Let's pray.
Thank you, Lord, for the gift of music.
Thank you for the gifts you give to
your church, such as our music team and
Paul now, using those fingers that you created
to stir us once again to think about
you, Lord, and to prepare our hearts now
to hear your voice as Grant has prayed.
Now, I pray, that's exactly what we will
hear.
Lord, it may be some for the first
time.
It may be others of us.
It's been a while since we've really heard
your voice, although we cover it up well.
Speak, Lord, then, in the stillness while we
wait on you.
In the name of Jesus, our Lord, we
pray.
Amen.
Well, let me add my welcome also to
the South Delta Baptist Church.
It's good to see you again.
The summer is almost gone.
We're still not all back here, but I
think we possibly will be two weeks from
now, and we're looking forward to a great,
great fall as Pastor Doug gives us leadership
and our pastoral team.
But welcome to South Delta this morning.
If you haven't been here during the summer,
then we've been going now for three or
four months through the Gospel of John, and
we've been seeing some of the tremendous images.
You see, life is a journey, and the
Gospel through John is a journey.
And the Gospel through John actually picks up
and brings into fulfillment the journey that God's
people in the Old Testament had.
They went from the land of Egypt, and
they went through the desert, and they eventually
got to the Promised Land.
And en route, God did all kinds of
marvelous miracles for them.
He fed them.
He showed them the way to go.
He refreshed them with water.
He guided them in all kinds of ways.
John picks those up, and about half a
century after Jesus' crucifixion, John now, who would
likely have been the last apostle to have
died, he now says, now I've got it.
It's finally sunk in.
I can see it now.
I've seen the light.
Why didn't I get it when Jesus was
speaking?
Well, for the same reason that I never
got things all at once, and I still
don't have them all yet.
And you didn't get things all at once.
It takes time.
But John now says, let me look back
at what Jesus has said.
It's all tied in with his people, the
Jews in the Old Testament.
Now he says, those who trust in him,
those who come to the foot of the
cross at Calvary, and by faith and in
repentance respond to his offer of forgiveness, he
sends his spirit into their hearts.
Now Jesus then becomes to them the fulfillment
of all these Old Testament things that we've
been reading about.
So John goes into those, and we've been
thinking of them over the months.
We saw, for instance, that Jesus was the
tabernacle.
Now, have you heard of that strange word?
I did tell you some years ago, some,
it seems like years ago since I came,
some weeks ago, I did tell you that,
in actual fact, there was a tabernacle, a
kind of a tavern in the Old Testament,
you'll forgive that word, but that's what it
means, a temporary dwelling place, an inn, an
overnight stop.
They would pitch their tents, and they had
a big tent in the middle where they
worshipped God, and the glory of God was
in that tent.
Now then, Jesus said, I'm pitching my tent
among you.
His tent wasn't a canvas tent, his tent
was his body, and his soul and his
spirit showed the very glory of God.
Not only that, he was God also.
God-man, the God-man, as much God
as if he were never man, as much
man as though he were never God, and
he pitched the tent of his body among
us so we could see God's glory, but
he said, you can't start the journey until,
first of all, you're covered by the blood.
So he goes to the cross, but the
way he's introduced into that is John the
Baptist, in John chapter 1, when he was
baptizing, he points to Jesus, he says, look,
do you remember that lamb that you had
in the Old Testament?
You sprinkled the blood on the doorposts and
the lintel?
Hey, guess what?
It was by that lamb you were saved
and protected.
Jesus, look at him, he's the lamb of
God.
Well, if we're going to start the journey,
how will we have food?
Moses gave us manna.
Yes, but Jesus says, I am the bread
of life.
I'm the real food for your Christian journey,
and you will feed on me through my
word, and God, in a marvelous way, will
keep you strengthened for the journey.
We can't go without water.
Where's the water coming from?
Look in the Old Testament.
Moses struck the rock, and God miraculously allowed
water to come forth, and people could drink.
Ah, Jesus said, I am the rock.
