I AM: The Gate

Of all the symbols or metaphors Jesus could use to reveal something to us about God, on the surface, “a gate” seems a bit anticlimactic. Despite what we may think, though, Jesus was actually correcting the false ideologies about God that were and are still prevalent today. He reminds us that even in our seasons of suffering God still loves and protects us. He also declares that true life and salvation are attainable, but only through him. And finally, he clarifies that his invitation to true life is on offer for all who are willing to admit that they’re lost.

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 Well, I’m sitting on a porch, uh, outside of a camp cabin with a 10 year old boy named Elliot sitting next to. We’re at a summer camp in New York. Uh, I’m working there as a camp counselor, uh, for about two months, uh, during a summer, uh, in college. And Elliot is a camper at this summer camp. And it’s your typical summer camp that you would see in like the parent trap or something like that.

It’s, uh, just for, you know, kids ages. Uh, hundreds of kids from like first grade to eighth grade, even into high school. And there’s all sorts of different departments. And so there’s like a, a sports department, there’s an equestrian department, there’s a, uh, like an art department, and the kids can kind of go to these different departments, uh, during their days and kind of do these different activities.

There’s the music department, which is where I work, and then there’s the theater department, which is. Favorite department. El Lead is actually the most popular kid in camp by far out of the hundreds of kids that are there. Uh, this little 10 year old has everyone’s attention. He’s always making people laugh.

He’s the one who’s sort of the life at the party. Outside of the campfires at night, he’s even the star of the two end of the summer camp musicals Joseph in the amazing technical dreamcoat and guise and dolls. If you guys know anything about musicals, he is the star of both of those. Everyone knows him.

Uh, he’s never seen without a smile on his face or making somebody else laugh. But in this moment, as both of us sit outside of this camp, cabin, Elliot is in tears because just days before they sent him to camp, uh, his parents told him that they were getting. And that their divorce would be finalized, uh, before he even got home from camp.

Now, this is the first time he’s opened up to anyone about it, and I’m honored that he’s trusted me enough to, to be the one to, to share this with. And we’ve been trained a little bit before the kids get to camp. We spend about two weeks learning how to be counselors and how to handle mild level crises and conflicts and things like that.

But nothing could prepare me for what he asks me next. Why does God hate? Hmm. Wow. We’ve been there. He’s a theater. He’s a little dramatic. He’s a theater kid, . Now, I don’t know how to tell him that in the grand scheme of things, he’s going to be okay. That even though he’s 10, and it feels like his world is collapsing, that this is actually not the worst thing that could happen to him.

That his parents still love him and all of that. But at the same time, I also dunno how to reconcile my belief in a good, loving and personal God with the reality of a 10 year old boy dealing with the most intense and avoidable pain that he’s ever had to go through. Now this isn’t a Christian camp. Uh, and so the, the rule is that you can share your personal, spiritual, religious beliefs if you are specifically asked about them.

Uh, you can’t just go kind of proselytizing to these kids. And so I wanna be really careful about how I answer Elliot’s question. So I fumble my way through an answer. Something about how God allows bad things to happen to us so that we can learn to love and to grow. It’s a pretty safe. That’s a pretty non-denominational answer.

Anybody with any background, religious or not would generally be okay with that as an answer, but it’s also not a very good answer, but it is enough of an answer to kind of distract him, get his mind off of the situation, and then turn his attention towards the ice cream that the other counselors have smuggled into the cabin for the night.

Now, Elliott’s question reveals a fundamental question that I believe is at the heart of the human experience, and that is what is God? All of us want to know if there really is something or someone that exists beyond this life. We want to know if this life is all that there is, but more than that, I would argue that we all want to know what this something or this someone is like.

Is he good? Is he distant or is he passive or more applicably like what Elliot was wrestling with and what I imagine many of us have wrestled with in our days on this Earth. What is God’s role in the bad things that happened to me? Uh, like Elliot and summer camp, at some point, our perception of who God is and what he’s like clashes with our reality.

And so we don’t know how to reconcile our belief in a good and loving, benevolent God with the reality of the pain, suffering, and injustice that we witness and experience on this side of heaven. And so we’re in the middle of this teaching series. Looking at the seven I Am statements of Jesus recorded in John’s Gospel.

And these are significant because these seven statements are translations of the Greek phrase, a ego, Amy, which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew phrase. I am, uh, from Exodus when Moses encounters God in the book of Exodus. He asks this God, who he is, he says, who do I? You know, and I’m gonna go lead these people out of Egypt.

