Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

The setting for Psalm 23 that we’ve been gifted by—I think John maybe or Brad came up with that version to that tune. It’s lovely. The sermon text for today is once more the benediction in Hebrews 13:20 and 21. And of course it speaks of the great shepherd. And so I pray the Lord God will use today’s scriptures and the Holy Spirit to cause you to rest in that finished work of Jesus knowing that he is indeed the great shepherd of the sheep.

Please stand for the reading of Hebrews 13:20 and 21. Now may the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the everlasting covenant make you complete in every good work to do his will, working in you what is well pleasing in his sight through Jesus Christ to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for these wonderful words of benediction and peace. And we pray Lord God that your spirit would indeed minister the things of Jesus to us through the proclamation of your word. We thank you that the Lord Jesus speaks peace to us. And may Lord God your words, your scriptures speak peace to us today as well. The peace that comes as being part of the sheep of the great shepherd.

In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated. We’re working away slowly through this wonderful benediction that kind of ties off, summarizes, and then applies what this very doctrinally rich sermon has taught us in the application of this in very practical ways. There’s another benediction that I’ve mentioned before—1 Peter 5:10 and 11 says this. Now may the God of all grace—so our text in Hebrews may the God of peace; the God of peace is the God of grace.

Now may the God of grace, all grace, who called us to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you. To him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen. A benediction emphasizing that we receive this gracious gift of God even in the context of difficult trials and troubles. The Lord God is indeed moving through his grace, through having made us part of the flock of the Lord Jesus Christ, even using those struggles and trials to strengthen us, to establish us, to equip us essentially for the work that God has called us to do and to settle us—that part of peace that is calmness before him.

So we praise God that this is what happens every Lord’s day at the conclusion of the service. One of these great benedictions has spoken over us. And what we’ve been trying to see is that the terms in this benediction in Hebrews 13—we’re trying to get a broader perspective of what they are. So now, “may the God of peace”—well, we’ve tried to show last week that peace is a lot more comprehensive than what we normally think of it as. You know, we normally think of that settledness, calmness, retreat, but in reality, of course, peace, as we saw through so many texts last week, involves as well the conquering of God’s enemies. And so peace is a thing that grows to fill the earth. It’s the right ordering and blessing and prosperity that comes from the presence of Christ by the spirit in the context of the world, and so that grows. It’s a broader understanding.

You know, we got “peace who brought up from the dead that great shepherd of the sheep.” This peace is established through the work ultimately of God in raising Jesus up from the dead. Now the citation is from Isaiah 63:11, and we looked last week—thank you—we looked last week and saw that this bringing us up out of Isaiah 63:11 references the sea and other Old Testament references—the land, Egypt, and bondage to sin and death. Clearly, from death, from sheol, it’s a much more comprehensive thing that Jesus has done and is doing than just equipping us to go to heaven. Bringing us out of that kind of the second death of going to hell perpetually—it’s a lot broader than that.

The shepherd is leading the sheep and he’s leading us away from realms of death. And when we sin, we hold on to death in the old ways. But the shepherd has come to definitively move the world away from death. And we said, remember that the three days in the belly of the whale is a picture of that. And Jesus gives himself over to the death world of the Jewish establishment of that time on Thursday evening in his arrest. So it’s comprehensive and it isn’t just there. It’s a comprehensive term again that’s being brought up out of what? The sea, the land, death, the old world, sheol, bondage to Egypt. So it’s a much more comprehensive term.

Peace is more comprehensive. It has a lot more to do with this world than we would normally think. And this idea of being brought out from death has a lot more to do with this world than we normally think as well. And so when—and then last week we talked about how the death culture has been promoted in large measure by the public school system in this country for the last hundred years. And you know, it’s important to understand that. As one, as Howard L. talked to us about it afterwards in some conversation, it’s very easy to critique things. It’s very easy to say what the problem is. But you see, we’re not just brought out of death. We’re brought into life.

