Do You Know the Good Shepherd’s Voice? (Luke 10-11; John 10:1-21)

A Few Thoughts to Consider

How do you distinguish the voice of God from all the other voices in this world?

In a world of noise, it’s sometimes challenging to slow down and hear the voice of Jesus. In John 10:11, Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” Throughout the Old Testament, most notably in Psalm 23, God is called our shepherd. He is the one who renews, protects, and guides us. Thus, when Jesus refers to himself as the good shepherd, he is connecting himself to all that has come before and distancing himself from those who were “thieves and robbers” who came to “steal and kill and destroy.” For example, in Ezekiel 34, God tells Ezekiel to prophesy against the shepherds of Israel and to say,

² “‘This is what the Lord God says to the shepherds: Woe to the shepherds of Israel, who have been feeding themselves! Shouldn’t the shepherds feed their flock? ³ You eat the fat, wear the wool, and butcher the fattened animals, but you do not tend the flock. ⁴ You have not strengthened the weak, healed the sick, bandaged the injured, brought back the strays, or sought the lost. Instead, you have ruled them with violence and cruelty. ⁵ They were scattered for lack of a shepherd; they became food for all the wild animals when they were scattered. 

In John 10:8, Jesus says, “All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep didn’t listen to them.” “These ‘thieves and robbers’ are presumably ‘the Jews’ or ‘the Pharisees.’”^[1] They were just like the shepherds of old warned about in Ezekiel. They sounded good but preyed on the weak and did not have the best interests of their sheep at heart.

Evil shepherds are revealed in times of hardship. Jesus says in verses 12-13, ¹² The hired hand, since he is not the shepherd and doesn’t own the sheep, leaves them and runs away when he sees a wolf coming. The wolf then snatches and scatters them. ¹³ This happens because he is a hired hand and doesn’t care about the sheep.” But Jesus does care.

In John 10:1-6, Jesus reveals that the key to following the good shepherd is to learn his voice. “Unlike Western shepherds who drive the sheep, often using a sheep dog, the shepherds of the Near East, both now and in Jesus’ day, lead their flocks, their voice calling them on.”^[2] Jesus isn’t the one who drives or compels. He is the one who calls and invites. When life is at its worst, he is there.