Grace Messages Grace Community Fellowship Church

Today, Joshua Miller fills in for Pastor John and discusses how to stand firm in your faith with truths from Ephesians in this sermon. Learn how to stay grounded and unwavering in your beliefs no matter what challenges come your way.

Today the religious leaders learn that Jesus is the Good Shepherd. He is not only the gate, but the gate keeper. The blind man’s excommunication from the synagogue and Jesus’ pursuit of him in John 9 gives us the reason Jesus uses the illustration of the sheep and the shepherd in John 10. The shepherd’s life was commonly understood in Jesus’ day, but as we saw last week, the Jewish religious leaders did not get what Jesus was saying. This morning, Jesus begins to circle back and explain what He intended to communicate with this illustration

“How good is good enough to go to heaven?” This morning, we want to answer this question from the Scriptures by using the story of Zacchaeus to answer it. Often, religious thinking is as short-sighted with their answer to this question as Zacchaeus was in his physical stature.

As we turn the page into chapter 10 of John, we are still on the same trip to Jerusalem that Jesus started in John 7. The account we pick up this morning is just a few days after the Feast of Tabernacles, and immediately after the healing of the blind man. In a sense, the chapter break here is unfortunate. The blind man was cast out of the synagogue for his faith, and he was thrown into the arms of the good shepherd – thus the teaching and illustration in John 10 is really a commentary on the conflict of John 9.

Today we finish the story of the incredible healing of a blind man by Jesus. In John Chapter 9, we have been considering John’s sixth hand-selected SIGN chosen to convince His readers to put their faith in Jesus Christ. That sign was an UNDENIABLE divine miracle, as Jesus gave sight to a man who was born blind. As the Jewish religious leaders finished their investigation, they cast the blind man out of the synagogue and right into the arms of Jesus! This is when the REAL miracle occurred – this blind man was given spiritual sight; he was born again!

In this morning's message, Pastor Carl Greene talks about the incredible value of humility, as found in the Bible, and the seemingly paradoxical nature of being humble.