Who do I say sent me? Which is a fair question. In the ancient near East, there’s a pan on it. There’s hundreds of gods. He wants to know which one is he talking to. And God responds not by giving him a name, but by making a declaration, I am sent you. Meaning God is above all other gods. He’s more powerful and more.

And so when Jesus comes thousands of years later and he says the same thing in John, it’s another declaration, but at the end of each ego, Amy statement, I am statement, he adds something to kind of color in this picture of who God is. Not only is God more real than we can imagine, but he’s also the light of the world.

He’s also the bread of life. Or for today, Jesus is the gate. Now before we can unpack everything contained within this statement that Cade read for us in John 10, I am the gate. We have to go back and see why Jesus says this about himself. So if you have a Bible, uh, you can just flip to the page before and look with me at John chapter nine.

We’re gonna start in verse one, and we’re gonna look at the first seven verses. So John nine says, as he was passing by, he saw a man born, born blind from. His disciples asked him, rabbi, who sinned this man or his parents that he was born blind? Neither this man nor his parents sinned. Jesus answered. This came about so that God’s work might be displayed in him.

We must do the works of Him who sent me while at his day night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. After he said these things, he spit on the ground, made some mud from the saliva, and spread the mud on his. Go. He told him, wash in the pool of solom, which means scent.

So he left, washed, and came back. Seeing. Now this story sets up why Jesus calls himself the gate and compares us to sheep and all of that that we’re gonna get to, but it also reveals a dec declarative statement about God. Notice in verse two, what did the disciples ask? Jesus? In a way, it’s the same question that Elliot asks, and it’s the same question you and I ask Rabbi, teacher who.

This man or his parents that he was born. Implied in the disciples question is an assumption about who God is and what he has come to do. Because in the ancient world, there is this prevalent belief, uh, that illnesses and disabilities were a direct curse from God based on the severity of your sin. And so a really bad sin would equate to a really bad curse like blindness.

And then this case, the sin could have been the blind man’s, or more likely it would’ve been his parents because he was born blind.

wealth and material possessions were also direct blessings for good behavior. Uh, and so if you were born blind and ill, that meant that you came from a bad, sinful household or that you yourself were a bad sinner. But if you had wealth and material possessions, it was generally believed that you were blessed by God, that you were doing something right, and so God was giving you material and provisional blessings.

To make you succeed over others. And so when Jesus tells all these stories, when you’re reading the gospels about the poor person inheriting the kingdom of heaven while the rich person is left outside of the kingdom, that’s really what this is about. It’s not just about wealth. It’s about the false assumption behind that wealth.

Now these people who were given these curses or these disabilities, by God were excluded from the temple, which is really significant because they were not excluded because of their blindness. They were excluded because of their sin. Right. They were excluded because the reason that they were blind was believed to be because they were sinners.

And so the results of the lifestyle that these people had to live wasn’t just a physical disability, it was also a relational disability. It’s likely that this man wasn’t even seen as a sinner himself, but as someone who came from a household, Of sin again because he was born blind. And so he was ostracized and kept outside of the temple, which was a place that was supposed to symbolize God’s presence, the very place meant for healing and restoration.

And so this man in his blindness was completely cut off from his family, from his friends, and from the feasts and celebrations that happened in his city. It would be like him not being able to celebrate Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving simply because he was seen as a. Later in the story, the Pharisees are gonna see this man whom Jesus heals, and they’re gonna confront him.

So they invite him in, uh, and they, they question him. They don’t believe he was born blind. They say, you know, were you really born blind? Really? They’re trying to use this man’s, um, condition, his disability, whatever, to trap Jesus. And they don’t believe him when he says I am. So they call him the parents and the parents are so afraid of the Pharisees.

The text says that they say the kid can answer for himself. He’s an adult. Let him call him and see what he says. So they call him back and the parents leave on their. And so this is the life that this man was living. This is the world that Jesus is entering into, and all of this was based on this false assumption about who God is and what he does.

The assumption that God gives us what we deserve. , we call this self-righteousness, which we’ve talked a lot about here in our church, in these teachings and sermons, and usually self-righteousness implies some idea that, um, we are trying to make ourselves better so that we can get something good from God.

But it’s a double-sided coin. Here’s my definition of self-righteousness. It’s a false belief that we can manipulate God’s actions towards us with good behavior. And so there is some truth to our suffering being the result of sin and its consequences. So it’s generally true that our actions do have consequences on ourselves and on others.

And it’s also true that God does reward good behavior, but these consequences and rewards are rarely the types that we think work for or want to accept. That’s good. Call it karma. Call it what Goes Around and comes around. God only helps those who help themselves or whatever you want. But this belief is as prevalent today as it was back then.

