Jesus The Door to Another Realm (DCLC – July ’87, Part 5)

This group of people is one of the happiest bunches of people I think I’ve ever met in my life. What I have to say tonight is incredibly simple. I don’t really feel any of us will hear anything new, but maybe it’ll just fit right nicely. It’s the next thing in The Life of Christ in Stereo. I’m going to read the passage and talk to you about it just briefly. It is John 10:1-21. “Verily I say unto you, he who enters not the sheepfold by the door, but climbs up by some other way, such a one as a thief and a robber, but he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him, the gatekeeper opens, and the sheep hear His voice, and His own sheep He calls by name and leads them out. Even when He pushes out His own sheep, He goes His way before them, and the sheep follow Him because they know His voice, but a stranger they will not at all follow, but will flee from Him because they know not the voice of strangers.”

This allegory Jesus directed to them, but they did not grasp what it was that He was telling them. Jesus spoke therefore to them again, “Verily, verily, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who ever came before Me are thieves and robbers. Sheep did not hear them. I am the door; if anyone enters through me, he shall be saved and shall go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes not but to steal and kill and destroy. I came that My sheep may have life and might have it pressed down running over and abundant. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep, but the hired man, who is not a shepherd, to whom the sheep are not His own, sees the wolf coming, leaves the sheep, and flees. The wolf seizes and scatters the sheep. The hired man flees because he is a hired man and cares himself not about the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and I know those who are Mine, and I am known by Mine. Just as the Father knows Me, and I also know the Father. And My life, I am laying down for the sheep, and other sheep have I which are not of this fold. Those also must I bring, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock and one shepherd. Because of this, the Father loves Me that I am laying down My life so that I may claim it again. No one is taking it away from Me, of my own accord I lay it down. I have the authority to lay it down and the authority to claim it again. This command I received from My Father.”

What is there in a man’s experience that would cause him to talk this way? If I could but remember that nobody had ever talked this way before, that nobody had ever heard this kind of talking. This was not Oriental, it was not Western, it was not Hebrew, it was not Old Testament; it was new. And then for me to realize that He was saturated with these words and the concepts behind these words were really real things to Him, experiences out of His own life. What the Father is to the Son, the Son is to you. Therefore, I can only say that there is a door; for Jesus Christ, that door is the Father, and He can go in, and He can go out, and Jesus Christ can find pasture in, and He can find pasture out, that the Father is His door, the Father is His shepherd, and He is kept as a sheep, as a lamb by His Father. And He knew that long before He met me. And He knew that long before He met these people. His Father was a door for Him. His Father is the door. The Father is the door. Jesus Christ goes in and comes out by means of His Father. Now He has simply turned around to us; the only Lamb now speaks to many sheep, and the story that He tells is quite fascinating. Any of you who are of Plymouth Brethren background know how this passage is interpreted. You want to hear it? That there is a fold and there is a flock and they’re different and the fold is the organized church and you’re in it and there’s a fence around it and Jesus Christ is the door out and you go through Jesus Christ out of the fold, out of denominations out of structured organization, and you go out where you’re free to roam around free in Christ, and He is your door out of the organize church; don’t be in the fold, be in the flock, and that’s their interpretation of this passage. And by the way, that’s not a bad interpretation. Have any of you ever heard that before? Would you raise your hand if you have? You have heard that, brother? Have you heard that? Have we got any others? Stan, is that pretty accurate what I just said, or is there more to it? More or less. Okay. Tom, is that kind of the way you heard it? More or less. Alright. Andy says, “Yeah, he heard that, too.”

Well, I got to remember that every time my Lord opens His mouth, He’s speaking from experience, but He has something He is speaking of. Brothers and sisters, He really had a door in His life. That’s right, He really had a door in His life. He was used to going through that door. I want to ask you a question. Can you sense when you walk out of where you are into your spirit? I’m not talking about anything real big; no big deal. Can you sense a transfer? Can you sit down in this chair that I’ve been describing? Put your feet up, lean back, let your mind just stop wandering all over the world, sit down. I don’t know about you, but I know when I got my eyes closed, there comes a second in there when everything is in one place and I walk out of my soul and my spirit. It’s very simple; you can hardly detect it; it’s not a big deal. But at this moment, I have millions of choices, it seems; at least a dozen or two. I have so much that I can do. I can cry, beg, gripe, and complain. I can talk, I can listen, or I can make love to Him, or I could just sit there and do absolutely nothing. And I can move around the whole realm that He’s in, if I so choose.

