If You Are Christ Tell Us Plainly

If you'll turn with me in your Bibles please to John chapter 10. We continue in our study.

I did not include this morning an insert in the bulletin, but that's because we've already put it in there twice and it's still valid.

So I'm sorry if you don't have one, it's not going to make any difference, but if you've been here for the preceding sermons then you know that we are doing a sermon series based upon a biblical manuscript, a papyri from around the year 200, it's

P45 if you're interested in its specific designation. And it was originally a papyrus of about 220 pages, much less of that is available today.

There are fragments of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts in P45 today.

It resides primarily in the Chester Beattie Library in Dublin, Ireland, where I have seen portions of it in the past.

And we are utilizing it as sort of our guide. If it contains a portion of scripture, a portion of a chapter, we're going to be addressing that chapter in this series, and we hence have begun with John chapter 10 and we are at verse 19.

So if you want to turn in your Bibles or your papyri, if you happen to have one with you, to John chapter 10 verse 19, that is where we will be looking today as we look to God's Word.

Now, of course, the problem in doing a verse -by -verse series, even in this form, is that it requires us to sort of regain the context each time that we enter into a particular text, which can be somewhat difficult, but I think it is well worth the price because of the fact that when you work through the

Bible verse -by -verse, it is difficult to skip over things without being rather obvious in the fact that you're skipping over something.

It also requires the person leading the study to be consistent in the methodology of interpretations they're using because there are folks sitting out there who are listening very carefully to what you're saying.

Obviously, hopefully, in our context, there is a positive charitable attitude toward the person bringing the message.

I'm not overly accustomed to that. I am quite accustomed to being heard normally with anything but a charitable or positive mindset on the part of the person listening to me, but hopefully in your own church you can hope for, not always get, but hope for somewhat of a charitable reading, but the reality is that you as the person in the pew, what we want to try to do is to bring you into a position where you are able to determine whether what is being presented to you is being presented to you consistently.

This is really, I think, a responsibility of the people of God. As an individual, we are a

Baptist congregation. I realize that doesn't say a whole lot because there are all sorts of different kinds of Baptists with all sorts of different kinds of views, but we would agree with the emphasis that is a part of historic

Baptist belief that each individual believer has a responsibility before God.

Sometimes it's called the priesthood of the believer. That is that the believer stands before God with certain responsibilities, and one of those responsibilities is to be a person who handles the

Word of God and who listens to the proclamation of the teaching of the

Word of God, not with a critical spirit or a hypercritical spirit, or even a hypocritical spirit for that matter, but listens with the engaging of the mind and the spirit, and fundamentally we do not believe that while the person standing here has the greater condemnation and will be judged for what is spoken, we do not believe that you will get to stand before God someday and say, well, you know, the priest told me

X, Y, or Z. The preacher told me X, Y, or Z. Well, you had the Word of God. Why didn't you check these things out?

We see in the scriptures when Jesus encountered the traditions of men, he did not excuse people on the basis of, well, you know, it's what the rabbi told me.

He said, God spoke to you these words, and therefore you're accountable for them.

And so as we work through these texts, we try to encourage all our hearers to listen with understanding, to listen with faith.

Indeed, I like the, it's sort of frightening today to see the liberal churches that still have the traditions of the past, but no longer the essence of the belief.

But there's a great tradition in many of the older mainline denominations.

When the scriptures were read, you would hear them say, either at the beginning or the end, this is the

Word of the Lord. This is the Word of the Lord. And it's frightening to hear that in denominations where they no longer believe that, but they still say it.

I'm not really certain why they do that, but we do believe that when we handle the

Word of God, this is the Word of the Lord, and as such should be handled with great respect.

And so in John chapter 10, you are probably familiar with this text. In fact, we're moving into a section that's somewhat dangerous, and I've explained my use that term, the danger of dealing with very familiar texts.

Because we as Christians, if you especially had the privilege that I had in growing up in a

Christian family, exposed the Word of God on a regular basis for really the entirety of your life, the danger of dealing with familiar texts is familiarity.

You've studied it, you may have memorized it, and the idea is, well, if I've memorized the text, certainly there's nothing more that I can learn about it.

