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Transcript - HR503 Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved. 1 of 15 LESSON 12 of 20 HR503 The Biblical Ideal: The Good Shepherd (John 10) Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics We continue, Lord Jesus, to thank You for the privilege of being Your ambassadors and ask that You will take us in hand and mold us and shape us so that we may truly follow in Your footsteps and become the kind of preaching men that You want us to be. We ask especially, as we think today of the pastoral ideal, that You will clarify our vision and raise our ideals and our sights. We ask it for Your name’s sake, amen. If you’ve got our syllabus, you’ll see that we come now to two lectures that I’ve entitled “Ideals of Ministry.” And the biblical ideal I take from Jesus Himself, the Good Shepherd, and the historical ideal from Charles Simeon of Cambridge at the beginning of the last century. Now you could easily say that my subject today is not strictly to do with biblical preaching, because it’s about the pastor rather than the preacher. But my purpose in including this lecture within our syllabus is that I believe it is essential to see the task of the preacher as a part of the task of the pastor and not to separate and isolate the two, but to see our preaching duty as a part of our pastoral responsibility. It’s perfectly true there are some men who are called to preaching and teaching who are not in a pastoral context or responsibility, but I imagine that most of us here are called to the pastorate. And we look forward to the day when God will give us either sole or part responsibility for a local congregation and that, within this pastoral care of the people, we are called to preach. Now don’t let us isolate our preaching/teaching ministry from the total pastoral care or responsibility to which we are called. That, then, is the purpose and rationale for my including this subject in our syllabus. Again, in a wider context still, I want to say something about the ministry in general and to remind you, although I doubt you will need to be reminded, that the whole concept of the Christian ministry is in the melting pot today. There are many people in John R. W. Stott, D. D. Experience: Founder, Langham Partnership International

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Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics

Transcript - HR503 Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

1 of 15

LESSON 12 of 20HR503

The Biblical Ideal: The Good Shepherd (John 10)

Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics

We continue, Lord Jesus, to thank You for the privilege of being Your ambassadors and ask that You will take us in hand and mold us and shape us so that we may truly follow in Your footsteps and become the kind of preaching men that You want us to be. We ask especially, as we think today of the pastoral ideal, that You will clarify our vision and raise our ideals and our sights. We ask it for Your name’s sake, amen.

If you’ve got our syllabus, you’ll see that we come now to two lectures that I’ve entitled “Ideals of Ministry.” And the biblical ideal I take from Jesus Himself, the Good Shepherd, and the historical ideal from Charles Simeon of Cambridge at the beginning of the last century. Now you could easily say that my subject today is not strictly to do with biblical preaching, because it’s about the pastor rather than the preacher. But my purpose in including this lecture within our syllabus is that I believe it is essential to see the task of the preacher as a part of the task of the pastor and not to separate and isolate the two, but to see our preaching duty as a part of our pastoral responsibility.

It’s perfectly true there are some men who are called to preaching and teaching who are not in a pastoral context or responsibility, but I imagine that most of us here are called to the pastorate. And we look forward to the day when God will give us either sole or part responsibility for a local congregation and that, within this pastoral care of the people, we are called to preach. Now don’t let us isolate our preaching/teaching ministry from the total pastoral care or responsibility to which we are called. That, then, is the purpose and rationale for my including this subject in our syllabus.

Again, in a wider context still, I want to say something about the ministry in general and to remind you, although I doubt you will need to be reminded, that the whole concept of the Christian ministry is in the melting pot today. There are many people in

John R. W. Stott, D. D.Experience: Founder, Langham

Partnership International

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The Biblical Ideal: The Good Shepherd (John 10)

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the visible church who are calling today, by their books and their speeches, for a radical reappraisal of the ordained ministry. And some think that the solution most conducive to the help of the church is the abolition of the clergy. Well, I would say “Amen” with regard to some clergy, and the sooner they’re abolished the better! But I doubt very much whether the abolition of the clergy as a whole is the right solution to the problem. There are other people who are insisting that the shape of the ministry must change in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

I do not want to spend time on trying to unfold the causes of this malaise. And it’s extraordinary how widespread it is, the number of books that are being written about the ministry today, the number of people who are talking about it all over the world. What is the purpose of the ordained ministry in these days? But I think I’ll say just one or two quick things about the origins of this widespread malaise today.

