John 10

We're starting a new series this week and we're calling it Dialogue.

Uh churches are pretty famous for monologues.

Generally, you come to a church as one person talking, and uh we're gonna take the next four weeks and actually I'm gonna teach with other people over these next four weeks.

And today I've got two awesome uh people with me, and I could introduce you guys.

Why don't you introduce yourselves?

Cool.

So my name is Eddie Parker the Fourth, and I'm the executive pastor of Creative here at OneChurch.

So that means I have the opportunity to work with the production team, OneChurch Music, and anything that's in media and marketing.

So I get to have some fun with some of the best creatives I know.

It's a it's a dream.

Eddie Tyus Parker the Fourth.

The fourth, numeral four.

And my son, we actually continued the legacy.

He's Eddie Tyus Parker the fifth.

And it's it's straight Eddie, not Edwards.

Not Edwards.

Well, my name is Shane Douglas Huey Sr.

My son uh Shane Jr.

He actually turned six years old today, y'all.

He clap for my son.

Love my little guy.

So I am the executive pastor of ministries, and what I get to do here at OneChurch is work to ensure that all of our ministries are making disciples.

I get to work with the best team ever, and we get to do it among the greatest church in the world.

I know when I speak for Eddie and myself, this is our dream job, y'all.

This is this is this is the best place to be.

So thanks so much for uh letting us chat with you for a few minutes today.

Alright, so what we're gonna do today is we're we're actually going to teach the verse uh John 10 10.

John 10 10 says that the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy, and I've come that you may have life and have it to the full.

All right, we're gonna look at that.

Um, this series, the heart of this series, we're actually taking from a clean in the book of Ecclesiastes that says, Two are better than one, for they get a good return for their labor.

All right, and so I think even three is better than two, all right.

So what we're going to do the math, the math works out on that.

That's good.

Um you'll see we have on the table prisms, and these prisms represent when you tilt a prism, right?

You put prism in uh into a light and it and it will you know provide color.

When you turn the prism, things move around, you see something differently.

So we're gonna kind of tilt the prism on this verse, and uh kind of let me explain a few vocabulary words here so you understand what we're doing.

This will not only help you understand like sermons or messages when you're hearing them, but actually can enhance your personal study when you open up God's word.

All right, three words.

The first one is exposition.

Exposition is an explanation of the text, which means before I jump into the book of James or I jump into the book of Matthew or Malachi, who are these people?

What is the context?

Is it Old Testament, New Testament?

Uh, who are they writing it to?

What was going on in the world?

How many chapters is it?

What's the genre of the book?

Can we all admit that the Bible can be a bit confusing?

Okay, it's 66 books and it has a lot of different context.

And so it's important if you are a Christian, you're a follower of Jesus, and you believe the Bible is God's word, you should take very seriously, trying to get the most accurate interpretation that you can get.

I'm gonna tell you that's not easy because there are a lot of very intelligent, sincere believers that interpret the same passage different ways.

And so that is where we do have to have grace.

But I would encourage you, instead of taking the mindset that whatever I was taught or whatever I currently believe is 100% ironclad, uh perfect uh translation or interpretation of a text, to actually develop curiosity and throughout your life to be open and asking yourself the question, am I interpreting this correctly?

If you are the former, if you've already decided that you've crystallized all of your theology and all of your interpretations, then all you'll do is look for a church that's an echo chamber.

You'll look for leaders that will just simply say what you want to hear, versus actually being willing to be open.

And when something is challenged, instead of rejecting it, you go and investigate with an open mind and heart and go, hey, it's quite possible that for decades on end I have misinterpreted something.

And so I think we should all value highly, I would encourage you to value highly good interpretation.

All right, so that's exposition.

Um, a couple weeks ago I did in Matthew 14, I did an exposition that caused maybe a question that you've seen in the scripture to kind of tilt the prism, right?

Jesus says to Peter, when Peter's on the water, he begins to sink, Peter, why do you have so little faith?

Okay?

If you just read that in isolation, uh it sounds like condemnation.

It sounds like Jesus is shaming Peter.

And of course, that's why even reading texts can are kind of make it easy to be misinterpreted.

How many of you have ever texted somebody something or emailed something or read it and you're like, how should I read this, right?

Like Greg, there's like four different ways to say you're good, right?

