I Am the Door (John 10:1–10)

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Vanessa Hawkins: Did anybody in this place come to behold Jesus this morning? I did too. I did too. Let’s behold Him. Now, let’s go to John 10. We’re going to read verses one through 10. John 10, verses one through 10, and it reads truly, truly. I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber, but he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him, the gatekeeper opens the sheep hear His voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know His voice a stranger. They will not follow, and they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers, this figure of speech Jesus used with them, but they did not understand what it was that he was saying to them. So Jesus said to them, 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 listen to them. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. Now in these 10 short verses, Scripture introduces Jesus both as the door of the sheep and the shepherd of the sheep. And in our time together, of course, we’re going to focus on the door. And if the Bible is unfamiliar to you, starting with Jesus, making this declaration that I am the door of the sheep might seem strange as it would starting in the middle of any story. So to that end, we’ll travel back to the beginning together so that we can sink our teeth into the meat of this text and discover why it is such good news that Jesus is the door. So to get us to get there together, today, I’m going to talk about the day the door closed, looking for access another way, and Jesus as the door. For those of you who are my note takers the day the door closed, looking for access another way, and Jesus as the door. Now I must admit, as I’ve been preparing for this message, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my dad and as a little girl, I just wanted to follow him everywhere. I wanted to do what I saw him do. I wanted to be anywhere that he was, and even if it was riding in his old black 1963 Ford, f1, 100. F1, 100 pickup truck getting our hands dirty together in the garden. And even occasionally he’d let me shoot his gun when he went hunting in the woods. But wherever he was, I just wanted to be there. And as you may have guessed from the activities that I named, I wasn’t quite the prissy little girl. I was right, right? I was more of that barefoot rock climbing, rock throwing, tree climbing, mud pie making garden variety daddy’s girl. And so he would take me to school in his pickup truck, and when we got home, I would sit on his lap, and I would tell him every mundane detail of my day. I would tell him about all the games we played at recess. I would tell him how Chuck wore his Superman t shirt. And then I would tell him how Renee wouldn’t even share her crayon. I mean, he got all of the kindergarten scandal. He knew all of it. I told him all of it and how, of course, I had to teach Miss Joyce how to dance. Our teacher told him all of it. And you know what I remember about those times most is the welcome I felt when I went to him. He never hesitated in. To receive me because my feet were too dirty or because I was still wearing my lunch, or bits of the playground from recess. He always was glad to see me. Always wanted to be near me, and he always wanted to hear the details of my day. And I know he loved me because he would rejoice in the last mundane detail as much as he had the first I knew in those moments that I was completely loved, completely delighted in. And it’s the picture that my mind goes to over and over again when I consider the relationship that our Heavenly Father longs to have with us, it was the relationship our first parents, Adam and Eve, knew all too well on countless days they had enjoyed sweet time with the Lord, with the Father, up close and personal. They had run to him to tell him all that they had been seeing and doing in the garden, and he delighted in every detail. He knew Eve’s favorite flower and he knew Adam’s favorite view of the garden they were naked before him, but not just physically.

They were naked before him, emotionally naked and not ashamed. He knew them, and they knew him, until the one day when they heard the voice of God walking through the garden in the cool of the day as Genesis three records, they didn’t run to him that day. No, instead, they hid. And we hear the heart of God breaking as he calls out, Adam, where are you? It’s always fascinating to me to hear God ask a question. You know, the God of all wisdom, knowledge and understanding, asking a question is clear that it’s not because he needs to know the answer. He already does. He’s asking it because we need to know the answer. I can remember having my three daughters at home. I home schooled for like seven years, and I can remember having them at home and they’d be playing off in the house, somewhere in another room, and usually that was chaos, right? Three girls, there was loud shrills, and long as toys were clanking together, and as long as there was laughter and just a roar from the room, I knew everything was as it should be, but it was when things went quiet that was a bit problematic. You know, that eerie quiet that’s just a little too quiet. Yeah. So when that would happen, I would say, Hey, girls, what you doing in there? And I didn’t really need to ask them what they were doing there, because depending upon what part of the house they were in, I knew the particular brand of mischief that they likely were into. But I would ask the question so that they could assess where they were, to see if they were doing what they should be doing. Jesus says, God says to Adam, Adam, where are you? In essence, saying, consider where you are. Consider where I put you. I made you to be up close and personal. I made you to be an intimate communion with me. You’ve done this thing and you’ve separated yourself from me. You’ve eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and you have exchanged my presence for shameful hiding Adam. Where are you?