I think it is partly due to anticlericalism that the secularity of contemporary society has brought in its wake quite a high tide of anticlericalism. It’s partly that the modern state, especially in the Western world in Europe and America, with its multiplicity of statutory and voluntary bodies, has taken over so many of the functions that were previously performed by the clergy in education, in social welfare, in marriage counseling, in pastoral counseling, and so on. So many of these functions have been taken over by the state or by voluntary bodies within the state that thoughtful people are asking whether clergy are not now redundant, whether they’re not now parasites on the body politic.

Alongside our diminished status, those of us who are pastors—and I have been ordained for 25 years, and within that quarter century I’ve been very conscious of the steady diminution of the status of the clergyman in the community. There was a time when people looked up to the clergy. I think now they tend much more to look down or to look quizzically at them and ask what on earth their function is in the state, maybe less in America than in Europe, but one is very conscious of it in Europe.

Alongside this has come the assault of the circular theologians on traditional orthodoxy, and this has undermined the faith of more clergy who like to confess it. This was brought home to me when I heard of an elderly clergyman in our country who was watching a religious television program in which two university professors were discussing the resurrection and confessing their disbelief in

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a historical resurrection. This elderly clergyman was so upset that he then committed suicide. There is a really deep undermining of the faith of many clergy who were brought up in an age of greater faith and have now entered a period of doubt.

Here are some of the courses of the contemporary malaise and wondering what the nature and function of the ministry is. The ministry is in crisis, apart from evangelical colleges described in that recent Time Magazine as obscure outposts of evangelical conservatism—like this school to which you and I belong. Despite the increasing numbers who attend such schools, there is, generally speaking, a steadily decreasing number of men offering for the ministry. There is a rising number of those who begin their training and either don’t complete their training or don’t go forward to ordination after their training. Never before in the history of the church have there been so many ministerial dropouts who quit the ministry after they’ve entered it. Dr. Elton Trueblood, the well-known evangelical Quaker in this country, has written in one of his books that he knows an insurance company that employs two hundred former pastors.

So all this too is one of the reasons I wanted to take this subject today. In this situation, it is good and right to go back to the beginning and to seek to relay the foundations on which our vocation, the pastoral ministry, is built. I will mention three foundation stones and then come straight on to my subject.

The first is that ministry means service. An elementary knowledge of Greek tells us that diakonia may be translated either ministry or service. Yet what may be linguistically obvious is often pragmatically very far from obvious. Quoting from Michael Green’s excellent little book called Called to Serve: Ministry and Ministers in the Church, he says, “Almost all consideration of different types of Christian ministries begins, that is especially in the Christian church and in ecumenical discussions, with a discussion of the validity of the orders in question, their regularity, their authentication, their apostolicity.” That is very natural; he says it is the way of the world, but it is not the way of Jesus Christ. He saw ministry not in terms of status, but rather in terms of function, the passion for Christian ministry that he said was one of service. He was supremely and in everything a servant of the Lord and of men. That was his glory, and he looked for no other. And so it must be with any ministry that claims to be truly Christian.

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Again, he writes a little bit later in the same book, “When we reflect on the history of the church, are we not bound to confess that she has failed to follow the example of her Founder? All too often she has worn the robes of the ruler, not the apron of the servant. Even in our day it can hardly be said that the brand image of the church, even of the ministry of the church, is of a society united in love for Jesus and devoted to selfless service of others.” The robes of the ruler, or the apron of the servant? So that’s where I begin, ministry means service.

The second foundation stone is that such service is a totally satisfactory end in itself and not a means to some other end. We serve because it is our joy and privilege to serve. We do not serve in order to be served, in order to catch the eye of our superiors, in order to win the admiration or the approbation of men; still less, to accumulate some merit. The very notion of ministerial promotion or, as it is often called, ecclesiastical preferment, is in its essence worldly.

So many people talk about ministers as if the ministry is simply another profession and that you’ll climb the rungs of the ladder of promotion. I do not want to be misunderstood. There is, of course, a place of being given wider responsibility and accepting wider responsibility in the Christian church, according to the gifts that God has given us; but wider responsibility is different from promotion. I sometimes think to myself how Jesus was content in His public ministry to wander among the meadows of Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. There was no promotion, but only a demotion that led to the cross.

