410 Trust This Shepherd

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Trust This Shepherd”, originally shared on April 22, 2026. It was the 410^th  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

    There are lots of voices competing for our trust, telling us that they are the only ones who are worthy. Today, we’re going to find out who is trustworthy.

   I ran across an old meme the other day that said, “Every time you paint a room it gets a little smaller.”

   Let’s just think about that for a minute. 😊

   It’s true, but does it matter?

   The room is smaller (dried paint is about .0016” thick), but does it matter enough to make us not want to freshen up the room, or to change its mood, or to match its décor? Or, to make it better?

   Could making our world a little bit smaller be a good thing?

   I thought of that when I was considering the Gospel text that will be read in the vast majority of churches this coming Sunday, John 10:1-10.

   It’s about a gate for protecting “sheep”. That is, who’s in and who’s out.

   Not too many of us have any firsthand experience of caring for sheep. And few of us want to.

   Little lambs are cute, but little lambs grow up into big oafish sheep that need everything.

   So, what do we make of it when Jesus refers to himself as “the shepherd of the sheep”? And, when his disciples don’t understand what he’s talking about, he says that he is “the gate for the sheep”?

   Most of us certainly don’t know. Could it have something to do with our experience of shepherds and sheep, or the lack of it?

   Being a shepherd was somewhat romanticized at the time of Jesus because few people then did it anymore.

   Like some of us romanticize the days when we or our families were farmers. We only remember the good things. We forget about the hard, almost endless, work it takes, the isolation, and the almost total dependance upon things beyond our control.

   Even in Jesus’ day, being a shepherd was not really desirable work. Shepherds were nomadic. They moved their flocks to wherever they could find food and water, so they had no fixed address most of the time.

   They were strangers. They were viewed with suspicion.

   When you heard that shepherds were coming, you hid your daughters and locked up your valuables. Shepherds were not allowed within city limits. Their testimony was not acceptable in a court of law. They smelled bad.

   The word pastor comes from the word “shepherd” in many languages. 😊

   Pastors guide their “flocks”, though we don’t use the term “flocks” for “congregations” much anymore. It seems kind of old-fashioned, and almost none of us accept being called “sheep” as a compliment.

   Most people think of sheep as being passive, as needing someone to take care of them, and as only doing what they are told, none of which are thought of as admirable qualities in our culture.

   So is our message, “Come and be a sheep”? No.

   The Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, John 10:1-10, tells us what the message is in its first five verses. Speaking to the Pharisees about who He is, Jesus says in John 10:1-5,

10 “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. ² The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. ³ The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. ⁴ When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. ⁵ They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.”

   Shepherds spoke to their sheep all day long.

   Many flocks were kept in the same sheepfold with other flocks in Jesus’ day on earth. Shepherds would go to the fold, call their sheep, and only the shepherd’s sheep would follow him, because they knew his voice.

   The message is that all people need a shepherd, this shepherd: Jesus. When you hear him, you know that you can trust him.

   How do we know who our shepherd is? We hear his voice and we know it is him. The Holy Spirit opens our ears and; we resonate with him.

   RCA was a pioneer in audio recording and home entertainment. They manufactured the gramophone, which had a thick, surface destroying needle connected to a large trumpet shaped speaker like an easter lily flower coming out of it. Its shape is what the Grammy award trophy is modeled after. You would crank it up manually and it would spin, first around cylinders and then around flat records, and sound would come out of it. RCA’s logo was a dog staring quizzically into the speaker, and its slogan was “His master’s voice.”

   We hear God speak, but in a different way.

   Remember when Jesus taught, he didn’t always expect everybody to understand. What did he say, in Mark 4:9?

⁹ And he said, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”   

   We who are being saved hear in a different way.

   We know the voice of Jesus because we know Jesus. God has made it so.

   I read a story a while ago about a Native American man who was visiting his long-time city dwelling friend in New York. They were walking along the streets of Manhattan when he suddenly stopped and stood still.

   “What’s wrong?” said the friend.

   “Nothing,” said the Native American. “Listen.”

   “I don’t hear anything,” said the friend.

   The Native American walked over to a tree planted in a ceramic pot and motioned for his friend to come closer. He lifted a branch and there, they both heard the sound of the cricket.

   Once he could see it, the friend heard it clearly.

   “How did you hear that?” the friend asked.

   “Watch,” the Native American said, and he reached into his pocket and threw a few coins on the sidewalk.

   People all around them stopped and looked for the money.

   The Native American said, “We hear the things for which we listen.”

   What do we look for? Do we look for God?

   What do we hear? Do we listen for God?

   Seeing is not only believing. Believing gives us the eyes to see.

   We know that we need a Savior and that we have one in Jesus Christ. We have been given the ears to hear! God has made us His own! This is the Good News!

   This is the message of Easter!

   Jesus gave His life for us. No one took it away from Him. Jesus gave His life and then He took it back again, He rose from the dead! He died as a one-time sacrifice to restore the living relationship with God for which we were created at the beginning of time. He is Risen from the dead! He is who he said he was. He is our Savior, the good shepherd!

   An abundant, real life in this world, and eternal life in the world to come awaits all who repent of their old lives, believe, and are baptised! That’s too good to keep to ourselves.

   I once heard a story about a tourist who was riding a tour bus in Israel, looking at the geography. Suddenly, he saw a flock of sheep and a shepherd behind it. The shepherd was shouting at the sheep and hitting them with his staff to keep them moving forward.

   The tourist went to the guide and said, “I’ve always pictured shepherds walking in front of their sheep and the sheep following the shepherd. “Why is that shepherd pushing and driving them from behind?”

   The guide replied, “That’s not the shepherd. That’s the butcher.”

