Lord, we just want to look to You today. We pray for a word in season, that You would be our encouragement and our strength. You would really speak today, in Jesus’ name.
So, the little outline I handed out is “I Am.” Where that particular “I Am” came from was John 14:6. Who knows that?
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by me.”
That was a verse in response to a question from Thomas. He said, “Lord, we do not know where You are going. How do we know the way?”
The setting for that interchange was that the Lord had been with them. He had been leading them very practically, day by day, physically with them. But He had told them He was going away. They did not understand it, and they were upset. You know, they were stirred up and did not know what was going on.
It kind of sounds familiar to our circumstance. Things are stirred up. We do not know where we are going. We do not know what is happening. Our nests are stirred up. But I want to say that is good.
What the Lord was doing was calling them to trust Him, to believe in Him in spirit—not physically, but in spirit—and to learn the fullness of this walk in the Spirit.
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
Would the Lord speak that to each one of us in these tumultuous days?
This verse was my personal Jesus Revolution. Who has read The Jesus Revolution and watched the movie? That was a real move of the Spirit in the seventies.
The book is set in Southern California, where a lot of action was going on. But that revolution was going from coast to coast, and it reached even a little small-town boy in flyover country. It was good for him, you know?
So what was going on in my life at that time was the Vietnam War. Friends were being drafted and not coming home. It was a purposeless war; to this day, it is purposeless. I was going to graduate from college and lose my student deferment real soon. I thought, “Oh, wow, where am I going?”
But thank the Lord, someone from Campus Crusade called me to lunch in the cafeteria at the YMCA and shared the gospel with me. He said, “Don’t you want to pray that prayer right here? Pray it now.”
And I said, “Not out here in public.” You know, we were the conservative generation—the Methodists.
But on the way home, I sure prayed it. Walking by the library there at the University of Illinois, I touched the Lord and never looked back.
So that was my testimony. The Campus Crusade work always wanted the young people who were saved to have a testimony. My testimony was, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” I think that was for fundraising; I am not sure. But it was to get other students to know that there was a truth to this gospel.
So, I have five points:
This setting of this verse was a transition. There had been a lot of public ministry out in the cities and in the synagogues. The Lord was reaching out to the Jews, basically.
At this point, He went from a public, outward ministry to a personal, inward ministry. His attention moved from the broad crowds to the eleven who were with Him, so that the eyes of their hearts might be enlightened and they might know who Jesus was—to be their Savior.
John, at the end of his Gospel, says:
“Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book:
but these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;
and that believing ye may have life in His name.”
—John 20:30-31
This was a different Savior. This was not a political Savior. This was so that you might have life in His name, that you might get saved and live in the good of that. So He was after a personal, spiritual, internal gospel.
While I was thinking about this message, I was reading A. W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. He says, “The argument of this book is the essential interiority of true religion. The church has gained or lost power exactly as she has moved toward or away from the inwardness of her faith.”
That is what He was after with the disciples. So that is a good question for us: are we caught with the external things of the faith—what God can do for us—or with who God is to us, the internal? The “I Am” is central: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
This transition started, really, for me in John 11:54:
“Jesus therefore walked no more openly among the Jews, but departed thence into the country near to the wilderness, into a city called Ephraim;
and there He tarried with the disciples.”
He wanted to be with them. He had something to do for them and in them, and He wanted to spend time with them.
In John 12, the Lord begins to share with the disciples that His purpose and calling was a heavenly way, not an earthly way. They thought He was going to be their physical Savior. He was not a temporal King, but a spiritual One.
Then, continuing this transition, He said:
“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself.”
—John 12:32
He was saying this to indicate the kind of death by which He was to die. Luke states it in a good way, in Luke 18:31-34:
“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all the things that are written by the prophets shall be accomplished unto the Son of man.
For He shall be delivered up unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and shamefully treated, and spit upon:
and they shall scourge and kill Him: and the third day He shall rise again.”“And they understood none of these things; and this saying was hid from them, and they perceived not the things that were said.”
