John 10:1-18 - Jesus, The Door And The Key To Our Salvation.

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the

Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who

Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you.

You know, everyone in this room has a variety of quirky behaviors and peculiar idiosyncrasies that if we knew we would think you are very wonderfully unique.

There's things about you and about me that all of us in this room may not know. Maybe they're a little whimsical or silly, but who cares because they make you who you are.

For instance, I like closed doors. And I'm not talking about metaphorically like I like to torpedo opportunities or burn bridges or anything like that.

I'm talking about that I like closed doors. When I walk into a room, I like to close the door because I'm not an animal.

I wasn't raised in a barn as my grandma used to say. I mean, that's sort of normal, right?

I like to have the doors closed. I like to sleep with the door closed. You know, I don't want everybody looking at me while I'm sleeping.

That's just weird. That's normal. But it gets a little quirky when

I can't sleep unless the door is closed or it's cracked and I'm thinking, gosh,

I just got to get up and fix it. Like we had a door that wouldn't close and I swear I didn't sleep for a year. I had to like figure out how to jam a piece of cardboard in it just to get it to close.

That's weird. It's just who I am. I can't relax. Maybe it's because I was in the military and I'm always checking my exits and I make sure that there's no

Taliban around the corner. I don't know. Maybe it's just because I have deep -seated insecurity issues like probably all of us do.

I have no idea. That's just one of my idiosyncrasies. But doors actually represent a lot of things.

Doors represent a lot of things in society. One of the most common items that you and I interact with in the modern world and even in the ancient world is doors.

They're on buildings, houses, bathroom, cars, banks, fences, sheds. Some open out.

Some open in. Some are manual. Some are automatic. Some are digital. And some, like on the

Tesla Model X, which I don't want because it's too ostentatious, open skyward. I did ride in one though when

I was in San Diego. It's pretty cool. Doors are meant to grant access to certain people and doors are meant to prohibit access from others.

For instance, you think about a house. If you own the house, your key is meant to gain access for you and for anyone who you approve to come in.

Everyone else is not allowed. Think about your car. If you go outside, thank

God that all keys don't work in all cars because our cars would be stolen. My car was stolen.

I know how it feels. In that sense, doors function as a boundary marker.

They let the approved people in. They bar access to those who are not approved. They give us privacy and protection.

Praise God there's a door on the bathroom for the privacy that that is. Unless you have kids and then they just burst right through it anyway.

There's other shades of meaning though with doors. We talked about one earlier in the book of Deuteronomy. Let's talk about a couple here now.

Cain. God comes to Cain and says, Cain, sin is crouching at the door of your heart.

What is God talking about? God is not applauding Cain that the second generation from creation that human beings had the good sense to finally create doors.

That's not the point that God is making. Although, that is kind of fascinating if you think about it. Adam and Eve's kids made doors.

One of the first technologies in the world was doors. That's kind of cool. It's not the point God's making though.

God's point is that Cain is leaving his heart vulnerable to attack. God's point is that Cain is refusing to heed the warning of God.

In this sense, the door is sort of a metaphor or an analogy for Cain's conscience.

The thing that's meant to protect him from sin, the thing that's meant to help him navigate a sinful situation, he's ignoring, leaving it open, and the sinful situation comes in and crushes him.

As you can see, he falls under a deeper curse. Even a deeper curse than his father

Adam. We look in the book of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Fifty times the word doorway is mentioned in relation to the temple or the tabernacle.

If you remember, the tabernacle was this little tent temple that they constructed and they could carry around from place to place.

Fifty times the word doorway is used between Exodus and Numbers.

And every single time the word doorway is mentioned, there's some priestly activity that's supposed to go on on the outside.

Either a sacrifice or a washing or some sort of burning or some sort of pouring or some sort of smoke or some sort of clothing that they need to put on.

Every single time that they're outside of the door, they're meant to do some action before they can gain entrance.

The point in that situation is that we are strangers when it comes to God. We're on the outside of our relationship with God.

And if it's not for the sacrificial system and the shedding of blood, no one will gain access to God in the

Old Testament. So, whereas Cain, the door was sort of a metaphor of his conscience, in the temple and in the tabernacle, the door was a metaphor of separation from God, a barrier from him because we cannot be in the presence of a thrice holy

God being sinful creatures ourselves. The door symbolized a sort of protection for humanity, not for God, but for humans.

Because if we come into the presence of God, we will be dissolved in light of his holiness.

So, the door there is a door of protection for the outsiders, not protection for the insiders like our houses and cars.

The door also there represents the gospel, that unless something is killed, unless the shedding of blood happens, there is no one who can be in the presence of a holy

God. So, there the door represents sort of three things. Doors have metaphorical meaning.

When you say, I have a door of opportunity, you're talking about some open door at your job or whatever else. Doors mean things metaphorically, and John 10 picks up on this.

Jesus picks up on this when he talks about the fact that he is the door, which is an interesting thing to say, that you are the door.

So, what I want us to do, we're going to read just for a second, we're also going to introduce this topic, we're going to pray, and then we're going to dive in.

So, this is what Jesus says. Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep.

All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door. If anyone enters through me, he will be saved, and he will go out and find pasture.

So, what I want us to do with this passage today is I want to look at what's the background that Jesus is talking about with shepherds and doors and sheep pen and folds.

And I want us to understand what Jesus is talking about. The second thing I want us to do is I want to see how

Christ is the one who enters, not us. The third thing that I want us to see is that Christ is, in fact, the door.