Has anybody ever done that before?

Because context matters, right?

It's like, you good?

Yeah, I could be having the best day ever.

And someone's like, You good?

It's like I was.

You just ruined the day for me.

Or it could be like one of compassion, like, hey you good?

Right.

Or amen, you good.

Like, you know, you're excused.

Right.

Or if you really are good, they're like, You good, you good, you're good.

That's the best thing.

That boy good, that boy good.

All right, that boy good.

All right.

Um, so yeah, so within the Bible, uh, you read you read something like Jesus saying, Why do you have so little faith?

And we we see it as a shaming.

Whereas when you look at it in its proper exposition in the full context, why did Peter have so little faith?

Well, because he had an honest question.

Okay, John the Baptist was decapitated at the beginning of the chapter.

Then Jesus feeds 5,000 with five loaves and two fish, and now he's out here starting to sink.

So you're out there going, Why do you have little faith?

Well, because he's not sure exactly how safe he is in the moment.

When Jesus is asking the question, maybe it wasn't a scolding, maybe it was discipling Peter to really genuinely wrestle to the bottom of that question.

All right, that's exposition.

Second is illustration.

It actually says in Matthew 13, 34, Jesus never taught publicly without using parables or metaphors.

Why?

Because he understood how easy it is to be misinterpreted, misunderstood, and metaphors are taking complex things and making them simple.

So Jesus would tell this lofty theological concept, but he would say, hey, there was a guy with some seed, or or there was a woman who lost a coin.

He would bring it down to a very simple story, and that's the great thing about a metaphor is it keeps teaching even after you leave.

Here we are, all these thousands of years later, still, you know, tilting the prism on these different things.

And Jesus often used metaphors that were very relevant to their day.

So the things like farming was a huge part of their economy.

It was an agrarian culture, so he would use those type things.

And I think it's important that we look to contextualize, to look for illustrations that fit our world.

All right?

The third is application.

This is where James says, hey, don't get caught up being a hearer of the word, that you forget to be a doer of the word.

And I think this is where actually you could sit and get real good exposition and good solid illustration and then forget to go, okay, how should that shape how I think and what I do?

By the way, usually in that order.

Because if all we do is harp on behaviors, then all you do is make behavioral changes without mind changes, which you don't sustain.

Okay, if you change a behavior and you don't change your thinking, you'll only change it temporarily.

You'll go right back to the level of your thinking.

So when you're looking at a Bible verse, even on a Tuesday, Wednesday, just you and your Bible and the Holy Spirit, okay, be asking yourself, do I need to calibrate, recalibrate my thinking to the Word of God?

And then what does this mean in terms of my behavior?

So we're gonna go to John 10 here.

I'm gonna start with the exposition.

I'm gonna kick it over to Shane to get us going.

Quick exposition before we go to John 10.

Let's think John 9.

John 9, Jesus shows up to a man who is blind and he's begging.

Bible says he has been blind since birth.

So he's never known what it was like to see shapes and to see colors and to see people.

And so Jesus shows up and his disciples are caught in an attitude and a mindset of legalism, and they say to Jesus, why is this man blind?

Did he sin or did his parents sin?

So they think the only way bad things happen is sin is if you somebody done something.

And and Jesus starts goes in at that.

He says, No one sinned.

He puts their parents, they put their his parents on trial in a moment.

Yeah.

And Jesus said it wasn't that wasn't the issue.

And Jesus heals the man, and then they literally put the man on trial, right?

Because Jesus heals him on the Sabbath.

And so the Pharisees aren't happy for the man who was healed.

They are more offended that Jesus healed him on Sunday or on the Sabbath, you know.

And how many of you know you you've had an issue of mindset when you care less that someone was healed of being blind since birth, then you care more about what day of the week it happened on.

Missing the point.

Missing the point.

So they put him on trial and they're like, what really happened?

Were you really blind?

Yeah, dude, I've been blind all my life.

Oh, they bring in his parents, bring in his parents.

Is that really your son?

Yeah, that's our son.

Has he been blind all his life?

Yeah, he's been blind all his life.

And now he can see, yeah.

Well, no, uh, this can't be, this can't be.

Because, you know, if he was really of God, he wouldn't have healed on the Sabbath.

And so they they bring the man back in, they keep interrogating him, and eventually it's like one of the most beautiful things in the whole New Testament.

