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Eastside Church Sermons
These are the sermons of Eastside Church in Madison, WI. We live in a broken world - everyone feels it. We believe we were made to have lasting peace with ourselves, each other, and God. Because of who Jesus is and what he has done, we don’t have to experience the hardships (or joys) of this life alone. We exist to be a church made up of people who love, live like, and speak of Jesus, locally and globally, as the Spirit leads.
Eastside Church Sermons
Jesus Is The Way, The Truth, and The Life (John 14:1-7) by Houston Tucker
Discover the transformative power of intentional living through the lens of faith. Our latest session delves into the philosophy of crafting living spaces with purpose, as a metaphor for the deliberate choices we make in life. Reflecting on the architecture of tiny homes, we explore the significance of self-awareness and setting priorities, and how these decisions extend beyond our physical dwellings to the core of our existence. The anecdote of a family in the Catskills, who embraced a 12,000-year-old boulder as the heart of their home, perfectly illustrates the impact of building our lives around an unwavering foundation, much like the steadfastness found in Jesus' teachings.
Embrace the challenging notion that Jesus' path, as ‘the way, the truth, and the life,’ offers an exclusive yet liberating journey to freedom and purpose. Ponder with us the profound implications of anchoring our lives to a singular, immutable truth, and how this can confront our cultural inclinations for autonomy. Through biblical narratives and theological insights, we illuminate why Jesus' exclusive claim is not a constraint but a path to a richer, more meaningful existence. This discussion invites you to reexamine the significance of establishing a relationship with God, facilitated uniquely through Jesus, as a remedy for spiritual afflictions, akin to the indispensable role of vitamin C against scurvy.
Confront the intricacies of sustaining faith amidst life's darkest moments and scripture's toughest teachings. Our conversation steers through the complexities of trusting in Jesus, especially when the road feels uncertain and His word is difficult to reconcile with our own understanding. We navigate the terrain of doubt and belief, encouraging you to hold fast to the conviction that Jesus is the true way to a life of fullness. Join us for this enlightening session, and leave equipped with a renewed perspective to trust in Jesus as your ultimate guide through the ebbs and flows of life and faith.
Alright, we're gonna do a little.
Speaker 1:Live makes him perfect. Okay, hey, okay. So you just heard it, heard it here first. We're talking about this famous line in the book of John. You heard it at the very end there Jesus says I am the way, the truth and the life, and so my name's Houston. If you don't know me, go ahead and meet you. I think I know everybody here, but just in case, maybe you've forgotten since last week I'm Houston, it's good to meet you, it's good to see you. Okay, so does anyone else. Does anyone else get on YouTube a lot, like watch YouTube videos? I feel like this is gonna be the guys in the room we're gonna be like yeah, youtube and women, just please hold on, bear with me.
Speaker 1:I recently got on this kick, this kind of deep dive on architecture for small houses, architecture and design. I don't know why. Well, we have a small house, and so it's like I'm watching these videos and super fascinating. I don't know how I got there, but all I know that all of my feet now is architecture and design specifically for small homes. And what I think is interesting. I've even bought a book recently. It's bad, okay, but anyways, what I found that's super interesting is the idea when you're designing a small home, right, like a tiny home, I think, even if you've been to our house even smaller than we've got If you're designing a tiny home or you're trying to design an apartment space, you have to make decisions on the outset of the design.
Speaker 1:You have to. The thing they say is that before you go in, you have to know yourself enough to know what you're about, right? And when you go to design your space, it has to flow out of the specific things that you're about that you've chosen to do your life around, right. And so if you've got a small space and you love hosting people like you like having people over for meals then you know you have to sacrifice that space somewhere, right? So it's like, if you want to have a big enough table to have your friends and family over, that means you have to have a small bedroom, right. Or if you want a big open space, a lot of light, a lot of airflow, that means you can't put up walls in the space, right? You see what I'm saying when you're designing the space, you have to decide on the outset what the space is about, and then you design it.