And that's really good news for us, even though it's going to take us just a moment to get there. So, if you will, let's turn to John 10, 1 through 18.

This is the second time we've read this passage. We'll read it again by the Lord's grace next week, if he doesn't return. And let's read this passage together.

John 10, 1 through 18. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber.

But he who enters by the door is a shepherd of the sheep. To him, the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name, and he leads them out.

When he puts forth all of his own, and he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. A stranger they simply will not follow, but will flee from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.

This figure of speech, Jesus spoke to them, but they did not understand what these things were, which he had been saying to them.

So Jesus said to them again, Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them.

I am the door. If anyone enters through me, he will be saved, and he will go in and find pasture.

The thief comes only to steal and to kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.

He flees because he's a hired hand, and he's not concerned about the sheep. But I am the good shepherd, and I know my own and my own know me, even as the

Father knows me, and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep.

I have other sheep which are not of this fold. I must bring them also, for they will hear my voice, and they will become one flock with one shepherd.

For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life so that I may take it again.

No one has taken it away from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again.

This commandment I receive from my Father. Let's pray. Lord, there's so much in this passage that we've decided to take it in multiple weeks, this week focused on the door.

Lord, I pray that we would see how in this beautiful I am statement that Jesus claims not only to enter the door, but he is the door.

Lord, I pray that we would understand what Jesus is saying to the Jewish audience that is listening to him.

Lord, I pray that we would see the expectations of Israel, the fallen 10 tribes of the

Old Testament. Lord, I pray that we would see how in Christ these truths are ours, and that we can have the deepest and most beautiful security because of you,

Jesus. Lord, teach us confidence in our salvation today. Root us deeply in our salvation by your

Spirit. Lord, if there's anyone here who does not know you or has wrongly convinced themselves that they do know you,

I pray that your Spirit would give no peace. I pray that your Spirit would afflict. I pray that your

Spirit would convict. I pray that your Spirit would cause that man or that woman to cry out,

Dear Jesus, save me. But Lord, for all who are your sheep, I pray that the most beautiful, eternal, satisfying security would be imparted to each and every single one of us, that Lord, we would never question our salvation after we see what you've said in this passage.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. There's two illusions that Jesus uses here.

He says that he enters through the door and that he is the door, so he uses both. The first one is in verses one through six.

The second one is in verses seven and beyond. And what I want us to do is I want us to take these analogies, take these metaphors, take these illusions in order.

And I want us to begin with how he enters through the door to save his Jewish people.

Now, in those days, shepherds did not drive their flocks with dogs and horses and everything else that we would think of in the

Western world. Shepherding was an intimate job. It was an intimate practice. The sheep would instantaneously respond to the voice, whether it be the singing or the humming or the speaking of the shepherd.

They didn't need sheepdogs and other things to drive the sheep. The shepherd had his voice. What the shepherd would do is at nighttime, he would lead the sheep back into the fold.

And the fold was typically a field of sorts, and it had a big wall wrapped around it, mostly circular in shape, sometimes square in shape.

And the wall was tall enough so that the sheep couldn't get out, but also tall enough so that thieves and robbers could not get in.

And the shepherd would bring his sheep into that sort of, that common area where there's grass, where there's safety, and the sheep would sleep there during the night.

Now, in that culture, sheep were considered as commodity. The more sheep you had, the richer that you were considered to be in that particular era.

It would be like today. The more stocks you have or the more options that you have or the more money that you have or whatever else, you're considered wealthy in those, since however much real estate you have.

Back then, it was sort of counted on how much sheep that you had, which meant that if that was your system of economy, then you would do everything that you possibly could to protect it.

For instance, we have encrypted bank accounts and passwords and vaults and safes to protect our money.

Well, in their day, they had tall stone walls that were there to protect their sheep so they wouldn't be stolen or beaten or abused or anything else.

Now, if you were going to get over this wall, which was possible, you would have to climb it, scale it, and descend down into the fold in order to steal someone else's assets.

It wasn't easy. It was noisy. And a shepherd worth his keep would have heard you coming and would have stopped you from what you were doing.

It's kind of like today when someone fraudulently steals your property. We call them hackers or bank robbers or con artists or insurance.

Back then, they were called thieves and robbers, just like they are today.

Back then, they had a physical wall. Today, we have things like firewalls, which sounds menacing, but it's really not. There was only one place where anybody could get in.

There was an opening in the wall. So you have a 360 -degree perimeter, but there's an opening, and that was called the door.

But this place that was called the door didn't have hinges, it didn't have knobs or keyholes, it didn't have handles, it didn't have any wood.

It was just an opening in the wall. This opening in the wall literally was just an opening in the wall.

That's it. But it was called the door. And this doorway was sort of like what we would consider today a cased opening when you go to a home that doesn't have a door hanging in an opening, but it's cased and it's prepped and it's there sort of to invite traffic.

That's sort of the thing that's going on back in those time periods. But you have to ask yourself, why would this have no door, no protection?

Because this was their commodity. It would be like you and I posting our online password to our bank account on our status update on Facebook or Twitter.

That would be stupid. It would be like us leaving cash in a safe with the door open.

Or it would be like one relevant example for me today. At the end of today's service, all of the tithes, offerings, and gifts,

I'm going to take those at some point, I'm going to go to the bank and I'm going to deposit them. Well, imagine that on the way,

Shannon calls me and says the babies need milk, I need to go to the grocery store, and I decide to do that first. I leave the doors open in my car, and all of God's gifts get stolen.

