“The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.  I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. John 10:10 (NKJV)

The Bible quote above is part of a conversation Jesus had with some rather uptight religious people called Pharisees.  These Pharisees stood in outspoken opposition to Jesus’ ministry.  To give you a little background, the Pharisees taught that only those who meticulously followed the narrowest interpretations of all the Old Testament laws and Jewish traditions could earn God’s blessings.  Depending on how short you fell of total perfection, God might not only withhold his favor, he would punish you—causing your crops to fail or visiting disaster, disease, and ill fortune on you, your children, and even your children’s children.  It was a pretty simple idea: If you were rich, healthy, and prosperous, God was blessing you for your good deeds; if you were poor, sick, or struggling, it was because you or some ancestor ticked off God.

An amazing number of people who are sincerely trying to follow Christ’s teachings are unconsciously operating from ideas that have more in common with the Pharisees’ teachings (and the Hindu philosophy of good and bad karma) than anything Jesus taught.  When you assume everything that’s wrong with your life is your own fault—or society’s, your parents’, or even an ex-spouse’s fault—or when you assume that to get God’s blessings, you have to be perfect—then you’re missing the point of what Jesus is saying in John 10:10.  Jesus is very clear that there’s more to it than that.  For one thing, there’s a supernatural thief doing everything he can think of to steal, kill, and utterly destroy the flow of blessings God intends for your life.

You know this thief.  He’s been with you since the earliest days of your childhood, stealing words of encouragement from your heart and leaving blame, condemnation, and suspicion in their place.  His snaky voice has always been there in the background, whispering.  See if you recognize it:

            You don’t belong . . .

            If you were more like your brother, you’d be successful . . .

            That co-worker is out to get you . . .

            Nobody appreciates you . . .

This thief is subtle, devious, and brutal in his never-ending quest to rob you of every drop of whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy in your life (Philippians 4:8).  The Bible compares him to a roaring lion prowling around looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8).  And unfortunately, that someone is you.

But there’s good news—you can fight this thief by desperately clinging to Jesus’ promises.  Read the second part of John 10:10.  Jesus says he came so you can have life—and not the life of “quiet desperation” that Henry David Thoreau declared as the lot of man—Jesus came to give you abundant life.

Look up the word abundant in your trusty thesaurus and you’ll find words like copious, ample, rich, lavish, generous, plentiful, bounteous, overflowing, and large.  Those are some good words.  We like to think Jesus came down to earth because he wanted you to be “livin’ large” in every way that really matters.  You may have a hard time imagining it, but financial prosperity is only a minor element of the riches Jesus came to give you.  By the time you’re done reading these blogs, we hope you’ll discover deeper elements of abundance that can overflow into your life in a way that wealth never could.

How Do Blessings Flow?

One of Steve’s [Sjogren] favorite words in any language comes from the Norwegian translation of “abundant life” from John 10:10.  The Norwegian word is over-flod (pronounced oover-floood).  Don’t you just love the sound of it?  If your kids have ever left the water running in the bathtub or your toilet has ever overflowed, you know something of what it’s like to have copious, ample, rich, lavish, abounding amounts of water all over the floor.  But what does overflowing life look like?

Try to image being filled with all the fullness of God?  We’re taking about so much love, so much joy, and so much power that you could never, ever contain it.  And guess what?  You aren’t meant to contain it; you are designed to be constantly filled up with, and constantly pouring out God’s love and blessing.  Just as a tree is intricately designed down to the last tiny leaf to grow upward toward the sun, you are created to be a channel through which God’s blessings can flow.  You were meant to pass on the healing and refreshing water he gives to you, and pour it into other lives.

Wait one blessed minute here!  Are you saying God is only filling me up so I can turn around and give it all away?  That doesn’t make sense!  And, if you listen to the Thief, it doesn’t.  But if you listen to God, you’ll find out why it’s the best way.  Here’s what the Bible says:

All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort.  He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others.  When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.  For the more we suffer for Christ, the more God will shower us with his comfort through Christ” (2 Corinthians 1:3-5).

It’s that oover-floood thing again!  First, whatever troubles we may have, God gives us comfort from his unlimited supply.  So when we encounter others with troubles, we can pass on the comfort we received from God.  And, yeah, this would be a bad deal for us if God’s comfort supply could ever run short, which is why it’s one of the Thief’s key strategies to undermine our trust in God’s ability to meet our needs.  When we don’t believe that God is willing or able to give us what we need, we start putting our own interests ahead of others’ and stockpiling things for ourselves.  Although God created us to love God and people and to use things, the Thief convinces us to reverse that order.  We start loving things and using God or people as a means to get what we want.  In doing this, we not only destroy the flow of good things God intends for us, we open the door to all sorts of evil.

Here’s the story of Dr. Bob—a very smart and successful man who fell victim to the lies of the Thief.

Bob was born to Jewish parents during the Nazi occupation of Poland.  When Bob was an infant, his family fled Poland for the United States, but when they arrived, their immigration visas were denied and they were forced to travel south to Cuba, the closest country that would take them in.  So they settled in Cuba during the turbulent years preceding Castro’s revolution.  By the time he was a teenager, Bob and his family were war refugees again, only this time they were able to immigrate to the U.S.