Anyway, this is the transition. This is the purpose. I think that transition into John 14 could be summarized in John 20:17, where He said to Mary, “Stop clinging to Me.” He was going to rise and be received into glory. Do not hold on to Him in a merely temporal way.
Remember what He said to Thomas? Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going. How do we know the way?” And Jesus said to him, “I am, I am, the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me.”
I had not really thought, over the years, about this verse—how important “I Am” is to it. “I Am.” The God of all creation, the God of the universe, would say to us, “I Am.” How can we get upset about our circumstances and our problems when we are right in the throne room with the great I Am?
This is number two: “I Am.” Brother Nee has a book entitled Christ, the Sum of All Spiritual Things. That is a good place to read about this.
There are places in the Bible that speak about the “I Am.” I will just mention a couple of them. We are all familiar with Exodus 3:13-14:
“And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you;
and they shall say to me, What is His name? what shall I say unto them?
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM:
and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”
“I Am.” “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
And Hebrews 11:6:
“And without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing unto Him;
for he that cometh to God must believe that He is,
and that He is a rewarder of them that seek after Him.”
We must believe that He is. Do we believe that He is, or do we believe things about Him—blessings from Him? He is a rewarder. We can easily become occupied with the things of God: His blessings, His keeping. But I think in this day of moral decline and turmoil, it would be a great comfort for us to know that God is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.
God is Spirit and truth. One point in John 14 that is helpful to me is John 14:16-17, one of the comforts the Lord Jesus gave His disciples:
“And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may be with you for ever,
even the Spirit of truth: whom the world cannot receive; for it beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth Him:
ye know Him; for He abideth with you, and shall be in you.”
The “I Am” is revealed to us in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “I Am.”
There are just a few places in the Gospel of John where He emphasizes this: the great “I Am.” Let us think about them for a minute.
John 6:35:
“Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life:
he that cometh to me shall not hunger,
and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”
“I am the bread of life”—spiritual bread. Do you ever feel like you just have not got it anymore? That the world has you down, that things are crazy? You have not got it? Well, I would say to us all, He is the bread of life. He who comes to Him will not hunger, and he who believes in Him will never thirst. Spiritual bread. Praise the Lord.
John 8:12:
“Again therefore Jesus spake unto them, saying, I am the light of the world:
he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness,
but shall have the light of life.”
In a dark day, how good it is to have light. You know, we have the light: the written Word, the Word in Spirit. Let us not live in the darkness.
John 10:9-10:
“I am the door; by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and go out, and shall find pasture.
The thief cometh not, but that he may steal, and kill, and destroy:
I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”
“I Am.”
John 11:25-26:
“Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life:
he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live;
and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die. Believest thou this?”
“I am the resurrection and the life.” Death no longer has a hold on us. He is resurrection life today, to live, and He is resurrection life for eternity.
Anyway, the way, the truth, and the life. Thomas said he did not know the way. He was disoriented, but Jesus said, “I Am” to Thomas. Praise the Lord.
The third point is the way: “I am the way.” You know, we can get lost. Things are stirred up. What is going on? This is going on, that is going on—and the way, the way.
The first point I want to make is that He says, “I am the way to the Father. No one comes to the Father but through Me.” That is the way of life: to come to the Father.
Hebrews 9:13-14 says:
“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh:
how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish unto God,
cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”
He is the way. The blood of Jesus washes us. We can enter the holy place.
Hebrews 10:19-22 says:
“Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus,
by the way which He dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh;
and having a great priest over the house of God;
let us draw near with a true heart in fulness of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience,
and having our body washed with pure water.”
Let us draw near. Our sin, our guilt, and our condemnation no longer need to control us. We are clear in God’s eyes, and there is no reason to stand afar off.
Often, we stand afar off from our side because we are afraid to approach. We are too busy to approach. But Tozer talks about a self-life veil—our self-life. Do you ever feel that? A veil, impossible to break through. There is something here, and I cannot get through. I cannot deal with it.