That would be utterly stupid on my part. I should go to the bank first, and if I don't,

I should lock my car door, I should put it in a place where... I should just go to the bank first, right?

There's no excuse for that. We lock up the things that are valuable to us. That's what we do.

So why is this sheepfold so utterly exposed? Why is there no door?

Why is there no lock? Why is it left like this? Well, the answer actually gets right at the heart of both of these two illusions.

Jesus is the one who enters the door, but also he's the one who is the door. So the first metaphor that he uses is that he enters the door.

In that time period, shepherds could, if they were so inclined, hire someone who was called a watchman.

So the shepherd could go and lay down in his own bed and get some sleep and rest, and then in the morning he could come out.

The watchman would post himself in the middle of the door all night long. And there's several reasons for this.

Number one, he could more easily identify the shepherd when he comes. You imagine that you have a fairly generic voice.

You're not like me and stand out in New England with a Southern accent. Let's say you have a fairly distinguished or a fairly normal voice, and someone calls out and says,

I'm the shepherd, but they're not. They open the door, and then it's all over. The door was open to actually help the watchman easily identify the shepherd when he comes.

That's the first thing. So he could have face -to -face contact with the shepherd, see him, and say, this is the shepherd,

I'm going to let him in. The second is that it allowed more easy access and movement of the sheep.

If you think about, and I know for parents this is easy to imagine, you're trying to exit a house, and there's a screen door with the loaded sort of spring thing that makes it keep closing, and it keeps banging your kids in the head.

You're trying to hold it so that your kids don't grow up with permanent brain damage. These are just parenting things, right?

Well, that is more difficult than if the door just didn't do that, if it didn't have that spring -loaded action to it.

What they did was they created this big opening so sheep could easily come in and sheep could easily come out.

It was good access that way. The third is, I think the most important reason that this place was open is because it allowed for uninhibited intimacy.

There was no distance between the shepherd and his sheep. The sheep knew him, and it says that he knew his sheep by name.

So when the shepherd would come in the morning, if he's the kind of shepherd who hired a watchman, he would call out, and his sheep would hear him, and they would wake up, and they would see him coming.

I don't know if sheep wag their tails. It seems like something reasonable. I'm not a shepherd. I didn't find that in my research.

The sheep would be excited to hear him coming, and they would be ready to run up to him and follow him out to pasture.

So this sort of intimacy, this no doors, no walls, no division, no boundary between the shepherd and the sheep, actually is really quite important to the way that Middle Eastern people shepherd their sheep.

It's an intimate sort of endeavor, not like today where we don't think that way.

So there was an uninhibited recognition, there was an uninhibited movement, and there was an uninhibited intimacy.

That's why the door was left open. But it required a faithful watchman in order to watch it, in order to guard it.

This is where Jesus indicts the Pharisees as being unfaithful watchmen. They're the ones that allowed wolves and thieves and robbers to come in and persecute

Jesus' flock, and we'll talk about that more next week. But Jesus is applying this passage to himself.

He's saying that he is the one that stands in the middle of the door. He is the one who met face to face with God, the true watchman of Israel.

And he's the one who comes and calls his sheep by name. His Jewish sheep.

The sheep in Israel who were his, who belonged to him, he was going to call out of the old and dying

Old Testament covenant religion, he was going to call into his kingdom of grace and peace.

Jesus came 2 ,000 years ago as the Good Shepherd and called by name his elect

Jewish people out of Judaism and into following him.

And he has uninhibited intimacy with them as well as we know with us.

Jesus is the one who enters through the door, and he did that 2 ,000 years ago just as he said. But he also said that he is the door, which

I think is a very fascinating thing. Now when he says, I am the door, he switches metaphors here in verses 7 because they didn't understand the first metaphor, so he has to give them another one to kind of help them out.

He switches metaphors and he says, I am the door. What that does not mean is what we would maybe be tempted to think that it means, because we have verses like, knock and the door will be opened to you, which is a very famous passage.

Or he's the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except by me. And you think that there's this door that you knock on and when you enter into it, you get to know

Jesus. Those things are true. When you knock on the door, he does open it. He is the one who is the way, the truth, and the life.

But these passages are not talking about us coming to know Jesus and us knocking on the door and him opening it up.

These passages are about Jesus standing in the door, being the door while we are kind of doing our own thing, waiting on him.

This is Jesus doing the work of salvation, not us. I mean, if you think about it, if you tend to think about doors in Scripture as being things that we knock on, you can imagine a sheep wandering up from the fields and knocking on the sheep pen and the shepherd being surprised and said, look, another one.

That's not what's happening here. Jesus is the door. We don't come knocking on the door,

Jesus is the door. And I want to show you what that means. Now, most shepherds did not have a watchman, as I said, some were inclined to, but most shepherds took this as a very personal thing that they got to do themselves.

And they would actually lay their body at night. So they'd bring their sheep into the fold, the sheep would go to sleep, they would be resting, and the shepherd would lay his body in the door jam so that in the middle of the night, because sheep are notoriously dumb animals.

And I'm not saying that as denigrating sheep, they are. That's why we're called sheep. That's funny.

Because we're dumb. He would lay his body in front of the door so that the sheep could not accidentally wander off, because they would.

I read a pretty interesting story about this this week.

