The Gate
Introduction
Jab 1 - Fever Reflection
I recently read Fever by Deon Meyer. It imagines a world after a deadly pandemic has wiped out most of humanity and how a man and his son travel through this broken world trying to form a new community.
One of the most striking elements of the story is the contrast between life before and after the collapse. Before the Fever, the world is remembered as stable and convenient, but hollow. Strangely isolated. In contrast, the post-collapse world is dangerous and unpredictable, yet it forces something back into people. They need each other to survive, and in needing each other, they begin to actually live. Meyer suggests a powerful irony: it was only after losing the safety of the modern world that people discovered what a full life actually felt like.
The contrast is unsettling because it reverses what we assume about “living the good life.” We assume that achievement, stability, convenience and control are the ingredients. Yet, we keep finding the opposite.
Jab 2 - My Reflection
How often do I try and find life this way?
I think to myself that a promotion will make life easier. Because then I will have more. I will have more space in the budget. Less pressure at home. Then I can actually live. So that becomes my focus. I push. I work longer hours. I carry the pressure. I give it everything.
Then I get it, and it is genuinely good, and things are easier that first month and even the second.
But then it returns. The same uneasiness, the same internal pressure, the same sense that I am still not where I thought I would be by now.
And I realise I haven’t arrived anywhere. I’ve only moved the target.
Jab 3 - The Common Pattern
I don’t think I’m alone in this.
We live in a world that constantly promises the good life through more — more connectivity, more convenience, more control, more optimisation. ALL advertising plays on this. As if life is a problem to be solved. THIS is what you are missing to finally live the good life. As if the right combination of achievement and stability will finally unlock something, that we are one adjustment away from feeling like we’ve made it.
But it never works. The more we achieve, the more we feel we need to achieve. The more we earn, the more we spend. The more connected we become, the lonelier we feel. The more time we get time off and the more we fill the space before even noticing it was there. Something isn’t landing. Life keeps feeling like something just ahead of us, just out of reach, just around the next corner.
Right Hook - The Text
In the passage today, Jesus describes exactly this. He speaks of people trying to enter life by going around — climbing walls, finding shortcuts, following voices that sound like life but aren’t. And he says plainly that those voices do not lead where they promise. They scatter. They destroy.
But then he says something else. Something that deserves our full attention.
Jesus says, “I am the gate”.
Let’s take a look at the passage more closely to see what he is saying.
Explanation
Teaching Point 1 - Modes of Being
I love the language Jesus uses in this passage. Although it might feel out of place for us, sheep pens and shepherds were part of people’s daily experience. And I love how Jesus uses the ordinary and familiar to describe something universal — the pattern of how we seek life as human beings. And it is not a question of whether we are seeking. We are. We all are. The question is how. How are we approaching life. Jesus gives three modes that people use to try to get into the sheep pen.
The first mode Jesus describes as “climbing in another way”. This is the effortful, ambitious, striving, reaching, self-directed mode. Where we take life into our own hands, thinking that life can be achieved or attained. Rather than entering through the gate, we do it our own way. “I can get there if I achieve these things”, we say. It often stems from a normal response to just trying to survive through the current season of to-do lists. In this mode, there is an overwhelming sense that homeostasis is achievable if we just get a few things in place.
The second mode Jesus describes as “listening to thieves and robbers”. Where climbing is exhausting, this is effortless — and therefore more dangerous. This is the passive mode, where we outsource life to whatever is promising it in the moment. It is often felt as a desire for escaping the weight of the day, but then expresses itself as mindless consumption. We give up the drivers seat and allow ourselves to be carried along by whatever voice happens to be loudest. Jesus doesn’t call these voices neutral. He calls them thieves — because that is what they do. They don’t give life. They take it.
The third mode Jesus describes as “hearing the shepherd’s voice and entering through the gate”. This is categorically different from the other two. It is a mode of trust. We don’t fight, we don’t try, we just walk through the gate. There is no striving or passivity, just a trusting, present acceptance.
Teaching Point 2 - There is Only One Source
After this, Jesus then says, “I am the gate”.
