Alleluia! The Great Shepherd of the Sheep lives. He has laid down His life and then He has taken it up again. Alleluia!

Now, listen to what He wants to do as He speaks through His prophet Ezekiel. "I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord." Over and over throughout Ezekiel's sermon, the Lord says, "I will seek out my sheep." "I will rescue them from the places where they have been scattered." "I will feed them with good pasture." "I will seek the lost." "I will bring back the strayed." "I will bind up the injured." "I will strengthen the weak."

What we hear from Ezekiel's sermon is that the Lord takes a personal interest in His sheep. And by His grace, we are those sheep He takes that personal, special interest. Everything He says about them, He is saying about you and me.

When that same Lord has taken on flesh, He says the same thing. But now, it is even more dramatic. Not just "I am the Good Shepherd," but the Greek shows this is the big "I am, " God's name, almost like "I am is the Good Shepherd." Then He goes on. "I lay down my life for the sheep." "I know my own and my own know me." "They will listen to my voice." "My voice. Not the voice of a hired hand. No, my sheep will listen to my voice."

Sometimes we look for ways to hear God's voice. I just saw a youtube video where this woman was talking about getting literal feathers and pearls and even diamonds from God. She took these to be God's way of reinforcing what she was doing. She even held up a diamond to the camera and said God had dropped this out of the sky for her. I thought, "Wow! This is really scary!" I see nothing in the Bible to say this is God speaking. Worse yet, when I watched a related video to see what they had to say about basic Christian points, I heard nothing. That was not important. What was important is that God was doing this and God was doing that in the Chicagoland area. I would say this fails the test of I Jn 4. You can look it up later.

But still we look for God to speak to us, where we can hear His voice. And praise God, you know just where to go to hear it. Last week, we passed out statements and asked for your response. One of those statements dealt exactly with that question. 63 people filled them out and turned them in. Every single person who filled it out knew exactly where to look for it. You knew God spoke through the pastor He has sent to you.

Unfortunately, God has sent a sinner to be your pastor. Your pastor has quirks and flaws and for quite a few of you, this has made it pretty difficult for you to hear God speaking through him. I'm sorry for this. The more you see my flaws, the harder it is to hear God speaking. The closer you get, and the more you see, the more difficult it becomes.

I feel badly about this, but our Lord has something to say about it today. He has something for us when He talks about His personal concern for His sheep. For those of you who are struggling with the man the Lord has sent, you have a great start.

You already know you SHOULD be hearing his words through me--as faulty as I am. You know you SHOULD see the Lord ministering to you through me. You know you SHOULD see the Lord guiding you and feeding you and filling you, through my words, if He really does use His called ministers. Now, it's a matter of getting from the "shoulds" to the "dos." ...from "I should see this," to "I do see this." When this happens, you will have an even clearer picture of how much the Lord cares.

You already know how much He cares. We confess it regularly. He became flesh to redeem us. By His death He has restored life to us. He endured hell for your sake and mine. That alone would show us how much He cares, but then He talks about all He does to bring it to us. That is what we are talking about.

When you have that picture, when you see how much He cares personally, then you will move from the "shoulds" to the "dos." You will recognize every sermon is delivered for you. You will hear the absolution is spoken to you. You will see the Lord's Supper distributed for you. Even those who aren't struggling with this, will benefit from seeing the Shepherd working through His called servant, who is basically His sheepdog.

I'll get back to the sheepdog in a minute. Right now, I would like to demonstrate the gap between the shoulds and dos. Last week on the Lutheran Hour, Ken Klaas told the story of a fur trapper in the MN Northwoods from about a century ago. He had a dog that was really half-dog, half-wolf. The fur trapper was married and they had a child, but his wife died before the child was two years old. The man needed to keep trapping to support himself and his son, so he would have his dog stand guard while he would quickly go check his traps. One day he was delayed and when he got back, he didn't see his little boy in the crib, but he saw blood all over. His dog didn't greet him either. His worst fears had been realized. The wolf in his dog came out. He took a hatchet and took his revenge.

After sobbing for a while, he heard the child crying. He looked under the bed where he had been hiding, terrified, but unharmed. Then he followed the trail of blood to the corner of the room where he saw a gray wolf whose throat had been slit by the teeth of another dog. He started crying again. He had killed the savior of his son.

Now, when I heard the story I felt the same way as many of you. I felt great pity for the dog. I felt like it was a horrible miscarriage of justice. For rescuing the child, the dog was killed. What a tragedy!

