Sunday February 23, 2025 | Greg Boyd
Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
In this sermon, Greg challenges us to open our minds up to the idea that Jesus, the Good Shepherd, speaks to his sheep. This means that God speaks in a way that we can hear and follow him to the cross. Greg then explains the way that the voice of God works and how we can learn to listen.
John always emphasizes the Lamb at the center of the throne where the transcendent God sits. The slain Lamb defines God to the core of God’s being. However, the image here is surprising because the Lamb becomes the shepherd who cares for his people. This passage echoes Psalm 23. This sermon focuses on the role of the shepherd in our lives, specifically on hearing the shepherd’s voice and what that means.
The first thing to recognize is that the voice of Shepherd will lead us to the cross. It was common to depict leaders as shepherds in the Ancient Near East, but never as simultaneously shepherd and slain little lamb. Jesus said in John 12:31-33: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. There is a double meaning here to “lifted up.” It simultaneously conveys death and exaltation. To follow the Shepherd’s voice will mean going in the direction of other-oriented love. This is a general principle that we must remember about hearing God’s voice.
The second thing is to acknowledge that we have a relationship with the Shepherd who wants to lead us in specific ways, and thus speaks to us. We need to look at a couple of passages from John 10 to hear Jesus’ words on this matter:
The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. (John 10:2-4)
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. And I lay down my life for the sheep. (John 10: 14-15)
The Shepherd is always speaking to the sheep, and he calls them by name. He knows us personally, and the sheep know the voice of the Shepherd. There is an intimate familiarity that the sheep have for the Shepherd. When the Shepherd speaks, the sheep listen and respond.
The entire New Testament teaches that God not only hears us when we talk to God, but also God speaks to his people through his indwelling Spirit. We see the same thing in the relationship between Jesus and the Father in John 5:19 and John 12:49. Jesus sensed the voice of the Father, not necessarily an audible voice as if he was listening to another person. Jesus usually heard and saw God in the same way we hear and see God: in our imagination. Jesus had an intimate relationship with the Father in his imagination. In the church tradition, this is called the inner sanctuary, the place where our spirit encounters the divine.
This is challenging for us today because we are conditioned to distrust our imagination and to assume every voice in our head is our own voice. We think in terms of a secular mindset. Thinking about God or talking to God involves taking a break from our otherwise atheistic lives. We step out of our secularized default to go to church, and then we return to our secularized default.
We need a total reframe. We need to imagine that our Shepherd is always speaking to us, trying to lead us to nice waters, encouraging us, correcting us, pointing out opportunities to serve.
There are three things that we can do to hear the Shepherd’s voice. First, validate your imagination. We must accept, by faith, that our imagination is not just “make believe” but a God-given portal by which we can access the spiritual dimension. We need to acknowledge that if your heart is seeking God, some of what transpires in your imagination may originate not in your own creativity, but in God. Not everything that we imagine is from God, but we need to open ourselves up to the possibility of God speaking to us in our own inner voice.
Another thing is to ask this question: If perfect love were to have anything to say to me, what would perfect love say? Or think about this: What would perfect love have me to do? This can help us get in the right frame of mind, a mind that looks to the cross as the guidepost of what God’s prompting looks like.
Finally, invite the Good Shepherd into your thought processes. Start talking to Jesus in conversational ways and make space to reflect and listen. This can open up your inner sanctuary to the voice of the Shepherd.
The Shepherd is always guiding us, his sheep. When we attune our ears to hear, we might be surprised by the way that he leads us to be a blessing in this world.