Or even more so, I memorized it with a particular understanding, and if I discover something that I didn't know before, that might be troubling to me.

Or if I hear something that actually contradicts the understanding that I had before, that can cause problems as well.

The tendency is, well, I've heard these words before. There's nothing more any of us could ever understand about John 3 .16,

right? You see it every time you watch a football game. How could you learn anything more about it? It's up there in the stands.

There's that guy waving that sign that says John 3 .16. So we know everything there is to know about it, right?

And that is the danger. So as we look, especially at verses 28, 29, 30 here of this chapter, the danger is that we already know these things.

We already know what Jesus was saying here. Well, hopefully the Lord will bless our time at looking at this text, and we will listen to it in its context.

The context that has come before this, very deep words of the Lord Jesus, speaking of himself as the good shepherd.

He lays down his life for the sheep. He has the right, he has the authority to lay his life down. He takes it back up.

No one takes it from him. We've spent quite some time in that section because of the fact that this is one of those places where you have direct teaching by the

Lord Jesus Christ as to what the intention of his self -sacrifice is.

So much of, we commented on this, so much of today's theology of the cross is based upon, well, you know, there's this passage over here, and it's talking about false teachers, and therefore it must mean this about the atonement or something like that, rather than starting with the key text where Jesus says, this is why

I'm dying, and this is for whom I'm dying, and this is what my death's going to accomplish, and then looking at other passages that just briefly touch upon something in light of the clear text of scripture.

Very often in today's world, you have the unclear text overthrowing the clear text.

And so we spent a good deal of time on this and finished up the last time with Jesus' own assertion.

He has authority to lay down his life. He has authority to take it up again. This commandment he received from his

Father, once again the perfect unity that exists between the Father and the Son. Jesus isn't some rebel deity out there doing his own thing.

There is a perfect unity between the Father and the Son and the accomplishment of salvation. Well, when

God's truth is proclaimed, very often this results in schism.

That's the very first word of verse 19, a schism developed amongst the

Jews because of these words. And so the people are hearing Jesus speaking, and certainly if you are prejudiced against Jesus, if you are prejudiced in listening to his words, then you're going to hear them in one way.

And if you have a different tradition, a different background, maybe you're not as prejudiced or maybe you find something in the words of Jesus to be attractive to you, you're going to hear them maybe in another way.

But a schism developed, and you see this a number of times in the

Gospel of John and in the Synoptic Gospels as well, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And certain of them were saying, he has a demon, he's mad, why do you listen to him?

And we might dismiss such angry words as to say that he's a demoniac, he has a demon and is mad, why are you listening to him?

Obviously what they're saying is there is nothing of value whatsoever in what this man has been saying.

They see no value at all. They see it as an absolute waste of time to be standing there and listening to this man speaking.

And so here are some who have a very strong prejudice.

They have not heard Jesus' words, they are not giving him any grace whatsoever in the sense of being willing to hear, maybe to consider, in light of everything else, maybe these are people who know almost nothing about him at all, we don't know.

All we know is that there are certain people amongst the Jews, the schism develops, and when there was a strong rejection of Jesus, so much so as to say that someone has a demon is, again this comes up a number of times in the

Gospels, it was meant to be a tremendous insult, especially to a person who very plainly is viewed as a religious leader.

To say that someone is demonized, is mad, is a babbler, is of course to seek to diminish them in the eyes of others and to insult them in the most serious way possible.

And so there were some that heard the words of Jesus, and they responded the same way that we hear people responding today.

When Jesus' words, especially his authoritative words in regards to sexuality, morality, marriage, the authority of the word of God, the authority of God to define human purpose, what is good, what is right, we hear many people in our society who will respond the same way.

Many do not want to, you know, we all want to be inclusive thing, until you actually speak a word of truth, a word that requires response, and then of course all of a sudden all that inclusivity evaporates into pure battery acid.

But we encounter this kind of an attitude today, a nasty rejection to any kind of proclamation of authority on the part of the

Lord Jesus. But then there were others, and others were saying, well, but these are not the words of a demoniac.