Speaker 1:And so as I'm doing these deep dives, as I'm just going just nuts on this, I find this video about this family and they were hiking in the Catskills in New York and they come to this place kind of atop of a hill and they find this big boulder and they say it's like a 12,000-year-old boulder. I don't know how they know that, but they say it was from the last Ice Age, right, that somehow the Ice Age had deposited there on this mountain, on this hill. And in this video the family, they loved this boulder, they thought it was so neat, and so what they decided to do was they decided, you know, they're looking for a place to build their home. They decided to build their house literally around this boulder. And so, if you imagine, their house is kind of a grid, four squares, and one of the squares, this boulder, takes up the whole space of the house and there's this kind of glass case around it and it's fascinating, super fascinating house, not a particularly small one, but when they designed the house, everything was with this boulder in mind, and so almost every room in the house you can see it right, the windows line up perfectly so that you can get a view to it, the light catches it in the morning, the roof slopes in so that when it rains it pours on the boulder. Super neat, you should check it out if you like this kind of stuff. Very neat.
Speaker 1:But what really stuck with me watching this video was hearing the owner talk about it. You know he's an architect and he loved they find this boulder and they loved it right. And it's so interesting hearing him talk about the logic behind the house. And he said this line it stuck with me. Okay, he said when we arrived, we found that the boulder was sitting on the highest point in the land and we felt that it was an invitation to build our lives around it. And so he said and I think that's interesting, right, because the whole design of the house, boulder in mind, everything radiates out from it. And this guy, these people, they said we want to build our lives around it.
Speaker 1:And when we come to our passage today, we hear one of the most famous things that Jesus ever said. He said I'm the way, the truth in the life, and what I want us to see is that what he said is an invitation. He's in the middle of the most intimate teaching with his disciples. He's in this upper room, right, this small room, with just his closest people. And he knows he's going to die soon and so the stakes are very high. He's got to teach them really important things. He's got to tell them some really important things before he goes. And what he knows he's got to shout out of doubt is that what they need more than anything else, then and then forever, is to build their lives around them.
Speaker 1:But here's the deal Jesus makes it really clear. He makes it really clear that he's the only thing, the only thing in the whole universe that you can build your life around. He's exclusive. He's very particular about it. You heard it from what Laurie read. He says no one comes to the Father except through me. It's a very exclusive claim. And this is hard. This is hard for us, hard for our culture. We wrestle with this line. We wrestle with this idea that Jesus is exclusive Because an exclusive God offends us, right? We want freedom, you know. We want to be able to build our lives around whatever rock or bolter or piece of architecture we want. We want that freedom, right? But here's the deal. Jesus knows that this boulder that has been around since the last ice age, that has been around long before any people came to this Catskills mountain and probably long after people are there. He knows that even that boulder is not going to make it in the end right. He knows that this house that was built around this rock, this ancient rock, even it will not last. And so what Jesus is saying is that if you want to build your life on something that will last, if you want to be around to the end, this is the only way. He is the only way. So that's what we're going to see today.
Speaker 1:We're going to look at this line that Jesus said, that he is the way, the truth and the life. We're going to unpack it Okay, we're going to look at each one of those individually the whole time. We're going to really keep an eye. We're going to keep a mind towards Jesus making these exclusive claims. We're going to see that Jesus is not only the way, he's the only way. We're going to see that Jesus is not only the truth, he's the only truth. He's not only the life, he's the only life. Do you see what I'm saying? We're going to look at Jesus and his exclusivity today and at the very end, we're going to take a minute and we're going to think about why Jesus is not only exclusive but he's excellent, and why it's good that he's the only way, the only truth and the only life. So, again, we're going to look at this in three parts Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and at the end we're going to talk about His excellence.
Speaker 1:But before that, would you pray for me, lord? We're coming for you today. I'm coming for you today, aware of how small I am, how small we are, just one of six, seven billion people on earth, and you are such a great, big God and yet, like we sang today, you know us and you love us, and that you reach out to us. So, god, I just pray that, as we unpack what it means that you, lord Jesus, are the way, the truth and the life, I just pray that you open our eyes and our ears and our hearts, lord, a lot of us, we've heard this before plenty of times and I just pray that you say something fresh to us today, not new truths, but new apprehensions of the truth. Lord, give us grace as you open your word and I pray, lord, that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts will be glorifying to you, lord, our God, and Redeemer Jesus' name. Amen. Okay, all right.
