I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life

This morning, I'd like us to open God's word to John 14, and we're gonna read from verses one to six. It probably is, in my opinion, one of the most controversial pieces of scripture in our postmodern age. It's definitely one of the most provocative. And I'd like us to read it because it makes a claim, like I said, that sits uneasy with a lot of people and it claims that Christianity is the only truth worth following. John 14, verses one to six.

Jesus said to His disciples, do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God. Trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you.

I'm going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you may also be where I am. You know the place. You know the way to the place where I am going. Thomas said to Him, Lord, we don't know where You are going, so how can we know the way?

Jesus answered, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. And then verse seven as well. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know Him and have seen Him.

We're going to be really looking at that sixth verse, I'm the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. One of my favourite comic book heroes is Batman. I love the mystique of the caped crusader, the winged avenger. I'm a nerd.

And up until now, my all-time favourite Batman movie is the one called Dark Knight, which is where Heath Ledger plays the Joker in his last film ever. And what I loved about the movie is that it moved past all the cool action scenes and the gadgets and all those sort of things, but it zoomed in on the philosophy behind why Batman is Batman. It deals with Bruce Wayne, the alter ego of Batman, and how he comes to grips with who the dark knight is, why he needs to be Batman and who for. In one of the climactic scenes of the movie, Batman comes to the realisation that being Batman is no longer a choice anymore. It's no longer a choice.

It's a necessity. Gotham City needs Batman, whether they think so or not. Gotham in its dysfunctional, corrupted state will self-destruct without the ever-vigilant dark knight. And in this highlighted moment, in one scene, Bruce Wayne is speaking with his friend and his mentor, his trusty butler, Alfred, and everything has sort of come up to this one point. And Bruce says to Alfred, and he wants to give up, and he says to Alfred, people are dying, Alfred.

What would you have me do? And Alfred responds, endure, Master Wayne. Take it. Gotham will hate you for it, but that's the point of Batman. He can be the outcast.

He can make the choice that no one else can make. The right choice. The right choice. Batman has to make the right choice even when people will hate him for doing it. Even when it is deeply unpopular, even when it seemingly robs him of his freedom to live a life that might be a lot easier, he has to make the right choice.

And I find a large overlap between that sort of idea and our faith or Christianity. Have you ever heard someone say to you Christians believe that they have the absolute truth that everyone else has to follow? That attitude endangers everyone's freedom. Or perhaps you've had it said to you, a one-truth-fits-all approach is just too confining. Christians don't have the freedom to think for themselves.

I believe each individual must determine truth for him or herself. Who's heard that being said? Yes. Perhaps you've been tempted, secretly, to think according to that way as well. Is believing that there is just one way to live something that we should try to avoid as Christians?

We just recently had the announcement from Pope Francis sort of softening a lot of stances that the Catholic Church were big on. Is believing that there is just one way to live something that we should try to avoid as Christians? Should we soften on it? Doesn't every person have the right to decide what is right for them? Doesn't every person have the right to decide what is good or bad in their context?

In our passage this morning, Jesus talks to His disciples just before He goes to the cross. And though they don't know it, Jesus begins with these words, do not let your heart be troubled. Trust in God. Trust also in me. These words were going to resonate with them twenty-four hours later when they saw their Master on the cross.

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust in me. And then He says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Those are absolute statements, friends. Those are absolute statements.

The original Greek is very clear, in fact, and it uses the definite article, which in English is "the". The indefinite article was "a". So He says, I am the way, the truth, the life, not a way, not a truth, not a life. This is an absolute statement that Jesus is making right at the end of His ministry. A lot of people view Christianity as a limit to personal growth and expression because it restricts our freedom to choose and to practise our various beliefs.

The German philosopher, for example, that really has moved so much of our thinking in the modern era is the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who defined an enlightened human being as one who trusts in his or her own power of thinking rather than authority or tradition. Now we like that. We hear that and we're like, actually, yeah, that that makes sense. Trust in our own power of thinking rather than authority or tradition. Now, this philosophy has grown over the last two hundred years to the point that any authority in any moral matter is treated with a lot of suspicion.

What do we think about the government and what it says on stuff? What do we think and how do we treat the police or the laws of the country or courts? We treat it, it's met with deep suspicion. In other words, freedom to determine our own moral standards is considered a necessity for being fully human. Freedom, they say, is the complete absence of any restrictions that will constrain us from doing certain things.

