MONDAY 17th
John 14:1-7
NIV (v6) – ‘Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’
ESV (v6) – ‘Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’
We come to the last but one of the ‘I am’ statements of Jesus in these first few verses in this fourteenth chapter. Jesus says four things about himself:
I am the way
I am the truth
I am the life
No one can come to the Father except through me
You may remember in a previous devotion I talked about the uniqueness of the Lord Jesus Christ and of the gospel message which we proclaim. The uniqueness of Jesus and the gospel message is not something the Christian faith has mustered up to try to proclaim and propagate its message, it is something which has come from the mouth of the Lord Jesus himself. He himself made the declaration that he is the only way to the Father, therefore the only way to heaven. When Peter and the disciples declared in Acts 4:12 that there is no other name given under heaven by which we can be saved, they were not making up some new idea, or some fanciful plan or scheme they were declaring the truth of the message which Jesus himself declared.
Earlier in John’s gospel we are reminded of the uniqueness of Jesus in that we are reminded that 1) God loved the world 2) That he sent his Son into the world 3) So that WHOEVER believes IN HIM will not perish but will have eternal life (3:16)
This ‘I am’ statement in John 14:6, sums up everything about what this gospel is all about. It is about pointing men and women to the one who is the only source of eternal life, the only means of eternal life and the only giver of eternal life. All other ‘faiths’, ‘religions’, ‘isms’, are dead ends, there is only one door, only one Saviour, only one way and it is through the Lord Jesus Christ, the only one who has loved us and given himself for us. (1 John 4:10)
This statement in v6 came out of the inquisitiveness of Thomas who wanted to know where Jesus was going and how we can know the way to where he is going (v5)
The world has always been searching for answers, for the meaning of life, about the afterlife etc. The answers to all the questions can be found in the Lord Jesus Christ, for in knowing him we find real purpose and we have real hope.
May we continually rejoice in the hope that we have as we have come to know the one who is the way, and the truth and the life, and may we continue to pray that many more will come to find him and know him, and may we individually be used in some way to point others to the one who is the way, the truth and the life.