The One Who Holds His Sheep

This is Christ the King Sermons. Christ the King Sermons is a ministry of Christ the King Presbyterian Church located in Raleigh, North Carolina. CTK is a community rooted in the depth of the gospel, refined by hard conversations, fueled by meaningful relationships, and committed to redemptive work in Raleigh.

If you would join me in turning to John chapter 10, we're going to read verses 22 through 30 this morning. You can find that either on the screen behind us or it is printed in your worship folder. As is our custom, I would like to invite you into joining me in reading this aloud together.

Let's read from John 10 together, CTK, starting in verse 22:

At that time, the feast of dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter and Jesus was walking in the temple in the colonnade of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, "How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly." Jesus answered them, "I told you and you do not believe. The works that I do in my father's name bear witness about me but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My father who has given them to me is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them out of the father's hand. I and the father are one." — John 10:22-30

Let me pray. Jesus, we thank you for your word. We thank you for these words and we pray that you would join us here, that you would send your spirit to meet us to make these words alive to us today. Jesus, you are our rock and you are our fortress and you are our redeemer and you hold us and love us dearly. In your name we pray, amen.

Well, good morning again CTK. My name is Paul Deschamps. I'm one of the assistant pastors here. I'm also a church planter who is working to establish Northside Presbyterian Church up in Roseville beginning sometime in 2026. Many of you have known me for a while, which is awesome. And if you're new here today or you haven't really gotten a chance to meet me, I spent several years serving here as the director of student ministry, which means that I was asked to preach a lot of Christmas Eve messages and Christmas sermons. But there's one kind of sermon that I've never gotten to preach, never had the occasion to preach until today, and that is a Hanukkah sermon. Bet you never ever heard of a Hanukkah sermon before. Well, that ends right now because it is Hanukkah in August. And honestly, I'm okay with it. If you're anything like me, I'm kind of ready for the summer to be over. It's been so hot and so muggy that as I was preparing for this passage, I found a new favorite verse that I'd never really caught before.

Verse 22: "At the time of the feast of the dedication took place in Jerusalem and it was winter." — John 10:22

Sweet, sweet winter. Please come. The longing of my heart. Jesus knows what I need. I'm kidding mostly. But in all seriousness, what can feel like a throwaway verse is really important. This verse, what's going on, it really sets the stage for this conversation. Everything that we're about to see is set up in just that little verse.

Last week, Danny Yancey, our esteemed worship director, preached an amazing sermon on listening to the true voice of Jesus, our good shepherd. The good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. It was really well done and really worth going back and listening to. It feels like we're in the second half of John 10, and it feels like the conversation today flows immediately out of that passage that Danny preached, like we cut it in two. But this little segue verse tells us that it's actually been two or three months since that Good Shepherd discourse ended. Our conversation and our scene happens today because John tells us it's the feast of the dedication, which is also known as the festival of lights or Hanukkah. We got there.

And this is the only mention of Hanukkah in the whole Bible. That's because it's not one of the Old Testament festivals that was commanded in the Torah, in the law of Moses. This is a cultural celebration. This is not a theological celebration. It began as relatively recent—contemporary for this passage—only about two hundred years. It occurred about two hundred years before this scene and as the result of one of Israel's darkest chapters.

The Greeks under Antiochus Epiphanes seized Jerusalem in January and they desecrated the temple. They turned the chambers of the temple into a brothel. They sacrificed pigs on the altar.

They converted the altar into being an altar for the god Zeus and in a cruel joke, they would force the priests to eat pig meat. And if you know anything about Jewish culture, that was an unclean animal. But a Jewish revolt led by Judas Maccabeus—and he's got the greatest nickname ever—is the hammer. He drove the Greeks out of Jerusalem. He reclaimed the temple, rededicated it. And so Hanukkah is a celebration of that rededication, a reclaiming of something that was broken and lost. There's the miraculous celebration with the menorah of the lights of the oil that only had a day's worth of oil left and it burned for eight days. So they light the candles every night for eight nights to celebrate this time of reclaiming the temple. And so it's an annual festival—it's a whole lot more like Jewish Independence Day than it is like the cultural Christmas we kind of assign to it.