Or indeed, if you think of the apostle Paul, I know he was an authoritative apostle, he was also an itinerant evangelistic, and there was no promotion. He was content to remain obscure, largely penniless. I hope that we will be rid of this idea that what we’re seeking in the “profession” of the ministry is promotion. Indeed I have always liked very much a phrase of T. W. Manson in his book The Church’s Ministry, where he says, “In the kingdom of God, service is not a stepping stone to nobility. It is nobility, the only kind of nobility that is recognized.” Isn’t that beautiful? So even if it is the providence of God that we remain in comparative obscurity all our lives, in some small community ministering, this should still be our joy, because people are valuable in God’s sight. It is a high honor to be called to serve them.

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Have I mentioned to you the name of Festo Kivengere? Do you know Festo Kivengere? Festo Kivengere is an Anglican evangelical from Uganda. He spent three years at the Presbyterian church in Pittsburgh. He has been to this country a good deal and is a very deep Christian, been touched by the revival in East Africa, the most Christlike brother and a very gifted evangelist and teacher. Yesterday, interestingly enough, he was consecrated Bishop of Kigezi in Western Uganda. When he announced his appointment or his election as a bishop in the Anglican church, he wrote down a circular to his friends. I haven’t actually brought the wording, but I think I can get it more or less right, which touched me very much. He reminded us of another bishop, actually, Bishop Omari of Morogoro in Tanzania. This bishop had said to his people, “In a few days’ time you’re going to see me dressed in the gorgeous robes of an Anglican bishop. You may begin to feel rather afraid of me when you see me in my scarlet robe, but when you see me like that remember the story of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. And remember how they took the donkey and spread their gorgeous robes upon the donkey in order that Jesus might sit upon the robes and ride into Jerusalem.” He said, “When you see my gorgeous robes, remember there’s only a donkey underneath.”

I’ve heard Festo Kivengere say something else. They emphasize so much the call of Christ, the service and humility, in the Anglican church in East Africa and in the revival. He said, “If you take the throne of your life and put yourself upon it, you will discover that you are conspicuously too small for that position.” It’s a delightful way of putting it, isn’t it? There, then, is my second point. It is that such service of other people is an end in itself, totally satisfactory in itself.

My third point, which begins to bring me to the point, is that such Christian ministry or service must be patterned after the ministry of Jesus Christ, that He is the diakonos, the Servant par excellence. He is the perfect prototype of what diakonia means, and all service or Christian ministry that deserves the name Christian is derived from the ministry of Jesus. He is always our pattern.

In particular, then, since I want to talk to you about the biblical ideal of the pastor; and pastor, of course, means a shepherd. Therefore if we’re called to a pastoral ministry, then the pattern, the paradigm of our pastorate, is in Jesus Christ who is the Good Shepherd. He is called the Chief Shepherd, that great Shepherd of the sheep, the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, and the Good Shepherd. He’s given four “shepherdly” titles. So we are Christ’s

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The Biblical Ideal: The Good Shepherd (John 10)

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undershepherds; and wise indeed are the undershepherds who understudy the Good Shepherd and derive our pastoral ideals from Him.

I think I talked to you last week about the danger of arguing from an analogy. This is perhaps a good example, that not everything that is true of a shepherd is true of a minister. For example, there was a former bishop of London called Bishop Winnington-Ingram at the beginning of this century. He was on vacation once up in the Highlands of Scotland. He was on vacation incognito, and he had on a dirty old Plus Four suit and a dirty, old, greasy cloth cap. Nobody would have recognized that he was a bishop of London. As he walked alone through the Highlands of Scotland, he fell in with a Scottish shepherd, and the two men got talking. The Scottish shepherd was a very dour Scot with very few words; so after a while of silence together, the shepherd said to the bishop, “And what do you do?” So the bishop said, “Well, I’m sort of a shepherd also.” There was a long silence. About half an hour later, the Scottish shepherd said, “And how many sheep have you got?” So the bishop made a quick calculation and said, “About five million.” So the dour Scot lapsed into another half-hour silence to digest this extraordinary statement. And then he said, “What on earth do you do at lambing time?”

That is, as you understand, one of the ways in which the analogy is not to be pressed in the shepherd and his sheep. Nevertheless, I thought I would give you about half a dozen characteristics of the pastoral ideal, the shepherd and his sheep, and take them from John 10, the passage of the good shepherd.