He's he goes, I don't know if he's a sinner or not.

All I know is I once was blind and now I see.

All right.

So you go talk to him, y'all go figure it out.

All I know is I couldn't see that and now I see that.

All right, that's all I know.

My life has been changed, okay?

That's all I know.

Somebody should write a song about that.

They should.

It's kind of kenzy, man.

Yes.

So, anyway, it gets to the end, and Jesus now goes after the Pharisees, and he's saying to them, guys, look how messed up your leadership mindset is.

Right.

You care more about the day of the week than you do the beautiful thing God's done in this man.

And then Jesus goes into John 10.

Now, check this out with all that context.

Very truly I tell you, Pharisees, anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way is a thief and a robber.

Okay?

Little foreshadowing.

We're gonna get to John 10, 10, where he says the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy.

Who's the thief?

Well, he names the thief in verse 1.

He says, Pharisees.

We we tend to attribute the thief.

If you hear that verse in isolation, the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy, we right away put that on the devil.

And yet Jesus is talking about bad leadership.

I'm not saying the devil didn't have something to do with bad leadership, but what I'm saying is Jesus is talking to the Pharisees, and he's calling them the thieves.

Verse 2 the one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.

The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice.

He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.

And when he has brought out all of his own, he goes ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice, but they will never follow a stranger.

In fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize the stranger's voice.

Verse 6, Jesus used this figure of speech, but the Pharisees did not understand.

They didn't understand the application of the illustration.

Verse 7, therefore Jesus made it clear, very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.

All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them.

I am the gate.

Whoever enters through me will be saved.

They will come in and go out and find pasture.

The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy.

I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.

The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

Shane, what do you see in this exposition?

Yeah, so this text is so rich.

So here's my turn of the prism.

And just to reiterate what Pastor Greg has already said, I can't encourage you enough to make your posture when you approach Scripture one of curiosity rather than certainty.

That isn't to say that we aren't certain on uh the essentials.

Oh, my bad, thanks.

The essentials being we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, we believe that Jesus died for our sins, we believe that he's coming back.

But when you approach the scripture with curiosity, you can be assured that there's going to be a unique revelation every time you come to the word.

So here's my my turn of the prism.

The thing that that stands out to me in this text is the freedom that is found in the safety of the shepherd.

Freedom that's found in the safety of the shepherd.

How many of you have ever heard the phrase, the safest place to be is in the will of God?

Anyone heard that phrase before?

Wave at me.

Okay, now we know who our church folks are.

If you haven't heard that phrase before, feel free to attribute that to me.

Next time you talk, just say, hey, my pastor told me the most profound thing to shake.

Shane Huey Sr.

At Shane Huey Sr.

Give my man some follows.

Let's go.

The safest place to be is in the will of God.

Well, well, John 10 turns the prism on that truth, and he relays it this way.

He says, the safest place to be is in the safety of the shepherd.

Look at uh verse uh number uh one.

The the implication of verse one is that the shepherd is the one when we heed and hear his voice, he's the one that guards us against the thief and the robber.

The thief denotes deception or trickery, the robber denotes destruction.

These things could be allegorical for anything that detracts from the abundant life, the life to the full that Jesus offers us.

Verse 9, Jesus uses this example.

He calls himself the gate.

This is actually in real time an example of Jesus himself turning the prism as he teaches, because in this text he'll refer to himself as the good shepherd, and then all of a sudden he says, I'm the gate.

So which one are you, Jesus?

Well, it's both, depending on how you're turning the prism.

The gate was uh rather the sheep pen, a common construction for a sheep pen was it was a bunch of stones that were arranged in a circle, and there would be one entryway, one way in and one way out.

And the the width of this entryway was commonly the width of a man lying down, because once the sheep were in the pen at night, the shepherd would literally lie down to enclose them to provide safety and cover, so that if a predator were to try to come in and attack the sheep, they would literally have to step over the body of the shepherd.

Now, what's interesting to note is that is that Jesus seems to indicate here that freedom is the outworking, the overflow, the result of the safety that comes from the shepherd.

Let me read verse 9 to you again in the NLT.

It says, Yes, I am the gate.

Those who come in through me will be saved.

They will come and go freely and find good pasture.