And so this benediction moves from those initial statements to this idea that God is going to equip us, or give us the proper rigging and prepare us and repair us in the world to do his will. He’s going to equip us for positive things. So where are we going with an understanding of peace and being brought out of the realms of death and then today a discussion of the great shepherd? Well, we’re going to see positive works. So, you know, positive impact on the world. We’re not about critiquing all the bad things in the world, public schools, spending most of our energy doing that. We want to spend most of our energy building educational structures—home schools, private schools, blends—that will honor the Lord Jesus Christ and equip a culture again to submit to and rejoice in the wonderful knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, and that’s harder work. It’s real easy to kick at something that’s bad. It’s a lot harder to apply ourselves, but that’s what God is doing in this benediction. He’s moving us out of death into life. And we’ll see as we come to the second verse—verse 21—that he’s equipping us for all kinds of positive works. So, you know, what we’re trying to say is that our view of these terms, our view of the scriptures—our distinctives as a church—are quite important.

I was doing some preparation work for the next verse, verse 21, this last week and I read an online sermon of this text, and you know, the man was pointing out, for instance—and I’m not kicking anybody here, but as an example, his example not mine—you know, it makes a difference whether we are Calvinists and reformed or whether we are Lutheran. Because the Lutheran, you see, they think that the whole thing is getting salvation, the first use of the law to bring us to a recognition of our sin. But you know, we think that the whole purpose of being brought up out of death—I mean, recognizing our sin, repenting—is so that we can engage ourselves in positive acts of life on this earth.

There’s growing Lutheran influence at Westminster Theological Seminary West. And as a result, they don’t have much use anymore for people like George Schaeffer trying to say that there are scriptural truths from the whole Bible that we’re supposed to apply to marriages and fix them on the basis of God’s law. Well, no. The law of God is just meant to bring us to salvation, you see, and just to repentance. No, no, no, no. That’s great. That’s good. We’re glad for that emphasis. I’m glad that this Lutheran church we inherited has all these crosses everywhere to remind us of all that. But we pick up our cross daily and follow Christ. We come out of death daily. We apply ourselves to life-giving institutions daily.

And so it makes a big difference, you know, what we think that standard is for what’s doing well pleasing in the sight of God. And we’ll talk about that. You know, it makes a big difference. And as we’ll see today, the shepherd, the shepherd is someone who feeds the flock. Feeds them what? Just the message of salvation. No, he feeds them statutes and judgments and how to live their lives. So it makes a difference how we understand these terms, and that’s why I’m going through them slowly. It makes a difference, you know, what we think about God.

And this sermon to the Hebrews has talked a lot about the Lord Jesus Christ affirming being the second person of the trinity, and as a result of that, all kinds of things happened. We’ve come to a greater appreciation though here at RCC in the last few years about the importance of the theology—if you want to call it that. What is the importance of the trinity? Well, we see being played out in our world.

We have a religion, Islam, that posits not a trinity of persons in the eternal godhead. You know, if you have one of these Jehovah’s Witnesses or cults who deny the trinity come to your door, I ask him, “Is God the God of love?” Well, yeah. What does that mean? Who did he love in eternity? Well, he loved himself. He’s a pretty selfish God, you see. And that selfish God is a God of power.

Typically, we affirm a God who is, you know, that the scriptures teach, is one God existing in three persons. He’s eternally love and community and putting the other before himself because he’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And in that community of persons in the trinity, we have the eternal existence of a truly loving God. And so it makes a huge difference in how we go about things. You know, Islam wants to subject everyone with force and power. And we say just the reverse. It’s the preaching of the gospel of Christ accompanied by deeds of loving kindness. See, this is how the heavenly kingdom comes.

Now, we’re not saying that, you know, there aren’t important civil structures and that wars shouldn’t be fought when they’re needed, etc. But we’re saying that can never bring biblical peace to a region. The only thing that brings peace is the preaching the gospel. Now, Jesus is the great shepherd that God has brought up from the dead. And this is so critical.

I was reading an interview with René Girard these past two weeks. Pagan cultures are caught in a cycle of desiring what each other desires, producing warfare and conflict, and then putting all that off on a scapegoat that they kill. This is what cultures do. Jesus Christ comes and he is the perfect scapegoat. We could say he’s perfect. He’s without sin and he’s killed by the Jews trying to achieve peace in their culture.

You know, we can’t take care of things on our own. We’ll kill somebody. So they kill Jesus out of envy. The scriptures make that quite clear. And what does Jesus do from the cross? He says, “Forgive them, Father, because they don’t know what they do.” You see, Jesus ends that cycle of violence, violence being the way to bring peace to a culture. Ultimately, peace is brought through the preaching of the gospel. And through the end of that cycle, Jesus Christ has accomplished all things for our salvation. He’s forgiven us our sins. He’s brought us peace and he’s removed from us fear.