Not a gate. Not one option among several. THE gate. The only legitimate point of entry. And it’s worth pausing on what a gate actually does — it doesn’t compete with the wall, it doesn’t argue with the climbers. It simply is the way in. You don’t earn access to a gate. You don’t optimise your way toward it. You walk through it. There is the gate over there, there is no entry requirement.
This is one of seven moments in John where Jesus speaks this way — each time anchoring life, nourishment, direction, resurrection — entirely in himself, the source of life. And the pattern is always the same. Not here is a path that leads toward something good. But I am the thing itself.
Which means the logic we normally operate with gets inverted. We tend to assume that if we build a good enough life — stable, ordered, meaningful — it will eventually lead us toward God. That flourishing is the path and God is the destination at the end of it.
Jesus reverses this entirely.
We have to believe and remember:
Life doesn’t lead to Christ. Christ leads to life.
Teaching Point 3 - Life inside the Gate
Acts 2 shows us what that looks like from the inside. The early church — togetherness, shared meals, generosity, joy, a tangible presence with one another and with God. It is a compelling picture. And the temptation when we read it is to treat it as a programme. As if these are the habits to adopt, the community to build, the practices to implement in order to finally get life.
But that is reading it backwards.
This is not how they got life. This is what life looked like after they had entered through Christ. The community, the generosity, the joy — these are not the gate. They are what is on the other side of it. They are the fruit, not the method.
Which means if you try to manufacture this — the togetherness, the aliveness, the sense of something real — without entering through the gate, you will find it hollow. Because you will be climbing again. Trying to construct from the outside what can only be received from within.
The gate is not at the end of your striving. It is available right now. And the one standing at it is not waiting for you to have sorted yourself out first. He is simply calling. The only question is whether you are listening.
Application
So I want to give us one thing to take with you. Not three. One — because if you leave here with a list, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll strive your way through it, and miss the point entirely.
The one thing is this: to notice which mode you’re in.
We can relabel the three modes that Jesus describes as 1. striving/reaching, 2. stooping, 3. surrendering. And remember, these are internal modes of operating.
Striving
Striving/reaching is where we are self-oriented, taking control, achieving, effortful. To notice it, you will feel tension, worried that something bad is about to happen if you take your foot off the gas, that you just need to get this one more thing done before you can relax.
Stooping
Stooping is where you move to a lower state of consciousness, a checking out, passive distraction. To notice it, you will feel the addictive pull of things that “make you feel better”, the desire to escape the current task. I don’t want to be here now. Think about the pull toward mindless scrolling, eating/drinking, Netflix/YouTube.
Surrendering
Surrendering is where we accept that very little is actually in our control. That what is in front of us can never be the source of life but always only an out flowing of our life. To notice it, you feel light and present. You know that if you succeed or fail, you are still a part of life and that this thing is not the source.
These are not fixed categories — you move between them across a single day, sometimes within a single task. The same piece of work can be done in grinding self-justification, in hollow distracted going-through-the-motions, or in genuine present-tense freedom. Same task. Completely different inner orientation.
So begin to notice. Not to fix it immediately — just to see it. Ask honestly, without judgment: which mode am I in right now? That question, practised consistently, is more disruptive than it sounds. You cannot exit a mode you haven’t noticed you’re operating in.
Now this noticing requires a certain quality of quiet to actually work. And most of us have filled our lives to a point where that quiet almost never comes. We reach for noise instinctively. We fill every gap. And if we’re honest, part of the reason is that silence has a way of exposing how much we’ve been depending on distraction to avoid ourselves.
So alongside the noticing — create one small space this week where you are not consuming, not producing, not performing. A morning. A walk without a podcast. Ten minutes that are genuinely unhurried. Not as a spiritual achievement. Just as a condition for hearing. Jesus says his sheep know his voice. But voice recognition requires listening. And you cannot listen at the pace most of us are moving.
Each moment you are already choosing one of these modes. The only question is which one. And the one worth choosing is already open.
One Liner
Life doesn’t lead to Christ. Christ leads to life.