5-1-22 Misericordias Domini

Bible Text: John 10:11-16 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Easter 2022 | There is no word used more, when Jesus talks about his sheep, than the word “mine.” In fact, there are two words for “mine” in the Greek and Jesus uses them both and uses them constantly for his sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know my own. My own know me. He says it again and again. He is very purposely announcing His fulfillment of Isaiah 43, God’s great promise to Israel, “Thus says the Lord who created you, Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine.” Jesus contrasts himself with a hired hand. The hired hand doesn’t own the sheep. So he flees when danger comes, because he doesn’t care about the sheep, he cares about his own life. It is exactly the opposite with Jesus. He refuses to flee because He’s invested His life in us. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. His life and His sheep’s lives are intertwined. Our interests are the same. He can’t abandon us, because that would be to abandon Himself. As St. John says, “If we are faithless; He is faithful. He cannot deny Himself.” This is why He says that no one will snatch us from His hands. For Him to lose us is unthinkable; He has already lost His life to gain us. And so He uses this word “mine” so much and so insistently of us.

This insistence of the Lord Jesus that we are His we see in everything He is and does. He is the God-man. From everlasting to everlasting He is God, but then, Behold, the Man, He is born of a virgin. He becomes our brother. He faced the temptations of the devil for us, submitted to His own law for us, suffers agony, undergoes mockery and shame and separation from His Father, hell itself on the cross, because we belong to Him and so that we will belong to Him. And He rises for the same purpose. He has to rise, because death cannot keep God and because He is the righteous One, because He has done all things, even suffering death, perfectly. But He rises also to claim us as His own. And that claim is His preaching. It is what you are hearing right now.

The word that Jesus speaks is qualitatively different, it is of a different kind from any other word you will hear. Both because of its source and because of its content. When the propagandist, whether he be a rapper or a politician, propagandizes the little ones and tells them to live for themselves, or as the United States assistant secretary of health just told our children as he urged girls to become boys and boys to become girls, “be true to yourself,” or as the President scolds the country and tells us that it’s your body and your choice, this does not come from a source that owns you. In most cases it doesn’t even come from a source who knows your name or cares about you in the least. It’s certainly not anyone who loves you and has laid down his life for you. And the content of what they say is so obviously worldly. Live for yourself? Pursue wealth? Listen to your sinful heart? Kill your children if you so choose? What kind of awful advice is this? The devil has exposed himself and he is a fool.

The word of Jesus is very different. It comes from a source of inexhaustible love. He is the Good Shepherd who has laid down His life for the sheep. And it comes from One who knows your name, as Jesus says, “He calls his own sheep by name.” This is the beauty of Jesus’ love and of any true love. There are many of us. We sing, “O little flock, fear not the foe,” and compared to the multitude of unbelievers it is a little flock, but there is an innumerable company of saints in heaven, there are countless believing hearts living throughout this world who hear the voice of their Shepherd, and though we are one flock and we have one Shepherd, Jesus knows us all by name, loves us all individually, knows our needs, counts every hair on our heads, numbers our days on this earth, prepares personally for our place in heaven.

And yet His love is not divided among us, as if there were only so much of it, and we could each only have just some part of it. Someone once asked my mother, who has 12 children, how she could divide her love between so many children. And mom said, “It’s not a matter of division. It’s a matter of multiplication.” The more children, the more love. Love is something that is drawn out of someone and the more people draw from it, the more it gives, and from God, from the Lord Jesus, we are drawing from an inexhaustible source. It pours on us individually. So the Lord Jesus knows me, knows my name, and more importantly speaks to me.

