Sermon Audio
The Seventeenth Sunday After Trinity
One Way
John 13:31-14:31
“Follow thou me. I am the way and the truth and the life. Without the way, there is no going; without the truth there is no knowing; without the life there is no living. I am the way that thou must follow; the truth that thou must believe; the life for which thou must hope. I am the inviolable way, the infallible truth, the never-ending life . . .”
Thomas à Kempis wrote those lines in “The Imitation of Christ.”
And so we arrive at the scandalous claim of the Lord Jesus: “I am the only way to God.”
(Read text.)
We have before us the first half, more or less, of Jesus’ farewell discourse. Scholars tussle over which message the Lord was delivering. He is speaking directly to His disciples and so, some say, He was delivering a message of discipleship – how to live out the imitation of Christ.
Others insist that His message is one of evangelism and that He is equipping His disciples to carry His gospel both to the Jews of the diaspora and to all the nations after He departs and the Holy Spirit descends upon them. These are His ultimate audience.
Implicit in this gospel is that which every potential convert must hear, the call to honor the Father by imitating the Son. I favor this second view.
Jesus is telling the Jews – not only those in Jerusalem and Palestine but those scattered across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East – that He is the final piece in God’s revelation of Himself. If they believe what God has declared before through His prophets, they must believe in His Christ.
For the prophets told of His coming and in Him is the fulfillment of that promise, the supreme revelation of God, the incarnate Word.
Jesus is telling the gentiles that He is the way of salvation for all, regardless of nationality. Put away all other gods and worship the One the Father sent and, through Him and the Holy Spirit, the Father on high.
God’s covenant community, contained up to now in Israel, is about to explode and spill out over all the earth.
The key term in the verse is the word “way.” Jesus has promised His disciples a place in His Father’s house and told them He will precede them and prepare that place for them. They are understandably puzzled. What route should they take?
Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?”
Through all the ages, have not men yearned to see God? Moses said to Yahweh in the tabernacle, “Please, show me Your glory.”
Still, Jesus is troubled. His disciples have lived with Him for three years and they remain stuck in their mundane understanding. Because they have seen His Christ, they have seen God.
The Lord Himself is the way. You don’t need a map or a compass; you need faith. Believe in Him as the long-awaited Messiah and you have found the way to God.
Those who have that faith discover, on their way, the truth and the life that accompany it. In Christ are the truth of the Father, with whom He is inextricably associated, and eternal life.
The truth attached to the way is, of course, moral truth. In North Carolina last week, a former state senator who had crusaded for years for restrictive gun laws discovered two intruders in his home. He shot one of them. He refused to speak to reporters after the incident.
By way of contrast, Jesus didn’t simply tell the truth; He embodied it.
The life is that which the Christian begins living from the time he first believes. Even before he joins his Lord, it is life more abundant because it is filled with the certain hope of eternity in paradise.
And here is still another of the “I am” statements that bind the Son to the great “I am who I am” of Exodus 3. He has already told them, in John 10(:9), “I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will go in and out and find pasture.”
Writing long before recent theologians conjured an array of alternative “ways,” John Calvin saw them coming:
“So all theology, when separated from Christ, is not only empty and confused but also mad, deceitful, and spurious,” Calvin wrote, “for although philosophers sometimes come up with excellent sayings, they contain nothing but what is ephemeral, and are even mixed up with perverse errors.”
Calvin wasn’t terribly inclusive.
Theologians call this claim of exclusivity the “scandal of particularity.” God is not some remote and amorphous idea; He is particularized in the man Jesus Christ.
But, hold it right there, Preacher. Who are you to condemn all those Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims --- and, for that matter, crystal-gazers and atheists – to hell?
For our faith to have a logical consistency, Christ must be the only way to God. The cornerstone of this faith is the Incarnation, God become man.
The man Jesus is God incarnate, the eternal Word made flesh. And there is no other like Him. Any claim to the contrary is contradictory and inconsistent.
