Before I begin, I'd like to just talk a little bit about the peculiar circumstance which leads me to this location, three times in a row. And some of it was discussions we had back in the fall when Pastor Holdeman was in denial about Adam leaving. You know, the rest of us were sort of thinking about, okay, so when this happens, we should do something about it. And it actually turns out that the Lord's blessed us a lot. There are many very capable people in this presbytery, and we've got a very rich presbytery in terms of pastoral help. It's been really good, but one of the things that we wanted to have was some continuity, so it's not just like, oh, I wonder what's today, you know? You open the cabinet and the Cheerios falls out or whatnot. I mean, you want there to be some sort of sequence to it. So I thought, you know, maybe the Lord was leading me to try to do, instead of just one, which sermon B, elders should have ready to go in case, you know, like Adam's van gets hit on the way home from the morning service or something, which did happen last year, to do a multiple series. One of the things that this does is it really increases our appreciation for what pastors do in trying to do more than one. It's relatively easy to do one message, but to do a sequence is actually very difficult. But the Lord had something that he kept bugging me about last fall, and so I'd like to share it with you now. Let me quickly tell you a little bit about the circumstance before we turn to God's Word. I went down to Covenant College to give a workshop because there's a colleague down there who was a student here at Indiana University. I didn't know she was a Christian when she was here. She didn't know I was a Christian when I was here. Really? Seriously, right? It's like ridiculous. And so we've gotten to know each other in a pretty good friendship. And so I went down to give a workshop to sort of help her out with the program down there. And she gives me an introduction, right? So you've got this person coming in from outside and you get this professional introduction and they tell you about, you know, all of the professional-y kinds of things. And you sort of go like, yeah, yeah, that's me. Yeah, yeah, that's me. And then she says, oh, but there's one other thing which I was surprised to find out about him. I'm thinking, yeah, she's going to say I'm a Presbyterian. Because Covenant is Presbyterian College. Or she'll say, I'm a Calvinist, or something like that. But you've got to understand, she's this tall. She's from Texas. And she turns around and she says, and you know what I think about Professor DeYoung? He loves Jesus. And I'm a Dutch guy. And that's kind of explicit. We're very reticent types of people. So I kind of sat there, and I've been introduced in many different ways over the years in many different contexts, but that one just really caught me by surprise. And I've been thinking about that since then. Why? That is the stupidest reaction that I had, right? That I would just be taken aback by that. But it's true. It is true. And why not? And so I've been kind of convicted by that a little bit. And I want to say what my goal with these three sermons in the next few weeks is that we all learn how to love Jesus. And one of the things that I think we're going to find along the way is, number one, there's a lot of good reasons, too. And we're also going to find along the way There's a lot of ways that you need to love him. And there's many, many different aspects to this picture, which I want to just bring before you and have you think about that. To do this, come with me to the Gospel of John. And it's going to be page 1241, which is John 13, verse 31 and following. That's going to be sort of the theme verse for this week and the next few weeks. Let me just read it. But before I do so, let me briefly pray. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for your son, Jesus Christ. He is our Lord, he is our Savior, and he is worthy. So Lord, we pray that you would bless us that we would be able to see him. through this wonderful gift of your word. Send your spirit, O Lord, that this would be the case. In Jesus' name we pray for his sake. Give him glory and honor. John 13, verse 31. So when he had gone out, he refers to Judas. Jesus said, now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify in himself and glorify him immediately. Little children, I shall be with you a little while longer. You will seek me, as I said to the Jews. Where I am going, you cannot come. So now I say to you, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you, that you may also love one another. By this, all will know that you're my disciples if you have love for one another. Simon Peter said to him, Lord, where are you going? And Jesus answered him, where I'm going, you cannot follow me now, but you shall follow me afterward. Peter said to him, Lord, why can't I follow you now? I will lay down my life for your sake. Jesus answered him. Will you lay down your life for me? For my sake, most assuredly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow until you've denied me three times. Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions. If it weren't so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, there you might be also. Where I go, you know, and the way, you know." And Thomas said to him, Lord, we don't know where you're going, so how can we know the way? And Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. And our theme verse is that last one, verse 6. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Thus ends the reading of God's word. John's writings, which I've found to be actually very difficult to understand. If you think, Peter once said of Paul's writings that they're difficult. and people get them wrong. Well, I actually think that the writings of John are more difficult. I don't know if you agree with me on this. If you ever read through the letters, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, it all looks deceptively simple until you try to make sense of all of it. And you realize it's extraordinary complicated. And if you read through his gospel, understanding what's going on in the teachings that are there, The main points are very simple, but boy, if you start really trying to figure out what John is saying and how he's saying it, it is extraordinarily difficult. The Gospel of John is wonderful for bumper stickers, but when you actually try to understand how all the bumper stickers fit together, it is actually very, very difficult. So bear with me as I try to exposit a little bit of what's on here. One of the things that you're going to see if you read through the Gospel of John, and if you stick with me for the next three weeks or so, is that he takes certain themes that will recur over and over and over again. And so he'll introduce them someplace and just talk about them, and then suddenly they'll resurface in a new place. So you think you know where he's going, and all of a sudden this theme will pop up from somewhere before. It feels a little bit like a wicker basket, right, where all of a sudden the thing dives down underneath and it kind of floats around, and then suddenly that little blue color or whatever pops up again later. And it's a very, very complex tapestry that John weaves with this. And as Danny Proutos says, how many points is a sermon supposed to have? One. I grew up where the sermons were supposed to have three points. So the only way I can reconcile that is with three sermons. And you can guess, you don't have to guess or try to figure out what the three are going to be from this passage. The way, the truth, and the life. The easiest one is the way. So I'm starting there, and that's where Jesus started as well. The second thing that you'll find when you look through the Gospel of John, the Gospel in particular, is John gives a lot of the teaching of Jesus in great detail. He gives large expositions that Jesus produced. That's where you find the largest of all of the Gospels. And one of the things you're also going to find in the Gospel of John is that he has Jesus interacting with people right in the middle of these teaching sessions. And those interactions tell us a lot about what Jesus is talking about. In fact, I find that those interactions are where the truth of Jesus' sermons comes down and lands in the lives of the individuals that are there. John is a master at pointing out how Jesus' teaching is interacting with the people that Jesus was teaching too. And I hope that you'll see that today. Part one then is that we're going to take is Jesus is the way. This is actually not a very large theme in the Gospel of John. If you try to pursue it, you'll not find it. The other ones, the truth and the life, I encourage you to take the next two weeks to start pulling those passages out of the Gospel of John. But this is not a big thing that he has in there. But the general picture, the general metaphor that John is tapping into is this idea of a journey, right? A way. The way is like a path, a road, a highway. And what does that remind me of? Well, this is not foreign to us as Christians living today. In fact, what's the VBS theme coming up? Pilgrim's Progress. What is Pilgrim's Progress about? It's about a journey, right? This is a metaphor that is very deeply embedded in the Christian consciousness, the idea that life is a journey, and it starts from the city of destruction and goes to the celestial city, interacting with many different things along the way. But it's not just in isolated forms like this. This metaphor is everywhere around us, this idea that life is sometimes to be thought of as journey. John Wayne, even in the old movies, used to call people pilgrims, right? I mean, what's he talking about? They're not, you know, on the Mayflower, right? This idea that everyone's a pilgrim and we're all headed somewhere. People nowadays, I've heard people call us fellow travelers, so those are people in the same party, I guess. Fellow travelers, what does that mean? We're all traveling somewhere. The journey is the most important part. Make sure you stop and smell the roses. What's the metaphor? Stop and smell the roses in front of your house? No, they're the ones beside the road as you're traveling. Even songs from the movie Cars. All right, Cars. What, have we got a movie about cars? What are cars for? Traveling. Life is a highway. Sorry. Yeah, life is a highway. I'm going to ride on it all night long. Right? I mean, this is very deeply, deeply embedded in what we're thinking. However, the question that we also have to think about is, is this really a biblical idea, this idea that life is a journey? And if it is, how is it biblical? Right? And I think if you start pondering this just a little bit, Before we even get to Jesus' teaching and what he's assuming