Speaker 1:First, what does it mean that Jesus is the way? Okay, there are two aspects of this that I want us to. Sorry, there's kind of two in one aspects. I'll say that of this that I want us to grab on to. Okay, jesus is the way to God. Okay, he's the only way to God, and that has implications on our life. Okay, so here's what I mean by that.
Speaker 1:Let's look at our passage, starting in verse four. Read through the end Jesus is the only way to God. Verse four says and you know the way to where I am going. And Thomas said Lord, we don't know the way, we don't know where you're going. How can we know the way? Jesus said to him I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. And from now on, you do know him and you have seen him.
Speaker 1:So again, the context here is that Jesus is preparing disciples. He knows the end of his life is coming, and so what he says at the beginning of our passage is that he's going to the Father. And then he says what we just read, and you know the way, and, of course, thomas doing the great service for all of us. He says, um, no, no, we don't Jesus, we have no idea what you're talking about. And Jesus says the perfect line. He says, no, no, I am the way. And so what does that mean? Simply, it means that Jesus is the one way to God. Now, this is tough. This is tough because that's a loaded line in our culture and in our world. The line that Jesus is the way to, or really just the way to, god in general is loaded. We all have different ideas of what that means.
Speaker 1:Okay, what I want to do is think about what does the Bible mean when it says the way to God, and what we should think about. This is kind of in proximity terms, like coming to God, approaching him right, and we were saying earlier about God seated on his throne, and one of the pictures here is that God is like a king, right, and if you want to talk to God, you have to come to the courtroom, come to his court and approach his throne. And we do that for all kinds of reasons. We do that because we need something from him. We do that because we want to be with him, we do that because we want forgiveness. There's all kinds of reasons why we come to God, but this is the picture. It's walking up to his presence, to his throne, and so the question is how do you get there? Right, what's the route, what's the path, so to speak? But here's the deal.
Speaker 1:The Christians see something different in this. The non-Christians, we think about going to God like a kind of spiritual enlightenment, maybe like an experience, maybe like a set of knowledge, but the Christians sees this, at its core, as a relational thing. Okay, because if you look at our passage, if you see how Jesus describes God, like, look at verse six. It says no one comes to the Father except through me. Or all the way back to verse two, in my Father's house there are many rooms. So we have to see that, for the Christian, coming to God means, at its very very core, a relationship with God, and specifically Jesus talking here about a relationship with God, is Father right? And so sorry, backtrack. How then do we get there? How do we get to that place? How do we get to having a relationship with God? And Jesus says very clearly, very simply, if you want a relationship with God, if you want to come to Him, you have to go through Jesus. He's the only way. And this is the part where, like, the non-Christians start to bristle, right, even some of us Christians start to bristle, because the idea of Jesus being the only way to come to God is controversial, to say the least. You know, I said earlier, we all want the freedom to choose our own way to God, right, but here's what I think.
Speaker 1:I was at the Lake Edge MC a couple of weeks ago and me and Joe and Val were in Ben's kitchen and we were talking about scurvy of all things. Literally no idea how we got there, but we were. And do you guys know what scurvy is? Right, it's a disease that people on ships, pirates, famous pirate disease. It's what they would get when they were at sea for a long, long time and they didn't have any fruit, fresh fruit, available to them. And, as Joe helped me understand with his medical knowledge, scurvy is not so much a disease but a deficiency, right, a vitamin C deficiency. And, joe, if I'm ruining anything here, just go along with it, because I think it's a good illustration. So it's like what scurvy is at the core is a vitamin C deficiency, right, like. Your body needs vitamin C or else you'll die, and it's as simple as that. It needs vitamin C to function properly and without it you'll die.
Speaker 1:Now imagine you and I were on a boat, okay, and we have lived at the boat. We've lived at sea for six months, right, and we've not seen land for a long time. Now imagine you are starting to show signs of scurvy. Okay, I don't know what those are. Your eyes are going to fall out, your hair is turning colors, I don't know whatever they are Like. You're showing signs and we all know, because we're all pirates living this pirate life.