“I will fear no evil do I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” And the great shepherd, which we’re talking about today, this is what it’s all about. The shepherd is not something distinct from—well, it is distinct—but he’s not something isolated from the sheep. He leads the sheep forward. We saw this. Moses was the shepherd in Isaiah 63:11 that God brought up out of the land, or out of the sea. Different ways, different verses say different things. God brought up Moses and then with Moses, the sheep of the flock. God brought up Jesus from the dead, the greater Moses, the great shepherd of the sheep. And he brings us in his train. He brings us following him as Christians, and this means that we walk in that way of Jesus Christ.

So what we believe about things is absolutely critical. We don’t think that the end of the world comes with violence. We think that the transformation of the world comes with the preaching of the power of violence. We could say the dynamite of God, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is how we think the world is saved. The message of Christ—not ultimately. You know, they asked Girard about conservative Christian political people and he said, “Well, you know, an awful lot of them, they think that violence is the end of everything. They’re waiting, you know, just with their breath held for Jesus to come back and destroy everybody, all his enemies with violence, you see.”

Well, as I said, I’m not saying that there isn’t some truth to that. I mean, God does bring his judgments against his enemies. But Jesus transforms the world through the gospel of peace, through the gospel of forgiveness of sins, for dealing with people in that way. And people that reject this understanding of eschatology—that the world, that a better world has come, the transformation of the world happens through the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ—people that reject that tend to get stuck in cycles of violence and striking out and violence is what it’s all about.

So these are very important, critical verses as we come to the conclusion of this sermon. They tell us that what we’re talking about here is of tremendous importance. You know, all these so-called distinctives are important. How, when we come to church, we do things a little different now. You know, we want to learn from other churches. I’ll have you pray for an event October 22nd. Matt and I attended a meeting of the Oregon City pastors—a little smaller group of them—making plans for quarterly joint worship services. So the churches in Oregon City would like to every three months have a joint worship service.

And originally, this was just going to be, you know, they pick a worship team out that would lead it every three months. But our influence has changed that so that each church will conduct worship services that it hosts in its particular way that it sees worship as being. And in the providence of God, you know, it’s been decided that we’re going to have the first one of these here October 22nd in the evening starting at about 6:00.

So, you know, if the elders approve this—it’s a tentative thing, but and we’ve talked a little bit, but not a whole lot about it—but assuming that this goes ahead, you know, we want to work with the extended churches of Jesus Christ. We want to minister whatever gifts of worship we think we have to them, and we also want to be open to receiving gifts from them. So, you know, there is this catholicity that we’ve stressed, but don’t think that means that everything’s all the same.

It makes a difference that we come together in the Lord’s day trained as the army of God. When we sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” affirming the trinity of God, it means something to us. It means our culture is determined that way. You see, it means we don’t serve ultimately a God who is going to crush everything and a God of violence and power. And I mean, he’s holy. He is righteous. He certainly brings judgments in the earth. But ultimately, God is love. God is this trinity of community. And we think this is, you know, what determines our culture.

We come together to sing these songs. When we sing, you know, “Round the Lord in glory seated,” a martial theme, right? It’s a kind of an army marching thing. It’s almost hard for me standing up not to start marching along to that song. We are formed up as the army of God through what we think is our best understanding of how the liturgy is to flow based on the scriptures. And then we have a preponderance of Psalms or psalm-like songs to teach us that, you know, again, if you look at the Psalms and sing the Psalms, it transforms you.

You’re not supposed to come here and want to sing what you like to sing and transform the worship service by you. We’re supposed to come to the worship service and be transformed by God into this army for the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, the Psalms are filled with victory. But the Psalms are also filled with a great deal of suffering, are they not? A lot of those Psalms, you know, trouble, trouble, trouble. Well, that’s what we have.

If we’re going to follow the great shepherd, the Lord Jesus Christ, we’re going to have trouble in this world. And we are trained up how to go about the expansion and the manifestation of the kingdom of Jesus Christ by singing those Psalms. We’re formed up together into a mighty army of God. But it’s an army that sees that ultimately it’s through service to the community, service to other people, through proclaiming the peace of Jesus Christ, through deeds of love and kindness that the heavenly kingdom comes.

Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a place for arms and self-defense and armies and self-defense of Christian warfare or all that stuff. All that’s true, but ultimately we don’t put our trust in that. We put our trust in the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s the dynamite, the power of God that transforms the world. So our worship makes a difference. It makes a difference whether our children are brought to this table or not. It’s a means of grace for people to walk away from this church and have their children excluded from that table.

You know, I think that God is gracious to children being raised in Baptist churches in Oregon City, that his arm is not shortened. But if we think that it’s no big deal whether we have the Lord’s supper every week and whether our children are involved in that and whether it culminates our worship service, the peace that we experience there, we’re wrong. And if we turn our back on that, then I think it’s going to be to the detriment of our own Christian maturity and walk.

So these things make a difference. Eschatology makes a difference. Ethics makes a difference. What’s the standard for how we’re going to follow the shepherd? Well, how do we feed? How are we fed by our undershepherds? And how do we feed our families as shepherds of them? Well, if it doesn’t involve the law of God, an ethic based on God’s statutes and judgments and commandments, then we’re not feeding them. We’re starving them.

So, all these things make a tremendous difference. It makes a difference. So, let’s talk a little bit now and try to expand out. And for most of you, you’ll know most of this stuff, but let’s expand out a little bit about what this means. This line that Jesus is the great shepherd of the sheep. Now in Hebrews, we’ve already encountered this same term as the great shepherd because Jesus is described as the great high priest in chapter 4.

“Seeing then that we have a great high priest.” So remember what we learned—what we learned is that Jesus is not the same as the Old Testament priesthood. The new covenant, the old covenant was vanishing and going away. We needed a greater one. But that greater one is described in terms of what God has revealed in the past. So Jesus remains a high priest, but he is the great high priest, right?

And as this great high priest, by the way, this particular verse tells us, “For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are.” So remember that the designation of Jesus’s great high priest began with an emphasis on his sympathy, his empathy, his compassion for his people. The great shepherd cares for you. Cast all your care upon him knowing that he cares for you. The verse means he’s thinking of you.

So the great high priest and the great shepherd, the Lord Jesus Christ is identified as he who sympathizes. You see, now this is tremendous for us because if we’re going to be under-priests to the culture and world, and if we’re going to be under-shepherds in our families in this community, then it means that a big part of that is having compassion for people that suffer even under the context of the burden of their own hands.

You see, Jesus is compassion. He’s the great high priest. And then in Hebrews 10:19-25, we read, “Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the holiest by the blood of Jesus by a new and living way which he consecrated for us through the veil, that is his flesh. Having a”—now the King James, I think, says “high priest.” That’s wrong. “Having a great priest, it’s the same word great”—in Hebrews 10:19-25. “A great priest over the house of God.”

And so the great shepherd over the flock, the great priest over the house. These are the descriptions of Jesus in the context of this sermon. And we’re to draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our faith without wavering. For he who promised—this great priest is faithful. You see, faithful.

And so you might remember through the book of Hebrews: Jesus is the great high priest. He’s the great priest. And how is he described in his priestly function in two ways? And those ways are compassion and sympathy for those who are part of his flock and their struggles with their sins, etc., and secondly, faithfulness. Those are the two poles. He’s not so compassionate in our flawed definition of the term that he’s not faithful to the Father and to the Father’s word. But he’s not so faithful in an improper sense to that word and to God the Father that he isn’t compassionate toward those who struggle and fall in sin.

You see, those are the two poles. These are the kind of people we’re supposed to be—compassionate and faithful. So Jesus is the great priest. He’s the great high priest. Earlier in Hebrews as well, we read about Moses, going back citing from Exodus 3: Moses was a shepherd to the sheep. And so Jesus is—Moses is the shepherd from the Old Testament. That’s drawn for us in Isaiah 63, that we talked about.

And Jesus is the great shepherd of the sheep. So he’s distinct from Moses and yet not totally apart. We can look at the life of Moses as the book of Hebrews does and learn valuable lessons about who Jesus is. Now it’s not restricted just to Moses, but Moses is a shepherd in Isaiah 63:11. He’s a shepherd in leading forth the flock, just like Jesus is. But also in Exodus 3, Moses was tending his flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian.

And he leads the flock out—sorry, I misplaced a page here—but in Exodus 3, he’s in this—it’s when he’s shepherding the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro. This is when God comes to meet him and to call him to be a greater shepherd in the sense of leading his people out of Egypt. This is where God appears to Moses at the burning bush. We don’t think about that detail of the story, but it’s an important one.