Now, if you've been with us this summer in John's gospel, perhaps you've begun to pick up on a pattern. We've preached several of these passages that start like this: "It was the feast of [fill in the blank]," right? And Jesus is in the temple and he's teaching and he's challenged. So usually what John is doing in those moments is he's trying to tie the meaning of the feast, the meaning of the celebration to some truth that's being exposed in Jesus.

But this is what's surprising here. When we think of Hanukkah and the festival of lights, John makes no explicit connection to Jesus as the light of the world. He actually did that at the last festival, the festival of booths. Why is that? It's because his focus isn't on the festival's imagery but on this confrontation in the colonnade, where the question is not about candles and lamps but about who Jesus really is and what is the true nature of the role of the Christ, of the Messiah.

So the crowd surrounds him and they ask him, they press him:

"How long will you keep us in suspense? If you're the Christ, tell us plainly."

And this is not idle curiosity. Think about everything that's going on in this picture of reclaiming the temple. For them, Hanukkah was about a deliverer. They were looking for a leader like Judas the hammer Maccabees who would rise up and drive out the oppressors, who would protect the temple, who would restore Israel's glory. They wanted a messiah who would guard the building, guard their culture, guard their religious beliefs. But Jesus had come as the messiah who would guard his people. They wanted political security, national strength, but Jesus came offering eternal security and unquestionable belonging.

So when Jesus says, "You do not believe because you're not among my sheep," what he's doing is he's exposing the deeper need—not for another revolution, but for the gift of his calling and the guarantee of his hold.

The Gift and Guarantee of Belonging

This passage matters for us today because we live with voices and pressures that threaten our confidence in him. And like them, we can look for assurance in all the wrong places—in our circumstances, in our leaders, in visible victories—and we miss the deeper gift and the guarantee that only comes from belonging to Jesus.

So the main idea today is really simple: Belonging to Jesus is both a gift and a guarantee. That's what we're going to talk about today. Just two points—the gift of belonging and the guarantee of belonging.

The people that gathered around Jesus, they wanted a Messiah who would belong to them, right? Someone to fit their agenda, to fight their battles, to secure their power. But that's not how Jesus rolls. He reminds them that belonging doesn't work that way, that their theological shoe is on the wrong foot. And so the challenge Jesus makes in this passage is, in essence: it's not about whether I belong to you but whether you belong to me.

See, belonging isn't about controlling Jesus or defining him on our own terms. It's about being called. It's about being known and it's about being held by him. Because belonging isn't something we manufacture, it's not something that we maintain—belonging is a pure gift.

The Gift of Belonging

I've got a birthday coming up in a few weeks. Think about your birthday. When you were born, you didn't do anything to cause your own existence. You didn't earn your way into this world. Life itself was given to you. And every year when people give you birthday gifts, they don't hand you a paycheck or a receipt for services rendered. They give you something simply because you exist. How cool is that? A birthday gift is not earned, it's not deserved, it's not worked for—it's just given. Because your life is worth celebrating.

And that's the picture Jesus is painting in John 10. He's talking about belonging to him and he uses this language of a gift.

In verse 27, he says, "My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me and I give them eternal life." Notice the tone—he doesn't say my sheep hear my voice because they've worked hard enough. He doesn't say I know them because they've proven themselves. He doesn't even say they earn eternal life by being faithful enough to me. No, he says I give it. It's a gift. It's not wages for good behavior. It's not trading in on our religious performance. It's not a prize for moral achievement. This is sheer gift. And like every good gift, it flows out of the love of the gift giver.

So what kind of gift do we receive in Christ? This passage shows us at least four: the gift of his call, the gift of being known, the gift of eternal life, and the gift of assurance. Let's take those briefly one by one.

As they're pressing in on Jesus, they're demanding more evidence about who he was. But think about what they'd already seen, right? By studying John this summer, they've watched him heal the sick, they've watched him feed thousands, open the blind eyes, teach with authority that no rabbi could match. They weren't short on any evidence about who Jesus is. They are short on their belief, Jesus tells them. And in many ways our culture is the same, right? In America the name of Jesus is everywhere. Most homes have at least one Bible on the shelf. His birth and his resurrection are national holidays. His words are often quoted in political speeches. They're printed on coffee mugs. They're worked into pop songs. I was in a gift shop and there was an entire case of little tiny plastic Jesus dolls with a sign that said "for when you need a little Jesus in your life." There's sermons, there's podcasts, there's Christian media. It's just a click away. The issue isn't whether we've heard of Jesus. The issue is whether we have heard Jesus. And that's what Jesus is getting at when he says, "My sheep hear my voice." The shepherd's voice is recognizable only to his sheep because they are the ones that he has called. They're his.