It's from actually modern day time. The man who wrote it, his name is Paul Lee Tan, and he was on a trip in Syria, and this is what he observed.

He said, there was a tourist in Syria who observed with interest how a shepherd drove all his sheep into a sheepfold one evening.

The fold was an enclosing wall with only one opening. In that opening, he noticed that there was neither a door nor a gate, and he remarked to the shepherd, can't the wild beast get in here?

No, answered the shepherd, because I am the door. That's what the shepherd said, the Syrian shepherd.

When the sheep are in for the night, I lay down across the doorway. No sheep can get out except over my body, and no wolf or thief can get in except through me.

That's what Jesus is saying that he is. He is the door. He's the one who lays his body out in protection of us.

He's protecting us from threats that are coming from the outside, and he's protecting us from ourselves from wandering outside of his flock from the inside, because we're all like sheep.

We're the ones. There's this great video on YouTube. You can type it in, Sheep Falling in a Pit. It's hilarious. It's actually probably not, but the sheep jumps and is so delighted.

It falls into a pit. The shepherd comes over, picks the sheep up, moves them out of the pit, and the little sheep is so happy that it's free, it frolics again and falls into the pit.

We have this innate tendency as people to find ourselves wandering out of God's grace.

If we could leave him, we would. If we could lose ourself from him or loose ourself from him, we absolutely would.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray. So what a faithful Savior who lays in the door so that in the middle of the night, we cannot leave him.

In the darkest moments of our life, we cannot stray from him, because to do so, we'd have to go through him, and we're not that powerful.

Jesus is a double -knocked door. And what I mean by that is that the world cannot get in from the outside to take away our salvation.

Now, let me be honest. They can shoot arrows over the fence. They can hit us with attacks, and we've seen all kinds of things that can frustrate us and stress us out, but our salvation is secure in Christ.

They cannot come in. They cannot take us out of his flock. The world cannot, because to do so, they'd have to go through him, and the world is not that powerful.

And from the inside, we cannot walk out of God's graces, because to do so would be for us to be more powerful than Christ, and we are not that powerful.

For those who belong to him, if you are his, you are truly his, and you will always be his, and there's nothing at all that you can do to stop it, because you're not powerful enough to break through Jesus' barrier.

That's what this passage is saying. What a beautiful truth that is, that Jesus is the one protecting us from leaving, that Jesus is the one who's keeping us from wandering outside of his grace.

Jesus is not like a Middle Eastern shepherd. You think of the very best Middle Eastern shepherd that you can possibly imagine, the one that you would want over your flocks.

He might still have a bad night one day. His kid might have a fever, and he stays up all night long, and he's trying to do his best, and he gets on his post at four o 'clock in the morning, and he's exhausted, he falls asleep, and then a thief comes over the wall and takes out one of the sheep.

That's not Jesus. He never slumbers. He never sleeps. He's never late on his job. He's always there guarding us, protecting us.

He's faithful in every single capacity. Jesus never fails. Psalm 121 says it like this.

This whole passage is about Jesus the shepherd. Listen to it. I lift up my eyes to the mountains.

From where shall my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, who made the heaven and the earth.

He will not allow your foot to slip. He who keeps you will not slumber.

Behold, he who keeps Israel will not slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper. That's shepherding language.

The Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun will not smite you by day nor the moon by night.

The Lord will protect you from all evil. He will keep your soul. The Lord will guard you.

You're coming out and you're going in from this time forth and forever. He will protect you from the outside world.

He will protect you from yourself. And in this passage, we see that he's talking to Israel.

In John 10, we see that he's talking to Judah, that he lays himself out in order to protect his people personally with his own body.

Why do you think this good shepherd went to the cross? Because he intends to protect his people forever with his own body.

There's no attack that can steal you. There's no system, structure, or famine, or hurricane, earthquake, legislation, virus, person, party, authority, power, and no weapon formed against you can ever prosper as long as you are in the fold of Christ.

That means today that we're safe in our salvation.

One of the most common things that I hear from Christians is when they say things like,

I'm not sure that I'm a Christian. I'm not sure that I'm saved. I still struggle with things like joy.

I don't feel like that I'm growing. My heart is still so sick with sin. I'm so inundated by my pride.

I worry. I doubt. I fear. I tremble over all these things. How could I possibly be a Christian if I'm still struggling with these things?

I hear this all the time. I hear this all the time that we as people tend to doubt our salvation, and the reason that we doubt our salvation is we've forgotten who

Christ is, and we've over -emphasized who we are. We tend to look at our performance, our track record, our sanctification, and we assume that something so glorious as salvation can never be given to us because how could it be?

We've not earned it. We're people who go to work and get our paycheck. We get what we deserve kind of people. We're the kind of people who like to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, but there's no bootstraps in salvation.

It's Him. Some of us actually do have reason to doubt, and it's not because that you're a

Christian. It's because maybe that you've convinced yourself that you're a Christian, and that's scary.

Some of us, and I hope no one here today, if you live like hell every day of your life with no conviction over sin, no growing affection for Jesus, no desire to please

Him, no passion in your heart for holiness, you're probably not a Christian. If you have no evidence of the

Spirit of God in your life, no evidence at all, no gifts, no fruit, nothing, you're probably not a

Christian. Some of us, I pray to God no one here,

I say that sort of generally speaking, but if there's someone here who has no fruit of the

Spirit, no evidence of God's grace, no love for Jesus, no passion for holiness, nothing, there's no evidence whatsoever that maybe we need to stop pretending.