We begin with a straightforward and fundamental truth: A good shepherd knows his sheep. I want to emphasize this, because it seems to me that preaching, when you’re in a pulpit, is “six feet above contradiction,” as is often said. You’re isolated and aloof from your people who are over there. It is, to some extent, a very impersonal relationship. You’re addressing them at a distance; and even if you have good eye contact and this kind of thing, nevertheless, they are over there, and you are over here. There is something slightly artificial about that, unless you are in a personal contact with them, unless you know your sheep.

Taking John 10, in verse 3, for example, “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” He knows their name. Verse 14: “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and am known by them.” Now the Oriental shepherd was and is, of course, different

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in many ways from his Western counterpart, because he keeps his sheep for wool and not for mutton. He has them with him for many years, and a great relationship of considerable intimacy and of trust grows up between the shepherd and the flock of sheep. This was certainly the relation between Jesus and His disciples on earth. As He says, “I’m the good shepherd, and I know my sheep.” He could call people by name. We think of Zacchaeus. We think of Nathaniel, who was astonished and said, “But how is it that you know me?”

I think this is the first and basic characteristic of all Christ’s true undershepherds: that one of the foundations of a distinctively Christian ministry, patterned on the ministry of Christ, is this personal and living relationship that grows up between the pastor and the people. They’re not our patients. They’re not our clients. They’re not our customers. They are people whom we know and who know us. Nor should they be simply impersonal names or numbers on a church register or in the bowels of a computer. They are people whom we know, whom we love, and whom we serve. They know us, and we know them.

It seems to me that in this age of depersonalization and dehumanization, not only the Christian church, in general, but the Christian pastor, in particular, should protest against these artificial non-relationships and should insist on a personal relationship between himself and them. That means that he takes trouble to get to know them; to get to know their names, their circumstances, their family, their job, their problems.

If we have a poor, untrained memory, we’ve got to take trouble. The two major bits of practical advice I give you on learning people’s names (and you’ve discovered how bad I am when I have to ask you your names more than once) is that I find it’s impossible to learn a name until I’ve first learned a face. I think this is true of most people, because of our largely photographic memories. It is much easier to affix a name to a face than it is to fix a face to a name. There’s not much good having a lot of names floating around in your head if you haven’t got faces to attach them to. So it’s a good thing to get the face first, and then when you’ve learned somebody’s face, you can say to them, “Remind me of your name.”

The second thing is to pray for people. If you pray for your congregation by name when you’re a pastor, you really can’t forget their names. When one does forget their names, I think it’s

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an evidence that one is not praying for them as one should.

Well, that’s the first and straightforward thing: The good shepherd knows his sheep. And the second is: He serves them. “I am the good shepherd, and the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep” (verse 11). He’s prepared to serve them right up to even the point of dying for them. We may not be required to do that, but we’re called to live for them.

The shepherd is devoted to his sheep. Now this is true of the ordinary shepherd. I’ve talked to a number of shepherds about this, and it’s extraordinary how demanding sheep are in many ways. The shepherd’s life is dominated by their needs. He doesn’t serve himself, but them. It is written in Ezekiel 34:2 and 8, where God’s chief complaint of the Israelite shepherds is that they serve themselves and not the sheep. Sheep are not particularly clean animals, as you probably know. They look very delightful when they’re small and gamboling about in the spring and so on. You want to pick them up and hug them, until you find they’re full of ticks, fleas, and other pests, which necessitate their having to be dipped two or three times a year into a chemical to kill the pests.

I think it is true that many shepherds do not find shepherding an altogether pleasant job to do. They may grumble and ask why they’ve got to give up their lives to serve a lot of dirty sheep. I don’t think it’s farfetched to say that there is an analogy there with us too. Certainly Jesus Christ showed Himself a Good Shepherd. He was not a hireling doing the job for money. He was a true shepherd who cared for His sheep. He was prepared not only to live but also to die for them. The indispensable mark of love, of course, is sacrifice and service.

Every pastor has to do dirty jobs. You may not relish all the chores that you are called to do. There is some administration, and there are certainly in the flock some wayward and troublesome sheep that you may find it hard to love. We’ve got plenty in our congregation, anyway, in London; and I know what it is to be tempted to get irritated by people. There are people who may have their emotional problems, have personality disturbances, and you know how they can suck you dry, how demanding and exacting they are, how difficult it is, because we’re children of Adam, truly to love people like this.