A better way to translate that phrase, be saved, is actually to find safety.

And then if you go on, another phrase used there is the phrase, they will come in and go out.

That language was actually a pretty common Hebrew idiom that would be used to refer to freedom.

Uh, and it's littered throughout the Old Testament.

Let me give you just a couple of examples.

Deuteronomy 28, verse 6 says, You will be blessed when you come in, and blessed when you go out.

Deuteronomy 28:6

Any Fred Hammond fans in the room?

Yes?

Come on, somebody.

You know, Fred didn't write that.

God did.

We're blessed.

We're blessed in the city, we're blessed in the field, we're blessed when we come when we go.

That's straight from the heart of the Father.

Here's another verse for you.

Psalm 121, verse 8.

Psalms 121:8

The Lord keeps watch over you as you come and go, both now and forever.

So Jesus says that freedom is the overflow of the safety that comes from the shepherd.

Now, if you're anything like me, you might be asking yourself some version of this question right now.

How free are we talking about here, Jesus?

Like, does that mean I get to do my own thing?

Does that mean I get to eat whatever I want without any consequence?

Does that mean I get to decide what I do with my money, where I go with my ambitions?

The issue is we often conceive of freedom as being a life without rules, a life without leadership, a life without boundaries.

But hear me well, one church.

That isn't freedom, that's actually bondage.

Because before long you become enslaved to every impulse and desire.

Jesus says that true freedom is found in the safety of the shepherds.

So here's what's interesting when we think about the context that Jesus is talking to the Pharisees, all right.

The Pharisees, if you think of like the nature of a boa constrictor, just tightening, tightening, tightening, over the years they took the law, the 613 laws of pious living, so to speak, and they added to them to create this really tight, restricted legalism.

Essentially, legalism being I'm gonna earn the favor of God or I'm going to uh, you know, basically avoid the wrath of God based on my behaviors and what I do.

So if this is the law of God and this is a sin, I'm gonna add two or three to stay as far away as I possibly can.

They were trying to establish a really hard boundary because the way that religion worked for them was they were they were categorizing people based on whether they were in or whether they were out.

And that boundary was so tight.

They were making that sheep pen, they were making your their world very, very small.

Yeah, and and while there's wisdom in knowing yourself and knowing uh where your temptations are and avoiding those environments or you know, staying far away and not flirting with the edge, right?

At the same time, what it was doing was creating a life of paranoia, uh a life that was so shame and restriction that they were missing the freedom that's in Christ.

It's interesting because people still migrate to legalism, they still do.

Although Christ you know create creates a boundary but gives us our freedom back.

He says it here in the text when he's like, you come in and you go out in freedom, and says that when you go to this pasture, okay, within the pasture you can invent.

Within the pasture, you can create.

That makes me think of Psalm 23.

Uh, it says that the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He leads me to green pasture where I lie down.

And the implication of that is when you lie down in a green pasture, that means you're full.

That means you're content.

If you're in a pasture and you're not full, you're grazing.

But the pastures that Jesus leads to is the sort where we find contentment and satisfaction in him.

It's a it's a um a misunderstanding of the text to then go and say, Well, because of that, uh, I have no restrictions, no boundaries, I can do whatever I want.

That that's what Paul talks about in Romans 6.

He goes, hey, okay, I've talked to you for five chapters about grace and how gracious God is.

He says, So do we go and sin so that grace may abound?

He's like, of course not, that's dumb.

Go sit send your brains out, get all kinds of consequences in your life, and go, look how free I am.

He he he goes on to say, he goes, hey, when you when you thought you were free and you let sin tell you what to do, and you thought you had absolutely no boundaries, no consequences, he goes, look, look at how restricted you were.

He said, but now that you've learned how kind Jesus is, that you've learned about the shepherd, he said, now actually you learn what true freedom really is.

Absolutely.

The message virgin says, How did that turn out for you?

And I love that language that it uses uh in Romans 6, right?

And so these parameters, these rules, uh kind of remind me of uh my first love uh before Sharice.

Okay, growth, right?

My first love before Sharice, and that is actually basketball.

Um and when I first uh learned how to play basketball.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Do you want to walk that back at all?

Like, do you if your wife is watching?

No, no, she's definitely she's definitely my first love, but this was like your greatest love.

Sure.

But I think your first love prior to your wife is different.

