still to God and prayer.
Gracious Heavenly Father, we just thank you for your spirit.
Thank you Holy Spirit for being the Comforter.
Thank you for being present this morning.
Lord, I ask you to move me behind the cross.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart
be like a sweet spirit to the hearts of your people this day and night.
Usher, thank you for your service this morning.
We appreciate it all.
For the Angel Choir, Ms. Knowles, Ms. Brenda, Ms. Vanessa,
for your gift of music, for your care of the Angel Choir
and their desire will be on the increase to come to rehearsal.
Thank you for the 3rd Saturday feeding team and Wren Lloyd
and the clothing team and all who served this week.
Mr. Cheatham, thank you for keeping us in due stance this week,
making sure everything is in order and in shape.
We appreciate your care of the sanctuary and all the areas of the building.
And I say thank you to all who have come this day
because we could have been somewhere else,
but the Lord said this is my house and this is where I need you to be.
So I thank you for coming. I thank you to our visitors,
the Golden Eagle Club, VAN, like V-A-N.
All right, so y'all must have VAN.
Hey, I'm getting smart.
Make that connection.
God is good, though. God is truly good.
Well, today I want to ask you a question that maybe you haven't been asked in a long time,
but what about abundant life do we miss?
What is it about the words in John that simply say abundant life that we seem to miss?
If someone walked up to you, Ms. Dixon, and said,
I've got abundant life for you, would you turn them down?
You'd say how, where, and what do I need to do today?
John F. King, if somebody said today is your day to get abundant life,
would you turn them down or would you sit and kind of say, let me get some info?
Would you give some info? I think I would.
So I'm just going to say to you, it's very few times that I will look at all four passages
in the lectionary and struggle with which one has the best to preach from.
If you have a piece of paper, we've read, and I appreciate David Malvo,
our lay leader, youth lay leader.
He's a local.
We appreciate his leadership this morning, but he read the Acts passage,
and he read the Gospel passage.
I'd like you to write these other two down that you can go back in your own time
and check them out, but it's Psalm 23, one that you're very familiar with,
and then 1 Peter 2, 19 through 25.
And I want to say to you, the question is about abundant life,
but the answer is about the sheep and the shepherd.
Say the answer is about the sheep and the shepherd.
Recognize that many of us struggle sometimes because we get a little confused
about who the sheep and the shepherd are.
So I want to say that the sermon titled this morning is simply,
we're all one of the sheep.
We are all one of the sheep.
If you apart and counted in God's kingdom, we are all one of the sheep.
Can you say, I'm a sheep, you a sheep, we a sheep?
I know that was kind of an ebonic moment, but you know, just go with me.
I'm a sheep, you a sheep, we all sheep.
You'll get that by the time we get through this message, amen?
John 10 starts out with, really, truly, I tell you,
who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate,
but climbs in by another way, is a thief and a bandit.
That's a tough way to start a passage, because the first thing we'll say, what?
That ain't me.
She just told me I'm a sheep, we a sheep, all together we sheep.
She doesn't say anything about being a thief or a robber.
So in your Bible, I hope that you have one of those Bibles you can underline and write it,
but underlining there, those two words, thief and a bandit.
And then it goes on and says, the one who enters the gate, say the gate,
is the shepherd of the sheep.
So the other two things we want to look at is the gate and the shepherd, their connection.
Okay?
And then it goes on to say, he calls his own sheep by name, and the sheep is his voice.
So if you a thief and a bandit, then you must be in the process of becoming a sheep.
You're soon to be a sheep.
You're waiting to be touched to be a sheep.
There's still hope for you.
So if you say, oh my goodness, I've been found out I'm a thief and a bandit
because I've been trying to go in the other window and God's been telling me to come through the gate,
and I just realized right now I'm a thief, don't you hope?
Because guess what?
You've already told me that you a sheep, I'm a sheep, we all in here sheep.
I didn't say anybody was a thief.
I didn't say anybody was a bandit.
I'm just reading what John says.
So if you want to get mad with me, go into your prayer closet later on in the day,
confess unto God, and figure out when you was having your thief moment,
and we don't have to talk our lives.
Because we've all been a thief in the night.
We've all stepped away from what God has given us as the preferred way to live our lives.
We've all said, oh look Jesus, you go ahead and whip that.
I'm going to give you these three things.
I've got these other two.
And see, we're not a full-time thief.
We're just a sometime thief.
Because see, we realize that we've given God three things, and we've held on to two things,
and the scripture says, give everything unto the Lord.
So we say, now look, we're not real, real thieves.
I mean, we ain't being caught.
