Helping each other know & follow Jesus in our home, city, and world.

Text: John 10:10-18

Our need to daily renounce self-centered sanctification and embrace our inability to live life for Jesus apart from the loving leadership of the Good Shepherd is critical to our discipleship.

God uses your acknowledgment of your constant failures as a reminder that you are powerless to sanctify yourself. You and I are sinners through and through. Our only hope of righteousness is in Christ and Christ alone.

In our text, five times in four verses, Jesus promises to lay down His life for His sheep. The Good Shepherd took upon Himself the fate that would otherwise fall upon His sheep. Christ's death on the cross fully paid the penalty for our sin! God graciously imputes Christ's righteousness to us as if it were our own and will remember our sins no more!

We must live in constant awareness of these amazing truths if we are going to experience the abundant life the Good Shepherd provides.

The best way I've found to follow the Good Shepherd daily is to begin each day by praying and rehearsing the gospel.

Colossians 3:16 tells us "Let the message about Christ completely fill your lives" (CEV). This is the gospel message! This is what Scripture means when it commands us to "walk in the Spirit."

Daily, I remind myself of who I am, apart from the rescue of Jesus. I resign to my inability to be holy and have victory over my flesh. I confess my sins. In the words of CS Lewis, "[This] cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven."

This is not a method or a strategy. It's a personal connection to the Good Shepherd. Just as Jesus knew His Father, we know Jesus. 

"I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father" (John 10:14-15a).

It's all about Jesus!
John