The apostle Paul says that in 1 Corinthians
10.
That rock was Christ, and he was smitten
on the cross, and the water came forth,
the water of the Holy Spirit that we
saw some weeks ago, and God will refresh
our lives by the water.
Not only that, but how will we see
our way through the wilderness of this life?
We don't know how to make decisions, which
way to go.
Ah, Jesus said, you know you had the
pillar of fire to guide you in the
wilderness?
I now will, because I am the light
of the world, and whoever follows me will
not walk in darkness, but will have the
light of life.
And indeed, John, Pastor John, spoke on that,
didn't he, a couple of weeks ago, when
we did our last session on John, and
he spoke about that marvelous chapter 9, where
we saw that Jesus was indeed the light
of the world.
Now, a lot of those things come into
John's gospel, but today, as you've already seen,
we're going to talk about the Good Shepherd,
and I'd like you just to open, if
you've got a Bible, then open it to
John chapter 10, verses 1 to 10.
If you don't have your own, then there's
one in the pew, and if you look
on page 769, you'll find John's gospel, chapter
10.
Just a slightly different translation, but to translate
Greek into English is like trying to play
on the piano something written for a violin.
You can't get all the beauty out, and
it takes several translations, so this gives us
the gist of this.
So Grant has so well read it to
us.
What I'm going to do now is, I'm
going to, today, this morning, sum up, give
us some little lessons, be selective, just two
or three things, because we're going to have
communion a little later.
What I'm going to do is be selective,
and in John chapter 10, verses 1 through
18, we've got kind of a morning time,
an afternoon time, and an evening time.
It sort of moves in that way, although,
Grant, I wouldn't be divisive over that, but
in the morning time, how the shepherd comes
to the sheepfold and calls his sheep out,
and how during the daytime, and particularly in
the afternoons, as maybe they're going up on
those high plateaus there, they will find some
part that may be green.
Not too many of those in Israel, but
they would find some, and the shepherd would
lead his flock into pasture, and then we'll
finish there until next week, because we're going
to take up this same passage next week
again in the morning, and in the evening,
I'm going to have one more summer in
the Psalms, and we're going to finish with
the Shepherd's Psalm, Psalm 23, so it's all
about shepherding, and it's going to get us
ready for Awana and for all kinds of
other activities that we've heard about, but this
morning, in our communion, I'm going to go
on to the evening time, and in the
last few verses of our passage, we're going
to see that this one has the wolf,
has the animals come when the shadows lengthen,
as the animals attack the flock.
This one, the good shepherd, gives his life
voluntarily for the sheep.
He has power to lay it down and
power to take it again, and we're going
to see that just briefly as we come
to the communion table.
So first of all, let me give you
a picture of what the first 18 verses
are.
There are a lot of different little expressions
used, and if you're not familiar with the
Bible, you won't understand this.
In fact, it tells us in verse 6,
Jesus used this figure of speech, which means
an allegory, not a parable so much, because
a parable has one main meaning, but an
allegory, you can take the various parts of
it, and you can say this means that,
that one speaks of that, this one represents
that, and so on.
So in verse 6, Jesus used this allegory,
but they didn't understand what he was telling
them, because God had blinded the minds of
those who didn't want to believe.
This morning, if you want to believe, if
you want to know more about this great
shepherd of the sheep, then this morning, I
would invite you just to listen as I
just tell you what these various people represent.
I won't take them in order, but the
order in which I think will help you.
The good shepherd, verse 11, I am the
good shepherd, obviously that's Jesus the Christ.
In the next line, the good shepherd lays
down his life for the sheep.
The sheep here are primarily Jewish believers.
If you look a little later on, in
verse 15, is it?
No, verse 16, I have other sheep that
are not of the sheep pen.
The sheep pen is the land of Israel.
It's the sheep fold where the sheep are
kept, but other sheep don't belong to that
land of Israel.
They are the Gentiles, and many of us
this morning are Gentile Christians, and they are
the other sheep.
