Sermon Tone Analysis

John 10

©December 23rd, 2022 by Rev. Rick Goettsche SERIES: Advent

Some of the most beloved passages in the Bible are passages that talk about the relationship between a shepherd and sheep.

Many people know the 23rd Psalm, which begins with, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” That psalm was written by David, who was a shepherd himself, so we hear in his words the tenderness and care he had for his sheep.

The 23rd Psalm describes the way the Lord cares for His people with a similar tenderness and care.

Even though we live in a farming community, sheep are still relatively foreign to most of us.

We’re familiar with cattle, maybe pigs and chickens, but most people around us don’t raise sheep, so we don’t have nearly as good of a frame of reference for them.

That’s what is kind of fun about the video we showed tonight.

It gives us a glimpse into what working with sheep is like.

In short, I imagine working with sheep is frustrating!

I do find it interesting that he compared working with sheep to something with which I’m quite familiar…working with children!

Sheep seem to do dumb things.

They get themselves into trouble constantly if you aren’t keeping an eye on them.

I love that he says that sheep are the kind of animals who will walk off a cliff just because it’s there!

It takes the right kind of person to be able to care for a creature that requires so much hands-on effort just to keep them safe.

That is why I think it instructive that one of the Lord’s common analogies for our relationship to Him is that we are like sheep.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we tend to get into trouble if we don’t have someone keeping an eye on us.

Just like sheep, we have a tendency to walk off “cliffs” just because they are there.

How many times have we gotten into trouble just because we wanted to see what happened when we did something?

How often will someone tell us what we need to do, but we feel the need to test the waters just to see if it’s really true? It’s like someone telling you that something is really hot—I know some of us will be tempted to touch it, just to make sure…and then act surprised when we get burned!

Or when someone says that something smells terrible, isn’t there a part of you that will try to take a whiff just to see if it’s really as bad as they say?

When you see a wet paint sign, don’t you feel compelled to touch it just to see?

Is there any wonder that the Lord often describes us as being like sheep?

Tonight I want to talk a little bit about our “sheep-ness” and the Lord’s “shepherd-ness”.

When we think of the nativity scene, we think of Mary and Joseph, maybe some livestock, the shepherds to whom the angels spoke, and the wise men.

But I want to remind you that there was another shepherd present in Bethlehem—He was lying in the manger.

As we celebrate Christmas, I want to remind you of how that baby born in Bethlehem is our Good Shepherd who is worthy of our worship.

We the Sheep

As I mentioned, the Bible talks an awful lot about the sheep/shepherd relationship.

Inevitably, we are described as sheep and the Lord is described as our shepherd.

There’s good reason for this.

Just as we are apt to ignore the advice we receive from other people in favor of trusting our own judgment, so too are we apt to ignore God’s commands in order to do what our hearts desire.

In one of the great passages in the Bible that tells us in advance about how the Messiah would sacrifice Himself for us, we read a bit about our similarity to sheep,

All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.

We have left God’s paths to follow our own.

(Isaiah 53:6a, NLT)

This is a pretty good description of the human race as a whole.

We leave God’s paths to follow our own.

We see this everywhere in our world today, don’t we?

We redefine morality to fit the current trends in our culture.

We pick and choose which of God’s commands we want to emphasize, and ignore the ones that we don’t like.

When I was in college, a friend of mine had what I thought was a million-dollar idea.

He called it the cut and paste Bible.

You could pick and choose which parts of the Bible you want to include and which parts you want to cut out, and then they’d bind up your new, customized Bible and send it to you.

Then you’d have a Bible that affirmed what you wanted it to affirm and didn’t condemn anything you didn’t want condemned.

This seems like a silly (and sacrilegious) concept, but isn’t that how many of us actually live our lives?

Think about the things you know God has said not to do that you do anyway.

We know what God has said, but we choose to go our own way instead.

This is exactly what sheep do.

So it’s no wonder that God refers to us this way time and time again.

When we recognize that we are like sheep, who constantly rebel against the Lord, we also understand something else—the Lord has every right to turn His back on us.

Lots of people imagine that they are basically good people.

They think that they are better than (or at least as good as) those around them.

There’s a problem with this line of thought though—we are comparing ourselves to other sheep!

Being proud of being as good as the other sheep is kind of like someone being proud that they were the best inmate on death row.

While that may be true, it’s not much of an accomplishment!

Here's what we have to understand.

Every single person on the face of the earth is like a sheep who chooses to wander from their shepherd.

Left to our own devices, we are in great danger.

Our only hope is to return to the safety offered by our shepherd…but we can’t do that on our own.

We’ve made that clear by our actions many times over.

The Good Shepherd

Let’s be honest, if we had to deal with people like us all the time, we might be tempted to just give up on them—to write them off and leave them to their own devices.

We’d be tempted to tell them that they deserve whatever they get—that they’ve made their bed and now they need to lie in it.

Fortunately for us, that is not how the Lord treats us.

Instead, like a loving shepherd, He deals gently and patiently with His sheep, and cares for us even though we seem unwilling to listen.

In the book of John, Jesus tells us about the kind of shepherd He is to His sheep.

11 “I am the good shepherd.

The good shepherd sacrifices his life for the sheep.

12 A hired hand will run when he sees a wolf coming.

He will abandon the sheep because they don’t belong to him and he isn’t their shepherd.

And so the wolf attacks them and scatters the flock.

13 The hired hand runs away because he’s working only for the money and doesn’t really care about the sheep.

(John 1:11-13, NLT)

If you have ever run or owned a business (or maybe you know someone who does), you know that even the best employees are not nearly as committed to that business as you are.

As an owner, you know you will do whatever it takes to make sure the business succeeds.

You’ll work late, you’ll work nights and weekends, you’ll work sick, you’ll even work for reduced pay if you think it will help the business succeed.

Even your best employees are unwilling to make that kind of commitment to the business.

The same is true on the farm.

You may employ great farmhands who are dedicated and committed, but the reality is that they won’t have the same kind of commitment as the farmer running the family farm that has been in his family for generations.

There’s a difference between the hired hand and the one who owns the land (or livestock).

This is how Jesus describes His relationship to His sheep.

He is not merely a hired hand; He is the Shepherd.

He is committed to His sheep, even to the point of laying down His own life for them.

No hired hand would be willing to make such a sacrifice.

This is what is astounding about the Christmas celebration.

We recognize that this baby in the manger was also the Good Shepherd who would lay down His life for His sheep.

Jesus came to earth to rescue the people who, like sheep, had wandered far from Him.

Why did Jesus need to lay down His life to do that?

The reason is that it is only by laying down His life that Jesus could pay the penalty for our rebellion against God.

Sin (rebelling against God) always carries consequences with it.

One of those consequences is a separation and distance from God.

Another is that because God is good, He cannot simply overlook our sin.

A good God must punish sin wherever He sees it—even in us.

This means that because of our rebellion against God, we have stored up for ourselves a great deal of punishment.

Without the intervention of someone else, we would be separated from God for all of eternity as He punished us in the way our rebellion against Him deserved.

But this is where Jesus came in.

Jesus, as our Good Shepherd chose to lay down His life, to sacrifice Himself, to secure our forgiveness.

By Jesus sacrificing Himself and taking our punishment, He makes it possible for us to be set free.

That’s what makes Him such a good Shepherd.