In giving Adam and Eve the boundaries for flourishing in the garden, he told them that the day that they ate of this tree that would be the day that they would surely die. And being a God who cannot lie, Adam and Eve’s rebellion ushered death into the world that spread to all humanity, including you and me. And yet the father knowing that the fig leaves that they hid behind was insufficient to cover their shame, so he graciously shed the blood of an animal to cover their nakedness. I. It was then that he promised to send a remedy, someone who would crush the head of the enemy and someone and that the enemy would bruise his heel. He promised a Savior, and it is the Father Himself that we hear in the garden preaching the gospel for the first time, and in his kindness and in his severe mercy, He put Adam and Eve out of the garden and put angels with flaming swords to keep them from re entering, because to re enter in a state of death, the state of death that they were in, and then to eat from the tree of life would be to trap it, to be trapped in a state of death forever. So he put them out of the garden, and in His mercy, He put an angel with the flaming sword to keep them from returning in. That’s the day that the door closed any intimacy that they had known with the father was lost. And so how then do we know that this Jesus who shows up on the page of our text is the one that the Father has promised the apostle John tells us, from the beginning of the gospel in chapter one, verse 10, that this God, man, Jesus, was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know Him. The Pharisees, these Jewish teachers of the law, followed him from place to place, opposing his teaching and asking if he was the one. Are you the one the father promised, the one that they had read about in Scriptures, the one that they have been anticipating since their youth? Could this be the one? And Jesus, being the master communicator that he is, gives them a parable, a figure of speech in the language of their world.

Those in the audience would have had at least a sheep or two in that culture, and so he talks about sheep and sheepfolds to communicate deeper truth. He says in verse one, truly, truly. I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. Now those listening would have been familiar with sheep and sheepfolds. They would have understood a sheepfold to just be a stone sheep pen with only one entrance. But what was less clear and perhaps even offensive was exactly who is Jesus Calling a thief and a robber. He says that. He says he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. And when they didn’t understand it, he says it to them again in verse seven, he doubles down on it. He says, I am the door of the sheep. And all who came before me were thieves and robbers. And if you’re like me, you hear this and say, is Wait, wait, is Jesus throwing shade? I mean, because surely there were some faithful teachers of the law that came before him, right? I mean, why is he saying this harsh thing? Well, consider who’s in his audience, those following him around and opposing the truth of the gospel and suggesting that there’s another way to the Father, He says, Those who search for another way outside this gospel truth that I’m proclaiming, that man is a thief and a robber. So why is he making this distinction between thieves and robbers? Well, I want to tell you this thieves and robbers have the same end goal, to separate you from your stuff, right? The same end goal, they just go about it slightly differently. Thieves, the connotation of that, it tends to be thieves are a little bit more covert, a little bit more sly about it, little bit more discreet. A robber is more blatant, more bold in his deeds, and it might even involve violent theft when we’re talking about robbers. And so when Jesus enters the temple in Matthew 21 and he calls the money changers and the people selling animals a den of robbers, I find that interesting. He.

Had a whip of cords, drove them out of the temple with their with their animals, poured out the money changers, money turned over tables. Suffice it to say he was furious. And why? He said to them, it is written, My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers. That’s violent theft. I’ve looked at this passage many times and thought that Jesus outrage was just about irreverence in his father’s house. And while it is about that, it’s about so much more than that. It wasn’t inherently wrong for a money changer to be a money changer or to sell animals. People would need animals if they were going into the temple to worship and to sacrifice the animals for worship, but what was wrong was their heart posture and their priorities. What Jesus was accusing them of stealing was far greater than money and far more precious than money. He was accusing them of stealing other people’s access to the Father. You see, the outer courts was the only place in the temple that was open to all people, including non Jewish persons, women and foreigners. And so that’s the significance of Jesus saying that his father’s house was to be a house of prayer for all nations, including non Jewish people and immigrants. And so the money changers setting up shop in the outer courts was akin to them setting up a convenience store for those who were going further into the temple. And they were disrupting the worship, though, of those in the outer courts who already had very limited access, and so their worship space was being completely overrun and disrupted by animal purchases for the convenience of those with greater status going inside, the money changers sought their own gain to the disadvantage of those worshiping in the outer courts, and Jesus was livid, yes, at the irreverence, but also at the bold injustice, the blatant robbery of those being denied access to worship and to pray to his father in his father’s house, when he says his house is To be a house of prayer for all nations. It means not just for the people that we deserve need to be accommodated, not just for the people that we prefer, or who are like us, or the ones who can increase us the most, but for all nations, all people groups. It means we don’t get to exclude what who he has included. We don’t get to disinvite who he has invited. It means we don’t get to put practices into place that deny any people group access from coming into the Lord’s house. He says, My house is to be a house of prayer for all nations, yet you have turned it into a den of robbers. And I want to suggest to us that the moment that we communicate to people that they need Jesus plus something else, is the moment that we take on the role of the thief and the robber, the moment that we communicate that in order to get into the family of God, you need Jesus plus something else. That’s the moment that we become the thieves and the robbers who put up barriers to the Father to protect our sameness. The money changers of that day didn’t care about the sheep, those worshipers in the outer court. They didn’t care about them. Their system boldly disadvantaged the most vulnerable for the benefit of the most influential.

