So, it’s good to be with you this morning. We’re going to invest a bit of time in God’s word. And I read an article, oh, some months ago, uh, by a Chicago University humanities professor named Mark Lila. He wrote a piece for the New York Times 20 years ago called Getting Religion. And he describes how for seven years of his adolescence and his young adulthood, he was an evangelical Christian. He says he’d been brought up in the Roman Catholic Church, bluecollar Detroit suburb, but he says church played no significant role at all in his family’s life. At age 13, he decided he was an atheist. Lila writes, “But the following year on a lark, I attended a Christian rock concert at my high school auditorium and on the way out was given a modern translation of the New Testament. Like most Catholics back then, and perhaps even now, I’d never held a Bible in my hands. I began to read it the moment I got home and I didn’t stop until breakfast the next morning. When I staggered into the kitchen, my father asked, “What happened to you?” And I said, “I didn’t know.” Within a few months, uh Mark Lila considered himself saved. He took an old sweatshirt and in permanent marker he wrote property of Jesus on it and wore it to school. And he asked a friend to make him a large leather cross that he also wore around his neck every day. He says, “I prowled the school halls with a leatherbound Scullfield reference Bible tucked under my arm, looking for victims.” He says, “The Bible became his only portal to the realm of ideas. It addressed matters of morality and justice and cosmology and psychology and esquetology and mortality.” He says, ‘The Bible uh posed all the important questions that were vaguely forming in my adolescent mind, but that now took on shape and contour, and of course, it answered those questions. A Pentecostal prayer group became what he calls his substitute family throughout his high school years in the early 70s. He spent most nights with them at prayer meetings, guitar practice, just sitting on the shag carpet of the living rooms, Bibles open on their laps. His faith was passionate. He says it was fueled by music and scripture and speaking in tongues and faith healings and revival and fellowship and riding the waves of the Holy Spirit during prayer times. He says his parents did their best for their two boys, but the only psychological tools at their disposal were discipline and guilt. He says in his family, expressions of affection, sympathy, forgiveness were rare. But at those Friday night meetings, he says, I learned another way to be. I learned to bang on a guitar, to sing at the top of my voice, to admit my worries and failings and collapse into the arms of someone whose love I could trust, knowing it could never be withdrawn. All of that seemed an enormous gift of God, and I wanted to thank him. Now, the article takes a turn as Lila describes his eventual slipping away from faith during and after his university years. He says, “Conversion stories are slippery things. I once was lost, but now I’m found. That’s never the whole story, and it’s usually not the end of the story. It wasn’t for me.” He says, “My new life as an evangelical Christian ended almost as abruptly as it had begun, and it was followed by other rebirths that took me to college, to graduate school, to journalism, to stints living in Europe, and now to middle age as a professor.” But then he says, “What is the whole story? And what does it mean to tell it even to yourself? For 25 years, I’ve been pondering that question. Now, his point in his article, his main point, while remaining largely sympathetic toward Christians, suggests that they live their lives with a certain narrowness. He says that you shouldn’t character caricature Christians as people who are incurious or indifferent to learning. In fact, in fact, he says Christians are glutton for learning. They’re investing many hours in Bible study groups, buying books, taking courses, taking notes during sermons, highlighting passages in their Bibles. But he concludes, if anything, it’s their thirst for knowledge that undoes them. Like so many Americans, they know little about history and science and secular literature or foreign cultures. Yet, their thirst for answers to the most urgent moral and existential questions is overwhelming. So they grab for the only glass in the room, God’s revealed word. So Mark L, he’s bothered by what he views as the narrowness among Christians, uh, their stubborn adherence to their book, to their Bible, drinking incessantly from the only glass in the room. Now, I’d push back at Lila a little bit for suggesting that Christians are amateurs or have no interest in things like science or history or literature. Modern science if you if you look at it historically owes an enormous debt to Christian people who believe that an orderly world an orderly study of the cosmos could be achieved because a god of rationality and order has created