or just preaching, and he was right. That is the way it is translated from the Greek: “the shepherd, the good.”
What is the difference between Him being a shepherd and everyone else being a shepherd? He is good. What does it mean that He is good? Does it mean He is morally good? Yes, He was morally good. He was perfect in every way. But is that the extent of His goodness?
No. I believe that His goodness as a shepherd, beyond His moral character, was that He cared for the sheep.
It was not just that He was doing a job. Would it not have been terrible if, when the Lord walked the earth and they brought little children to Him, He had said, “Get those kids away from Me. I have a job to do”? Or if, when the leper came, He said, “I’ll say the word, but I’m not going to touch you”?
The whole thing is, He cared. He cares for the sheep. He even knows them by name. The thing that makes Him good is that He cares for the sheep. He protects them from the wolf who would destroy them.
The bottom line is that His care for the sheep is shown in this: He lays down His life for the sheep. I have had a problem with this, because if He lays down His life for the sheep, how can He be shepherd anymore?
A lot of people understand this verse—“He lays down His life for the sheep”—as speaking of His sacrifice on the cross. There is truth in that, but I think it is much more than that, because He still has to be shepherd, right?
In John 12:24, it says:
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.”
If you plant a grain of corn, bury it, and it comes back up again, the life in that grain has been reproduced on the stalk. Instead of having one little seed, you now have thirty, sixty, a hundred—or more. You have more than what you started with, but it is all the same life.
The life that He laid down becomes the life that is raised up and reproduced in us. This life in us is that shepherding life of Christ.
We sang a song—I think Linda Pittman picked it—hymn number 116. In verse 6 it says:
“For me, Lord Jesus, Thou hast died,
And I have died in Thee;
Thou art risen, my bands are all untied,
And now Thou livest in me.”
He lives in us as our Shepherd, to shepherd us in this life. I find that my life is being led by the life of Christ in me. He is the Shepherd.
When we look at Psalm 23, it says, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Yes, the Lord is my Shepherd, but not from the outside. He is my Shepherd from the inside now. It is not something tugging me along from the outside; it is something on the inside that is leading me.
He makes me lie down in green pastures. He brings me into rest. What kind of rest? We have just talked about this door that has been opened to us. I can now rest. I do not have to try to work my way into God. I can rest in what He has done.
He leads me into all the truth about Himself. It is wonderful: some of us have a Bible study on Tuesday night, and we have gone a number of times to Luke 24, where the Lord comes to the disciples and shows them from the Scriptures that the Christ had to suffer first.
We have to be reminded over and over that it was meant for Him to suffer. Sometimes we say, “Oh Lord, I have made You suffer.” Yes, that is true, and you should be sorry in that way. But you should also be grateful. He suffered for you, and He suffered to bring you into something bigger.
He suffered to bring us into rest before God. His suffering is not so that we can say, “Well, You better work better for Me now.” He did not do that. He suffered to bring us into rest, to bring us to Himself, and to bring us into peace with God. He reconciled us.
There is nothing better than being reconciled with somebody. When there has been a fight and that person is reconciled with you—where you were the one who was wrong and there was nothing you could do to reconcile yourself—but that person comes to a place in his or her heart and says, “You know something? I put that under the bridge. From this point on, it is like it never happened.” Oh, what grace that is.
For us, it is the same way. He leads us beside still waters and into pastures where we can find rest. He restores my soul.
When we think we have to do something for God, it is like our souls are in the wrong place. If we were a cart and a horse, it would be like our soul was trying to pull the cart. We never get rest.
But because of what Christ has done, the soul is no longer in this improper place. It takes its place behind the spirit. The spirit is now the head. The soul does not go shotgun; it is in the back seat in a wheelchair. It is hard to drive from the back seat, but you know how we try to do it.
When we can reconcile ourselves to the fact, “You know something? I just cannot drive anymore,” there is freedom. There is freedom when we can say, “I cannot drive anymore, but I know there is Someone who can take me where I need to go, and I can trust Him.” He restores my soul to that place.
He leads me in paths of righteousness, into places of doing right. He does not just put before me a list: “Do this, this, and this.” He leads me to places where I am doing what is right because my heart is convicted or moved by the Spirit within me to do this or not to do that.
Then it says He brings me into the valley of the shadow of death. Boy, why do they put that one in there? It was okay up to that point: green pastures, still waters, even paths of righteousness. But the valley of the shadow of death? Why put that in there?
At our Bible study this last Tuesday, we were going through Matthew, where John and James had their mother ask Jesus, “Can they sit at Your right and left hand?” Jesus turned to them and said, “Are you able to drink the cup I am going to drink, and to be baptized with the baptism I am going to be baptized with?”
We began to speculate about what He was talking about. It could not be the cup of taking on the sins of the world, because only Christ could take that. Only Christ could be baptized through that cross.