Speaker 1:Now imagine I say to you here okay, look, you've got symptoms of scurvy, you're sick, but I have an orange. Take this orange, eat it, it's going to save your life. Now imagine you say to me I'm not into oranges, I've got this fish, I'll be fine. And I say, no, you won't, you're going to die. You need vitamin C, you need citrus. And then you say to me Houston, that is such a small-minded thing to say. I'm just so offensive that you would tell me that there is only one way to cure scurvy. I like fish, I like my way and I'm going to be just fine with my salted fish, thank you. What's going to happen? You're going to be dead in a week. I don't know how long it takes to get you Right. See, and that's what Jesus is getting at here.
Speaker 1:When he says I am the way to the Father, we bulk it that because we're not going to die. We bulk it that because we say Jesus, how dare you make these exclusive claims? But the truth is is that this is God himself coming down to us and he says this is the way. And we say I don't like that way, it's wild, right? Like telling a doctor here's the medicine I'm prescribing to you. It will cure you and you will live nothing. I'd rather try something else. That's how we approach Jesus and that's what's going on. So what's going on when Jesus says he is the way? See, this is not Jesus, like gatekeeping. This is not Jesus saying I like some, not others. This is not us Christians saying look, you got to be on the end crowd or else no, this is Jesus saying you are sick, here's the cure. And so what does it really mean to accept that? What does it mean to accept Jesus as the way. I have a short thought about that.
Speaker 1:Do you guys ever, when you're driving, not like what your GPS is telling you to do? Right, I don't do this, of course, and Kinsey doesn't know I'm going to do this. I'm going to use her at my expense at this point, or use this illustration at her expense. Sometimes, when we're driving, like to Kansas City or something, it's like you know, like you've done this route a hundred times, and then the GPS takes you on a strange route, right, and it's trying to avoid like traffic or something, right, or an accident or whatever. It takes you on a strange route and the number of times that we have been on, like the side road, and the GPS says that this is the route to get there, and Kinsey would be like we're going to die out here in these woods, right, and it's like like that's funny, but we all do that, right, we all do that, we do that with directions, we do that with GPS, but like we do that with Jesus, don't we Like, if Jesus says the way, that means that he knows the way, that means that he knows the way to get to God, it means that he knows the way to live our lives.
Speaker 1:And so often when we read his words and we say I like 90% of what you're doing here in Jesus, but I just can't get behind this 10%. Right, we do this to Jesus where we say, look, you have gotten me this far and you said that the route will take me here at the end, but I'm just not sure about this part in the middle. And what do we do? We jump ship, we take a different route, we take a turn, we get lost, inevitably. This is how we treat Jesus and how Jesus is the way, and really what that says is that we need to be able to trust Him. Right, we need to be able to trust when he says that he's the way. We need to be able to trust that he knows, he knows where he's going, he knows where he's taking us. And it's hard. It's hard when the way gets hard. It's hard when things keep getting in our path that we don't think should be there. It's hard when it means we have to go a way that we just don't want, and that's why it's really important.
Speaker 1:The second part that Jesus is the truth. Okay, so let's talk about that. What does it mean that Jesus is the truth? You know. Truth is a big theme in the book of John. It's a big theme. Jesus talks about truth a lot, especially when he's talking about Himself. But what does it mean that Jesus is the truth? I think to get a handle on this, we need to start by looking at what the opposite of truth is. Okay, john likes to put these ideas next to each other. He likes to contrast, he talks about light and dark, he talks about life and death and he talks about truth and lies.
Speaker 1:And you know, back in chapter eight, jesus had this strange interaction with the religious leaders. And do you remember that part where Jesus says if you follow me, if you listen to my words, you'll know the truth, and the truth will set you free. And the religious leaders, they hear that and they have a big problem with them. They don't like what Jesus has said because they believe hey, we know the truth, because they know the scriptures, they know about the things God has said. And then they say Jesus, we're not slaves. What are you talking about? Set us free. And do you remember what Jesus said in response? Jesus said if any of you sins, your slave to sin. And it goes on a little bit later to say that the reason why we all sin is because we believe the lies of the devil. And so he says, essentially, sin in slaves, right, sin in slaves.