Vanessa Hawkins
Jesus wasn’t having it. He called them a den of robbers, bold in their theft of the worship space for those on the lower rungs of society who came to pray and worship their god. He says this. He says, All who came before me were thieves and robbers. And to put a finer point on it, in verse 10, he says, The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy. And I want to tell you that this kind of thievery that he’s talking about isn’t petty theft. It’s not a victimless crime. It robs the sheep of the life of worship and flourishing for which he was created. Jesus says that the thief’s purpose is to steal, kill and destroy you. Yeah. Now it’s easy for us to consider thievery that happened in the garden right, that Satan, deceiving Eve, twisting God’s words, robbing them of their contentment, ushering spiritual death into the world and destroying their intimate relationship with the Father. But what is perhaps harder to see is that there is still a very real and present enemy who exists to steal, kill and destroy. And I know we get uncomfortable talking about the devil in such sophisticated and enlightened spaces, but I want to suggest to you that a part of our problem is that many of us don’t even know we’re in a fight.

We have a real enemy who is actively seeking to steal, kill and to destroy everything that’s good and holy in our lives, and we’re afraid to call it what it is. We are constantly being discipled by the image of Gods of our culture. We take in so many false cultural narratives in the run of a day that contradict the truth of the gospel and rob us of the truth and the flourishing that we were created for. I was recently talking to this young man about his dating relationship, and he was this about this young lady that he was interested in pursuing, and I was encouraging him to seek to be a genuine friend to her, and told him that any lasting relationship would at least start with that. And he was very honest in letting me know that. Well, you know, that’s not really required anymore. I’m just they talk to me like that. Y’all, they say some stuff to me. They say some stuff. I’m just saying. I’m gonna give you the clean version, all right. And so he says, Now that’s not really required anymore. Dating, dating is really about just kind of being open to anything, and sex is purely really, it’s just transactional. And so it doesn’t need to be complicated by, you know, love, commitment and all of that old school stuff. And so I listened for a while, and then finally I stopped him, and I told him, I said, Son, everything new ain’t improved the Word of God is still true no matter how learned and enlightened we think we’ve become. What he was really telling me is that he had found another way he thought to the good life, and for him, that was sexual freedom. It was about using his body to do whatever felt good, and it falsely assumes that real freedom is found in our own taught, our own autonomy, you know, doing whatever we want to do with these bodies. But can I tell you that no created being has unlimited freedom. We’re all bound by something. And so for him, the so called sexual freedom sound like the good life. But while we have the freedom to choose our actions, we are most definitely bound to the consequences of the choice. And so this sexual freedom that was a good life to him had the potential to bind him to unwanted pregnancies, child support, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual addiction, shallow relationships, emptiness, loneliness, on and on and on, because what seems like the way to the really good life really is just a lie whispered in the culture by a master thief, and it’s not the only lie He’s telling. I’ll bet he’s whispering some to you, and we are most vulnerable to these lies in the places of our deepest discontentment. So it’s reasonable then to ask ourselves where those places might be. Where are the places in your own heart of endless striving, where it seems you can never really be satisfied? Where is your place of greatest struggle and greatest discontentment? Those are the places where we are most likely to be tempted to look for another way for happiness, those places of deep longing where we’re convinced that if we just had blank we would be happy. For some it’s the longing for. A thinner waistline. Yeah, I signed up for that, or for others to turn back the signs of aging. That’s the way to contentment. For some, it’s just needing more certificate, one more certificate, one more degree to prove their significance. For some, is to get a certain number of social media followers, or endlessly seeking for love and approval in bad relationships. For some, it’s the pursuit of money and financial security that just continues to elude us and on and on and on. And none of these things and themselves are bad goals. It’s just when our desires become all consuming and when the good thing becomes the ultimate thing, that we turn the corner to idolatry, that inordinate desire for something other than God. I think it’s Martin Luther who tells us that underneath every act of idolatry is a disbelief in the Gospel, or, in other words, a belief that there is another way to abundant life. Those idols teach us and expose for us that we’re really not convinced that we can never be good enough, pretty enough, rich enough, smart enough to find lasting satisfaction. We look for other ways to abundant life and all the other ways. I want to tell you they’re thieves and robbers that enslave us. They fool us into looking for satisfaction that they can never really offer us. They keep us distracted and striving and restless, wasting our time, wasting our energy, surrendering our peace, always promising what it can never deliver. Thieves and robbers. Now it’s worth asking what’s been robbing you? What are you putting in an ordinate amount of time and resources into and never really finding any satisfaction? It’s essential that we identify these thieves and robbers and arrest them with the truth of the gospel. I just want to urge you to not let them roam free in your life and live rent free in your head. The enemy whispers lies on repeat in our lives, telling us we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough, we’re not thin enough, we’re not rich enough, we’re not good enough, and in a million other ways that we don’t measure up to some other poor, unsuspecting woman who has just as many issues as we do, we can Only combat those lies by preaching the gospel to ourselves over and over again, and instead of being imprisoned by the lies of the enemy, we have to continue to speak the truth that sets the captives free. But in order to do that, we have to be so gospel scripture saturated that we can quickly recognize what’s not truth and challenge it with the truth of the gospel that, my friends, is how you arrest a thief. Jesus says it’s the thief who comes to steal, kill and destroy.

