Sheep of the Good Shepherd

John 10:11-16

(Good Shepherd Sunday - 2000)

Thank God, a child seven years old knows what the Church is, namely, the holy believers and lambs who hear the voice of their Shepherd.” So wrote Martin Luther in the Smalcald Articles, one of the confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. He took this definition straight from the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel. There is good reason for our Lord Jesus to call himself a shepherd and to call his church sheep and lambs.

Of course there is good biblical precedent. Psalm 23 describes the LORD God as the Shepherd of his flock. The Old Testament Lesson for today also uses the metaphor of a shepherd and sheep to describe God’s relationship to his people. Today’s Epistle Lesson calls Jesus the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls. This is a divinely inspired metaphor. What does it mean?

God compares us to sheep for a reason. We are sheep. We are not dogs. Dogs are smarter than sheep, but they are far too trusting. You can easily mislead a dog by a false display of friendship. Go up to someone else’s dog and say, “Here, boy!” and most of the time the dog will come to you. You don’t even need to know its name. A sheep won’t do that. Even if you know the name of the sheep, he won’t come to the sound of your voice unless he knows your voice and has learned to trust it. A sheep is not a very bright animal, but it is very conservative animal. He doesn’t trust anything new and different. A new and unfamiliar voice frightens him. He depends on what he knows and he simply won’t follow the voice of a stranger.

But a sheep is not very bright. In fact, a sheep is really quite stupid. One sheep will follow another sheep without any idea of where he is going. Since he doesn’t have the kind of independent judgment that some other animals have, he can’t help but follow the crowd. This is why a sheep needs a shepherd.

Now the hireling is the man who is paid to watch after the sheep, but he only works for pay. If a predator threatens the sheep, the hireling will ask himself if it is worth his pay to risk his life and limb for the benefit of the sheep. He can always get another job. He decides that his life and well-being are more important to him than his job, so when he sees the wolf coming, he leaves the sheep to the wolf.

The Good Shepherd is willing to give his life for the sheep. And this is what he does. Since the hireling neither owns the sheep nor cares about them, he won’t suffer for them. He works for pay. He won’t pay a price. Instead, he wants to be paid. The Good Shepherd will pay a price. He will pay the price of his very life.

He knows the sheep and the sheep know him. This is the most intimate knowledge there is. Jesus likens it to the knowledge of God the Father of his Son and the Son of his Father. There can be no more perfect a knowledge than this. He knows his sheep. This is much more than a knowledge of facts about the sheep. He knows them. He knows them as only the one who became their substitute can know them. When he laid down his life for them he took their place. Their sin became his.

The Good Shepherd gives his life in substitution for the sheep. This is what he tells us. This is the voice we hear. We hear him telling us that he lays down his life for us and takes it up again. The voice of the shepherd is the voice of the gospel. The gospel tells us that the shepherd knows us by experience because he bore our griefs and carried our sorrows. The law tells us that we all like sheep have gone astray, everyone of us has turned to his own way. The gospel tells us that God has laid all our sins on Jesus. This is how he knows us. He knows us by experience. This is the only real kind of knowledge. Jesus joined us in our flesh and blood. He became one of us. He suffered for us. He knows our weaknesses, our fears, our failings, our sins, and our shame. He knows it all because he has borne it all.

Last week we saw how Jesus gave to his church on earth the authority of his holy gospel, the authority to forgive sins. The only way any pastor can lay serious claim to the title, pastor, is if he preaches this gospel. If he does, then those who hear his preaching will hear the voice of the Good Pastor, Jesus. If the pastor preaches something else than this gospel, he is no pastor, but a hireling or even a wolf. Of course, Jesus is the Good Shepherd and the devil is the wolf. Human agents are just that: agents or ministers. The real battle is always between Christ and the devil.

Jesus is the one who sends the Holy Ghost to “call, gather, enlighten, and sanctify the whole Christian Church on earth and to keep it with [him] in the one true faith.” The devil is the one who invents every kind of false teaching. False teaching that purports to be the voice of the Good Shepherd is in fact the wolf covering himself up with a sheepskin, to disguise his true designs. He’s a wolf. A wolf eats sheep. The devil destroys Christians by destroying their faith. He does this by leading them away from the voice of the Shepherd. This is why he invents false doctrine. If you are trusting in a lie, you aren’t trusting in the truth. The various divisions that you see in the church of Jesus Christ are all caused by the devil’s lies.

And yet, despite the divisions that we see, the church itself is undivided. The Holy Christian Church is one. So we confess, “I believe in one, holy, Christian, and apostolic Church.” Listen to how the Large Catechism puts this precious truth:

I believe that there is upon earth a little holy group and congregation of pure saints, under one head, even Christ, called together by the Holy Ghost in one faith, one mind, and understanding, with manifold gifts, yet agreeing in love, without sects or schisms. I am also a part and member of the same, a sharer and joint owner of all the goods it possesses, brought to it and incorporated into it by the Holy Ghost by having heard and continuing to hear the Word of God, which is the beginning of entering it. For formerly, before we had attained to this, we were altogether of the devil, knowing nothing of God and of Christ.