   But the Pharisees, the religious influencers of Jesus time on earth, don’t get it, as our Gospel reading for this Sunday continues, in John 10:6,

⁶ Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

   How can people come to faith if they are separated from God by their sin?

   How can we know that God cares about we sinners, much less loves us?

   By the cross. This is what Paul says in Romans 5:6-8,

⁶ For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. ⁸ But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

   Almost all of my ancestors came from the country of Norway. My family there can trace our relatives back to the Viking Era in the 1,100’s. Some of our ancestors were farmers who worshiped many gods. Some may have been marauders. Some may have been slaves.

   But they came to Christ. They were saved by Jesus. They repented and received new life by the grace of God through the ministry of missionaries, Christians who shared their faith, just like us, as Christians have done for 2,000 years.

   But, as with their faith, my family didn’t always know what they had.

   My grandmother on my father’s side remembered the time when her family burned most of the cherry wood furniture they brought with them from Norway, because nobody wanted that old stuff. They wanted the modern American plastic kind.

   How do we know what is real at any given time, what endures? How can we know who God is, and what God has given to us? Trust this shepherd, Jesus, care for others, and show others how to do the same.

   When we share the gospel, we share Jesus, not our culture. The meaning of things is more important than human traditions. Quality is more important than size. Making Christians is more important than making church members.

   And we are helped by the fact that Christianity is able to adapt to cultures, not like some other religions that are locked into one culture and one language at one time in their history.

   We believe that what defines us is at the core of our faith, revealed to us through the Bible, and expressed primarily in two ancient creeds: The Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. They represent the faith that was handed down from Jesus to the apostles, and now to us.

   And, as Church reformer Martin Luther said, as long as the Gospel is rightly preached and the Sacraments are rightly administered, everything else is secondary. It may be important, but it is not something that cannot be adapted. It is not based on a law, or on a saying, but on a person, Jesus Christ. That gives us a great deal of freedom, and it is given so that we can receive and promote life!

   We see this in the final four verses of this coming Sunday’s Gospel reading, in John 10:7-10,

⁷ So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. ⁸ All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. ⁹ I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. ¹⁰ The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

   So, when the Pharisees couldn’t understand what Jesus was saying when he said that he is the shepherded that rightly brings the sheep into the fold, Jesus told them that he was the gate to the fold.

   Did that make it any clearer for them? Or us?

   What was he talking about?

   I think that he’s making a reference to a verse from the Psalms that we often read at funerals. It’s a verse about death and salvation and about the meaning of life and the cross. It’s Psalm 118:20,

²⁰       This is the gate of the Lord;

the righteous shall enter through it.

   Jesus is the gate.

   We can only be made righteous before God by faith in Jesus Christ.

   That is a very exclusive statement.

   It connects to a news article that I read this week about a priest in India, and to a Bible verse that was read all over the world this past Sunday.

   Father Vincent Pereira was charged with a crime for saying, during a worship service, that Christianity is the only true religion, because it could hurt the religious sentiments of other people.

   Father Pereira, a Roman Catholic priest, appealed to the Supreme Court of India, where the case awaits trial.

   The president of an international Christian human rights group has asked the court to reject the charge against Father Pereira, and to reject the claim that no faith can claim exclusive truth, because it would criminalize “a key doctrinal belief of many religions.”

   Isn’t that true? All religions have a wisdom tradition, but not all religions are true. If we believed something else was true, wouldn’t we believe that?

   There are many, many different religions in the world. But, just because there are many, does that mean that one of them can’t be true?

   Jesus says, in today’s Gospel reading, ^9 “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”

   He says it even more plainly in another passage from the gospel of John, in John 14:6-7,

⁶ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. ⁷ If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

   Nations and cultures rise and fall while Jesus, the Good Shepherd, will be present forever because Jesus is God, the second person of the Trinity, fully God and fully human being.

   How do people find Jesus? Jesus finds them, often through missionaries, through people who teach people how to recognize what is already inside of them by knowing how to hear the shepherd’s voice. Jesus is already present in every culture, and He calls people of every nation to follow Him.

   Lives that have been changed are lived in love for God and in the service of others, with our whole selves.

   And we bring our whole selves to worship God.

   We respond to his voice by worshiping Him in a way that is not directed toward ourselves, but toward the one true living God.

   That’s why, as the Danish Lutheran philosopher and theologian Soren Kirkegaard said, when worship is finished, the question we ask is not, “What did I get out of that?” but “How did I do?”

   There are many church related groups in the world, but there is only one Church. The Body of Christ.

   It is composed of all the baptized believing Christians who know the voice of the Good Shepherd, Jesus, and follow Him in daily life. And worship Him with the other members of the Body of Christ.

   That one flock is composed of people of every race and place and language and culture. People of every nation. Even of people of every time! A community of people who love God, love others, and hear the voice of Jesus, the one shepherd.

   Every time you paint a room, you do make it a little smaller. But in the room that is the Christian church, the inside is always larger than the outside. 😊

   The voice of Jesus the shepherd is calling all people to hear his voice and to follow Him now.

   That voice doesn’t come from any one culture because Christianity doesn’t come from the North or from the South or from the East or from the West.

   It comes from above. And it proclaims the one way to salvation through Jesus Christ, our shepherd!

   When I was in the Marine Corps, I saw a t-shirt that said, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest #*&^%$@$& in the valley.”

   We don’t do that. And we don’t have to. We have a Good Shepherd. When it comes to what is needed for life and salvation, the Good Shepherd has done it all. For us.

   You can hear Jesus in your heart today, and you can trust that shepherd.

   Christ is Risen! He is Risen, Indeed! Alleluia!