September 13, 2026
I Came That You Might Have Life
John 10:1-10
When our family is looking for something to watch together on TV, we often reach for Masterpiece Classics on PBS. The Crown, Grantchester, Poldark, All Creatures Great and Small – they’re almost always good and commercial free.
Except for the very beginning. The series is sponsored by a couple foundations, by viewers like you, and — of course — Viking River Cruises. By now we laugh at the ads — a river ship gliding past castles on the Rhine, an older couple laughing on a balcony with wine glasses in hand, a voiceover intoning lines I can often recite from memory, with no small measure of derision:
“When I really philosophize about it, there is only one thing we don’t have enough of, and that’s time. Time is the only truly scarce commodity, and when you come to that realization, it’s important you spend your time wisely — and what better way to spend your time than traveling…”
Of course they would say that: they’re selling a cruise. But it’s a good ad, and it begins with a kernel of real truth — time is scarce. It may not be the only true scarce commodity, but it is fleeting.
This past summer a lot of people who bought that promise from Viking spent their scarce time on a bus. The rivers in Europe ran historically low — the Rhine, the Danube — so low that Viking had to cancel excursions, swap ships, put passengers up in hotels, load them onto buses to ferry them between towns.
One of the ships ran aground on a sandbank. By the end of the summer, Viking had issued countless vouchers to people who spent their scarce time on the road and not on the water.
Whether or not a Viking Cruise is a good investment of your time, the first part of the ad isn’t wrong. Time is fleeting, it is passing, it is flying. An old riddle goes like this:
I can be saved, spent, and wasted, Yet no one can ever touch me. People try to hoard me, but I cannot be kept. What am I? Time.
The real question isn’t where or how we spend our time. The real question is what voice we are listening to, to tell us what spending our time well even means. Because how we spend our time is how we spend our life.
Today we begin a new program year together, with classes and activities kicking off. In worship and education this year, we’re going to spend a good bit of time circling one word: alive. What does it mean to be alive?
Not just getting up every day and doing stuff, but alive to God — to draw breath in God’s image, to be meant for relationship with God and neighbor?
We’re going to come at that question from many directions — through the seasons of our lives, through our hopes about the world we’re making and leaving behind, through technology and what it means for humanity, and through the practices that shape a soul.
We’ll keep coming back to one scripture verse, John 10:10: I came that you may have life… The verse is rooted deeply in the nature of God.
In the world around our ancient scriptures, there were many who claimed to be a god – from statues to rulers to myths.
Our scriptures tell us, from Moses and Mount Sinai to Jesus and the empty tomb, that in contrast to every other god, the God of Israel and Jesus is the living God. Not mute. Not inert. Not indifferent. Not mortal. But alive and overflowing with life.
This verse, “I came that you may have life,” is in our text today. Here is the background.
Jesus has been in an argument. In the chapter just before this one, he heals a man born blind, and the religious leaders object. They who are supposed to be shepherding God’s people can’t see what’s right in front of them — that Jesus is the promised Messiah.
When the healed man won’t stop telling the truth about what happened to him, they throw him out of the synagogue. Jesus goes and finds him. There’s no break in the story here — this reading flows straight from that expulsion into what Jesus says next. The man who was cast out is brought in and interrogated.
He confesses: he followed the voice of the one who healed him. Wouldn’t you? He did not understand the theology of it – he just knew he was blind and now he could see.
Jesus pipes up to say, “The ones who are really blind around here are you, the religious leaders–who claim to have sight but can’t see; who claim to know the way but lead people into confusion.
Then Jesus gives them this analogy about sheep — who are very dependent creatures easily misled, and often compared to human beings — and about a sheep pen, with one door.
The ones who come in rightly, through the door, are shepherds. The ones who climb over the wall some other way, Jesus says, are thieves and bandits. The one who comes in the door is trustworthy; the one who sneaks over the gate can’t be trusted.
Just when folks are looking puzzled, Jesus turns the analogy in a different direction. He says, “I am the door.” You would expect him to say, “I am the shepherd who comes through the door” — and he does say that a few verses later. First, he says, “I am the door.”
John tells us that even the people listening that day didn’t understand it. The Gospel of John is full of things like this – one analogy after another to try to communicate a truth that is too big to fit inside one picture.
Jesus is both the door and the shepherd. He is both the guard and the guide.
Tucked into analogy of sheep is this one sentence I want us to bear in mind this year:
I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
It’s worth taking time with that word “life,” because English flattens something that is much sharper in Greek.
John had a Greek word available to him for ordinary life — bios, the root of “biography.” Bios means your lifestyle, your circumstances, your way of life, marriage, kids, job the story of your life. John doesn’t use that word.
He uses zōē — and John uses this word over and over again to describe the very essence of life. This is the essential nature of the living God. This is life force.
