John 10:10
I Am Come That They Might Have Life…
Woodlawn Baptist Church
August 7, 2005
Introduction
A couple of weeks ago I preached a message from John 9, where Jesus said that He came “for judgment, that they which which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.” Perhaps you remember that the occasion was the healing of the man who had been born blind. Jesus had opened that man’s eyes, a miracle that had never been performed before on someone who had been born blind, and He performed the miracle on the Sabbath, causing a controversy among the Pharisees. When the man defended Jesus he was cast out of the synagogue. Jesus then found him and opened his eyes again, but this time it was his spiritual eyes, which resulted in his salvation.
God is still at work in your life today opening your eyes, but you must make the personal choice to see what He wants you to see. If He opens your eyes to your need for salvation, you must see your sinfulness and see your need of a Savior and act on what He shows you. If He opens your eyes to some spiritual truth, you have to be willing to see that you have been wrong and change your mind. God is in the business of opening eyes, but He never forces you to see what you don’t want to see.
I want you to keep that in mind as we read today’s text. Chapter 10 is simply a continuation of the conversation Jesus was having with the Pharisees. It opens with the words “verily, verily,” which never begin a new conversation in the book of John. Jesus was working to open their eyes to their spiritual blindness, so He relates the following story, beginning in verse 1.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice. And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers. This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not what things they were which he spake unto them. Then said Jesus unto them again, Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep. All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have light, and that they might have it more abundantly.”
Listen, why did Jesus come? That is the question we have been answering on Sunday mornings for the last few weeks. Today’s passage is the sixth in a series of seven messages I hope will answer that question in your minds. Why did Jesus come? “I came that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”
There are three questions I want to deal with this morning: What is abundant life? What keeps you from experiencing it? And then lastly, What can you do to enjoy abundant living? The invitation today is going to be to move away from the religious spirit that has blinded so many of God’s people and has kept them, and perhaps even you in bondage. God wants you to experience more than that, so let’s begin by asking,
What is abundant life?
In order to understand abundant life, you need to begin with life. Jesus said, “I have come that they might have life…” implying that the present condition was death. The Scriptures explicitly teach that outside of Jesus Christ we are spiritually dead. I want you to read with me Ephesians 2:1-5. It says,
“And you hath he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. But God, who is rich in mercy, for this great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, by grace are ye saved.”
Who made you alive? Jesus! But he’s not talking about living and breathing and eating and working. He’s not talking about physical life – you were dead alright, but you were dead in your sins: all of us! We’ve all sinned and come short of the glory of God. Romans 5:12 says that “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin: and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” “The wages of sin is death,” Romans 6:23 tells us. There are plenty of ways you can think about what I’m talking about here. Lost or saved. Blind or not? Before Christ we are in the dark, but in Him we are in the light. The point is that if you want to experience any life at all, it has to come through Jesus Christ. John 10:9, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved…” The illustration Jesus used in the first several verses is that of a sheepfold, or a courtyard where a flock of sheep were brought in for the night. There was one door, or one gate into the yard, and the rest was surrounded by a wall of hedges or stone. Listen to me: Jesus Christ is that door. There’s only one way in. “No man comes unto the Father but by me” He said.
Abundant life begins with life period. You can fill your homes and your bank accounts and your garages all you want. You can life a great life and have plenty of friends, but I want to tell you that until you come to the place in your life where you repent of your sins and trust Christ to save you, you are dead in your sins and nothing you can do will change it. Nothing you can do will give you the life you can experience in Christ Jesus. There is absolutely no abundant life without life.
Now, once you place your faith in Christ, once you’ve been made alive in Him, the question is whether you are experiencing abundant life, or whether you are simply existing and treading water with the life God has given you in Christ. You see, most believers are not experiencing abundant life, but Jesus said that He came to give it.
