GATHERING THE SHEEP

John 10:14-16

 "I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me--  just as the Father knows me and I know the Father--and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.

                When we had the ground breaking for our last addition onto our building, I referred to this passage. I talked about how God has placed us in this location to gather His sheep into the fold. We were expanding our building so that we had a larger sheep pen in which to bring the sheep. After my remarks, the architect commented that this was the first time he had ever designed a sheep pen.

                Over the years we have seen God honor our commitment to reach out, not just to our community, but to the world. I was reminded of this blessing on Sunday, as I looked out over a diverse congregation. Our involvement with the International Student Office has allowed us to touch the lives of students from around the world. This has been a great blessing.

                As the Church has grown in the world, there is one distinct group of people who have, for the most part, remained outside of the Church. That group is the Jews; God’s chosen people. There have been Jews who have come to faith in Christ, but not in large numbers. Even those Jews who have recognized Jesus as the Promised Messiah, have retained their distinctiveness within the Church as Messianic Jews.

                In John 10, Jesus promised that His “sheep” would recognize His voice and follow Him. He also promised that He would incorporate all of His sheep into one flock. Paul reminded us, in Ephesians 2, that the barriers of ethnicity, class and gender are removed in the Church. Although these distinctions do not disappear, their power is diminished, as Christ recreates us into one new humanity.

                Something truly amazing has been happening over the past year. Jesus has been awakening Jews to His call. On Sept. 22, Joel C. Rosenberg posted some amazing information on his blog. Here is part of what he had to say.

“Since last Yom Kippur, millions of Jews have begun a quest to find the Messiah. For reasons I cannot fully explain, Jews are suddenly searching for answers to the deepest and most important questions concerning life and death and God and atonement and eternity, in numbers unprecedented in history. Some are searching through the Hebrew Scriptures for answers. A stunning number are actually reading the New Testament, most for the first time. They are searching on Google for information about the Messiah. They are even watching a new series of videos by Jews who claim to have found the answers. The videos — some of which have gone viral — were produced and posted on a new website called www.imetmessiah.com. To me, these are fascinating developments. They certainly aren’t being reported by the media. But they are worth examining.”

                After sharing some insightful comments on Yom Kippur, Joel tells his personal story of coming to faith in Christ. Then he shares the amazing news of what God is doing among the Jewish people.

“When my father, who was raised an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, discovered in 1973 — after a careful study of the Gospel According to Luke — that Jesus of Nazareth is the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, and received the Messiah by faith, my father thought he was one of the first Jews in history who believed this. He had never met a Jewish believer in Jesus. He had never heard of such a person. And in 1973, there were fewer than 2,000 Jewish people on the planet who were followers of Jesus.”

“But today, some 300,000 Jews around the world are followers of Jesus. And millions of Jews are searching for the Messiah and thus reading the Hebrew prophecies, and comparing them with the writings of the New Testament, and trying to decide whether Jesus really is the Messiah we have desperately longed for over so many centuries.”

“Today, on Yom Kippur, you can watch short videos of Jewish people explaining how they met the Messiah. More than 10 million people have watched these videos just in the past few months. Remarkably, more than 900,000 Hebrew speakers have watched the Hebrew-language versions of these videos in just the past four months. Given that there are only about 7 million Hebrew speakers in the world today, this means that nearly 1 in 7 of them have recently watched videos by Israeli Jews explaining how they came to discover that Yeshua is our Messiah.”

                It looks like Jesus is calling His sheep and they are responding. Together with us they are becoming a part of God’s new humanity. This is truly an amazing time to be alive and to witness God’s plans being fulfilled before our eyes.