We need just to remind ourselves that they are the flock of God, which He has purchased with His own blood. That phrase in Acts

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20:28, probably the best Greek manuscript, is that they are the flock of the Lord, which He has purchased with His own blood. But it’s the nearest the New Testament ever gets to saying that the blood of Christ is the blood of God. It’s the blood of One who is not only man, but God and man. It’s when you think of the preciousness of the blood that was shed for them.

So, in Acts 20:28, Paul says to the elders of the Ephesian church, who had met him in Ephesus: “Now take heed to yourselves. Take heed to the flock of God, over which He has made you overseers and which He has purchased with His own blood.” It’s God’s flock that He has purchased with His blood. Of course, you only have to think about that to realize how precious these people are, and say to yourself, If He was willing to die for them, am I not willing to live for them? And, immediately, one of these difficult, aggravating people in the congregation grows into significance and into importance, and we begin to love them again and find our happiness in serving them for Christ’s sake.

He knows them. He serves them. Thirdly, he leads them. It is largely as a result of this intimate knowledge and relationship that grows up between the Eastern shepherd and the sheep that he is able to lead them. He never drives them from behind in the East, as I imagine you all know, never uses trained sheepdogs to run them up from behind and yap or bite at their heels. No, he walks in front of them, and they follow him. If you’ve been to the Holy Land, as I have and maybe some of you have, it’s a very memorable thing to see a shepherd walking in front of his flock of sheep and maybe goats as well.

This idea comes occasionally in the Old Testament, where Jehovah is the Shepherd of Israel. The passage of the Israelites across the wilderness is likened in one or two passages to the movement of a great flock of sheep following their shepherd. Psalm 80:1, “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou who leadest Joseph like a flock!” If it’s true of Jehovah and the whole of Israel, it’s true also of Jehovah and the individual Israelite, who knew the grace of God in personal experience. We only have to think of Psalm 23:1–2, “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want; . . . He leads me beside the still waters.” He goes in front of me, I follow Him.

It is also true of the good shepherd in the New Testament era, John 10:2–3: “The gatekeeper opens to the shepherd of the sheep. The sheep hear his voice. He calls his sheep by name and he leads them out.” He goes before them, and the sheep follow him for

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they know his voice.

What is the application of that to the undershepherd? It is simply this, that we are called to lead the sheep, particularly by our example, in such a way that it is safe for them to follow. The apostle Peter summed it up admirably in his injunction in 1 Peter 5:2–3: “Tend the flock of God.” Look after God’s flock, “not as domineering over those in your charge but being examples to the flock,” leading them by your example; not lords, but leaders.

I find to some extent a terrifying thought that, whether we know it or not, the congregation we serve over the years reflects very much the kind of teaching and the kind of example which they are receiving from the pastorate. Just as parents find it rather devastating to see their own characteristics coming out in their children, so the pastor can see for good or ill the effect that his example is having. This is so much true that the views of the congregation, both of Christ and Christianity, are largely derived, or at least strongly colored, by us. So we need to watch our example if we’re to lead them.

Fourthly, he feeds them. This comes more directly to our preaching ministry. John 10:9: “I am the door; if any one enters in, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.” It is self-evident that one of the chief functions of a shepherd is to feed the sheep. Jesus proves Himself the Good Shepherd in this: If He is our shepherd, we lack nothing. “The LORD is my shepherd.” I lack nothing. “He makes me lie down in green pastures” so that I can be fed. “He leads me beside still waters.” I can drink. And, of course, Christ did this to His own disciples in teaching them and feeding them with His Word when He was with them. We are asked to do the same as undershepherds. “Should not shepherds feed the sheep?” (Ezekiel 34:2).

I wonder if you’ve ever asked yourself how a shepherd does feed the sheep. But the answer is, he doesn’t. I suppose if a lamb is sick, he will take it up into his arms, and he’ll bottle feed it. But, normally speaking, the shepherd does not feed the sheep at all. He leads them to pasture where they feed themselves. Surely that is an important lesson for us. Here in John 10:9, the way the shepherd feeds the sheep is “they go in and out and find pasture.” Or, again, Ezekiel 34:14, “I will feed them with good pasture. . . . They shall lie down in good grazing land, and on fat pasture they will feed.” I will feed them with good pasture. On fat pasture, they will feed. So the way in which the shepherd feeds the sheep is to

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lead them to the pasture where they feed themselves.