I have a little bit of both pens
in me, so that's all right.
I'm fit to speak on this passage, maybe.
Then, not only that, but notice, will you,
in verse 7, I tell you I am
the gate for the sheep.
Or, again, look at the same expression in
verse 3.
The man who enters by the gate is
the shepherd of the sheep.
Now, then, the gate means two different things.
The first main parable is the good shepherd,
or the allegory, but within that allegory is
another little allegory known as I am the
door.
I am the gate.
I am the entranceway to the sheep fold,
but in the first main allegory, then the
gateway is the office of the Messiah, verse
3.
The office of the Messiah, and so it
is that the man, the true shepherd, Jesus,
enters through the gate, which is the office
of the Messiah, for he is the Messiah,
God's anointed one, and in the Old Testament,
he is predicted and prophesied when he was
to be born, where he was to be
born, how he was to be born, how
he would live and minister, how he would
die upon a cross, and 50 of these
predictions came true in 24 hours, in Calvary,
when Jesus died.
So, therefore, that's the office of the Messiah,
and the true gate is the one that
comes to fulfill all of those, is the
one that comes through that gate, rather, to
fulfill all of those.
Not only the gate, but then, I want
you to notice, too, in verse 3, it
says the watchman opens the gate for him.
Of course, some people think that the watchman
is John the Baptist.
I'm not going to argue or split a
church, but, frankly, the watchman, I believe, is
God the Father himself.
He opens the gate.
He says, all right, you are the true
Messiah.
You can come and look after your sheep.
Not only that, but then, in verse 9,
what will happen is, when we go into
that fold and come out of that fold,
we will come in and go out and
find pasture.
The pasture for the Christians is the Christian
life.
It's the life for the capital L.
It's the life that Jesus brings us into.
It's the life that, now, I've experienced for
nearly half a century, and how I thank
God that he transformed my life one day
in Hong Kong.
But that's what the pasture, the good pasture,
is.
Then, you also look, again, in verse 12,
and it says that the wolf comes, and
what happens is, the one who's not the
shepherd abandons the sheep and runs away.
Who is the wolf?
Well, I suspect it's the evil one himself.
It's Satan, or maybe his cohorts, his agents.
And then we would look, perhaps, on first
the hired hand in verse 12.
The hired hand would be not, indeed, the
true shepherd of the sheep, one that really
doesn't love the sheep, one that doesn't get
up and cuddle them and commune with them
and get to know them, and they run
to him.
No, he's just a hired hand, and he's
in it for some other purpose.
And, again, the hired hand, very likely, will
speak, indeed, of of those people that are
not the true shepherds, and, of course, will
run away.
We'll see some of that next week.
I won't get into that today.
Then notice verse 1, the end of verse
1, the thieves and the robbers who climb
over the walls.
The thieves and the robbers, again, we don't
know, but probably those are false messiahs, for
there were many of them just before Jesus
came, and they claimed to be the messiah.
They were revolutionaries.
They had political aims and purposes, very often,
and they sought to lead the people, but
they climbed over the wall.
They couldn't come through the gate for the
simple reason they couldn't fulfill those prophecies.
They weren't born in Bethlehem.
They weren't born at the right time.
They weren't born of a virgin.
They didn't live the kind of life.
They didn't die on a cross in the
way Jesus did.
They were false messiahs, thieves, and robbers.
And then, of course, you have the stranger,
which is in verse 5.
The sheep will never follow a stranger.
A stranger is someone comes up and tries
to get them to follow him, but not
only will they not follow him, they'll turn
on their heels and run away.
So those are some of the pictures here.
We'll pick up more of those next week,
but let me, what I want to do
now is just zero into one thing for
the morning and one thing for the afternoon.
That's one, I don't mean to say that
you're going to be here all afternoon.
I mean, I'm going to pick one thing
for the morning of the shepherd and the
sheep, and one thing for the afternoon.
It's a wonderful thing, you know, that we
are called sheep.