I think most of the time I don’t do anything much at all but just sit there and have the privilege of not being in my soul or not be in my mind, and not being so caught up in all the processes that are going on around me. But I really want to just deepen that a little bit and give you, I’m going to just imagine this for a moment that my Lord is sitting by a well, that He is sitting out by a campfire at night with His disciples, that He’s on a long dusty hot road somewhere, He sits down and He says, “Father,” and though He is surrounded by the sick, His heart is broken. The blind, the religious, the infirmed in every way, the heartbroken, and He has and He does have needs. While He was on this earth, He had lots of needs. He needed water, and He needed air, and He needed food, and He just sat back. I can imagine Him saying, “Father,” and in a way that I cannot comprehend and may never on this earth experience, He slips through that door, and for a moment, He is more there than He is more here and the Father is His door, and He is a sheep, and His shepherd comes and leads Him into some other place. A simple thing.

You know, maybe a minute or two later, a disciple walks up and says, “Lord, there’s this Pharisee who wants to talk to you.” You know, and He has to go talk to this man, and He’s still very conscious of being with His Father and listening to His Father. Nonetheless, a moment ago, He was being led. The majority of what He is, as far as His facilities to grasp reality, the majority was over here. And maybe at this moment, the majority, or at least half, is over here in our realm. Now I don’t know all of this for sure, but I know He Himself must have moved, and His Father was that door, His Father was that door.

Now then, the Lord Jesus Christ pictures about the same situation for us, and I guess what I see is a fenced place where all the sheep have been, where they are. I’m not going to say they’ve been herded in there; that’s just where they are, they’re inside. There must be a lot of them because there’s a gatekeeper. It must be a good protective fence, very thick. Maybe you can’t even see through it, a lot of sheep in there. Throughout the centuries, a lot of people have climbed over because the doors closed, grabbed some of the sheep, and stolen. They can’t go through the door, and I want to talk to you about that door because that door is very, very real.

When God created the invisible realms, they were all-inclusive; they were everything. And He somehow made them a place that wasn’t everything; it was limited and finite. The material realm, there’s this infinite realm, and the very finite realm that they touched. And one day they overlapped, and you had this incredible thing: an interface, a place where everything that was spiritual could be in the presence of that which was physical, and man and angels and God and man could be together in one place. It was not the earth, and it was not heaven. It was some of heaven and some of earth, and I’m going to repeat myself; it’s the place that is your natural habitat. Earth is not your habitat; heaven is not your habitat. God did not tell you to live on the earth; God did not tell you to live in the heavens. He told you to live in the garden where both worlds overlap. That’s because you’re hybrid. You overlap two realms.

Then came the fall, and you no longer were a hybrid, and I’m speaking a little inaccurately, but I don’t want to be a theologian, just let me be a Christian here. You’re no longer a hybrid; you’re almost totally of this earth. You lost your relationship to the spiritual infinite realm. He did us a great favor when He pushed the garden back, or I guess what He did was just push heaven back, and there, in its place, was a desert. But He did not push heaven so far back or the other realms so far back but what they touched, they just barely touched, and between them was a door, but He kept it closed, and to make sure it never got opened on our side, He put two cherubim, gave them a sword that circled constantly, a sword of blazing fire. The only way that door could be opened was from the other realm, and one day, He opened that door. The cherubim turned around and, in astonishment, beheld God leaving His realm.

And they stepped back and let Him pass through Mary’s womb into our realm, and He comes forth, but He brought that realm with Him because He had a living spirit. So that realm followed Him, and He grew up on this earth. I can’t explain this, but that door just followed Him wherever He was; in that realm, it followed Him. Well, Gene, I didn’t see it. No, it’s invisible. Yeah, but it looked like if somebody walked around behind Him there, He would have bumped into it. It’s also non-dimensional. That door in that realm just followed Him, and inside of Him, that door stayed open, and He could be here on this realm in our realm, but He could also Father, Father, and that door was open to Him, and He could go in and out and find pasture, praise the Lord. You find water, find pasture, and He drew life, and it was so abundant. God didn’t give Him just a little of God, of His Father’s life, just enough to pinch through while He was on earth, but through that door poured an abundance in my life.

Now you know you’ve read John 10:10 and you’ve been told He’s going to give you abundant life: Cadillacs, big car, all these things. No, another life, the Christian life, divine life, the Father’s life, eternal life, God the Father in abundance was given to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ considered that kind of life a great life, abundant life. He felt He was abundantly supplied because He had the Father. I want to tell you again that the door followed Him around, and He could walk in and out because there was a door, and He could find food to eat in and out, and His Father was the door.