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The Way to Heaven

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“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. 2 In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. 4 And you know the way to where I am going.” 5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

So tonight I want us to dig into this statement: SLIDE

Jesus is the Way to Heaven

And as we work through it, we’re going to expand this statement as our understanding grows.

What do you think Heaven is like? (ask the audience)

Let’s read what scripture has to say about heaven:

Slide

1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Heaven is finally being back in right, continual, intimate relationship with God.

Slide

Jesus is the way back to right relationship with God--He’s not just the ticket into a heavenly, eternal amusement park.

Heaven is a place, but the point is not where it is, it’s who’s there. Heaven is where we finally get to be restored to the way things are supposed to be, with us living in unbroken communion with God Himself.

Let’s focus on the first part here for a minute: Jesus is the way.

Jesus is not a portal to heaven.

We’re not wandering around looking for the magic words, and then once we learn the magical phrase: Jesus is Lord--POOF! We’re off to heaven. Life in christ is different than that.

Look at what Thomas said: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?

The disciples were looking for GPS directions. Jesus was talking about going to a specific place: Heaven, back to the Father’s side.

And Thomas says, “Jesus, we don’t know how to find heaven on a map. So how can we know how to get there from here?

Now here’s the cool thing: Thomas is the guy in the room asking the stupid question we are all wondering:

Jesus is talking about going to heaven to make a place for them, and then he says “and you guys know how to get here afterwards!”

And they say, no Jesus, we don’t know how to get there. We don’t know the way.

And Jesus says, “Yeah you do. I am the way.”

See Thomas isn’t wrong here. Jesus was talking about the path His disciples would need to take to heaven. But that path isn’t left here, right there. That path is walking with Jesus.

Jesus is inviting us into a journey with Him. And as we walk through life with Him, he’s going to be transforming us into His image, a task that will only be completed once we finally meet him face to face.

So let’s go back to this statement we’ve been working on:

Slide

Following Jesus is the way back to right relationship with God

Now I want to make sure we’re very clear on one thing before moving forward: Jesus has already paid the debt that we owed because of our sin. He has taken us off the road that leads to hell, and put us on the path that leads to eternity with Him.

What we’re talking about tonight is what that journey with Jesus looks like.

Jesus is going to spend the next few chapters talking about what it looks like to live life in Christ.

And this is all done with the backdrop of what he’s about to do.

He’s not telling us how to earn a place with God.

How to not screw this thing up.

He’s about to go purchase their freedom from death on the cross at calvary. He’s showing them what walking with Him is going to be like after that.

So what we want to take away from tonight is encouragement--a call upward, a call to new life in Christ, not condemnation.

So if we’re clear on that, lets pick up reading back in , starting in verse 15:

15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. 18 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” 22 Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” 23 Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. 24 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me.

So what is the main theme we keep seeing Jesus repeating here? SLIDE

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” He says that in v. 15.

In verse 21 He says something similar: “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.”

And one more time in verse 23 “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word.

Oof. So that got intense fast.

I imagine as we read that, you may have started sweating. Your heart may have started beating a little bit faster.

Depending on your personality, you may have either immediately started grading yourself, or just gotten overwhelmed and declared yourself a failure immediately.

But here’s the thing: this isn’t a sudden left turn in the conversation.

We’re here at the last supper, and Jesus is preparing His disciples for His death, resurrection, and life after He goes back to the Father.

That’s why we started today at the beginning of chapter 14, working on our understanding of what Jesus said about being “the way.”

And what did we come up with? Slide

Following Jesus is the way to heaven--the way back to right relationship with God.

He’s called us as his followers, and now He’s showing us what life will look like as we walk with Him.

And Jesus knows His disciples, and He knows us.

And He knows we have an adversary who is going to try to trick us out of walking faithfully with Jesus in any way possible.

And one of those ways He wants to deceive us is by tricking us into thinking that Jesus is merely our wristband that gets us into heaven.

Cause if the devil could have it his way, We’re cruising along, we get told about heaven and hell, and that Jesus is the only way to heaven. We take that “Jesus” wristband, and slap it on, then continue on our merry way, living just like we were before.

But that’s NOT what life with Christ looks like. Life in Christ is intended to be so much more. And Jesus wants to make sure that His disciples, and that we, don’t miss this!

So to fully understand this, I want us to think about it in this way: What does life look like lived in Christ, versus what life looks like without Him, and what are the main differences between those experiences: SLIDE

Difference #1: The Spirit of Truth

Look what Jesus said here in verses 15-17:

15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

We’re not going to be alone in all of this. When Jesus leaves, He’s going to the Father, and He’s going to ask the Father to send the Holy Spirit, the “Spirit of Truth.”

And the Spirit of Truth:

Is going to be with us forever.

We’re going to know him because He will dwell in us.

But look what life is like for the non-believer, for the world: We get the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit, but Jesus says that the Spirit is the one “whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.”

So what’s the difference here?

We get the Spirit of Truth.

But for those who don’t know Jesus? They can’t receive the Spirit because they can’t see him and don’t know him.