Another preacher made the point more colorfully than Calvin. Some years ago, well before I was ordained, Marjorie and I attended an inner-city church in Houston where an orator called Pastor Rufus D. Smith IV held forth.
To give you a taste of the flavor of his preaching, he was prone to saying, “Do I hear an amen? ‘Cause I’m a black preacher and to a black preacher ‘amen!’ is like ‘sic ‘em’ to a dog.”
Marjorie and I also worked for an international relief and development agency. In one of our programs, each summer we brought over English teachers from Central Asia for a month of intensive training to improve both their language and teaching skills.
We placed them in homes of people we knew. One of those was a good friend named Tom who was a member of our church. He brought his Central Asian teacher with him on a Sunday morning. Keep in mind that Central Asians are almost universally Muslims.
That was the Sunday Pastor Rufus D. Smith IV chose to preach on the scandal of particularity. I can summon his dulcet tones to this day: “Don’t put your trust in Buddha; he’s nothin’ but a statue. Don’t put your trust in Mohammad; his bones are rottin’ in the desert.”
I gulped . . . and fastened my gaze on the back of the head of the Muslim man seated with Tom a few rows in front of us. I was wondering if I was going to have to sprint to the front and defend our pastor, as had been necessary once before when a Ukrainian woman stormed the pulpit. But that’s another story.
The Muslim kept his cool. Peace prevailed.
Those who know Jesus as the way will love Him, and those who love Him will obey Him. This commandment to obey is a safeguard: The disciples, and their successors, are not to wallow in a weepy nostalgia about how great things were when the Lord was around.
They will continue under His orders as though He were still with them, and they will not be left to their own devices. The Holy Spirit will come to comfort and guide them as they live for Christ. God does not leave His own as orphans.
And on the other side of the cross, on the other side of Pentecost, indeed they did understand. In Acts 5(:30-31) we hear Peter telling the Jerusalem authorities:
"The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you murdered by hanging on a tree. Him God has exalted to His right hand to be Prince and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.”
And in his first epistle, John writes: “And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world” (2:1-2).
The linkage of love and obedience begins, of course, with our Lord, who provides us the model. His love for His Father is so great that He obeyed Him perfectly, even to the point of death upon the cross. Here is His warrant for demanding obedience of His disciples, both 2,000 years ago and today.
The standard may seem harsh. Nowhere does He command an effort of obedience or half-hearted obedience or that-good-ol’-college-try obedience. The demand is always absolute.
Yet as long as we wear this flesh we continue in sin. How can we imitate Christ in obeying perfectly?
We cannot . . . and He knows it. But He can never subscribe to anything less than perfection because in so doing He would compromise His holiness. If He approved just one tiny speck of a sin He would endorse what He hates, what He came to purge from the world.
The very rationale of the Incarnation is for the Son to scrub the creation of sin so He and His Father can restore their kingdom to earth, set up their thrones upon it and rule it forever. And when that great day comes, our triune God will look upon us – because of what Christ has done – as though we had never sinned.
So we live in the tension, our yearning to please our Lord tugging us in one direction and our sinful flesh jerking us in the other. I was talking to a young man in the county jail last week. He told me of his heartache.
He knows what God expects of him – and he does have an above-average familiarity with the Scriptures – and again and again he resolves to live in a way that honors his Lord. And again and again he falls back into the old, familiar sins.
He’s what they call in East Texas “backslid.”
I assured him that guilt is a tool of the devil. He uses it to make us believe we can’t be good enough . . . to obscure the truth that Jesus is the way to eternal life. Our own goodness cannot save us; faith in His loving grace can.
I directed the young man to the words of St. Paul, from Romans 7(:15-20):
“For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
“For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.”
If God could find it in His heart to forgive Paul – and I suspect He did – will he not forgive a middle-of-the-road, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety sinner in Durango? The young man, I regret to say, could take no solace from those words. I pray you can.