in this passage, you realize a lot of the stuff that we think about when you say life is a journey is just not particularly biblical. But there is a lot in scripture about journeys, this passage being one of them. Jesus is about ready to head off on a journey, and so are you as a Christian. And if you go back, there is much biblical material behind that. I give them the notes on the passage on the back of the handout, if you have that. We are introduced to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12. And Genesis chapter 12, verse one, now the Lord said to Abram, get out of your country from your family, from your father's house to land that I will show you. And so we follow that chunk of the Bible is just following Abraham through this journey that goes to the land of Canaan to Egypt, back to the land of Canaan, back forth, back and forth. It's constantly on the move. Later on, right? If you go on to the book of Exodus, There's a very large journey that essentially forms the bulk of the Pentateuch as the Israelites move out of Egypt and they all are now traveling together. And life is a very, very large and long journey there. It's an image that's just filled with all kinds of things. As they move through the desert, they move together. They don't all just kind of wander like a bunch of cats being herded, right, like the video. They wander in some form with the pillar guiding them. And in the middle of the community is a tent. And that tent is where God lives, right? And it's an image of the church. as it travels through life. Later on, as we get into the prophetic period, there's an important sort of verse, and that is Isaiah 40, which is at a crucial point in the prophecy of Isaiah. I give you that as well. This one, if you guys have been listening to the Messiah recently, with my daughter, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. I mean, what is a highway for? Right? It's related to the journey again that you're building, a highway. And so there's a lot in scripture. How about the New Testament? Is there stuff in the New Testament? Well, if you just look in the back of your Bibles, you get a map, right? And in the Old Testament part of the maps, you know, all the maps have little round countries that are all painted different colors, pink and orange and so on. But in the New Testament, what do you get? Paul's journeys with the little arrows and you're following it through the book of Acts. You're following him on journeys as well. And so there's a lot in the scripture that is behind this when Jesus talks about moving from place to place. But there's a couple of things I think we have to remove off the table right away before we understand what Jesus is talking about. Though this general image of life as a journey is certainly biblical, one of the things you'll notice is that journey is typically not a good thing. The fact that the Israelites were in the desert for 40 years on a trip was not great. This was not a vacation where you get to pull your trailer behind you. This was punishment. This is called wandering. There really is no such thing as biblical wanderlust. Right? We like traveling as much as anyone. Right? In fact, I think it was the Moors that were quoted. Joe was quoted as saying that we move more than a moving company. We're traveling more than a moving company. Since they got Charlie down in Birmingham, I'm with you, brother. Right? You do a lot of traveling. We do a lot of traveling, and that's because we have people that we care for in a lot of different places. As much as I love traveling, you've got to understand that the biblical concept of traveling is really about getting there. As much as I hate that way of traveling, I like the rest areas, but it really is about getting there. And it's not a great thing to be drifting and wandering all the time. And the other thing to understand that we have to remove is this concept of highway and mechanized transportation. I think in order to understand this biblical image, you've got to get that out of your mind. One of the great things about cars is this idea that you can just sit in there and like every basketball game you've ever watched has 8-9 commercials with people whistling through the desert with their wind in their hair. But that's not the kind of stuff that's in the biblical picture. This idea of cruise control Christianity, as we were talking about it in the Sunday school over here a few weeks back, I mean, there's no such thing as cruise control Christianity in the Old Testament because there's no such thing as cruise control, because there's no such thing as a car to put on cruise control. That is completely foreign. But that error of thinking that there is such a thing, is very prevalent. In fact, the Catholic Church is very popular in certain circumstances to talk about the church as a ship. Kind of like Noah's Ark and the idea is, you know, everybody's on board and the clergy is the crew and the rest of us are the passengers in this ship. And what do you do in the ship? The ship gets you from point A to point B and you just kind of sit there. And that's not That's not the kind of traveling that we were talking about here. We're not talking about anything that will happen without you doing it, right? And that's why, I think, as a piece with Isaiah 40, verse 3, at the beginning of the chapter, a voice of one preparing the way for the Lord makes straight in the desert a highway for our God. At the end of that chapter is a famous verse, Isaiah 40, verse 31, about those that wait. And those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. More recently, as the passage from the scene in Chariots of Fire, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint. And you understand that this is the journey, right? This is not guys running around and around in a circle on a cinder track to see who can do it the fastest, right? This is the journey of getting from point A to point B. This is talking about life, and it's talking about life in the concept of a metaphor, not of a highway that's made out of tarmac and a car with wheels, but it's a little path that wanders its way either torturously up and down, or, if the Lord prepares the way, not so torturously up and down, but one on which you have to walk. You have to walk and there is no cruise control. Now let's turn to the passage that's before us. So Jesus says that he is the way. And there's a couple of points that he makes about this concept of the journey. And let's talk real briefly about those. And I want to get to the meat of what Jesus is doing in this passage. In verses 31 to 35, the immediate context is Judas' betrayal. We're stepping in the middle of the story here. So Judas walks out the door. And immediately, then, Jesus talks about this. situation, right? And the betrayer walks out the door and Jesus says, now the Son of Man is going to be glorified. And now it's going to happen. It's going to be glorious. And you're just thinking, if you're the disciples, you're just puzzled, right? This is like, what is he talking about? You're not even sure what's going on with betrayal. You're not sure who he's talking about. You think it might be yourself. And Jesus is saying, now the Son of Man is going to be glorified. And then immediately the first thing that he focuses on is, I'm heading out the door and I won't be here. And he says, a new command I give you, a new command that I give you, that you love one another. Now, your immediate reaction when you read to that, it's sort of like when mom heads off to the store, right, and leaves the kids at home. So I'm not going to be here, and you leave a bunch of instructions behind that you don't beat up on your brother or you listen to your sister or whatnot, right? I mean, that's your immediate reaction to this. But that's not, that does not do justice to what Jesus is doing at this juncture, right? He says, I am leaving and I'm giving a command. And one of the things that's in the background of this, if you think in terms of the journey, is in the Old Testament, they went out into the desert. The Israelites passed through the Red Sea. They head out into the desert. And where do they go? They go to Sinai, where God gives them the law. And here it is, Jesus giving them the law. And note, what it tells you about this idea of traveling is that this idea of traveling, the journey, is moral. It's primarily about your decisions. This is where it's helpful to get the idea of the car out of your mind. Because the car, you can just set it, and it does it. But when you're walking through life, You not only have to worry about the crossroads when trying to decide how to get there. Google will do that pretty soon for you. You not only have to decide where to make the turns, where to go left, where to go right. You actually have to make the decision to keep going. Every step of the journey is a decision. You can either keep going, Or you can turn that way. Or you can turn that way. Or like the Israelites, you can turn around and go back. But you're always, always moving deeper into the moral results of your decisions. Life is a journey, but it's not the happy day express. You guys know this? Nobody knows this? Happy Day Express? I'm glad, actually. This is something that was deeply embedded in my mind as a child. It must have been some VBS thing for a little while. The Happy Day Express was a train ride, and Jesus was printed on the engine. And what you wanted to do was, like, get on the train, and you ride the train, and you eventually get to heaven. And Jesus is the locomotive, and you're riding in the train, which is, deeply dumb. But that's not really very biblical. And so you see, if you see the journey is involving walking and stepping day after day after day after day, now you understand why Jesus is giving them a new command. Right? Because Jesus' journey from this point through the cross involved decisions, decisions, and decisions. You know, the gospel writers emphasize this point in many different ways, that Jesus did not have his life taken from him. He was executed, but he did not have his life taken from him. He gave it. Right? Every step. He could have turned. But he didn't. That's a profound challenge, I think, for us as Christians, because I think we all want to get unhappy to express. Right? I don't like the idea of walking. I am not a cross-country runner. I think, I don't understand why you do that. Stairmasters, they look like, you know, an image out of Dante. That's my take on this. But I think morally, I think that's true of all of us. We all would like to set everything on cruise control and not be challenged and not face difficult decisions. But that's not what Jesus is talking about here. Second point, I think that comes out of this passage just a little bit later. And this is in verses 1 through 3 of chapter 14. And the point here is that the notion of a journey is to get to the end. And the end is really the important part of the journey. As much as I like traveling, the crucial thing is where are you going? You see that the decisions you make, it raises the question, which road do you follow? If you look back in the Old Testament, there is a very pointed answer to this. Abraham was headed to the promised land. He kind of knew where it was, but it wasn't his. So he had the interesting dilemma of following a journey when he wasn't going to get there. Book of Exodus, they're all traveling to the Promised Land, and when they got there, they didn't dare to move in. But you see, the point is the end. The question is, where are you going? In the prophecy of Isaiah, where's the highway going? Well, the highway is going to Jerusalem, or to Zion. And based on the passage we looked at this morning, Daniel In the period of Daniel, you're heading back. That's where you're headed. There is the goal. Where is the road leading? Contrary to modern sensibility, roads do not lead to the same place. We all know this, right? I'm preaching to the choir here on that one. Matthew 7, verse 13, Jesus says, enter by the narrow gate. Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to, not Bloomington, but destruction. There are many who go that way. Now, where does this idea come from, by the way? Where does this daft notion that all roads lead to the same place come from? It's an article of faith that's propagated by our culture. It's not an obvious fact when you look at people's life paths that they all go to the same place. In fact, it's ridiculous to think that. And yet that's almost an article of uncontrovertible faith to many of my neighbors. All roads lead to the same, no, all roads do not lead to the same place. And we all know that. And so this passage highlights also the direction. Where is this headed? Where is Jesus going on this journey? Well, he's going, and he's going to bring his disciples to a place in which there are many mansions, in my translation. Let's dispel a little bit of something here. That's a very funny translation. The notion of mansion in the 1600s is not the same as it is now, right? It's not something that would be an Iron Gate subdivision. A mansion is basically just a structure, right, back in the time when the King James Version was translated. It's just a construction. You know, a mason put it together, basically. And so other translations say many rooms. Well, many rooms kind of gets at the idea, too, right? This is like going to church camp. where you just get one room and a dorm, right? So it's one building with lots and lots of rooms, except it's not really one building. But if you think, the way that they would live in families is you would have a house and then you'd add on to it and you'd add on to it and you'd add on. It's like the old farmhouses. And eventually maybe you'd build one next door and then there's like John and Christy Holderman where you got two houses next to each. This is the idea that you have basically an extended family. This is what Jesus is talking about. Many rooms, that means there's a room for you. Jonathan just came home and he's still got a room. I'm not sure how long I can defend it from Abby, but it's still there. There's still a room. This is the picture. And there's lots and lots of rooms for you all, right? That's the picture. But Jesus is even more pointed about this, right? And that he defines it, if you look at the end of the passage, when he's interacting with Thomas, he defines it specifically not about the mansion or getting your own spread or place to live and streets of gold and all of that stuff. He defines it as going to the Father, the journey, is going to the father. The best part about being with family is being with family, not about the environment, right? And you see, that's another thing that is highlighted here is that the journey is relational. It's not about where you're going, but who you're going to. Right? You see how profound that really is. I think many of us are extraordinarily absorbed, like me, extraordinarily absorbed with ourselves. And I don't think we define our lives that way. I don't think we see that. This again is why, what is the new command? The new command is that you love The road? No. Love? No. The mansion? No. The boat? No. The job? No. You love one another. And the life is a journey in which you become in closer relationship with the Father and with each other. That's the journey he's talking about. It's a wonderful piece of teaching, and I think that you can see how powerful this is, right? The ethic that's involved with this. And you can ask yourself the question very fruitfully, right? Number one, do you see life as a moral thing, where you make decisions every day, every moment? And do you evaluate things in terms of relationships, especially with God, but also each other. Do you do that? Wonderful piece of teaching. And then John messes it up by inserting people. So we go back to our story and look at what happens. Two people are inserted just to sort of play their role. They give their little cameo and then they move off stage. Actually, there's a third one, which is Philip, but it can't do everything. So there's only two that we're going to talk about here. The first one of these, each of these people illustrates an issue that we have in the light of this sort of teaching. The first one is Peter. And so Peter, Jesus tells him, love one another. Peter answers, Lord, where are you going? You ever have a conversation like this? This is called not being on the same page, right? Love one another. Look, where are you going? And Jesus answers, you're not coming along. I've got little kids like them. I'll get in the car and go with you. No, you're not coming along. Later, you're coming along. But now, no, you're not coming along. Peter. But why? I want to go with you. Okay, I'm being a little bit flippant here, but you see how dysfunctional this conversation is. This is ridiculous, right? It's just completely ridiculous. And if you look at the interchange, there's obvious points that we can draw from the interchange, right? You see what Jesus is saying. Jesus says, you can't follow me now. You will follow me later. That's very ominous, right? If you're Peter, you know what he's talking about. He's talking about the fact that Peter did not die a, quote, natural death. He was encouraged into the other life by being convicted and killed like Jesus. I mean, that's the most obvious thing. And it's interesting, he didn't say, yeah, you can come with me, just wait a little bit, right? He just says, nope, you can't come. Later, you're going to come, but you can't come. You can't come. And the main point to miss and to not miss here is not so much that Peter was martyred later, but that Peter was incapable of following Jesus at this juncture. And Jesus said, you can't come on this journey. He just was meaning, you can't come. You're not traveling with me. And so the main problem with this whole teaching is you can't do it. Peter couldn't do it. And Jesus said, You're going to deny me three times, and you know the way the story worked out. Guess what? One, two, three, bing, bang, boom. He just fell right on his face. And then you have the interchange with Thomas, which is equally troubling, right? Jesus immediately says, this is in 14 verse 4, where I go, you know, and the way you know, right? Where I'm going and how I'm getting there, you know all about this." And what's Thomas' response? Uh, no I don't. No, I don't know. I don't know. What are you talking about? So Jesus responds with the theme passage, right? I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father. except through me. And what's with Thomas? Just think a little bit about what he's saying here, right? He's saying, Jesus says, come follow me. This is the way it's going to work. And Thomas says, no, I'm too stupid. I can't do that. Right? A very interesting contrast. On one hand, you have Peter. And Peter's, you know, I'm going to go do it. I'm going to follow you. Yeah, that's it. And Thomas says, I'm going to plead ignorance. I would have done it, but, you know, I'm kind of dumb. I can't do that. No, no, we don't know. We don't know anything. I'm an agnostic. I don't get it. This is too confusing for me. In fact, I'm smarter than the rest of you because I'm more confused than you. Right? You recognize the move here. Right? Say, what happened in the living room there? What? Something happened in the living room? Right? This is called pleading ignorance. In the face of Jesus telling him, you know the way, and he's going, nope, I don't know. I don't know it. And you see what this is. This is deliberate ignorance. And it's another barrier to being able to grasp his teaching. Because on one hand, Like if you're Peter, which you are, you can't do it. And if you're like Thomas, which you are, you don't even get to the job of failing. It's not that you fail, you don't even achieve failure. I don't know. And let's not get too hard on him, right, because if we go back to what we're talking about, which is your decisions in life, you can understand, right, why he's actually being honest here. He doesn't know what to do. And so if life is a journey where you're moving deeper into relational decisions, You are lame and blind. You can't travel and you don't know where to go. This was after Jesus, by the way, had been working with these guys for how long? It's not for lack of means. It's because they are us. They're people. And so what is Jesus' response? Verse 6, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Couple things you got to grasp about this. This is an extraordinarily radical statement. It's one of the reasons why We're gonna spend three weeks looking at it the radicalness of what Jesus is saying in this passage We've kind of domesticated it because we've heard it so much But it's very it's radical the first point not to miss and this is sort of obvious is that Jesus is claiming to be God OK, you can't miss that. And I'll give you a couple of passages on your outline. This is a different one of the I Am's. There's seven of them, right? And this is a different one. But in Psalm 23, verse 1, the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. John 10, verse 11, earlier in this book, I am the good shepherd. Okay, you guys can do the math, right? You do the algebra. I equals the Lord. And that's the way it works. When you look at these passages, how people interact with Jesus when he makes claims like this, they understand what he is saying. He is saying that he is God. And this is another passage. I am the way. And more specifically, he's saying that he is the way. Let's think about this a little bit. This is not the way most cultural Christians think. We knew somebody back in Ohio days who grew up in the Methodist church and he was into liberal politics and stuff like that. He had been bathed in the gospel since he was tiny and we had a discussion with him and he said, you know what, I never understood, what's all this stuff about Jesus? Like, what's the big deal about him? He said this, right? He grew up in the Methodist church and he didn't understand what the big deal about him was. Well, it's because he thought of it like this, Jesus, points out the way. He's a great teacher, right? Or maybe Jesus illustrates the way. He lives out the way like a drama, so you can get it, right? You see the story of Jesus' passion, and then you do that too. This is pretty good, but there's a lot of other people like that. There's Buddha and all those. Or maybe even, you might like this one, Jesus leads the way. Right? That's looking a little more promising, right? Here we are, the troops, Christian soldiers, marching. Jesus at the front. We're following him down the way. Is that what it's saying? No. No. It's saying he is the way. I hesitated to do this, but there is an example, I think, to make sure you understand the point here. And it actually comes from despair.com. Looks like you guys don't know this. That makes me happy, actually. So despair.com was a real popular website. When people were putting up inspirational pictures, you know, eagles soaring and leadership and things like that, despair.com would do the same thing. They're artistically exactly the same until you actually read them. And they would talk about things like goals, a picture of a kid scoring a goal. The sub-caption says, never get in the way of some over-competitive guy and his goals. Stuff like that, where there's a little kid getting run over, so instead of focusing on the guy scoring the goal, you're looking at the kid with the footprints all over him. That's the kind of stuff that they do. Well, there was one that they did, which a lot of it is just sort of cynical and goofy, but probably right. A guy kayaking over a waterfall. Not a good plan. They had one which was interesting, and it said bridge, bridges. Bridges. Because this is like corporate speak now, being the bridge, connecting people, right? And the subcaption says, be a bridge, that way everybody can walk over you. Right? That's the thrust of it. But that's what Jesus is saying here. Right? He's not somebody walking down the path. He is the path. I'm trying to think about, okay, kids draw pictures. I don't know how to draw this picture. But this is what he's saying. Jesus is the path. Right? If you think back to the Old Testament, what does this mean? So Moses goes through the Red Sea. Where's Jesus in that? He's the path through the Red Sea. He's not Moses. Or even more, the prophecy of Isaiah. You know, John is saying, prepare a way for the Lord. Jesus is saying, You guys, you think you're making a road for me? No, actually, God is the one preparing the way, and I'm it. John the Baptist took Isaiah's prophecy and was announcing the way of the Lord, that highway that leads to Jerusalem. And it's Jesus. I can't grasp that. But one thing for sure I understand is that if you're Peter, which you are, if you're Peter, you can't do it. Jesus can't. He does it for you. Right. Second, Peter one versus two and three. Peter wrote this a few years later. Ah, boy, you start reading through Peter's letters, you see this. Now here's one place where it comes up. This is toward the beginning of the second letter. He starts off, Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of our Lord Jesus, our Lord, as His divine power has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness through knowledge of Him who called us by His glory and virtue. You see what this passage is saying, what Peter's saying, he's bearing witness to the idea that he doesn't have the power to do any of this stuff, life and godliness. It's Jesus our Lord whose divine power has given us this. It's him, in a sense, that's doing it. As you make decisions and you march on through life, He is working His will in you. You see that? And if you're Thomas, and you are, He is the way for those who have no idea where they're going. You see the power of it, right? Thomas is saying, I have no clue. And Jesus is saying, you know me. You have a clue. It's Jesus. And so application. If you're one of those guys that's out there trying to do it. Stop trying to do it by yourself. Grab a hold of Jesus instead. And if you're just confused and trying to avoid doing it, look at Jesus and grab a hold of Him. Grant his spirit in our lives to give us the power to do the right thing. Because he's doing it. And the knowledge to know where to go. Because he's traveling with us. Let's close in prayer. Our Father in heaven, thank you for your Son, who is the way to you, in whom we travel, in whom we understand and know you. Lord, we thank you so much for how you've been faithful to us to this moment in bringing us along as your people and in directing our footsteps up to this point, giving our minds a vision of your Father and the path. Lord, we pray you would just incorporate us and keep us as your body, as you are the way. May you be glorified and honored in everything that we do. Lord, may you remove falsehood and foolishness and bless us to be a blessing to your glory throughout this week. for Christ's name we pray these things. Amen.