A demon is not able to open the eyes of the blind, is it? And so there were others who hear these words, and they recognize a consistency, they recognize that they seem to ring with the same kind of concerns, the same kind of focus that they, well, they read from the prophets, that they read in the

Psalter. There is a consistency here, and there seems to be a consistency in this man's life as well, and the way that he lives.

And really, isn't there something that would sort of define the words of a demoniac, a person that truly is demonized?

These words are filled with grace, these words just are not the words you would hear coming from a demoniac.

It's not like we have too many descriptions of what demoniacs have to say in Scripture, but the few that we have, we recognize that they do not speak with grace and love and so on and so forth.

There's not a consistency between the life and speech of such individuals. And so, further, do we really see a demon opening the eyes of the blind, bringing restoration to God's creation?

Instead, we see, we understand that the opponent of our souls, the devil and his demons, they don't want to open blind eyes, they want to make eyes blind.

They don't want to heal the sick, they want to make the healthy sick. They want to steal and kill and destroy, and this one is reversing that process.

So how could a demon be involved in doing something like that? Now, we might look at these two responses and we might want to ask questions, well, could it be that these, this second group, you know, are these the ones that will be the future seed of the church and things like that?

Well, the fact of the matter is, the text just simply doesn't give us much in the way of insight into the relative amount of restraint being exercised by the

Spirit of God. Certainly there is restraint being exercised because in only a matter of verses, what's going to happen?

Well, such anger is going to develop on the part of certain of these Jews, they're going to pick up stones and stone

Jesus. It's already happened in chapter 8, chapter 5, they were seeking to kill him, and by chapter 19 they're appearing before Pilate, they've decided the best way to do this is to let the

Romans take care of this, and so we know that the Spirit of God is active in restraining.

And there's a number of times, and this is going to be one of those instances where it's just simply very lightly said,

Jesus went out from the midst of them, or he escaped their grasp, and we're not told how.

I mean, we're going to see here in a moment that the Jews surrounded Jesus, so how do you get out of being surrounded in a fairly small place?

We don't know. The possibility is left open that these were miraculous events.

What is clear is that God had a purpose, and a timing to that purpose.

And having Jesus die under a pile of rocks in the temple was not his purpose. And so, from the divine perspective, and this is where so many of our fellow believers, be careful of the specter of hyper -Calvinism that makes perfection of theology the standard, but some of our fellow believers, they really resist a recognition of the sovereign will of God in the affairs of men, because they can't see, and they can't make the distinction that the

Bible makes in recognizing from our perspective, we can only see what

God has created us to be able to see. We can't see the future. We can't see spiritual forces that are involved in what's going on around us.

We have God's prescriptive will, we have his word, we live in light of that. He tells us this is how you're to live wisely, this is how you're to live in such ways to honor me, this is how you live in such ways to love others, and to demonstrate my love through you to others, and that's all we've got.

We're not given special glasses that allow us to see who the elect are, or follow the decree of God, and all the rest of that stuff.

But because that's all we can see, they seem to think there is no decree of God that is then involved in determining these things.

But very plainly, on the one level we can say Jesus was never in danger from the Jews, because God had a purpose,

Jesus himself had said, it is necessary that I go to Jerusalem, this is what the scriptures say, this is how

I'm supposed to die. So in that realm we can say there is no question that the cross was a fixed reality, that's where Jesus was going, and nothing was going to keep him from getting there.

But it doesn't change the reality of the fact that these men had hate in their hearts.

It doesn't change the reality that they will be held accountable for the hatred they had in their hearts. It doesn't change the fact that I believe,

I can't prove this, but I believe that probably in that early church, you had men who had been broken by the spirit of God come to believe in Jesus Christ, who could tell the story, could tell the story about how they had once held a rock in their hand and had been ready to cast it at the

Lord Jesus, and yet today they had become his follower. I can't prove that, but don't put that beyond the grace of my

God. Don't put that beyond his capacity. I mean, what an illustration that would be, take out the heart of stone and give a heart of flesh, right?

Well, let me tell you a story about how that happened. Will we meet someone like that someday?