We must not leave this passage without noticing the counter-weight to the scandal of particularity. It is simply this: Christ’s universal love. He is not at all particular about whom He saves from the penalty of sin.
Any who asks will receive, regardless of gender, race, color or national origin, intelligence, wealth, influence, social status or education, religious background – or the absence of one – or moral history.
He is the living water and the tap is never shut. He is the bread of life and the cupboard is never bare.
Francis Schaeffer called love the “final apologetic.” Mount every argument for God you can muster; if you have not lived out His love in your incarnation, you will win no souls. Indeed, you will not deserve a hearing.
Mother Teresa prayed: “Dearest Lord, may I see you today and every day in the person of your sick, and, while nursing them, minister unto you. Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive disguises of the irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you and say, ‘Jesus, my patient, how sweet it is to serve you.’”
On the cross, Christ made every other definition of love obsolete. Nor has any arisen since to rival His.
Finally, Jesus’ rebuke of Peter – “the rooster shall not crow till you have denied Me three times” – takes us back a week to His identification of Judas as His betrayer. Both Peter and Judas had come to Him early on; both had walked with him and seen the signs He performed and listened to the word of truth He taught.
Both received His love.
But in the end, both failed Him utterly; both deserted Him in His hour of need. Rather than offering support and solace, both piled more hurt on all the hurt He already bore. How isolated He was on His way to the cross.
Both abdicated out in the open, before God and men, and the failure of both was recorded for posterity and is still examined today.
Yet one was lost and the other saved. Given the chance to repent, one recoiled . . . and fled . . . and died by his own hand . . . and fell into hell. One seized the chance to repent . . . and asked for mercy . . . and went to heaven.
Beloved, we have within us, you and I, the seeds of betrayal. Indeed, we have failed our Lord many times . . . and added to His pain. So it is that we approach His throne daily to plead for His mercy, sinking in the quicksand of our sin until, once more, He plucks us up in love and sets us gently down on solid rock.
His name be praised. Amen.
One Way
John 13:31-14:31
“Follow thou me. I am the way and the truth and the life. Without the way, there is no going; without the truth there is no knowing; without the life there is no living. I am the way that thou must follow; the truth that thou must believe; the life for which thou must hope. I am the inviolable way, the infallible truth, the never-ending life . . .”
Thomas à Kempis wrote those lines in “The Imitation of Christ.”
And so we arrive at the scandalous claim of the Lord Jesus: “I am the only way to God.”
(Read text.)
We have before us the first half, more or less, of Jesus’ farewell discourse. Scholars tussle over which message the Lord was delivering. He is speaking directly to His disciples and so, some say, He was delivering a message of discipleship – how to live out the imitation of Christ.
Others insist that His message is one of evangelism and that He is equipping His disciples to carry His gospel both to the Jews of the diaspora and to all the nations after He departs and the Holy Spirit descends upon them. These are His ultimate audience.
Implicit in this gospel is that which every potential convert must hear, the call to honor the Father by imitating the Son. I favor this second view.
Jesus is telling the Jews – not only those in Jerusalem and Palestine but those scattered across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East – that He is the final piece in God’s revelation of Himself. If they believe what God has declared before through His prophets, they must believe in His Christ.
For the prophets told of His coming and in Him is the fulfillment of that promise, the supreme revelation of God, the incarnate Word.
Jesus is telling the gentiles that He is the way of salvation for all, regardless of nationality. Put away all other gods and worship the One the Father sent and, through Him and the Holy Spirit, the Father on high.
God’s covenant community, contained up to now in Israel, is about to explode and spill out over all the earth.
The key term in the verse is the word “way.” Jesus has promised His disciples a place in His Father’s house and told them He will precede them and prepare that place for them. They are understandably puzzled. What route should they take?
Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?”
Through all the ages, have not men yearned to see God? Moses said to Yahweh in the tabernacle, “Please, show me Your glory.”