Now, if the life Christ offers is spiritual life, it also means that the abundant life Christ offers is spiritual as well. You cannot say that abundant life is about physical or material things. If it is, then there are hundreds of thousands of believers who will never experience what Christ offers. God never promised abundance of stuff. He may bless you with it and He may not. But abundant living is not connected to those things. Instead, abundant life is about a quality of life – over and above, abounding, overflowing, and far exceeding what most people settle for.
Abundant life is knowing what life is really all about and living according to the purpose for which God created you. It is about you experiencing the fulness of Christ on a regular basis and rejoicing in the grace He offers. It is about a personal, dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ so that you know the depths and heights and length and width of God’s love for you. It’s not just about seeing a little fruit in your life, but about being loaded down with spiritual fruit that your branches are touching the ground under the weight of God’s blessings.
Abundant life is when you pull the sponge out of the water and it is dripping and running everywhere because it is so full it can’t hold any more. Abundant life is found in the last half of verse 9. The grass is not greener on the other side of the fence – it is green everywhere!
Abundant life is finding victory over sin in Christ. It is about yielding up old habits and replacing them with godly ones. It is about giving up your stinking thinking and replacing it with the mind of Christ. Abundant life is about being able to love people who are unloveable. It is about great marriages instead of mediocre ones. It is about you seeing your workplace as a mission field instead of a hellhole. It is being able to find contentment with whatever God allows you to endure. It is being able to praise God in the good times and in the bad. It is about you and me becoming the new people in Christ that we are commanded to be.
Read with me in Ezekiel 34:11ff and listen for the language of abundance.
“For thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out. As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day. And I will bring them out from the people, and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their own land, and feed them upon the mountains of Israel by the rivers, and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them in good pasture, and upon the high mountains of Israel shall their fold be: there shall they lie in a good fold, and in a fat pasture shall they feed upon the mountains of Israel. I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to lie down, saith the Lord God. I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick: but I will destroy the fat and the strong; I will feed them with judgment.”
Listen to me: God never intended that you simply exist. He never intended that you live out your days on this earth in defeat and doubt and worry and anger, but that’s exactly what so many are settling for. Some never make it that far. It is as though God offers us great riches; more than our eyes can imagine, but we prefer to stick with what we’ve got than to come a little closer and accept what we’ve been offered.
What keeps me from experiencing abundant life?
What is it that keeps us from experiencing abundant life? Simply wanting it is not enough. There is a beautiful picture of abundance in the Old Testament story of Israel coming out of Egypt and into Canaan. God delivered them from bondage and tried to give them great abundance, but they were afraid of what it would cost them to get it. When they saw the giants in the land of Canaan they decided that the whole journey had been some cruel trick, and it cost them abundant life. You see, Canaan doesn’t represent heaven. I don’t care how much we sing about crossing the Jordan River, it was not heaven on the other side. Canaan is a picture of abundant life, but those people who went over the Jordan River with Joshua fought for every inch of that land. Did God want to give it to them? Was it a land of milk and honey? You bet it was – but trusting the Lord God they had to fight for every inch of it.
I say that to point out that if you really want the abundant life Christ offers; don’t expect it to come easy. There are going to be giants in the way: obstacles of some sort, and those obstacles, or the battles we fight are battles of the heart and mind – it is a spiritual warfare.
Jesus had Satan in mind when He said in verse 10 that the “thief cometh not but for to steal, and to kill and to destroy,” but there is no doubt that Satan used the human instruments of the Pharisees to perform his wicked work. Do you know what I believe is Satan’s number one tool for robbing you of your ability to experience abundant life? It is religion. Religion is nothing more than a counterfeit of the real thing. You see, what God offers you is a relationship, not religion. He offers you Canaan, but most of us have become quite happy with the wilderness. Have you been infected by it? Have you allowed your heart to be satisfied with something less than abundant life? Let me give you some of the identifying characteristics of it so you can determine for yourself.
There is an overemphasis on outward form
Think about what had just happened in the presence of the Pharisees. A man who had been blind all his life had been miraculously healed and now he could see. Did they rejoice with him? Did they praise God? Was there are sense of awe and wonder as God manifested His mighty power right in their midst? No! They were upset because the event took place on the Sabbath.