I don't know. It's pure speculation, but it's certainly not beyond God's power. And so the fact of the matter is, what happens here, when these men pick up stone to stone, from the human perspective, there is a position of tremendous danger here, and God is active in restraining the madness of men.

Just because we know that it's God's purpose that Jesus die at a later time, in a later way, that doesn't make this all just a puppet show.

The very hearts of men are being revealed here, both for good and for evil. Unfortunately, people like to just try to press everything out into something nice and simple and know it just has to be this way.

You have to allow the full depth, the full color.

People want, they want God's truth in black and white, and guess what? God's truth is full of color.

It's full of depth, and people just want to make it far too simplistic. And so there's a division.

When Jesus' word is spoken, there is division. And then, how much time passes?

We don't know, but clearly, there is somewhat of a shift in verse 22.

Because we are given a time frame here that refers to the feast of dedication, or what we know today as Hanukkah.

And this is a fairly new celebration in the first century, because it commemorated an event that was in fairly recent memory, not in the memory of anybody that was alive, but it's not like it went back to Moses or something.

This was the overthrowing of certain foreign powers and the rededication of the temple after the temple had been profaned by these foreign powers.

And so, if you've seen the menorah that is really frequently used as a symbol of Judaism today, it goes to Hanukkah, and this feast of dedication was celebrated either from late

November to late December, again, depending on how the Jewish calendar interacted with the solar calendar that we utilize today.

And you'll notice, it says it was winter. Actually, literally, I like this, literally what it said was, it was bad weather.

And it just became sort of the, you called winter bad weather. That's when you had the bad weather.

And so, Jesus is walking, according to verse 23, in the temple in the portico of Solomon.

Now, this is on the east side of the temple, it was a well -known area where you would have columns along the east wall of the temple, and probably, we don't know, we're not given this information, but probably the reason he's walking there is that that's about the nicest place you could be walking.

A little bit like our weather the past 48 hours or so, evidently,

Brother Callahan was praying and so it's been raining a lot, and so if you're going to be walking about, maybe teaching your disciples or something like that, walking around out in the rain isn't necessarily overly enjoyable, especially in the colder times of the year.

And so, Jesus is walking about in the temple, and this is toward the end of the year.

Now, what happened before, how long a period of time has elapsed here, we're not told.

John is putting together different incidents here that have a similar theme, specifically in regards to the idea of Jesus being the shepherd of his sheep.

And so, here's an encounter, and some of your translations will say the

Jews gathered around him. Really, I think the best way to translate this is they surrounded him.

This is something that they did. This is something that it was sort of like, okay, he's over there. Now, Benjamin, you go that way, and you go that way, and you take your group that way, and we're going to make sure he's got nowhere to go, and we're going to surround him, and we're going to get him to do what we need him to do.

What did they need Jesus to do? They needed Jesus to give them a statement that they could utilize, a statement that would have sufficient political charge to it that they could try to make an accusation against Jesus.

We've mentioned this before, but let me remind you of it, because frequently we forget about this aspect, or we minimize it because some people make too much of it, which is another error that we need to try to avoid.

God has worked out his work of redemption in a fallen world, and in a fallen world, believe it or not, in almost every single situation, you've got something called politics.

Yes, yes, it's not just in the United States of America. If you know anything about history, there have always been politicians.

If you want proof of total depravity, there you go. There have always been politicians.

And unfortunately, we tend to think that we always live in the day of the worst politicians.

No, we don't. All you've got to do is just do a little bit of reading in the history of Rome, do a little bit of reading in the emperors.

No, no, the worst we've ever had. Looks like a saint in comparison to some of the people that we could direct you to, historically speaking.

But there was a very charged political atmosphere in the days of Jesus, and certainly the fact that the people of Israel were under the boot of Rome, that there was an unfair, non -representative taxation system that was not carried out fairly, and everybody knew it, which is why what was one of the worst insults that you could render to someone?

He's a tax collector. He's a publican. And in fact, to be a Jewish tax collector, to work for Rome amongst your own people and extract from your own people these unfair amounts of taxes, and then everybody knew the tax collector collected more than he was supposed to.

