John 10:10

The thief cometh not, but that he may steal, and kill, and destroy: I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.

The religious hierarchy of hardened Israel was the murderous thief intent on killing and destroying, and Christ is the true shepherd who came to bring abundant life to the people of God.

Abundantly ... How grotesque and unreal are the ideas of those who think the Christian leads a life of boring inhibition, sitting out his years in the chilly twilight of monastic gloom, forbidden to do anything that everyone else wants to do, and always cowering in fear before an angry God! On the contrary, the Christian life is the happy life, free, abundant, and overflowing, adventurous and exciting beyond any other kind of existence. Why cannot men believe their Creator, to the effect that the way of Christ is the way of joy and fulfillment? Interpreters' Bible has the following in the same vein of thought:

(Concerning) those who fling their lives away in an avid questing for sensation, seeking to make a collection of experiences as others do of stamps, and esteeming every new experience of any kind an addition to their store, who will get drunk, simply for experience, and touch unholy things that they may taste the whole of life: - they do not realize, poor duped fools, misled by hobbledehoy thinkers, so called, who have cooked these immature ideas into a kind of messy philosophy - they do not realize that in life, as in arithmetic, there is a minus sign as surely as a plus; and that certain experiences do not add to, but subtract from, what we had and were before, each new indulgence in forbidden things leaving us poorer, leaner, emptier, and at length beggared.[14]

One in full possession of his intelligence cannot seriously suppose that God would have created man with a constitution that would enable him to be happier in the service of the devil than in the service of God. The abundant life is not with the evil one, but with Jesus Christ our Lord.