We came to a kind of conclusion—or a consensus. I think it was Steve Sheridan who brought this up, so Steve, I want to cite you here. As a good historian, you have to cite your sources.
We talked about it as being the cup at Gethsemane. This was where the Lord denied Himself. Many people say this is where He actually went to the cross—where He decided, “This is where I am going to the cross.” The rest followed because He had already made up His mind.
The valley of the shadow of death for us is where we give up our life—not our life as martyrs, so to speak, but our life up to the will of the Father.
Will we drink this cup? This is where we let Someone else lead us. How can we go through these things where we have to give up our choice? It says, “For You are with me.”
A lot of times, we do not want to follow the Lord that far because we are afraid. We are afraid He will do something in our lives that will hurt us or take something away. When you are young, you do not want to consecrate yourself to the Lord because He might make you go to China or marry somebody ugly.
As we get older, we think, “Oh man, He is going to make me give up this cushy job,” or, “I am going to have to move to Virginia, for goodness’ sake.” There is a fear of giving all because we are afraid we will not get anything in return. We think the Lord just takes things from us.
We will always be that way until the first time we say, “Not my will, but Yours be done.” It is that first time when we do that and find that the Lord is good. We find, as Romans 12:2 says, that His will is good, acceptable, and perfect.
Then we have a history. We can say, “The last time I came to a crossroads, and I went the way the Lord wanted me to go, I found that it was good. Can I not trust Him this time?”
Then we begin to have an experience of the Lord as our Shepherd. It is no longer merely a nice little psalm or a nice little picture in our mind. It becomes a reality in our lives.
He is the good Shepherd. Do you think He who cares for you is going to bring you into some place to harm you? You have to start thinking like this. Do you think He is out to harm you? If so, your picture of Him is wrong.
He says, “I am the good shepherd. I care for the sheep. I care for you. I know where you are going. I know where you are at. I know My sheep, and I care for you.”
He wants us to come into the experience of seeing that He is the good Shepherd. He does not want you merely to have a doctrine: “Oh yes, the Lord is a good Shepherd.” No, He wants you to be able to say, “I have found that He is the good Shepherd. My life plays that out.”
There is a nice little hymn, hymn 402. I am glad we have been singing more hymns, even though sometimes we struggle with them. The depth of experience you find in these hymns is tremendous.
“All the way my Savior leads me—
What have I to ask beside?
Can I doubt His tender mercy,
Who through life has been my Guide?
Heavenly peace, divinest comfort,
Here by faith in Him to dwell!
For I know, whate’er befall me,
Jesus doeth all things well.”“All the way my Savior leads me,
Cheers each winding path I tread,
Gives me grace for every trial,
Feeds me with the living bread;
Though my weary steps may falter
And my soul athirst may be,
Gushing from the Rock before me,
Lo! a spring of joy I see.”“All the way my Savior leads me—
Oh, the fullness of His love!
Perfect rest to me is promised
In my Father’s house above.
When my spirit, clothed immortal,
Wings its flight to realms of day,
This my song through endless ages:
Jesus led me all the way.”
That is a wonderful picture of the Lord being our Shepherd. You notice it says, “I am going on these winding trails,” but what do I find? He is with me. There is bread I did not know was there. There is water from a rock that I would never have known.
Had I not said, “Thy will, not mine, be done,” I would not have known it. There is something the Lord wants us to have of Himself in that way.
In Revelation, He says to one of the churches, “I will give you of the hidden manna.” There is stuff that is hidden that we cannot see, and unless we go this way, we will never find it.
But when we find it, how fully satisfying it is. “Delightful” is really too weak a word. How fully satisfying it is.
Then we have the sheep. John 10 says a couple of things about them. In verse 3:
“To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice; and he calls His own sheep by name and leads them out.”
In verse 14:
“I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own.”
And in verse 16:
“And other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they will hear My voice; and there will be one flock and one shepherd.”
The sheep are us, right? He is the Shepherd, and we are the sheep. Now, something you need to know about the sheep: the sheep were not perfect.
If you look in Ezekiel 34, beginning with verse 15, it gives a description of the sheep:
“I will feed My flock, and I will make them lie down,” says the Lord God.
“I will seek what was lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen what was sick.”
What does that say about the sheep? They are scattered, broken, and sick. It does not sound like a great flock, does it? But are you not glad that He says, “This flock I own”?
What does He do with the sick? He binds them up. He does all these things for us.
Again, I am sorry to keep picking out hymns, but these hymns are so full of wonderful things. In hymn 838, by A. J. Gordon, it says:
“In tenderness He sought me,
Weary and sick with sin.”
Notice: I am weary and sick with sin, but what does it say about Him? In tenderness, He sought me. He sought me when I was weary and sick. He did not seek me when I was perfect. He did not seek me when I was well. He sought me when I was weary and sick with sin.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
The hymn continues:
“And on His shoulders brought me
Back to His fold again,
While angels in His presence sang
Until the courts of heaven rang.
Oh, the love that sought