That's how he could get so rich. That's how he afforded the big house. There was that level.

And so you had the zealots, for example, who were known for sneaking up behind these people in crowded public places, and there were a lot of crowded public places, especially during the feast times, and using a knife to stab officials to death.

They would just knew exactly where to go, and in the midst of the crowd, you just stabbed the person.

They might cry out, but if there's lots of people and lots of noise, and other people are crying out to other people and calling names and stuff, and then they'd just slip off into the crowd.

This was a part of what would happen in those days, which is why the more popular you became or unpopular you became, depending on how you look at it.

In other words, the higher you rose, you didn't go out in public by yourself. You went out with people around you to try to protect you from these types of things.

This was further exacerbated by the fact that already at this time in history, there had been many who had claimed to be

Ha Christos, the Christ in Greek, but Mashiach, the

Messiah, in Hebrew. And they would gather people around themselves, and they would go out into the wilderness, and they would start raiding, and they would start calling people themselves, and obviously they would very frequently quote scripture and say,

I am the fulfillment of this, or I am the fulfillment of that. And about this point in time,

Rome was getting sick and tired of these people. And so one of the most dangerous things that could ever be said would be someone to stand up in the middle of Jerusalem and say,

I'm the Messiah. Because by this point in time, any Roman soldier within earshot is going to report it.

They're going to gather together their soldiers, and they're going to come get this guy. And if he's ever seen again, he's going to be extremely chastened.

But he's probably never going to be seen again, except possibly on a Roman cross. Because they had lost men.

There had been Roman soldiers killed in raids by these zealots and these followers of these messiahs.

And so it was an extremely politically charged atmosphere.

And so it's not surprising then that when the Jews surround Jesus, they say to him, literally, how long will you suspend our soul?

How long will you keep us hanging? That's what they were asking.

And they were basically accusing Jesus of not being clear.

They were accusing Jesus of not being open, of not being honest, of playing games with them.

How long will you suspend our soul? If you are the

Messiah, if you are the Messiah, then tell us plainly.

Openly. Make a public profession, come out into the streets of Jerusalem, and loudly proclaim,

I am the Messiah. Now, this is not, again, something that should surprise us.

Remember back in John chapter 7, even Jesus's brothers, his unbelieving brothers, had said to him, someone who does the works that you do shouldn't do them in secret.

You should do these things openly. And there was a level of mockery in what they were saying.

There was a level of mockery and disbelief and unbelief in what was being said by them.

And here, very plainly, what you are getting from the

Jews is they said, look, obviously he's attracting far too many people.

He's attracting far too many disciples. Many of his parables contain less than subtle shots at us.

He is making the people critical of our leadership, how we run the temple, how we are running the worship of God.

And so, look, we have an opportunity here. We have enough people here. He's in our precincts, in essence.

This is a fairly enclosed spot. And so, let's get him to make this profession that we can then use against him.

And so, they were not, there was nothing, there's nothing here. You need to understand, some people will read this, and if they don't read it in its historical context, the tendency is to go, well, if the primary

Christian confession is that Jesus is the Messiah, then why was Jesus so coy about it?

I mean, so much so that many theologians have coined the phrase, the messianic secret.

Because Jesus will heal somebody, and they'll say, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, shh, don't tell anyone.

Don't tell anyone? I don't understand that the

Christians after the cross are supposed to tell everybody. And in fact, they are willing to die for telling everybody.

Was Jesus less brave than them? And so, you have to think about it.

You have to give some thought. Why is it that Jesus responds, for example, as he does here in verse 25?

He says, I told you, and you don't believe. I told you, and you're not believing.

The works that I do, in the name of my Father, these testify concerning me.

Now, is there an answer there? Of course there is. Of course there is.

Jesus has been arguing in John chapter 5, John chapter 6,

John chapter 8. The healing of the blind man, John chapter 9, does the same thing.