Yeah, but when it comes to your your your love for your basketball versus love for your wife, yeah.

We gotta get to comparison.

No, I mean, we're you're asking this question in March.

I mean, can I I mean I love my I love my wife so much, actually.

It's her birthday tomorrow, which leads me to actually our marriage coaching program that we have as a church.

That you you can sign up right now.

You can go to 1.church cares cares.

1.church cares.

We have marriage coaches that can help you out of situations just like this.

Yeah, just like yeah, yeah, yeah.

I will benefit from that and be sleeping on the couch tonight.

Anyway, um, so preaching sports center.

It's a win-win.

So anyway, I don't even want to be in this show.

We're gonna finish a sermon.

Welcome to your intervention, Eddie.

All right, this was a setup all along.

All right, anyway, back to the rules and parameters uh that sometimes we can face as believers, right?

When I first fell in love with basketball, like in that whatever you want to call it, um, I didn't fall in love because of the rules, but I did learn them, right?

I learned what a double dribble was, I learned what a travel was.

Hey, you can't go past that line.

But what really caused me to fall in love with it was actually the artistry and the freedom of the game.

To be able to create within the confines of the rules, right?

A guy named Eddie Jones was the best at this, man.

He was a Lakers great, and he was absolutely fantastic in the fact that great might be strong.

Debatable.

He was a great Lakers.

He was solid, he had a good run.

He was a great Lakers player, anyway.

But he was able to create within the confines of the game, and actually, the rules are what gave him freedom to create.

Exactly.

Yeah, so I liken this too.

I come from a basketball family.

My wife was an accomplished high school hooper in DC where she's from.

I refer to my boys as the starting backcourt, my three-year-old Miles, and my six-year-old today, JR.

We are naming and claiming Buckeye scholarships in the name of Jesus.

Come on, somebody.

I didn't know if wearing a buckeye jersey was appropriate stage etiquette, but I couldn't go out without repping them.

We're winning against Villanova today.

I'm prophesying that in the name of Jesus.

But when I so I want to stir affection for the game in the hearts of my boys, and in order to do that, you know what I do?

I pull up game seven of the 2016 NBA finals.

And we watch when Kyrie Irvin hits up.

Did I see the biggest thing?

In the 90s, we'd say, get it out.

Get it out.

That was an actual depiction of the block that was in that game.

I didn't do that in the other services, and I accidentally hit that right at the camera.

I'm gonna be interested to see that footage.

Yeah.

Or the or the bill.

Or the bill.

I just got matumboed on stage in the middle of a sermon.

Anyway.

What were you saying?

I was talking about I was talking about game seven, 2016 finals, one of the greatest days of my life.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, okay, now it comes full circle.

Illustration.

Well done.

And we watch these moments where greatness is on display and they fall in love with the beauty of the game.

But but it's interesting.

My boys sort of intuit.

They'll ask me, they'll say, hey dad, what does that boundary mean?

Why is the referee blowing the whistle?

What is a travel?

Because they understand that it's within those boundaries that the game becomes beautiful.

The rules are what keep basketball from becoming hockey, right?

And it's not until you understand the rules can you really appreciate the strategy and the free-flowing nature of the game.

So let me put a bow in it by saying it this way.

God's instruction, God's prohibition, even, isn't intended to rob you of your joy.

It's intended to protect you from harm so that you can walk into this full life that He's offered us.

Well said.

So good, man.

That's so good.

Eddie, what'd you see when you when you were reading?

Yeah, man.

So I decided to tilt it a different way, man.

Verse three really stuck out to me when it talked about the voices, right?

The voice of the shepherd.

It keeps saying the voice of the shepherd.

And every single day I wake up, I don't know if any of you are like me, I have to contend with so many voices in my life, right?

The voices of social media, the voices of text messages, the voices of emails from work or personal or spam, voices everywhere, commercials, all of this stuff, right?

So every day we have to decipher is this my voice?

Your internal voice, which sometimes can be the loudest, right?

The worst thing that you can do if you go through anything is isolate yourself because your voice sometimes tries to take over the voice of God, right?

So we have to decipher this.

Is this my voice, right?

Is this the voice of God?

Is this the voice of the enemy or is this the voice of culture?

Right?

Every single day we're being bombarded by these voices.