Moses is fulfilling a shepherding role in terms of his father’s sheep. And we see this, you know, from one end of the scriptures to the other—the idea of the shepherd is, you know, just very important and prominent throughout the Bible. You know, even in Genesis 4, the first—you know, Abel is a tender of—is in the context of flocks and herds. He’s a keeper of sheep. So the very first righteous martyr, so to speak, is also a shepherd.

In Genesis 13, Abram’s herdsmen, shepherds strive with the herdsmen of Lot. And so the idea is that you know, there are—the shepherd has to be the good shepherd as Jesus describes himself in John 10—because both sides, so to speak, have shepherds. But shepherd is a concept that goes throughout the Old Testament. So Jesus is described as the great shepherd of the sheep.

The primary reference in Hebrews is to Moses, but in a broader sense, Jesus is the greater Abel. He’s the greater Jacob. Remember, Jacob, you know, helps his wife to water her flocks by moving the stone off the well. So he’s a shepherd. He provides sustenance to—Moses, as we said, is a shepherd. Joseph is, you know, taking charge of tending his father’s flocks. He’s a shepherd. David, of course, is the great shepherd that we think of in the Old Testament.

So Jesus is the greater David, the greater Abel, the greater Moses, the greater Jacob. Isaac’s herdsmen strive with other shepherds. So all these pictures in the book of Genesis and then throughout the rest of the Old Testament are fulfilled in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so in each of those—what we can do then is we have a justification if we’re looking at a whole Bible approach to what this shepherding is all about.

What does it mean that Jesus is a shepherd? And what we want to apply again our biblical categories instead of, you know, bringing in whatever idea we have about peace or about being brought out of death or what it means to be a shepherd and think about, you know, how you take care of sheep. Well, that’s okay. That’s useful. But beyond that, we want to look at the inspired word of God to tell us what is being told about who Jesus is. As a result, who we are to be as Christians.

We’re to be comforted by this great knowledge of Jesus as the shepherd, the great shepherd of the sheep. And we’re also to be formed up by it. If we’re following this shepherd as sheep, then we’re also going to have—Jesus tells us—he establishes under-shepherds to do his work as well.

Now in Isaiah 63, we remember that this shepherd reference is first there. We read in verse 11: “Then he remembered the days of old, Moses and the people, saying, ‘Where is he who brought them up out of the sea with the shepherd of his flock? Where is he who put his holy spirit within them?’” The Spirit brings the great shepherd to us. And that Spirit is a spirit that shepherds God’s people through men—Moses, ultimately Jesus, and then through his under-shepherds.

And Isaiah 63 says that the purpose of the shepherd is to again bring people out of death into life. So, it is—you know, in the Bible in the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, you look up the reference to shepherds—they’re mostly indictments against the shepherds because the shepherds are saying everything’s cool when everything isn’t cool in Israel. They’re sinning. They’re in horrible sin against God and the shepherds are saying “peace when there is no peace,” and I think we would have to say, as much as we—you know, we don’t want to think of ourselves as better than everybody else—but we have to say that there are many shepherds in America that need to hear that passage of judgment.

They are not bringing their flocks out of the ways of death into the ways of life. They’re not doing their job in terms of trying to bring their children out of the dead, ministering public school system and provide positive educational alternatives for those involved in that system. That’s just one example. If all we do is hear from the pulpit that Jesus has saved us for heaven and then we don’t hear the statutes and judgments and aren’t fed with those things in terms of how to live, we’re not being led out of the realm of death again, and God’s people suffer in the context of that realm.

So the shepherd, by the immediate reference from Isaiah 63 that’s being cited here, is to bring God’s people out of the realms of death into the realm of life—holistic life now, all across the board. And as a result of this it says, “then to make for himself an everlasting name who leads them through the deep. As a beast goes down into the valley verse 14, the spirit of the Lord causes him to rest.”

Now, this is another big theme and it’s one that we don’t like. Maybe if I’m going to rest when I want to rest, that’s not exactly the biblical picture. What does David say in Psalm 23? What does the shepherd do? He makes me lie down. You see, in our anxiety, we tend to want to run around like a sheep does and die. But the shepherd says, “No, past.”

Now and the Lord—this is why again it makes a difference what we do at the Lord’s day—and I know that you know there are good men that disagree, but it’s our concept of elders that we’re to make the people lie down and rest on the Lord’s day. We need that, and this is a job of the under-shepherds of Jesus Christ to cause God’s people to—force them—makes me lie down to rest.

