The Good Shepherd John 10:11-21

-Jesus is the Good Shepherd and His sheep know Him!

I. Jesus Protects His Sheep vv. 11-13

In this morning’s passage, we pick up where we left off last week:

Jesus is addressing the crowd in the wake of healing a man born blind

Last week, He compared Himself to a door that allows the sheep into and out of the sheep pen at the end and beginning of each day

Now, He will add a new dimension to this parable

Jesus tells us that He is the good shepherd of the sheep

That description is important. What is good about the good shepherd?

The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep; His care for the sheep is sacrificial in nature!

We can contrast the good shepherd with the hired shepherds:

When the wolves come who want to destroy the sheep, the hired hands flee because the sheep do not belong to them and they do not care about the sheep

The Good Shepherd, however, will gladly lay down His life for the sake of the sheep:

They are His sheep

He loves them

Please do not miss the power of this: Jesus loved you enough to give His life for you!

Friday of this week, my daughter Maggie sent off some blood work from a local lab. That’s not too uncommon, but the circumstance is. A few weeks back, we received a phone call from someone asking to speak with Maggie Landry, from the National Bone Marrow Registry. She submitted her bloodwork some time back and now she has been matched with a 40 year-old woman in need of peripheral blood stem cells. We are awaiting this final set of results to confirm that she is a match and, Lord willing, she will travel to make her donation some time in the next few months. It’s a pretty simple procedure. Would you donate a little blood to save someone’s life. Of course you would! But, how much would you be willing to give? Jesus gave it all; He laid down His life for His sheep.

II. Jesus Gathers His Sheep vv. 14-16

Jesus continues His teaching here and gives us another characteristic of the good shepherd

He is good because He knows His sheep and gathers them together

Jesus wants us to live in a relationship with Him

He knows us and wants us to know Him; there is a kind of familiarity that is present here

Jesus compares this to His relationship with God the Father; just as He has a unique relationship with God, He wants us to have that kind of intimate relationship with Him

Not only does Jesus know His sheep that were present that day, there are many more!

It’s immediately clear that Jesus has a flock of sheep that follow Him:

There are 12 apostles and other disciples

There is a crowd that has surrounded Him as He worked miracles and taught

Now, there is a formerly blind man who believes in Jesus .

However, there are even more sheep:

Outside of this immediate community in Galilee and even beyond Judea and the Jewish people, Jesus is calling people to follow Him

We are part of this new flock

Jesus is working to gather all of us together into a single flock, uniting people across ethnic, cultural, geographic, and historical boundaries into a single people united in Him and we get to be a part of it!

Revelation 7:9–10

[9] After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, [10] and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (ESV)

III. Jesus is Loved by His Father vv. 17-18

Third, we see that Jesus has a special kind of relationship with God:

Jesus tells us that His Father loves Him

That does not seem like too big of a deal to us, until we recognize what it signifies: Jesus is a uniquely selected vessel of grace

There is a relationship between the Father and the Son and it is founded by a mutual love:

The Father loves Jesus because He commits to a sacrificial mission: He will lay down His life for the sheep

The Father gives authority to Jesus to lay down His life, but He authorizes Him further: He will take His life up again

This is part of the power of what is taking place in the death and resurrection of Jesus:

Anyone can lay down his life for another, but Jesus does much more than that:

He does not lay just lay down His life; He takes it up again

The Resurrection of Jesus is a sign to all of Creation that God loves and affirms His Son:

Jesus is Lord

Jesus is God’s chosen servant

Jesus died in innocence

Though He died for the sake of our sin, He is not condemned but is confirmed by God in His righteousness

If we are in Christ, then just as we died with Him we are raised with Him; we share in the Father’s love! God the Father loves you just like He loves Jesus; the Resurrection is the proof!

Romans 4:22–25

[22] That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” [23] But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, [24] but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, [25] who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. (ESV)

For if Christ were not risen, it would be evidence that God was not yet satisfied for [our] sins. Now the resurrection is God declaring his satisfaction; he thereby declared that it was enough; Christ was thereby released from his work; Christ, as he was Mediator, is thereby justified.

-Jonathan Edwards

IV. Jesus is Hated by the World vv. 19-21

All that Jesus teaches about His unique relationship with the Father makes what takes place next even more staggering

Strong accusation comes from some of the people:

He is accused of being demon-possessed or being insane

Either He is filled with evil or He is devoid of His mental faculties, disconnected from reality

The evidence does not suggest this to be true

A man who was insane could not teach with this kind of clarity

A man who was possessed by a demon could not and would not open the eyes of the blind

A man with this wisdom and this power is from the Lord; In fact, He is the Lord

This third option, that He is Lord is the problem!

I want us to be fair to the crowd here; they seem to understand the stakes

We don’t have neutrality as an option; either He’s a liar, a lunatic, or He is Lord!

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher: He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says that he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill His as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher: He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

-CS Lewis

Where are you? What choice have you made? Are you ready to choose?