What's the argument? The argument is there is a consistency, a beautiful, divine, intended consistency, for those with ears to hear and eyes to see, between the works that Jesus is doing and the words that Jesus speaks that testify as to who he is, that yes, he is indeed the

Messiah, but not just the Messiah. And here's where there's something else we need to understand if we're going to really understand

Jesus's response. There were a lot of false ideas as to what the Messiah was. And Jesus's hesitation to just simply walk down the street going,

I'm the Messiah, follow me, I'm the Messiah, follow me, is because he well knew that in the minds of everyone hearing him, those words would have different meanings.

And what Messiah was supposed to mean, oh, there was much speculation.

If you go to seminary, you'll spend a fair amount of time, you'll have to work hard to stay awake, unless you're already involved in apologetics like I was, which is what made it interesting to me.

But for a lot of folks, all the time you spend on intertestamental literature, the stuff that the

Jews were writing before Jesus came along, which becomes the context of the New Testament, of course. Oh, there was so much speculation about what the

Messiah was going to be. And, you know, the one rabbi would look at this text, here very plainly, there's going to be political deliverance.

And so we see ourselves under the heel of Rome. And so for many people, what the Messiah was to be, is to be a political deliverer.

He's going to overthrow the Roman yoke. And other people saw other relationships.

And some people actually saw spiritual aspects. And what almost nobody saw was a suffering aspect.

What they saw was victory. What they saw was the glorious leading of the troops of Zion, and so on and so forth.

Almost nobody wanted to see the suffering part, the Isaiah chapters 52 and 53 part, and things like that.

And so there are all sorts of different theories. And if you walk down the road with people, have all sorts of different theories, and proclaim yourself to be the

Messiah, all of a sudden you're going to have absolute bedlam. You're going to have chaos reigning in what's going on.

Let alone what the Romans are going to hear. They don't care about what the prophets said.

That's irrelevant to them. They hear a challenge to their authority. They hear another person is going to gather together a bunch of people, and we're going to have a mess.

And so we're going to nip this in the bud immediately. And so Jesus' response is actually a very wise response.

Because what's he doing? He's directing people back to the only source that can properly identify what the

Messiah is supposed to be. And the perfect unity that exists between what the Messiah is to accomplish, and what the

Father has already revealed of himself. In fact, the point is going to be that this one, this

Messiah is in fact the Son of God who reveals the Father, and who has come to give his life for his sheep.

But that was not a common understanding of the Messiah in the days of Jesus.

And so his response is a wise response. And it recognizes that God is accomplishing something.

And that until the cross, and until the resurrection, and until the outpouring of the

Holy Spirit, there is not going to be an ability on the part of anyone to be able to see the fulfillment of the prophetic word until it itself is fulfilled.

That's why you have all these threads coming together in Acts chapter 2. And Peter stands there and says, this is what the prophets were talking about.

Now we can tell you, he's not doing that when he's hiding in the upper room. He's not doing that until the resurrection takes place.

And even after the resurrection, Jesus has to meet with the disciples and do what? Open their hearts and minds to understand the scriptures.

And so God had a time. God had a purpose. And Jesus obviously answers wisely in light of where he is at that point in God's purpose at that time.

So the idea that, well, you know, he just wasn't really being honest.

No, he was being very honest, but he was answering in the wisest way he could. And that is pointing to his activity, the works which

I am doing in my father's name. These bear testimony of me, but we'll finish up with verse 26.

But you are not believing because you have not exercised your autonomous free will to do so.

That is the synergist Arminian textual variant version.

And if you weren't actually reading along, unfortunately for many people, they would not have even been stopped by what

I said. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's the only reason anyone doesn't believe is because they have not exercised their autonomous free will in order to do so because we know it is the given, it is the foundation of so much of modern theology that no matter what else you believe, the one thing you must believe is that everything that you believe every single human being contains the capacity in and of themselves apart from the powerful working of the spirit of God that brings spiritual life.

It's got to be apart from the exercise of God's power in any special way to be able to by themselves respond to the gospel message positively in a way that is pleasing to God.

Remember, notice I said positively. Everybody responds to the gospel message. Everybody responds.

You can respond with apathy. That still responds. That's a negative one. That's one that doesn't please God. And you can respond religiously by embracing false religion.