Tozer says it is a veil in our hearts that keeps us away. Well, the veil has been rent, and the way is clear. But also, we need to be dealt with ourselves.
Matthew 16:24 says:
“If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”
So, the self-life. We need to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and be done with our self-life that keeps us away from the Father—whatever it is: good self, bad self, anxious self, troubled self, proud self, discouraged self. We have been crucified with Christ. There is no reason to stay far off.
Another way Jesus is the way is that He is the practical way as we walk through this life. He is our way. What is the literal interpretation of “way”? In the original language, it is a road. He is the road through our days.
At times we do not know what to do, but our eyes are on You. Psalm 32:8 is one of my favorite verses:
“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go:
I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee.”
It is difficult to know which way to go, no doubt about it. But, “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go. I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee.” Jesus is the way, very practically.
I just had a thought on this way through our days. We are living in an increasingly dark day. I think if we do not think it is a dark day, we are a little brain-dead—or spiritually dull. It is a dark day.
But you know what? The Lord knows all about it, and He expects us to walk through these days by His grace. Our first tendency is to escape, to get out of the trials. But He would have us, by His grace, go through.
Two things got me thinking of this. I read a book on the founding of CLC—Christian Literature Crusade. It is where a lot of books and authors we really appreciate have been published: Andrew Murray, Arthur Wallace, and others. It was sort of a missionary work.
World Evangelism Crusade started in the early 1900s, and they realized in the thirties and forties that there was a great lack of good Christian literature—solid Christian literature. They started that burden there in England. It grew and grew, and of course it is with us today.
It started to really go in the middle of the Second World War, when they were bombing London. They were so excited to find a building they needed because it had been bombed and nobody wanted it. So they were not flipping out over the bombing. They were just, by grace, going through that mess.
And who else do we know lived through the bombing in London? Well, T. Austin-Sparks. In some of his books, he would say, “Well, they were bombing today, and so we could not be out.” I think even part of the compound at Honor Oak got bombed. Anyway, they went through.
And King David, of course, went through the valley of the shadow of death:
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.”
—Psalm 23:4
So, difficult days—we can go through by the grace of God. Why? Because Thou art with me. God is with us, and we can take Him for our strength.
He says, “Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.” His rod is a weapon of protection. The staff is correction: it hooks us and brings us back onto the path. We do not want to be corrected, but praise God, He corrects us and gets us back on the path. So, God is the way through.
The next one is the truth: “I am the truth.” There are great days of confusion about what is truth. Every day, if we turn on the television or the radio—maybe we should not—it is nuts. It is nuts: lies and spiritual and moral decline.
What that old Pilate said when he was interviewing Jesus: “What is truth?” What is the truth? Well, we know the truth. Our Lord would say to us, “I am the truth.”
Spiritual truth, spiritual and heavenly truth. It is very easy to consider truth as natural reason, as some kind of philosophical proof in a logic class. That is what we are fighting against: secular humanism.
Let us make sure we do not take the Word of God and merely reason it through. We need to know the Word desperately, but we need to know it by Spirit and life.
Jesus told the Samaritan woman:
“God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
—John 4:24
Something Sharon reminded me of is what Brother Kuo would often say to us over the years: the spiritual is way more real than the physical. We think all these things around us are real, but the real truth is spiritual.
Tozer says, “Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits. We habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of any other. We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world, but we doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word.”
“The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent, and self-demonstrating. It does not appeal to our faith. It is here, assaulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final.”
Is that not true? It is clamorous, insistent, and self-demonstrating. I hate to say it, but we are just inundated with this stuff: television, the internet, all the blogs. It is baloney, you know? We have to be careful that we do not get inundated. It is here, assaulting our five senses.
But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality—the city of God shining all around us. The world of sense triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible, the temporal of the eternal. That is a curse inherited by every member of Adam’s tragic race.
At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The object of the Christian’s faith is unseen reality. “I am the truth.”
I think these passages at the beginning of John are wonderful concerning Jesus as the truth. John 1:1 says:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.”