it. And we all know many Christian literary giants and the commitment to Christian missions has often placed Christians at the forefront of engaging with other cultures. But Lila is certainly right in saying that people like us, ordinary Christians, place great prominence and priority on the Bible as the word of God. We do see it, as Lila puts it, as our portal to the world of ideas. What would be up for debate then would be, is the Bible sufficient to serve as our portal to the world of ideas? Or are Christians too narrow and too exclusive in their view of the world? Are they missing the bigger picture that Lilis says he discovered once he left the Christian faith behind? Now, it’s no mystery really where we as Christians get our exclusivity from. We we get it from Jesus. Our passage this morning in John 14 is one of several claims that Jesus makes to absolute exclusivity in the Gospel of John. We’ve worked our way through that gospel this past year. And Jesus has self-described as the bread of life, as the light of the world, the door, the good shepherd, the resurrection, and the life. And this morning, Jesus makes probably the most exclusive statement of all when he says to his disciples in the upper room, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” There’s no debating that of all the people who’ve ever lived on this planet, Jesus Christ has left the most massive footprint behind. Today, every country, every tribe, every nation, every tongue, Jesus is being worshiped and his words being preached. It’s not just because of his works that Jesus is so widely remembered. Yet, Jesus was a teacher and he told people to love one another and he was kind to the poor and he laid hands on the sick and he fed people who were hungry. No one’s ever going to take issue with Jesus for doing such things. But there are lots of people in history who’ve been respected, influential teachers, who have loved people, who have fed and cared for the poor and helped the sick and sought to bring justice and peace to our world. That outside footprint of Jesus Christ, that the one that he’s left behind, it’s not just because of his charitable service. It’s because of his claims which he backed up on the cross. I like Tim Keller’s statement uh that Jesus had lots of humility but no modesty. Lots of humility but no modesty. He’s very tender and humble with people, with outsiders, with tax collectors, with prostitutes. He chose people like bluecollar fishermen to be his closest friends and followers. He was born in a manger. He worked as a rural carpenter. He was certainly humble, but his claims were completely immodest. I’m the Lord of the Sabbath. Don’t bring me your little Sabbath rules about working on Saturdays. I’m the boss of that day. I’m the resurrection and the life. I’m the door. I’m the way, the truth, and the life. No modest person would ever make such claims about themselves. So Jesus was always sticking it to people. You can either destroy me or you can bow down to me. You can crown me or you can kill me. But I’m not going to leave you any other options open. When Jesus said that he was the way, he went on to explain to his disciples that he was the way to the father, the very pathway to God. And no other pathway would get anyone to that same destination. No one comes to the father except through me. That statement was prompted by a question from one of his disciples. Jesus had told them that he was going to prepare a place for them, a forever home in his father’s house. And a bewildered Thomas asked Jesus, “Lord, we don’t know where you’re going, so how can we know the way?” And the few glimpses we have of Thomas in the New Testament demonstrates he didn’t like subtlety much. He really wanted answers. When Jesus was leaving a place of relative safety to go and raise Lazarus from the dead, going to a more dangerous area, Thomas rather resignedly, a little like Eeyore the donkey, said, “Well, we might as well go and die with him.” And of course, doubting Thomas. He’s famous for that. Best known for his skepticism with the resurrection. I’m not going to take your word for it until I can put my finger in his wounds. I’m not going to believe it. No one was ever going to pull the wool over Thomas’s eyes. And in the upper room, he just wanted Jesus to get to the point and stop speaking in riddles. Lord, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way? Apparently, Jesus’ answer about being the way that didn’t satisfy Thomas. It didn’t satisfy the others. In verse 9, Philip also made a statement indicating that he wanted clarification. No more abstraction. Lord, show us the father. It’ll be enough for us. So Jesus disciples, they were not gullible primitives. They were as rational and skeptical and as demanding a proof as any of us. But Jesus sought to communicate to them as the way. He was transporting them into the presence of the father. In fact, he already had. Jesus goes on in our passage