I Am The Life Series

I Am the Life

It’s funny, I don’t have a favorite German Chancellor or a favourite African dictator but I do have a couple of favorite American Presidents. I have enjoyed reading the quiet wit of Calvin Coolidge, don’t know what he was like as a president but he said some quotable things. Although it happened when I was really young I have heard enough people talk about Camelot to wonder how things would have turned out if JFK had of lived, sometimes I put Bill Clinton on the list, but that’s just to annoy my republican friends. But my all-time favourite US president would have to be Abraham Lincoln, and that is probably true for a lot of people. Partly, because as I have mentioned before, he is a distant relative of mine on my Mother’s side, but also because of his stand against slavery and how he handled the entire issue of forgiveness following the defeat of the south in the US Civil war, or as some people refer to it, the war of Northern Aggression. My respect and admiration for Lincoln has only increased with my recent discovery that he was also a vampire hunter. A vampire hunter can you imagine?

It was Abraham Lincoln who said and lived the adage “And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.” It seems that sometimes we are so consumed with getting as many years as possible we forget to enrich them and treat each year as special. We become caught up in a quest for quantity over quality. And it becomes easy to fall into one of two traps. We either live like there is no tomorrow or we live like there is no today. But Jesus was apparently concerned with how we live in the present and also how we would live in the forever. There were times, very few but there were times that he raised the dead to life, Lazarus, Jarius’ daughter and the widows son. In that case he was adding years to their lives, when he offers us eternal life he is offering to extend our lives. And because of how he called us to live, and love and forgive he was offering to put more life in our years, to make our lives fuller.

In the scripture that Colin read for us Jesus told those who followed him John 14:6 Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.” And in the first part of this month we looked at what it meant for Jesus to be the “Way” and the “Truth”. Jesus didn’t say he would point us to the way or show us the truth he stated that he was the way and he was the truth. And Jesus didn’t say he was one way or one truth he said he was the way and the truth.

If we asked people today how they came to Cornerstone this morning we would discover that there are a variety of ways to come to our church. If we were talking about direction you could arrive here up the Hammonds Plains Rd. or down the Hammonds Plains Rd. You could come up Gatehouse Run or out Kingswood Dr. and it would make no difference, because you would have arrived at your destination. There are many ways to arrive at Cornerstone, and you could come via any of those ways by a variety of modes of transportation. You could ride a bicycle, or walk, or come by car or motorcycle. I guess you could probably parachute in or land a helicopter in the parking lot if you wanted.

However Jesus said very clearly and without hesitation, John 14:6 Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.” And so very clearly Jesus said there was no other way to find God and no other way to find the truth about God other than through the Son of God. And I know that sounds narrow and dogmatic and it is meant to be, because the truth has to be narrow and dogmatic about itself. And if your vision of Jesus is a much more inclusive Jesus than you have never read the story of Jesus because in it not only does he say he is the only way and the only truth he also makes comments like Matthew 7:14 But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it. And while I feel that every person should have the opportunity to hear the story about Jesus I understand that not every person will embrace the truth about Jesus. And not every person will choose to embrace the life that Jesus offers. So what is this life that Jesus speaks of?