So bringing out of—life is the job of the shepherd—or out of death rather into life—and it is a life that is characterized by a calm and stillness that is particularly evident on the Lord’s day, the keeping of the Lord’s day, making us to lie down and rest in the work of Jesus and that we carry that into our week then as we get back up and do the work.

1 Peter 5:1-4 talks about these under-shepherds. “The elders who are among you I exhort, I who am a fellow elder and witness of the sufferings of Christ and also a partaker of the glory that will be revealed. Well, see, you know, to partake of glory, we have to be partaker of the sufferings. So, we follow Jesus in his obedience to the Father. We go through the trials and tribulations knowing that just as creation went dark six times, when it comes back up, it’s a better creation. It’s a better world.

Even before the fall, these cycles of going down into deep sleep, death-like sleep, we could say, and the creation comes back up. This is just what happens to Adam, right? He goes into deep sleep and when he wakes up, the world’s a lot better place. It’s a lot better place. Just so thankful to God for my wife and it’s been a wonderful thing and I know it is for all of you, too. It’s just a great gift. Well, that happened through death of Adam, right? I mean, not all the way down, but down into coma-like sleep.

So, we partakers of the glory by partakers of the sufferings. But then verse two, he tells these elders to “shepherd the flock of God which is among you, serving as overseers, not by compulsion but willingly, not for dishonest gain but eagerly, not as being lords over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that does not fade away.”

So pastors and elders are called to shepherd the flock. They’re under-shepherds to the chief shepherd, the great shepherd of the sheep. They are called then to do this work of bringing God’s people out of the realms of death, leading them into paths of life, equipping them for the good work—not just the critique work. Yeah, you got to tear apart the rubble, and then you got to build something new. And that’s what we’re trying to do—focus on that.

And the under-shepherds are responsible to have this occur in the life of the congregation. God says it’s up. It is part of who we are.

Now, the great demonstration or picture of Jesus as the chief shepherd is found in John chapter 10. Why don’t you turn there? Turn to John chapter 10 and we’ll look at this section of the scriptures that tells us so much about Jesus and his shepherding work.

John 10:1—”Assuredly I say to you, he who does not enter the sheep fold by the door but climbs up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. He who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. So this is Jesus. He’s saying, ‘I am the shepherd.’ To him, the doorkeeper opens and the sheep hears his voice and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. Okay? So the shepherd knows the sheep and he leads them out.

Now we’ll look at a couple of verses in a minute, but this idea of going in and out, going out, going in—this is another—I’ll read a verse in a couple of minutes that talks about this—this is the shepherd’s job for the sheep to go out and in with them. And in the Old Testament, if you go to that, you know, that phrase and how it’s used, it means conquest. An army goes in and out here and there roundabout. So, the shepherd leads his people in these paths of life and he leads them into proper warfare, biblical warfare, not by violence, but by proclaiming the implications of the gospel of Christ.

The shepherd leads a conquering sheepfold. He leads them out and they go back in. They go in and out. And this is a metaphor for accomplishing the purposes of God in the world. “When he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them and the sheep follow him for they know his voice.”

So again, just like Isaiah 63:11, God raises up Jesus from the dead. He goes before us and we see in that what our life is. The sheep follow the shepherd. We know his voice. Where does that voice come from? By the way, it comes from your pastors, your under-shepherds. You don’t hear the voice of Jesus ringing in your ear apart from other people speaking to you. Normally, now the Holy Spirit can speak to your heart, but normally you hear the voice of God’s under-shepherds and you follow them.

Children, you hear the voice of mom and dad and it’s the voice of Jesus shepherding you through mom and dad. You see, you should think of it that way. How do the sheep hear his voice today? Jesus is not here. They hear him through other people. The Holy Spirit using other members of Christ’s body to speak to them. And so they follow him. He goes before them. The same thing that Isaiah 63:11 and Hebrews 13:20 says—God has raised up from the dead the Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep.

And then drop down to verse 9. “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved. Go in and out and find pasture. So here again, we have that metaphor of in and out. You’ll go ahead. You’ll do the work of seizing in the world. You’re not just saved to then, you know, tread water, do the dog paddle for the next 30 years of your life. No, you’re saved to go in and out and accomplish things for the purposes of Jesus—preaching the gospel. I mean, not overtly, but through how you live your life and you convert people just through that means.