Freedom is having no restrictions on that. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be a true definition when Christians say they've been liberated. That's the interesting thing. When Christians say, I've been set free, they limit themselves by following Jesus Christ. They say freedom, which is the result of a restriction or an absence of any restrictions, isn't true liberation.

Why do we say this? Because freedom can't be defined as strictly the absence of confinement and constraint. Because in many cases, constraint leads to liberation. Let me put it this way. We've got a sportsman here, a few sportsmen here, but one in particular who is apparently a gun at AFL, Billy, Zeb's brother.

Now, someone may be born with an amazing skill in a sport, but you will have to take on years and years of practice to refine your skill in that sport. This is a restriction. It's a limit on your freedom. There are many other things you won't be able to do because you set aside that time for shooting hoops or for bowling in the nets. If you have the talent for that sport, however, the discipline and the restriction you place on yourself each day in practising will unleash your ability that would have otherwise gone untapped.

Does that make sense? Well, what have you done? You've deliberately chosen to lose your freedom to engage in some things in order to release yourself into a richer kind of liberation to accomplish greater things. Or to put it another way, a fish lives in water. Right?

Fish lives in water. That fish is only truly liberated or free, however, when it is restricted to the water because it needs to absorb oxygen through that water. If we were to say true freedom means no restrictions, we would have to catch him and release him from his bondage of the sea and place him on land because that's true freedom. But what would happen? He would die.

So he is restricted, but in that restriction, he has life. In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as it is finding the right ones. The liberating restrictions. When Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, He was making an absolute statement. Now some people might say, okay, I understand that there are restrictions we place in ourselves in order to flourish in some areas.

So little scrawny Jimmy shouldn't take up a rugby ball and go and play for the first fifteen because he's going to get snapped and probably break a collarbone. So, you know, it's a restriction to tell him it's probably not a good idea to play rugby. We get that. I get it that through constraints to our talents, our IQ, our family even, that we might actually unleash even more freedoms or liberations. Working hard, for example, is a restriction on its own.

I get that. But what about determining what is morally right and morally wrong? Can we really judge an area that seems so grey by something that is absolute? Shouldn't we be able to determine our own morality? So, I mean, like the fish example, that's physical.

What about moral? What about spiritual, emotional, all that sort of stuff? Well, Tim Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York, says that when he gets asked this question, he always responds by asking the person this. Is there anyone in the world right now doing things which you believe they need to stop doing right now? ISIS, the Syrian dictatorship.

Without fail, they respond by saying, yes, of course. Absolutely. There are people right now doing things that they should stop doing, even if they believe they are doing it for good reasons. Then he asks them this, doesn't that mean that you do believe there is some kind of absolute truth regarding morality that everyone should follow regardless of that person's understanding of morality? Doesn't it mean that you actually believe that there is a law that should be abided by regardless of what a person thinks or feels?

And obviously, that leaves them a little bit stumped. There are some critical flaws in our postmodern thinking that truth is relative, that morality is relative and grey. The next question then is, what is this absolute moral truth? If we can agree that there are non-negotiables regarding what is right and wrong, then who has determined these non-negotiables, and what are they? What kind of environment is the one that will liberate us?

The answer is something that you might not expect, and that is love. Love is the most liberating freedom loss of all. Love is the most liberating freedom loss of all. One of the principles of love, either a love for a really good mate or a romantic love, is that you have to lose independence to gain greater intimacy. If you want the freedom of love, the liberating, fulfilling security of love, you actually have to limit yourself in so many ways.

You cannot enter into a deep relationship and still make independent choices. To experience the joy and the freedom of love, you must give up personal autonomy. Again, we're challenged with the complexity of the concept of freedom, but a love relationship limits your personal options. Human beings are most free and alive in relationships of love, yet healthy love relationships involve mutual, unselfish love. Think about it this way, your first real love.

Wouldn't you spend hours and hours and hours trying to understand this person, trying to understand what their pleasures are, what their joys are, just so that you can go and find it for them or get them to have or enjoy that with you in some way. Dark chocolate. I love dark chocolate. You're gonna go and get some dark chocolate, aren't you? I love going to the rugby.