and he says, he says, um, anyone who has seen me has seen the father. I am in the father. The father’s in me. It is the father living in me who’s doing his work. In other words, Jesus was really saying to his his men, you know, you guys know me intimately. For three years, we’ve been together, traveled together, eaten together, sailed together, been in storms together. We’ve ministered together. You men are confident in your friendship with me. You’re confident that I’m not going to throw you out of the boat in the middle of a storm. I’m not going to write you off when your faith falters. Because I am the way to the Father, you can be just as confident in his warmth and his friendship toward you. I and the Father are one. We’re not schizophrenic in that I might like you, but the Father might not like you. You men know that you have disappointed me. You’ve exasperated me at times. You know that I found your lack of faith to be disturbing. But you also know how much I love you, how much I want your best, how much I seek to protect you and pray for you. The way I feel about you is the exact same way the father feels about you. When I say that I’m the way to the father, I mean you’re really already there. To see my eyes twinkle with love for you is to see the eyes of your father twinkling over you as well. So we don’t want to in this passage about exclusivity. We don’t want to miss the the warmth and the beauty that Jesus is saying here. Exclusivity might sound cold to some ears. No one comes to the father except through me. If we bypass the intimacy that Jesus is explaining, that might sound chilly and narrow and rude. But exclusivity and narrowness really aren’t the same thing. Generations past, maybe that of your grandparents, not that long ago, polio was a disease that afflicted. It crippled many people, could be particularly cruel to young people. Singer Joanie Mitchell contracted polio in the early 1950s resulted in some paralysis and a weakened left hand that stayed with her for life. She had to develop some unique guitar tunings to overcome that. By 1955, Dr. Jonas Sulk had developed a polio vaccine that was announced to be safe and effective. Most of us, I’m sure, received that vaccine as children. Now, no one would ever say that it’s narrow of us to take the polio vaccine to ward off polio. No one would ever say that we should be more open-minded and pluralistic and that Tylenol or ivormectin is probably just as good for for dealing with polio. That would be ridiculous to us. So, it’s not narrow of us to see the polio vaccine as the exclusive answer to the polio virus. Nor is it narrow of us to believe that the sin virus in all of us can only be defeated by the son of god. He’s the only way back to friendship and fellowship with the father. It is being exclusive but it’s not being narrow to consider all other religions as ivormectin offering med medications that won’t be effective against our basic sin disease. So Jesus presents himself as exclusive, but as we’ll see in a few moments, far from narrow because his vaccine is offered freely to everyone who will ever take it. So when Jesus says that he is the way, the only way to the father, there’s an intimate warmth in what he’s saying, also just the practical medical spiritual reality in that his exclusive remedy is the only thing that can take care of our disease. And if we think that a nice guy like Jesus would never possibly intend to be so exclusive, his followers had no confusion as to what he was actually saying to them. Not long after their time in the upper room, Jesus had had died. He had been raised from the dead. He’d ascended into heaven. And Peter filled with the Holy Spirit testified to the religious leaders in Jerusalem, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there’s no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” The Apostle Paul writing to Timothy in 1 Timothy 2 declared, “There’s one God. There’s one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.” So Jesus’ followers were crystal clear regarding his being the exclusive way. Even as they took the gospel message all over the world to every tribe and tongue and nation, no matter what gods were being worshiped by the people in the cultures they encountered, the Christian apostles and evangelists called them away from their false worship. Paul said, “Get away from your worthless gods.” And they declared Jesus to be the only way to the father and the only true path to salvation. So in our passage, Jesus first presents himself as the exclusive way and second as the exclusive truth. That’s not very wellreceived at our time in history. In our western world, authenticity is valued far more than authority. People put a lot more stock in an inner discovery of identity and inner personal truth rather than accepting an external declaration of who we are and what we must believe. When Jesus declares himself as the capital T truth, he puts himself in a