"People With a Purpose" Part III

Sermon: Fifth Sunday of Easter year A

The Rev. Matt Kennedy

The Church of the Good Shepherd

Usually when I’m preaching through a sermon series, like I have been for the last two weeks and I come up on a special Sunday, like today, Good Shepherd Sunday, I have a dilemma, do I preach on the assigned readings or do I keep preaching through the series? Well, today, by the grace of God, I don’t have to make that choice.

The sermon series I’ve been preaching is based on Acts 2, why don’t we go ahead and find Acts 2, and it concerns the tasks each church must engage in to fulfill God’s purpose. We’ve named 1 so far, to preach the gospel to the lost, the people in the world who don’t know Jesus Christ.

We said last week that once this message is preached and people believe, they are called first thing, to participate in their local church because it is within the local church that the remaining four more tasks all found in Acts 2 are accomplished: 1. To be devoted to the apostle’s teaching, 2. To be devoted to fellowship 3. To be devoted to the breaking of the bread and 4. To be devoted to prayer.”

This week I wanted to take up the first task listed here, being devoted to the apostles teaching and maybe as I explain what it means you’ll see why the dilemma I thought I was going to face this morning disappeared when I read this morning’s gospel.

What do you think the “apostles teaching” consisted of? What were the apostles teaching about? Right, they were teaching about Jesus. These first believers listened to the apostles because the apostles were the 11 guys who knew Jesus best, who’d followed him day and night for three years. They were first-hand hearers of the things Jesus said and first hand witnesses of the things that he did. They could tell you about his miracles and they could tell you about his sermons. They could tell you about his birth, because his mom, Mary was with them, and they could tell you about his death, burial and resurrection they were witnesses to it all.

So essentially what the apostles did was tell these new believers everything they knew about Jesus and the new believers were dedicated, devoted the text says, to hearing it, why? Because, now that they had invited Jesus into their hearts they had a real living relationship with him. Jesus is not dead. So while these stories and teachings the disciples were passing on may have taken place in the past they concerned the life of someone who had become part of their present life, someone who had come to live and dwell in the very deepest parts of their hearts and so it was like being in love for the first time, they wanted to know everything about him and the more they knew and the more they learned about his life and teachings, the more they got to know the Jesus they loved. So they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching because they were devoted to Jesus and there was something about the apostles teaching that connected them more deeply to him.

So maybe you can see why I think this morning’s gospel plays right into the sermon I was already going to preach? Let’s read part of it together, John 10:2-5, “The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep. The watchman opens the gate for him and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.” The gospel lesson is all about a shepherd and his sheep and this part specifically focuses on the power of the Shepherd‘s voice. Who’s the shepherd? Yes, Jesus, and the people who believe the gospel and ask Jesus to come into their lives become his sheep. So the Sheep and the Shepherd have an intimate connection.

Notice what the Shepherd does. He leads the sheep out of their old pen by calling their names. They come out and they follow his voice. They know his voice. Now sheep are pretty dumb creatures, they need a shepherd. In the west most shepherding is done by sheepdogs who run around and bark at the sheep until they go where the shepherd wants them to go.

But in the middle east the herding is not done by dogs, but by the shepherd himself. The shepherd and the sheep spend so much time together that the sheep begin to adopt the shepherd as their head-sheep, they don’t see him as a human so much as they see him as a very large strange looking alpha sheep who always seems to know where the water is and where the greenest pastures lay. After a while the sheep know the Shepherd so well, all he has to do is call out, and they will follow.

Jesus is saying in the gospel, I’m like that shepherd and you’re like my sheep. If you believe in me I will live in your heart and you will come to know my voice and follow me when I call to you.

The reason the believers in Acts 2 devoted themselves to the apostles teaching is because through that teaching they heard the voice of the Shepherd. Jesus himself led his sheep through the words and teachings of the apostles. I’m not just making this connection out of thin air. On the night before he died Jesus made two very special promises to the apostles.

First, he promised to send them the Holy Spirit, who would live in their hearts. We talked about that two Sundays ago.

Second, he promised that the Holy Spirit would, and I’m going to quote now from John 14:26 and16:13-14, “The…Holy Spirit…will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you… [he will] guide you [the disciples] into all truth. He [the Spirit] will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you.” Jesus promised the apostles, and only the apostles, that he would lead and guide his people, the sheep, us, directly through their teachings. The teachings of Peter, John, Matthew, all of them, were really the teachings of Jesus Christ through them. When the apostles taught, they taught accurately and without error because Jesus himself was making his truth known to them and they were passing it on to his sheep. The apostles teaching in Acts 2 is the voice of the Shepherd leading the sheep. And being devoted to it is the first of the four remaining tasks listed.

That was fine for the first believers, but how can we possibly do that now? Jesus is still alive in heaven and in our hearts, but the apostles are long dead. What fortunate people those early believers were to have the apostles teaching them day after day, becoming more and more familiar with the Shepherd’s voice and being led through every trial and circumstance by Christ himself speaking through his disciples. I sure wish we could have an experience like that here and now.

I guess we’ll just have to muddle through life, lost sheep trying to figure out where the Shepherd wants us to go with no real way of knowing for sure.

Is that right?

No.

Pick up your bibles and open them to Matthew. Did you know that everything to the right of Matthew all the way to the last book, Revelation, is the teaching of Christ through his apostles recorded for us in writing.

Every single book in the New Testament was either written by an apostle directly or read and approved by an apostle and because of that we can know that we are holding in our hands the complete and infallible teaching of Christ given to his church by virtue of the Holy Spirit. You not only hear Matthew Mark Luke and John, Peter, James, Jude and Paul, you hear the voice of the Shepherd Jesus Christ.

And so it is our calling to be devoted to these teachings, heart and mind. To listen, read, study and follow because these are the living words of our living God. Any individual believer and any church that loses this devotion, is a ship without a rudder, a traveler without a map, a sheep without a shepherd and he she or it will get lost.

I thank God for your devotion to the Shepherd’s voice. About 50% of the people who come here every Sunday attend a bible study during the week.

It’s our goal to bring it up to 100%.

To be a healthy, thriving, and growing flock, a local church can’t be made up of deaf sheep. Deaf sheep get lost, get taken by wolves, or get left behind in old familiar pastures. A flock, a church, made up of sheep who devote themselves to the master’s voice is led to green pastures and beside still waters.

Amen