Still, Jesus is troubled. His disciples have lived with Him for three years and they remain stuck in their mundane understanding. Because they have seen His Christ, they have seen God.
The Lord Himself is the way. You don’t need a map or a compass; you need faith. Believe in Him as the long-awaited Messiah and you have found the way to God.
Those who have that faith discover, on their way, the truth and the life that accompany it. In Christ are the truth of the Father, with whom He is inextricably associated, and eternal life.
The truth attached to the way is, of course, moral truth. In North Carolina last week, a former state senator who had crusaded for years for restrictive gun laws discovered two intruders in his home. He shot one of them. He refused to speak to reporters after the incident.
By way of contrast, Jesus didn’t simply tell the truth; He embodied it.
The life is that which the Christian begins living from the time he first believes. Even before he joins his Lord, it is life more abundant because it is filled with the certain hope of eternity in paradise.
And here is still another of the “I am” statements that bind the Son to the great “I am who I am” of Exodus 3. He has already told them, in John 10(:9), “I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will go in and out and find pasture.”
Writing long before recent theologians conjured an array of alternative “ways,” John Calvin saw them coming:
“So all theology, when separated from Christ, is not only empty and confused but also mad, deceitful, and spurious,” Calvin wrote, “for although philosophers sometimes come up with excellent sayings, they contain nothing but what is ephemeral, and are even mixed up with perverse errors.”
Calvin wasn’t terribly inclusive.
Theologians call this claim of exclusivity the “scandal of particularity.” God is not some remote and amorphous idea; He is particularized in the man Jesus Christ.
But, hold it right there, Preacher. Who are you to condemn all those Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims --- and, for that matter, crystal-gazers and atheists – to hell?
For our faith to have a logical consistency, Christ must be the only way to God. The cornerstone of this faith is the Incarnation, God become man.
The man Jesus is God incarnate, the eternal Word made flesh. And there is no other like Him. Any claim to the contrary is contradictory and inconsistent.
Another preacher made the point more colorfully than Calvin. Some years ago, well before I was ordained, Marjorie and I attended an inner-city church in Houston where an orator called Pastor Rufus D. Smith IV held forth.
To give you a taste of the flavor of his preaching, he was prone to saying, “Do I hear an amen? ‘Cause I’m a black preacher and to a black preacher ‘amen!’ is like ‘sic ‘em’ to a dog.”
Marjorie and I also worked for an international relief and development agency. In one of our programs, each summer we brought over English teachers from Central Asia for a month of intensive training to improve both their language and teaching skills.
We placed them in homes of people we knew. One of those was a good friend named Tom who was a member of our church. He brought his Central Asian teacher with him on a Sunday morning. Keep in mind that Central Asians are almost universally Muslims.
That was the Sunday Pastor Rufus D. Smith IV chose to preach on the scandal of particularity. I can summon his dulcet tones to this day: “Don’t put your trust in Buddha; he’s nothin’ but a statue. Don’t put your trust in Mohammad; his bones are rottin’ in the desert.”
I gulped . . . and fastened my gaze on the back of the head of the Muslim man seated with Tom a few rows in front of us. I was wondering if I was going to have to sprint to the front and defend our pastor, as had been necessary once before when a Ukrainian woman stormed the pulpit. But that’s another story.
The Muslim kept his cool. Peace prevailed.
Those who know Jesus as the way will love Him, and those who love Him will obey Him. This commandment to obey is a safeguard: The disciples, and their successors, are not to wallow in a weepy nostalgia about how great things were when the Lord was around.
They will continue under His orders as though He were still with them, and they will not be left to their own devices. The Holy Spirit will come to comfort and guide them as they live for Christ. God does not leave His own as orphans.
And on the other side of the cross, on the other side of Pentecost, indeed they did understand. In Acts 5(:30-31) we hear Peter telling the Jerusalem authorities:
"The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you murdered by hanging on a tree. Him God has exalted to His right hand to be Prince and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.”