If you notice in this verse, verse 27, notice the order of these things that happen? The hearing comes first and the following comes after. Because belief doesn't begin with us straining hard enough to pick out the words. It begins with him speaking our name. Belonging begins not with our competence but with his gracious call.

And that's why Jesus could say earlier in John 6:37:

All that the Father gives me will come to me. Whoever comes to me, I will never cast out.

Do you hear that? If you hear Jesus' call to you and you follow him and you go to him, he will never cast you out. Is that not great news, CTK? Belief doesn't begin with our initiative. It begins with the gift of God's initiative. That's what we call his calling.

And he continues, "I call them and I know them." Now the word "know" isn't like casual knowing. It doesn't mean like I know about them, like someone scrolling on your social media profile and getting the curated version of yourself. No, this is a deep covenantal knowledge of a shepherd who loves his sheep.

When I think of shepherds and sheep, I cannot escape thinking about probably the most beloved passage in the whole Bible—Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me along paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. For you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. My cup is overflowing. Goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell with you, my Lord, in your house forever.

Have those words ever just touched your soul? The shepherd knows what his sheep needs before they even know it themselves. He knows when you're weary and you need rest. He knows when you are hungry and you need to be fed. He knows when you are afraid and you need comfort. He knows you better than you know yourself.

And here's the staggering truth: you are not just one face in a faceless flock. You are not overlooked or forgotten, but in Christ you are known by name and you are remembered and you are thought about and you are so deeply loved. And for some of you, that might be the gift that you need to unwrap today. Maybe you feel invisible in your workplace, you feel overlooked in your family, you feel unremarkable in your community. But Jesus says I know you—not just your name, I know your struggles and I know your fears and I know the longings of your heart and I know what you need. And because his knowledge is perfect, his love is unwavering.

And as if his call and his knowledge weren't enough, Jesus says, "I give them eternal life."

You notice again, he doesn't say I'm going to trade in eternal life in exchange for their good behavior. I think that's what a lot of people think Christianity is like. If I believe in Jesus and I try my very best, maybe at the end of time, he'll let me into heaven. But he doesn't say, I reward them with eternal life once they've proven it. He says, I give it.

The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. — Romans 6:23

Wages are earned. Death is earned. Eternal life is a gift. And here's more good news. That eternal life isn't just about this distant hope that after death we'll go off to this place called heaven. No, this is a present possession. It's something that we can experience now because to belong to Jesus is to share in his life now. And even in the midst of brokenness and even in the midst of pain, we live as people who have been brought from death to life. We live with hope and with joy and beauty and love of the eternal God who's already been at work in us.

This is where a birthday gift lands here with real force. We don't deserve that. We can't earn that. But man, do I want to celebrate that? We did nothing to make ourselves spiritually alive. We didn't earn God's favor. We didn't deserve his love, but this eternal life, this gift of eternal life here and now, is placed in our hands purely because of his grace.

And so the last gift in this passage—one more gift in this awesome birthday party with a lot of presents—it often gets overlooked. It's the gift of assurance. Think about it. If salvation dependent on your effort, then we could never have any confidence, really. Wouldn't you always wonder, am I really his? Am I holding on tightly enough? What if I screw up tomorrow? Jesus doesn't want his sheep living in fear. He wants them resting in his assurance. And that's why he speaks so plainly here.

My sheep hear my voice, I know them and I give them eternal life.

Hold on to this truth, deep assurance. The author, scholar, pastor J. I. Packer, he wrote in his book Knowing God, he said, "Adopted children, they need assurance that they belong and a perfect parent will not withhold it." That's exactly what Jesus is doing here. He's a perfect shepherd who wants his sheep to know that they belong with him.

