Introduction
For a townie like me, sheep are an unfamiliar and tantalising sight. I once
visited friends who had moved to rural Sussex. Next to their palatial mansion
was a farm. My friends observed that all weekend I couldn’t stop photographing
the sheep.
Our daughter is different. Not that we live in a rural area,
but her pre-school recently had a visit from Marsh Farm Country Park
staff. They brought with them chicks and lambs. A few weeks later my wife took
our daughter and son away for a week’s holiday on a farm. When they arrived, the
farm owner greeted them who, knowing small children were coming, brought a
couple of lambs to welcome them. Rebekah took one look at them and said,
‘Haven’t you got any kittens?’ One blasé little four-year-old, one deflated
farmer.
For Jesus and his culture, sheep weren’t just an everyday commonplace;
they were a significant religious image. Never mind the Passover lamb, the
moment Jesus described himself earlier in John 10 as the ‘good shepherd’, he
was dropping a political bomb in the Jewish religious world. Ezekiel had castigated
the ‘shepherds of Israel’ of his day, that is the religious leaders; Jesus, by
calling himself the good shepherd, was implicitly criticising the leaders of
his day.
Moreover, in this passage, it gets worse: not only aren’t
they shepherds, they aren’t even sheep (verses 25-26)! Effectively, they’re not
even part of God’s people!
So the question arises: who are the sheep? What do they look
like? How do you identify them? Jesus seems to know, and in a moment, I’d like
us to explore what he says.
However, before we do, let me note that this question is a
dangerous one. ‘Who are the flock of God?’ can be misused. Some people use it
to make self-righteous descriptions of who’s in and who’s out. For some, it’s
more about trying to keep some undesirables out than finding ways of welcoming
them in. And the descriptions of who’s ‘in’ end up looking uncannily like those
who are making the definitions! We may not know infallibly who is in the
kingdom of God and who isn’t, so we should retain a proper humility. However,
if we are going to think about the question, the most important thing we must
do is make sure we take our bearings from Jesus. In my fallible way, that’s
what I hope we can do this morning.
Here is what Jesus says:
‘My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give
them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of
my hand.’
(verses 27-28)
1. My sheep hear my
voice (verse 27)
You may know the story about a group of Christians on a pilgrimage in the Holy
Land. From their coach they saw someone hounding a flock of sheep, driving them
and shouting at them to go a certain way. ‘What kind of shepherd is that?’ they
asked their guide. ‘Oh, that wasn’t the shepherd,’ replied the guide, ‘that was
the butcher.’
For sheep, there’s a difference between the shepherd’s voice
and other voices. They are tuned into the shepherd’s voice. The first sign of
being sheep in the flock of Christ is that we hear his voice. We listen to him.
We take direction from Jesus.
There are whole books written on ‘Listening
To God’, so what can I say in just a few minutes? Let me focus on one area:
the most reliable way we can tune into the shepherd’s voice is to listen for
his word as we read the Bible prayerfully. In Psalm 16:8, David says, ‘I keep
the Lord always before me.’ Joshua is told in Joshua 1:8, ‘The book of the law
shall not depart from your mouth.’ But what should we do about this?
The great spiritual writer Dallas
Willard has said in his recent book ‘The
Great Omission’.
‘Bible memorization
is absolutely fundamental to spiritual formation. If I had to – and of course I
don’t have to – choose between all the disciplines of the spiritual life and
take only one, I would choose Bible memorization. I would not be a pastor of a
church that did not have a program of Bible memorization in it, because Bible memorization
is a fundamental way of filling our minds with what they need.’
(page 58)
So take time to memorise a Bible verse. Also, take time over
passages of Scripture. Do what the great ancient technique of ‘lectio divina’
suggests: take a passage, read it, reflect on what strikes you, decide how
you are going to respond, and rejoice at what God has said to you.
Read, reflect, respond, and rejoice.
Alternatively, do what Ignatius
of Loyola recommended in his ‘Spiritual
Exercises’: having stilled yourself in the presence of God, read a Bible
story and ask yourself, if you were present at the incident, what would your
five senses tell you? What would you hear, taste, smell, touch or say? Read it
again and imagine yourself as one of the people in the story. Get inside their
thoughts, feelings and actions. Read it more and imagine yourself as another
character – even as Jesus, if it is a Gospel narrative you are reading.
Bible memorisation, lectio divina, the Spiritual Exercises
of Ignatius and others are all ways tuning into God. Whether these techniques
are ones that work for you or not, the crucial point is this: the true sheep of
Christ’s flock make sure they hear his voice. What is each of us doing in that
respect?
2. I know them (verse
27)
I struggled with these words at first: ‘I know them’ – doesn’t Jesus know
everyone? In what sense does he know his sheep that is different from the way
he knows all people?
I concluded that ‘knowing’ is not just about knowledge, as
if it were just a collection of information; knowing is also about
relationship. When Jesus says he knows his sheep, I believe he is referring to
intimacy. You may recall how older English Bible translations used the verb ‘to
know’ for the intimate relationship between a man and a woman: ‘Adam knew Eve’,
and so on.
Now before anyone worries I am not suggesting that there is
anything sexual between Jesus and us, but I am saying this: he desires a close
relationship with us. He is always making advances towards us: he speaks, he
acts, and he woos us. He is calling us in the church and in the world. And this
will be especially apparent if we have taken the trouble to listen to his
voice.