And in his first epistle, John writes: “And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world” (2:1-2).
The linkage of love and obedience begins, of course, with our Lord, who provides us the model. His love for His Father is so great that He obeyed Him perfectly, even to the point of death upon the cross. Here is His warrant for demanding obedience of His disciples, both 2,000 years ago and today.
The standard may seem harsh. Nowhere does He command an effort of obedience or half-hearted obedience or that-good-ol’-college-try obedience. The demand is always absolute.
Yet as long as we wear this flesh we continue in sin. How can we imitate Christ in obeying perfectly?
We cannot . . . and He knows it. But He can never subscribe to anything less than perfection because in so doing He would compromise His holiness. If He approved just one tiny speck of a sin He would endorse what He hates, what He came to purge from the world.
The very rationale of the Incarnation is for the Son to scrub the creation of sin so He and His Father can restore their kingdom to earth, set up their thrones upon it and rule it forever. And when that great day comes, our triune God will look upon us – because of what Christ has done – as though we had never sinned.
So we live in the tension, our yearning to please our Lord tugging us in one direction and our sinful flesh jerking us in the other. I was talking to a young man in the county jail last week. He told me of his heartache.
He knows what God expects of him – and he does have an above-average familiarity with the Scriptures – and again and again he resolves to live in a way that honors his Lord. And again and again he falls back into the old, familiar sins.
He’s what they call in East Texas “backslid.”
I assured him that guilt is a tool of the devil. He uses it to make us believe we can’t be good enough . . . to obscure the truth that Jesus is the way to eternal life. Our own goodness cannot save us; faith in His loving grace can.
I directed the young man to the words of St. Paul, from Romans 7(:15-20):
“For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
“For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.”
If God could find it in His heart to forgive Paul – and I suspect He did – will he not forgive a middle-of-the-road, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety sinner in Durango? The young man, I regret to say, could take no solace from those words. I pray you can.
We must not leave this passage without noticing the counter-weight to the scandal of particularity. It is simply this: Christ’s universal love. He is not at all particular about whom He saves from the penalty of sin.
Any who asks will receive, regardless of gender, race, color or national origin, intelligence, wealth, influence, social status or education, religious background – or the absence of one – or moral history.
He is the living water and the tap is never shut. He is the bread of life and the cupboard is never bare.
Francis Schaeffer called love the “final apologetic.” Mount every argument for God you can muster; if you have not lived out His love in your incarnation, you will win no souls. Indeed, you will not deserve a hearing.
Mother Teresa prayed: “Dearest Lord, may I see you today and every day in the person of your sick, and, while nursing them, minister unto you. Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive disguises of the irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you and say, ‘Jesus, my patient, how sweet it is to serve you.’”
On the cross, Christ made every other definition of love obsolete. Nor has any arisen since to rival His.
Finally, Jesus’ rebuke of Peter – “the rooster shall not crow till you have denied Me three times” – takes us back a week to His identification of Judas as His betrayer. Both Peter and Judas had come to Him early on; both had walked with him and seen the signs He performed and listened to the word of truth He taught.
Both received His love.
But in the end, both failed Him utterly; both deserted Him in His hour of need. Rather than offering support and solace, both piled more hurt on all the hurt He already bore. How isolated He was on His way to the cross.
Both abdicated out in the open, before God and men, and the failure of both was recorded for posterity and is still examined today.
Yet one was lost and the other saved. Given the chance to repent, one recoiled . . . and fled . . . and died by his own hand . . . and fell into hell. One seized the chance to repent . . . and asked for mercy . . . and went to heaven.
Beloved, we have within us, you and I, the seeds of betrayal. Indeed, we have failed our Lord many times . . . and added to His pain. So it is that we approach His throne daily to plead for His mercy, sinking in the quicksand of our sin until, once more, He plucks us up in love and sets us gently down on solid rock.
His name be praised. Amen.