There is only one flock and one Shepherd. The true unity of Christ’s Church is not a dream or a plan for the future. It is not something to be achieved by clever church-political negotiations or ecumenical dialogues. It is an article of faith. God said it and that settles it and faith believes it. There is one flock and one Shepherd. Jesus is the Shepherd and every Christian scattered throughout the whole world who hears his voice and trusts in his gospel is joined in an intimate union with every other Christian to form one holy and indivisible Church of Jesus Christ.

Who belongs to this Church is God’s business. We can know that the Church is here because we have here the means of grace that Christ has given to his Church. Here is the voice of the Holy Ghost who testifies to the gospel of Jesus Christ just as Jesus promised. But where faith is, precisely where, in whose heart, that we leave to God. We don’t presume to do God’s business for him.

We do know that Christ’s sheep hear his voice. That we know. And so we make sure that it is Christ’s voice that is preached, taught, and confessed. Otherwise we are no longer the Church at all, but a human institution. The wolf comes and scatters the flock that doesn’t have the voice of the Good Shepherd to protect them. When that voice is silenced, the Church is divided. The unity of the church comes from receiving the same thing. We receive the same treasures from the same Lord Jesus. It is as St. Paul puts it in Ephesians, “One Lord, one faith, one baptism.” What you receive you have within you. If you are trusting in the gospel it is because God gave it to you from the outside. It came into your heart from outside of you. The gospel did not come from inside of you. Rather, what is inside of us the Bible calls the flesh. The flesh is the sinful nature with which we are born. It does not trust in God. It does not seek after God. It runs away from God. It never can recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd. It thinks the gospel is foolishness. The flesh is corrupted beyond human understanding. St. Paul says that nothing good lives in it. The flesh must be killed. Killing the flesh with God’s word is the daily battle of every Christian.

The sad fact of religious life, however, is not only that the flesh is not killed, but that it is nourished and pampered. Then the religion of the flesh, which is self-worship, replaces the true religion revealed by Christ. His voice is silenced in favor of various trendy, fashionable religions of the flesh.

When it comes to spiritual discernment, we are our own worst enemy. Sheep are foolish animals, and we forget this at our great spiritual peril. Would you entrust the care of your home to a four-year-old? Would you let a little child drive your new car? Then you shouldn’t entrust your own spiritual care to yourself. Spiritually, we are less competent than a four-year-old.

This is why Christians must be suspicious. New ideas aren’t good ideas. Christians don’t trust their own feelings or notions or wisdom. If somebody comes up with a new idea in the area of Christian teaching, watch out! The worst kind of foolishness is the open-mindedness of our contemporary culture. A Christian must be closed to any other voice than that of the Good Shepherd.

We must go only by the word. This is how the sheep lives. He trusts implicitly in the voice of the shepherd. Without it, he is lost. The word makes all the difference. Our lives aren’t much different to look at than the lives of those outside of the church. We do many of the same things. You certainly cannot tell by the outward appearance who the sheep are. They are not richer, prettier, smarter, or more successful than those who don’t know Jesus. Even in matters of virtuous living, the heathen are capable of amazing acts of virtue and honor. We need to acknowledge the truth wherever we see it. One need not be a Christian to know the difference between right and wrong.

What makes a Christian a Christian is what he has received. We hear the voice that gives us life. Jesus said, “The words I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.” (John 6:63) He can give us life through his words because he has life to give. The Good Shepherd is I AM who revealed himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to Moses at the burning bush. The Good Shepherd is the LORD God of Israel. He is the only God there is. And his voice alone guides us to heaven because his voice gives us heaven.

The wolf eats the sheep for his food. It is his nature to do so. He won’t change because he cannot change. The Good Shepherd serves the sheep. The wolf eats the sheep. The Good Shepherd gives his life for the sheep. The wolf steals life away from the sheep. The Good Shepherd promises the sheep his own life in exchange for theirs. And he delivers.

All false teaching comes from the wolf. And of course you won’t have ears attuned to recognize only the truth if you don’t think the truth matters. This is why the most effective tool of the devil is to persuade Christ’s sheep to be indifferent about doctrine. It is the doctrinal indifference of our day that renders the sheep entirely helpless, standing alone, with no defense against the onslaught of the wolf.

It is a popular but entirely false notion that we Christians who insist on holding on without any compromise to the pure doctrine of the Bible are arrogant religious know-it-alls who really ought to be more humble about our Christian claims. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason we hold tenaciously to the pure teaching of the gospel is because we are poor, foolish, ignorant, helpless, and completely unreliable sheep. We were hopelessly lost. Jesus had to find us. We couldn’t find our way back home. We don’t want to become lost again. This is why we learn that voice that keeps us safe. We learn to recognize it, and to trust it. It will lead us through every loss of this life. It will lead us to the fountain of grace that covers all our sins by Christ’s holy blood. It will lead us to heaven when we die. Nothing else will. So we cherish the pure, wholesome, gracious spiritual nurture that Jesus gives us. We hold on to it for dear life, because it is our life. Amen.