Before and After - 4 - Salvation

Scripture: John 10:1-10

John 10:1–10 NIV

1 “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. 2 The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 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. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5 But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.” 6 Jesus used this figure of speech, but the Pharisees did not understand what he was telling them. 7 Therefore Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. 8 All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them. 9 I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

4/26/2026

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Special Music

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes: Week 3: Special Music

Dalton singing before Kid’s Time

Opening Prayer:

Merciful Shepherd, we confess that we often wander from Your fold. We fail to follow Your voice and seek our own way. When we see others from Your flock get away, we don’t call out for them, and we let them continue on this dangerous path. Forgive us and lead us back to your care. We pray this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Call to Worship

Leader: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

People: He makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters.

Leader: Jesus said, “I am the gate for the sheep.”

People: We come to worship the one who leads us to abundant life.

Leader: Come, let us worship the Good Shepherd.

All: Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Salvation

Opening

When I was young, my parents used to make me go outside and play. We had a television — only a handful of channels — but there was almost always something interesting on. It felt like a window to a bigger world. As I grew up, I’d hear adults worrying about a generation raised by television. And I’d chuckle when I visited older family members who left their TVs on all day, speaking into the silence as a form of companionship.

Nowadays, we carry our TVs in our pockets, on our wrists, everywhere we go. And the voices never stop. Come here. Buy this. Follow me. They promise the world and leave us empty. And some of them — the ones that get deep enough — steal something from us we didn’t even know we had.

And Jesus would call them thieves. But Jesus is different. He’s calling us to something more.

In these past weeks since Easter, we’ve been exploring everything that changed when Jesus walked out of the tomb. We discovered a faith that goes beyond our sight. We discovered hope—broken and dead, redeemed, and brought to new life. Today, we discover that salvation isn’t just where we’re going — it’s how we live on the way there. And Jesus paints us a picture of what that life looks like.

Movement 1: The Scene

To see what Jesus means, we need to go back to the moment he said it. Because he wasn’t speaking to a crowd. He was speaking to the Pharisees — the most religious people in the room. He launches into this lesson about caring for sheep because they had just experienced the miracle of the man born blind being healed by Jesus. Their response to this miracle was to cast him out of the synagogue.

It’s easy to see the Pharisees as the villains. Especially after what they’ve just done. But the gospel writers mention the Pharisees more than any other group. And there’s a reason for that. They were the closest to Jesus. Many of them were close enough to the kingdom of heaven that they could smell it. We know that some of them — Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea — eventually became followers of Jesus and were part of the Easter story.

The Pharisees knew the scriptures, and they knew that the Prophet Ezekiel, in chapter 34, prophesied against the shepherds of Israel. God accused them of not taking care of the flock. Not strengthening the weak. Not healing the sick. Not searching for the lost. They knew God was promising to come and shepherd his own flock, no longer leaving them to the false shepherds. And they wanted to do whatever they could to make the day that the Messiah came, the one true shepherd, come quickly.

They were standing at the gate, trying to direct God’s people to the one true shepherd. Standing at the gate — sincerely, desperately — doing the best they could. Some of them were standing at the gate that day, struggling inside with what they had just witnessed in this miraculous healing. They were feeling convicted about their own part in how this man had been treated in their quest for the truth. I think they had been living their lives so long without a shepherd that it may have been hard for them to place themselves in this parable. They had been standing at the gate so long, directing others, that they had forgotten they were sheep too.

But there was something about the voice of Jesus… that kept them from turning away.

Movement 2: The Sheep Pen

Jesus turns to the Pharisees and says to them,

"Anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep."

The Pharisees knew very well that the world had many ways of coming after them. The Jewish people had nearly lost everything before — their city destroyed, their temple torn down, their people carried into exile. They'd survived by God's grace and rebuilt from the rubble. The Pharisees had no intention of following anyone who hadn't proven himself through the proper channels. They had been burned before. That's why they were suspicious of Jesus.

But Jesus isn't done. He goes deeper.

"The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name, and he leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and the 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 a stranger's voice."

He calls his own sheep by name. Did you hear that? By name...

Not by category. Not by group. By name. The shepherd knows who you are.

Jesus shows them it's more than just coming through the right way. The shepherd knows the sheep. He knows their name, and the sheep know his voice as well. They come when he calls them as he leads them out of the pen. They only follow their shepherd. If a stranger tries to come after them, even if the stranger comes through the gate, they don't know his voice, and the stranger doesn't know their names. They won't follow him. In fact, Jesus says they'll run away from him.

These sheep are smart like that. Or maybe it's not that they're smart. Maybe it's that they've spent so much time with the shepherd that his voice is the most familiar sound in their world. But the Pharisees? They're struggling. John tells us they didn't understand what Jesus was telling them. And maybe that's because they couldn't find themselves in the story.

Are they the thieves?

Are they the sheep?

Maybe they were both. Maybe Jesus was giving them an opportunity to decide — right there, standing at the gate.

And then, Jesus shows them where he is...