And so they go in and out, and he gives them pasture. So, of course, we know this, but here’s a text that tells us explicitly that it’s the job of the pastor to feed the sheep—to pasture. Okay. So, he feeds them and in feeding them equips them for the going in and out, for the warfare, the spiritual warfare that they’ll accomplish by being obedient servants of Jesus in their business and their family and their recreation, whatever it is.

Verse 11, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep.” So, see, this is the call to death. And we ordained there. And I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago—elders are ordained. They get hands placed upon them. And when you put your hand on the lamb in the Old Testament, the next thing that happens is his throat gets slit. So elders are called as under-shepherds to suffer the loss of life for the sake of the sheep.

So Jesus is the shepherd. We’ve been told that they’re under-shepherds. We can look at what Jesus does—leading people in and out, giving them pasture and laying down his life for the sheep.

Now the Lord God always has interesting—not always, but certain weeks I have very interesting sermon preparation. And this week was no exception. In fact, this was a stellar week in sermon preparation. The providence of God—preparing for this task, this sermon of course begins after my sermon ends the Sunday before. And Sunday evening, I received notice of an attack on one of the sheep of another church that I’m a member of the session of—not this church.

And so, you know, from a professing Christian attack, a horrible attack. And so, you know, we discussed it and the elders of this other church go to the defense of this person. We talk to the person that is attacking and unable to bring him to repentance. This attack was circulated to a list of 65 email addresses. I get an email from Randy Booth, the moderator of our denomination, Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches. “What’s going on here?” He was given a copy of this.

So this attack on a member of a CREC church that I’m a pastor over came, and the pastors of this church step up. We’re the good shepherds. We’ll take the bullet if need be. So, we enter into the defense of this sheep. And as a result of this, by the end of the week, I’m threatened with physical violence on Friday. Somebody’s going to come beat me up. And then on Saturday, I wake up and the first thing I hear is my message on my phone from this person telling me that they hope that my soul rots in hell eternally.

So, okay. And I, you know, I don’t handle this all that well at the time. I don’t handle it real poorly, but I could have done better. But I’m thinking to myself, by the end of Saturday night, this all has been preparation. It’s a demonstration that you have to step up to defend the sheep. And if you need to take a bullet for Christ’s precious flock, you’re going to do that.

Now, I don’t have to take one physically yet. Hopefully I won’t be so dumb. The other thing that was very interesting about this point of sermon preparation was at the beginning of this week there were statements about what a great guy I was and how this person never had trouble with me, but he wanted to blame another pastor and he wanted me to join in in scapegoating this other person for the problems that this other guy sees. And I wouldn’t do it. I wasn’t nasty about it, but I said, “Well, I’m not going to go down that road of scapegoating another pastor. He may have faults, may have contributed, but at the end of the day, you know, I’m not going to scapegoat him.”

So, by the end of the week, the same man who was trying to get me to scapegoat another pastor and was saying that I was somebody that he always respected—by the end of the week, I’m the one who’s now the scapegoat who he wants to destroy and see roasted eternally in hell. That’s the way it works. That’s the way the fallen world is. You see, it’s a demonstration of this whole scapegoating mentality even in the context of the Christian church.

And shepherds, they have to be committed. They have to understand that when people go sideways, it’s either in or out of the church. This is what they’re going to do. They’re going to attack you. So, we’re training a couple of men for to become elders maybe in the next six months. And so, you know, I talked to them about this incident, which involved them and get used to it. This is what you’re going to have to do, okay? Because we’re under-shepherds to Jesus and we have to be willing, you know, for the sake of defending the flock and preserving them and pasturing them and all that stuff, we have to take, you know, the verbal assaults or if need be the physical assaults.

Now, you parents know what this is about, right? You know that if somebody comes to your home and attacks your children, you’re going to step up and if he’s got a gun pointed at your wife or your children, you’re going to step in front and if need be, you’ll take that bullet for the family. Right. Well, I hope it’s right and I hope you see that’s what you’re called to do.

Now, it’s never that, you know, heroic. It doesn’t never come like that kind of, you know, it doesn’t actually usually have somebody pointing a gun at you, but you have to be willing and committed to pastoring and shepherding your flock, the subset of the flock that you’ve got to suffer abuse, humiliation, ridicule, public slander, all that stuff, you see, because that’s what Jesus did. And that’s the path that leads to glory.