Right? Right. And this self-righteousness is something that we do and also something done to us. It’s something that we do by trying to get good things from God by our good. But it’s also something done to us because like the blind man, we can find ourselves looked down on oppressed by others and generally ignored by those in our community because of the false belief that we’ve done something to deserve our suffering.

Again, there is truth to the statement that our sin results in consequences, but not all of us get what we deserve. In fact, none of us get what we. Yeah, say it. And the problem with this belief isn’t just that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s actually catastrophic to our souls. For example, spiritual formation, everything that we’re about in this church, practicing Sabbath, scripture, silent, solitude, community generosity, all of the things that we’re gonna go through for the next two years for our practice series can then become about getting something from.

We become so consumed with our lives that we actually never give to others. It just becomes a way for us to work on our project. Self personal self-improvement becomes the end game for us. Generosity and other practices like it are unappealing unless we get something out of them. Wow. It also places the locale of our spiritual growth in ourselves, and so we never learn to depend on God if we can manipulate him with good intentions and good.

And then it puts us in contrast to everyone around us. If we are more successful than our neighbor, it must be because God likes us more. Come on. If we’re suffering more than our neighbor, it must be because we’ve done something wrong. God must be punishing us, and as Jesus is gonna later say at the end of chapter nine, our problem is not just this faulty thinking, our problem is what he would call spiritual blind.

So the man that was born blind was not the real issue in the story. The the Pharisees were who were propagating this idea that this is who God is, like this is what he does to those who sin, and this is what he does to those who don’t sin. They’ve created this dualistic, binary way of thinking that puts themselves up because of their self-righteousness and puts others down.

Their problem according to Jesus is spiritual blindness. And you and I struggle the same thing today. We are blind to who we are outside of Christ. We are blind to who God is right and left. Without a guide like Jesus, we are blind to the persuasion of people who would allure us with a false sense of spiritual security that can be achieved through our own actions.

So if suffering happens, God must hate. . If God hates us, we must be able to do something better. If we do better, then God will reward us. And if God rewards us, we can avoid suffering. Cue the endless cycle of performance. Right? And so we get to John 10. What is Jesus’s answer to this problem? John 10 verse one says, truly I tell you, anyone who doesn’t enter the sheep pen by the.

but climbs in some other way is a thief and a robber. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he is brought all his own outside, he goes ahead of them. The sheep follow him because they know his voice.

They will never follow a stranger. Instead, they will run away from him because they don’t know the voice of stranger. Jesus gave them this figure of speech, but they did not understand what he was telling them. Same Jesus, Jesus said again, truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. Yeah. That took a second.

You guys were like, what? all who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep didn’t listen to them. I am the gate. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and come in and go out and find. A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. But I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance.

Amen. So if our problem is spiritual blindness, if our problem is that we make up these stories to make sense of God in the world around us, what is Jesus’ answer? I am the gate.

It’s a little anticlimactic. It’s a little confusing, right? Bread of life makes sense. It sounds good. It sounds appealing. We want that light of the world makes sense. God illuminates the darkness. We can come to him with our sin even next week. God is a shepherd. I am the shepherd. That’s comforting and it sounds nice and appealing, but a gate.

Yeah. And then not only that, but Jesus then implies that we are sheep. It’s one of the most common metaphors used to describe humanity in the Bible. In fact, my Old Testament professor argued that you could actually translate the sheep or goats. So like you don’t even get to be like a cute lamb, you’re like a goat

And so our problem according to Jesus is this, that we are like spiritually blind sheep without a shepherd or a sheep pen. We are left to hopelessly wander throughout this. Wow. Right, right, left on our own. Without clarity, we will make up any story about God’s nature and actions to make sense of our lives.

And that story, because we’re human, usually drives us to work harder, to do better, and to be holier than is possible on our own. So with the rest of our time, I wanna unpack this statement. I am the gate. What does this actually mean? Because contained within this statement, I think, is a truth, a correction that Jesus is making about the faulty ideology coming out of the story of the blind man.

And so there are three essential claims about Jesus’s, uh, self proclamation of being. The gates that I wanna look at first, Jesus protects. So the gate of a sheet pen wasn’t just an access point, it was also a means of protection. The, the sheet pen was like a large sort of stone encounter. I should have put a picture up.

But, uh, it was basically these short stones stacked on top of each other to make kind of a circle, uh, with one entrance in it. And that was the gate. And the idea was that, um, predators could come in and out to steal and destroy the sheep without the proper protection. But with the gate, you were able to keep thieves and robbers out.

You were able to keep predators out and keep the sheep in. The sheep knew where to go to find a safe haven or protection. And so the thieves and the robbers in this instance, who is Jesus protecting us against? He’s protecting us against the Pharisees, essentially, right? The Pharisees were imposing this gospel of self-righteousness on others.

And so in one sense, Jesus comes to protect us the same way today that the more that we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus. The more likely we’re able to recognize false teachers and recognize that Jesus is the only access point in and out that we can find a pastor to. But in another sense, Jesus comes to protect us from the false ideas that these, uh, predators, these thieves and robbers come to propagate themselves.

And so Jesus being the perfect image of God himself shows us what God is really like. In other words, if you want to know what God is like, you look at Jesus. That’s why Jesus has come. You want to correct the false ideologies that people have, the claims people make about God. All you have to do is look at Jesus, right?

By Jesus describing himself as the gate, this is what he’s saying, that Jesus is the gate for the sheep because he protects us from predators and from false ideologies. But this also means that if Jesus is the gate, if Jesus wants to protect us, then Jesus is the most trustworthy person that we can relate.

That we can believe that God always has our best interest in mind. That suffering in this life is for our own good and for God’s glory. And these are all hard truths to grapple with. This is not necessarily a teaching or sermon on the implications and subtleties of dealing with suffering, but these are truths nonetheless, at the intersection of our experience of suffering an injustice.

In this life and God’s claims about who he is, we have a choice. When our perception of who God is and our reality of experiences of suffering, clash, we have a choice to make. Will we trust that Jesus always has our best interest in mind? Yeah. Say it or will we revert back to the way of the Pharisees warping the character of God into something that we can control and manipulate by trying harder, doing better, and getting a better life from the hand of.

Will we lean into seasons of suffering with hope that God is present in those seasons with us? Or will we work to get ourselves out and distance ourselves from God moving closer towards us, man? Yeah, Jesus protects his sheep. Secondly, Jesus leads to the Father. Right. There was only one entrance to the sheep pin.

And so if we’re gonna extend this analogy, this metaphor, the sheep pin represents what Jesus calls life and life in abundance or access to God himself. And there’s only one way in and one way out. Jesus is the only access point that we have to God. God, eternal life, healing, salvation. The life that you’ve always wanted is only found within the context of a relationship with.

That brokenness that you feel that you live in, that you experience and that you spread to others is a direct result of the broken connection that you have with the source of all life, which is God himself. Now, this is a claim of exclusivity. There is no other way that you can get to God. There is no other way that you can find salvation or healing.

In this life, there is no other way that you can get what you are really after. No identity, no meaning, and no joy that really lasts apart from God. And to some, this is the most controversial claim of Christianity, to say that there is only one way in and out. This sort of tribalistic us versus them. We have something right?

We know everything and everyone else is excluded from the family of. , God but this claim of exclusivity is not vindictive, sadistic, or arrogant of Jesus. This is not Jesus hiding himself from the masses, hoping that not too many people find out about him because heaven is getting crowded. Jesus being the only way to God is actually really good news for us.

Yeah, come on, say it, because if Jesus isn’t the only way to God, then we have to get there ourselves. In other words, if Jesus is not the only way to God, then the only other option that we have is the way of self-righteousness. Yeah. The only hope we have is to try our best to get from God what he freely wants to give us in Christ.

Yeah. That only works as one scholar. Put self-righteousness is the natural disposition of the human heart, and then we find that we can’t actually get from God what we want, and so we settle for lesser. The culture at large will settle for the triple idols, the triple gods of money, sex and power, or even in our community, our small little suburb of Queen Creek, east Valley, whatever.

Three examples that I’ve noticed are an easy life, a good reputation and stability. Now, these things are not bad things in and of themselves, but as aw tosser once. , what a person thinks about God is the most important thing about them. Meaning that what you worship becomes what your identity is in. And if your identity is in money, sex, power, and easy life, a good reputation or stability of any kind, pick your idol of choice, that’s fine.

But according to Jesus, these idols never give you what you want. Right? They steal, they kill, and they destroy. Yeah. Yeah. But Jesus is the. , what we want is possible and achievable. That’s the good news of the gospel. It’s not good news and bad news. It’s just good news. The good news, first off, is that salvation is possible, that you can have the life that you want, salvation and eternal life in heaven with God and with others forever.

Yes, but also more than that, what Jesus calls life and life and abundance, meaning, identity, purpose, and joy. It’s on offer to every. And the good news is on top of that, not only is it accessible, but it’s only accessible through Jesus, meaning that you cannot work hard enough for it. You cannot exclude people from it, and suffering cannot take it away.

