Amen.
So it's since it's, uh, it's, uh, I guess it's Hispanic month, right?
So the sermon today will be in Spanish, but don't worry, we've got headsets.
They'll pass them out so you can listen to the translation.
No, no.
Okay.
I do want to encourage everybody to learn Spanish because I was
told on good authority that Spanish is the language spoken in heaven.
So you don't want to spend eternity with headsets listening to translation.
I'm just kidding.
Okay.
I'm just kidding.
Please don't quote me on that.
Amen.
Jesus, the good shepherd.
We're going to have a little sermon and then go right
into the main event of today.
The appointing of three new elders in the Orange County region,
which I'm super excited about.
Um, let's, let's, before we jump into scripture, let's,
let's go to God in prayer.
Father God, we're so excited about all the things that you're
doing all over the world, God.
And yet we also know that there's so, so much great need in our world, Father.
We pray for all our world to know you, God.
For everyone around to know you.
For there to be many more baptisms and many more people who know you and
live with you and walk with you, God.
We pray especially for our brothers and sisters.
In Beirut right now, father, the sisters and brothers that we've
had in Ukraine, who've just been surviving bombs and warfare.
And now we have our brothers and sisters.
Some of them are very dear friends to me.
God, please be with them, protect them, protect especially the
Children all over the world, God.
Be with them, help them to know that you are with them.
Help them to find you, to discover you, to know you, God, help us to be a light
to the world so that we can help everybody who wants to, to know you and be with you.
God, we love you and thank you.
As we have time now to study your word, uh, open our hearts and our minds, help
us to focus God on your scriptures, to open up our hearts and minds so
that your word can penetrate and transform us, God, and change our lives.
God, help us.
to be like Jesus.
Please bless this time that we have.
In Jesus name we pray.
Amen.
So John chapter 1010 is the classic, the good shepherd, right?
The good, the good shepherd scripture.
And he starts out by saying, before he introduces himself as the good
shepherd, he says, The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.
I have come that they may have life to live.
and have it to the full.
This is Jesus introduction of what his role is here.
If you're visiting and you're wondering exactly what is this about?
Maybe you're already been, you know, going to church.
Maybe you know a lot about, maybe you don't know much,
maybe you don't know anything.
This is Jesus introducing himself, telling us why he's here and he's
telling, he starts, I said, the thief comes only to kill, to steal and to kill.
That's of course we know who the thief is.
It is Satan.
And there is evil in the world.
All you gotta do is turn on the news.
We know there's evil in the world.
And our world is in a raging battle between good and evil.
And no matter how you may see it or your world view, but we
know there's a battle going on.
And the Bible tells us it's a spiritual battle.
It's not necessarily just an obvious battle often times.
It's a battle that's fought out in our hearts and our minds
for what is right and good.
And why we need Jesus.
He says, I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.
What does he mean by that?
What does he mean by life to the full?
And a clue is in the word, which, if you've listened to my
sermons, you know I love this.
It's one of my favorite words.
Zoe.
It means life to the full.
There's another word for life.
Bios.
And that's just what everything has, that breathes, that grows.
Plants have bios.
Animals have bios.
Everything has that breathes and lives has bios.
Like we get the word biography, biology.
But this word is special.
And you thought it was just somebody's name.
No, it's Zoe.
It's powerful.
It's life.
It's what we think of the good life.
And it's what Jesus came for.
It's what He came to give us.
He came to give us the good life, the right life, life as it should be lived.
We only get one shot at this.
One shot.
And I would love to believe in reincarnation, but it's just not true.
It sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
That you could just do a mulligan on life.
I'll just do over, you know, be like a video game.
I'm just gonna start over.
And that would be great, but that's not reality.
The Bible says that everybody lives and dies and appears
before God on Judgment Day.
One time.
So don't blow it.
Let's get this life thing down.
And Jesus presents himself to us as the way, the truth, and the life.
Sowing.
He says, this is what I've come for.
To give you this.
And the thing is, everybody wants a good life, right?
Everybody, whether you live in Hollywood or Compton, whether you're
young or very old, whether, everybody everywhere wants a good life.
Even if they don't know the word Zoe, they don't know what it
means, but that's what they want.
Everybody wants that.
And the world thinks that a good life, Zoe, the great life, comes from
money, comes from beauty, comes from education, comes from possessions,
comes from having the right boyfriend or girlfriend, or finding the right spouse,
or, or, or just having the right career.
That's it.
But yet, there, we know, we can look around, the truth is there
are many people who have plenty of money, lots of beauty, education,
possessions, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a spouse, and they don't have Zoe.