Movement 3: The Gate

"I am the gate," Jesus says. Not a wall. Not a window. A gate — something you walk through.

"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."

They know him, and he knows them, even with all the voices in the world crying for their attention. There's something about his voice and the way it resonates in them when he calls their name.

"I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out and find pasture."

Now, wait a minute. I thought salvation was something that we got in and stayed in. I thought this sheep pen was our own promised land, our own little bit of heaven. It keeps us safe, like Noah's Ark. And when the winds blow, and the rains come down, we know we're safe inside because we followed Jesus when he invited us in. But now Jesus is telling us that this gate opens both ways, and he calls us to come into that place of rest and also to go back out into the world to find pasture.

What kind of salvation has us moving back and forth through this gate?

The kind that has already been tested. Because Jesus didn't just call himself the gate — he walked through it. He went out into the world, all the way to the cross, all the way into the grave. And he came back. He came through death and out the other side, alive. That's the gate he's offering us. Not a theory. Not a hope that might work. A gate that he has already gone through and is standing on the other side of, calling us by name.

The kind of salvation that is more than a destination—it's a way of life. We've learned from the world that the only thing that matters is that you end up at the right place. It doesn't matter how you get there. All of those voices tell us that their way works too, that their way works faster or better, that they can get you to where you want to be at half the cost of everyone else, and move you to the head of the line.

Salvation in Him is a destination. It is coming to the gate. But it's not only a destination. It's also the journey with Him. It's the life you live between here and there. It's not just coming in from the cold and from the danger to some place safe and warm where we can rest forever. He leads us back out into the world to find nourishment and grow. He reminds us of all those competing voices — the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. "But I," Jesus says, "have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."

Jesus isn't just counting how many sheep are in the pen. He knows each of us by name. He knows how much we've grown in the past year. He knows where our scars are.

He knows our likes and dislikes, our gifts, and our temptations. He leads us out to grow. And he calls us back to rest. Out and in. In and out. No matter where we are — in the safety of the pen or out in the open pasture — he is the gate we pass through. And He is always there — calling us by name.

Movement 4: The Voice

There is comfort in knowing where we are and where we are going, but there is so much more comfort in having a Savior who knows us by name and who goes with us. He calls us to follow Him our whole lives, through the valley of the shadow of death and into that new life on the other side.

Some of you have walked through that valley this month. And the shepherd was there. He knew your loved one by name. He knows you by name. And he hasn't left your side.

He doesn't confine us to one place and tell us to sit still and be good because He made us to move and to grow. That's why one of the words the Bible uses to describe salvation is freedom. Not isolation. Not fear. Freedom — the freedom to move from place to place knowing that you are never far from the Shepherd's voice and the gate that brings you home.

In the 1700s, a group of Christians called the Moravians fled persecution and found refuge on a small estate in Germany. They were safe — but safety wasn't enough. They turned on each other. They quarreled. They stagnated. Then God broke through. During a communion service, the Holy Spirit fell on them, and everything changed. Their home became a house of prayer — a prayer vigil that continued day and night for over a hundred years. And from that place of prayer, God sent them out — not trained pastors, but farmers, bakers, builders — out to the Caribbean, to Greenland, to the ends of the earth, carrying the shepherd's voice wherever they went. They went out to grow. And they always came back to pray. Out and in. In and out.

We were not made to know when and where to go. We were made to recognize the voice of Jesus and follow where he leads. We were made to trust in his care and provision, knowing that he knows our needs — and the needs of our loved ones — better than we do. The best thing we can offer anyone is the shepherd who already knows their name.

Remember what God promised through Ezekiel — “I myself will shepherd my flock”? Jesus is that shepherd. And he's still calling — not just to us, but to the ones who haven't heard his voice yet.

Where do you hear Jesus calling you today?

Is He calling you out? Out of safety and shelter, into the world? To take the faith and hope He's given you — renewed and redeemed by the power of the resurrection — and be a witness to this new and abundant life?

Or is he calling you to come home, back to the sheep pen? To rest in his presence. To be healed and to know you belong.

You are planting seeds this week. You will put them in the ground and trust that God will bring life from them. But there is another kind of seed — the word of your testimony, the story of what Jesus has done for you. Who will you plant that seed with this week?

Maybe it's a conversation over coffee. Maybe it's telling your neighbor what gets you through the hard days. Maybe it's simply saying, 'I'd love for you to come to church with me.' You don't have to have all the answers. You just have to know the shepherd's voice well enough to echo it.

Who in your life needs to hear that the shepherd knows their name — and the gate is open?

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus, thank you for coming to us when we were lost, wounded, and alone. Thank you for calling us by name and leading us home. And thank you for calling us out into the fields to grow as we serve alongside you.

Help us to hear your voice clearly, wherever we are. Help us to lean on you, our shepherd, more than our own understanding. Help us to follow faithfully where you lead us, knowing you have conquered death, and we find our salvation and new life in you.

In your Holy Name we pray, Amen.

Benediction

The shepherd sends you out. But he always calls you back. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — Go in peace.