There's nothing more foolish than spending an entire lifetime pretending to be something that you're not. I pray that if that you repent and turn to the

Lord Jesus Christ so that you can have the security and the safety and the love of the shepherd that His elect sheep have.

I pray that you repent and you turn and stop faking it because faking it's only going to end you up in the fiery pit of hell.

Jesus said, I would rather you be cold or hot instead of lukewarm because for the lukewarm He will spew you right out of His mouth.

Those are really, really hard statements in the scriptures, but they're true. But listen,

I want to tell you this as well. When I say hard things like this, if you have love for Jesus, even if it's not yet developed, and even if it's small, and even if it's just a glimmer of light in the deepest part of your soul, you have a desire for Jesus.

If you really love Him, even if it's imperfect, then I want to encourage you that you're probably a Christian.

I can't say, I'm not God, but if you have a little bit of love in your heart for Jesus, if you're heartbroken over your sin, even just a little bit, then be of good faith because you didn't put that desire in your heart.

You didn't put that hatred of sin inside of you. That's what God did. Do you want to please

Him even if it's just a little bit? I pray that it grows, but if you want to please Him just a little bit, then you're a Christian.

We don't want to please God. We're haters of God apart from God. If our heart's sick over the fact that we don't love

Him as much as we want to. I've heard so many people in the same sentence say, I don't think I'm a Christian, but I really want to love

Jesus more. If you really want to love Jesus more, you're a Christian. That's true of you.

These kind of desires are not from you. They're from Him. That means that you're

His, and you belong to Him. Non -Christians have no love for Jesus.

The reprobate don't want Jesus. The lost man doesn't really hate his sin. He hates the consequences.

If you have any affection for Jesus in your heart, small and imperfect as it may be, if you have any evidence that the

Almighty is working in you, that your stony heart is being turned into a heart of flesh, then

I pray that you would sing praises to the living God because you're a Christian. You're saved.

You can't stop being His. You can't cease being His. You can't wander out of His pastures or sneak past Him.

Jesus guards the way with His own body. We're not that good. Nothing can ever take you out of His hand.

Look at what it says in John 10, 27 through 29, verses we'll get to in, I don't know, three or four weeks.

It says, My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me, and I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of My hand.

That's not a complicated Greek word. It means no one. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all.

No one is able, capable, has the power to snatch them out of the

Father's hand. You are safe if you're in Christ Jesus. I know of many, many churches that tell you that you can lose your salvation if you don't perform, and if you don't do this, and if you don't do that.

That is a weapon. That is a pharisaical tool to try to manipulate you, and to get you to serve more, give more, do more, and everything else, so that you make sure that you're a

Christian. The Catholic Church has been doing this for a thousand years, trying to get you to pay more money, do more, earn more, in order to get you to do more, so to convince you that you're saved.

That's an abomination to God. That's an abomination to the Gospel. You don't have to do more in order to be a

Christian. You're a Christian because of what Christ Jesus has done on the cross. Nothing can take you out of His hand.

And 2 ,000 years ago, Jesus came, and He entered through the fold of the Jewish gate. He called

His Jewish believers out. He brought them into pasture. He offered up His perfect body on a cross for them.

He saved them, and He dealt with their two worst enemies. The first was the Pharisees who were abusing them, and then the second, which was probably a worse enemy, was themselves, who kept trying to wander out of God's graces, and now they can't, because they're safe in Christ.

Jesus doesn't lose sheep. He won't lose a single one. There's other

New Testament examples, and I'm only citing a few of them. Romans 8, 38 through 39,

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.

Romans 11, 29 says the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. That means they cannot be revoked, obviously.

Jude 1, 21 says He's able to keep you from stumbling, and able to make you stand in the presence of God. 2

Corinthians 1, 22 says He's put His seal on you so that it can never be taken from you. Ephesians 2, 8 says that your salvation is a gift from God, and God's not an

Indian giver. Philippians 1, 6 It doesn't say it that way. That was me paraphrasing. Philippians 1, 6 says that He who began the good work in you will see that work to completion because God's not a negligent worker, and He will finish the thing that He started.

Hebrews 10, 14 says that He's perfected those who are His once and for all and the work cannot be undone.

I'm hammering this. Because some still have not heard it.

You've heard me say it. The audio waves have left my mouth. I'm talking loud enough,

I believe. But you haven't heard it. Some of you don't yet believe it.

Some of you believe when you go home and you look in the mirror that you still are damaged goods and that Jesus can't save you.

Repent of that because He did and He has and He will and He always will. What better metaphor could

Jesus use than laying His own body down, stopping you from leaving. What better metaphor could

He use? Since it was His broken body on the cross that actually gained us access to Him and it's

His broken body on the cross that will keep us having access to Him both now and forever.

We are protected by Jesus' body. What else could we need? This is the very best news that we'll ever hear.

It says that He calls His sheep by name. This is another confidence that you can have. It doesn't say that His sheep call

Him by name. It says that He calls His sheep by name which means that even when we're confused, even when we don't fully know

Him, even when we're not yet in intimate relationship with Him, He knows us. Salvation in the

Bible is not about if you know Jesus. Salvation in the Bible is does Jesus know you? Does He know you by name?

Does He seek and find and save you? Does He find you? Does He die for you? Does He ransom you? Does He adopt you?