different category than any leaders of any other religions. They might be viewed as pointing people toward the truth. But Jesus says, “I’m the destination. I’m the consummation of all truth.” In a world that’s not very comfortable accepting the idea of absolute truth, for someone to call themselves the absolute truth, that’s hard to hear. There are people they have a credible motiv motivation to see our planet come together in peace and they often wish to say well all religions are basically teaching the same thing. All religions contain some of the truth. All hold some pieces of the puzzle but no one should claim a monopoly on spiritual truth. And sometimes they use the illustration of the blind men discovering the elephant. And the illustration goes that a group of blind men one day suddenly bump into an elephant and they all grab hold of the elephant uh uh different areas everyone begins to say what an elephant is like. One grabs the trunk and says that elephants are they’re long and flexible creatures and another grabs the leg and says no elephants are short and very thick and stiff creatures. They’re not long and flexible. Another blind man feels the side of the elephant and says neither of you two are right. Elephants are huge, flat creatures, and they begin to argue, all having grasped one piece of elephant reality, but none of them can claim to see the whole picture. The moral of the story is that all religions see part of the spiritual truth. No one can see the whole truth, so no one should insist that they’ve cornered the market on truth. Leslie Nubigan was a British missionary to India for many years, and over the years, that illustration was thrown at him time and time again. How can you say you see the whole thing? Nobody can see the whole thing. And one day he was listening to that illustration and it suddenly hit him. The only way you could know that none of the blind men had the entire grip on the reality of the elephant was if you yourself could see the whole elephant. The only way you could possibly assume or possibly know that every religion sees only part of the truth is if you assume that you can see all of the truth. And he realized that’s an incredibly arrogant illustration to say that all religions are equal. He says it sounds humble to say that the truth is much greater than anyone can grasp. But in saying that, you’re saying that you’ve grasped it. You can see it all. Your claim sounds humble, but you’re really making yourselves out to be superior. You’re saying no one can see the entire panorama of spiritual truth, religious truth, except you. So trying to say that all religions offer a piece of truth doesn’t really offer a coherent solution to anything. I know that Jesus claim to be the capital T truth is troubling for people. We’re all born, we’re all raised in furrows of faith that incline us to believe in either something or nothing. our parents, our family heritage. It might be very pagan, very atheistic. It might be Hindu or Sik or Buddhist or Muslim or Christian. Those furrows, those ancient pathways were born into, they have a hold on us and they actually provide our first explanation of how to think about religion and how to think about reality. But the history of Christendom is the story of the last 2,000 years that everywhere all over the world people have emerged from whatever furrows they’ve grown up in to enter the Christian story and be part of the Christian family. Initially it was Jewish people. They had a very deep furrow of what to believe. But many many came out of that furrow to embrace Christ. And then it went to Asia Minor and then it went into barbarian regions of southern and northern Europe. and it penetrated to Africa and India and China and South America and it’s everywhere. The gospel message portraying Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life. It provided for people a new explanation of reality and how our world works. And for us to evaluate whose truth is the right truth. Is it Judah? Is it Jesus? Is it Buddha? Is it Muhammad? We shouldn’t ask,”Well, who has the beliefs that are most comfortable and amenable to my family tradition or to my culture in my time?” The much better question to ask is this one. Which set of religious beliefs best explains how the world works and why it is the way it is? Which set of religious beliefs best corresponds to reality? Which set of religious beliefs is going to move the world toward shalom, toward ultimate peace, toward reconciliation between God and man? Back in John 8:32, we read how Jesus declared, “If you hold to my teaching, you really are my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” To evaluate truth is to ask if what I believe lines up with the curvature of the world and whether or not it sets me free. Are my religious beliefs broad enough to explain both the massive evil in our world and also all the grace and the beauty and the generosity that we see? Does it