They don't have life to the full.
Why?
Because that comes from Jesus.
That comes from Him.
That's the truth.
We do not have life to the full without Jesus.
He shows us the truth.
The way in fact, it's incredibly difficult to even have a good life To have a
great life why because the world just throws all kinds of stuff at us all the
time Whether you're a teen trying to find a group to belong to in school or
or college Trying to figure out your future your life and who you're going
to get married Are you going to get married or you're in a career trying
to figure out am I in the right career?
Jump career wherever we're at Jesus is the way You And the problem
is, this is like, this is why it's called the secret of the kingdom,
because most people don't know that.
They don't know that.
And that's the secret of the kingdom.
That Jesus really is the way.
I want to read you a story.
I'm going to challenge this a little bit, so pay attention, because it's four pages
long, but hang in there with me, okay?
It's one of the most powerful stories.
I've ever heard to explain what we're talking about here.
From John Ortberg's book, the life you've always wanted.
The state run convalescent hospital is not a pleasant place.
It is large understaffed and overfilled with senile, helpless and lonely people
waiting to die on the brightest of days.
It seems like it seems dark inside and it smells of sickness and stale urine.
I went there once or twice a week for four years, but never wanted to go there.
And I always left with a sense of relief.
It is not the kind of place one gets used to.
On this particular day, I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited
before, looking in vain for a few who were alive enough to receive a flower
and a few words of encouragement.
This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases, men
and women strapped into carts.
or wheelchairs looking completely helpless.
As I neared the end of the hallway, I saw an old woman strapped in a wheelchair.
Her face was in absolute horror.
The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me she was blind.
The large hearing aid over one ear told me she was almost deaf.
One side of her face was being eaten by cancer.
There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and
it had pushed her nose to one side.
dropping an eye and distorting her jaw so that would have, what
would have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth.
As a consequence, she drooled constantly.
I was told later that when new nurses arrived, the supervisors would send
them to feed this woman thinking that if they could stand this site, they
could stand anything in the building.
I also learned later that this woman was 89 years old and that she had been there
bedridden, blind, nearly deaf and alone.
For 25 years, this was Mabel.
This is a true story.
I don't know why I spoke to her.
She looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that
hallway, but I put a flower in her hand and said, here's a flower for you.
Happy Mother's Day.
She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it.
And then she spoke and much to my surprise, her words, although somewhat
garbled because of her deformity.
We're obviously produced by a clear mind.
She said, thank you, it's lovely.
But can I give it to someone else?
I can't see it, you know I'm blind.
I said, of course.
And I pushed her in a chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought
I could find some alert patients.
I found one and I stopped the chair.
Mabel held out the flower and said, here, this is from Jesus.
That was when it began to dawn on me That this was not an ordinary human being.
Later, I wheeled her back into her room and learned more about her history.
She had grown up on a small farm that she managed with only her
mother until her mother died.
Then she ran the farm alone until 1950, when her blindness and sickness
sent her to the convalescent hospital.
For 25 years, she got weaker and sicker with constant headaches,
backaches, stomach aches, and then the cancer came too.
Her three roommates were all human vegetables who screamed
occasionally but never talked.
They often soiled their bedclothes, and because the hospital was
understaffed, especially on Sundays when I usually visited,
the stench was often overpowering.
Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks, and I went to see her once or
twice a week for the next three years.
Her first words to me were usually an offer of hard candy from a
tissue box she kept near her bed.
Some days I would react to her from, I would read to her from the Bible.
And often when I would pause, she would continue reciting the
passage from memory, word for word.
On other days, I would take a book of hymns and sing with her.
And she would know all the words of the old songs.
For Mabel, these were not merely exercises in memory.
She would often stop in mid hymn and make a brief comment about lyrics
she considered particularly relevant.
I never heard her speak of loneliness or pain, except in the stress she placed
on certain lines and certain hymns.
It was not many weeks before I turned from a sense that I was
helping to a sense of wonder.
And I would go to her with a pen and paper to write down the things she would say.
During one hectic week of final exams, I was frustrated because my mind seemed
to be pulled in ten directions at once with all the things I had to think about.
The question occurred to me, what does Mabel have to think about?
Hour after hour, day after day, week after week.
Not even able to know if it's day or night.
So I went to her and asked, Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here?
And she said, I think about my Jesus.
I sat there and thought for a moment about the difficulty for me of thinking
about Jesus for even five minutes.
And I asked, what do you think about Jesus?
