We have become too comfortable in our culture with treating a church building like it is “the holy place”. We try to consolidate of our spirituality to when we are within the walls. We are quick to chastise others for not being there at the predetermined “spiritual” times and then we are just as quick to neglect meeting with those same people the entire rest of the week. Did you know the church in the beginning met daily? Ok, that is a message for another time. Throughout COVID-19 to today people have liked to yank vs. 24-25 of this passage out of context and weaponize them to guilt people into showing up to a building. They choose to completely discard the textual and cultural context when doing so. Let us look at the cultural context and then explore those verses around 24-25.

This letter was written to Jewish believers living outside of Palestine, possibly even Rome. These were spiritually immature and struggling with living out their faith due life-threatening persecution. As a result, many were entirely defecting from the faith (not just “missing church”). The writer of Hebrews wrote to remind them in the first part of the letter about the theology that brought them to Christ and changed their lives. Then in chapter 10 he begins to explain practical ways to live out that teaching. He calls them to remember with confidence how they should live because of the power of Christ’s sacrifice.

Big Idea: 3 confident calls we must answer because of Christ’s sacrifice. [What the passage is actually about.] (Hebrews 10:19-25)

Most of us devoid of shepherding experience would probably do a bad job out of the gate in that situation. There was one, however, who claimed to not just be a good shepherd, but the good shepherd though he too lacked practical experience, with the animal anyway. He could make this declaration because he was shepherding a different kind of creature altogether – people. This week as we look at God’s Word, we see the second of Jesus’ comparison images as he calls himself “the good shepherd”. As we saw last week, the setting for this passage is what is known as “the good shepherd discourse” and it is in this passage that we will see the second of the two images tonight. Additionally, as we saw last week Jesus was attempting to call Jewish followers to himself and away from the Pharisees and their corrupt religious system. He did this by way of figure of speech and comparing his shepherding to theirs. We are going to consider from the text 2 “shepherd signs” that demonstrate that Jesus was not only the good shepherd for Jewish people then but is also the good shepherd for us today. Big Idea: 2 signs that Jesus is “the good shepherd” for us. (John 10:11-21)