So while we up here in church, I'm just going to go with the past and tell them I'm a good sheep.
But you don't have to confess on me because it says confess unto the Lord.
But we've all been a thief at some point in our lives.
You may not be feeling now, but you know, soul or a little something, something along the way.
Maybe it was in the office and you took a box of paperclips because you needed them for the kids before at the house.
Or maybe you just picked up a few boxes of old tile they was going to throw out at the plant in the maintenance department,
and they don't use that stuff no more.
Yeah, I know.
We serve a forgiving Savior.
Confess and just go on.
Or maybe you work at the grocery distribution and they had put some stuff to return to the sales people because the bag was gross,
and you said, hang on, new number, throw that out, no one.
I'm going to dump it in my own little plastic bag and leave the wrappers for the Keebler Cookie Man, okay?
See, I can speak from experience because I used to sell Keebler cookies in one of my previous lifetimes.
See, some people come into this as a second career, but I think I've had two or three.
You know, we'll talk about it later on.
But young in my life I sold Keebler cookies.
And I would get to the store and I'd say some of the people were tearing up my cookie bag because they knew I had to give them credit.
And I'd see all these other plastic bags in the back and I'd say, why are these back here?
What do you do with those cookies when you give credit?
I said, I have to put them in a plastic container and destroy them.
Don't destroy them because they ain't that bad, only a few got cracked up.
And I just knew folk was tearing up my cookies in the back.
I'm building the slaves and they're stopping on the boxes so they can get credit for those cookies.
And somebody was stealing them and it may not have been you, but you may have been the benefactor of the stolen cookies.
So you was not a direct thief, you was a sub-thief.
What a mighty God we serve because we say we are sheep, you sheep, we sheep, us, okay?
So God is moving us from the mindset of what it means because he's blessing his sheep.
So today's message simply is about what's the connection between the sheep, the shepherd, and the gate.
I said the sheep, the shepherd, and the gate.
The gate is where we enter into God's house, God's preferred place for our life so the abundance can begin moving forward
because we have to be in the place and the place is being who God is calling us to be.
But if he says come through the gate and we sneak through the back or we come in a side window
or we come in a way he hasn't called us to come in, we're out of order.
So one thing about this passage is it makes it really, really clear Jesus is both the gate and the shepherd.
Read the passage closely, look at the connotation of what it means to be a shepherd and the gate
because the gate is the place, is the doorway, is the entry, and Jesus says what?
In order to get eternal life, in order for you to have salvation, you've got to come through me.
The gate must be open and the shepherd is waiting for you to come.
What's the benefit of coming?
Well, we all know the 23rd Psalm. It says, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters and he restores my soul.
That ought to make you shout because the reason that the shepherd is so intense about us becoming who he wants us to be
is because he wants to restore. Some of us have forgotten what a good soul feels like
because we become comfortable coming through the side door.
We've even made a commitment to side door living.
I'm going to give God these three things and God need to be happy with these three unangrazing.
Because see, I've got this Jesus.
Everybody ain't going to be willing to say those other two things that were strangling you to death.
But I can admit the things that I did not give to God and leave with God has strangled me over and over
until I had to get down on my knees and say, Lord, I confess.
I'm sorry that I held those last two things out.
I'm sorry that I kept them in my pocket thinking I could handle it all by myself.
I'm sorry that I didn't commit fully and completely to coming through the gate.
But Psalm 23 says, he restores me.
But then if you go up to the ask passage and you look at what it says, it says the last verse of what we read says,
praising God and having the good will of all people.
And day by day the Lord added to the number of those who were being saved
because they came through the gate and they met the sight.
But I like this 25th verse in 1 Peter to write it down.
Just write the passages down, 1 Peter 2, 19 through 25.
These are all part of lectionary, just kind of a commercial here.
What is lectionary?
Lectionary gives four passages every week.
And the common lectionary is set up so all Christian churches have an opportunity to preach from it,
Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, anybody who loves Jesus Christ.
The common lectionary is set up by a common group of leadership and there's three common years.
But every Sunday there's an Old Testament, there's a Psalm, there's an Epistle, and there's a Gospel.
And they have a connecting link between each other.
Some churches read all four and our worship team, we choose to read the Scripture and the Gospel.
But the important part is there's a thread between all four of these passages
and the thread this week is the shepherd.
But 1 Peter 2, verse 25 says, for you were going astray like sheep,
but now you have returned to the shepherd and the guardian of your house.
That's good news.
Because each of us have gone astray on Sunday at some point in our lives
and we needed that guidance of the shepherd.
I'm not a country girl so I don't pretend to know what it's like to have sheep on a hill
and have a shepherd tap them with a cane.