Vanessa Hawkins
Jesus draws a stark contrast between what the thief comes to do and then what he comes to do. He says, The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. I came that they might have life and have it abundantly. He says in verse nine that those who enter through the door go in and out and find good pasture. Now, as good students of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, the Pharisees, would have known that when Jesus said that they would go in and out and find good pasture, that he was using covenant language. He was referring to the promises God consistently made to Israel throughout the Old Testament, that they would be His people and He would be their God, and that they indeed kept his commandments and lived lives of obedience to His Word, then blessings would chase them down and overtake them. These are the covenant blessings that he’s echoing from Deuteronomy. 28, and six. Listen to this. He says, You will be blessed in the city, blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed. Crops of your land and the young of your livestock, the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. The condition of all of those promises was, if they indeed kept his commandments and lived lives of obedience to His Word, then blessings would chase them down. I find it interesting that Jesus is standing before them as the blessing that has chased them down for 42 generations since the father promised the Savior. He’s saying to them that the Promised life of blessing you’ve been longing for is standing right in front of you. It’s only through me. It will never come through your efforts to save yourself to be good enough, or to try to earn your way back to the Father. It’s only through me that you find good pasture, abundant life. So when he says that they will have life abundantly, what then does he mean? Because in our culture, when we think about abundant life, we tend to think about stuff. We tend to think about possessions. And while many of the those covenant blessings that we just considered are very much about material things. They are about so much more the covenant blessings were about the whole of the life, the whole of the well being of those who were following God, not just their stuff, but all of life, and this life and the life to come, it is said of Jesus in John 116 that it is from his fullness, his abundance, that we receive grace upon grace that that tells me, then what Jesus is full of, what he has in abundance is grace, undeserved kindness that he pours out again and again, to the undeserving, to the inadequate, to the imperfect, to you and me. And sometimes our places of greatest abundance are our places of greatest failure. And you know why?