And she replied slowly and deliberately, deliberately, as I wrote, I think
about how good he's been to me.
He's been awfully good to me in my life.
You know, I'm one of those kind who's mostly satisfied.
Lots of folks wouldn't care much for what I think.
Lots of folks wouldn't think I'm kind would think I'm kind of
old fashioned, but I don't care.
I'd rather have Jesus.
He's all the world to me.
And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn.
Jesus is all the world to me.
My life, my joy, my all.
He is my strength from day to day.
Without him, I would fall.
When I am sad, to him I go.
No other one can cheer me so.
When I am sad, he makes me glad.
He's my friend.
This is not fiction.
Incredible as it may seem, a human being really lived like this.
I know I knew her.
How could she do it?
Seconds ticked and minutes crawled and so did days and weeks and months and years of
pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening.
And she lay there and sang hymns.
How could she do it?
The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something that you
and I don't have much of.
She had power.
Lying there in that bed, unable to move, unable to see.
Unable to hear, unable to talk to anyone.
She had an incredible power.
Here was an ordinary human being who received supernatural power
to do extraordinary things.
Her entire life consisted of following Jesus as best she could in her situation.
Patient endurance of suffering, solitude, prayer, meditation, and
scripture, worship, fellowship.
When it was all possible, when it was possible, Giving when she had a
flower or a piece of candy to offer.
Imagine being in her condition and saying, I think about how good he's been to me.
He's been awfully good to me in my life, you know.
I'm one of those who's, who, the kind who's mostly satisfied.
This is the 23rd Psalm come to life.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
For anyone who really saw Mabel, I Who was willing to turn aside.
A hospital bed became a burning bush.
A place where this ordinary, pain filled world was visited by the presence of God.
When others saw the life in that hospital bed, they wanted to take off their shoes.
They were on holy ground.
The lid was off.
The turn came with a catch of breath and a beating heart and tears.
They were standing on holy ground.
Do you believe that such a life is possible for an ordinary human being?
Do you believe it is possible for you?
This is promised in the gospel.
The good news proclaimed by Jesus.
The kingdom of God has come near.
Repent and believe in the good news.
The good news, as Jesus preached, is that now it is possible for ordinary men and
women to live in the presence of God.
And under the power of God, that good news as Jesus preached is
not about the minimal entrance requirements for getting into heaven.
When you die, it is about the glorious redemption of human
life, your life and my life.
This is real Christianity.
This is real faith.
This is authentic faith.
This is real religion is God intended.
It something that is a hidden treasure, that is a pearl of great value, that
is worth more than everything and all that we have to have this faith.
Why and how could she do it?
'cause she had Jesus, she had the good shepherd.
Mabel is authentic.
What could make a person's life?
So full of suffering, yet so full of peace.
How could anyone survive such horrors, and yet be kind and
gentle, even giving and loving?
Most of us struggle with a whole lot less suffering than that.
We struggle with this.
Mabel understood and overcame because she knew the Good Shepherd.
She knew Jesus.
I love that she says, my Jesus, my Jesus, she understood the value of life with
Jesus and therefore had the power to overcome challenges to be healed from
this life and its many damages to love, the love to overcome hatred, anger, and
fear that is just destroying our world.
The patience to wait on the Lord and let Him work over the days, over the
weeks, over the months, over the years.
The faith that sustains a person through any hardship and any suffering.
The faith that keeps us strong and going forward.
At this very moment, we have brothers and sisters hiding from bombs.
Trying to find food to feed their kids, our own members going through this.
I've been talking to Mofeed in Beirut and there, you know what they're doing?
They're out trying to help refugees and they're baptizing people.
People are turning themselves into Jesus.
There are people waking up on the streets of LA, no home.
Some of these people are children.
Trying to figure out how to survive another day under
a bridge or in a shelter.
There are people trying to sober up today before they go to work tomorrow.
Trying to hide their addiction before somebody finds out and fires them.
There are people trying to heal hurts inflicted by people who
were supposed to love them.
There are people just lonely, lonely, wanting a friend.
And some of them, of these people I'm talking about,
are right here this morning.
And on and on and on, the world needs Jesus.
The world needs the Good Shepherd.
Jesus goes on and He says, and we'll close out with this, He
says, I'm the Good Shepherd.
The Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.
The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep.
So when he sees a wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away.
Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it.
The man runs away because he's a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.
I am the good shepherd.
I know my sheep and my sheep know me.
Just as the father knows me and I know the father.
And I lay down my life for the sheep.
Who is he talking about?
Talking about us.
He's talking about you.
That he lays down his life for you.
And what are you going to do about that?
He talks about being the good shepherd.
Who stays and fights the bear and the wolf and the lion.
And doesn't run away.
When things get hard, it's so tempting to run away.
It's so tempting to just say, I'm out, I'm done.
This is hard.
I didn't sign up for this.
Thank God Jesus didn't run away.
Thank God when things got tough, He didn't quit.
He kept pushing forward as the Hebrew writers for the joy set before Him.
He endured the pain.
It's hard to endure the pain.
It's hard to press forward.
I remember one time I was I was, this was my pre christian days and I had
visited my cousin and we were at his house and I had a really nice lowrider.
1969 Grand Prix, shag rug, chandelier, chrome steering wheel,
chain, chrome chain steering wheel.
My car, oh yes, it could go up and down, yes.
I was cool, believe it or not.
And I was at my cousin's house who also had a really nice lowrider.
And we got a call that there was a TV station that wanted
to do a report on Barrio Unity.
You know, and so they needed lowriders from the community.
So we all went, all his friends, we all went there.
We're all parked in this parking lot waiting for the news channel to show up.
And this other lowrider cruised by from another neighborhood,
another barrio, you know.
And he looked at us and there was about five of, uh, about five or six cars
parked and we're all hanging out there and he takes off and we're like, Oh,
and he comes back in about 20 minutes.
We're still waiting with about six other low riders and they parked across the
street and they get out of their cars and I see this one guy pull a chain.
Another guy grabbed a crowbar.
I said, another guy grabbed a bat.
And I thought, Oh, we're in trouble.
This is going to happen.
This is going to go down.
And I ran, grabbed my crowbar and my cousin grabbed his crowbar.
And I was like, we could just run.
We could just go, you know, but it was such a battle.
Cause I was like, I don't want to get hit by a crowbar.
I don't want everybody to swing a chain and hit me over the head.
And we're like, we can't, we can't run.
We want to run.
I wanted to run.
I wanted to go.
I've, you know, I've been shot at.
I've been stabbed at.
I've been beat up more times.
It's painful.
I wanted to run.
And thank God, as they started crossing the street, the TV van
and the, and the truck pulled up to do a special on Barrio Unity.
Everybody quickly hit their crowbars and chains.
And they asked us to drive together.
In their, in their thing, you know.
I understand.
The desire to run.
The desire to quit.
The desire to just say, this is too hard, forget it.
I didn't sign up for this.
That's the classic line.
I've been waiting for years to get this right and they're not got it right.
This church, it's got problems.
Christianity is too hard.
Where's Jesus?
I get it.
Thankfully, Jesus didn't quit.
He didn't quit on me.
He knew me then, and loved me.
And I was difficult.
He knows all of us.
The Good Shepherd knows his sheep.
He knows you.
He knows your hurts.
He knows your pains.
He knows your sorrow.
He knows your joy.
Amen.
He knows you want Zoe.
You want a good life.
And it doesn't matter if you're 16 or 76, we all want a good life.
The amazing thing, he's not even talking about heaven.
He's not talking about what happens after you die.
He's talking about right now what's happening right now.
How did Mabel have so much peace?
How could somebody going through so much?
I think peace
is one of the greatest evidences of the power of God.
It's one of the things that shows most that somebody is walking in the spirit
because it takes the spirit of God to overcome anger, to overcome hatred,
to overcome resentment and bitterness.
It takes God.
But see, here's the thing.
Jesus is actually building an army of shepherds.
It's what he wants to help take care of God's people so that
they can be a light to the world.
He pulls together men and women who will go and preach the gospel,
and many of them become evangelists and women's ministry counselors.
And they advanced the gospel and they advanced the kingdom of God.
But he also pulls up and raises up the veterans, the old guys, the,
I won't say the old group women.
Okay.
I won't say that the old guys and their wives,
the old guys and their beautiful young wives
to take care of that group of people who've gotten baptized.
Who have committed their lives to Jesus to help them thrive.
To help them shine in this world.
So that we can make a difference in this world.
But it is a fight, make no mistake.
And thankfully Jesus isn't a quitter.
He fights for you, for me.
He fights for the church.
He told Peter, Even the gates of Hades will not overcome his church.
Why?
Because Jesus is here.
Even with all our warts and all, even with all our issues
and struggles, Jesus is here.
That's just the way it is.
None of us will ever be perfect in the sense of flawlessness.
We all need Jesus.
And so I'm very excited because we're adding to that army
of shepherds this morning.