So while believers have the illuminating light of the Holy Spirit in us--the default state for those who don’t know Christ is spiritual blindness.

Look how Paul describes this in 2 Corinthians 4:4 “In their case, the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ….”

So back to our chart here:

Believers have the Spirit of Truth, while Non Believers have the Spirit of Blindness.

What difference does that make?

Proverbs 16:25 says “there is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.

We are born in spiritual blindness and sin.

But when we give our lives to Christ, He gives us the Spirit of Truth, and we begin to see things as they truly are more and more, rather than the way we used to see them in our blindness.

So Jesus isn’t threatening us here--this is an encouragement. As we walk with Him, He’s given us His Spirit, to help us begin to grasp what is true and what is false. And as our Spiritual blindness is chipped away, piece by piece, we aren’t just going to be begrudgingly doing what is right “Cause Jesus told us to”.

We’re going to be recognizing more and more that God was right in the first place! And we’ll start to conform to life on His terms instead of our own way.

This is where our obedience comes from! It comes from loving Jesus, and growing to understand that He’s right!

That this sin stuff that we’ve kept into our lives isn’t giving us life. It’s taking from us!

So that’s a huge difference between life with Jesus, and life without Him.

But there’s more, look at verse 21

“Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”

Loving Jesus draws us into relationship with the Father and the Son. As we walk in obedience to him, we get to experience His love, and we get to know and understand more and more of who He is?

How? That’s what he’s saying at the end of the verse there: “I will manifest myself to him.” To manifest means to fully show or reveal.

Walking in obedience to Jesus means getting to know Him better.

Not only will we get to see him at work--we’re going to have a deeper and deeper understanding of how and why He’s working how He’s working.

And that leads us to difference number 2: SLIDE

Difference #2: Believers get to see God and know Him better. Nonbelievers are blind to his presence and who He is.

Jesus has already made this point in verses 17 --the world cannot see or know the Spirit, and again in verse 19: He says “Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.”

There is a reason the world is in a constant state of fear, and anger, and confusion, and bitterness. They just see the visible realm. They just see all the bad stuff happening. They see the cancer. They don’t see the miraculous healing God does all the time. They see the shootings. They don’t see the people sacrificially laying down their lives for one another. They see the bad stuff. They don’t see God at work in the midst of it.

The World doesn’t get to see God working, because of their blindness. But the more we walk with Christ, the more he reveals himself to us. The more we get to experience the love of the Father and the Son in our lives. How could that not make a difference in the way we live? If we’re learning just how good and sweet relationship with God is, are we going to continue being enslaved to our old ways?

Hopefully we are a little more encouraged about this “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” stuff Jesus is talking about.

But there is one more wrinkle we need to talk about when it comes to obeying Jesus.

Like I said earlier, our natural state is being born into spiritual blindness. We’re raised up in a broken world, and no matter how good our upbringing is, there are many ways that we buy into the lies that the world teaches us.

And Jesus calls us out of those old ways.

And He’s right to do so.

He’s the God of the universe.

He knows how we were made!

Of course he knows what is right and what is wrong

He knows what is dangerous and what is the safer way.

But we don’t always see it that way.

And one of our tendencies is to want to wait until God’s way makes sense to us, before we believe.

But here’s the problem. Sin has a blinding effect. The deeper we are involved in it, the less clearly we can see and understand.

So a lot of times, we have to blindly obey God, and walk out of it, before we’re able to turn around and see it for what it is.

How bad it actually was.

How dysfunctional and destructive it really was.

And this is the twist:

The Twist: With God, Often Understanding Follows Obedience.

I’m currently reading through numbers, and I just got to the part where God tells them to send spies out to see the land, and then go take it.

But the spies come back, and are afraid.

They’ve seen how good the land is, but they’ve also seen how big the people are.

And they are afraid.

So they stir up the people to REFUSE to go in and take the land that God has promised to give them.

Now in one sense, they’re right. The people of the land are mightier than they are. They do have strong fortresses, and giants living in the land.

On a purely human level, Israel has no shot.

But they have God with them!

Here’s the crazy part: God just led them miraculously out of slavery in Egypt. He did these crazy plagues, displaying His glory and making a mockery of the might of Egypt in the process.

And on the way out, He clears a path for them to cross through the red sea.

Then he drowns the entire egyptian army in that same sea.

You know who was more powerful than any of those Canaanite tribes in the promised land? Egypt.

Do you know what the Israelites had to do to defeat the Egyptians? Just keep walking forward.

Then on the way through the desert, God miraculously provides Manna, and Water, And meat. All miraculously.

No generation had seen God work like this group of people had.

Yet they got to the border of the promised land and were too afraid to take it.

Why? Because it didn’t make sense to them. In human terms there was no way they could win.

Do you know what would have happened if they had marched in?

They would have taken the land.

This was their problem: They didn’t understand how God was going to work, so they refused to obey. But if they had only stepped out in faith and believed that God was going to keep on doing miracles (like ALL the miracles they had seen), they would have gotten to see His promises come to fruition.