we have become familiar with the claim on the lips of Christ and do not realize what we are really confronted with in that single great Personality standing among men and offering to meet the ultimate human need, to give us the deepest, richest, most priceless thing in the world, which no one of us can give another. "I am come that ye may have life, and that ye may have it abundantly."
And notice that here is not a claim only. There is a strange and startling contrast. "The thief cometh to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that ye may have life." On the one side is our Lord. Him we know. But who is this thief on the other side who has come, not to give life, but to reduce it, contract it, dilute it—destroy it altogether? Well, we know well enough that sin is such a thief, that wherever sin is allowed to come into our lives it abridges those lives, draws in the walls of their expansion, cuts down and impoverishes their joys. And there are many things short of sin, less coarse and evil, which, nevertheless, draw in the boundaries of life, narrow and stifle it, and do the work of the thief who came to kill, and to destroy, and to steal. Over against all these He stands Who said: "I came to give life, to give it abundantly."
Now we know very well what men and women say when you bring them this offer of Christ's