We don't like that very much, but we
are told, aren't we, that all we like
sheep have gone astray.
We've turned everyone to their own way.
And frankly, the similitude of sheep and people
is downright embarrassing, because that's what we are.
And Jesus knew that, and he's the good
shepherd, and he leads us.
And if only we're honest with ourselves and
would just de-swell our heads a little
bit, we'll realize that that's exactly what we
are like, just like sheep.
After all, we started singing up here, you
all joined in.
We came in here, you all followed us
in.
You see, no, no, other than that, I
mean, in all kinds of ways in life,
we're like sheep and we go astray.
So let me come to the one thing,
but let me lead up to it.
Let me just give you a kind of
a running commentary of the first verses here.
Notice that this is exactly the continuation of
what Pastor John spoke on two weeks ago,
when he was in John chapter 9, and
he went right through it.
And I just heard that sermon, John, just
two days ago in my car radio.
I turned it on.
Wow, I wanted to preach it.
That was right on.
Thank you so much for telling us how
we're all different ways we react when Jesus
does a great miracle in our lives.
Now, the Pharisees reacted in the wrong way.
You claim to be God, so you aren't
genuine.
Well, you did this on the Sabbath, so
you're not genuine.
They just looked for the things to poke
holes in if they could.
And of course, there was no justification for
that.
But now at the end of chapter 9,
Jesus says to the blind man in verse
38, 37, that you've seen the Messiah and
he's speaking with you.
The man says, Lord, I believe, and he
worshipped him.
And Jesus then makes this statement, and now
I believe the Pharisees, who are in chapter
10, actually listened in.
For judgment I've come into this world, so
that the blind will see.
That's like you.
That's what he was saying to this blind
man.
The blind will see, and those who don't
know Jesus and are open to listening about
him, they will see.
But those who see or claim they can
see will become blind.
They won't be able to see anymore.
So the Pharisees chipped in here, and they
say to him, what?
Are we blind too?
And Jesus said in verse 41, if you
were blind, you would not be guilty of
sin.
But you've seen the truth, and you've rejected
it.
You've got all these prophecies in the Old
Testament to show you that I am the
one that should come, and you've rejected it.
So now you claim to see, your guilt
remains.
I tell you the truth.
The man who does not enter the sheep
pen by the gate, but climbs in by
some other way, is a thief and a
robber.
So there's a sense in which they too
will be included in those thieves and the
robbers, along with the false messiahs, because they
were leading the people astray.
They were blind leaders of the blind.
So it's picked up from that, but look
what it means.
I tell you the truth, or verily, verily,
our Old Statement would say, the man who
does not enter the sheep pen by the
gate, but climbs in by some other way,
is a thief and a robber.
Now there were two kinds of sheep pens
in Israel.
In those days, you'd have a kind of
a rural one out in the fields, or
on the plateau, or up in the hills,
and you'd have a sort of a semi
-rural one in the village, or down in
the town somewhere.
The one in the town would be a
more permanent structure, and you may have several
flocks, and several shepherds may bring their flock,
and there'd be a watchman looking after it
there, and he'd let his flock in, and
they'd mix with all the others.
How will he know?
Oh, well, they've got numbers on, so he
knows the numbers.
No, no, no, they are going to know
his voice when he comes next morning.
So that's the kind of pen they have.
And then they have that gate, and that
gate is such that, in fact, the watchman
would only open it to genuine shepherds.
But when they got out into the country,
or when they were too far away from
the village, and they wanted to stay the
night, and it was reasonably decent weather, then
what would happen is they would have a
temporary pen, a temporary sheepfold, and they would
sort of build it, put it together.
There may be one they'd used before.
It wasn't quite as strong as the other,
and you could sort of still see through
it in that, but it was some protection
from the animals, and some enclosure so the
sheeps wouldn't wander.
It wasn't very nice, Mark.
You imagine having hundreds of sheep in there.
