You will say, 'The image is changed. Christ was the wicket-gate; but now He has become the person who passes through that gate.' Yes, and if you have followed the course of the thought; if you have seen why He is described as the door through which shepherd and sheep must enter in,--why the shepherds of Israel are reproved when they will not pass through that door,--you will see the necessity of the double image. You will feel that He whom all shepherds are bound to acknowledge, if they would have the sheep hear them, must be Himself, in the highest sense, _the_ Shepherd. And the test that He is this Shepherd, explains the perpetual worth and significance of the other symbol. '_He gives His life for the sheep._' The false shepherds wish to find out a way for themselves, which is not the way that the sheep take. They do not like the thought of stooping--beings of another and higher race as they are--to the conditions of these silly creatures. _He_ identifies Himself with them. They have to die. _He_ dies. That is the first and obvious view of the sentence; and it is the one to which we come back at last, as the deepest and most wonderful of all. But before we can take it in its full force, we must recal the old sentence, '_In Him was life_;' and the other which He has just uttered, '_I am come that they might have life more abundantly_.' The property of death is, that it is solitary and incommunicable; the property of life is, that it must be communicated,--that from him in whom it dwells most it must be poured forth most. He in whom the source of life is, from whom all the streams of it have issued, comes into the world to encounter death, which appears to have got the mastery,--to claim them whom He has created capable of life, for life. But how can He give life? How can He overcome death? He must _give up_ life. He must die. The highest life is the life that sacrifices itself. All older shepherds had shown that it was. For their country and their brethren they had poured out their life; _that_ men had received as the proof that they were from God,--that they were quickened by Him. The good Shepherd, the Shepherd of shepherds, justifies the belief. He shows that they had done what they did by inspiration from Him. He shows that, in this instance also,--in this instance especially,--they were receiving of His fulness, and grace for grace. The Word takes flesh and blood, because the children are partakers of flesh and blood. The Shepherd dies, because the sheep die.