Men I Would Carry Out Of A Fire

There is a man on that crew he has known nineteen years and he would go into a burning building after him without stopping to think about it.

That is not a figure of speech and I am not decorating it. There was a fire in a barn in the second winter they worked together and he did go in, and he came out with the other one's coat in his fist, and neither of them has ever mentioned it since.

Nineteen years. Same trucks, same weather, same bad coffee. He has been at that man's kitchen table more times than he could count and he knows what his children are afraid of.

And he has never once been in a room with him where anybody was praying.

Not because either of them is ashamed. It has simply never come up, in nineteen years, because they were raised in different places and those places do not overlap, and each of them privately files the other under a heading that neither has ever said out loud.

Good man. Not the same thing as us.

He would trust him with his life. He has trusted him with his life. And there is a fence in his head that the fire did not get anywhere near.

So let me ask you, out here where nobody is listening.

Who would you go into a fire for and never sit beside on a Sunday?

He mentioned a pen the others had not seen

There is a sentence in John that must have landed very strangely on the men who first heard it.

Jesus has been talking about a sheepfold, and a shepherd, and the ones who know his voice. Warm, close, particular. Everybody listening is thinking about themselves and their own people, which is what you do.

And then He says this, and it comes out of nowhere.

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.John 10:16

Read it as a farmer would.

You are being told in John 10 that there is stock you have not seen, and the Spirit who was given to you is the same Spirit at work over a fence you have not looked past, and the man saying it is not asking anybody's opinion about the arrangement.

I have other sheep. Present tense. He is not planning to acquire them. He already has them, out of sight, in a pen the men listening did not know about, and He mentions it the way you would mention a field over a hill.

And then: I must bring them also. Not I might. Not if they come round to our way of thinking.

Now, plainly, the way we talk leaning on a gate.

I am not going to tell you the fence is nothing. Fences are there for reasons, most of them old, and a man who tears one down without knowing why it was put up is a fool. I have no interest in that and neither should you.

But a fence marks a field. It does not mark the flock.

That is the whole difference and it is the thing the fire already told you. The word says there shall be one flock and one shepherd, and the Spirit who calls them is not standing on your side of a wire. You went into a barn for a man you have filed under not the same thing as us, and your legs knew something your head has never agreed to.