Jimmy Bae
Mar 1, 2026
I really believe that a lot of us who grew up in the church have the wrong first impression of who Jesus is. And it's costing us more than we realize.
Let me explain what I mean.
When I first met my wife's older sister, Christabel, I thought she hated me. She had this look that could end you. Total bulldog energy. I remember thinking, okay, this is going to be one of those in-laws where you just sit on the other side of the table at Thanksgiving and pray she doesn't talk to you.
Then one day I was in San Francisco by myself, and she hit me up like, "Hey, do you want to grab dinner?" And I was like, oh, she's actually kind of nice? We went out, she introduced me to all her friends, she shared her life story with me. We were literally crying in the car together. From that point on, she became one of the most generous, loving people in my life. She babysits my daughter Shiloh, she's always telling us to go on a date night, always sending gifts from across the country.
If I had let my first impression of her dictate the rest of our relationship, I would have been robbed of all of that.
I think a lot of us have done the same thing with Jesus.
The God I Thought I Knew
If your spiritual upbringing was anything like mine, or if your exposure to God came through the media, through atheist friends asking impossible questions, or through a culture of religion that only knew how to be sad, then I think you might be working with a distorted picture.
I was on the worship team in high school, playing guitar. We never sang fast songs. We only sang emo songs. We'd take the upbeat ones and slow them way down. Everything was dramatic and heavy. And that was my whole experience of God. Prayers of repentance. Tears of sorrow. I only knew how to relate to God as someone who was constantly messing up.
Then one day, this college girl named Sarah came into our youth service while I was leading worship. I peeked my eyes open and I was kind of stunned. She had her hands up, tears streaming down her face, and she was smiling. Like, full-on joy. And I thought, I don't know God like that at all. She knows an aspect of God that I've been completely cut off from. I only know him as a forgiver and a judge. She knows him as an intimate friend, a lover, a father.
In that moment, I wanted to know what it felt like to be so full of the love of God that I cried tears of joy. I wanted to know what it looked like to actually be happy with God, not just sorry all the time.
The Sermon Jesus Preached to the Church People
In John chapter 10, Jesus tells this parable about a good shepherd and his sheep. And here's what you need to know about the audience: he's talking to the Pharisees. The religious elite. The pastors and leaders of the temple. These were people who were supposed to draw others closer to God, but they were doing more harm than good.
In the chapter right before this, John 9, the Pharisees saw a blind man get healed by Jesus, and instead of celebrating, they kicked the guy out of the temple because the healing didn't come through their system. It didn't add clout to their brand. And Jesus goes right after them for it.
He lays out three antagonists in this passage: the thief, the hired hand, and the wolf. A lot of times I've heard this taught as if it's about the devil. "The devil comes to steal, kill, and destroy." But the more I study this passage, the less convinced I am that Jesus is talking about Satan here. He's talking about bad shepherds. Bad spiritual leaders. He's looking the Pharisees dead in the face and saying, you are the problem.
This is actually a fulfillment of something God said through the prophet Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 34, God rebukes the shepherds of Israel for taking care of themselves instead of the flock. They ate the best food, wore the best clothes, and ignored the weak, the sick, and the lost. And then God says, "I myself will search for my sheep and look after them." When Jesus shows up in John 10 and says "I am the good shepherd," he's stepping into that promise.
The Thief, the Hired Hand, and the Wolf
The thief is the self-serving leader. The one who uses the sheep for their own gain. I think this is a real rebuke to pastors in the modern American church. Some leaders only pay attention to the biggest donors. They collect people like warm bodies in pews. They manipulate and they take.
But the thing I want to spend some time on is what I call the distorted voice. Jesus says the sheep know his voice and follow him. But a lot of us who grew up in the church have had leaders speak over us with a voice that wasn't actually from God. And those words became an internal script.
A mentor of mine once pointed out how many "should" statements I was living under. I should be more productive. I should prepare another sermon. I should pray more. I should evangelize. That pressure robbed me of rest for ten years. My entire twenties were exhausting.
Whenever I felt anxiety, instead of processing it, I was taught to just "live by faith and not by sight." Pray it away. Push through. And that worked in the short term. But ten years later, it turned into two to three panic attacks a month. Burnout. Depression. Distance from God.
My mentor looked at me one day and said, "Stop shoulding on yourself." And I was like, what did you just say? He said it again. He told me that so many of the lies we carry are disguised as religious "should" statements. And they keep us in shame and self-condemnation instead of walking in freedom.
I grew up in a very conservative community, and a lot of what my pastors told me was biblical truth turned out to just be cultural values. When I actually started reading the Bible for myself, I found that so many things I thought were black and white were actually much more nuanced. I don't think those leaders were trying to hurt me. I think they genuinely loved me and were doing the best they could. But the result was that I built my spirituality on culture instead of scripture.