There is a very healthy emphasis here in all our biblical teaching and preaching; namely, that even in preaching, in which the relationship of minister to congregation is most clearly that of the teacher to the taught, and the taught appear to be largely passive, they should not be. They should not be inert. They should not be just uncritical sponges, absorbing. They should be sheep who are feeding, actively grazing, absorbing, digesting the food in the pasture to which we are leading them in Scripture. I think we should encourage them to bring Bibles to church, or provide Bibles for them. It is a great thing when the minister gives out his text, and there’s a great rustle of leaves all over the church, as the people find the place. As they have their Bibles open, it’s easier for the congregation to feed up on the Word as the pastor is expounding it; so that a Bible-preaching minister should develop a Bible-reading congregation. He should whet their appetites so that they ruminate in the pastures of God’s Word on their own. Not bottle feeding, but pasture feeding, is the pastoral preacher’s ideal method for feeding his flock.

That follows naturally from last week, when we were thinking about the principles of interpreting Scripture, because it makes our task a very exacting one; that our teaching will be so true and accurate that they’ll have no need to reject it; so plain that they can feed upon it with ease; so rich that they can go on sucking its juices all week; so tasty that their appetites are whetted for more. If the spiritual appetite of the congregation is not whetted by our biblical exposition, there is surely something wrong with us.

The student who leaves college who has benefitted most from his time at college is not the student who says, “No, I’ve learnt so much I don’t need to learn any more,” and closes all his books for good, but the student who has learned at college, by the stimulus and the stimulation of his college life, to go on reading. Self-education and how to do it is the thing that has been taught him more than anything else. As the object of education is the promotion of self-education, this Bible expository ministry awakens the spiritual appetite of the congregation. They find his preaching so enlightening, so edifying, so relevant, so satisfying that they are constantly enticed to the pastures, without the pastor leading them there, in order to feed by themselves.

Fifthly, he guards them. Here also is part of our teaching ministry, in verses 12 and 13. We’re introduced now to the wolf: “He who

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is a hireling and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he’s a hireling and cares nothing for the sheep. But I am the good shepherd, and I’m not like that.” Here in the analogy, in the metaphor that our Lord is developing, the chief enemy of both the shepherd and the sheep is the wolf. Hungry, cunning, fierce, predatory; hunting as they do, now singly and now in packs; ready to pounce on defenseless sheep; scattering the flock; and tearing their victims limb from limb. This is the graphic metaphor that our Lord develops.

When the wolf comes, He says, the hireling who is in it only for the money, that is whose shepherding is merely a job, turns tail and flees. It is only a good shepherd who is brave enough and conscientious enough to stand guard and to defend and rescue the sheep from the wolves. We don’t need to move very far from this passage to understand what Jesus was speaking about. He says in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 7:15, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” Here he likens the false prophet to the wolf, who often comes in the disguise of a sheep.

Paul explains it more clearly in his sermon to the elders of the Ephesian church, when he met them at Miletus. Acts 20:29–30: “I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them.” So here the analogy, or the allegory, for that is what it is, is clear. The sheep are the people of God. The shepherds are their faithful pastors. The wolves are false teachers, and the hirelings are unfaithful pastors who do nothing but flee and abandon the sheep to their fate.

To speak plainly, we have to say that there are many false teachers in the church today, who are like wolves in the flock of Christ. There are not enough good shepherds to withstand them and to fulfill this part of their pastoral responsibility, which is to guard and to protect the sheep from the wolves. I don’t hesitate to say the twentieth-century radical and secular theologians are dangerous wolves. We may, and I personally do, sympathize with them in their concern about the great gulf between traditional religion and the contemporary world. I think we can recognize their sincerity and their good will. I think we must listen to them. I do not even desire that we may learn from them. But I cannot

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regard them as other than grievous wolves who are dividing and scattering the sheep of Christ.

What do we have to do then? We’ve got to resist them. I want to say two things about this task. First, it is a costly task. I have no actual experience of protecting sheep from wolves, but I’m pretty sure you can’t shoo the wolves away merely by shouting and waving your arms about. I don’t think that would succeed. I think you’ve got to get to grips with them at close range, and of course I’m thinking there especially of days when you haven’t got a gun. And I imagine you’ve got to do what David did when he was a shepherd boy and take it by its beard. Do you remember what he said? First Samuel 17:34–36: “Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and when there came a lion, or a bear,” and I imagine it’s the same with a wolf, “and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and smote him, and delivered it out of his mouth; and if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him and killed him. Your servant has killed both lions and bears.”