First, there's not much grass generally, but inside
a sheepfold, when all those feet are trampling
it down and eating the last blade they
can find, it's nothing but muck and dust
in there, and the shepherd wants to come
early in the morning and get them out,
because the sheep are desperate to get out
with the shepherd and for good pasture.
But what happens is, in that kind of
a place, there isn't a gate.
So the shepherd then, in the rural type,
actually lies down, and he makes himself in
such a position that any animal wanting to
get in has to crawl over his body,
or any sheep wanting to get out has
to go over his body.
Jesus therefore says, I am the gate.
Do you want to come into my sheep?
Do you want to come in to be
a part of my flock?
Then to get into the pen, you have
to come through me.
He's the only way we have of salvation,
my friend.
I don't know whether you're struggling to live
the Christian life these days.
You're struggling to do that, but you've never
come in through the gate.
You've climbed over the walls yourself.
You've tried to, sort of, you've oozed yourself
into Christianity by some spiritual osmosis, and you've
sort of found yourself inside the pen.
Maybe you sang in the choir first.
Maybe you took up some little role somewhere
or other in the church, and they didn't
ask you too many questions, and before long
you were part of the deacon's board.
Who knows?
You may be there right now and may
not know Jesus Christ.
After all, we don't know.
How does the pastoral team or the deacon's
board know?
Only God knows your heart, and if you've
never come through Jesus Christ, he's the gate
of the sheep, and then you must come
to him because there's no other name under
heaven whereby we must be saved, says Acts
4.12. Jesus said in John 14 and
verse 6, I am the way, the truth,
the life.
No one comes to the Father except through
me.
So he would lay down in the gateway
there, and he became the gate.
All right, all that just to explain the
background of verse 1, so you can see
we're going to get a long way because
I've got five minutes.
I tell you the truth, the man who
does not enter the sheep pen by the
gate but climbs in by some other way
is a thief and a robber.
The man who enters by the gate, now
Jesus is hinting about himself here because he's
the only one that can enter by the
gate, he's the shepherd of his sheep.
The watchman opens the door for him, the
gate for him.
Now, I told you some think that's John
the Baptist and some think that's God the
Father.
I believe the latter, but let me read
you what it says at the end of
John 1.
The end of, or rather in the middle
of John 1.
Next day, John saw Jesus coming towards him
and said, verse 29, look, the Lamb of
God who takes away the sin of the
world.
He's the watchman pointing to the shepherd.
This is the one I meant.
Come on, I'm the watchman.
Sheep, listen to this one.
He's the watchman, he's introducing him.
A man who comes after me has surpassed
me because he was before me.
That's Jesus because he's God.
I myself did not know him, but the
reason I came, says John, baptizing with water
here in Jordan, was that he might be
revealed.
And now, look, he's come and he's asking
to be baptized.
Then John gave this testimony.
I saw the Spirit.
So now, not only is John the watchman,
but he's saying God himself is the one
that pointed him out.
I saw the Spirit come down from heaven
as a dove and remain on Jesus.
I would not have known him except that
the one who sent me to baptize with
water told me.
The man on whom you see the Spirit
come and remain on him, he is the
one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.
Now look what John says.
I have seen and testify that this is
the Son of God.
John was the watchman.
God the Father was the watchman.
He explained it to John.
John explained in human language and everybody knew.
So here's the watchman.
And the watchman, God the Father, John the
Baptist, who was his agent, opens the gate.
The watchman opens the gate for him, verse
three, and the sheep hear his voice.
They listen to his voice.
Imagine that maybe you're in the semi-rural
one in the village or the town and
there are several flocks there.
And the watchman sees somebody coming.
Oh, he recognizes George.
So George comes.
He's the shepherd.
He's got his sheep in here.
They're about, oh, about 35 of these sheep
are his.
So he goes and he says, okay, you
just stay there now.
I'll send my agents inside and they'll whip
all around there and they'll hook on to
everyone they think is yours and drag them
over here.
That's not the way you do it.
That's not how God does it in our
lives.
He doesn't force us to toe the line.
He gives us this marvelous example.