And it wasn't just church leaders. When I was about six years old, I watched a kid in my class raise his hand to ask the teacher for help. Three boys made fun of him for it. It didn't even happen to me, but from that moment, I internalized a rule: never ask for help. That came up years later in therapy. I realized it had bled into my relationship with God. I couldn't receive grace without earning it. If I fell into sin, I subconsciously felt like I had to cry enough, be sad enough, demonstrate enough sorrow before I was worthy of forgiveness.
God kept trying to lovingly correct me. Repentance in the Greek, metanoia, doesn't actually mean "say sorry." It means change your mind. I really believe God would rather have us soberly say, "I'm never doing that again, I'm changing my life," than have us crawl back to the altar in tears praying the same prayer for the hundredth time.
Anything that robs you of your ability to connect with God, to sit in his grace, to receive his love, is a thief.
The hired hand is the weak leader. The one who's there for the paycheck but has no real investment. They'll walk with you as long as it's convenient, and the second it gets hard, they disappear. I know that pain. What it feels like to pour your life into a mentor, a pastor, a spiritual family, and then one day you're no longer useful to them, and they just drop you. You show up to the goodbye party and everyone says "we love you, we bless you," and then you never hear from a single person again.
If you've been hurt by a church leader, as a church leader, I'm sorry that happened to you. But I want to say this gently: the people who hurt you are broken, and they are murky representatives of God at best. My prayer is that the hired hands in your life would not become the barrier between you and the Good Shepherd.
The wolves are any force that comes to scatter and devour. That could be the enemy, the world, persecution, whatever it is. The point Jesus is making is that your life is not a neutral field. It is a battleground. Spiritual warfare is real.
Some of you might be asking, "I got blessed on Sunday, so why is Monday through Saturday still so hard?" Because you were never meant to survive on yesterday's blessings. You need to connect with God daily. The robbers, the hired hands, the wolves don't take a day off.
A theologian from the Protestant Reformation said our souls are like a violin. If you leave a stringed instrument alone for a day, it goes out of tune. Before you play it again, you have to tune it. Every day, our souls are drifting. And daily, God is calling us back.
I Am the Door
Jesus makes two "I am" statements in John 10. The first: I am the gate. That means access.
You can only appreciate access when you've lived in inaccessibility. For the Jews hearing Jesus, the presence of God was locked behind layers of ritual. Blood sacrifices, offerings, purification, cleansing, and even then, you could only get to the outer courts. You could never actually connect with God face to face. And Jesus is saying, I'm throwing all of that away. I'm the new door. Walk through me and you have full access.
Tim Keller said it like this: only the child of a king can wake him up at 3 a.m. asking for a glass of water. Nobody would dare bother a king like that. But their own baby, crying in the middle of the night? The king steps off the throne and becomes a dad. You have that kind of access now.
Through the door, we also get protection. I took my daughter skiing recently, and she'd learned from the book of Daniel that God protected Daniel in the lion's den. So as she went down the slope, she kept saying, "God is great! God is great!" And when she got to the bottom safely, she looked at my wife and said, "God protected us. We didn't fall." I had to gently correct her theology. I was like, even if you fell, he's still great. Don't just be a blessings follower.
But God does protect us. In Corinthians, it says he won't allow us to go through anything beyond what we can handle. And if it feels like more than we can handle, maybe that's actually a sign of how much he trusts us.
And through the door, we get belonging. Jesus says whoever enters through him will go in and out and find pasture. No matter where you are, you'll always have a home in him.
I've had people come to me and say, "Pastor Jimmy, I want to love God, but honestly, it's hard for me to even care about the concept of God." And I'll ask them, well, what do you care about? What do you actually want? And they'll say things like, I want ride-or-die friends. I want people who know me and still love me. I want purpose. I want significance. I want to feel like my life matters.
And I just turn it around on them. You already want Jesus. He is all of those things. You've just been looking for what he offers in everything else. Or distorted voices in the past have made you believe that Jesus is sorrow, repentance, and suffering instead of access, protection, belonging, and love.
I Am the Good Shepherd
The second "I am" statement: I am the good shepherd.
Jesus says, "I know my sheep and my sheep know me." Sit in that for a second. Jesus knows you. He sees the days of your life that nobody else sees. The thoughts no one understands. The secret prayers. The tears that no one else knows about.
Tim Keller put it this way: to be loved but not known is superficial. And our greatest fear is to be known but not loved. Someone walks with you for three years, finds out something real about you, and they back out. That kind of rejection cuts deep.
But to be fully known and fully loved? That's what it means to be loved by God. On the cross, Jesus saw every sin you've committed, every thought and action in your present, and everything you'll do in the future. And he still said, I'll die for this person. I'm here. I give my life.
And he did it willingly. There's an old heresy that says God was losing to the forces of evil and had to pay Jesus as a ransom. But Jesus says in John 10, "No one takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord." He gave it freely because he loves his sheep.