Speaker 1:And if you dug down to the root of the tree of sin, it's believing a lie. And this makes sense because if we think back to the beginning of the whole Bible, we think back to the book Genesis. You know what does Satan say to Eve? He says no, no, no, listen, listen, listen, god, he doesn't have your best interests at heart. He's holding out on you. He doesn't want what's best for me. If you eat this tree, you'll get it, you'll get it. He doesn't want what's best for me. If you eat this tree, you'll be fine, better than fine.
Speaker 1:And the result is that Adam and Eve, they eat from this tree and they decide in that moment yes, this is the truth, that God doesn't have our best interests at heart, and really I have to look out for me. And that's the only way. We decided to go our own way. And the result is that, deep down, every single one of us has built our homes, so to speak, around this lie. If you think back to that home I talked about earlier, around the rock it's like at the center of this glass case is not some boulder. It's not God, it's a lie.
Speaker 1:And the lie is God does not have your best interests at heart, and so you have to. And so when Jesus says I am the truth, look, he's not just saying, hey, I'm telling you true things. He is. And he's not just saying, hey, this belief system, this thing that I'm telling you about, is true, but it is. What he's saying is that the core of each one of our lives is a lie and that he alone has the power to break it, to destroy it and to replace it. And we think about it. If the core of the human experience is this lie that we believe God does not have my best interest at heart and I must then choose my own way, then Jesus is in a unique position to uproot that lie. Right, because who is Jesus? Jesus is God who has come to us. I mean, what did he do at this time? Jesus healed people. Jesus fed the hungry, jesus cared for the outcast, jesus mourned with those who lost people, jesus rose to death. And what he's doing in all these things is showing us that this is what he's about, showing us that really, that lie that we have put down here is not true. It's just that it's a lie. He does have our best interest at heart. He does want the best for us. He's claiming that we can trust him. He's trustworthy. I mean, look back at our passage. Look at verse one. Look how it starts Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. He says don't let your hearts be troubled, don't give in to that despair. Believe trust. See, we use the word believe so loosely, right, in Christian circles especially. But in our world, believe is a very weak word, right, we think of belief as like, yeah, I believe that the sun is in the sky. I mentally assent to a truth. Right, but the way that Jesus and the Bible talk about belief is like trust, like putting bets on it. And it's like this.
Speaker 1:Have you ever been in the Willis Tower in Chicago? There's this part they call the sky deck and what it is is these like four or five little glass kind of enclosures that jut out over this. I don't know. 50 story buildings, huge building. You go near the top and then these glass enclosures that jut out past the building and what people do is they walk out on it and they stand in this glass enclosure where you can look down and see the ground below you. Some of you are shuddering, that's right, and so Kinsley and I. We do this a few years ago. We go up the Willis Tower and we're in line. There's a lot of people we probably saw hundreds of people come through this line and what you do is you go into the glass enclosure and you take some picture like look down, make a big deal about it. We saw like hundreds of people come through and by the time we're getting up to the front.
Speaker 1:I'm in a position where I believe in that. I assent to the truth that this is structurally sound. I saw guys bigger than me, whole families go in there. I can assent to the idea that this is structurally sound, but it is a completely different thing to walk out onto it, right? Kinsley can tell you I'm like shaky. You know I'm in this spot where it's like, yeah, sure, it's held hundreds of people before me, but I'm probably the one that's going to do it and write.
Speaker 1:And so what's happening here? I believe, yeah, I believe this is structurally sound, but the question is, do I trust it? Do I trust this glass Do I trust it's going to hold me and not drown me 50 stories? And this is what Jesus is talking about. This is why it is such a big deal that Jesus says he is the truth. Because to believe in Jesus as the truth doesn't just mean, hey, you believe that he's true or right. It means that you believe that he will hold you when the time comes. It means you believe that when you step out in faith, as it were, and put your weight on him, that he is stable and can hold you. See, this is the linchpin.
Speaker 1:This statement in the middle is the linchpin of Jesus' whole deal. Right, because Jesus can say, until he's blue in the face hey, I'm the good shepherd, sure? Or he can say, hey, I am the one before Abraham. Or he can say, I'm the bread of life. He say all the things he wants to right, but if he is not trustworthy, if he is not the truth, none of it matters. None of it matters Because he can't hold your weight. See, when Jesus claims to be the truth, again, he's not just saying, he's telling the truth. He's saying that he is the thing you can build your life on. He's the way that you can have real, true life. And that brings us to our final point, our third point. The Jesus is the life. What does it mean? The Jesus is life? Well, throughout Scripture there's this theme. There's this theme that Jesus, that God, is not just the creator of everything. We call him the sustainer.