But the shepherd, when he just comes there,
as soon as he gives that sound, then
they have strange, weird sounds sometimes, like I
used to have strange, weird sounds speaking to
my children.
The youngest daughter is over here this morning
and her family, and she knows I had
the most weird sounds.
Her name wasn't her name.
It was another name.
All kinds of things.
And they will call the sheep by their
different names, three feet or black ear or
something like that, that reminds them of this
one.
And they'll just call them by name.
But even before they call by name, they
just got to say one word in a
certain tone.
Oh, the sheep look up.
And when they look up, they just listen
for their name.
And one by one, they come.
Other times, they don't even need to hear
their name.
They recognize the shepherd's voice.
They know the tone of voice.
Oh, my friend this morning, can you recognize
the voice of the good shepherd?
Do you know when God is speaking to
your heart?
For there's a sense in which there's another
sheepfold this morning.
It's the sheepfold of your life.
And inside it dwells the real you, that
like sheep have gone astray.
And it's just you in there.
And when the shepherd comes and knocks that
door, or when he comes and just speaks
a word in your ear, as God's Holy
Spirit convicts you, do you hear his voice?
Do you respond to him?
But notice what the sheep do.
It says, the watchman opens the gate for
him and the sheep listen to his voice.
He calls his own sheep by name and
leads them out.
Let me go on a verse.
And when he has brought out all his
own, he doesn't miss any you know, it's
all is all.
He goes on ahead of them and his
sheep follow him because they know his voice.
So three things happen.
We used to have three hours in school
when I was small, reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Well, here are another three hours.
And you've got the three hours now that
are important when Jesus the good shepherd speaks.
Number one, you recognize that voice.
Number two, you respond and you lift up
your head and stop chewing the grass and
you look and say, that's my shepherd.
But thirdly, you don't stop at that point.
You recognize, you respond, and you run for
the closer the relationship between the shepherd and
the sheep in Israel, the faster those sheep
run.
They know there are goodies there.
They know he's going to lead them out
into good posture.
They know he loves them.
He's going to tickle them under the chin
and cuddle them and just whisper goodies in
their ears.
They've got all kinds of wonderful things for
them.
So it is with our shepherd.
And when he calls us, we need to
respond like that.
Where do we hear his voice?
Well, as we're in our own sheepfold, we
can hear his voice primarily in this book,
the scriptures.
This is the safest place for you to
hear his voice and not get mistaken.
And as you read it, or as it's
read this morning, as we have several times
the scripture, then did you hear his voice?
Did you relate to that?
Did you say, I know that voice, I
think that way, God's spirit has caused me
to think that way.
Then you respond.
And you say, all right, I'm going to
respond and I'm going to run.
But not only in the scriptures, but also
maybe through a friend.
Maybe a friend has brought you this morning.
You've seen something in their lives, something that
someone within you is responding to.
You can see and hear that it's the
voice of God.
You can see him in their faces and
hear him in their voices.
Maybe it's through radio or television.
Maybe it's through reading a book, a book
that suddenly brought you face to face, perhaps
a Western sunset there, a sunset at night.
And as you look at the sky and
all its glorious colors that Keith Price can't
see, then you say, isn't that marvelous?
I can see God, but that's not enough.
You know, you've got to see him as
the creator, but you've got to say this
one who was the creator became flesh and
dwelt among us.
And he's the one that's my shepherd calling
me now to serve him and to worship
him.
So you recognize the voice, you respond to
it, and you run to him.
Why do we not follow?
We'll often recognize and we'll respond with our
heads and lift them up, but we won't
run to him.
Or we say we will on Sundays.
And I know I'm one of you, so
easy to do that.
I know I'm human.
You can't be a Christian before you're human.
You can't be a pastor before you're a
Christian.
I mean, you've got to be human first.
And it's in us all that we want
to go our own way.
That's the whole point of sheep.
We've all gone our own way.
And we want to have my way.
I want to insist on my rights.
Why did you do that?