You're gonna go to the rugby even though really it's not your thing. And you love doing it. It's not like it's a chore. You love doing it because you want to see and experience the joy of that person when they enjoy it. When some people hear Jesus is the only way to the Father and that His truth is the absolute truth.

When people first hear that, they immediately think that's dehumanising because God has all the power, and I have to adjust to God. God has all the power, and I must adjust, and that seems unfair. But in the most radical way, we see the love of God in Christianity because we see God adjusting to us. In our passage, in verse three we read, or the end of verse two really, Jesus saying, I'm going to prepare a place for you. I'm going to prepare a place for you.

And that is exactly this freedom loss that we are talking about when it comes to love. Christ had to secure our place, and therefore, had to go to the cross. That was the cost of His love to us. That was His loss of independence. In Jesus Christ becoming human and suffering and dying on the cross and bearing the wrath of our God, He submitted to our condition.

He adjusted towards us as sinners who should have hung on that cross, as people who did not love God, who rejected God, and continue to wrestle with rejecting God, as people who have abused and continue to abuse God's love, God should have divorced us. Like a broken marriage, a marriage scarred by rejection, a marriage that is simply one way, one person loving and one person taking. Like a bad marriage like that, God should have divorced us. But in our place, Jesus was divorced. On the cross, which what Jesus was talking about here in John 14, Jesus submitted to our condition as sinners and died in our place in order to offer forgiveness to us.

In the most profound way, God said, I will adjust to you. And Jesus said, I will change for you. I'll serve you even though it means a sacrifice to me. Now a friend of CS Lewis once asked him, is it easy to love God? Is it easy to love God?

And he replied to his friend, it's easy to those who do it. Now that's not as silly as it sounds. When we fall deeply in love, you want to please your beloved. You don't want to wait for the person to ask you to do something for him or her. You eagerly want to discover their joys, to learn every little thing that brings them joy.

For a Christian, it's the same. The love of God constrains. It causes us to limit ourselves. It does cause us to be self-disciplined. But once you realise how Jesus changed for you and changed Himself and gave Himself for you, once you realise that He loves you with an unending, indestructible, relentless love, the love that we sung about that breached that gap, you aren't afraid of giving up whatever people think freedom is today.

We follow Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life, and therefore, we find a richer freedom in Him. When we walk in the footsteps of Jesus as a true disciple, following His every move, living and doing life as He did, as He showed us, doing life how God designed life to be lived, then of course, there is going to be a right way, and there's going to be a wrong way of doing it. Of course, there's going to be good decisions we can make, and there's going to be bad decisions we can make. There's going to be choices which constrain us or limit us in order to love God and do what pleases Him. You know God's desire is for you to love and respect Him, but you do it gladly.

You do it gladly. God has a better way in mind, and Jesus said, I am that way. God knows what life should truly look like, and Jesus said, I am that truth. God wants you to live life to the fullest. And Jesus said, I am that life.

Be like the fish restricted to the water because it's in the water that we find our freedom. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, this is a good message for us to hear again, a message that we need to be reminded of. Father, that in You, there is freedom even if it is labelled a freedom loss. And, Lord, for so many people around us, it does not make sense.

But, Father, it is easy to love You when we do it. Father, I pray that as we reflect on this in our lives, as we look into our own actions and our own ways of thinking about areas in our life that we know, Lord, You are tugging at and You're highlighting that needs to be sharpened up or changed or completely overhauled. Father, I pray that You'll give us the grace and the mercy to be able to do that, the courage to do that, to make decisions in life that need to be done, the discipline to go through with it. But Father, I also pray that we may see the fruit of these decisions. We may experience the joy.

We may experience the peace that we may we may find the deepest pleasures, Lord, of being with You, of pleasing You, of being in this amazing relationship with You. Help us to take out our eyes off earthly things, Lord, and to place it on heavenly things, Lord, where You are seated. Father, we pray for those around us who are affected by our decisions. We pray that they will also come to understand. We pray for friends and family who don't understand this freedom that is available to them.

We pray, Lord, that even in our lives, they may see that there is a joy, that there is something inside of us that cannot be overcome by our circumstances or our context. Father, that it is through Your Spirit that we have been made alive and we understand the grace that we have freely received. Thank you for this, Lord. Amen.