Speaker 1:And a lot of people like to think of God as like a clockmaker. Right, like he has made this machine, this contraption, that once he sets it down, it operates. And there's a classic line to talk about God that he's the clockmaker who's walked away. Right, he set things in motion and walked away. But the Bible says that actually, god's relationship to His creation is a lot less like a clockmaker in his clock and a lot more like a singer in his song. And we sang about it in the song Canons, that all creation is like this song, that God is singing. And, guys, what happens when we stop singing? The song's gone. Right, it's not a matter of okay and it's out there. It's going to do its thing. As soon as we stop singing, the song's gone. And this is God's relationship with His creation. It's like a father singing over his kids, like a musician on stage singing in opera. He's making this beautiful thing as he goes, he's sustaining it, he keeps making it.
Speaker 1:Hebrews 1.3 says that Jesus upholds the universe by the word of His power. I mean he might literally be singing the world into existence every day. It's beautiful. I love that. I love that image. But there's another thing.
Speaker 1:When Jesus says that he's the life, there's another thing going on there. He's saying if we think about the contrast that John keeps making, what Jesus is saying by saying that he's the life is he's saying that without Him is death. And really that means that we like to think about life, as everyone gets to kind of choose their own way. Right, you choose what life is about, you choose what makes life meaningful, what makes it matter or whatever. But the truth is that what Jesus is saying is that there are two options Is that you can have Him and have life, or you can not have Him and not have life. So it doesn't mean that someone without Jesus is living like a diminished life. It doesn't mean that someone without Jesus you know they're just not getting the best life. What he's saying is that without Jesus you are having no life, you're not getting it at all. And that should make sense, right, if we think of Jesus, the creator, the sustainer, the one who's singing us into existence every day. It's like the song denying the singer at any point. It doesn't work, it doesn't make sense, it's not life.
Speaker 1:You know, I think a picture of this Stella is in this stage where she's trying to figure out how things work, you know, and she loves to try to make things work the way she wants them to, and she absolutely loses her mind when they don't right. You guys are kids, you know exactly what I'm talking about, and it's like I think the best way to think about how Jesus relates to life is that if you have an electronic toy, right, and you imagine that we have the battery pack open and we're trying to take random things from the house and trying to put it in this battery pack, we're taking blocks that doesn't work. We take yogurt that doesn't work. We take our fist that doesn't work. None of this is working right. And if you have kids, what's happening at this point Screams, melt down. Not you guys, of course. You're very wise and mature, those of us with little, little kids and this is what we're doing. This is what we're doing with life.
Speaker 1:It's like we have this battery pack missing and Jesus is the batters. It's not that, hey, you can put whatever you want there and you might not have as good of a toy. It's no, you don't have a toy, you have a hunk of plastic. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do. It's not life, it's not running, it's not operating. Only when you put the batteries in does it work. In the same way, to recognize Jesus as the life, the only life, is to recognize that Jesus is like batteries to an electronic toy. It's the only option, the only way that that thing does what it's supposed to do, the only way that it works. And it means that to put Jesus at the center of our lives.
Speaker 1:You can feel like a loss, you can feel like we've lost the freedom, and maybe, in one sense, you've lost the freedom to put yogurt in your electronic toys. But the truth is, what you've really gained is the thing that you've wanted all along. You actually gained life. And the truth is that, man, until we do it, we don't even know what we're missing. And so I wanna end with this.
Speaker 1:I've talked about how Jesus is the only way right, he's exclusive, he's the only way, he's the only truth, he's the only life. But what I wanna convince us of at the end is that he's not just the only way, he's the most excellent way. And what I mean is this like we know, jesus is the only way to God, but so often I think, what that means for us. What we hear is that, hey, we have to follow Jesus' example in order to be okay with God. But the truth is we can't do that right. No person in this room or in history has been able to do that, has been able to follow Jesus' pattern and live rightly with God.
