Jesus is the Life – John 14:6

What is it these days with zombies? Kids books are dominated by the walking dead. Films are filled with zombies, even blockbusters filmed in Glasgow. I guess it all started when Mary Shelley decided to give her friends a fright by writing a book about a zombie-monster called ‘Frankenstein‘. But today, the living dead are everywhere. People are morbidly fascinated by the idea of life after death. It seems to me that there’s a subliminal, sub-conscious cry going out from our society today saying, “we’ve been told by the atheists that death is the end, but we know that it’s not true.“

The good news of the Gospel is that there is life, full and free, in Jesus Christ. When He says in John 14:6, “I am the life“, He wants us to understand that you don’t need to leave your senses behind and believe in zombies to have life after death, but that you can have His eternal life within you today and beyond death. In Jesus is true, dynamic life – life offered free of charge and with no hidden catches. There are 3 elements of Jesus as the life I want to us to explore together: first, life in Jesus; secondly, life from Jesus and lastly, life for Jesus. My prayer is that each of us would be filled with the life of Jesus, fully equipped for living as a Christian in today’s Scotland.

 

[A] Life in Jesus

Someone might claim to know the way to life, but no-one claims to be life itself. They might say they have discovered some activity which gives them life, but they won’t and can’t say that they themselves have that life. But Jesus says, “I am the life”. What gives Jesus the right to say that He not only knows the way for someone to have life, but that He Himself is that life? Is Jesus some kind of egotist, some kind of madman or some kind of deceitful liar? On the contrary, there are two very good reasons that Jesus is telling the truth when He says, “I am the life”: first, Jesus as God and second, Jesus as Creator. This is the Jesus who in Himself has life and whose life is the life of the universe in which we live and more particularly, our own lives.

 

1. Jesus as God – throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus repeatedly gives evidence, both by word and by work, that He is God. His miracles are performed as signposts to His acting as God in the flesh – doing things only God can do. His teaching is deeper, more authoritative than a mere man can go. And here, in John 14:6, we have another strand of evidence, where Jesus says of Himself, “I am”. As you know from our previous studies, the OT name of God is ‘I am’. And so, by self-consciously using the OT name of God, Jesus here is claiming to be God. Jesus is the great ‘I am’ of the OT – the God who divided the Red Sea; the God who revealed Himself in glory to the prophet Isaiah; the God who miraculously triumphed over His enemies. And this God has life in Himself. When you think of God, you are to think of life – of pure and highly charged life. After all, His Name is ‘I am’ – the God who always was, always is and always will be. He doesn’t depend upon us for His existence, nor does He rely upon us for His life. Rather than drawing His life from us, He gives life to us. In John 1:4 we read of Jesus that, “in Him was life, and that life was the light of all men”. He is life not because He draws life from us, like some divine parasite, but because, in grace and love, He gives life to us.

 

2. Jesus as Creator – back at the beginning of John 1 we learn that it was through Jesus that the world was created. The life of God is seen in all He has made. It is seen in the things we encounter every day – in trees and sky; in fire and water. But it is also seen in things we meet less frequently. We see His life in the power of solar flares and of the orbits of the planets. We see His life in the strength of the ocean currents. We see His life in the temperature of the earth’s core. We see the quantity, quality and variety of His life in the number of the living organisms, each according to their own species, which inhabit our world. None of us have big enough brains to understand all there is to know about our universe. We are small grains of sand on a huge beach. What is our energy compared to that of a stampeding herd of wildebeest or to that of a mighty hurricane? This says nothing about the heavenly beings, the angels whom God has created. If we cannot fully take in the sheer quantity, quality and variety of life God has created, how can we even begin to understand how much life there is in God Himself. And yet, Jesus says to us today, “I am the life” – the life of the whole created universe.

 

Does Jesus have the right or authority to say, “I am the life”? You can see that He does by virtue of His being God and of being Creator. The irony here is that the atheist, who so confidently asserts that there is no God, depends upon the very life of the God in whom he does not believe, for his being alive in the first place, for the very breath he takes and for the brain which rebels so badly against God. Jesus says, “I am the life”. Believe Him and trust in Him and you too will have life.

 

[B] Life from Jesus

Dominic Sandbrook is a leading British modern historian. He has charted the story of our lives by looking at the kind of things we place in our shopping baskets. In 1947 the kind of things we bought said a lot about our lives then – vegetables, meat, prunes, fish, tinned salmon and woollen clothes. These were days of rationing, no freezers and no mod-cons. Today, our shopping baskets are filled with energy drinks, parmesan cheese, baseball caps, fresh milk and newspapers. It reflects days of plenty where people have far more disposable income. The story of our lives is found in where we buy, what we buy and who we buy from. And by saying, “I am the life”, Jesus is saying to us today, “buy life not from the world around you, but from me!” Let the shopping basket of your heart be filled with life from Jesus. There are two areas in which Jesus offers us life: first, life from Jesus’ death and secondly, life from Jesus’ word.

 

1. Life from Jesus’ Death – one of the greatest paradoxes is that life often comes from death. Someone dies in a car crash. Having given consent that when they die, their organs can be used, someone who desperately needs a liver transplant receives life. He lives because another man died. On a greater scale, the Glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ is that Jesus has died in order to give us life. On the Cross, the same Jesus who spoke these beautiful words in John 14, gave Himself up to the most horrible of deaths and the anger of God against our sin. He paid the price we owed to God; He died the death we deserved to die; and in His death we have life. One commentator has put it like this, “He who died, condemned, enables us to live, forgiven.” Jesus descended into the deepest pit of death so that we might ascend to the highest heights of life. Now what makes this utterly astonishing is when you remember who this Jesus is – the Jesus who has life in Himself because He is God in the flesh; the Jesus who is the Creator. And in His death, Jesus gives us His extraordinary, infinitely beautiful life.