During all these tribulations, the Thief was working overtime in Bob’s heart—convincing Bob that he didn’t fit in anywhere.  He was that “foreign boy” in Cuba and an “outsider” in an American society dominated by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.  For Bob, the result of these lies was a nearly insatiable drive to prove himself and teach every snob who looked down on him a lesson.  Hiding his Cuban accent as best he could, Bob earned a coveted spot at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and then completed his residency as Chief of Pediatrics at Yale.  Though his academic and professional success surpassed most of his classmates, Bob still wasn’t satisfied.  His thriving practice, fine reputation, beautiful family, and large home were not enough.  He was obsessed with proving himself through wealth, expensive things, high-powered friends, and beautiful women.  When his first marriage eventually failed, he threw himself into the singles scene with a vengeance, appropriately christening his new party boat, “The Hedonist.”

The more it looked like Dr. Bob had it all, the emptier he was inside.  You see, the Thief had fostered his insatiable hunger for success specifically to steal away every good relationship Bob had ever had.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Recently a man said this about Bob: “He’s so different from the man I remember from 25 years ago.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so completely transformed!  He was so driven back then; all he ever talked about was money.  I think he spent more time talking with his stockbroker than he did with his wife and children.”

You see, as Bob’s second marriage was heading for the rocks, he and his new wife, Janis, decided to try something neither had done since childhood—they went to church.  While they were there, they signed up for a class called Renewing the Mind.  This course showed Bob and Janis how to expose and overcome the lies of the Thief.  As Dr. Bob related memories from his childhood he wept—not just in grief, but because for the first time he had begun to understand the true abundance God had in mind for him.

Bob and Janis recently celebrated 17 years of a marriage that literally overflows with love and joy.  It spills over into the lives of the struggling couples with whom they volunteer, to the needy children whom they provide free medical supplies and treatment, and, for the last 10 years, to the people in the struggling churches of Cuba!

You may be wondering why Bob or anyone else would believe the Thief in the first place.  And nobody would if he wasn’t such a good liar.  The Thief is incredibly adept at taking your life circumstance and twisting them to reflect a negative reality.  Just as the Thief convinced Bob that he was an outsider and needed to constantly prove himself in order to be worthy, the Thief lies to us all.  Maybe you’re not exactly like Bob—you don’t feel the need to prove yourself—but maybe instead the Thief has convinced you that your spouse isn’t meeting your needs and you’re a victim of a bad marriage.  Or maybe the Thief has twisted your perception of life so that you’re depressed and hopeless.  Or perhaps the Thief has used one of his favorite tricks and trapped you in a pattern of apathy and indifference—a pattern that has led you to settle for a life you never wanted.  The Thief has an arsenal of weapons, each one meant to block the flow of blessings in your life and eventually turn you into a dried-up fountain.

A Life That Sucks

Does a working fountain dry up when it continually yields its water to flow out from one tier to another?  Of course not! But try to imagine what might take place if somehow one of the tiers became convinced it had to stop its outward flow and keep all of “its water” to itself.  Whether that tier acted from fear, ignorance, or selfishness, the harmony of its design is disrupted when the flow to any part of a fountain is blocked.  Eventually water will stop flowing into that tier—because if a tier is full of water and it’s not going to let any flow out, then there’s no reason for that tier to have any more water.  Even with an inexhaustible source of living water, this is the kind of thing that leads to the tragedy of dried-up fountains.  And the Thief rejoices.

The result of the Thief’s deception is very plain to see: When you dance to the Thief’s tune, your life begins to suck in instead of flow out.

From God’s perspective, a life that is beginning to “suck” looks something like the diagram shown here.  Instead of the flow of God’s Spirit pouring out and lavishly overflowing into the lives of others, Self is in the center attempting to inhale or vacuum what it needs from everyone around it.  Having forsaken God’s spring of living water, the Self attempts to beg, borrow, or steal what it needs from other humans.  The result is an increasingly empty, increasingly dried-up, increasingly self-focused life.  And if you pay attention to many of the people around you, you’ll hear them subtly (or not so subtly) crying out, “Listen to me! Love me! Share with me! Serve me!”  If you listen honestly, one of the voices you may hear is your own.

If your soul has ever been duped by the water Thief—and since the Garden of Eden we have all experienced this at one time or another—you’ll appreciate seeing some of his most sinister and effective strategies exposed in the next blog.

Getting Your Feet Wet  (feel free to comment here or the Reflection Pool questions)

What comes to mind when you think about what the Thief has stolen, killed, or destroyed in your life?

Take a minute to go into your kitchen or bathroom and look at the drain in the bottom of your sink. Think of all the good things that slipped through your fingers as a result of the Thief’s lies in your life.  Now turn the water on and think about the abundant life Jesus has for you.  If you want to, tell God the deepest desire of your heart by saying something like, “God, I’m really thirsty for more.  Here is my heart’s desire.”  Then take a big drink.

“Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4, NIV).

The Reflection Pool

Be honest: What are the desires of your heart?  How do you think those desires compare to the desires God has for your life?

Describe a time you really felt like the Thief was attacking you and lying to you.  Were you successful in fighting off the Thief?  Why or why not?

After reading this blog, how do you think you can fight the Thief in the future?