And here's the kicker: you're not going to find it anywhere else like this. There's no other religion in the world that offers this. Every other faith system leaves you guessing. Have I prayed enough? Have I sacrificed enough? Have I given enough? Have I repented enough? Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, secular humanism—they all put the weight of performance squarely on your shoulders. But in Christ, the weight shifts to his shoulders. Belonging isn't about what you've achieved, but it's about what he's given. This assurance that we're given, it's not spiritual arrogance, but it's resting in the strength of his promises.

So how does this land in our lives? If you're an anxious believer—the one who constantly fears that they're not doing enough, not believing enough, not holding tightly enough—Jesus just says to you: you belong to me. You're mine. Do you know this? Please know this. You're mine because I called you and I know you and I give you life, and please rest.

Or the one who thinks they don't really need to hear the voice because they've got this religion thing figured out. They've got their morality under control. They're not all that bad. Cultural Christianity is a pretty convenient safety net. But Jesus' words cut really deep. You may have heard about me, but you don't hear me. And you don't belong to me. All the evidence in the world won't save you if you don't respond to my call.

So belonging is both humbling and comforting. It humbles us because it begins with God's call, not our competence. It comforts us because it assures us that his grip on us is far stronger than our grip on him.

The Guarantee of Belonging

So what does it mean to belong to Jesus? It means receiving the greatest gift you could ever imagine. His call, his knowledge, eternal life, and assurance—altogether wrapped up in one amazing gift. But it's not just a gift. It's not just a shiny present for you to marvel at. It also comes with a guarantee. Because once he calls you, once he knows you, once he gives you life, he's never going to let you go.

Jesus doesn't just say "I give them eternal life," but he just goes on. He leans into it more. He just keeps going. He says:

They will never perish. And no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of my Father's hand. And I and the Father are one.

And he really doubles down on this. That's a guarantee.

That's the kind of warranty that I want to have on a nice present. Jesus gives us one of the strongest images of security in all of scripture. The sheep held in his hand and the hand of his father's simultaneously. Picture this: Jesus holding on to you and then the hand of his father holding on to him and you. That's a grip that nothing and no one can tear away. There's no safer place in the universe than that.

If you're familiar with Philippians 1:6, this is what that means:

He who began a good work in you will carry it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus. — Philippians 1:6

God doesn't start with something and then abandon it halfway through. He doesn't say, "This was a bad idea. Let's redirect." No. He begins his work in you. He calls you to himself. He unites you to Christ and he guarantees that he will finish what he started. This is not just wishful thinking—this is the very character of God. He will do this.

A couple of years ago I took my family on vacation to Utah. We went down to Moab and we went hiking in Canyonlands National Park. There's this section called the Island In The Sky where there are these amazing stone islands—really cliffs that drop down 1,500 feet to the next valley floor with no guardrails. You can literally just walk right up to the edge. It's jaw dropping. It's gorgeous. It's absolutely amazing.

I was walking with my son Thomas, who was about eight at the time, and as his dad I was acutely aware of the danger of having an eight-year-old loose on a cliff. Let me ask you this: What's safer for me—to wait for him to realize how risky it was to be up there and for him to recoil and reach up and hold my hand, or for me as his dad to reach down and grab his hand so he knew that I was there? That's the picture Jesus is painting. Our security is not about how quickly we realize that we're in danger and cling to him. The security that we are given is in knowing that his hand has reached down to hold us.

Because let's be honest, if our eternal life depended on our ability to hold on, we would all be lost already. I know I would. Our grip is weak. Our obedience is inconsistent. Our faith is mixed with doubt. And our love grows cold. But salvation doesn't rest on our strength. It rests on his.

Jesus says they'll never perish. That doesn't mean we won't walk through suffering. It doesn't mean we won't face actual physical death. But it means that death will not have the last word over us because we are secure in him and we live even though we die.

And he adds: no one will snatch them out of my hand. No one. That includes your enemies. It includes your circumstances. It includes your addictions. It includes your failures, even your own self-destructive tendencies. But those things are no match for his grip.

Paul puts it this way in Romans 8:38-39:

For I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. — Romans 8:38-39

Jesus doesn't stop with holding us in his own hand. He doubles down: "The Father who's given them to me is greater than all. No one can snatch them. I and the Father are one." This isn't just a unity of purpose. They're not just on the same team with the same goal. This is unity of essence—that the Son and the Father share in the same divine power, the same eternal authority, the same unstoppable commitment to keep you.