But then, we look at Jesus. He was God Himself. He was completely innocent. His only crime was to love us. To rescue us He was killed. And we were the ones who killed Him. The man felt great remorse for killing his dog, but do we feel that kind of remorse for killing Jesus? We know we should, but do we?

I'm not saying that we have to work up tears for what we have done to Jesus, but this demonstrates how shoulds, aren't always dos.

And why aren't they? Because we struggle with a lack of faith. Jesus may have risen from the dead, but we don't really believe we were responsible for His death. We all struggle with a lack of faith.

To demonstrate further, just like I had said last week, the question before the absolution in the service of corporate confession and absolution goes like this: Do you believe the forgiveness I speak is not mine, but God's? We may answer "yes," but there's a reason that question is there. We don't, or at least we don't as much as we should.

The man with a possessed son cried out to Jesus, "Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief."

I hope everyone sees why I had no choice but to preach this sermon. I saw hurting sheep. No, rather, the Lord saw hurting sheep, His hurting sheep. He saw that they were having trouble seeing Him do His work through His servant. More than just simply seeing it, He has compassion. He wants all of His flock to receive all they possibly can from Him, but for some it has become a struggle. Therefore, He wanted you to hear this sermon. Not every sermon is going to deal with the pastoral office, but when this is the issue that is disturbing his flock in this place, this is what He wants addressed.

You may remember a couple minutes ago that I called myself a sheepdog. I could call myself a shepherd or an undershepherd. In fact, the title "pastor" calls that to mind. But even better than seeing myself as a shepherd or an undershepherd, under the Great Shepherd, I like seeing myself as a sheepdog.

The sheepdog doesn't do what he wants to do. He does what the shepherd wants. The shepherd and the sheepdog work as a unit, the sheepdog using his intelligence and initiative to do the shepherd's will. A sheepdog never bites the sheep out of frustration, but guides them faithfully, always doing the shepherd's will.

Perhaps it seems that I have bitten some of you. I know the shepherd's will from His word, and I see what He wants for His sheep. I'll be the first to admit, though, I'm not the perfect sheepdog. I can become defensive and my sinfulness become evident. I know Christ suffered for that. He paid the price as though He was the one who had done it.

I think it may be though, that when I have tried to carry out the Lord's will revealed in His word, that is when some of you felt you were bit.

Let's change the picture a little bit but keep the understanding that the Lord speaks to you through me, His called servant. Instead of a flock, you are a team. Instead of a shepherd, a coach. The coach sees a team that could do more than they are. To get them to see they have more than they realize, he drives them kind of hard. They resent it at first, but then begin to see the reason why he was teaching them discipline.

The Christian life is one of discipline. It calls for a daily drowning of our sinful nature. Then it calls for a new man to daily emerge to live before God in righteousness and purity. This is so because we are surrounded by enemies to our soul, which would have us question God's Word and render us ineffective in service to our neighbor. Most especially, they would have us do anything but acknowledge how deep our sin is, keeping us from seeing how gracious our God is in Christ.

Therefore we need to be better prepared to face them, to face them only in the merits of Christ. But our inclination is not to rely on Christ's merit, but rather on our own, and what we do, which will guarantee we will lose. Do you remember what our goal was as we entered Lent? To look at ourselves and our faith less, and more at Jesus. This is another way of saying our goal was that our faith would grow.

When we come to worship, we don't have a whole lot of time here. We have to make the most of the time we do have. Our faith grows at worship, by directing our attention from ourselves to Jesus, by shifting our dependence from the Law to the Gospel. And this is where I fear you feel you are being driven.

I guess, in a way, the coach is driving you, and yet not really. A coach forces his team to work really hard to get the most out of practice, but it's not like that. Instead, our Lord wants you to get every last bit out of worship, without-I might add-wearing you out-an issue I'm still working on. He sees this is where He gives you what you need for daily life, and sets the tone for what you will do for the rest of the week in your personal or family devotional life. And this is the main point: He doesn't want you to waste time on anything other than what He does in the service which prepares you for the battle and gives you what you need so you can serve your neighbor. When that has clashed with your desires, it may have felt that his sheepdog bit you.

I'm not coddling you and acting like this is no one's fault. It is. It is all of ours. We do not believe as we should. We struggle with unbelief. That is why our shoulds and dos, don't match. But with the feeding and protecting and the healing of the Great Shepherd, the shoulds will come closer and closer to the dos, and you will see, despite the faults and flaws of the man God has called-whoever that may be-the Great Shepherd uses him so He can serve you.

AMEN