![]() My intentions were good but they had no reason to trust me. Even the voices that have good intentions can be ones that lead us away from God’s will for our lives. Just like the sheep I was trying to get out of the alfalfa field. Sometimes those voices seem so Godly, or so wise, or so correct. May have had a connection to God but were saying things “for God” but were not God. He is talking about the ones that may have seemed right. Here Jesus is cautioning about listening to anyone that does not come through Him. These voices can be from anywhere. Often times we think of evil people as the ones Jesus is referring to. It is easy to separate these but we need to remember we are still with the same group that criticized Jesus for healing the blind man on the Sabbath. First He is the Shepherd, now He is the gate. This is all part of the same conversation. Jesus seems to switch His metaphor on this one. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. So Jesus again said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. This figure of speech Jesus used with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. They did not recognize the voice of another shepherd. They knew from experience that this was a sound they could trust and that it meant good things are ahead. All the other sheep in the corral would just ignore the sound because it meant nothing to them. Each shepherd had a different voice or mechanism to call the sheep and his flock would follow that sound. They would have flocks from several different shepherds in one large corral. In the morning the shepherd would come and call to his sheep and the ones that recognized his voice would follow him out of the corral and into the surrounding fields to eat. They just knew my will was “not in their best interest” so they did everything they could to oppose me.īack in Jesus’ day shepherds would bring their sheep into pens in the evening for protection. These sheep did not recognize my voice and I probably seemed to them as a danger. They were all for staying in the alfalfa where they had plenty to eat and little or no dangers as far as they knew. It didn’t matter the method I tried the sheep did not want to go where I wanted them to go. I did know then that herding sheep is not as easy as it sounds. One of my jobs was to herd some sheep out of an alfalfa field back into the pen where they belonged. Being a city boy, I really had no idea of what I was doing. My mom had to attend summer classes at the U to renew her teaching certificate and so my sister and I stayed with some people that had farms and helped them. When I was between 7th and 8th grades I spent the summer working on a couple of ranches. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.” (John 10:1-5) When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. ![]() ![]() The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. ![]() But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. “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. ![]()
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