This not an improvement in circumstances, or twist that brings good fortune. This is not “the good life” as opposed to a “hard life.”
Jesus did not come to give us a better bio. Jesus came to give the very essence of life. The quality of being alive, the force that brings fruit from seed and puts life into dust.
This is Life that was, as John puts it clear back in his opening lines, in God from the beginning and made known in Jesus.
And the word “abundantly” undersells the gift even more. The Greek is perisson — the same word used for the baskets of leftovers after Jesus feeds five thousand people with a boy’s lunch. It doesn’t mean “enough,” or even “plenty.” It means overflowing. More than you could ever know what to do with.
So here is the sentence again, closer to what it’s saying: I came so that you might have the very life-force of God and have it in overflowing measure.
This is God’s gift in Jesus. This is what salvation looks like. That’s why the man who received his sight could say he was saved–he received the life-force of God.
This is what the Apostle Paul means by “life in Christ.” Life in Christ is not only life after death. It is also life here and now. It’s simply Life – the gift of God’s vitality in overflowing measure.
Jesus was concerned that there were thieves and bandits trying to mislead, harm, and steal the sheep and their life. We should be concerned too.
Whatever their other virtues, sheep are not the brightest animals, and they are deeply dependent. They need to be led to pasture, protected, and a good shepherd who knows where the grass is and where the wolf is hiding, how to keep them out of trouble, how to call them into the pen.
We are like that. We need a shepherd whose voice we know, whom we can trust to lead us in paths of life.
Our life’s work isn’t figuring out abstract theology or existential philosophy. Our life’s work is learning to recognize that one voice among many and learning to trust it. Whatever may be said about sheep and how inept they are, they do know how to trust the shepherd’s voice.
John says the sheep “know his voice” (v. 4). It’s the kind of knowing that comes from long acquaintance. The way you recognize a person’s footsteps in the hallway and know who is coming, the way a dog knows the sound of your car before you turn into the driveway. You don’t learn a voice like that by hearing it once. You learn it the way you learn any voice you love: over years of listening carefully, mostly in the ordinary practices of prayer and worship and scripture and life together.
There are many other voices, thieves and bandits, who will try to mislead and harm the sheep. Some are loud and political. They sound, at first, like the voice of freedom or safety or prosperity. But follow that voice very long and the promises prove to be hollow, and the speaker has feet of clay, and the people are left wondering how things got so bad.
Some voices are loud and religious. They sound, at first, like the shepherd’s– they are using the shepherd’s words. This is the preacher who tells you that abundant life means health, wealth, and success, that God just wants you to be happy, and that enough faith will get you there. Follow that voice long enough and it tends to enrich the preacher and leave everyone else disappointed, waiting on a life that never overflows.
Some voices are loud and cultural. They sound at first like a pretty good life plan, follow this track and you’ll be successful, admired, and happy. Follow that voice long enough, and you realize you’ve given your life to the culture, and lost the one life that was yours to live.
Leo Tolstoy’s short novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich is about a man who never learned to tell the difference between the voice of a thief and the voice of a shepherd. He does everything correctly — the right career, the right marriage, the right house, the right friends — arranging his whole life around what looks proper and impressive to the people around him. It’s only at the end, dying, that it feels empty and he sees clearly and devastatingly: it might have been otherwise.
He had followed a voice all his life — the voice of advancement, of appearances, of what a successful man is supposed to want — and it was not, it turns out, the voice of the one who made him, of the one who came to bring him life.
There are many false voices. This text gives us a way to test which voice we’re listening to before you reach the end of life to find out. The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy — to leave you running on building a biography, on mere facts of your existence.
The shepherd comes so that you might have zōē, the very vitality of God, and have it perisson — not just enough, not even plenty, but overflowing, more than you could ever spend.
That is the test: are you overflowing with divine life? It has nothing to do with whether a day feels easy or hard. Self-giving love is depleting. Forgiveness is arduous. Loving a difficult person is exhausting. Serving others is demanding. But doing the hard thing and living the abundant life aren’t opposites.
Jesus the Messiah is the shape of abundant life, a living voice and presence. His life doesn’t wait on the other side of an empty calendar or a great experience. It flows through the ordinary practices of worship and prayer, through the ordinary rhythms of everyday life, through loving actual people, in an actual place, through actual stuff. And somehow, life overflows.
Finding abundant life isn’t a task God has handed you. It’s the life God is giving you, in relationship with the Savior, and it is on offer again this morning, and every morning: I came that you may have life.
So here’s my hope for us today, on the first Sunday of a year built around that sentence: that we learn to really tell the difference between abundant God-life and all of the poor imitations; between the voice of the shepherd who cares for the sheep, and every other bandit that sneaks over the wall and calls for our attention.
“Time is the only truly scarce commodity, and when you come to that realization…”
What better way to spend your time than with the one who said, “I came that you may have life, and have it to the full.”
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina