A Rich and Satisfying Life?

I was spending some time tonight praying and, as I try to do regularly, I asked God if there was anything specific He wanted me to read in the Bible tonight. Now I'm not a huge fan of playing Bible Roulette (more often then not using this particular method to find your answers to life's question will land you in the genealogies leaving you more confused then when you started) but as I was praying and waiting to hear from God I absentmindedly flipped open my Bible to John 10. This is a passage that's come to mean a lot to me in the last year and as soon as I saw what I'd done, I knew God had spoken to me. As I read the passage, what stood out to me was verse 10 where Jesus says:

"The thief's purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life."

Wow. That's Jesus's purpose? I don't know about you, but before reading this tonight if you asked me what His purpose was I'd probably have said to come and die for our sins. And certainly that's true but, according to Jesus, it's not the whole truth.

I know the idea of having a rich and satisfying life is going to be a tough pill for a lot of people to swallow. For starters, there's a lot of rough stuff going on in the world today. How can we feel rich and satisfied in a world with so much evil? Is Jesus telling us to just stick our heads in the sand and ignore it all? Of course not. I believe He's telling us to recognize all of that bad stuff, that there is a thief, that there is evil and give it all to Him. NOT as an excuse to ignore it or do nothing about it but so that He can do something about it using us as his vessels. And whether He uses us a lot or a little to help in this world, it's clear to me that in the midst of it all He wants to blow us away with His joy, with His riches, with His blessings.

Of course, that's just part of our objection. Even ignoring the world around us there's our personal lives. Most of us have resigned ourselves to the idea that Hobbes was right when he wrote, "life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Or, to put a more modern spin on it, life sucks and then you die.

But that's not Jesus's opinion. And if you claim to believe the Bible, it shouldn't be yours either. Not by a long shot.

Sure life is tough and there's plenty to mourn in this world. Even Jesus is described as a man of sorrows in Isaiah. But while there is a time to mourn, a time for grief, a time for suffering, those things are clearly not intended to be the focal point of our life.

What Jesus is saying here is that life CAN be good. No, more than that, it can be AMAZING. Even when things are, by the world's standards, terrible, even in the midst of grief and evil, we can wake up every morning and expect God to blow us away. I can only imagine how many blessings I've missed because I simply did not believe what Jesus says here.

This isn't just a platitude. These aren't mere happy thoughts. This isn't a shot in the arm or an extra cup of coffee in the morning to get us through the day. And this is definitely not an excuse to ignore life; it's an invitation to embrace it. I believe God's challenge to me in leading me to this passage was to live like His promise of a rich and satisfying life is true, to live like He's the hero He promises to be. I want to pass on that same challenge to you. It's a step of faith but taking it can revolutionize everything.

And the one sitting on the throne said, "Look, I am making everything new!"
-Revelation 21:5