Jesus is the only way that’s tough to life and life and abundance. Last thing is Jesus saves the. Again, Jesus’ claim to exclusivity is not vindictive or sadistic. Right? He doesn’t joyously sort of let a few into the pen and then leave others outside begging to come in, right? Jesus does say in Matthew that the road is narrow, but it’s not narrow because it’s meant for a few people.

It’s narrow because it is a difficult road to give up the way of self-righteousness and to accept Jesus is the only way. In other words, to walk through the. requires us to admit, to admit that we are lost like sheep. Wow. Right? That we are blind and we need healing. That our self-righteousness is getting us nowhere, but that Jesus is the gate means that he is an open access point to the Father, that he is the guidepost signaling, the entrance to freedom and to safety.

That Jesus is the gate means that people like Elliot don’t have to wonder how God feels about them. Amen. Right? That Jesus is the gate means that you and I don’t have to work for something that Jesus wants to give us freely, and that Jesus is the gate means that for anybody who wants hope in suffering, they can have an answer to their pain, joy, in the midst of it and meaning and purpose, that nothing in this life can take away.

Yeah. Amen. Thank you. And the good news is that God has done everything in his power to ensure that you and I have access to this life, life and life in abundance. And so, as we close, um, in your groups this week, you’re gonna engage in two practices. Um, the first is to actually pray for the lost, which I believe is one of the best ways that we can correct ourselves from selfe.

Yeah, to take the focus of attention off of ourselves and onto others and acknowledge that just like Jesus saved us, we can help lead others into the pen directing them to the gate. And the second practice is to actually practice Sabbath. Again, this is a practice that we hope we’re done teaching on it, but we hope that it continues.

Um, right. And Sabbath is one of the best ways that we can actually relinquish control, recognizing that God delights in us so that we are able to delight in Him. Mm-hmm. . And so those are the practices for the week. That’s how we can, um, remind ourselves that Jesus is the gate and kind of live this out. Um, but for now I want us to actually respond.

And so, um, the band can start coming up. We’re gonna end with a prayer and respond just like we always do. So would you guys stand.

Now I just wanna lead us in a prayer, um, a prayer of examination after we’re done praying. There’s a, a few other ways that you can respond. Just like always you can come and, uh, take communion, right? We have communion on either side of this. Stage. Um, we encourage you to come, once the music starts playing, you can come and partake in the elements.

A, a way of, um, actually with your, your body taking and saying that God has done this for me. I have life accessible to me just like I have this bread and this cup accessible to me now. Or you can also come and kneel. We have these kneeling pads, uh, up at the front of the stage or at the front of the altar.

If you, um, want to just symbolically. Forward and relinquish that control that self-righteousness to God. A lot of times the first step of spiritual formation, like most of us in this room, are all about following Jesus with our schedules and our time, and we wanna be formed like him, and that’s why you’re coming to this church.

But that usually starts with accepting the invitation to respond. Right to give up the former way of life, something that God is inviting us to relinquish control over. And so a symbolic way of doing that to receive prayers to come and kneel here at the altar, nothing magical happens here. It’s just a way for you to, with your body, worship God, the way that you worship him through song.

The last way that we can respond is, um, through singing, by declaring to God our gratitude for. By declaring to God that no matter what I mean, worship is an act of resistance. We are resisting the way of the world by saying that the way of Jesus, the way into the sheep pen is not something that we can earn.

And we’re celebrating that and we declare that to ourselves and also to each other. And so you can respond either by taking communion, um, by kneeling at the altar, or by receiving prayer, uh, through Pastor Trey. Um, but for now, let me pray and then we can start, um, we can start with our.

Uh, father God, we thank you for this time. God, we thank you that you love us and care about us enough to give us access to the Father.

We ask that as we leave this space, that we would be aware, that we would be cognizant of the ways that we’ve given into self-righteousness, ways that we might not have been aware of, that we try to manipulate your. Uh, ways that we try and earn something from you, even ways that we try and make sense of the world around us, the suffering that we endure.

Um, we just pray that you would remind us of the truth that you love us despite what we go through. That our suffering is not always a direct indication of your attitude towards us. In fact, if we are in you, we’ve accepted the life that you have to offer. That even in our suffering, you love us in those moments no less than we are, uh, when we are successful, when we are out of those seasons.

Father, we asked that we would be able to accept this as a truth in our lives. That it would fuel the way that we live, and that we would spread that to others that we would care about the lost, just like you car cared about us when we were lost. Uh, father, we give you this time, we ask that you speak to us each in the ways that, um, you want and that we would respond, that we’d have the courage to respond in the way that, uh, you want us to.

We pray all this in your name.