And as long as you're called, you're gonna have this internal struggle between the voice of the kingdom and the voice of culture.

What does kingdom say and what does the culture say?

Because oftentimes those two things conflict.

Why does that matter to you today?

Because whoever has your ear has your heart.

Whoever has your ear has your heart.

Think about this.

Nobody says your name like your parents do.

Nobody, right?

Now, if you come from an unhealthy family dynamic, I understand that maybe that authoritative figure could come off uh and bring some fear in your life, but that's not the voice of the Good Shepherd.

The Good Shepherd is connected to trust, right?

But nobody calls your name like your parents.

Now, my parents call my name a few different ways.

One of them is Eddie.

That means something, right?

The second is Eddie, alright?

Third, Eddie Tyus Parker IV.

Oh Lord.

The wages of sin is death.

When the full government name comes out, you know you're in trouble, right?

But what does that mean to me?

I understand the urgency of it, and I also understand however it's said, that's how fast I have to move.

Could it be however God speaks to you in your devotional time is how fast you have to respond?

Right?

You hear differently when you're loved.

So how do you hear the voice of God practically today, right?

I love that we're talking about application.

Sometimes the voice of God doesn't always come in this booming voice like, go this way.

It can.

It can be old English, it can be King James, it could be Message Bible, it can be the gospel according to Eddie translation.

I just made that up.

It can be whatever.

Or you can find God's voice in anything, right?

How about this?

In scripture.

If you haven't heard the voice of God, maybe it's because you haven't opened your Bible in a little bit, right?

You can also hear the voice of God in wise counsel or in the people around you.

Listen, sometimes the way that I hear the voice of God is when I'm driving into work and I'm turning on some worship music and God speaks very clearly to me.

However, you hear the voice of God, it's important for us to put ourselves in proximity to hear the voice of the shepherd.

Now, what the voice of the shepherd is not, it doesn't bring this fear that we said, right?

So if you hear an authoritative voice or a voice that's driving you to fear, oftentimes we can understand that that is not the voice of the good shepherd.

The fear of missing out, the fear of being single, the fear of uh not being good enough, those are not the voices that we should subscribe to.

Now that doesn't mean that the shepherd, when the shepherd speaks, you're not gonna feel fear because when there's a threat coming, what the shepherd would do because he loves you so much, he will protect you from the fear because oftentimes he sees what you don't see.

He sees ahead of you to try to protect you.

So in that moment, that immediacy, that urgency causes you to respond to his voice.

You know, one of the things I was studying actually in uh one of the commentaries was they talked about the tactic of sheep thieves, where they would come over the wall and they would often disguise themselves, they would dress in the garb of a shepherd and they would pretend to be a shepherd, but because the sheep didn't trust or know their voice, they would have to spook the sheep.

They would uh sheep, they would have to scare them to get them to run out, and they try to again uh separate them from the shepherd.

And and so um because of that, they were driving them with fear.

Jesus says, hey, shepherds lead with their voice, they get out front, but these guys would get behind them, spook them, and drive them.

And and so you what would happen is when the shepherd would show up, even if he was outnumbered, even if he couldn't physically overpower the robber, he would just begin calling the sheep by name.

He would use his voice, and and the whole uh flock would turn and follow the shepherd uh because they recognized his voice.

So I love that distinction you make between you know condemnation that degrades us and causes us anxiety and fear versus conviction, which is that I trust the perspective of the shepherd to see something I don't see, whether it's a predator or whether it's a terrain I'm not built for, he's calling me in a different direction, maybe with a sense of urgency, but but at the same time, that that urgency isn't meant to grip me with fear, it's to cause me to respond because he's protecting me.

Yeah, that's really good, man.

Two things to help you decipher that voice, right?

What is the voice of God really like?

Well, number one, it's powerful.

In verse three, it says that the sheep know my voice.

That's an authoritative statement, right there.

I love when God decides to flex in our situation, right?

The voice that spoke the earth into existence, the voice that is able to heal the blind, the voice that is able to cast out demons, the voice that is able to calm the waves, it's a powerful voice.

But not only is it powerful, because that's amazing, but it's also personal.

The scripture says that he knows the sheep by name.

And a modern-day shepherd and even a shepherd back in those times would have hundreds and hundreds of sheep that they would have to care for, but he knows you by name.