 

It’s not good to be fascinated by zombies and death. It leads to despair. You start wearing black and hearing voices in your head. But let me tell you that it is good to be fascinated by the death of Jesus – not in terms of the blood and gore – but in terms of what Jesus was doing on the Cross by dying our death, paying the price of our sin and giving us life through Him. Do you want to enter into life? Then make a life study of the Cross of Jesus. Through the Cross, we have life from Jesus’ death.

 

2. Life from Jesus’ Word – in John 6:63 Jesus says, “the words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.” The words of Jesus, as recorded for us in the Bible, are the life of the Christian. They are the means by which Jesus gives us life – the life He died to give us; the life He has in Himself by virtue of His being the God and creator of all things. It is as we read the Bible for ourselves, study it in groups and hear it being authoritatively preached that Jesus, the life, is offered to us. And yet, there still is a missing piece in the puzzle – namely, how that life becomes ours. We can listen to the Word and yet leave this place today no more alive than we were when we came in. Just because life is offered to us through the Bible doesn’t mean to say that we have it for ourselves. How can the life Jesus offers us through His Word become ours? Jesus answers that question in John 5:24 when He says, “whoever hears my word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life.” Life becomes ours as we hear the Word of Jesus and believe in Him. We hear of our sinful state before God and we believe that Jesus is the Saviour who has died to take our sins away. We hear of how without Christ we are without hope in the world and we believe that Jesus is the meaning, logic and reason of all things. In other words, we place our faith in Him.

 

Through the medium of the Word of God, the Bible, we believe and trust in the Jesus who taught such powerful truth, who said of Himself, “I am the life” and who died to give us life. And it is as we have faith in Him, He gives us His life. In other words, life from Jesus comes to us as we believe in who Jesus is and what He has done. And so my question to each of us today is this: we might be fascinated by life after death, but have you trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ so that you may have that life now? Do you believe that what He did on the Cross by dying to take away sin, He did for you? Have you placed your faith in His finished work such that you can say along with the Apostle Paul, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body I life by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me”?

 

This life comes from Jesus and from Jesus alone. He is ‘the’ life such that there is nowhere else we can get life from if it is not from Jesus. Come now, come today and taste the life there is to be found in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.

 

[C] Life for Jesus

I hope thus far to have showed you why Jesus has life in and of Himself therefore why He has the authority to say, “I am the life”. I also hope to have showed you how it is that the life Jesus has can become yours – namely though hearing the Living Word of Jesus and having faith in what He did upon the Cross for us. I want to close today by dealing with the single-most important issue as far as each of us is concerned – namely, what is the life Jesus offers us? In what way is the life He offers us different from our natural lives? In other words, what difference should this study into Jesus as ‘the life’ make to you. We shall deal with this in two ways: life today and life forever.

 

1. Life Today – throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus uses the phrases ‘life’ and ‘eternal life’ interchangeably. Jesus is making the point that whatever eternal life is, it isn’t life which is merely in the future, when we die, but it is life that begins now – in fact, as we learned from John 5:24, life which begins at the moment we believe in Jesus. We also know that its not just natural life – the life everybody else has. It is something more. I want to quote one commentator who says, “this life is God given to the soul and imparting to it holy strength and perfect blessedness”. What is this life which we can have in Jesus today? It is God Himself living within us giving us strength and contentment. Just as Jesus has life in Himself and gives us that life through our believing in Him, so that life is Jesus living within us. When we die, we will go to be with Jesus forever. But the life we can have today is that same Jesus within us through His Holy Spirit. We can have, as one famous Scottish writer put it, “the life of God in the soul of man”. This is a life which the natural, unbelieving man knows nothing of.

 

God within us, the God who is life and created life, opens our eyes to the true reality of the way things are. He gives us eyes to see through our problems to His provision. He gives us strength to deal with the issues we are facing. He opens the curtain of heaven and allows us a sneak preview of life there. He gives us His presence so that we know we are not alone in this world but that He is with us. He gives us real, true, spiritual life – ours from the first moment we believe in Jesus.

 

2. Life Forever – eternal life might begin the moment we believe in Jesus, but, as the name suggests, it never ends. Think of a grain of sand on the beach as being a 1,000 years. Now think of how long is represented by all the sand on the biggest beach in the world! Millions, billions, trillions of years without end. But not only will our life then be infinite in its quantity, but also in its quality. It will be very different from this life. The American preacher and theologian B.B. Warfield once wrote, “It would not be no boon to continue natural life forever.” What makes his remark so poignant is that Warfield married his wife in 1876. Very soon after, she was struck by lightning and paralysed. He cared for her for 40 years until her death in 1915. He loved her dearly, but for her to continue endlessly living a paralysed life would not be a heaven. No – eternal life will be filled with the intimate pleasures of God, and just as we cannot begin to imagine the depths of the torments of hell, so we cannot begin to imagine the heights of the pleasures of heaven. Life forever, in the physical presence of Jesus – what a prospect!

 

Life in Jesus Christ begins now with the inward, spiritual presence of Jesus; but there is no end to the life. Rather, it will go on, but not like it is now with all the problems – it will go from being all about the inward presence of Jesus to being all about inward presence of Jesus and the outward presence of Jesus. And on the authority of the Bible, I invite you to experience the life of God in the soul of man. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will live in Him as He comes to live in you. Come now, for in Jesus is life and life to the full. AMEN

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