And John 1:14-18:
“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us
(and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father),
full of grace and truth.”“John beareth witness of Him, and crieth, saying, This was He of whom I said, He that cometh after me is become before me: for He was before me.
For of His fulness we all received, and grace for grace.
For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.”
He is the way, the truth. We are most blessed to have the written Word of God. It is an absolute miracle that we have it.
We dare not ignore it. With all the lies around us, when this garbage comes out, if we have been reading the Word and studying the Word, we will say, “Oh, that is not right. What is that?” You know, transgenderism and all that.
If we are grounded in the Word, we are going to avoid so many problems. This Word of God is our means of discernment. Think about it. Practically, we have this Word. Spiritually, we have it, which is a great thing. But just the fact that it survived, you know?
We even got it out of the hands of the Catholic priests and into our hands through the Gutenberg press. What a great miracle. So, do not ignore the Word.
John 8:31-32 says:
“Jesus therefore said to those Jews that had believed Him, If ye abide in my word, then are ye truly my disciples;
and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
I want to read that verse in Wuest’s translation: “As for you, if you remain in the Word which is Mine, truly My disciples you are. And you shall know the truth in an experiential way, and the truth shall make you free.”
Hebrews 4:12, which we are familiar with, says:
“For the word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword,
and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow,
and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
The Word of God is a great thing to separate us from our natural life and our natural understanding—dividing soul and spirit.
John 5:39-40 says:
“Ye search the scriptures, because ye think that in them ye have eternal life;
and these are they which bear witness of me;
and ye will not come to me, that ye may have life.”
We can answer Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” if we are in the Word.
Tozer, speaking about reading the Bible, says, “Now we read the Book as the record of what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads, how can we believe?”
“The facts are that God is not silent. He has never been silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The second Person of the Holy Trinity is called the Word. The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind for us, put into our familiar human words.”
“I think a new world will arise out of the religious mist when we approach our Bible with the idea that it is not only a book which was once spoken, but a book which is now speaking. The prophets habitually said, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ They meant their hearers to understand that God speaking is in the continuous present.”
“If you would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible, expecting it to speak to you. Do not come with the notion that it is a thing which you may push around at your convenience. It is more than a thing. It is a voice, a word—the very Word of the living God.”
“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
The last one is the life. Thank God, huh? “I am the life. I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
The Lord Jesus was telling the disciples that He was going to leave them, but He wanted them to understand that He was only leaving them physically, presently. He was encouraging them to see Him not with their natural eyes, with their eyeballs, but with the eyes of their hearts.
Our only hope in this tumultuous day is to live and trust—to live in the Lord in spirit. The only way to make it through is Christ our life.
This needs to be our spiritual experience. These trying days allow us to come to the end of our natural strength. We need to be careful, when we come to the end of our natural strength, that we do not become negative, go under, and get depressed. Rather, it is an opportunity to call on the name of the Lord.
“No longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me.”
That is why I chose this hymn. It is not necessarily a bad thing when we come to the end of our natural strength and natural resources. It is a good thing to know what the right response is when we find ourselves in that circumstance.
I want to read about the author of that poem, that hymn: Annie Johnson Flint.
She was born in Vineland, New Jersey, and became an orphan at age six. She was adopted by a family who lived outside of Camden. She and her sister resided with them until the age of twenty-three.
At the early age of twenty, she was attacked with arthritis, which began in her hands until they became severely twisted and deformed. After five years, she became debilitated and crippled, and could no longer walk.
For forty years, she was confined to her room, using upwards of nine pillows to support her during periods of acute suffering. However, Annie Johnson Flint lived a long life and became good friends with Margaret Barber.
She learned at the age of nine how to put words together in rhyme and rhythm. Out of her personal suffering, she produced nine volumes of excellent poetry and beautiful hymns.
I am not making an exception out of this. It is just that out of her perpetual sufferings, she was able to rise above them because she knew the Lord. The sufferings were not the end. The sufferings were God’s way.
Let us not make sufferings an end, but ask, what is our response to those sufferings? And she could write out of that:
“When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is