Powerful enough to create the ends of the world and the galaxies, but personal enough to know you, your story, and care about you.

So let's do this as we bring today uh to a close.

I want to give you two things to pray about, starting now, and and maybe it's something that you kind of sit with this week.

The first is that we are all, in a sense, sheep.

We are all followers, right?

You've been given leadership responsibility somewhere.

You're you're leading people in your community, in your home, uh, on the job.

Uh, even we lead our peers, and like you are a leader, so in a sense, you have that, but we're all followers first.

Doesn't matter how how much authority you have or influence you have or how important you are or powerful, whatever.

We are all followers of Jesus.

And so today I would encourage you to sort of evaluate yourself as a follower.

Am I walking in obedience?

Okay, am I living legalistically, bound in condemnation, worried uh that I'm gonna mess everything up, or am I walking in the pastures that God has created and I'm not walking in fear, I'm walking in confidence uh that He is going to take care of me.

And maybe for some of you specifically today, it's that the voice of the shepherd has led you in a deviation from where you thought you would be.

You were going east, and now you're finding yourself going west, and maybe you've had no peace, right?

Last week when we were talking about Jesus in another uh in Luke 15, he says, talks about the lost sheep, and we talk about how sheep are innocent.

They they don't try to get lost, but sometimes they do on accident.

And so maybe you were headed in a direction and and your career, maybe you've had a door slammed shut in your career.

Maybe you lost a job that you thought that was your future, you had a vision for that job, and yet now you find yourself, okay, I've got to scramble, I've gone in a different direction.

Same with a relationship.

Maybe you had a relationship implode, or or now you've um you've had closure to it, and you're moving on over here, and you're you're feeling anxiety, you're feeling fear, you're feeling worry, you're hearing these voices go, you're always gonna be alone, and you're never gonna get there.

You have all this stuff playing in your head, and maybe today it's trusting the shepherd who maybe was saving you from something out east, and he was taking you out west because he saw the threat and he saw some terrain and said, Come this way, come this way.

And so instead of being bound in fear, today have confidence, have peace that you are following the voice of the good shepherd.

The second is I think we would be remiss to miss the message Jesus is sending to leaders in John 10.

He's talking to Pharisees who were essentially using people for personal gain, and he's setting a standard.

Jesus went to great lengths to train his disciples of the mentality of a leader.

In fact, we see in Luke 22, Jesus says to them, He says, Hey, in your world, great men or great leaders lord over the people, and yet they're known as friends of the people because they're so politically savvy, but they don't care about the people, they only care about the important seats.

And he said, I'm among you as one who serves.

He said, Who's greater?

The one who sits at the table or the one who serves at the table?

He said, Yeah, you think it's the one who sits.

He goes, I'm among you as one who serves.

You can feel the full weight of his context, of the of the life that they had observed, Jesus living.

It's like he's saying, Hey, hey, did any of you turn water into wine?

No, I did, and I'm among you as one who serves.

Did any of you walk on water?

Huh?

No, I did, and I'm among you as one who serves.

Did any of you feed 5,000 with five loaves and two fish?

No, I did, and I'm among you as one who serves.

He's giving them an illustration, he's giving them a metaphor.

Walk with this, think with it.

Am I a servant leader?

When Jesus says I'm the gate, he's giving them a mentality of a leader.

Are you the type of leader who drives people, who scares people, who who spooks people?

Are you the kind that would lay yourself in the gate, that you would be the gate, that the wolf has to come over me, that I'm gonna protect the people around me, that I'm gonna lead out front, that I'm gonna earn their trust, that they care about me, that I would put myself in harm's way.

What kind of leader are you?

So I would encourage you, in whatever sphere of influence God has given you, evaluate yourself in the moment.

Let the Holy Spirit search you in two ways.

One, how am I doing as a follower?

How am I doing as a sheep?

And number two, how am I doing as a shepherd with the people that God has entrusted to me?

I don't know about you.

I don't want to be the type of leader that has to come up over the wall.

I want to be the one that the good shepherd steps aside, opens up the gate, says, Come on in, come on in.

You've earned my trust.

Come on in, you have the right mentality.

I can trust you with more influence, I can trust you with more authority, I can trust you with more people because you got the right heart.

Let's allow the Lord to show us right now what he wants us to see.