Does He clothe you in His righteousness? We've got to get past this idea that we can do something to make

Jesus love us or that we can do something to make Jesus save us. That prayer that you prayed and that time that you said,

Jesus, I need you, is not a good work that warrants your salvation. Your salvation is done by the good work of Jesus and that work motivated you to pray.

Now things get a little tricky in this passage because Jesus was talking to the

Jews. Jesus was talking to the Jewish people and He's fulfilling promises that were made to them that the

Good Shepherd would come and set the Jews free. That the Good Shepherd would come and set

Israel free. But I want us to, for a moment as we close, understand how these things actually do apply to us and I want us to look at a passage in the

Old Testament that's going to tie all of this together where we're going to see how the Jews and Israel and the

Gentiles just like us all come under the banner of this truth. And I want to show us because I don't want anyone to ever tell you that this verse doesn't apply to you.

So I want to show you how irrevocably it applies to you and we're going to go back in the Old Testament for a moment to do that. I would say, is that a good idea for you?

But I'm here, you're there, and we just, we have to. So here we go. 14 through 16 in John 10 says it like this,

I am the Good Shepherd and I know my own and my own know me. Even as the Father knows me,

I know the Father and I lay down my life for the sheep. So that's the Jewish sheep that he's talking to but it also says that I have other sheep which are not of this fold which

I must bring them in also and they will hear my voice and they will become one flock with one shepherd.

In a moment we're going to see how all of this ties together but we have to understand before we do that a little bit about who

Israel actually is. You see in the Bible, Israel, it's kind of a hard word to actually figure out because Israel could mean

Jacob, the person who was renamed Israel because he wrestled with God. It could mean the united 12 tribes of Israel in their united kingdom or it could mean the northern kingdom of 10 tribes after they divided and separated off.

The term can be confusing. So for a moment I want us to understand exactly what it means that Jesus came and saved

Judah. He came and revived Israel and that is good news for us, the church.

Okay? So first, what is Israel? Israel was supposed to be united 12 tribes that had a purpose.

They were to be united under one God. They were to be united in their 12 tribes and they were to be collectively a light to the

Gentiles. That's the threefold purpose of Israel. They were to be under one God. They were to be 12 tribes and they were to be a light to the

Gentiles. Now as we see in the Old Testament, we're going to do a brief flyover of the entire

Old Testament for a moment. We're going to see how they failed in their purpose. Genesis, God created man and the man sinned and he destroyed it.

And he saved one family under Noah but they sinned so God, again, chose another family through Abraham and Abraham's seed,

Isaac, he chose to be the promised child. And then Isaac's child, Jacob, he chose to be the seed of the promise. And then

Jacob's 12 sons, he chose to be a nation. And those 12 sons were to be a nation that ended up blessing the entire world.

Genesis 12, 1. Now we see in Exodus at the beginning that that nation is now fruitful and multiplied and moved down to Egypt because of a famine.

And they're under the leadership of Moses. And Moses brings them out of Egypt with God's mighty hand and they come to Leviticus where they're now at Mount Sinai and they're learning how to worship this

God and how to live with this God. So now you're Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus already. That was pretty fast.

In Numbers, they leave the wilderness. They leave Mount Sinai with the instructions on how to conquer the land and with the instructions on how to worship

God and live with God. And there's one catastrophe after another in the book of Numbers where they don't worship

God. They don't follow Him. And the entire generation ends up nosediving into the right on the border of Israel or Canaan so that they don't enter the land and the entire generation dies.

That's the end of Numbers. God writes an entire book called Deuteronomy to train up the new generation that's going to enter the land.

That's Deuteronomy. Moses dies at the end of that book because of his disobedience. So, so far, no one's obedient.

But God gave them a book. That was Deuteronomy. At the end of Deuteronomy, God raises up Joshua and Joshua's plan was to conquer the land of Canaan for this nation so that this nation could be a united empire so they could be a light to the

Gentiles so that they could showcase the glory of God to the end of the world. But they didn't conquer the land. They left pockets of peoples who worshipped idols in the land and as the book of Judges opens up, we see that that puts them in a tailspin of idolatry where sometimes they worship

God and sometimes they worship the gods of the people and the nations that they were supposed to cast out in the book of Joshua.

Again, they're not faithful. At the end of the book of Joshua, you've got Ruth and a little bit of Samuel, which also ties into this period of time, which is the darkest era in Jewish history.

By the time you get to the later bits of 1 Samuel, the people choose a king. A king to unite them.

A king to make them an empire. A king that will help them be a light to the nations. But he doesn't.

Saul, the wicked king, leads them to division, despair, idolatry, and at the end of Saul's life, the country is more divided than ever, and it looks like the plan of God, the threefold plan that Israel will be under one

God, that there will be a kingdom of twelve united tribes as a light to the Gentiles has failed until you get to David.

God raises up David, who's not a perfect man, but he's a faithful man for most of his life.

There's a few occasions where he's not, but David, with love for God, unites this broken people together.

He conquers every bit of the promised territory that Moses lists in the first five books of the Bible, so Israel obtains the entire land.

They're united twelve tribes, and under his son Solomon, which is where you get into the book of Kings, Solomon further brings blessing to the nation in the earliest parts of his reign, and we see that the final promise, that they're united under one

God, united as twelve tribes, and they're a light to the Gentiles. We see the world streaming into the city of Jerusalem, saying, look at how good this

God is. The queen of Sheba comes and brags about Yahweh the whole way home. Nations are coming to Israel to see the blessings of God, and at the beginning of Solomon's reign, you get the closest picture of faithfulness in the entire

Old Testament. They're doing what God had told them to do, to be united under one God, united twelve tribes, showcasing the love of God to the nations, and then at the end of Solomon's life, he's bowing down his knee to idols, he's got thousands of wives, thousands of concubines, and the whole thing falls completely apart with his son.