I'm going to find out.
And I gradually lay it all down in
the way I want.
So I won't follow him.
I won't be willing to go into the
places that he wants to lead me.
How do I follow him?
I follow him now by being led out
into green pastures.
And I'm going to have to turn my
morning into my afternoon to finish because I've
already gone overtime because it's a short session
this morning.
And so how do we follow him?
Well, look what it says in verse 7.
We'll come back to this chapter next week
twice.
Verse 7, I tell you the truth, I
am the gate for the sheep.
All who ever came before me were thieves
and robbers, but the sheep didn't listen.
I am the gate.
Whoever enters through me will be saved or
will be kept safe, as you find in
your margin.
It means that if you come through me
into the sheepfold, you'll be safe from the
attack of the animals.
He will come in, but then also he'll
go out and find pasture.
So what happens now is Jesus, the one
we follow, when we follow him, we're feeding
in the pasture that he has led us
into.
Oh, what a marvelous pasture that is.
Do you know what it's called in verse
10?
It's called abundant life.
For I have come that they may have
life and have it to the full.
Abundant life.
That's what I've said several times in the
last six months.
You know, I'm always doing things in the
air like this, either around the microphone in
circles, or I love capital L's, because they
have two directions.
It has me in the corner here, but
it has God up that way and has
others out that way.
And true pasture, life abundant, life with a
capital L, is life with a relationship vertically
to the Good Shepherd, who we're going to
see in a few moments at this table,
gave his life for the sheep.
Not only did I become a Christian, but
I've continued to get to know him and
hear his voice, and I can't wait for
him to talk to me, not just each
morning, but throughout the day.
And then also there's a relationship out here,
because there are other sheep around, and now
I, as a Christian, am to go out
and have that relationship with Christians, not always
in the cloister.
We're to be out there.
We're only coming here to charge our batteries.
You don't come in here to live the
Christian life.
This is just to plug your shaver in.
This is, and then it's going to work
for the rest of the time, as it
were, right?
Sorry, hairdryer ladies, I see you don't use
shavers.
Okay, and so you plug it in, and
this is the battery recharging.
Then we go out and meet the needs
of the thirsty world that God calls us
to.
Well, I keep talking, don't I?
And it's gone on and on.
But anyway, let me bring this to a
close, and I'll go into it in a
little more detail in some other areas next
week where we have a full-length message,
but it will be over in reasonable time
even then.
So let me ask you, do you know
the shepherd?
Can you recognize his voice?
Here's the key question.
Do you really want to follow him?
You see, the main reason we don't follow,
believe it or not, is because we don't
really want to follow.
We want to have all the benefits of
being inside the sheepfold and protection.
Oh, yes, I'm a Christian.
I'm saved.
I'm born again, born from above.
Thank you, Lord, you've given me all that.
I'm enjoying that, and now I'm going out
to live my own life.
No, you come in for that protection, and
you go out into the pasture.
Do you hear his voice?
Do you follow him?
Does he, as he gives you the lead
for a shepherd in the east, of course,
walks in front, and all the sheep will
follow him, and those that are closest will
be in the front, and, of course, all
the other sheep will follow any other sheep.
So that's why they keep following him.
Do we follow him?
Now, as we're going back to school at
this time of year, or as we're starting
a new church year, and you need to
give your life in service for God, you
say, I've got too many other things to
do in materialism and other things I want
to pursue here, or I want to go
off and study this or learn that.
Well, this is good, but frankly, where are
our priorities?
Are our priorities now to be given to
the shepherd?
Do we do what he says and go
out and find pasture and live life to
the full?
Well, let's pick this up next Sunday morning,
and then again the Sunday evening as we
tie it in with Psalm 23, but I'm
going to call upon our team now just
to give us some more worship material, and
we're going to, I trust, worship the Lord
in our hearts, and bear in mind what
we've read this morning, and just in a
few minutes we'll come back to the communion
table, and then the deacons will come down
here, and we'll serve communion to those who
would care to partake.