Now I’m not a biblical literalist, you understand, and I’m not urging you to take radicals by their beards—nor that we should hew them in pieces before the Lord, like Elijah and the prophets of Baal—but that we should do this metaphorically speaking. Being interpreted, I think it means that a vague denunciation of false teaching and false teachers is not enough. It will neither scare the wolves away, nor will it serve the sheep. I think we’ve got to take them by the beard, in the sense that we’ve got to give ourselves the pain (and I mean that, the pain) of close combat; of reading their literature, which we would far rather not read; of listening to and wrestling with their arguments. And so, in our preaching and teaching, dealing with the real issues that are at stake. I believe it is only in this way that we can really help people.

A lot of this false teaching does filter down to the congregation. It filters down through the textbooks to high schools and university students. People now get it on television programs and in the stuff they read. They can read it in Time Magazine and so on. A lot of this radical stuff filters down. We’ve got to so understand and grapple with the arguments that we can help the congregation to resist the wolves. You can’t do it by vague denunciation. We can only do it by precise answers to precise problems.

If then (a) it is a costly task, I would want to say (b) it is a compassionate task. I hope that none of us here relishes controversy. I hope that we shrink from it as a distasteful duty. Of

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course, there are some people who love controversy. The light of battle enters their eye, and they’re never happier than when they are in polemics; but it seems to me that we should shrink from it as a distasteful duty. The only reason we undertake this duty is compassion for the sheep. The hireling flees because he cares nothing for the sheep. The question is whether we care nothing for the sheep of Christ that we’re prepared to dessert them to this exposure to false teaching. Jesus had compassion because people were “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Wouldn’t you agree that is a description of the church of God today? The church of God today, all over the world in many places, are sheep without a shepherd. There is an inadequate number of good shepherds, and there are too many hirelings. It is sheep without a shepherd that are an easy prey to the wolves.

That brings me to the sixth characteristic of the good shepherd, as I conclude; and that is he seeks them when they go astray. Verse 16: “I have other sheep, that are not of this fold.” They’re still outside it. “I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. And there will be one flock and one shepherd.” There is no doubt that Jesus was speaking to the Gentile unbelievers, who were not part of the Jewish fold, although He already called them “my sheep,” because in the providence of God, in the electing purpose of God, they were already His, in a sense. He says of them, “I must bring them too.” We know that our Lord Jesus went out into the wilderness to seek and to save the lost.

Interestingly, in the Episcopal ordination service, the bishop’s charge includes the exhortation to “seek the Christ’s sheep that are dispersed abroad in this naughty world . . .” It is old Elizabethan English, “to seek for Christ’s sheep that are dispersed abroad in this naughty world that they may be saved by Christ forever.” We must not be so preoccupied with the sheep that are saved that we forget the sheep of Christ that are outside the fold and need to be sought and brought in so that there is “one flock and one shepherd.”

Let me quote to you from Baxter in The Reformed Pastor just before I finish:

Oh, then, let us hear these arguments of Christ, whenever we feel ourselves grow dull and careless: ‘Did I die for them? Wiltnot thou look after them? Were they worth My blood, and are they not worth thy labor? Did I come down from heaven to earth “to seek and to save that which was lost”;

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Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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and wilt thou not go to the next door, or street, or village, to seek them? How small is thy labor and condescension as to Mine! I debased Myself to this, but it is thy honor to be so employed. Have I done so much and suffered so much for their salvation? Was I willing to make thee a co-worker with Me, and wilt thou refuse that little that lieth upon thy hands?’

So then I set before you this beautiful biblical ideal of the pastoral ministry. The duty of undershepherds, who follow in the footsteps of the Good Shepherd, is to know the sheep and serve them, to lead them and feed them, to guard them from the wolves, and to seek them when they’re lost. You see, it is a comprehensive ministry, not just teaching and preaching. Only then, either little we may be recognized and appreciated or honored on earth, we’re given the promise that “when the Chief Shepherd appears, we shall receive from His hand an unfading crown of glory.”