You can respond sensually by throwing yourself into a sensual lifestyle to help you forget about the demands of God upon your life or even to express your rebellion against God.

There's all sorts of ways that people respond. Man does respond. But to be able to respond to the gospel in a way that is pleasing to God and which brings spiritual life to the individual, that, the

Bible tells us, requires something else that is beyond our capacity. That's why it's all of grace.

That's why it's all of grace. Because the rest of verse 26 wasn't anything about autonomous free will.

Why are you not believing? Because you are not of my sheep. You are not of my sheep.

Now, I know, I know. Believe me, I deal with these folks all the time. Traditions can be so strong that there'll be people who would say, well, yes, they weren't at that time.

But at any point in time, any one of them simply could have just repented and believed and become one of Christ's sheep.

There's nothing more than that here. All he's saying is it's because you have not yet done for me what

I cannot do for you. And that is believed in me. I want you to believe in me.

Well, we may have our traditions and our Western individualism and everything else.

But let me tell you one thing that I am absolutely certain of. Nobody, nobody in Jesus' context in the first century when he spoke these words, in John's context, maybe even decades, many decades later when he wrote them down, nobody in that culture at that time would ever have interpreted

Jesus' words that way. Anybody who had ever seen a shepherd and a flock would have begun probably, hopefully at the beginning, softly to chuckle.

But eventually, it might have developed into a full guffaw if you had continued to press the idea that what you are actually saying is that the shepherd doesn't choose his sheep, the sheep choose their shepherd.

At first, they would have gone, you're kidding, right? And of course, our modern -day, philosophically -minded

Westerner go, well, you need to understand the centrality of the necessity of autonomous free will. Wait a minute, you're really saying that the sheep are going to choose their own shepherd, right?

That's what you're saying? And eventually, it's sort of that very funny laugh track that you'll find on the internet someplace where it starts slow, but I don't care who listens to it.

By the end, you are dying laughing because it's just contagious. And that's exactly what happened.

No one could ever believe that that's what Jesus was intending to say. And yet, there are those, well,

I would have to say this day, the majority of folks standing behind a sacred desk like this, if they're talking about this text, that's probably what they're going to say.

That's probably what they're going to say. That's the situation we face today. But you see why

John has included this incident with the previous, even though there's a time disconnection.

And that is Jesus returns to this idea of the sheep. And when he speaks of the sheep, earlier in the chapter, there is this personal relationship.

I know them, they know me, intimate relationship. And that's why they follow me.

They hear my voice. They know my voice. They won't follow another. They follow me. The reason you're not believing,

Jesus had already said it in John chapter eight. Why do you not hear my words? Why do you not understand what I'm saying? It's because you don't belong to God.

Those who belong to God hear the words of God. We don't like that because it removes our autonomy and makes us completely depend upon the grace of God.

It opens the door to terrible, horrible things like Adam being our federal head and falling in him.

And well, then those beautiful, wonderful things like Jesus being our federal head and our having righteousness because of him.

The two go together, by the way. We can't have that.

And so the mind hears this and then retranslates it.

That's what happens with so many people. We can't have that for ourselves. We must look at these texts and be honest with what they say.

Given that verse 27 and following will be a perfect context for this evening, which is the

Lord's Supper. Lord's Supper, commemoration, remembrance of the giving of Jesus Christ, who?

The good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep. And the beautiful relationship that that creates, again, all through the exercise of divine power.

We will close with verse 26. Let's pray together. Our gracious heavenly father, once again, we do thank you for your word.

We thank you for preserving it to us down to this day. And we thank you for that possibly cold, blustery day toward the end of the year when

Jesus, our Lord and savior, walked in the portico of Solomon. And the

Jews, thinking that they could get a political advantage, surrounded him. Yet from his lips flowed words of grace that, indeed, encourage us to this day.

They give light to us this day. And you have made sure that we could possess them, hear them, and believe them to this day.

We thank you for that. We would ask that amongst all who have gathered here this day, Lord, that if there be any who have not heard the voice of the savior,

Lord, that you would reveal him to them, that you would draw your elect into yourself. Lord, that you would glorify yourself in your truth as proclaimed this day.