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To understand the words of Jesus in John 10, we must observe that John 10 follows immediately after John 9, the story of the man born blind. In that story, Jesus healed a man born blind. And yet the Pharisees, a group of religious rulers, did everything in their power to debunk this miracle and therefore to reject Christ as one sent from God. The blind man was eventually cast out from the Synagogue for not going along with them. At the end of that story, there is an exchange between the blind man and Jesus, overheard by some of the Pharisees in which Jesus tells them two things about themselves: firstly, that they are in fact the ones who are blind, meaning that they have no spiritual insight or understanding. And, secondly, that, although they are blind, they nevertheless say that they see, and so their guilt remains.He follows this saying with what is said in John 10: “…he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber”. In this saying he identifies the Pharisees as those who do not enter the sheepfold by the right way. We might say that he means that they approach the task of shepherding the people inappropriately.What they ought to do is to enter by the door. For, as Christ says, “…he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep and leads them out”.The door, then, is Christ. He will say twice slightly later in verses 7 and 9, “I am the door”. The shepherd represents the good spiritual leader, who enters by Christ. And he enters the sheepfold, which is the Church. The sheep are God’s people. The doorkeeper, who opens the door is surely the Holy Spirit, the one whom Christ said would lead his people into all truth (John 16:13).Some of the Church Fathers believed that the door could represent both Christ and the Scriptures and this seems a good interpretation. John Chrysostom, for example, said, “The Scriptures He calls the door. They call us to the knowledge of God, they protect the sheep, they shut out the wolves, they bar the entrance to heretics. He that useth not the Scriptures but climbeth up some other way, i.e. some self-chosen, some unlawful way, is a thief…Some other way, may refer too to the commandments and traditions of men which the Scribes taught, to the neglect of the Law” (John Chrysostom, Homilies on John).That is a very insightful observation. In Jesus’ time, there were those who shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces by teaching commandments of men that were on the surface meant to help people to live by the Scriptures. But, in fact, they lead people away from the true meaning of the Scriptures, and so separated them from the God. The greatest extent of this, of course, was when they refused to acknowledge that the Scriptures were really all about Jesus, and that they pointed towards him.But the preaching of something else other than Christ and the Scriptures can take many forms. We must heed the message of John 10: there are wolves and they do seek the lead the sheep of God astray. This is part of the reason that we have John 10 in our Bibles: it is to exhort us to listen for the true voice of Christ in the Scriptures, as preached by faithful shepherds, and to listen for and to that voice, and not to follow the voice of another.It is one of the great tragedies of the modern Church that preaching the Scriptures appears to be some kind of novelty! Friends, there is no point in preaching if we do not preach the Scriptures and if we do not preach Christ. The Holy Spirit will not bless such preaching. The sheep will not listen to it. Their hearts will not be stirred to love for God and for Jesus. They will recognise it for the emptiness that it is and they will look elsewhere and go elsewhere to find true nourishment.A quotation from the English Puritan, Richard Baxter, comes to mind: “We speak as dying men to dying men. There is no time for embroidery.”I