Knowing the Shepherd’s Voice
Keith McFarren
April 26, 2026
John 10:1-10
    I don’t like being
compared to sheep.  Unfortunately, the
Bible does it all the time…but I still don’t like it.  I don’t like being compared to a dirty,
smelly sheep…especially when I take a shower every day.  And another thing, sheep aren’t very
smart.  I’m not a genius by any means but
I’ve got a little bit of intelligence up here (head).
    But one has to
wonder, if sheep aren’t very smart how do they recognize the shepherd’s
voice?  That’s kind of the question for
all of us this week.  We, like sheep,
don’t always make the best decisions either.
We stray; we get lost; we get trapped in ditches; we get turned upside
down; we bleat and we cry while we wait for the shepherd to rescue us.  So I wonder, do we, like sheep, know our
shepherd’s voice?
    We all want the
shepherd to rescue us when we need help.
And that’s the sign of a good leader…a good leader is someone who will
show up in the time of trouble and rescue us; someone who will show us the way
and keep us out of trouble.
    We all want good
leadership.  We want good shepherds to
lead us in and out of green pastures.
That’s why we have elections.  We
vote hoping to elect good leadership.  We
apply for jobs hoping that we’ll work under a good leader and we go to school
with the hopes that we’ll be educated by a good leader.
    But unfortunately,
we don’t always find the leadership we’re looking for or the leadership we
need.  It’s easy for the trust we place
in our leaders to be broken and when that trust is broken, we find ourselves
lost, or spiraling out of control or maybe in a ditch or who knows where,
trying to find our way out.
    This picture that
Jesus gives us this morning is a vivid portrait of a shepherd caring for his
sheep.  The shepherd would lead his sheep
out to a good grazing area and then stay there for a certain number of days
while they grazed in the lush grass.
While they were there the shepherd he would create a temporary corral,
or a temporary pen to keep the sheep in when they weren’t grazing.
    Using the stones
he would find in the fields, the shepherd would quickly put together a corral
or a pen, and at night he would lay down in the doorway of the corral or
pen.  That way there was no way a sheep
could wander away at night unless it stepped on the shepherd and there was no
way a wolf could come in without stepping on the shepherd and waking him
up.  He (the shepherd) put himself in the
position to serve as the gate.  There was
no way in and there was no way out unless the shepherd gave the okay.
    Do you see what’s
happening here?  That is what Jesus was
thinking of when he said, “I am the door.”
Through him and through him only are we are able to find access to God.
    “Through him,” Paul said, “we have access
to…the Father” (Ephesians 2:18).  The
writer of Hebrews calls him, “the new and living way” (Hebrews 10:20).  
    Jesus opens the
door to God.  In fact, until Jesus came,
people would think of God as being a stranger because they had no access to him
or even worse, they thought of him as being an enemy because, when he did show
up, he always seemed to be punishing Israel for something they did wrong.
    But Jesus came to
show people what God is really like, and in his coming he also showed us how to
gain access to God.  In his coming Jesus
showed us that he is the door through whom we have to go to have access to God.
    It was Jesus who
said, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” or as the New
Living Translation puts it, “My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying
life” (John 10:10).  In contrast to the
thief who takes life, Jesus is the one who gives life.  An abundant, rich, full life.  A life that is eternal, yet at the same time
a life that begins immediately.
    But what does that
mean?  Or in this case, how do we get
it?  What do we need to do to experience
this abundant life that Jesus is talking about?
The answer is to strive to be like Jesus in all that we say and all that
we do.
    If we really want
to experience life to its fullest, all we need to do is ask ourselves one
simple question, WWJD? —What
would Jesus do?  What would Jesus do in
this same situation? What would Jesus want me to do?  How can I be more faithful to Jesus?  How can I be more like Jesus?  That is how we can live life more abundantly –
by living our lives just as Jesus would live his.
    Jesus is the door
to God.  We believe that there is no way
for us to get to God except through this door - this door named Jesus.  So if we want to get through the door and
have better access to God and a better relationship with God, what better way
would there be than to believe in Jesus, and to trust in him and to listen to
him when he calls our name.   What better
way is there to have a better relationship with God than to use Jesus as a
model for our behavior, and to use him as a model for our actions and to use
him as a model to live our lives.
    It all begins by
listening.  We need to listen to Jesus
but we also need to follow him.  We need
to not only listen but we need to trust him.
We need to not only listen but we need to have hope as well.  
    Following the
shepherd is a product of listening to the shepherd.  He tells us in verse four that he will lead
us, but he can only do that after we have responded to the sound of his
voice.  He will lead us, he tells us, but
we have to choose to follow him.  
    And the only way
we can follow him is if we have learned to recognize the sound of his
voice…which calls for a certain amount of discernment on our part.    
    There are all
sorts of voices out there.  Good voices
and bad voices.  There are voices we need
to learn to run from.  Voices that want
to lead us astray and down the wrong path. Voices that don’t have our best
interests in mind, voices that don’t want us to prosper and grow, voices that
don’t want us to know the joy and happiness that abundant life can bring us.
    So how do we know
which is which?  Which is the good voice
and which is the not so good voice?  How
do we figure out which voice is God’s voice and which voice is the voice that
is out to hurt us?  John doesn’t give us
a whole lot of instruction about that this morning.
    But we do know
that it takes a lifetime of continual study and devotion and faithfulness.  Learning to distinguish the shepherd’s voice
is a process that John Wesley calls sanctification…it’s a lifetime of slow but
continual learning and devotion that helps us to grow closer to Jesus so that
we can become more like him.  
    There are a couple
of hints in these verses this morning that will help us.  First, we need to know that the shepherd not
only cares about us but he also knows our name.
We are more than just a social security number to Jesus.  We’re more than just a picture on a driver’s
license or an unused balance on a credit card or a statistic on a computer
printout.
    When he calls our
name, and we have submitted our life to him, it’s a call that is going to
resonate into the deepest parts of our soul.
Following Jesus has a “rightness” feel about it…it’s that feeling deep
within us, a response deep down in our soul that tells us we’re doing the right
thing and we’re going in the right direction.

    We know that we
are called to be who we are, not who we think we want to be or who the world
tells us we need to be.  And the more we
follow and the longer we follow we will begin to discover a peace within us
that helps us know we’re doing the right thing.
    In verse nine
we’re told that following Jesus is the only way - “whoever enters by me will be
saved.”  And that’s all well and good but
deciding to follow Jesus doesn’t mean that our spiritual journey is over.  We’re told instead that as the sheep of
Jesus’s flock we also come in and then go out and we too graze in the  pasture.
    The Christian
lifestyle is not for the lazy or the apathetic.
There is a lot of movement involved in it.  We don’t receive our salvation and then sit
down over in a corner somewhere and twiddle our thumbs.  
    We find our
sustenance in our coming and our going.  
As Christians, we are continually learning to recognize the voice of God
and by recognizing him, we will continue to draw closer to him as he calls out
for us to be on the move, day after day, to be coming and going all the time,
because we he wants nothing more than for us to go out amongst the world and
share the good news of the Gospel.
    When we try to
live our own lives by listening to the voices of the world around us, life can
be just as traumatic as it can be dull and boring.  But when we learn to recognize the shepherds
voice, when we walk with Jesus and submit ourselves to him, we will soon find
ourselves filled with a new vitality and a superabundance of life as we give of
ourselves to others and strive on a daily basis to be just like him.