The nation splits in half and it never is reconciled again. In the book of Kings, when the nation splits in half, there are now two nations instead of one, and they're not united under one

God anymore. The northern nation always worshipped idols. The northern nation was ten tribes called

Israel. The southern nation was Judah. And that takes us all the way up into 2

Chronicles and into the wisdom literature, which celebrates the return of a future

King David who will make all things right again. The prophets who are yelling at Israel and Judah and looking forward to the king who's going to return and make all things new.

That takes you all the way to the book of Malachi. That's the Old Testament. A people who were raised up for a purpose, and a people who failed their purpose repeatedly, habitually, and serially.

So they need a better king. They need a better prophet. They need a better priest. They need

Christ. Now, God spares the southern tribe

Judah, the two tribes. You've got Judah and Benjamin. The New Testament is about the

Jews. You don't have Israel in the New Testament. They're gone. And I want to show you this because maybe no one's ever told you this.

Israel was wiped out in 721 BC by the

Assyrian Empire. And I'll tell you exactly how it happened. Most of the men were killed in the siege of Samaria.

The rest were deported. And the way that Assyria deported people is that they took you and they split you and your family members apart and moved you all to different cities.

And they did that to everybody. So a million people broken up into fractions where you could never establish community, you could never have family, you could never remember your traditions.

They would separate children from mothers so that eventually the Jews dropped their ethnic heritage, sorry,

Israel, they dropped their Israelite names, they dropped their customs, they forgot their identity, they intermarried with the peoples, and the ten tribes of Israel are gone from 721 and a little bit after.

They're gone. When you look it up in Jewish history books, they're called the Lost Tribes of Israel for a reason because they're gone.

No more. So when you get to the New Testament, there's not twelve tribes, there's two. That's it.

So when God says and makes a forever promise in Psalm 121 that Israel will forever be

His, the credibility of God is at stake because Israel is gone. Israel is gone.

So how is this all going to get resolved? I think that when

Jesus says in John 10, 16 that He has other sheep, not of this fold, that we're going to see something miraculous happen with Israel and with the

Gentiles and we're going to see how it all applies in the end to us. And we're going to see that from Ezekiel 37.

Now normally I would not read an entire chapter of Ezekiel in any setting of my life unless I was in my

Bible reading plan and I would read it. But not publicly. It's a long book, it's a confusing book, but this is one of the clearest chapters in the book of Ezekiel and I'm going to read all of it to you.

I'm going to read the whole thing and I want you to see the lost and hopeless position that Israel has found itself in.

This was written 200 years after they're genetically wiped off the face of the earth. They have no hope, they have no dream, they're dead.

And the writer describes them as a valley of dead bones. So I want us to see what

God is saying to Israel and then I want us to see how that applies to us. This is Ezekiel 37.

You can follow along on the screen. The hand of the Lord was upon me, Ezekiel, and he brought me out in the

Spirit of the Lord and he set me down in the middle of the valley. And it was full of bones.

And he led me around among them, and behold, there were many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry.

And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, you know.

Then he said to me, prophesy over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the

Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones, behold, I will cause breath to enter and come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you, and you shall live.

And you shall know that I am the Lord. So I, Ezekiel, prophesied as I was commanded.

And as I prophesied, there was a sound and behold, a rattling. And the bones began to come together, bone upon bone, and I looked and behold, and there were sinews on them and the flesh had come upon them and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them.

And then he said to me, prophesy to the breath, prophesy, Son of man, and say to the breath, thus says the

Lord God, come from the four winds, breath and breathe on these slain that they may live.

So I prophesied as he commanded me. And the breath came into them and they lived and they stood on their feet an exceedingly great army.

And then he said to me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Two hundred years after they were gone.

Behold, they say, our bones are dried up and our hope is lost. We are indeed therefore cut off.

Therefore prophesy and say to them, thus says the Lord God, behold, I will open your graves and raise you up from your graves,

O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel and you shall know that I am the

Lord when I open up your graves and raise you from the from your graves, O my people.

And I will put my spirit within you and you shall live and I will place you in your own land and then you shall know that I am the

Lord and I have spoken and I will do it, declares the Lord. And the word of the Lord came to me,

Son of man, take a stick and write on it for Judah and for the people of Israel. United Nation.

Then take another stick and write on it for Joseph, the stick of Ephraim. That's another word for Israel and all the house of Israel associated with him and join them one to another in one stick that they may become one in your hand.

And when your people say to you, will not you tell us by what these mean? I want you to say to them, thus says the

Lord God, behold, I'm about to take the stick of Joseph that is in the hand of Ephraim and all the tribes of Israel associated with him and I will join it with the stick of Judah and I will make them one stick again and they may be in one in my hand.

When the sticks on which you write are in your hand before your eyes then say to them, thus says the Lord God, behold,

I will take the people of Israel from the nations strong or among, sorry, there's a hole punch here, among where they've gone and will gather them from all around and bring them into their own land and I will make them one nation in the land on the mountains of Israel and one king shall be king over them and they shall no longer be two nations, no longer divided into two kingdoms.

