Hey, welcome to the Pastor Mike Drop podcast. It's day 22 on our 40-day tour through the Gospel of John.

Open your Bibles, if you would please, to John chapter 10, starting in verse 19 today.

It says this, when Jesus said these things, the people were again divided in their opinions about him.

This is nothing new, but this is John's way in his gospel of giving us a bit of a pause,

an eye of the storm moment, a chance to reflect on

some of the things that we've been reading about. It's been boiling and it's been rising and it's

about to spill over. And so John artfully hits the pause button for us, his gentle readers.

And he clearly wants us to reflect because this comes through in the rest of John

chapter 10 on the major themes that he's been putting forward. So he kind of brings all of those out

again. Major theme number one, all the evidence points to the fact that Jesus is the Messiah,

the anointed one of God, which leads to major theme number two and the whole point for which

John's gospel is written, and he'll even say that on the last page of this gospel.

I'm writing these things so that you'll believe that Jesus is the Messiah. You'll believe

the mountains of evidence and the layers and the way they all fit together, not just with what was going on in Jesus' day, but centuries before.

Ezekiel chapter 34, for instance, hundreds of years before Jesus was even born,

God speaks through the prophet Ezekiel, verse 23, and says,

I will set over my people one shepherd, like my servant David,

he will feed them and be a shepherd to them.

There's a whole bunch before that and a whole bunch after that in Ezekiel 34, but we don't

have time.

Suffice it to say that when Jesus says, I'm the good shepherd, it wasn't just some random

statement or he wasn't

...