That’s because those are the places where the reality of God’s grace sink down into our lives the deepest, because those are the places where we know we couldn’t do anything to earn his goodness. Those are the places where we know that it is his good gift, his kindness towards us. So an abundant life then can is not just it’s not about having a perfect life, but it’s about having a life where our failures magnify our need for a Savior. Growing in this reality for our need for grace is key in Abundant Living, because it frees us from the pressures of perfection and performance, and allows us to just be beloved children who need their dad. Now, I will say, though, that sometimes we do such a good job of telling people that the Lord is full of grace and convince them that they can never earn their way to God, that we forget to tell him them that there is yet blessing and obedience. Yes, Jesus is full of grace and the covenant blessings were dependent on lives of obedience. Both are true and so living a life of obedience is to believe that the one who created us really does know best. He really does know the way for us to flourish. He really does know the way to the abundant life, and so we are not called to perfection, but to faithfulness that involves living lives of obedience. This life of obedience begins with receiving an invitation to come through the door. Jesus says, in verse nine, I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved. Now we know that one use of a door is protection. We lock our doors at night, right to keep out danger and to keep to ensure safety of those who are inside. Those listening to Jesus would have known that some sheep pens were simply just sides of caves or just piles of rock, and they didn’t have any kind of formal door. So often the shepherd of the sheep would have stretched himself across the opening, either he or sometimes his son, and would act himself as the door, the door to the sheep pen, kept the sheep in an enclosed space. Kept them safe. They kept out the wolves and the prey. Sitters that would harm them, and so the shepherd acting as a door was a declaration to every wolf, Every thief, every stranger, that if you want to get to these sheep, you got to first come through me. So we get some sense of how this worked. From David’s conversation with Saul about tending to his father’s sheep first, Samuel 1734, David says to Saul, your servant was tending his father’s sheep when a lion or a bear came and took a sheep from the flock, and I went out after it and attacked it, rescued the sheep from its mouth, rose up when it rose up against me, I grabbed it by its man, struck it and killed it. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear and Jesus declaring himself as the door was the declaration that those in his care would be protected by him and saved by Him, even if it cost him his life, and it did. He fought death our greatest enemy, the enemy that entered the world through a beautiful garden, and much like the shepherd who stretched his body across the opening of the sheep pen, Jesus stretched out his body on a cross between heaven and earth as a declaration to death that if you want to get to these sheep, you first gotta go through me, sinful man, beat him, ripped his flesh to shreds, brought him face to face with our mortal enemy. And I want to tell you that death was a formidable foe, but death swallowed up his humanity, but it couldn’t digest his divinity, because in three days he rose up from the grave. He had stripped death of all of its power. Jesus made a spectacle of death, just as David bragged that he had killed the lion, he had killed the bear, Jesus grabbed death by the throat, sucked all the poison out of death, threw death away. Death had no power over Jesus, and guess what? It lost its power over us. It no longer has power. How do we know that that’s true? John 528 says this. He says for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear His voice and come out. That means the day when Jesus calls. Everybody is getting up.

Vanessa Hawkins
Death can’t hold you. Everybody’s getting up now. Some will rise to eternal life. Some will rise to eternal judgment. But when Jesus calls everybody is getting up, he says, I am the door, and if anyone enters through me, he will be saved. The John, Apostle John, tells us how that’s possible, he says. He tells us that when Jesus was in the world, the world was made through him. Yet the world didn’t know him. He came to His own and His own people didn’t receive him. Yet to all who did receive Him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. And so if you believe that Jesus is the one that the father promised, if you believe that he is the one who came that we might have life to the full, if you believe that he is the one who lived a perfect life and fought our greatest enemy death, that means you believe in his name, and right in this very moment, you can receive him in the quiet of your heart, you can go to the Father and say, I heard that we can come back now, because Jesus says that He is the door. Having the right to become children of God means you never again have to look for another way to him. You don’t need to climb in over a wall or through a window. You don’t have to worry that your feet are too dirty and about the shameful bits of your life that you’re wearing. You’ve been given the right to walk right in through the door, you can go into the Father’s presence and tell him every detail of your life, all your joys and all your sorrows, knowing that he will hear you, receive you and delight in you. Having the right to become children of God means we have bold access. I’m not talking about outer court access. I’m not talking about second class access.

I’m talking about bold access, Child of God, access, daughter of the king, access. And so you can come on in through the door with all your faults and all. Your failures, all your disappointments and all of your regrets, all your guilt, all your shame, and you can know that the Father looks at you with joy and with delight as his daughter, his son, took all the guilt and shame, so you never have to wear it again. You never have to look for another way to him. You can just walk in through the door to all who received Him and believe in his name he gave the right to become children of God. If anyone enters by me, they will be saved. Come on in through the door. Jesus is the door. Let’s pray, gracious God. How we, thank you for Jesus the door. How we, thank you for access back into your presence. How we, thank you that you look at us with delight. How we thank you for the welcome that we receive in your presence. Thank you, Lord, that Jesus took on all the sin and the shame so we don’t have to wear it anymore. Thank you, God, thank You for the privilege and the welcome of walking through the door. Lord, I pray that we would run to you often to be recipients of this grace and access into this grace in which we stand in Jesus, Lord, we love you. Thank you for loving us enough to send us a door Jesus, and it’s in his name we pray, amen.