They shall not defile themselves anymore with their idols and with their detestable things or with any of their transgressions but I will save them from all of their backslidings in which they have sinned and will cleanse them and they shall be my own people and I will be their

God. My servant David shall be king over them and they shall have one shepherd.

Jesus is quoting this here in John 10. They shall walk in my rules and be careful to obey my statutes and they shall dwell in the land that I gave to my servant

Jacob where your fathers lived and their children and their children's children shall dwell there forever and David my servant shall be their prince forever and I will make a covenant of peace with them and it shall be an everlasting covenant with them and I will set them in their land and multiply them and I will set my sanctuary in their midst forever and my dwelling place shall be with them and I will be their

God and they shall be my people and then the nations will know that I am the

Lord who sanctifies Israel when my sanctuary is in their midst forever. When we read that passage as Christians we tend to skip over the history and the culture and the immediate context that this applies to Israel and we go straight to the fact that this applies to us and it does but I want us to see how we get there.

Of course the righteous root of David is going to come and rule over us. We see that as Jesus. Jesus is the one who's ruling over his church.

He's the one who made our dry bones live. He's the one who saved us from our sin and death, breathed new life into us, made us walk by his rules, obey his statutes, brought an everlasting covenant of peace to the children of God.

He is the one who did all of these things to us but it is also true that he brought back to life and resurrected dead

Israel because that's what he promised he would do on his own credibility in life. This passage was written to dead

Israel. This passage is a promise to resurrect the nation. This passage was there to bring back to life the lost community that had died in the annals of history.

Now the question that we have to ask ourselves is how do all of these things become true?

How does he come and save Judah? How does he resurrect Israel and how does he save a church?

That's the question that we have to ask and the question is answered in the New Testament. Paul says it like this in Galatians 6, 14 through 16.

But may it never be that I would boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world for neither is circumcision anything nor uncircumcision but a new creation.

Pay attention to this one. And those who walk by this rule which is from Ezekiel 37, peace and mercy be upon you, the

Israel of God. When Jesus resurrected the church

Paul is saying that he resurrected Israel. That we, Romans 11 tells us that we've been grafted in as a wild olive branch into the people of Israel.

A fascinating part of Ezekiel 37 is when he speaks and the dead bones come to life and the graves of Israel open.

Remember when Jesus is on the grave or on the cross and he says, Father forgive them they know what they do and he gives up his spirit and the graves are open in Matthew.

And the centurion says this must be the son of the living God. A Gentile cries out in faith to Jesus in fulfillment of Ezekiel 7 when

Gentiles are saved Israel is resurrected. Because Israel was never meant to be just Israelites in identity.

Israel was always meant to be a kingdom of people that represented all the nations in the world.

When the church is resurrected in Jesus Christ Israel is resurrected and all these prophecies come true.

Jesus came to rescue Judah. Jesus came to resurrect

Israel and you and I are the Israel of God inheritors of every single one of these promises.

So when Jesus says that we can have safety, security peace and all of these things in our salvation that means us now.

Because we've been grafted in. The eternal promises made to Israel are now eternal promises made to us that can never be taken away.

So don't let anyone ever look at you and say that this passage was to the Jews. This passage doesn't apply to you.

Ezekiel 37 says that it does. It applies to us. It's our inheritance because we have been grafted in.

John 17 Jesus' high priestly prayer. He says this, I do not ask for these only, the

Jews but also for those who believe in me through their word, the testimony of their witness and they may all be one just as you

Father are in me and I in you. That means that the preaching of the gospel that happened in Jerusalem that ignited into the region of Judea, that spread to the region of Samaria that now has gone to the ends of the earth includes you and I in Christ.

We are a part of the chosen people of God. We are the Israel of God. We inherit the promises of God.

That is what all this is saying. Which I think is really, really good news.

We go back to sort of the point of this passage. We now have become his sheep.

By his body you and I are protected and we are made safe and nothing, not demons, not hell, not politicians, not

COVID, not vaccines, not nothing and I know that's a double negative can take us away from the love of God that we have in Christ Jesus.

That is our comfort and I pray that when we doubt it we would remember that we have an advocate who never fails.

So even when we doubt it, even when we fail we're still safe then too. Let's pray.

Lord I pray and oh Lord I'm thankful that your eternal promises made to Israel have caught us the

Shepherds Church, Gentile Christians all across the world have caught us up into your gospel.

That we've been grafted into your family. We've been adopted so that Jews and Greeks now can worship the same

God and praise him for the same promises. Being delivered by the same sin and looking forward to the same salvation in heaven.

Lord I pray that if there's anyone here who is tempted to doubt the salvation that you've given them,

Lord I pray that they would find comfort in the fact that you lay down your body protecting them.

You protect them from the outside forces that would try to sabotage their faith and you protect them from the inside stubborn, mule -like heart that each and every one of us has.

Lord if there's someone here who is not in Christ, I pray that they would have no comfort. Lord I pray that their discomfort would drive them to the cross and that they would cry out for you and salvation so that they could have the things that we're rejoicing over.

But Lord for the Christian, I pray that there would be nothing but rejoicing. We have nothing at all to be sad about.

We have nothing at all to be frustrated about. We have nothing at all but joy for what

Jesus Christ has done for us. Lord I pray that that would infect our hearts so much that the world would have to stop and take notice.

Lord Jesus we love you and we thank you for all you've done for us, especially in keeping us eternally safe.