have sufficient explanatory value to describe a world that still carries the traces of its original beauty and also explains the ugliness of the sin nature in all of us? Does it satisfactorily answer the big questions? Why are we here? What’s wrong with the human race? What’s going to fix it? What should we be doing with our lives? What are the most important things for us to be involved in? For 2,000 years and every day that unfolds in our world, people are discovering that Jesus is the truth. People are finding that Jesus is a very snug fit with reality and they’re led out of their either religious or non-religious furrows of their upbringings and they’re being set free. As a result, Jesus declares himself to be the exclusive way, the truth. And the last thing we’ll look at is how Jesus describes himself as being the life, the one who animates dead things. Late great evangelist Billy Graham, he uh he had two major crusades in New York City during his career. one landmark crusade really at the launch of his ministry in in 1957. Huge ministry in New York City. And then his final public crusade also occurred there in 2005. And that last crusade that happened just prior to Mark Lila writing his article about his own years as an evangelical Christian and about losing his faith. In his article, he writes how in 2005, he took a a profess a professor friend to he hear Billy Graham that June in Queens, New York. On the first night of the crusade, Billy Graham spoke of the story of Nicodemus from John chapter 3. How that respected religious leader approached Jesus was told that he needed to be born again. And as he told the story, Billy Graham in his comfortable southern draw told how Nicodemus was a professor. And like all intellectuals, he thought he had everything figured out. And in fact, he had everything that most people would normally want in life. He was respected. He was powerful. He was knowledgeable. But he didn’t know the most essential thing that needs to happen to every human being. They need to be born again. And Mark Liller reflects on that evening. He says, “As benol as Billy’s punchline is, I’m reminded of its power. His sermons have never dwelt on the evils of the world like the old-time preachers. Nor has he presented Christianity as a success religion like the younger ones today. His approach has been almost purely existential. Billy simply looks people in the eye and says, “I know what you know, that you aren’t happy. You may have a decent job and a loving spouse and healthy children and a pension plan. You might even be a professor like Nicodemus. But there are moments when you sit on your lawn and you wonder, “Why do I feel so empty inside? What does it all mean?” I know you feel this way. I also know what you need. I’m not asking you to forsake father and mother, wife, and children. I’m not even asking you to forsake your car and your vacation home. Not because those things are valuable, but because they’re irrelevant. And Billy Graham closes with all I’m asking is that you hear Christ’s simple invitation that you accept him as your personal savior and start your life a new. So come forward. Come forward now while the organ plays. So Jesus of course presented himself to Nicodemus as he presents us to all of us himself as as a as our life. He says it’ll take a complete rebirth to enter that life. But people are being reborn every day because Jesus is the life. doesn’t just give us a syllabus to follow or a set of instructions or a blueprint or an example to be better people. Instead, he says, “I will come inside you. I’ll regenerate you. If you reach out to grab me, I’ll come in and I’ll change you. I’m not only your truth, I’m your life. I’m not like the founders of other religions. I’m not telling you to follow my rules or obey my example. I’m not giving you work to do because that’s going to crush you, just like all religion crushes people. I didn’t come to show you how to strive. I did the striving. I didn’t come to show you a mountain of righteousness you needed to climb. I climbed it for you. I didn’t show you how to come and live the perfect life. I lived the perfect life that you should have lived. And I died the death that should have been yours as punishment for your sin. If you reach out and receive me by faith, you’ll have life in you far greater you could ever imagine. And it will go on forever. So after watching hundreds and actually over the course of the crusade, thousands of people stream forward at that invitation given by Billy Graham to receive Christ. Mark Lilis says he found himself later on the train going home next to a pair of young Wall Street interns. One was a Christian from Mississippi. He was looking for a church to attend in Manhattan. He asked Mark Lila where he attended church and Mark Lila said, “Well, I don’t.” Young man was puzzled. He says, “Has tonight got you thinking about your spiritual situation?” “Of course,” Mark Lila answered