One time Jesus healed a lame man on the Sabbath. He hadn’t been able to walk for years, and on the day Jesus healed him he was scolded for carrying his bedroll. You think about your own life. Is there an overemphasis about saying the right words? About doing the right things and having the right look? Do you fear what others will think about what you do and how you live? Do you have a hesitancy to accept change? Does it ruffle your feathers when order is disrupted in your life?
An overemphasis on these things kills life! The Pharisees were nothing more than whitewashed tombs – pretty on the outside, but empty and dead on the inside, and what was worse was that they convinced everyone around them that those were the things that mattered to God as well. You may look great to everyone around you, but if that’s all you’re concerned about, then you’ve accepted a counterfeit of what God really offers. You may have the act down – but an act is just that – an act. Jesus sees right through you. He knows you’ve accepted something less than abundance and that you’ve replaced intimacy with Him with the acceptance of others.
There is an overemphasis on intellectualism
Religion reduces God to a subject for intellectual study. The goal is to understand God and make Him predictable. It’s an attempt to put God in our box. New moves of the Holy Spirit are rejected if they don’t match our understanding of God. We come to church to learn about God and about the Bible and about the Holy Spirit and about the faith, but somewhere we have missed the mark. Sure God wants us to learn about Him, but what He wants more is for us to learn Him. He doesn’t want you to know about Him; He wants you to know Him, and there’s a difference.
Religion says that it’s okay to fill your heads with more and more knowledge. We know about the atonement. We know about the cross. We know about the resurrection and the church and everything else, but at what point does what we know begin to transform who we are? Listen to me – there has never been a time in the history of man where God’s people have known so much about Him. We have more biblical knowledge today than ever before. We have the Bible in more languages, more study tools at our disposal, more opportunities to grow in our knowledge of God and His Word, and in spite of all that we have become a people with little heart for spiritual things. While we have filled our heads, our hearts are empty. Intellectualism kills life. “Just give me more Bible facts and I’ll be fine.” And if that’s all you want then you’ll be dead too.
There is a sense of condemnation and pride
Do you worry that you have to “get it right?” Are you bothered that others don’t get it right like you do? We can become so blinded by our own righteousness and our own ability to live by the Word of God that what may have initially drawn us to God becomes the very thing that separates us from God. In the beginning, you read through your Bible because you want to learn of God. You want to draw near to Him and sense His presence. But then you do it a time or two, maybe more. Then you begin to wonder why others don’t read theirs. You’re the only one you know who loves the Bible enough to read through it. They must not love the Lord.
Maybe you serve a lot. You volunteer for more than others. You are here more than others. Why can’t he stay away from that girl? Why can’t she give up the dope? You quit smoking, why can’t he? You don’t watch bad movies; and the list goes on and on and on.
The other night in our strategy team meeting, we were joking about some of the things we have come to believe like, “There are no free lunches.” “If you want love then earn it,” but I want to tell you that those are the statements of someone who has become infected by the spirit of religion. God’s kingdom is a kingdom of grace. It is all about grace.
Did you ever go to baseball or softball practice and want to bat? What do you have to do if you want to bat in practice? You have to take your turn fielding the ball. Doesn’t it make you mad when you work and work in the field and then someone who’s been sitting on the bench sucking up water gets up and gets to bat when he hasn’t earned the right to?
Well listen, abundant life is about being able to say to people that it’s okay if they bat. It’s about being a man or woman of grace – about giving love and favor when the other party doesn’t deserve it. Are you overly critical? Do you condemn others when they fall? Do you kick them out to pasture when they mess up? Do you find yourself comparing yourself with others in the church only to realize how much of a better Christian or church member you are?
Now listen to me: The blind man had been entrusted to the care of the Pharisees. He was part of their flock, but they threw him out. They had God all figured out, and Jesus could not be who the people were saying He was. That’s not how God works. They condemned Jesus and this man because they didn’t fit into their little box of thinking. If Jesus was going to heal people, He had better do it on a weekday. If they wanted to come to God, then they had better have their act together, but Jesus is a different kind of shepherd. In fact, He is the one and only true Shepherd.