This speaking is not through the air. I was with some fellow Christians not of the Lutheran persuasion earlier this week for a pro-life cause and was reminded once again why I’m so happy to be a Lutheran. Because I know where Jesus talks to me. It isn’t in a dream or some strange whispering in my ear. Not in some fluttering here in my heart. It’s in His Word. And specifically in the word my pastor speaks to me. Because he isn’t speaking it to me randomly, simply because we pay him to do it. He is speaking it because Jesus set it up this way. Think about this even historically. What institution has lasted for 2000 years and has said the same thing through those 2000 years, throughout all the earth in all different languages? What besides the Christian Church? Jesus made sure of this. It’s what He says, “I have other sheep who are not of this fold. Them also I must gather and they will hear my voice and there will be one flock, one shepherd.” This is what Jesus prays for as He sweats in agony in Gethsemane, that we would believe through the apostolic word. This is what He orders His apostles the very day He rose from the dead. What he orders when he ascends into heaven. It’s His insistence, the goal of His death and the point of His resurrection. He has guaranteed that His sheep will hear His voice. And this voice you get to hear from the pastor God gave you, who preaches from Jesus’ own word, and does what every faithful pastor has done now for 2000 years and will do, by Jesus’ insistence, until Jesus comes again and we hear His voice from His own mouth.

And the content of this speech is unlike anything else in all the world. Look how the trends of society change! Look at what has happened in the last hundred years, the last fifty years, the last fifteen years in our country! The definition of marriage, of man and woman, all changed, and they’ll change again, according to the whim of the elite, of academia and of wealth, and they won’t even blush at the inconsistency. They don’t blush now. Fifteen years ago a progressive candidate for president insisted marriage was between one man and one woman. Now he insists that if you believe that or say that you are a hateful bigot. Fifty years ago the current president opposed the so-called right to murder unborn children. Now he insists we have to codify it into law. This is what the speech of the world is like. It is embarrassing in the extreme. Shamefully mutable. Changes literally on a whim. And it is destructive, gives no true happiness to anyone, and certainly not eternal life.

But Jesus’ words still haven’t changed. And they will never change. His sheep will always recognize them and love them and prefer them to all other words, because they are so obviously superior and so remarkably true. They tell me what my sinful flesh does not want to hear, they destroy my pride in myself, they break me down to see that I am nothing without my Savior, I would only make a ruin of everything without Him. I couldn’t even do my job without Him, because I can do nothing without Him – in him we live and move and have our being; I couldn’t love my wife or children without Him, couldn’t forgive those who sin against me without Him, couldn’t know what I should do and what I shouldn’t, couldn’t know where I came from or what my future holds on earth on in eternity, without Him and without His voice. But His voice tells me everything. It gives me everything. It forgives me everything. It warns me against all that would harm me. It gives me courage when I am faint and strength when I am weak. It makes me see reality, tells me my worth and the worth of every single person I come across, that we have been bought with a price.

And so we are not our own. As we sing, “I am thine for Thou has bought me.” I can’t think of a more comforting and secure truth than this. It is a surrender that every sheep of the good shepherd is glad to give. You don’t belong to yourself. You belong to Jesus. Do you actually think you want to be independent, autonomous, be true to yourself? That is a lonely and sad existence, and a naïve lie. You can never be alone. There will at least be a wolf there to devour you. You are after all a sheep. And there will certainly be thieves and robbers to break in and steal and bad shepherds who mean you harm. You cannot be alone, autonomous, independent of any. The most embarrassing of Simon and Garfunkel’s songs, of which there are many, is “I am a rock, I am an island.” No, you are not. No man is an island unto himself, said a much better poet. And to be true to yourself you must first be true to your Shepherd, as He has been true to you. You belong to Him. He has bought you. And He means you well. He wants nothing but good for you. His voice will never disappoint you. You belong to him not as a slave to a slavemaster, not as some object, some possession, to its owner, no, you belong to Him as a wife to a loving husband, as a child to a fawning mother, as a friend for whom He has laid down His life. It is no burdensome or onerous belonging, this. It is what God created you for, what your very nature, despite the sin that now corrupts it, what your very nature was meant to enjoy, to belong to Jesus and so to know your God and to love Him and His commands and be surrounded by your fellow Christians and partake with them of the table He spreads before us, as goodness and mercy follow us all the days of our life, until we pass with Him through the valley of the shadow of death, and then dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Amen.

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