Speaker 1:And it's like, if we think about life as like a mountain and God's at the top of that mountain and we're trying to find our way up the mountain by saying that we have to follow Jesus and live his way. It's like telling somebody, hey, here is a sheer cliff, face, no hand holds a thousand miles long, you're to free climate. It's just not possible. But Jesus being the way means that God is at the top of the mountain, came down and he didn't just blaze a trail for us. He didn't just like show us, hey, here's the route you follow. He put us on his back and he climbed himself and he brought us up. Jesus is the way, because he brings us to God.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, we know Jesus is the truth, he's trustworthy, we can trust him. But it's like it's easy to think that someone's trustworthy, right, we're all trustworthy until we're not. That's how it works. Every person, we know that we've got this point that when we get there, we're gonna buckle, we're gonna fold, we're not gonna carry through. And so the question is is Jesus trustworthy?
Speaker 1:And, friends, we remember that in the gospel, at the end of his life, there's a scene where Jesus is on trial. He's on trial before Pilate and he's not talking, he's not defending himself. And Pilate says hey, don't you know, I have the power to set you free? Jesus says no, he don't. He says you can't do anything except what I let you Do. You remember what he says? He said I could call down a hundred angels right now to carry me away and wipe out this whole place, but he didn't. Why? Because we can trust him. We can trust him. He's gonna take us to the very end of the path. He's not gonna get part way up the mountain and say I'm tired, I'm done, I'm gonna go. No, he takes us all the way and we know that Jesus is the life right.
Speaker 1:But, friends, let's not miss the fact that this is not just like some nice idea that we tell ourselves. This is not just something we say to comfort ourselves when we've lost people. We have to remember that almost 2000 years ago, jesus, the creator and sustainer of life, willingly went to the cross and died. He bore our sins and he died so that we could live. And what we have to see is that when Jesus says that he's gonna give us life, he means he will give it even at his own expense. He's willing to go all the way, even to the grave, so that we can have life. So the last thing this is hard, this is hard to wrap our minds around, this is hard to walk out.
Speaker 1:And what I think is that we can all sit here and we can all say, yeah, jesus is the way, I'm gonna follow him. Yeah, he's trustworthy, I can trust that he's getting me where I'm going. Yeah, he's life. The end of this road is life and life with him. And we can sit here and we can say that. But I think the truth is that we all know that there are two things that will always trip us up on this path, and the first is like when bad things happen to us. I think about talking about driving to Kansas City and taking a strange route. There's this point when we're driving and we're on a side road and it's scary and it's dark and it's hard to see, and it's easy at that point to say I don't Jesus, I don't think that you have laid out the best route for me, I don't actually think that this is the good way, because this seems a lot like the way to die in the woods or God forbid.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we get into, keep the illustration, keep getting the car accidents. You know, really bad things happen to us. Our health declines, we lose loved ones, we lose jobs Real things that happen to us and we think, jesus, I am not sure that you know the way. And it's really easy, like now sitting in this room after we've sung some nice songs and spent time with each other, to say, yeah, jesus is the way. But it's like out there on the road, 2 am, your car is broken down. It's really hard to believe that Jesus is the way. And the other time is really similar. We all inevitably, inevitably, will find a time when we just don't agree with what Jesus is saying. The way is right and we can see this.
Speaker 1:I don't care who you are, you know you might love 95% of the Bible. There's 5% that you don't, I promise, and I've been reading the Psalms recently. I mean I just keep coming to these places where it's like how beautiful, beautiful I don't know. You know it's like this is too hard for me. I'm not sure about this one, god, I don't think I like this thing that you're saying.
Speaker 1:And in both of those cases, what I just want to encourage us with is that trust piece Is believing when Jesus says he's the way. The route does sometimes involve going through the woods, the route does sometimes involve car wrecks, the route does need to be the specific one, but we can trust. We can trust that he's actually taking us to the right place. We can trust that, even despite all of these things, that he's taking us to the Father. And so I just want to encourage you this week, or however long it is. You inevitably hit these roadblocks, so to speak, like you inevitably find these places where you think I think it'd be much better if I turned here, to just keep going and, man, remember when Jesus says that he is the way, when Jesus says that he is the way, and remember when Jesus says that he is the truth and believe when he says that he is the life. So you praise me.