Being aware that Christ knows us intimately is a matter of
time and of awareness. A survey
published on Thursday by Sheila’s
Wheels, the company that specialises in car insurance for women, claimed
that millions of women only manage ten minutes a day talking to their spouse or
partner. Forty per cent consider a car journey the best opportunity for a
conversation; one in five sends text messages; one in ten relies on Post-It
notes; and one in fourteen emails her loved one. When they do talk, the least
likely topic is the state of their own relationship. It’s a mark of the way
constant pressures bombard us, and a reminder that relationships need nurturing.
I am sure you can see the parallel with the spiritual life:
it, too, needs nurturing, and not just squeezed out by the pressures of
contemporary living. I say that as one who knows his own relationship with
Christ oscillates between the reasonable and the perfunctory. He knows us: how
can we not respond? How can we not carve out time, even if it isn’t regularly
hour upon hour?
Let’s connect, then, our listening that I spoke of in the
first section to this truth, that Christ knows us intimately. Let one inform
and inspire the other. Let us no longer say, ‘Lord, be with us,’ because he is
with us. Instead, let us be aware that he is with us and respond.
3. They follow me
(verse 27)
Here’s the problem, as I see it: we have scaled down the Gospel. In rightly
saying that we are forgiven by grace through faith and not works, we have
sometimes reduced Christianity just to being forgiven now and waiting for
heaven. Because we rightly resist the idea that any divine blessing comes from
our good works, we may slip into another error, and it is the error of being
passive. ‘Let go and let God,’ say some Christians. However, Dallas Willard, in
the book I mentioned earlier, has an important corrective to this:
‘Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.
Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action … the gospel of the entire New
Testament is that you can have new life now in the Kingdom of God if you will
trust Jesus Christ. Not just something he did, or something he said, but trust
the whole person of Christ in everything he touches – which is everything … If
you would really like to be into consuming grace, just lead a holy life. The true
saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on takeoff. Become the kind of person
who routinely does what Jesus did and said.’
(pages 61 and 62)
Steve
Chalke has recently taken to saying that Jesus never called anyone to
become a Christian; he called them to follow him. The flock of Christ are those
transformed by the forgiving grace of God in Christ, but who are then
transformed more and more into the likeness of Christ. It’s embarrassing when
we realise, from either research or personal experience, that the lives of
Christians are often indistinguishable from those who do not follow him.
Why are we not different? Some don’t want the effort: they’re
happy to receive what Dietrich
Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap
grace’. Instead, he claimed, ‘only he who believes is obedient’ and only he
who is obedient believes’.
Others want to be different, but don’t break the chains. This
is where the spiritual disciplines of Jesus come into play. Is it possible that
this following Jesus is the fruit of prayerfully reading the Bible, as I talked
about in the first point? Dallas Willard gives a great example of what happens
when we fill our minds with the ways of Jesus:
‘You will remember that Jesus said, “I am among you as one
who serves” (Luke 22:27). And he also said, “Whoever wishes to become great
among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:44) … Being a servant shifts one’s relationship
to everyone. What do you think it would do to sexual temptation if you thought
of yourself as a servant? What do you think it would do to covetousness? What do
you think it would do to the feeling of resentment because you didn’t get what
you thought you deserved? I’ll tell you. It will lift the burden.
(page 60)
This doesn’t happen instantly. We expect too much instantly
in a technological society. But as we pray over the Scriptures and they begin
to transform our thinking, so they will play a major part in transforming us
into followers of the Good Shepherd.
4. I give them
eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my
hand (verse 28)
What does eternal life have to do with the shepherd/sheep image? The preceding
thoughts can all connect: sheep hear the shepherd’s voice, the shepherd knows
his sheep and the sheep follow the shepherd. But eternal life?
I suggest it’s to do with protection. When Jesus talks about eternal life here, he talks
about his sheep never perishing, and not being snatched out of his hand. It has
nothing to do with the possibility that I can stray from the fold, but everything
to do with the truth that Jesus defends and protects his flock from those who
would cause them spiritual danger. He is utterly committed to our eternal spiritual
well-being.
But how is this so? For one thing, it implies that Jesus is
stronger than all the forces that come against us. John was to write in his
first Epistle,
‘You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them,
because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.’
(1
John 4:4)
We are not caught in a battle between two equal and opposite
forces of good and evil. The life and ministry of Jesus shows that his love and
goodness is supreme. He is able to protect us from eternal loss.
But how he does it is a different matter. It is not by
cosmic violence that Jesus overcomes those who would try to snatch us from his
hand. It is the opposite. Earlier in the chapter he has said that the good
shepherd lays down his life for the sheep (John
10:11). He protects at the cost of his own life. The Cross, in other words,
is not only about the forgiveness of sins, it is about providing all that we
need to keep us secure in the love of God.
How so? For a start, because forgiveness is a guard against
the wiles of the enemy. It answers accusations with God’s verdict of justifying
us by faith. But also, because the Cross and Resurrection are the key to living
a new life. As Christ died for sin, we die to sin, and as he was raised to new
life, we are raised to a new lifestyle. And the Resurrection shows God’s
verdict on the Cross. It makes possible the old adage, ‘When the devil reminds
you of your past, remind him of his future.’ Jesus, in his life, death and
resurrection does all in his power to guard his sheep.
Conclusion
So who are the flock of Christ? They are those people who listen to his word,
respond to his overtures of intimacy, but do not simply lie back and wait for
heaven: instead, they follow their shepherd’s voice and example. Christ the
shepherd draws near to them and protects them with his very life.
Now, on that basis, am I ‘in’? Do I want to be?
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