#24 - I am the way!

24. John 14:6

Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” — 
John 14:6

On board the missionary ship Duff one Sunday in December 1796, Captain James Wilson told his passengers, “I was the youngest of nineteen children. While I was still a lad, my father, a ship captain, took me to sea. I grew up amid influences of the worst kind. When the war with the American colonies broke out, I enlisted in the king’s service and fought in the bloody battle of Bunker Hill. Returning to England, I secured a berth on one of the vessels of the East India Company.”

While sailing toward India, Wilson said, his ship was captured, and he was thrown in jail.
 One night, learning he was to be sold into slavery, he jumped from the prison ramparts into an alligator-infested river. Wilson escaped the river only to be captured. He was stripped, bound, and marched five hundred miles. “How I survived that terrible march or the tortures of prison, I cannot explain,” he said.

At length, however, he was returned to England where, at age thirty-four, he met Pastor John Griffin. “In three hours of conversation, Griffin convinced me of the weakness of my belief in natural religion and planted in my mind certain truths which led to my conversion. The text he used with convincing effect was John 14:6.”

Wilson purchased a ship and became the first to transport missionaries to the South Pacific.
In his preaching he repeatedly proclaimed John 14:6. It was also a verse he used to bolster his missionaries, saying: “Dwell much on John 14:6. Jesus is the only source of life abundant for discouraged Christians and the only source of eternal life and hope for a degraded race.”
This is a timeless verse to learn. We should dwell much on it.

Compare John 14:6 with Acts 4:12, which says, “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (NKJV). Jesus is the only highway leading us to God; He is truth personified; He is the source and giver of eternal life—the only way of salvation. Thomas à Kempis said, “Without the way, there is no going; without the truth, there is no knowing; without the life, there is no living.”

Memory Tip

Jesus’ discourse on “Let not your heart be troubled” was interrupted by Thomas, who asked in John 14:5, “Lord, we don’t know where You’re going. How can we know the way?” Try imagining the tone of voice Thomas used. Was it gentle and sincere or edgy and argumentative? As you picture and replay the scene in your mind, you’ll soon find you’ve memorized the entire passage—John 14:1-6.

Jesus is not one of many ways to approach God, nor is He the best of several ways. He is the only way.—
A. W. Tozer

* 100 Bible Verses Everyone Should Know by Heart.