And he says the sheep will know his voice. I think about the time I went to the Verizon store and they accidentally deleted my contact list. For a whole month, people would text me and I had no idea who they were. But then my closest friend since we were two years old, Jonathan, called me. He just said, "What's up." I didn't need a name. I knew his voice immediately because of the history we shared. If you spend time with Jesus, you'll know his voice too. Not out of religious duty, but because you want to hear it.
What the Abundant Life Actually Means
In John 10:10, when Jesus says "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full," the Greek word he uses for life is not bios, which is biological existence. It's zoe. Zoe is a completely different quality of life. Jesus isn't just saying, "I'm going to make you live forever." Because honestly, if that's all he came to do, I'd want out. If eternal life is just more of the same exhausting survival, who wants that?
What he's saying is, I'm going to change the quality of your life. Before, you've been running on fumes. Crawling into each new day. No joy, no purpose, no belonging. That's bios. That's just surviving. Zoe is something else entirely. And it doesn't start when you die. It starts now.
The word "abundant" in Greek is perissos. It means overflowing. And Psalm 23 shows us that there are two ways to experience abundance: have a lot, or want nothing. The problem with having a lot is that the human heart always grows to want more. A Harvard psychologist found that there are two ways to increase happiness: get more or want less. But if you get more, you'll just want more, and the cycle never ends.
The Buddhists tried the "want nothing" approach. Their whole system says suffering comes from desire, so eliminate all desire and you'll reach nirvana. But if you and I sit still long enough, we're going to think about a cheeseburger. It's impossible to truly want nothing.
Jesus gives us a different answer. He doesn't say desire nothing. He says desire one thing. One chief desire that overwhelms everything else. In Psalm 27, David says, "One thing I desire: to see your beauty, to dwell in your temple, to gaze upon you." That's the secret.
I was once counseling a businessman worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He was breaking down, and he said something I'll never forget. He said, "I feel so poor when I look at you, Pastor Jimmy." I was confused. He explained that he had so many things he wanted that money couldn't buy. Deep, meaningful relationships. People who wanted to be around him for who he was, not because he had a yacht. He told me, "You are so rich, because you have things money cannot buy."
And when he said that, something shifted in me. I was like, I am kind of rich. I do feel kind of great. And from that moment, I stopped wanting. I just wanted to be with my people and be in the love of God.
The Shift in Psalm 23
There's something so beautiful in Psalm 23 that wrecked me. In the first three verses, David is talking about God in the third person. "He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside quiet waters. He refreshes my soul." It's descriptive. It's nice. But it's a little distant.
Then in verse four, right at the halfway point of the poem, the tone completely shifts. David starts walking through the darkest valley, and suddenly it's no longer "he." It's "you." "You are with me."
The abundant life doesn't mean you're always going to be in green pastures. It means that when you're in the darkest valley, God becomes so personal, so close, so intimate, that you stop talking about him and start talking to him. It's not "he is with me" as some religious concept you repeat at church. It's "you are with me" because you're desperate, you're hungry, your heart is pure, and it's about one thing: God, I need you right now.
For a long time when I was doing ministry, I was running on empty. Teaching, leading, burning out, having panic attacks. My fiancée at the time cooked me dinner one night, and I was just sitting there like a ghost. She asked if I was tired. I said I was really tired. She said we didn't have to hang out, even though she'd cooked for me, done my laundry, cleaned my whole place. She just left. And I looked out the window and saw her sitting in her car crying.
In that moment, the Holy Spirit spoke to me clearly. Something needs to change, or you're going to become the kind of husband and father you swore you'd never be.
So I gave it all up. The ambitions, the ministry momentum, everything I was building. I moved back to California. Became a youth pastor again. Killed all my dreams. Just took care of my wife and my child.
And then God asked me a question that broke me open. He said, if you are never used by me again, no platform, no big ministry, no success, if you never get any of that back, but you just had me, would you be okay?
I was honest. The answer was no. And he took me on a journey of stripping all of those other desires from my heart.
When I first held my daughter, that's when it all came together. The nurse placed that little baby in my arms, and my heart was so full. So much peace. I looked at her and thought, this is the way God looks at me. And in that moment, I had no more ambition. I didn't want to build anything. I just wanted to stay home with this baby and be present.
That's what it feels like to lack nothing. That's zoe. That's the abundant life. Not a prosperity gospel promise where everything goes your way. Jesus literally says in this same passage that there are thieves, hired hands, and wolves coming for you. This is not a life empty of suffering. But it's a life where the Good Shepherd walks with you through it all. He won't abandon you. He won't leave when it gets inconvenient. He won't manipulate you or use you. He's better than every pastor you've ever had or ever will have.
He knows you fully and loves you completely. And he's not too busy. He's right here, right now, in whatever valley you're walking through.