You have to be willing to sink down into death. That’s what happened to me this week. You know, all kinds of people know you’re a jerk and want you to rot in hell. There’s death to my reputation that’s occurring. And we have to be willing to follow the shepherd because God is going to raise us up from that death. You see, he went to death for us. And definitively, of course, we don’t do what he does in terms of—he then says that he willingly lays down his life and he will take it up again.

We can’t take up our lives, but we can trust that he in the power of the spirit as we do our shepherding job, you see, God will raise us up in better form. We got to remember the days of creation. We got to remember, you know, how do you get that beautiful wife? You die. Well, how do you get, you know, to the next stage of whatever the glory is that God wants you to have? You die. And if you do that, you see, if you remember that, if you remember Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, and what he did for us, then you’ll continue to move in your shepherding responsibilities that God gives you faithfully to him.

You will lay down your life, if need be, for the sheep voluntarily, stepping up and taking the abuse, if necessary, the bullet. And he says that the hireling flees when this happens because he’s a hireling. Verse 13—he doesn’t care about the sheep. The under-shepherds love the sheep enough to not take off when the time gets tough, but to step up and if need be, you know, suffer death.

“I’m the good shepherd. I know my sheep and I am known by my own.” How are they, you know, how do we know Jesus? Because he does this. Because he’s willing to do that, he loves us so much that he lays down his life for ours. How do you know your shepherds, your pastors? How do you know your parents? Well, hopefully because your parents and your pastors have set before you examples of stepping up if need be in your defense and taking forms of death upon themselves to help you. Okay.

And verse—oh, by the way, verse 17: “Therefore, my Father loves me because I laid down my life that I may take it again.” Tremendous verse of comfort to under-shepherds when they go through death of any sort, and you always go through some form of death to lead people and serve them. You’re putting their interests in front of your own. Every parent knows that. Well, understand—it looks like you got that little black cloud over you. You’re going through all kind of trouble for this or that purpose as a parent, as a pastor.

But understand and remember this verse: that the great shepherd of the sheep says that the Father loves him because he lays down his life for the sheep. So the very time that you are most tempted to doubt the goodness of God—why is he letting this man curse my eternal soul? Why is he letting this guy come to threaten to beat me up? You know, well, if you remember this verse, you know that as you do your job as under-shepherd, as you lay down your life for the sheep and for specific people, then the Lord God loves you for that.

This is the great sin we have. The problem, the unbelief we have, is doubting the Father’s love. And God assures us of his love through the most unusual of circumstances. God is not as we are. God says that he loves us and we will experience that love, I believe, most when we willingly lay down our life for those that God has entrusted to our particular care.

This is a tremendous truth that these verses give us over and over again. The great shepherd of the sheep, God calls us as under-shepherds. He calls us to be willing to lay down our lives for the sheep. And then he says that even in the midst of that, it looks like the darkest hour, but really it’s the brightest hour. The Father loves you because you’re willing to do just that.

Let’s stop there. Let’s pray.

Father God, we thank you for your great love for us. We thank you for the great shepherd of the sheep, the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you that because of the blood of the eternal everlasting covenant, the covenants of promise in the Old Testament, all being subsets of them, because of that blood, you have raised him from the dead. Help us, Lord God, when we must bleed for the sheep to accept it with honor and proudly, knowing that we serve you and that your love is showered upon us in those most difficult of times.

Lord God, I know that to some extent each one of us here are shepherds in some way or other in terms of our families, in terms of different places of work we’re in, in terms of our culture. We pray Lord God that you would empower each of us as sheep becoming shepherds to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord God, we thank you that we are sheep collectively, that you flock us up together, you bring us into the fold of Jesus Christ and we move in the context of that fold.

Help us, Father, this week to be those who cling to one another, who encourage each other to do this good work of following the great shepherd of the sheep, not fearing the death that might happen as we do our shepherding jobs, but rather embracing that, knowing that the end result of suffering is glory. Thank you, Lord God, for the tremendous truth of the gospel of our savior and the way it’s transformed the world, transformed our lives now.

Father, may we have faith. Give us the gift of grace from the Holy Spirit. Give us the gift of faith. And as we come forward to bring the results of our work this week to you, bless us, Lord God, as we come forward committing ourselves afresh to follow the great shepherd of the sheep, our Lord Jesus.

In his name we ask it. Amen.