The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (John 10:10 NIV)

Is the Christian life really a better bet than the alternatives?

My sense is that even though we want to believe it is true, we have a hard time articulating how it is so in our experience.

Jesus promises that as the Good Shepherd who looks after the sheep, and the gate by which the sheep are secured and protected, he will bring to his sheep life, and ‘to the full’, or ‘in abundance’.

Using the word ‘life’ as John’s gospel uses it, this means not just long life or eternal life, but a quality of life – life that has a richness about it.

Now this is a powerfully reassuring thing for Jesus to say, since those of us who are his sheep may well be afflicted by FOMO (as one of my students at Moore College once pointed out) – Fear of Missing Out.

FOMO is a particular condition of the post-modern soul whose longings are hardwired into the constantly bleeping machines in our pockets telling us that something is going on somewhere else. Life is being lived, richly: and we haven’t got it. Somewhere in the world people are having the time of their lives, hanging out with friends, bungee jumping, eating sublime food and having sex with angels.

And we aren’t.

Jesus’ critique of this is pretty strong. ‘Don’t be anxious’ he says. ‘The pagans run after these things.’ It doesn’t add to their lives, actually. It is all ephemeral. Chasing ‘the full life’ is like chasing the wind.

But Jesus says: follow me, and you get it all. My disciples get the lot. They are the women and men who can have it all. Now.

What can this mean, though? This is where Christians tend to lose a bit of nerve in my experience. There are three badly mistaken answers to this that do the rounds.

The first is that this is a promise for prosperity and wellness. ‘Abundant life’ means what it means for the secular person, and you’ll get what they most want: the house, the car, the boy/girl of your dreams.

Even though this seems to me to be obviously not what Jesus could mean –Christians still experience poverty, illness and death. It is a view that wreaks havoc amongst evangelical Christians across the world, sad to say. We should be less gullible about such preaching, and less forgiving of it when we see it.

There are too many preachers with Leer Jets, I am afraid. And it is doing incredible damage to the gospel of Christ in Africa and India.

The second is similar: it is when we say ‘Hey, you can be a Christian and be cool. In fact, Christianity is awesomely cool!’ Hipster beards and tattoos for all.

Nothing is wrong with this at one level. Christians are not unearthly, they are normal. Sometimes that normal includes being cool.

But the trouble with this way of doing it is that it accepts the terms of the world for coolness. It tries to make Christianity appear cool/hip/groovy/funky/rad/awesome in the way that the world defines these things. ‘See, he’s cool, and he’s a Christian! Wow!’ Notice which comes first here.

And what’s more, sometimes being a Christian is not cool. It can get you bullied, and sometimes killed. There are plenty of daggy Christians and daggy churches, and there’s nothing particularly wrong with that. (Someone’s got to speak up for the dags!)

The third mistaken response is… well, no response. It is to fail to really think about what this might mean at all. Which means that we end up failing to believe Jesus when he says it.

A couple of thoughts might unlock this conundrum for us. First, we tend to prioritise something experiential and subjective in our search for the abundant, full life. Whatever Jesus is talking about, we assume, must lie in our feelings about living in the world. How else can I know about living the abundant life except in the realm of my experience? Now, while I don’t think this is entirely wrong, it is certainly the wrong place to begin.

The context of the passage, John 10:1—18, actually helps us here (surprise, surprise!). Jesus is depicting himself as the Good Shepherd, who knows his sheep by name, and who – strangest of all – ‘lays down his life for the sheep’! That’s why he has come. His mission is not simply to be a life delivery system, but to bring full life to the sheep by his act of extraordinary sacrifice. He protects them from ‘the thief’ who threatens to steal, kill and destroy – and he does so by standing in the way to the point of death. The sheep live – he dies. And abundant life flows from him to them in this.

What was the nature of this death? It was a death that won forgiveness of sins for the sheep in Jesus’ pen. It brought them into connection with the source of life himself by cleansing them from the shame and guilt of sin – thereby shielding them from the attacks of the evil one, the accuser.

So ‘abundant life’ springs from the forgiveness of sin, and a life lived, as a consequence, in the sound of Jesus’ voice.

Now: forgiveness of sins by the sacrifice of the Good Shepherd is something that happened as an objective thing in the world. The sheep live abundantly whether they know it or not because of the death of the shepherd.

But it is something that we can apprehend. It is a reality that ought to permeate our consciousness and give us an awareness of the fullness of the life we have. The experience of forgiveness and the hope of new and eternal life is the key to full life. It changes everything.

And how does this work? It works because it is the thing that is really worth having above all things. And it relativises the other things – possessions, prosperity, cool. It makes those things seem petty, as they really are. If you hear the Shepherd’s voice, you will find that ‘the things of this world grow strangely dim’. You will be awakened to the life of hope, which fills you with joy even as you suffer all kinds of trials (James 1).

The experience of grace in the present and the hope of a future with God in Jesus makes it possible to have a life now that aptly can be described as ‘full’ or ‘abundant’ – because it really is.