I don't even know what the cane is called.
Shaff, hey, I knew you knew.
I knew there was somebody to help bring it back to my remembrance.
But can you imagine the shepherd just tapping with the staff saying,
come on back, you've gone too far.
You're almost on the edge of the land and I don't want you lost to the wolves.
Can somebody say, I don't want you lost to the wolves?
He has a contained area, but even with all the things that he has rocked off on the hill,
there's no necessarily gate up there that you can see,
but there's a way that the shepherd brings you through the gate
and taps you on the shoulder with the staff so you don't go too far.
I'm a sheep, we're sheep, we're sheep.
He taps all of us if we want to.
He taps kids that are nine years old playing with pimples.
He taps old people who go to sleep on the back row.
He taps children up in the quiet stand.
He taps ushers on the corner who want to talk.
He taps us all.
I mean, just tap them.
He is a respecter of no person.
He is a full, unashamed tapper.
He say, I see you and you mind?
You hear my voice.
I know you do.
I'm tapping you.
Come on back in.
I mean, he's good.
He got this.
And you can't deny that he got this.
You can just hear it going on.
Nobody else can hear the beat.
And he be just talking, hey, I hear you.
I feel you.
I'm talking to you.
Do you know how many of you hear this?
What is going on?
Nobody else hear the beat but me?
You be like, oh, man, that was my song.
And he gets us that way because he is a shepherd.
And he has the staff.
And he's got the gate.
And he wants everybody inside the gate.
And he wants everybody.
He say, yo, I know your name.
I know your mama.
I know your daddy.
I know your people, people.
Just come on back in here.
Don't care where you've been.
I'm ready for you to come home.
Ready for you to come home.
And I say to you this day, everybody
has been a stranger.
If we're willing to admit we've been a thief,
maybe we want one in the night.
Maybe we will get the thief in the afternoon.
But thanks be to God, you don't judge little thieves, big thieves.
It's all for you, for him.
But he also does.
Jesus, who died on the cross for your sins and mine.
He gave us an advocate and a comfort in the Holy Spirit.
And he's calling you for that, to say, you've heard me.
You know my voice.
I am your shepherd.
Say a few things to me.
I love you.
I care for you.
I've got abundant life waiting for you.
Will you come in the gate?
Will you walk through the door?
Will you stand when I've asked you to stand?
Will you be women, men, children, boys and girls, teachers, preachers?
Will you be the sheep I've called you to be?
Or will you be a thief and a robber?
This day, you have the choice.
Because you're woke.
Everybody didn't wake up this morning.
Everybody didn't see this day.
Everybody didn't have this moment.
But all of us in here are woke right now.
We can speak to what it means to be a good sheep
and know a good shepherd who loves us with all his heart.
So I say to you today, this is a different version of the Psalm,
23rd Psalm that I will close today with.
But I want to share with you.
And it simply says, the Lord is my shepherd.
That's relationship.
I shall not want.
That's all the supply I can stand.
He makes me to lie down in green patches.
Baby, baby, baby, that is Sabbath rest.
He leads me beside still water.
Oh, that's refreshment.
He restores my soul.
Meditation, that's healing.
That's shadow-routed healing.
You know what I mean?
He leads me in the path of righteousness.
That's cap on your shoulder.
Hey, I got your attention.
Don't shut up with your mouth, guidance from above.
That's like, oh, I see you everywhere you go.
You can't escape me because I see you.
For his name's sake, that's purpose.
Not just any purpose, but the purpose that you were born for
and you were born for and you were born for
and I was born for, the purpose because it's in Jesus' name.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
that's testing, testing of our faith.
Understanding what he's calling us to do,
that's a test that we can pass
because it says I fear no evil.
Oh, but that's protection.
Coming from the top of my head to the soles of my feet.
Thou art with me, that's faithfulness.
Thy rod and thy staff comfort me.
Oh, Holy Spirit, that's a discipline
because the Lord knows if he disciplines us,
he loves us and he cares for us.
He doesn't let his children fall short.
Thou prepareth a table before me
in the presence of mine enemy.
That's hope beyond hope, beyond hope.
That's a deliverance of reconciliation.
Thou anointed my head with all, oh, but that's consecration.
My cup, whew, runneth over.
That's abundance in the name of Jesus.
That's more and more and more and more
than you can ever imagine.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life.
That's a blessing from above.
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord,
that's security forever and ever and ever.
Ain't that good, eternity?
Ain't that eternity good?
If that's what it's about, being a shepherd,
count me in.
I'm a sheep.
The doors of the church are open.
Where you stand.