There may be some other reasons we don’t enjoy abundant life. Sin in your life may be keeping you from it. God offers deliverance to you from that sin, but you keep hanging on to it and won’t let go. You repent of that sin, maybe it is gossip, or you are hateful, or you want to give up something that has control of you. You’ve repented of it time and time again, but there it is dogging you again. The more you hang on to it when Christ calls you away from it the less you’ll enjoy abundant living. In fact, you’ll get to the point where you wonder if you can ever really enjoy it.
You may have some unfair expectations from God keeping you from enjoying abundant life. Are you fighting God? Waiting for Him to do some thing in your life or in your family that He never promised to you? Are you waiting for Him to reward you, or get you out of some mess? Perhaps you have simply come to accept that living out your days is easier than fighting for something better. You can’t win, so why bother trying? So you just give up and live defeated, taking whatever blessings happen to fall your way and you’ve learned to be content right where you are, even if it is less than what you wanted.
What can I do to enjoy abundant living?
God wants you to experience a taste of heaven right here on earth. Like Israel, you are somewhere on that journey to abundant living – to the land flowing with milk and honey that God has promised. He came that you might have life, and have it abundantly: to the full, over and over what most people have. You may still be in Egypt so to speak. In other words, you’ve never been delivered from the bondage of sin and death. You’ve never repented of your sins and placed your faith in Christ. He came that you might have life, but it’s your choice, and it is a choice of faith. I cannot make that choice for you, and I’ll admit that with all the religious plurality in the world today: with all the various voices telling you that Christianity is a big hoax, I don’t doubt that it can be a difficult decision, but Christ is the door: He is the only way. You have to trust Him and Him alone.
Others of you are wandering around in the wilderness. You’ve accepted the lies; you’ve been misled to believe that knowing about God is enough. You’ve replaced God on the throne of your heart with religious duty. You come to church week after week, perform your religious duties, give your money and say the prayers, but inwardly you are parched and thirsty. You look good on the outside, but inwardly there is a spiritual drought taking place.
Some of you may even be standing on Jordan’s banks today casting a wishful eye, and you want the abundant life Christ offers. You are ready to take Christ at His word and do battle for your heart and soul. What is the key? What can you do? I know this is going to sound over-simplified, but you must simply know Jesus and follow Him.
Throughout those first ten verses of John 10, Jesus said that His sheep know His voice and they follow Him. It is an amazing thing to me that sheep learn to distinguish between the voices of their shepherds. Even in a large sheepfold, where a porter works the gate, there can be several flocks of sheep, but when a shepherd comes in and calls his sheep, only his will hear and respond to his voice. He will call to them and they will follow him out. That only happens through much time spent in the shepherd’s presence. It cannot come any other way.
If you want all the blessings Christ offers to you today; if you really want the abundance of life that He offers, it will only come by following Him. Those shepherds didn’t drive their sheep – they led them, but if you aren’t familiar with the voice of Jesus you won’t know who to follow. It only comes through much time spent in His presence. Don’t assume that you know His voice; He may not work the same way today that He did last time. Don’t assume that you’re in good shape; He may be trying to teach you something new about yourself. Don’t assume that just because you’ve been around for many years that you’ll know what to do – that’s religion.
The longer I am saved, the more I struggle to know the life Christ offers. At first it seemed like there were blessings at every turn, but the more I have grown in my relationship with Him, the more difficult it has been to realize great abundance. You see, by now I know what to do. I have this Christianity thing down pat, and I suspect that you do to. You don’t even have to think about it any more. You can run on auto-pilot. But that is not what Christ wants from me or you. He wants to be fresh to us every day of our lives, no matter how long that is, because the longer we know Him, and the longer we follow Him, the deeper He wants to plow in our hearts and minds, but it is only through that process of being renewed daily in Him that you or I will ever experience the life He offers.