truthfully. The other intern told Lila that he had never thought much about religion, but when his friend from Mississippi suggested they go to the crusade, he figured why not. Lila asked him if he went forward during the altar call and was surprised uh when he said that he had. “Why,” Lila asked. “Because,” the intern said, shrugging, “what he was saying tonight made so much sense. Little writes, “I found it hard to conceal my bafflement since uh Billy had not said much at all. You must be born again. That was it. I felt a professorial lecture welling up in my throat about the history and psychology of religion and the church’s ambiguous role as both an incubator and a stifler of human knowledge. I wanted to warn him against the anti-intellectualism of American religion. I wanted to cast doubt on the step that he was about to take to help him see that there were other ways to live and other ways to seek knowledge and love and be transformed. I wanted to convince him that his dignity depended on maintaining a free and skeptical attitude toward doctrine. I wanted to save him. Then he then he reflects. He says, “I thought I was out of that business, but maybe not. It took me years to acquire the education I missed as a young man. Doubt like faith is learned. It’s a skill. But he says, “The curious thing about skepticism is that its adherence, ancient and modern, have often been proitizers. In reading them, I’ve often wanted to ask, why do you care?” Their skepticism offers no good answer to that question, and I don’t have one for myself. See, Mark Lola seems to be very honest, self-reflective as he wrestles with his evangelical past and his intellectual pursuits. the exclusivity of Christ, what he sees as the narrowness of Christians. You and I might have wrestled with that at some time our lives as well. Jesus saying, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” That can come across as a hard saying until we start thinking about how inclusive the exclusivity of Christ really is. Remember what Jesus said in John 6:37. He says, “All that the father gives me will come to me. Whoever comes to me, I’ll never drive away. It’s scandalously inclusive exclusivity. It’s an invitation that’s open to all. Some people might make fun of Christianity because we believe that a person can live a horrible life on their deathbed, turn to Christ, and they’ll be saved. They’ll be as safe and eternally saved as the greatest of saints. Now, people who make fun of deathbed conversions, they’re actually being far more exclusive than Jesus ever was because they’re essentially saying, “Good people get in, bad people are shut out.” Not so with Jesus. You know, there’s no indication that the thief next to him on the cross ever did anything right in his life. But when that thief called on Jesus to save him, Jesus says, “It’s okay. You’re with me. You’re coming to paradise. I guarantee it.” admitting that we’re not good, that our only fitness to salvation is that we’re not fit at all, and only Jesus through his sacrifice on the cross can save us. That’s what Christianity is. You know, when we speak of an exclusive club, like a country club or something like that, a private organization, we think of one that restricts its membership. But would you call Christianity an exclusive country club? If we go around town knocking on doors, imploring people to join us for free, that’s what Christians do. Most critics of Christianity would say you you guys ought to quit trying to recruit other members. You should just restrict yourself to your present group. But that would actually be very exclusive thing to do. And that’s not what Jesus calls us to do. Sharing our story with others is not at all disrespectful. It’s showing people the ultimate respect. Because if we have something that we believe is helpful and good and will benefit others, the only cure to their real disease, how can we justify not sharing that? If we have the vaccine that will cure their disease, don’t we want to offer that to everyone? Even to people who don’t know that they’re sick, even to people who view the vaccine as harmful or or useless. sharing our faith really aligns with that inclusive exclusivity of Jesus and his disciples. So, we we’re to get the word out that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and that only through him will people be set free. And I think we should just spend a few moments in prayer with Jesus this morning. And uh some of it just be a personal time for the next couple moments. If you would like to pray a few of these thoughts, thank Jesus that he has revealed himself to you as the way, the truth, and the life. Pray that you’ll have a heart for others that’s every bit as wide and broad as Jesus’ heart for all who will come to him. And then pray for boldness in sharing that scandalously inclusive gospel message with others. This is just your own time with Jesus. If you just take a few moments, I’ll close us off.