This means that this promise of security isn't just strong—it's unbreakable. And your assurance doesn't rest on a pastor's opinion. Your assurance doesn't rest on your feelings or your mood. It doesn't rest on whether you feel close to God today or far from him tomorrow. It rests on the unchanging character of God himself.

When We Struggle

Now I know that some of you are walking through really hard things right now. Maybe it's suffering in your health or deep grief or guilt that you just can't shake. And when we struggle, we tend to live like our salvation is dangling by a thread and that everyone can see what's on the inside and we've been fully unmasked and that we're just one mistake from losing everything. We wonder if God's patience is running out and we fear that his love is conditional and fragile and on the verge of collapse.

No. If you're his, you're not dangling by a thread. You're held in the hand of the Son, and the hand of the Son is covered by the hand of the Father, and nothing that your doubts or your failures or your fears can break that grip.

Let me also say this: Jesus' words are not supposed to make us feel careless either.

For those who live as if we don't need to hear his voice, who think we're good enough, it's a wake up call. That assurance belongs to the sheep who hear his voice and they follow him. Not to those who simply assume that they're fine because they grew up in the church. See, belonging isn't cultural. Belonging is covenantal.

And maybe if you're feeling uneasy today and this is the first time you're hearing his voice and you hear his call to follow him, that's not like an evite to a birthday party. Maybe I'll go. No. Your place in his family, the call to be a part of who he is and what he's done, your call is something that he bought and he guarantees with his very blood. The guarantee of belonging should humble us and not harden us and it should move us toward repentance and not away from it.

You know, I want to close this morning with a story that I heard. I was listening to a podcast recently. If you were a Christian in the '90s, early 2000s, you probably heard a lot about a mega church pastor named Francis Chan who kind of disappeared in recent time. I heard an interview with him talking about what happened and why he left his mega church. He admitted that for years his ministry was driven by fear, especially the fear of death. His parents had died when he was in middle school. They had died young and he was worried. He had this nagging worry that if he died today, Jesus would be disappointed in him. He hadn't done enough. And so that fueled everything he did in his ministry.

Even as a pastor, he said that he could never get to more than 90% certainty that if he died he was going to go to heaven. And that insecurity drove him to over perform every sermon, every ministry initiative, every act of service, every book, every Bible study. It was all weighted down by this anxiety that he might not measure up.

And he said something really profound in this podcast. He said that what was really driving him, it wasn't the fear of death. It was the fear of being loved. That he struggled to rest in the reality that God's love and God's grip were already secure. There were absolute certainties. And when he began to believe it, to truly believe it, his heart totally changed on his posture towards ministry. He says, "I now spend my time every day I wake up trying to know just how much Jesus loves me. Trying to rest in the understanding of the depth of God's love for me." He says, "And that produces in me a desire to follow Jesus closer than ever. Because it's a voice that loves me, not a voice that condemns me."

Do you see the shift? When you know that you're held in that double grip, father and son, that assurance doesn't make you lazy. It makes you eager. It doesn't just breed complacency, it fuels your obedience because he loves you. That's the guarantee of our belonging.

Yeah, we're in his hand. His hands are in the Father's. His unity with the Father makes his promise unbreakable. And because of that, our assurance is not a presumption. This is an act of worship. We get to worship Jesus for the deep love song that we just sang. Oh, the deep, deep love of Jesus. What a confidence we can rest in him.

So if you're fearful, you can rest. If you're a little overconfident, you can repent. But if you're in Christ, you can rejoice because your security is not fragile. It's fixed. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesus, it is so difficult for us to comprehend the deep, deep love that you have for us. Vast, unmeasured, boundless, and free. Would we be your sheep who hear your voice and delight to respond to you in love because we know how much you love us and how much you gave for us and how much you delight in calling us your own. Would we be a people that are assured of our salvation and assured of the hope that we have of eternal life? And would we live a life today that reflects this truth that we are connected to the eternal one and that the life we live now is filled with joy and hope even amidst broken things and broken places, that we can be a celebrating people because you call us yours. I pray this in your name, Jesus. Amen.

Let's stand and sing together.