Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me.
Anna Vadimovka Sorokina, or her shortened alias, Anna Sorokin, is a name that many in New York will never forget, some with acute embarrassment at their gullibility. She moved to the city in 2013 and immediately started telling her new friends and acquaintances that she was a German heiress with access to a trust fund worth EUR 60 million. And they believed her. She got access to expensive trips, five star hotels, Michelin starred restaurants and mansions and penthouses all across the city on the basis of an elaborate lie. She was eventually found out in 2017 after four year of living the high life. She is now serving a prison sentence in the notorious Rikers prison for her crimes. Her four years of fraud are being made into two movies (HBO and Netflix), a book and two autobiographies. She might still have a good life when she gets out, but I imagine it will be in Russia as there's every chance she will be deported. Her claims were found out. She got caught. Two thousand years after Jesus claimed to be the only way, the only truth and the only life, billions of Christians still believe this to be true and it still has not been undermined. You see, Jesus made this claim. That cannot be disputed. And because He made it, we have to make a choice, as the Christian thinker and writer CS Lewis put it: "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God." (Mere Christianity, CS Lewis). You may be wondering why I am discussing what might seem to be an obscure philosophical or theological question at the time of a global pandemic. However, never has it been more important to come to terms with this teaching. In a time of utter confusion, when people find themselves standing in the ruins of their careers, their families or even their lives, and are begging for any kind of direction, Jesus is the way. When they are beset by rumours, innuendo, gossip, half-truths and demonic lies and have no clue who to believe, Jesus is the truth. When it feels like everything is on pause, or even over, and no longer worth living, Jesus is the life. Not just a way, a truth, a life. It's time to dispense with political correctness and the talk of a "religious marketplace" once and for all. If you're in deep medical need, you don't head for a farmers market or a shopping mall. You need a hospital. You don't need to be sold something. You need a cure. That is what we need now. We don't need an aimless philosophical discussion or debate. We need a cure. Jesus is the way. Jesus is the truth. Jesus is the life. That is the cure we need for the directionlessness, truthlessness and lifelessness of our culture right now. I urge you to follow Him today. Where else could you go?
Jesus is the only WAy Truth and Life.